Read Online The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Frederik Pohl
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction - General, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Non-Classifiable
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tachyons, and packets of twinned particles that performed according to what human beings had called “the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Separability Phenomenon.”
The twinned Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky packets—call them “ERPS” for short—were the best. For one thing, they were the fastest. As humans had discovered, under certain conditions pairs of particles, however far apart in space, are somehow so sensitive to each other that an action performed on one of the particles, anywhere, will instantaneously be reflected in its twin, anywhere else. Instantaneously. That generally universal speed limit, the velocity of light, just doesn’t come into it when you’re talking about ERP pairs. It doesn’t apply. Knowing these facts, it was easy enough for Wan-To and his colleagues to devise complex particle pairs and gave them what amounted to instant sending and receiving stations. One of Wan-To’s sets was kept at home with him, the other was deployed anywhere in the universe he chose to plant it.
Wan-To had planted plenty of them. He liked them very much, not least because there was no “directionality” about them. There was no way of telling, from one of his distant ERP packets, where its twin was—and therefore, where he was. Since Wan-To definitely didn’t want just anyone to know where he was, he used the twinned ERP packets for talking to his worrying colleagues. They were his equivalent of an unlisted telephone number.
His other tools were also good, in different ways.
Tachyons, for instance, were almost as fast, and in some ways better. You could carry a lot more information a lot easier on tachyons—particles whose existence had been surmised, but not detected, on Earth. More than information could be carried. You could, for instance, hit someone pretty hard with a tachyon blast, if you wanted to do him harm. (From time to time Wan-To did want to do someone harm, if only to keep that one from doing the same to him.) A tachyon was a quite legitimate particle, even within the ancient confines of relativity theory. It obeyed the law of the limitation of the speed of light. The only thing that distinguished tachyons from less exotic particles was that for tachyons the velocity of light was the lower speed limit, not the upper. They could never go as slowly as c. Speed wasn’t much of a problem when you used tachyons. Indeed, since the lowest-energy tachyons were the fastest ones, for any normal purpose—say, at distances of up to a few hundred light-years—they were almost as speedy as the ERP pairs.
The objection to using tachyons wasn’t technical, it was tactical. Tachyons were noisy. They moved through space (instead of simply ignoring space, as the twinned pairs did), and so a person at the receiving end could rather easily figure out the direction they had come from.
Wan-To definitely did not want that done.
Then, of course, for lesser tasks he had the whole spectrum of photons at his disposal, too—radio, heat, visible light, gamma rays, X rays, even gravitons. All of these were useful, for different things, but they were all so terribly slow. None of them could move faster than that old 186,000 miles a second.
Still, they could be very handy when used in the right way, especially the range of particles that mediated the force of gravitation. With them, it wasn’t hard for Wan-To (or his brethren) to zap a star. Even human beings could have done it, if they had had access to the necessary gravitons, graviphotons, and grayiscalars, and in all those supplies Wan-To was immensely rich. If you flooded a target star with the right particles you could pull it right out of shape. All that held any star together was gravitational force. When stretched on the particle rack, the core bubbled and fountained like a geyser, and no structure inside it could survive.
Wan-To could imagine that happening to his own comfortable home very easily, and the thought gave him the creeps.
Finally, Wan-To could use
The twinned Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky packets—call them “ERPS” for short—were the best. For one thing, they were the fastest. As humans had discovered, under certain conditions pairs of particles, however far apart in space, are somehow so sensitive to each other that an action performed on one of the particles, anywhere, will instantaneously be reflected in its twin, anywhere else. Instantaneously. That generally universal speed limit, the velocity of light, just doesn’t come into it when you’re talking about ERP pairs. It doesn’t apply. Knowing these facts, it was easy enough for Wan-To and his colleagues to devise complex particle pairs and gave them what amounted to instant sending and receiving stations. One of Wan-To’s sets was kept at home with him, the other was deployed anywhere in the universe he chose to plant it.
Wan-To had planted plenty of them. He liked them very much, not least because there was no “directionality” about them. There was no way of telling, from one of his distant ERP packets, where its twin was—and therefore, where he was. Since Wan-To definitely didn’t want just anyone to know where he was, he used the twinned ERP packets for talking to his worrying colleagues. They were his equivalent of an unlisted telephone number.
His other tools were also good, in different ways.
Tachyons, for instance, were almost as fast, and in some ways better. You could carry a lot more information a lot easier on tachyons—particles whose existence had been surmised, but not detected, on Earth. More than information could be carried. You could, for instance, hit someone pretty hard with a tachyon blast, if you wanted to do him harm. (From time to time Wan-To did want to do someone harm, if only to keep that one from doing the same to him.) A tachyon was a quite legitimate particle, even within the ancient confines of relativity theory. It obeyed the law of the limitation of the speed of light. The only thing that distinguished tachyons from less exotic particles was that for tachyons the velocity of light was the lower speed limit, not the upper. They could never go as slowly as c. Speed wasn’t much of a problem when you used tachyons. Indeed, since the lowest-energy tachyons were the fastest ones, for any normal purpose—say, at distances of up to a few hundred light-years—they were almost as speedy as the ERP pairs.
The objection to using tachyons wasn’t technical, it was tactical. Tachyons were noisy. They moved through space (instead of simply ignoring space, as the twinned pairs did), and so a person at the receiving end could rather easily figure out the direction they had come from.
Wan-To definitely did not want that done.
Then, of course, for lesser tasks he had the whole spectrum of photons at his disposal, too—radio, heat, visible light, gamma rays, X rays, even gravitons. All of these were useful, for different things, but they were all so terribly slow. None of them could move faster than that old 186,000 miles a second.
Still, they could be very handy when used in the right way, especially the range of particles that mediated the force of gravitation. With them, it wasn’t hard for Wan-To (or his brethren) to zap a star. Even human beings could have done it, if they had had access to the necessary gravitons, graviphotons, and grayiscalars, and in all those supplies Wan-To was immensely rich. If you flooded a target star with the right particles you could pull it right out of shape. All that held any star together was gravitational force. When stretched on the particle rack, the core bubbled and fountained like a geyser, and no structure inside it could survive.
Wan-To could imagine that happening to his own comfortable home very easily, and the thought gave him the creeps.
Finally, Wan-To could use
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