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

тАЬTell me what this is all about,тАЭ I said. тАЬSo IтАЩll know what weтАЩre looking at
when this stuff runs.тАЭ

тАЬSure,тАЭ she said.

While we waited for QUARKER, she drew equations and plots on my
whiteboard in red, green, black, and yellow, and she explained that she was
postulating the existence of a new kind of attractor that came into being in a region
of maximum chaos, its physical result an impossible region of spacetime, where an
infinite number of particle events occupied a single, infinitesimal point.

Mathematically and otherwise, it is called a singularity, and in cosmology
something like it is assumed to be at the center of black holes. There were all sorts
of theorems about singularities, few of which I knew, none rigorously. Why would I?
This stuff went with astrophysics and the gravitational forces associated with huge
chunks of mass.

When she finished her explanations and turned from the whiteboard, I could
see that she was wired and sleepy at once. Mostly, though, she was exultant: she felt
sheтАЩd hit the jackpot. And of course she had, if any of this made sense ... it
couldnтАЩt, I thought.

The Thing gonged, to tell us we had our results. I pulled up a canvas-backed
chair beside her as she sat at the console. тАЬWeтАЩll walk through the simulation,тАЭ she
said. тАЬIf you have a question, ask.тАЭ

At first there were just cartoon schematics of the detectors; line drawings of
the big central detector and its surrounding EM boxes, hadron calorime-ters, and gas
chambers. Then the beam shots started coming, and in a small window at the top of
the screen, the beam parameters reeled by. Running Monte Carlos is one hell of a lot
easier than doing an actual run; you donтАЩt have the actual experimental uncertainties
about good beam, good vacuum, reliable detector equipment; itтАЩs a simulation, so
everything works right.

As we watched, the usual sorts of events occurred, particles and antiparticles
playing their spear-carrying roles in this drama, banging together and sending out jets
of energy that QUARKER dutifully calculated, watching the energy-conservation
books the whole time, ready to signal when something happened it couldnтАЩt fit into
the ledger. Complex and interesting enough in its own way, all this, but just
background.

QUARKER shifted gears all of a sudden, signaling it had so many collisions it
could not track them accurately. The screen turned into what we called a
тАЬhedgehog,тАЭ a bristly pattern of interactions too thick to count.

тАЬWe donтАЩt care,тАЭ Carol Hendrix whispered. тАЬDo it.тАЭ And she forced
QUARKER to plunge ahead, made it speed up the pictures of events. She didnтАЩt
care about the meanings of the individual events; she was looking for something
global and, I thought, damned unlikely.