"Niven, Larry - The Theory And Practice Of Teleportation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Result: everything on the ship is transparent. If we assume that some light will be picked up by the teleportation field and carried along with the ship, then how transparent everything is will depend on two things: the rate of travel, and the distance of an object from the passenger's eye. His hand is nearly opaque. The further wall is nearly invisible, because so much light is being picked up in the space between wall and eye...and dropped between wall and eye. The cabin in Figure 4 is unnecessary unless the ship carries rocket auxiliaries. With the end-teleport drive going, the stars are visible anywhere you look.
If the teleportation field will not transport light, the situation becomes more serious. At a useful rate of travel a light beam would have just time to traverse the diameter of a human eye before the eye disappears. So a human eye will still function. But the ship and all its contents, including the passenger, are totally invisible, and each passenger becomes a disembodied viewpoint falling between the stars.
Travel even faster, and a light beam may have time to touch the retina without first entering the lens of the eye. Now everything becomes a blur. On arrival the passenger becomes a psychiatric patient.
6) Interstellar dust would also be picked up en route. Most of it could be handled by a tough air conditioning system; but a certain proportion would appear already inside the transitory space occupied by the passenger. Definitely he would need medical attention on arrival.
7) Interstellar hydrogen would be swept up by the moving ship. Aboard an end-teleport drive there would be absolutely no smoking. Drinking, yes...
8) As for meteors and larger bodies. . . we'll use a trick.
Let's say we're going toward the galactic core, i.e. toward Sagitarius. Okay: Before we leave the system, we take our ship to within a few million miles of the Sun, on the Sagitarius side; and we hover.
We hover by end-teleporting outward as the Sun's gravity draws us inward. Half an hour of this should give us a respectable intrinsic velocity Sunward. Now we take off toward Sagitarius.
So we ram something en route. It can happen.
But . . . it takes energy to make two solid masses occupy the same space. Chances are we cannot teleport into what we've rammed. A fuse blows and the motor stops. That leaves the ship with its intrinsic velocity, which we have built up hugely in a direction opposite to the direction of travel.
So the ship backs up at hundreds of miles per second!
Even if we ram a planet, our intrinsic velocity is higher than escape velocity, and we're safe.
9) Conservation of energy rears its head once more. The ship becomes fiendishly cold as it leaves the solar system, and body temperature drops simultaneously.
The reverse occurs as we enter a system. It's a good thing we built a heavy air conditioning system to get rid of all that dust. We'll need it for temperature control.


VII


Why do I persist in assuming that the conservation laws hold?
This question caused a series of soapbox speeches, mostly in my defense (thanks, friends), along the back wall of my Boston audience. The assumptions are important, and I'm going to try to justify them.
1) The behavior of the universe does not change. In all known cases the laws of conservation of energy and momentum hold rigorously. Now we use them for prediction. The existence and most of the properties of the neutrino were predicted by use of these and other conservation laws. Later the neutrino itself was detected through judicious use of its own proposed properties.
If today's physicists can use conservation to predict ghost particles, I can use- them to predict the behavior of a teleport system.
2) In any case, I'm entitled to make any assumptions I like, if they are internally consistent. This is an exercise in speculation, remember? Speculation starts with assumptions. If you don't like mine, try your own; you might get some interesting results.
3) A passenger teleporting downhill must lose potential energy. Some equivalent gain in energy must appear. But why heat?
Good question. I myself generally assume that the energy will appear as a jump in electron orbits. Then the electrons drop back, releasing photons. The photons are absorbed before they reach the passenger's skin, giving heat. But almost any reasonable process will ultimately end in heat. Heat is the most general, most randomized form of energy.
Could the released energy appear as neutrinos? That would not give heat. But it would upset some of the obscure parity laws of nuclear physics (thus upsetting Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, and thousands of reactionary physicists) and it would make uphill teleportation impossible, for the process would have to destroy neutrinos which weren't there in the first place.


VIII


How about a perpetual motion machine?
See Figure 5 (page 107). The idea is to use open transmitter and receiver booths. The cargo, thirty gallous of water, is teleported to the receiver. It immediately pours out into the open transmitter, which teleports it back to the receiver, et cetera. Put a water wheel in the system and we get power.

Obviously there's a flaw. If conservation holds, the water freezes pretty quick. Furthermore, thermodynamics says that the energy to run the system will be greater than the maximum energy to be obtained from the continuously falling water.
But the system is interesting in other ways.
Let's replace the water with a ton of iron filings. That way we can enclose the whole system in a vacuum chamber and stop worrying about atmospheric friction, water evaporation, and freezing of the water. We let the filings fail under gravity until the mass is a black stream, near absolute zero, moving at seven miles per second. That's nineteen minutes of operation.
Now we let it go another nineteen minutes. The velocity doubles, and we've let the filings fail the equivalent of twice the distance from infinity to the Earth's surface.
We could maintain this acceleration forever, provided we do one thing. We will have to build our system at the North (or South) Pole. Otherwise the stream of filings will seem to bend away from the transmitter door as the Earth turns. (BOOM!) So we're at the North Pole...
In thirty days the mass of the filings has doubled. In sixty days it has quadrupled. Note that while Earth pulls the filings, the filings pull the Earth. Minutely, at first. But the filings aren't really going anywhere, so we have the equivalent of a reactionless drive. Every month the thrust doubles. If we run the system long enough the filings will weigh as much as a star. Obviously we don't want that. Tides! But in its present state, turning off the system would destroy the Earth. So we set up a second receiver at the South Pole.
The stream of filings goes tearing off through the Earth's atmosphere, a blue flash of iron vapor ramming air. Even the gamma rays are going upward! What a show! Listen to that applause! But all the teevee cameras have melted...
Well, this is where I quit. But try a few postulates yourself, and see what you get.