"James P. Hogan - Giants 2 - The Gentle Giants of Ganymede" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

And even if it could, there would be no purpose to be served. Chemically the
enzyme will behave the same whether it has radioisotopes in it or not. What
you're saying is preposterous!"
Hunt sighed and pointed a weary finger toward the screen.
"I'm not saying it, Chris," he reminded the professor. "The numbers are.
There are the facts -- check 'em." Hunt leaned forward and cocked his head to
one side, at the same time contorting his features into a frown as if he had
just been struck with a sudden thought. "What were you saying a minute ago
about people wanting to fit the evidence to suit the answers they'd already
made their minds up about?" he asked.


Chapter Two

At the age of eleven, Victor Hunt had moved from the bedlam of his
family home in the East End of London and gone to live with an uncle and aunt
in Worcester. His uncle -- the odd man out in the Hunt family -- was a design
engineer at the nearby laboratories of a leading computer manufacturer and it
was his patient guidance that first opened the boy's eyes to the excitement
and mystery of the world of electronics.
Some time later young Victor put his newfound fascination with the laws
of formal logic and the techniques of logic-circuit design to its first
practical test. He designed and built a hard-wired special-purpose processor
which, when given any date after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in
1582, would output a number from 1 to 7 denoting the day of the week on which
it had fallen. When, breathless with expectation, he switched it on for the
first time, the system remained dead. It turned out that he had connected an
electrolytic capacitor the wrong way around and shorted out the power supply.
This exercise taught him two things: Most problems have simple solutions
once somebody looks at things the right way, and the exhilaration of winning
in the end makes all the effort worthwhile. It also served to reinforce his
intuitive understanding that the only sure way to prove or disprove what
looked like a good idea was to find some way to test it. As his subsequent
career led him from electronics to mathematical physics and thence to
nucleonics, these fundamentals became the foundations of his permanent mental
makeup. In nearly thirty years he had never lost his addiction to the final
minutes of mounting suspense that came when the crucial experiment had been
prepared and the moment of truth was approaching.
He experienced that same feeling now, as he watched Vincent Carizan make
a few last-minute adjustments to the power-amplifier settings. The attraction
in the main electronics lab at Pithead Base that morning was an item of
equipment recovered from the Ganymean ship. It was roughly cylindrical, about
the size of an oil drum, and appeared to be rather simple in function in that
it possessed few input and output connections; apparently it was a self-
contained device of some sort, rather than a component in some larger and more
complex system.
However, its function was far from obvious. The engineers at Pithead had
concluded that the connections were intended as power inlet points. From an
analysis of the insulating materials used, the voltage clamping and protection
circuits, the smoothing circuits, and the filtering arrangements, they had