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

A wormholeтАФa far too cute name, but one we seem to be stuck withтАФis a
shortcut from one place to another. Physically, it is nothing more than a loop of
exotic matter. If you move through the hoop on this side of the wormhole, you
emerge out the hoop on that side. Topologically, the two sides of the wormhole are
pasted together, a piece cut out of space glued together elsewhere.
Exhibiting an excessive sense of caution, the proctors of Earthspace refused
to allow the other end of the Virgo wormhole to exit at the usual transportation
nexus, the wormhole swarm at Neptune-Trojan 4. The far end of the wormhole
opens instead to an orbit around Wolf-562, an undistinguished red dwarf sun circled
by two airless planets that are little more than frozen rocks, twenty-one light-years
from Earthspace. To get here we had to take a double wormhole hop: Wolf, Virgo.
The black hole is a hundred kilometers across. The wormhole is only a few
meters across. I would think that they were overly cautious.
The first lesson of relativity is that time and space are one. For a long time
after the theoretical prediction that such a thing as a traversable wormhole ought to
be possible, it was believed that a wormhole could also be made to traverse time as
well. It was only much later, when wormhole travel was tested, that it was found that
the Cauchy instability makes it impossible to form a wormhole that leads backward
in time. The theory was correctтАФspace and time are indeed just aspects of the same
reality, spacetimeтАФbut any attempt to move a wormhole in such a way that it
becomes a timehole produces a vacuum polarization to cancel out the time effect.
After weтАФthe spaceship I am to pilot, and myself/yourselfтАФcome through
the wormhole, the wormhole engineers go to work. I have never seen this process
close up, so I stay nearby to watch. This is going to be interesting.
A wormhole looks like nothing more than a circular loop of string. It is, in
fact, a loop of exotic material, negative-mass cosmic string. The engineers, working
telerobotically via vacuum manipulator pods, spray charge onto the string. They
charge it until it literally glows with Paschen discharge, like a neon light in the dirty
vacuum, and then use the electric charge to manipulate the shape. With the
application of invisible electromagnetic fields, the string starts to twist. This is a slow
process. Only a few meters across, the wormhole loop has a mass roughly equal to
that of Jupiter. Negative to that of Jupiter, to be precise, my scientist persona
reminds me, but either way, it is a slow thing to move.
 Ponderously, then, it twists further and further, until at last it becomes a
lemniscate, a figure of eight. The instant the string touches itself, it shimmers for a
moment, and then suddenly there are two glowing circles before us, twisting and
oscillating in shape like jellyfish.
The engineers spray more charge onto the two wormholes, and the two
wormholes, arcing lightning into space, slowly repel each other. The vibrations of the
cosmic string are spraying out gravitational radiation like a dog shaking off
waterтАФeven where I am, floating ten kilometers distant, I can feel it, like the swaying
of invisible tidesтАФand as they radiate energy, the loops enlarge. The radiation
rep-resents a serious danger. If the engineers lose control of the string for even a
brief instant, it might enter the instability known as тАЬsquiggle mode,тАЭ and
catastrophically enlarge. The engineers damp out the radiation before it gets critical,
thoughтАФthey are, after all, well practiced at thisтАФand the loops stabilize into two
perfect circles. On the other side, at Wolf, precisely the same scene has played out,
and two loops of exotic string now circle Wolf-562 as well. The wormhole has been
cloned.
All wormholes are daughters of the original wormhole, found floating in the