"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

would say something like, “In nonshiv-ering thermogenesis the body produces heat using futile cycles,”
and one of them would raise a hand and say, “But why, Sax?” and everyone would stare hard at their
lectern and not look at each other, while Sax would frown as if this had never happened before, and say,
“Well, it creates heat without using as much energy as shivering does. The muscle proteins contract, but
instead of grabbing they just slide over each other, and that creates the heat.” Jackie, so sincerely the
whole class nearly lost it: “But how?” He was blinking now, so fast they almost exploded watching him.
“Well, the amino acids in the proteins have broken covalent bonds, and the breaks release what is called
bond dissociation energy.”

“But why?”

Blinking ever harder: “Well, that’s just a matter of physics.” He diagrammed vigorously on the
blackboard: “Covalent bonds are formed when two atomic orbitals merge to form a single bond orbital,
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occupied by electrons from both atoms. Breaking the bond releases thirty to a hundred kcals of stored
energy.”

Several of them asked, in chorus, “But why?”

This got him into subatomic physics, where the chain of whys and becauses could go on for a half hour
without him ever once saying something they could understand. Finally they would sense they were near
the end game. “But why?”

“Well,” going cross-eyed as he tried to backtrack, “atoms want to get to their stable number of
electrons, and they’ll share electrons when they have to.”

“But why?”

Now he was looking trapped. “That’s just the way atoms bond. One of the ways.”

“But WHY?”

A shrug. “That’s how the atomic force works. That’s how things came out—”

And they all would shout, “in the Big Bang.”

They would howl with glee, and Sax’s forehead would knot up as he realized that they had done it to
him again. He would sigh, and go back to where he had been when the game began. But every time they
started it again, he never seemed to remember, as long as the initial why was plausible enough. And even
when he did recognize what was happening, he seemed helpless to stop it. His only defense was to say,
with a little frown, “Why what?” That slowed the game for a while; but then Nirgal and Jackie got clever
at guessing what in any statement most deserved a why, and as long as they could do that, Sax seemed
to feel it was his job to continue answering, right on up the chains of because to the Big Bang, or, every
once in a while, to a muttered “We don’t know.”

“We don’t know!” the class would exclaim in mock dismay. “Why not?”