The Singers of Time.pdf by me

Author:me [me]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-07-22T23:45:39+00:00

He looked at her blankly. "Oh? Well, a little maybe, but that's not what's worrying me. What I'm worried about is where the damned thing is. I know IVe picked the planet up from farther out than this."

And then, as the two Turtles at last appeared, despondently pulling themselves into the room, he appealed to them.

"What's wrong? Are our instruments screwed up?"

It was Chief Thunderbird who answered. "The instruments are working perfectly, Krake," the Turtle boomed, the grating voice like a dirge. "The situation is as our worst fears.

It is our entire sacred Mother planet that has disappeared.

There is nothing left of it at all."

Among the songs the aiodoi sing is a song which speaks of one-ness, and it goes:

"It is all now.

"It is all ever.

"It is all one."

And sometimes among the songs the aiodoi hear there is a song which echoes their own, even when it comes from a small voice on a distant world.

"Now suppose these notions of Stephen Hawking and all those other people are true, and our universe is only one of many—maybe of an infinity of them. Is there any way that one universe can make contact with another?

"The answer, surprisingly, is 'yes.' It may not be a practica-ble way. But theoretically, yes, there may be a point of contact; it's what Hawking and others called a Svormhole.'

"According to Hawking and Roger Penrose, the trouble with wormholes as a doorway to other universes was that they were surrounded by an impassable barrier called the Cauchy horizon. It was theoretically possible that something could pass the Cauchy barrier, but only if you didn't care what shape it got through in. Hawking and Penrose thought that the Cauchy horizon would destroy anything that entered it with one giant pulse of infinite energy.

"That was kind of discouraging to would-be universe trav-elers.

"But then Kip Thorne took a closer look at the problem, and came up with good news. The barrier wouldn't be all that destructive in one special case that he discovered, and that was where the wormhole had been formed from so-called 'exotic matter.'

"That inspired a couple of English scientists, Felicity Mellor and Ian Moss, to dig a little deeper into the question. Sure enough, they discovered that you didn't even need exotic matter. All you needed was a closed universe.

"The mistake their predecessors had been making lay in the assumption that the universe was flat and open. That made their mathematics easier, but it hid the truth from them.

There was, after all, no a priori reason to make that assumption. There was no evidence that the flat-open universe corresponded to physical reality. When Mellor and Moss did the problem over with the more plausible closed-universe assumption, they found that the problem of the Cauchy barrier had disappeared.

"So the way was open for anyone to go through a wormhole and come out in another universe. . . .

"Well, that's not quite true. There was one little remaining problem.

"For that kind of a trip, the first step was the hardest.

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