"Rex Gordon - The Time Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Rex)

that this is the world's most powerful magnetic core.' He indicated the massive centre with its coils and
windings. 'Our proton is like a flying electric current. We guide it in its path by magnetic forces.'
'There is a limit to electrical insulation,' Sara Francis said. 'There is a limit to what can be achieved
by a linear accelerator in a straight drop. But here the protons are circling in a spiral. We give them an
impulse each time they come round and make them move faster still.'
They were enthusiasts. They must have worked on that synchrotron from the beginning and they
showed it to me as though it was their baby. I saw objections in my ignorance. To them it was a passion.
'I thought you said your protons were already travelling at near the speed of light. If I remember
anything of Einstein at all, he says that that is the ultimate, that nothing could ever travel faster. Or if it did,
in some fashion I can't explain, its transit would be, instantaneous and it would be everywhere at once.'
They looked at me suddenly as though I had cheated them in some way, standing in the echoing hall
within the rock.
'Other people do it,' said William Strassen sharply. 'The European proton-synchrotron at Geneva has
a final output of twenty-five thousand-million volts!'
'And yours?' I said. 'What's yours тАФ all this тАФ designed to do?'
'Two point five million million volts!'
'There is a difference?'
'Just a hundred times as much,' Sara Francis said as though that were nothing, but confronting me no
longer as though I were a child.
'Theirs works, your doesn't?' I said. I looked around at the great rock dome and massive windings. I
believed I could see why there was a limit to the size of these things, even if they couldn't. And I was
prejudiced by what I had already heard. They had built all this, and instead of the hardest atom-smashing
rays ever, nothing, just nothing, came out at the end.
'You've got this wrong, Judgen,' Strassen told me seriously. 'It isn't that we reach a limit at the speed
of light, which is what you're thinking. Physical particles can never reach the speed of light. They begin to
gather size and mass. The Russians are already using these more massive particles to bombard their
targets in a point five million-million synchrotron at Novorosisk.'
He had calmed and become firm and clear. For a young man he was strangely, mentally, formidable. I
realized he knew what he was talking about if ever anyone did.
And as for me, it was true what the girl had thought. I was no more than a visitor in their great rock
halls. In their particular subject I was a child in arms.
The took me on to their laboratory. It was, as they said, the business end, in a great rock chamber.
The protons should have come out there, flying out through a slit tangentially, and the laboratory was
divided into two halves, a safe area behind a barrier wall, and an unsafe area filled with robot machinery
around the target, that we could only view through mirrors. In the safe area where we stood was a
control desk from which, I learned, Sara Francis controlled the operation of the synchrotron, while the
effect of high-speed protons on the target was watched and recorded through instruments of fantastic
delicacy, in theory, by Strassen and Galbraith or whoever might be the other operators allowed the use
of the machine when once they got it going.
'So what is the answer?' I asked Strassen while I looked around the spaces of the laboratory where
students were working on apparatus and where one side was mirrors that showed us the 'hot' area,
which was even deeper in the rock. 'What is the cause of your trouble, since Galbraith told me that when
you're working the synchrotron near its maximum, and you should be getting a beam of particles striking
that target behind the wall there, you get nothing out at all?'
 'Not nothing,' said Sara Francis.
Strassen looked at me strangely.
'The insulation breaks down,' he said.
'You mean you get a spark?'
He looked at a student who was working near us, then moved me away from him. It was a deliberate
gesture. He took me to a little table, and we bent over it, looking at some scraps of metal that had been