Ascents of Wonder by David Gerrold

Author:David Gerrold [Gerrold, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0445041285
Published: 2018-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

White Hole

by Daniel P. Dern

The snare drums whisper: Shbop-bop.

Listen!

The bass plucks out: Bop-shibob.

You hear that?

The saxophone calls: Tully-um, tolly.

Quick, help me find that music! Where’s it coming from?

Sounds like it’s down the street—dingy part of town, this. Such a dusty gray. But I’m getting closer, I can feel it. That door, that old boarded-up garage. I’ve found it!

It must be. What else could coax those chords? How else could they create such pain?

And if they can play like that, what might I learn, stranded in the graveyard downtown of Philadelphia, standing in the presence of that lovely white hole?

I’d pulled into Princeton from Copenhagen, fresh from the Summer European Cosmology Conference. L. P. Remson delivers paper on Twistors and Spin; or, Black Holes Have No Hair, my latest, likeliest thoughts. Rested with my fellow physicists after a harrowing lecture at Oxford, and looked forward towards returning to the States to talk with Irranu. Affine connections, Kroniker deltas, Christoffel symbols; scarcely a daytime word of English or Danish in ten days. Somebody brandishing an umbrella, scattered reporters scribbling and taping, and a mindful of exhausted, unsorted memories.

Black holes. Ever seen one? Of course not. That’s what they are. Nothing ever comes out: no light, no sound, no smell. The proof is only on the paper, and every so often the particle physics boys snicker. Black holes. Smaller than atoms, faster than quick. The great Siberian meteor was a black hole. And the fans go wild, as editors misshuffle facts. Friendly little singularities, with so much gravity they attract themselves into less than small, and smile as all spacedmic hell breaks loose.

In the lounge after the third day of Danish beer, seated around cozy splintering tables and drawing diagrams in the salt, we heard this record. Some new jazzman, Canadian piano, with a strange sound that made you sit up and say, “That’s something new.” And play it again, and again, to let the rhythms soak in deep.

Then I left Europe behind me, still tapping my foot, to brainstorm with Teodis Irranu on the golf-green lawns of Ivy League. His blackboard was hidden under a rainstorm of indices, and he said:

—Look, I’ve got it. They can exist. White holes.

No you can’t see them.

A white hole is a black hole with the time arrow reversed. Things come out.

My idle image Was a cornucopic singularity, mouthing a stream of golden elephants and crisp bright fruit and strange new objects meaningless to man. The cosmological horn of plenty.

Wrong, all wrong. See Equation 5e. White holes spin. Things come out along the plane of rotation, yes—but only simple things, like protons, and neutrons, energy packets, information. Continuous creation: think of the Universe with a black hole at one end and a white hole at the other. Existence shuttles between.

White holes create. They act anti-entropic. Ab nihilo, something new.

—I want one— Irranu said. —How can we study these damned things without a sample?—-

—Hey, Teodis— I said. —This is theoretical physics. We’re pencil pushers. Not lab boys. Let me see your scribbles once more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.