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

ton of rock or a ton of neutrinos, growing weaker with Best Novella
distance according to a roughly inverse square law. With Catherine
the rain of virtual particlesтАУand the phase shifts they Asaro: Aurora
createdтАУvarying from place to place, the paths of highest in Four Voices
probability ceased obeying the geometry of flat
spacetime. The luminous red triangle of most-probable
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trajectories was now visibly curved.
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Allen Steele:
The key idea dated back to Sakharov: gravity was
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nothing but the residue of the imperfect cancellation of
other forces; squeeze the quantum vacuum hard enough Tale
and EinsteinтАЩs equations fell out. But since Einstein, every
theory of gravity was also a theory of time. Relativity
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demanded that a free-falling particleтАЩs rotating phase
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agree with every other clock that traveled the same path,
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and once gravitational time dilation was linked to changes
Burstein:
in virtual particle density, every measure of timeтАУfrom
Cosmic
the half-life of a radioisotopeтАЩs decay (stimulated by
Corkscrew
vacuum fluctuations) to the vibrational modes of a sliver
of quartz (ultimately due to the same phase effects as
those giving rise to classical paths)тАУcould be Click Here for
reinterpreted as a count of interactions with virtual more
particles. information on
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It was this line of reasoning that had led KumarтАУa Awards.
century after Sakharov, building on work by Penrose,
Smolin, and RovelliтАУto devise a model of spacetime as a


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Asimov's - The Planck Dive

quantum sum of every possible network of particle world
lines, with classical "time" arising from the number of
intersections along a given strand of the net. This model
had been an unqualified success, surviving theoretical
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scrutiny and experimental tests for centuries. But it had
never been validated at the smallest length scales,
accessible only at absurdly high energies, and it made no
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