Page 18 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire
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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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