"P. J. Plauger - Wet Blanket" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plauger P J)

Wet Blanket
P. J. Plauger
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He awoke to fear and a conviction.

Blood pounded and bowels writhed in the icy grip of an unknown terror. He would have cried out-he
was alone, there was no one to hearтАФwere it not for a lifetime of discipline.

That discipline had an iron fist of its own, aided by a decade of training and drill. Almost before he was
consciously aware, the new grip was applied. Respiration slowed, blood pressure dropped, heartbeat
came down to eightyтАж seventyтАж a fast sixty beats per minute. Fear melted into calm.

Fred Hahnemann opened his eyes to the morning sunshine. Birdsong and the soft splashing.of water blew
into,his bedroom and touched his still damp forehead with cooling reassurance. It was going to be a
beautiful Indian summer day.

The familiar room echoed the encouragement of woods and water outside. Clothes laid out for the day
on a spartan valet, a sunlit worktable in one corner, and on it an open journal.

An open journal.

Answering the summons, Hahnemann threw, off the sheet and levered himself erect. Cold bricks stung his
bare feet as they left the throw rug behind. He wiped gummy residue from the corners of his eyes and
stared down at the book, left open at last nightтАЩs entry.

He picked up a fountain pen, uncapped it. Ignoring the words already on paper, he drew a bold
horizontal line, entered the date, beneath it and wrote:

тАЬThe universe is bistable.тАЭ

The sentence looked silly, sitting there all by itself, but he had nothing to add. At least not yet. The
statement was ludicrous; its presence in the journal of an eminent theoretical physicist could prove
embarrassing.

But Hahnemann, Leslie W. Stamford Professor of Physics and Astronomy Hahnemann, gave little
thought to that. The journalтАФand its eleven older brothers locked up in his files at the universityтАФalready
contained numerous entries that once were equally laughable. A few weeks, sometimes a year, of hard
work had, changed each of i those jokes into jargon.

The Hahnemann Effect, Hahnemann-Lee Quantization, the Hahnemann-Einstein Equations were the
names by which his colleagues paid tribute to those diamonds in the rough. A good analogy, that for they
were mined from deep within his subconscious, then polished at this very worktable, or in the maw of a
computer, or even in the rough and tumble of the laboratory.

And always there was a conviction. Long before sense or reason had their innings came the inner
certainty that each lump held indeed a gem of truth. Training saw to that, discipline insured the
follow-through - permitting his conscious personality to enjoy the riches cast up by his ever-probing inner
mind.