The Dark Arrow of Time
Page 1
Science and Fiction
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Massimo Villata
The Dark Arrow of Time
A Scientific Novel
Massimo VillataOsservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF, Pino Torinese (TO), Italy
ISSN 2197-1188e-ISSN 2197-1196
Science and Fiction
ISBN 978-3-319-67485-8e-ISBN 978-3-319-67486-5
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67486-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953782
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
The author published the Italian edition in 2012 with a selfpublishing, named ilmiolibro. EAN code: 9788891010728
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Contents
1 Very Fidgety, the Fat Lady Next to Him
2 They Were Flying Over Gentle Crimson Hills
3 Helias Slept Fitfully
4 Why Did You Do that?
5 The Next Morning It Rained
6 Seated Behind His Enormous Desk
7 A Sort of Autumn Had Arrived
8 The Professor, with His Most Blissful Expression
9 As They Came Closer to Mars
10 The Pilot and the Prisoner Had Reached the Shuttle
11 Nothing Moved in the Silent Valley
12 Helias Was Stretched Out on the Floor of His Room
13 Are They High Enough Yet?
14 The Meeting Had Left Helias Kadler Shaken and Confused
15 In that Moment, Helias Could Remember Very Little of His Conjectures
16 But Dr. Kadler, that Hot Afternoon Near a Sea on the Planet Thaýma
17 Helias Had Sat Down on the Step
18 Everything Had Ended Well
Appendix: The Science Behind the Fiction
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Massimo VillataThe Dark Arrow of TimeScience and Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67486-5_1
1. Very Fidgety, the Fat Lady Next to Him
Massimo Villata1
(1)Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF, Pino Torinese (TO), Italy
Massimo Villata
Email: villata@oato.inaf.it
Very fidgety, the fat lady next to him. Gripping the armrests tightly, every once in a while she would jerk her head a bit to one side or the other, for no clear reason. It was obviously her first trip, and you could tell from the blank look on her face, blank but strained, uncertain.
It was the first time for him too. It’s not that he wasn’t afraid, he was just trying to hide it, even from himself. And he was managing pretty well.
To some extent, actually, he was modeling himself on the serious man two seats down, who—at least apparently—was impassibly, calmly absorbed in his own thoughts, as if he did this every day, all just part of the job.
On the other side, a bit farther down, a black man was murmuring some kind of litany, like a subdued propitiatory chant.
They were all on a single, slightly curving row of seats, one beside another. He was almost in the center. Fifteen people, one seat was empty.
It was almost nine o’clock, almost time for liftoff be
fore the transmission. The cabin with the sixteen seats at the center of the big room full of machinery was closed, and the enormous hatch in the ceiling began to open. It would just be a few minutes more, long enough to finish docking.
It wasn’t a real trip. As he had learned in college, it wasn’t a question of moving people or things from one place to another, at a certain speed and taking a certain amount of time. That wouldn’t have been remotely feasible. Where he was going, around six parsecs1 away, a trip would have taken several years at the speeds that could be achieved, even allowing for the relativistic contraction of distances.
By now, real trips were only used for short distances, inside the solar system or its immediate neighborhood. But even they were about to be made obsolete by the recent advances in the transmission technique, cheaper in terms of energy though still riskier, relatively speaking. A probability of around three per thousand of being lost for good in cosmic space, he’d read somewhere.
So it wasn’t a trip, then, really just a hop, skip and a jump. Skipping a lot of trouble, too.
Our common existence is played out in a space-time continuum where moving from one point to another necessarily takes a time which is positive and greater than zero. How much greater depends on the speed. In theory, high speeds close to that of light make it possible to reduce the amount of time needed at will. Any given distance can be covered in a time less than that taken by light, even though the speed of light, as we know, cannot be reached or exceeded in our ‘world’. What changes is the passage of time, and the measure of the distances. If a spaceship travels at a velocity close to the speed of light, say at v = 0.995 c,2 over a distance (measured from Earth) of ten light-years, from our point of view it will take slightly over ten years to complete its trip. For the astronaut, on the other hand, the distances are significantly shorter, by around a factor of ten,3 and so the travel time will also be shorter. Consequently, the normal, real interstellar voyages last for small fractions of the astronauts’ lives, while decades go by back on Earth.
