"Niven, Larry - The Missing Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

“And then he started insisting that I use my influence on the pilots of an interstellar liner! That would have brought me here anyway, but what influence? If he comes from a place where astrophysicists have more power than fucking politicians, it’s for damn sure he’s from interstellar space! But I have to tell you about the Casimir effect.”
“Do you really?”
“Actually,” he said, “no. Let’s leave it that there’s energy in the vacuum. Fantastic levels. Space isn’t really empty, it’s a froth of virtual particles appearing and annihilating each other faster than any hypothetical instrument can detect them, and that’s where the energy is. It’s been demonstrated mathematically that if the vacuum in free space was empty of energy, you’d have minus energy near a black hole.
“The Casimir effect is an experiment that measures vacuum energy. You machine two plates very flat, and you move them very close together. They pull at each other—”
“Gravity?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“It’s done with virtual particles. Virtual particles flash into existence and annihilate each other everywhere in space. But you put these plates so close together that the wavelength between the two plates is too small. There’s no room for virtual particles to pop up between them. The pressure on the outsides pushes the plates together, and that’s the Casimir effect.”
“Strong?”
“Tiny. ‘Helmuthdip’ has been trying to tell me—Is that entity waving at you? The half-mechanical, ah, person?”
The Terminator Beaver was on his feet and coming around the bar. I said, “Terminator Beaver, meet Roger Teng-Hui, also known as ‘chinaRoger’. Teng, meet ‘helmuthdip’, aka Terminator Beaver. I believe you have much to discuss.”
#
They sat at the bar with their computers in front of them, sometimes activating displays to supplement the Chirpsithra translators. They both kept slipping into jargon, then remembered that they were talking to the bartender too. Sometimes it takes a third party to get two people talking the same language.
“The Chirpsithra won’t discuss what powers their star-to-star liners,” the Terminator Beaver said. “Our landers are various and we build them ourselves, but the liners have apparent infinite power and not enough fuel storage.”
“Antimatter?” Teng asked.
“Antimatter they keep for attitude jets, with dross from refined sewage as reaction mass. Our landers use antimatter. Spies have identified a system aboard Scrilbree Zesh for making antimatter! Where do they get the energy? Many species wish to solve the puzzle. Sometimes we cooperate. We know that the liner’s mass varies during a voyage, losing and gaining again.”
“The energy of the vacuum is thinly spread,” Teng said.
“By some measurements,” the Beaver agreed. “Some theories render it huge. The Casimir effect may measure only the least of what is available.”
I saw fit to cut in. “Near-infinite energy in the vacuum,” I said, “And near-infinite energy in these huge Chirpsithra ships. That isn’t all of your argument, is it? Because they don’t have to be related.”
They both tried to interrupt. The Beaver’s translator cried, “No, no, no! What of the missing mass?”
“He was doing that before,” Teng said. “It’s an interesting…notion.”
“We must suppose that early Chirpsithra—” The Beaver saw us about to object. “No? Then think of engineers who find a way to attain the energy of the vacuum. When work is done, something always disappears, does it not? Not energy nor potential nor mass, unless one into the other, but something is gone.”
“Entropy,” Teng said. “Disorder increases. Energy becomes less available.”
“Yes, but what is gone when energy is taken from the vacuum?” The Beaver’s silver goggles flickered as he studied our faces. “You cannot pull energy from the same volume over and over!” he snapped. “Vacuum must disappear!”
I said, “Okay—”
“They learn the ultimate secret, these Engineers. They may be the first of many. Their numbers and ambitions expand. Peculiar and active galaxies may show their work. There is no missing mass,” the Beaver said. “The universe is expanding too fast, the Bang was too energetic, but expansion slows because space is disappearing. In the limit, space will be flat.”
I asked, “Teng? Is this even sane?”
The man said, “Oh…sane. Look, there’s no way you can take the same energy out of the same block of emptiness forever. Energy has to become less available. Sure something has to go, and it’s probably volume. Space shrinks where the Engineers have passed. Why the Chirpsithra?”
“Look about you. They have such a power source! How many suspects can you identify?” the Beaver demanded, rather unfairly, since the bar had been nearly emptied.
Teng said, “Well, that’s my point. This universe has had around ten to the tenth years to produce a species capable of using the energy of the vacuum. We expect the universe to last…how long before interesting things stop happening? Ten to the fortieth years? Ten to the ten to the eighty? We are in the earliest moment of the universe. Most of time is in front of us. The Engineers might not even have a planet to evolve on yet! They may evolve after all the protons have disappeared.”
I said to the Beaver, “You have asked the Chirpsithra, haven’t you?”
“To us the Chirpsithra said nothing. To another race they once said that the secret of their drive was to be taken as a puzzle. ‘Just another cursed intelligence test.’”
Teng burst out, “Your damn hypothesis isn’t even falsifiable!”
I asked, “What?”
“When you’ve got a decent theory, you try to falsify it, Rick. You don’t want someone else making you look like a fool, so you try to disprove it yourself first. If a statement can’t be disproved, falsified if it’s false, it’s useless. Beaver, if the Engineers won’t start chewing up galaxies for a trillion trillion years, what evidence would you expect to find now?”
“Any species may ask.”
“Not us,” Teng said, suddenly bitter. “There weren’t even human footprints on Mars when the Chirpsithra came. If ever there are, they’ll be around a Chirpsithra landing site. Passengers. Why would they give us an interstellar drive? We can’t even build landers, and they use antimatter just for reaction jets!”
I made two cappuccinos while I thought. All talk stopped in the scream of steam.
It seems I’m doomed to spend my life with entities brighter and more knowledgeable than myself. They gather to talk, all these different shapes and minds, and I am priveleged to listen. I love it. But sometimes they talk and talk, and never act.
A mathematician once told me that all of math is a mind game. The strangest thing is that any of mathematics can be fitted into the way any part of the universe behaves. The huge vacuum energies that fall out of mathematical formulations needn’t be taken seriously. I knew that without ever seeing the equations, let alone being able to read them.
Then again… “Come with me,” I said. “Let me do the talking. Teng, you may not know it, but any ongoing conversation should not be interrupted. It’s a custom.”
“Right. What have you got in mind?” But I was in motion, and what I had in mind was very little.
#
The big table was down to Herman, three Chirpsithras, the silent Wheesthroo, and the big jellyfish in his aquarium jar. I placed the cappuccinos and pulled up high chairs for the rest of us. One of the Chirps was chittering. My translator said, “Not all of the life forms known to us enter the Draco Tavern. Poseidon masses as much as Scrilbree Zesh itself.” Scrilbree Zesh was the big ship still orbiting the Moon.
The jellyfish spoke like a snore. Its translator asked, “But this entity could visit Poseidon?”
“One of our ships might cross to Poseidon’s world. We would prefer to visit Poseidon before he dies. Wait but a moment.” The Chirp’s monitor strip twinkled.
Herman took the opportunity to half-whisper, “We’ve been talking about water worlds. That’s Scylla. Nothing to trade, but supposed to be a poet. Poseidon lives on a water world not far from here. He’s huge.”
The Chirp said, “No such voyage is now planned. Learning to talk again to another of his species would be tedious, but we estimate Poseidon’s lifespan in the thousands of years.”
“But mine is not,” Scylla the jellyfish said.
“We are sorry. Greeting, Rick.”