"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

their little jail was difficult enough that Bruno had never heard of its
happening by accident.
These "neubles" were the seeds of seedsЧit took eight of them, crushed
unimaginably farther, to build a collapsonЧand the little "moon" was actually
just Bruno's storage bin: ten thousand neubles held together by their own
considerable gravity. Another fifteen hundred formed the core of the tiny
planet, a sphere about half a meter across, with a skeleton of wellstone built
on top of it, fleshed out with a few hundred meters of dirt and rock and an
upper layer neatly sculpted by robots and artisans.
Bruno was very wealthy, you see.
But instead of moons and planets, one could also make black holes of these
things, black holes held rigidly into stable lattices, a phase of matter known
as "collapsium."[Footnote: See Appendix A: Collapsium]
Bruno had been the first to do this, and was still doing it these seventy years
later. He'd traded his soul for it, in some sense. Traded a whole phase of his
life, anyway: his love, his adopted home on Tongatapu. But what a thing to swap
them for: the bending and twisting of spacetime to his personal whims. The
potential of itЕ
That was the exciting part, and in truth, he'd be happy enough to direct the
enterprise, leaving the gruntwork to a horde of employees or devoted grad
students or something. The biggest problem was that almost no one was patient
enough to work the equations, even to deduce which structures were stable and
which were not, much less to derive the properties of the stable ones from first
principles. The work was hard, and there were very few graduates to be had for
it. That was the biggest problem. The second biggest was the sort of accidents
you got when collapsium experiments went awry, and the third biggest problem was
the twenty billion people who got understandably upset when this occurred.
So of the handful of people competent to perform the research, most stuck
contentedly to the safer paths, the trodden paths, the paths on which accidents
were far rarer than fame and fortune. Plodders, he sometimes called them.
He settled down in his invisible chair, feeling it subtly reshape itself beneath
him. Not soft but smart, a solid thing that yielded only for him. He cracked his
knuckles, flexed his shoulders, jiggled his wrists like an old-fashioned
strongman preparing to lift something heavy. He did these things slowly; an
observer might almost have said grimly. It didn't matter that the actual lifting
was done by electromagnetic grapples; he would submerge himself in that same
mental space where athletes go, where the body obeys the mind, where stiffness
and pain and time are reluctant to penetrate. On your marksЕ
Bruno had tried to be one of the plodders, he really had. He'd spent years
making his telecom collapsiters faster and better and cheaper, building the
Iscog, building his fortune. But all that was boring compared to what he really
wanted, which was to build an arc de fin capable of snatching photons from the
end of time itself. Time had an endЧthe state equations made that clear
enoughЧbut what sort of end was the subject of endless noise and conjecture. And
why grumble and theorize when you could just open up a window and see the whole
business with your own two eyes?
Hence these fifty collapsons, with their prancing orbits and their ghostly
Hawking/Cerenkov glow. Not to build the arcЧwhat a laugh!Чbut to build a tool
that might build a tool that might build a piece of the arc, or at least point
to a method by which it might be built. Bruno expected the project to last many