"Tom Maddox - Gravity's Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maddox Tom)

тАЬDiehl is a bureaucrat,тАЭ she said. тАЬHe doesnтАЩt even understand the physics.тАЭ

Yeah, I thought, true, but so what? Roger L. Diehl: my boss and everyone
elseтАЩs at the lab, also the SSCтАЩs guardian angel. He had shepherded the acceleratorтАЩs
mammoth budgets through a hostile Congress, mixing threat and promise, telling
them strange tales about discoveries that lay just at the 200 TeV horizon. All in all, he
continued the grand tradition of accelerator lab nobility: con men, politicians,
visionaries, what have you. Going back to Lawrence at Berkeley, accelerator labs
prospered under hard-pushing meg-alomaniacs whose talents lay as much in politics
and P.R. as science, men whose labs and egos were one.

тАЬLetтАЩs talk,тАЭ I said. тАЬCome inside, tell me your problem.тАЭ

тАЬAll right,тАЭ she said.

тАЬWhere are you staying?тАЭ I asked.

тАЬI thought IтАЩd find someplace later, after weтАЩve talked.тАЭ

тАЬYou can stay here. Where are your bags?тАЭ

тАЬThis is it.тАЭ She pointed to the sidewalk beside her. At her feet was a soft
black cotton bag.

тАЬCome on in,тАЭ I said.

****

I figured she would be doing interesting work, unusual work; maybe even valuable
work, if sheтАЩd gotten lucky. I wasnтАЩt the least bit ready for what she was up to,

We cranked up тАЬThe Thing,тАЭ a recent development in imaging. It had a
wall-mounted screen four feet in diameter; on it you could picture detector results
from any of the SSCтАЩs runs. When it was running, the screen was a tangle of lines,
the tracks of the particles, their collisions, disappearances, appearances; all the
wonderland magic so characteristic of the small, violent world of particle physics,
where events occur in billionths of a second, and matter appears and disappears like
the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only its smileтАФin the form of brightly-colored
particle tracks across our screens.

Still, setting up and running simulations is an art, and at any accelerator lab
thereтАЩll be one or two folk who have the gift. When a series of important shots is
coming up, they donтАЩt get much sleep. At Los Alamos, Carol Hendrix, despite her
status as group leader, was the resident wizard. At Texlab, we had Dickie Boy.

She stretched, then sat at the swing-arm desk with its keyboard and joystick
module and logged on to QUARKER with the account name and passwords I gave
her. Her programs were number-crunching bastards, and QUARKERтАЩS Cray back
end would be time-slicing like mad to fit them in.