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

not as a law handed down from on high, but from the inside out. It didn't last, though. I
went to bed, and the next morning the equations were as dry and cracked as the surface
of my tongue.

Sunday morning I skipped breakfast. The Pion Overdrive Grrrls were bolting their
petatron together in the banquet hall and I did not feel like receiving an intimate lesson in
scattering effects if they got enthusiastic about testing it before the demo. It looked
impressive -- all of ten metres long.

A seminar entitled: "embedded universes 101", discussing the possibility of creating
Linde-Mezhlumian fractally-embedded self- reproducing universes -- in effect,
mini-big-bangs contained within pocket black holes -- which rapidly deteriorated into
quasi-religious ranting when someone in the audience asked a remarkably convoluted
question about the practicality of "implementing the preconditions for a Barrow-Tipler
strong anthropic cosmology" within the toy universes.

Some time during that last talk my brain underwent a loss of coolant accident and melted
down. I confess: I'm not a true geek. The theological significance of the Higgs scalar field
leaves me cold. I don't really understand how to create a pocket universe, or what it
means. I'm just repeating what I heard there. These dudes are beyond it. Way beyond it.
Whatever it is.

I wandered back into the banquet hall to see the grrrls demonstrate top quark decay
characteristics. It went smoothly and for an encore they manufactured some W's and a
handful of Higgs bosons. Then one of their laser stages failed and they shut the rig down.
I got chatting to one of them afterwards and it turned out they were using home- brewed
chirped- pulse amplifiers bolted straight in front of simple high-gigahertz network driver
diodes -- lasers produced by the million for wavelength multiplexed networks like your
cable video system.

I kid you not. Thirty years ago it cost ten billion ecus and a machine thirty kilometres in
diameter. Today a bunch of teenagers spend maybe a couple of thousand ecus, build a
Rube Goldberg contraption three metres long, and achieve a hundred times the peak
energy.

And this is what a Particulate is about. Fast, cheap, and out of control. That law --
Moore's Law -- used to be just computers. But computers peaked, and now they're
stitched into the collar of your shirt to tell the washing machine how much detergent it
takes. Next it was biotechnology, but after the cancer fix and the old age hack all the
really hot biogeeks went underground ... or became merchant bankers. That left physics.
The old physicists hit Wall Street, leaving the field clear for the old-time hackers and
phreaks.

Raw enthusiasm, and left-recursive universe generators. But they still get carded at the
bar and they still can't blow up the world. Physics may have a bad rap these days, but it's
harmless enough: a fine subject for kids to get enthusiastic about. I never did find out
what happened to the Vampire Bats from Beyond Spacetime, though.

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