Timescape by Gregory Benford

Author:Gregory Benford [Benford, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Time Travel
ISBN: 9780553297096
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MAY 24, 1963

THE SAN DIEGO AREA WAS GROWING AND SPREADING. Rather than pattern itself on the jumble of Los Angeles, the younger city to the south chose to encourage white-collar employers, “clean” industries, and think tanks. The largest such tank in the area was General Atomic, scarcely a mile from the fledgling University. Quite considerable fish were to be seen swimming in its waters, puzzling at government-sponsored problems. Noted names from Berkeley and Caltech spent pleasant months scribbling on blackboards while outside, the General Atomic squirrels and rabbits lazily foraged for their handouts. The animals were part of a psychologist’s deliberate plan to evoke rest, quiet, and deep thought; the resemblance to a Disney film may have been accidental. The architect’s remorselessly circular motif for the central General Atomic offices, with the eagerly cooperative library at its center, had a similar aim. The ringed roads and buildings recalled Oriental notions of completeness, of serenity, of rest. The curved hallways would increase contact between researchers. In fact, though, the inescapable geometry meant that no one could see further than thirty feet along the curving corridors. This tended to prevent the accidental meetings as scientists came and went; they passed out of view before they could be noticed. To go home or to the library meant moving radially, and thus seeing nobody. As Freeman Dyson said that summer, “The mean interaction distance around here is no bigger than a soccer goal.” Yet often it was enough; these were exciting times. Only six months before, Mariner II had surveyed Venus close up for the first time. Gell-Mann and others were plumbing new depths in particle theory. In April, J. Robert Oppenheimer was named winner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1963 Fermi award. Oppenheimer had been, in the eyes of many scientists, the public whipping boy of the McCarthy era; he had been declared a security risk in 1954. Now at last the government seemed to be serving some penance for its stupidity. Hard feelings against Edward Teller, who had not spoken out strongly for Oppenheimer, in turn began to wane.

The feeling of opening, of fresh starts, was on the political scene already a cliché. The Kennedy ambience was a canon of media hype. Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” album, which mocked the Kennedy clan, sold briskly; the public sensed that the derision was all in good fun. Scientists were a more skeptical lot, however, mostly liberal or radical, and bothered by Bobby Kennedy’s generally perceived ruthlessness and neglect of the legal niceties of wiretapping. But the rise of support for scientific research was now coming to seem like a permanent feature, beginning with a sudden rush after Sputnik and rising linearly. Everyone knew it would plateau out, but not soon; there was much to be done, and few to do it.

Freeman Dyson came to California on leave from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, to work on the Orion project. Dyson had an immense reputation as a theoretical physicist and thus was invited to give one of the last spring Colloquia in the UCLJ Physics Department.

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