Page 18 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire
P. 18

Black Pinhole Nanofurnace

          Talk of money restored his suspiciousness. “Wait a minute, Sellers.
        We’re not mentioning specific sums, but this isn’t chicken feed. Do
        you really know what’s involved?”
          Down  to  details,  I  thought,  wherein  lies  the  devil.  “Please,  Dr.
        Aitkens: I’m not a physicist, although I have a bit of experience in
        analyzing industrial processes. From your early papers it can be seen
        that you had grasped the crux of the problem, the role of black-hole
        levels  of  gravitation  on  radiation.  Cosmology  founders  on  the
        problem  of  creatio  ex  nihilo:  the  known  universe,  a  vast  quantity  of
        mass-energy  distributed  unevenly  in  space-time—according  to  the
        standard  model  of  physics—originated  in  a  singularity,  a  point  of
        zero  extension  in  all  dimensions.  Similarly,  the  collapse  of  massive
        bodies proceeds by those same laws, ultimately disassembling mass-
        energy as it is drawn beyond an event horizon, as if behind a curtain,
        where  its  disappearance  is  hidden  from  view.  The  radiation  from
        both upheavals, nothing-into-something and something-into-nothing,
        is huge. Logic demands,  as you  stated,  that the  ‘nothing’  is indeed
        ‘something,’  a  vast  repository  of  energy  waxing  and  waning
        throughout endless space-time. Disruption, whatever its cause, forces
        radiation away from the scene of that cataclysmic event—or crucible,
        as you call it. Is that right, sir?”
          “Yes, yes, from a layman’s point of view.” Aitkens had resumed
        pacing. I felt that his attention was wandering and that I should wrap
        up my spiel as quickly as I could without slighting him.
          “Comparing output,” I went on, skipping an abstruse paragraph or
        two, “nuclear fusion releases much more energy than fission. But a
        black  hole  emits  a  hundred  times  more  than  fusion.  We  cannot
        harness a cosmic-scale black hole. But you, following your magnetic
        containment-vessel  research,  have  found  a  way  to  create  the
        equivalent  on  a  submicroscopic  level.  This  involves  a  unified  field
        theory linking the fundamental forces of nature, a set of equations
        you have yet to publish. As I understand it, at the center of a unit the
        size of a golf ball you can set in motion an instability or disruption
        less  than  a  nanometer  in  diameter,  in  which  a  minute  quantity  of
        atoms have been compressed in such a way to create not fission or
        fusion but collapse. Their environment creates its own local warped
        space-time  independent  of  planetary  inertial  frames,  and  the  inner
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