"Hogan, James P - Every Child Is Born A Scientist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

"I see . . ." A pause. "But tell me, how do you reconcile that statement with some of the fundamental laws of physics, some of which have stood unchallenged for decades or even for centuries? It is well known, is it not, that decay of the proton would violate the law of conservation of baryon number; decay of the electron would violate conservation of charge. And what about the conservation laws of mass-energy and momentum, for example? What happens to those if stable particles are simply allowed to appear and vanish?"

Clifford recognized the tone. The professor's attitude was negative. He was out to uncover the flaws-anything that would justify going no further for the present and sending Clifford back to the drawing board. The mildly challenging note was calculated to invoke an emotive response, thus carrying the whole discussion from the purely rational level to the irrational and opening the way for a choice of counterproductive continuations.

Clifford was on his guard. "Violation of many conservation laws is well known already. Although the strong nuclear interactions do obey all the laws listed, electromagnetic interactions do not conserve isotopic spin. Furthermore, the weak nuclear interactions don't conserve strangeness, nor do they conserve charge or parity discretely but only as a combined product of C and P. As a general principle, the stronger the force, the greater the number of laws it has to obey. This has been known as an experimental fact for a long time. In recent years we've known that it follows automatically from Maesanger wave functions. Each conservation principle is related to a particular order of resonance. Since stronger interactions involve more orders, they obey more conservation laws. As you reduce the number of orders involved, you lose the necessity to obey the laws that go with the higher orders.

"What I'm saying here . . . " he gestured toward the paper "is that the same pattern holds true right on through to the weakest force of all-gravity. When you get down to the level of the gravitational interaction-determined by b-order resonances only- you lose more of the conservation laws that come with the hi-orders. In fact, as it turns out, you lose all of them."

"I see," said Edwards. "But if that's so, why hasn't anybody ever found out about it? Why haven't centuries of experiments revealed it? On the contrary, they would appear to demonstrate the reverse of what you're saying."

Clifford knew fully that Edwards was not that naive. The possibility that conservation principles might not be universal was something that scientists had speculated about for a long time. But forcing somebody to adopt a defensive posture was always a first step toward weakening his case. Nevertheless, Clifford had no option but to go along with it.

"Because, as I mentioned earlier, the so-called stable particles have extremely long average lifetimes. Matter is created and extinguished at an infinitesimally small rate-on the everyday scale anyway; it would be utterly immeasurable by any laboratory experiment. For matter at ordinary density, it works out at about one extinction per ten billion particles present per year. No experiment ever devised could detect anything like that. You could only detect it on the cosmological scale-and nobody has performed experiments with whole galaxies yet."

"Mmm.. ." Edwards paused to collect his thoughts. Massey sensed that things could go either way and opted to stay out.

Clifford decided to move ahead. "All interactions can be represented as rotations in k-space. This accounts for the symmetries of quantum mechanics and the family-number conservation laws. In fact, all the conservation laws come out as simply different projections of one basic set of k-conservation relationships.

"Every rotation results in a redistribution of energy about the various k-axes, which we see as forces of one kind or another. The particular set of rotations that correspond to transitions of a particle between hi-space and normal space-events of creation and extinction-produces an expanding wave front in k-space that projects as a gravitational pulse. In other words, every particle creation or extinction generates a pulse of gravity."

There were no questions at that point, so Clifford continued. "A particle can appear spontaneously anywhere in the universe with equal probability. When it does, it will emanate a minute gravity pulse. The figures indicate something like one particle creation in a volume of millions of cubic meters per year; utterly immeasurable-that's why nobody has ever found out about it.

"On the other hand, a particle can vanish only from where it already is-obviously. So, where large numbers of particles are concentrated together, you will get a larger number of extinctions over a given period of time. Thus you'll get a higher rate of production of gravity pulses. The more particles there are and the more closely they're packed together, the greater the total additive effect of all the pulses. That's why you get a gravity field around large masses of matter; it isn't a static phenomenon at all-just the additive effect of a large number of gravity quanta. It appears 'smooth' only at the macroscopic level.

"Gravity isn't something that's simply associated with mass per se; it's just that mass defines a volume of space inside which a large number of extinctions can happen. It's the extinctions that produce the gravity."

"I thought you said the creations do so, too," Massey queried.

"They do, but their contribution is negligible. As I said, creations take place all through the universe with equal probability anywhere-inside a piece of matter or way outside the galaxy. In a region occupied by matter, the effect due to extinctions would dominate overwhelmingly."

"Mmm . . ." Edwards frowned at his knuckles while considering another angle.

"That suggests that mass ought to decay away to nothing. Why doesn't it?"

"It does. Again, the numbers we're talking about are much too small to be measurable on the small scale or over short time periods. As an example, a gram of water contains about ten to the power twenty-three atoms. If those atoms vanished at the rate of three million every second, it would take about ten billion years for all traces of the original gram to disappear. Is it any wonder the decay's never been detected experimentally? Is it any wonder that the gravity field of a planet appears smooth? We have no way of even detecting the gravity due to one gram of water, let alone measure it to see if it's quantized. You could only detect it at the cosmological level. At that level, totally dominated by gravity, conservation laws that hold good in laboratories might well break down. Certainly we have no experimental data to say they don't."

"That means all the bodies in the universe ought to decay away to nothing in time," Edwards pointed out. "They've had plenty of time, but there still seem to be plenty of them around."

"Maybe they do decay away to nothing," Clifford said. "Don't forget that spontaneous creation is going on all the time all over the universe as well. That's an awful lot of volume and it implies an awful lot of creation."

"You mean a continuous process in which new bodies are formed out of interstellar matter by the known sequences of galactic and planetary evolution; the newly created particles provide a source to replenish the interstellar matter in turn."

"Could be," Clifford agreed.

At last Edwards had drawn Clifford into an area in which he was unable to give definite answers. He pressed the advantage.

"But surely that requires some resurrection of the Continuous Creation Theory of cosmology. As we all know, that notion has been defunct for many years. The overwhelming weight of evidence unquestionably favors the Big Bang."
Clifford spread his arms wide in an attitude of helplessness.

"I know that. All I can say is, the mathematics works. I'm not an astronomer or a cosmologist. I'm not even an experimental scientist. I'm a theoretician. I don't know how conclusive the evidence for Big Bang