"Geoffrey A. Landis - Approaching Perimelasma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Some black holes, my scientist persona whispers, are decorated with an accretion
disk, shining like a gaudy signal in the sky. Dust and gas from the interstellar medium
fall toward the hungry singularity, accelerating to nearly the speed of light in their
descent, swirling madly as they fall. It collides; compresses; ionizes. Friction heats
the plasma millions of degrees, to emit a brilliant glow of hard X-rays. Such black
holes are anything but black; the incandescence of the infalling gas may be the most
brilliantly glowing thing in a galaxy. Nobody and nothing would be able to get near it;
nothing would be able to survive the radiation.
The Virgo hole is not one of these. It is ancient, dating from the very first
burst of star-formation when the universe was new, and has long ago swallowed or
ejected all the interstellar gas in its region, carving an emptiness far into the interstellar
medium around it.
The black hole is fifty-seven light years from Earth. Ten billion years ago, it
had been a supermassive star, and exploded in a supernova that for a brief moment
had shone brighter than the galaxy, in the process tossing away half its mass. Now
there is nothing left of the star. The burned-out remnant, some thirty times the mass
of the sun, has pulled in space itself around it, leaving nothing behind but gravity.


Before the download, the psychologist investigated myтАФyourтАФmental soundness.
We must have passed the test, obviously, since IтАЩm here. What type of man would
allow himself to fall into a black hole? That is my question. Maybe if I can answer
that, I would understand ourself.
But this did not seem to interest the psychologist. She did not, in fact, even
look directly at me. Her face had the focusless abstract gaze characteristic of
some-body hotlinked by the optic nerve to a computer system. Her talk was
perfunctory. To be fair, the object of her study was not the flesh me, but my
computed reflec-tion, the digital maps of my soul. I remember the last thing she said.
тАЬWe are fascinated with black holes because of their depth of metaphor,тАЭ she
said, looking nowhere. тАЬA black hole is, literally, the place of no return. We see it as
a metaphor for how we, ourselves, are hurled blindly into a place from which no
information ever reaches us, the place from which no one ever returns. We live our
lives falling into the future, and we will all inevitably meet the singularity.тАЭ She
paused, expecting, no doubt, some comment. But I remained silent.
тАЬJust remember this,тАЭ she said, and for the first time her eyes returned to the
outside world and focused on me. тАЬThis is a real black hole, not a metaphor. DonтАЩt
treat it like a metaphor. Expect reality.тАЭ She paused, and finally added, тАЬTrust the
math. ItтАЩs all we really know, and all that we have to trust.тАЭ
Little help.
Wolf versus the black hole! One might think that such a contest is an unequal one,
that the black hole has an overwhelming advantage.
Not quite so unequal.
On my side, I have technology. To start with, the wormhole, the technological
sleight-of-space which got you fifty-seven light years from Earth in the first place.
The wormhole is a monster of relativity no less than the black hole, a trick of
curved space allowed by the theory of general relativity. After the Virgo black hole
was discovered, a wormhole mouth was laboriously dragged to it, slower than light,
a project that took over a century. Once the wormhole was here, though, the trip
became only a short one, barely a meter of travel. Anybody could come here and
drop into it.