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

The Minerva event involving the fleeing Jevlenese had demonstrated
cross-Multiverse transfer to be possible. Ever since it happened, Thurien
scientists had been trying to unravel exactly what had taken place in the hope
of being able to reproduce the effect. Porthik Eesyan was one of the Thuriens'
principal scientific figures, attached to their culture's highest
administrative body at their Government Center in the principal city of
Thurios. Hunt moved back from the window and across in front of Caldwell's
desk, frowning while he collected his thoughts.

VISAR, the computing entity that managed the technicalities of the Thurien
civilization, was a distributed system scattered across all the star systems
that they had spread to. The Jevelenese, by contrast, had built their
counterpart to VISAR as a centralized system physically located in one planet,
where the workload was handled in a gigantic, contiguous, three-dimensional
matrix of cells, each combining the functions of computing, storage, and
communication. Changes of state propagating through the matrix from one
adjoining cell to another in the course of computation behaved in a way
comparable to that of elementary particles moving in physical space, which was
interesting but amounted to no more than an unremarkable analogy. But things
hadn't stopped there. The rules adopted by the Jevlenese system designers to
govern the interactions between cells resulted in the emergence of behavior
that uncannily mimicked such properties as mass, charge, energy, and momentum.
These in turn gave rise to extended structures formed in the manner of
molecules by the balance of opposing forces, out of which emerged a universe
of worlds orbiting data-radiating "suns," and eventually harboring its own
form of peculiar, squabblesome, sentient beings. It sounded as if Hunt was
saying that the underlying nature of the Multiverse was something similar.

"It seems as if it could be the key to the whole thing," Hunt said. "Forget
all the physics you've heard before, that talks about mass and energy moving
through space. That's the physics that happens within a Multiverse reality
that you happen to be a part of."

"You mean on some particular time lineтАФlike the one we're in here, right now?"

"Exactly. Where serial ordering gives rise to the perception of change,
unfolding in ways that differential equations describe. Ordinary physicsтАФand
that includes all the Thurien h-space business as wellтАФis expressed in the
language of change. But the Multiverse itself is changeless. So crossing it
would have to involve something other than physical movement. In the JEVEX
matrix nothing actually moves. Cells just flip between states."
Caldwell stared while he digested that. It seemed almost obvious once it was
spelled out. "Wouldn't the same underlying cell structure apply everywhere,
here included?" he queried. "It's all part of the same MV."

"Yes," Hunt agreed. "In fact, Dirac proposed something very like it: a
universe filled with a 'sea' of particles in negative energy states. They
become observable when they're kicked up to positive states. Antiparticles are
the holes left behind. They can move around too, as if they were