"Greg Egan - The Planck Drive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

as being surrounded by spherical shells on which the tidal
force is constantтАУsomething tangible you can measure on
the spotтАУyou can give them each a radius of curvature
without caring about the details of how you might travel
all the way to their center." With one spatial dimension
omitted to make room for time, the shells became circles,
and their histories on the map were shown as concentric
translucent cylinders.

As the disk itself grew, the distortion around it spread
faster. By ten M, Chandrasekhar was less than sixty
degrees wide, but even constellations in the opposite half
of the sky were visibly crowded together, as incoming
light rays were bent into more radial paths. The
gravitational blue shift, uniform across the sky, was
strong enough now to give the stars a savage glintтАУnot so
much icy, as blue-hot. On the map, the light cones dotted
along their world lineтАУstructures like stylized conical hour-
glasses, made up of all the light rays passing through a
given point at a given momentтАУwere beginning to tilt
toward the hole. Light cones marked the boundaries of
physically possible motion; to cross your own light cone
would be to outrace light.

Gisela created a pair of binoculars and offered them to
Cordelia. "Try looking at the halo."


file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20The%20Planck%20Dive.htm (8 of 36) [2/2/2004 2:01:04 AM]
Asimov's - The Planck Dive


Cordelia obliged her. "Ah! Where did all those stars come
from?"

"Lensing lets you see the stars behind the hole, but it
doesnтАЩt stop there. Light that grazes the three-M shell
orbits part-way around the hole before flying off in a new
directionтАУand thereтАЩs no limit to how far it can swing
around, if it grazes the shell close enough." On the map,
Gisela sketched half a dozen light rays approaching the
hole from various angles; after wrapping themselves in
barberтАЩs-pole helices at slightly different distances from
the three-M cylinder, they all headed off in almost the
same direction. "If you look into the light that escapes
from those orbits, you see an image of the whole sky,
compressed into a narrow ring. And at the inner edge of
that ring, thereтАЩs a smaller ring, and so onтАУeach made up
of light thatтАЩs orbited the hole one more time."