"Michael McCollum - Antares 01 - Antares Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

among the purveyors of scenic holocubes. By night, they were a jagged black wall looming against the
horizon. As Drake watched, a single star of eye searing, blue-white brilliance rose from behind the central
peak of the mountain range. In that moment, the scenery around them changed dramatically. The
scattered clouds, which had reflected the dull orange glow of the Homeport streetlights, suddenly blazed
forth with a blue-white fire of their own. The once dark forest on both sides of the highway was suffused
with an internal silver sheen, sending long, jet-black shadows leaping westward across the highway.

тАЬIs it always like this?тАЭ Drake asked, gesturing to the view beyond the limousine window.

Wilson nodded. тАЬIt has been ever since the nova began rising after dark. Before that it wasnтАЩt very
impressive at all - just a star bright enough to be visible in daylight.тАЭ

тАЬIt still looks that way from orbit,тАЭ Drake said. He gazed at the passing scene in silence for several
seconds. тАЬWho could have predicted that a disaster of such magnitude would be so beautiful?тАЭ

#

The first person to postulate a rational theory of gravitation was Sir Isaac Newton in 1687. His
PhilosophiaeNaturalisPrincipiaMathematica established the theory that gravity is a force, one by
which every atom in the universe attracts every other atom. NewtonтАЩs views on the subject remained
essentially unchallenged for nearly two and a half centuries. The reign of Newtonian physics ended in
1916. That was the year Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein suggested
that gravity is not a force at all, but rather a curvature in the very fabric of the space-time continuum
caused by the presence of mass. No one seriously challenged EinsteinтАЩs view of the universe until
Bashir-ben-Sulieman published his definitive treatise on macro-gravitational effects in 2078.

Sulieman was an astronomer working out of Farside Observatory, Luna. He had spent his life measuring
the precise positions and proper motions of several thousand of the nearer stars. After two decades of
work, he reluctantly concluded that EinsteinтАЩs simple models of gravitational curvature could not
adequately explain the placement of the stars in the firmament. The discrepancies were small and
exceedingly difficult to measure; but nonetheless, they were there. Try as he would, Sulieman could not
explain them away as тАЬdata scatterтАЭ or тАЬturbulence,тАЭ as had earlier astronomers working from deep
within the terrestrial atmosphere. The longer Sulieman pondered his data, the more convinced he became
that, besides being curved locally in the presence of stellar and planetary masses, space is also folded
back upon itself in long lines that stretch across thousands of light-years.

The idea that the space-time continuum is multidimensional is an old one. Classical space-time has four
dimensions, three spatial and one temporal: up/down, forward/back, right/left, past/future. However, if
four-dimensional space-time is curved (as Einstein postulated), then there has to be at least one additional
dimension for it to be curvedinto . For General Relativity to be correct, space-time must possess at least
five dimensions. Bashir-ben-SuliemanтАЩs contribution was to add yet another (orsixth ) dimension. He
reasoned that if EinsteinтАЩscurvedspace was indeed curvature in the fifth dimension, then his own
foldedspace must be curvature in the sixth. To keep the two separate, he established the convention of
тАЬverticallyтАЭ polarized curved space - indeed, humanityтАЩs very concept of vertical depends on gravity,
which is the prime manifestation of curved space - and тАЬhorizontallyтАЭ polarized folded space.

He theorized that the origin of the long, intricately wovenfoldlines was the massive black hole that
occupies the center of the galaxy. He went further. Noting that the foldlines stream outward along the
spiral arms, he wondered aloud whether the lines of folded space might not be sweeping up interstellar
matter as they rotated; in effect, acting as the catalyst for star formation. The problem of the relative