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

to his apartment in The Hash-bury. He explained it to me quietly as we drove, a dark side of the summer
of love that I'd not seen before. It was greasers, he said. They come down to Berkeley because they
heard that hippie chicks gave it away free, and get nasty when they met one who thought otherwise.

Her wounds were mostly superficial. Dancer cleaned her, put her in bed, and stayed up all night beside
her, talking and crooning and making little reassuring noises. I slept on one of the mattresses in the hall.
When I woke up in the morning, they were both in his bed. She was sleeping quietly. Dancer was awake,
holding her. I was aware enough to realize that that was all he was doing, holding her, but still I felt a
sharp pang of jealousy, and didn't know which one of them it was that I was jealous of.

Notes for a Lecture on Time Travel
The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of intellectual giants, whose likes will perhaps never
again be equaled. Einstein had just invented relativity, Heisenberg and Schrodinger quantum mechanics,
but nobody yet knew how to make the two theories consistent with each other. In 1930, a new person
tackled the problem. His name was Paul Dirac. He was twenty-eight years old. He succeeded where the
others had failed.

His theory was an unprecedented success, except for one small detail. According to Dirac's theory, a
particle could have either positive or negative energy. What did this mean, a particle of negative energy?
How could something have negative energy? And why don't ordinaryтАФpositive energyтАФparticles fall
down into these negative energy states, releasing a lot of free energy in the process?

You or I might have merely stipulated that it was impossible for an ordinary positive energy particle to
make a transition to negative energy. But Dirac was not an ordinary man. He was a genius, the greatest
physicist of all, and he had an answer. If every possible negative energy state was already occupied, a
particle couldn't drop into a negative energy state. Ah ha! So Dirac postulated that the entire universe is
entirely filled with negative energy particles. They surround us, permeate us, in the vacuum of outer space
and in the center of the earth, every possible place a particle could be. An infinitely dense "sea" of
negative energy particles. The Dirac sea.

His argument had holes in it, but that comes later.

ONCE I WENT to visit the crucifixion. I took a jet from Santa Cruz to Tel Aviv, and a bus from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem. On a hill outside the city, I dove through the Dirac sea.

I arrived in my three-piece suit. No way to help that, unless I wanted to travel naked. The land was
surprisingly green and fertile, more so than I'd expected. The hill was now a farm, covered with grape
arbors and olive trees. I hid the coils behind some rocks and walked down to the road. I didn't get far.
Five minutes on the road, I ran into a group of people. They had dark hair, dark skin, and wore clean
white tunics. Romans? Jews? Egyptians? How could I tell? They spoke to me, but I couldn't understand
a word. After a while two of them held me, while a third searched me. Were they robbers, searching for
money? Romans, searching for some kind of identity papers? I realized how naive I'd been to think I
could just find appropriate dress and somehow blend in with the crowds. Finding nothing, the one who'd
done the search carefully and methodically beat me up. At last he pushed me face down in the dirt. While
the other two held me down, he pulled out a dagger and slashed through the tendons on the back of each
leg. They were merciful, I guess. They left me with my life. Laughing and talking incomprehensibly among
themselves, they walked away.

My legs were useless. One of my arms was broken. It took me four hours to crawl back up the hill,
dragging myself with my good arm. Occasionally people would pass by on the road, studiously ignoring