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

But never before had there been fear.
He straightened up from the table, realizing that he had been staring through the fresh journal entry, in the
hope, perhaps, of seeing beyond its bald beginnings. No, that must come in its own time.

The thought of breakfast tugged him away from his fruitless probing. Yes, fruit, that was what he wanted.
Bananas and wheat germ, milk from a stone crock in the springhouse. An “apple while sitting on the rear
stoop, contemplating a bold cardinal come to visit him in his little clearing and share his bubbling waters.

Then on with clothes and, leather-bound book tucked securely into the front basket, onto his bicycle and
off up the path to the road. The routine of climbing hill and diving through vale almost charmed him, but
his thoughts kept coming back to his new-found conviction. And that gut-wrenching fear.

The campus was just stirring to life as Hahnemann coasted up to the physics building. A black squirrel
watched from an oak limb as he threw open his office window and turned on his desk lamp. There was
work to be done.

The universe is bistable.

It still seemed like nonsense, but it was all he had to go on. Gravity must be the culprit, for no other force
shaped ‘the universe quite so firmly as that weakest of forces. Weak, but permeating the farthest
reaches—giving space shape and time meaning that even the nuclear and electromagnetic forces must
acknowledge.

“Bistable” meant two different levels—energy levels. And it meant the existence of an interaction that
could cause an energy difference, remove a degeneracy and split two otherwise identical configurations
into discernible entities.

But where was there a degeneracy that could be split? Hahnemann knew general relativity, better than
most men knew their own desires. He had even added his bit to the lore of Einstein, and Dicke, and
Wheeler—a small bit, by his standards, but still no mean contribution. If there were a degeneracy in the
equations of space-time, physics, he should know about it. Or his subconscious, he reminded himself.

That much decided, he settled down to work, scouring the basic derivations in search of the mathematical
key to a physical lock faith told him existed. He didn’t find it by class time, and had to withdraw from the
cosmos long enough to preach Maxwell’s laws to a band of indolent sophomores, who had already
succumbed to the torpid weather.

Nor did he find it by dusk, as he pushed his way up the first hill on the road home. It was not, in fact, until
five days later that he found it—and it was not until after three days of checking had gene by that he
believed it. But the universe was, indeed, bistable. And he could find nothing to fear.

It was such a small thing, laid out there on the pages of his journal. Small and yet so profound. Dicke had
measured the effect to— what was it?—ten decimal places, and found it null. Hahnemann’s calculations
showed it up as a part in ten to the thirteenth. Such a small energy splitting, probably not more than ten
joules for the entire mass of Earth. Maybe too small to measure.

Now there was a challenge. For what was the good of discovering an effect if it could not be measured?
The philosopher in him found such a state of affairs repugnant; the physicist in him took up the gauntlet.
What he needed was an interference experiment.