"Charles Stross - Dechlorinating The Moderator" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

realized it was the bats. The vampire bats from beyond spacetime." He was talking about
a fractal map they derived for a scalar field decay process; and it did look sort of like a
bat, if you squinted at it by the light of a lava lamp after smoking too much dope.

Curtis got a standing ovation (whether for the delivery or the message), and the iguana
made a mess down the back of his t-shirt. He didn't seem to mind.

Everyone then pissed off to the cafe or the bar, leaving a rather sad-looking Englishman
to talk about cross-section derivatives in subcritical masses of plutonium to a nearly-
empty auditorium.

I don't remember much about that evening, except that I woke up at ten the next morning
with a splitting hang-over and three teenagers crashed out in the bathroom suite.
Breakfast was black coffee and codeine, washed down with runny scrambled eggs a la
hotel. Back to the program:

A talk about positronium, the care and feeding thereof, and how to bottle it for storage.
One of the problems modern particle physicists face -- besides the lack of funding -- is
that they don't have huge relativistic storage rings any more. The maximum energies the
big old synchrotrons could get up to were pretty puny by current standards, but the one
thing they were good at was acting as a relativistic reservoir. Stick a bunch of particles
with a half life of a billionth of a second into a storage ring at close enough to the speed of
light and they'll hang around for tea. But modern accelerators are all linear, and nobody
can afford the big metal power bills. The panel discussed various condensation traps and
magnetic bottle topologies (including a really weird five-dimensional Klein bottle) but
didn't really resolve the issue.

Lunchtime: the Fabulous Rubensteins (who looked more like Shyster, Shyster and
Flywheel) presented their pion-catalysed criticality experiment. It was the size of a truck
fuel cell, and pumped out four watts of power less than it took to run -- but they said it
had sucked in thirty watts two weeks earlier, and could theoretically achieve fusion
bootstrap and run hot with a bit more tuning. More intrusions from the world of high
finance: they cited some algorithms patented by Barclays de Zoet Webb and Whole
Earth Systems in their control rig, and a couple of suits from Exxon were seen lurking at
the back of the lecture hall. modeling systems (agoric decision processorsÑ basically
evolutionary algorithms used for market simulations) on predicting particle state decay
options. A lot of the weird shit the hard physics dudes get up to these days drops back
to ground state via some really strange nondeterministic transition states. Zap some of
them with enough energy along the way and you get even weirder, less probable,
transitions. Financial modeling protocols evaluate particle decay chains in terms of "bid"
and "offer" prices on their probability, and give really neat derivatives for that big
discovery-killing. (No wonder the guys who wrote that software did well on Wall Street
before the Softlanding.)

There was a cool cocktail party that night by the poolside, ghostly blue illumination
courtesy of cerenkov radiation from the slow neutrons in the pond. I was surrounded by
crazed physics geeks and geek-ettes, stoned on the most bizarre mixtures of smart drugs
and neurotransmitter analogues imaginable: the introspection mixes actually slowed them
 down enough for a mere mortal to talk to them and get something interesting back. It was
really good. For a while I actually felt as if I understood the Pauli exclusion principle --