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

A little later, an infinite number of guests arrive. "No problem," says the dauntless desk clerk. He moves
the person in room one into room two, the person in room two into room four, the person in room three
into room six, and so on. Presto! An infinite number of rooms vacant.

My time machine works on just that principle.
AGAIN I RETURN TO 1965, the fixed point, the strange attractor to my chaotic trajectory. In years of
wandering I've met countless people, but Daniel RanienтАФDancerтАФwas the only one who truly had his
head together. He had a soft, easy smile, a battered secondhand guitar, and as much wisdom as it has
taken me a hundred lifetimes to learn. I've known him in good times and bad, in summer days with blue
skies that we swore would last a thousand years, in days of winter blizzards with drifted snow piled high
over our heads. In happier times we have laid roses into the barrels of rifles; we have laid our bodies
across the city streets in the midst of riots, and not been hurt. And I have been with him when he died,
once, twice, a hundred times over.

He died on February 8, 1969, a month into the reign of King Richard the Trickster and his court fool
Spiro, a year before Kent State and Altamont and the secret war in Cambodia slowly strangled the
summer of dreams. He died, and there wasтАФisтАФnothing I can do. The last time he died I dragged him
to a hospital, where I screamed and ranted until finally I convinced them to admit him for observation,
though nothing seemed wrong with him. With X rays and arteriograms and radioactive tracers, they found
the incipient bubble in his brain; they drugged him, shaved his beautiful long brown hair, and operated on
him, cutting out the offending capillary and tying it off neatly. When the anesthetic wore off, I sat in the
hospital room and held his hand. There were big purple blotches under his eyes. He gripped my hand and
stared, silent, into space. Visiting hours or no, I didn't let them throw me out of the room. He just stared.
In the gray hours just before dawn he sighed softly and died. There was nothing at all that I could do.

TIME TRAVEL is subject to two constraints: conservation of energy, and causality. The energy to
appear in the past is only borrowed from the Dirac sea, and since ripples in the Dirac sea propagate in
the negative direction, transport is only into the past. Energy is conserved in the present as long as the
object transported returns with zero time delay, and the principle of causality assures that actions in the
past cannot change the present. For example, what if you went into the past and killed your father? Who,
then, would invent the time machine?

Once I tried to commit suicide by murdering my father, before he met my mother, twenty-three years
before I was born. It changed nothing, of course, and even when I did it, I knew it would change nothing.
But you have to try these things. How else could I know for sure?

NEXT WE TRIED sending a rat back. It made the trip through the Dirac sea and back undamaged.
Then we tried a trained rat, one we borrowed from the psychology lab across the green without telling
them what we wanted it for. Before its little trip it had been taught to run through a maze to get a piece of
bacon. Afterwards, it ran the maze as fast as ever.

We still had to try it on a human. I volunteered myself and didn't allow anyone to talk me out of it. By
trying it on myself, I dodged the university regulations about experimenting on humans.

The dive into the negative-energy sea felt like nothing at all. One moment I stood in the center of the loop
of Renselz coils, watched by my two grad students and a technician; the next I was alone, and the clock
had jumped back exactly one hour. Alone in a locked room with nothing but a camera and a clock, that
moment was the high point of my life.

The moment when I first met Dancer was the low point. I was in Berkeley, a bar called Trishia's, slowly