"Geoffrey A. Landis - Ripples in the Dirac Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

RIPPLES IN THE DIRAC SEA

Geoffrey A. Landis

Geoff Landis has just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA's Lewis Research Center in
Cleveland. He writes science fiction grounded in the hard sciences, but his first story, "Elemental," a Hugo
nominee for best novella of 1984, dealt with magical matters in a scientific context and appeared in
Analog. Later work has been published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Pulphouse, and
Amazing Stories.

About his award-winning short story, Geoff writes, " 'Ripples in the Dirac Sea' was an experimental story
for me. Quite a number of disparate threads wove into the final narrative. One important thread was my
feeling that a story involving time travel should have a nonlinear narrative to reflect the discontinuous way
the characters experience time.

"I also wanted to see if it was possible to write a story in which real physics is presented. Very little of
modern SF goes beyond the early quantum mechanics of Heisenberg and Schrodinger, work which is
admittedly remarkable and beautiful, but by no means the end of the story. Here I tried to invoke some of
the strangeness and beautyтАФ I might even say sense of wonderтАФof the physics of Paul Adrien Maurice
Dirac. In 'Ripples' I decided to explore the inconsistency between Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics
and the mathematics of infinity developed by Cantor and others (as far as I can tell, a quite real
inconsistency). The Dirac sea is also real, not an invention of mineтАФ despite the very science-fictional
feel of an infinitely dense sea of negative energy that surrounds and permeates us.

"Among the other threads, one might distinguish my attempts to deal with a protagonist who has both
great power and utter helplessness at the same time, my father's death of complications from a cerebral
aneurysm in 1984, along with some of my thoughts about the philosophical implications of time travel, the
sixties, dinosaurs, and various other things."

My death looms over me like a tidal wave, rushing toward me with an inexorable slow-motion majesty.
And yet I flee, pointless though it may be.

I depart, and my ripples diverge to infinity, like waves smoothing out the footprints of forgotten
travellers.

WE WERE SO CAREFUL to avoid any paradox, the day we first tested my machine. We pasted a
duct-tape cross onto the concrete floor of a windowless lab, placed an alarm clock on the mark, and
locked the door. An hour later we came back, removed the clock, and put the experimental machine in
the room with a super-eight camera set in the coils. I aimed the camera at the X, and one of my grad
students programmed the machine to send the camera back half an hour, stay in the past five minutes,
then return. It left and returned without even a flicker. When we developed the film, the time on the clock
was half an hour before we loaded the camera. We'd succeeded in opening the door into the past. We
celebrated with coffee and champagne.

Now that I know a lot more about time, I understand our mistake, that we had not thought to put a
movie camera in the room with the clock to photograph the machine as it arrived from the future. But
what is obvious to me now was not obvious then.

I ARRIVE, and the ripples converge to the instant now from the vastness of the infinite sea.