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

GRAVITY’S ANGEL
By Tom Maddox

Here’s an informed and thoughtful look at the megabuck world of Big Science—and
a reminder that even with the very biggest of projects, you can’t afford to overlook
even the smallest of possibilities . . .

Born in Beckley, West Virginia, Tom Maddox is currently on sabbatical from
his position at Evergreen State University in Washington. Although he has sold only
a handful of stories to date, primarily to Omni and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction
Magazine, he scored a major success last year with the publication of his
well-received first novel, Halo—and I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more from him
as the decade progresses. Maddox currently lives in Oakland, California, and
contributes a monthly column of “Reports from the Electronic Frontier” to Locus.

****

The Invisible Bicycle burned beneath me in the moonlight, its transparent wheels
refracting the hard white light into rainbow colors that played across the blacktop.
Beneath the road’s surface the accelerator tunnel ran, where the SSC—the
Superconducting Synchroton Collider—traced a circle 160 kilometers in
circumference underneath the Texas plains.

Depending on how you feel about big science and the Texas economy, the
SSC was either a superb new tool for researching the subatomic world, or
high-energy physics’ most outrageous boondoggle. Either way, it was a mammoth
raceway where subatomic particles were pushed to nearly the speed of light, then
crashed together as violently as we could contrive— smash-ups whose violence was
measured in trillions of electron volts.

Those big numbers get all the press, but it’s only when particles interact that
experiments bear fruit. The bunches of protons want to pass through each other like
ghosts, so we—the High Beta Experiment Team, my work group—had all sorts of
tricks for getting more interactions. Our first full-energy shots were coming up, and
when the beams collided in Experimental Area l, we would be rewarded for years of
design and experiment.

So I had thought. Now I rode a great circle above the SSC, haunted by
questions about infinity, singularity—improbable manifestations even among the
wonderland of quantum physics, where nothing was—quite—real. And more than
that, I was needled and unsettled by questions about the way we— not my group but
all of us, the high-energy physics community—did our business. I’d always taken
for granted that we were after the truth, whatever its form, whatever our feelings
about it. Now even that simple assumption had collapsed, and I was left with
unresolvable doubts about it all—the nature of the real, the objectivity of
physics—riddles posed by an unexpected visitor.

Two nights earlier I had returned from a ride to find a woman standing in front
of my house. “Hello,” I said, as I walked the Invisible Bicycle up the driveway
toward her. “Can I help you?”