"Attanasio, A A - Radix 02 - In Other Worlds 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Attanasio A.A)

more than' the dimmest semblance of a human head appeared. And
the rorschached shape could really have been anything. But Zee
recognized the square of Carl's head, the familiar silhouette so oft-
seen in the darkness of lights-out at St. Tim's, too well remembered
from those lonely first years when a friend was the closest he got to
family. Hard as he tried, though, his amplifications distinguished
little more than an amorphous shadow.
Then a friend of his who worked at IBM's
imageintensification lab in Jersey took pity on his feeble but
relentless efforts and decided to prove once and for all that the
mirror was a random fire pattern. A week later, the friend, pastier
and meeker-looking, presented him with a computer-enhanced
photograph. The five-by

seven-inch unglossed image showed a starburst of puissant radiance,
most of it blank with an unsealed intensity Daggered at the very
center, a clot of darkness resolved with a stabbing clarity to Carl
Schirmer's
horror-crazed features.
Eating the Strange
Nothing-the blankest word in the language. A year ago,
Carl Schirmer vanished into nothing. How? I've come to
believe that the microevents in the atoms of Carl's body are the
key. I'm not a physicist, but I know enough science to guess
what happened to him. Here's what I figure:
The very big and the very small-general relativity and
quantum mechanics--come together, at a fundamental unit of
length called Planck's length, which is the geometrical mean of
Compton's wavelength and Einstein's gravitational radius of a
particle. It looks like this:
1= h
C3
It's equivalent to about 10'3 centimeter. The edge of
nothingness. just beyond that smallness, spacetime

itself loses the flat, continuous shape we take for granted and
becomes a fantastic seething of wormholes and microbridges,
the tiniest webs and bubblings. Any part of this ceaseless
ferment lasts no more than the sheerest fraction of a -second.
It is the texture of Nothing. Like sponge. Or suds. Each
bubble is a solitary region of space: The surface of the bubble is
the farthest distance the center of the bubble can know about
in its brief lifespan because that's as far as light can travel in so
short a time. It's a universe in itself, existing only for that
fraction of time and during that fraction connecting our
universe with the ubiquitous Field that connects all universes.
To see how this fact connects with Carl Schirmer, we have
to go back to Planck. At the end of the nineteenth century, he
was trying to explain why radiation varies with temperature. As
an object is heated, first it gets red-hot, then white-hot. It only