Kevin's Watch

They walked on to the next exhibit, a model of the macrosphere’s cosmological evolution. As matter clumped together under mutual gravitational attraction from the initial quantum fluctuations of the early macrosphere , rotational motion either cut in at some point and blew the condensing gas cloud apart, or the process “crossed over the ridge” and the collapse continued unchecked. Star systems, galaxies, clusters and superclusters, all stabilized by orbital motion, were impossible here. But the fractal distribution of the primordial inhomogeneities meant that the end products of the collapse process had a wide spectrum of masses. Ninety per cent of matter ended up in giant black holes, but countless smaller bodies were predicted to form, sufficiently isolated to survive for long periods, including hundreds of trillions with a stability and energy output comparable to stars.

Orlando turned to Paolo. “Stars without planets. So where will the Transmuters be?”

“Orbiting a star, maybe. They could stabilize an orbit with light sails.”

“Built out of what? There’ll be no asteroids to mine. Maybe they created a lot of raw materials with the singularity when they first crossed through, but for anything new they’d have to mine the star itself.”

“That’s not impossible. Or they could live on the surface, if they chose. That’s where any native life is expected to be found.”

Orlando glanced back at the model, which included something like a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, plotting the evolving distribution of stellar temperatures and luminosities. “I wouldn’t have thought many stars would be cool enough. Except for brown dwarves, and they’d freeze completely in no time at all.”

“You can’t really compare temperatures. We’re used to nuclear reactions being orders of magnitude hotter than chemical ones, making them inimical to biology. But in the macrosphere they both involve similar amounts of energy.”

“Why?” Orlando’s gestalt still betrayed a sense of unease, but he was clearly hooked now.

Paolo gestured at an exhibit further along, beneath a rotating banner reading PARTICLE PHYSICS.

The macrosphere’s four-dimensional standard fiber yielded a much smaller set of fundamental particles than the ordinary universe’s six-dimensional one. In place of six flavors of quarks and six flavors of leptons there was just one of each, plus their antiparticles. There were gluons, gravitons and photons, but no W or Z bosons, since they mediated the process of quarks changing flavor. Three quarks or three antiquarks together formed a charged “nucleon” or “antinucleon”, similar to an ordinary proton or antiproton, and the sole lepton and its antiparticle were much like an electron and positron, but there was no combination of quarks analogous to a neutron.

Orlando scrutinized the table of particles. “The lepton is still much lighter than the nucleon, the photon still has zero rest mass, and the gluons still act like gluons … so what shifts the chemical energy closer to the nuclear?”

“You saw what happened with the gravity wells.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Ah. Same thing happens in an atom ? Electrostatic attraction also goes from inverse-square to inverse-fourth, so there are no stable orbits?”

“That’s right.”

“Hang on.” Orlando screwed his eyes shut, no doubt dredging ancient memories of his flesher education. “Doesn’t the uncertainty principle keep electrons from crashing into the nucleus? Even if there’s no angular momentum, the attraction of the nucleus can’t squeeze the electron’s wave too tightly, because confining its position just increases its momentum.”

“Yes. But increases it how much? Confining a wave spatially has an inverse effect on the spread of its momentum. Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of momentum, making that inverse-square. So the effective ‘force’, which is the rate of change of kinetic energy with distance, is inverse-cube.”

Orlion wrote:Finally finished The King's Justice.

Cord Hurn wrote:For now, I'm starting a re-read of SRD's Daughter of Regals & Other Tales.

ussusimiel wrote:Got House of Chains for myself recently, a couple of 100 pages in already and it's going along nicely. Much easier read these books now that I have some grasp on the cosmology of the whole thing!

u.

Linna Heartlistener wrote:

Cord Hurn wrote:For now, I'm starting a re-read of SRD's Daughter of Regals & Other Tales.

Love some of those!

Cord Hurn wrote:

Linna Heartlistener wrote:

Cord Hurn wrote:For now, I'm starting a re-read of SRD's Daughter of Regals & Other Tales.

Love some of those!

Me, too, Linna! I like "Unworthy of the Angel", Mythological Beast", Gilden-Fire", "Ser Visal's Tale", and especially the title story!