"James P. Hogan - Giants 5 - Mission to Minerva" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

"Okay, got it. Let's see, now . . ." The alter-Hunt looked away. "Which time
was that?" he inquired as he worked, evidently consulting some off-screen
oracle.

"A SaturdayтАФthe time that Julie from admin showed up with a couple of her
friends. There's an Orioles-Braves game due to be played later."

"I don't recall that. It was probably different on this time line. The
parallelisms can show surprising discontinuities." Then, in a louder voice,
apparently to someone nearby, "Have we got it yet?"

"Jerry was selling the restaurant-dance-bar thing again," Hunt said.

"Oh, that. Yes. Tell him to forget it. It's a scam. The pictures in the
brochure he's got are faked. It's a shell company set up by a Ukrainian outfit
who'll take the money and fold. If you want a better deal, buy Formaflex in
Austin. Small pilot experiment. Nobody knows about it yetтАФlimited license to
deal in Thurien matter-duplicator technology. It's going to go over big."
Alter-Hunt winked, then looked away again. "Okay? Are we ready? Can I sendтАФ"

The connection died, as twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth's surface
the object that had appeared out of nowhere dissolved into a haze that
dispersed and faded, leaving nothing.

Hunt waited fifteen minutes, but nothing more came through.


CHAPTER TWO

Even before the first contact with Ganymeans, when the Shapieron from ancient
Minerva returned from its strange exile out of normal spacetime, the majority
of Earth's physicists had come to favor the explanation of quantum weirdness
known as the Many Worlds Interpretation, or MWI. Its claims were so bizarre
and counterintuitive that many maintained it couldn't have been conceived by
unaided human imagination or unwitting self-deception. Therefore, it had to be
true. The discovery that a race of advanced, starfaring aliens had reached the
same conclusion seemed as strong an endorsement as anyone could wish for and
pretty much won over the last of the doubters.

The "quantum paradoxes" that textbooks and popular writers of years gone by
had reveled in arose when a system of quantum entities such as photons or
electrons existing in some particular state changed to some different state
when a number of new states were possible. Examples might be an energetically
excited atom that could relax back to its minimum-energy "ground" state via
any of several alternative sequences of intermediate energy levels, or a
photon hitting a half-silvered mirror, which gave it a fifty-fifty chance of
being reflected or transmitted. How did Nature "choose" from the various
possibilities the one that actually took place?