Asimov's - The Planck Dive by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: spa
Format: azw3
Published: 2004-02-02T02:01:00+00:00

Fifty hours before the Dive, Vikram instructed the probes in the lowest orbits to begin pouring nanomachines through the event horizon. Gisela and Cordelia joined him file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20The%20Planck%20Dive.htm (20 of 36) [2/2/2004 2:01:04 AM]

Asimov's - The Planck Dive in the control scape, a vast hall full of maps and gadgets for manipulating the hardware scattered around Chandrasekhar. Prospero was off interrogating Timon, an ordeal Vikram had just been through himself. "Oedipal urges" and "womb/vagina symbolism" had figured prominently, though Vikram had cheerfully informed Prospero that as far as he knew, no one in Cartan had ever shown much interest in either organ. Gisela found herself wondering precisely how Cordelia had been created; slavish simulations of flesher childbirth didn’t bear thinking about.

The nanomachines comprised only a trickle of matter, a few tons per second. Deep inside the hole, though, they’d measure the curvature around them–observing both starlight and signals from the nanomachines following behind–then modify their own collective mass distribution in such a way as to steer the hole’s future geometry closer to the target. Every deviation from free-fall meant jettisoning molecular fragments and sacrificing chemical energy, but before they’d entirely ripped themselves apart they’d give birth to photonic machines tailored to do the same thing on a smaller scale.

It was impossible to know whether or not any of this was working as planned, but a map in the scape showed the desired result. Vikram sketched in two counter-rotating bundles of light rays. "We can’t avoid having space collapsing in two directions and expanding in the third–unless we poured in so much matter that it collapsed in all three, which would be even worse. But it’s possible to keep changing the direction of expansion, flipping it ninety degrees again and again, evening things out. That allows light to execute a series of complete orbits–each taking about one hundredth the time of the previous one–and it also means there are periods of contraction across the beams, which counteract the de-focusing effects of the periods of expansion."

The two bundles of rays oscillated between circular and elliptical cross-sections as the curvature stretched and squeezed them. Cordelia created a magnifying glass and followed them "in": forward in time, toward the singularity. She said, "If the orbital periods form a geometric series, there’s no limit to the number of orbits you could fit in before the singularity. And the wavelength is blue-shifted in proportion to the size of the orbit, so diffraction effects never take over. So what’s there to stop you doing infinite computation?"

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20The%20Planck%20Dive.htm (21 of 36) [2/2/2004 2:01:04 AM]

Asimov's - The Planck Dive Vikram replied cautiously, "For a start, once colliding photons start creating particle-antiparticle pairs, there’ll be a range of energies for each species of particle when it will be traveling so much slower than lightspeed that the pulses will begin to smear. We think we’ve shaped and spaced the pulses in such a way that all the data will survive, but it would only take one unknown massive particle to turn the whole stream into gibberish.

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