They are almost always one-way trips, by whole families or social groups setting out to colonize new planets. News about the trips arrives sporadically, and how they turned out will only be known many years later. The whole business, in any case, involves monumental wastes of time and energy.
Transmission was a real revolution. It is not a trip in our world. Somebody had dubbed it “riding the light”.
Fifty-five seconds. Fifty-four. Fifty-three. The fat lady vacillates between apparent calm and attacks of the jitters. The buzzing resonates more loudly, its frequency increasing. Now it is almost a hiss. Or that’s how it seems, at least. The sleeping gas pumped through the mask begins to take effect, and it is hard to tell what is really going on. Through the portholes, he glimpses the attendants checking the seatbelts, the masks and the monitors one last time. The seats tip back. The fat lady goes limp. Helias turns his head to look at the serious man, still imperturbable, though his face behind the mask seems to lengthen and change color.
The long face is in front of him now, mask off and eyes half closed. Then it starts to revolve around the tip of the nose, slowly at first, then whirling faster and faster. So fast it is just concentric circles, light and dark. Slowing again, it comes to a halt, upside down. Now it is wearing a pair of dark glasses, oval lenses fitting close to the face. “We’ve arrived” it whispers to him, the voice calm and reassuring. The fat lady is still sleeping and looks like she’ll probably be at it for a while. Better let her wake up in her own good time. The black man is already on his feet, ramming on the eyeglasses handed to him and striding off toward the open door of the cabin, swinging his suitcase purposefully. Four people on the right are still sleeping. Some of the seats are already empty. A blond girl starts to stir, while Helias’s seat returns to the upright position and he puts his feet down. The seatbelts unlatch automatically. A bit hesitantly, he gets up, finds his luggage, activates the flotation unit and starts for the exit, already wearing his glasses. The serious man seems to be waiting for him over there, leaning on a machine in the open-ceilinged concourse.
Helias looked up at the sky. It seemed dark blue, but maybe that was because of the concentrator lenses in his glasses. There wasn’t much visible light on that planet. But its sun emitted plenty of infrared. The glasses increased the frequency of the infrared photons, moving them into the optical band where the human eye could ‘see’ them. Though this resulted in having enough photons to be able to see, the colors were obviously muddled, a sort of dusky, artificial Daltonism in the gloaming.
He walked past the serious man, pretending not to see him but sneaking a look through the dark glasses. The quiet voice made itself heard again.
“Dr. Helias Kadler?”
That voice, calming and disquieting at the same time.
“Yes? Yes, I’m Kadler.”
“I know you are going to the Kusmiri Center. If you wish, I can take you there.”
It was all very strange. And so who was this man? What did he know about him and his ‘call’? He hadn’t said, “I’m here to take you to the Center.” But “If you wish, I will take you there”. So he wasn’t there to welcome him. How could he have been, in any case, since he had arrived from Earth with him? His trip, for him, had gone by in a flash, an instant. But on Earth, twenty years had passed. If he had immediately gone back to Earth, or rather, if he had been ‘retransmitted’, he would have been home again an instant later, but forty years after his departure, and with no guarantee that things would still be the way they were before. No wonder that transmissions beyond a certain distance were, at least these days, always one-way trips.
And so how could that imperturbable man have arrived together with him from Earth, and at the same time offer himself as a guide to the place? But maybe it was just his impression, since the man been so nonchalant about the transmission, and seemed so much at ease on that planet. Maybe he was a newcomer like him, but simply was well informed about the local topography or means of transportation. But even so, how did he know his name, and why did he offer to accompany him?
“How do you know my name?”
“I am called Mattheus Bodieur.”
He hadn’t answered the question, but at least he had introduced himself.
“Are you from here, sir?”
Before responding, he glanced around as if he wanted to make sure he wasn’t overheard.
“Yes.”
He was lying. If not, he would have had to have left at least forty years earlier, apparently for the sole purpose of ‘accompanying’ a person—him—who at the time was twenty years younger. Just a child, in other words.
Helias’s first impulse was to say goodbye to the lying stranger and go his own way, following the directions given to him before departure. But his curiosity was piqued, and with his temperament, he wasn’t about to leave without getting to the bottom of this. He stood looking fixedly at the serious man’s dark glasses, noting that his skin seemed brown.
“If you need to think about it, may I at least have the pleasure of offering you a real Alkenian ice cream at the station emporium? It’s just what you need as a pick-me-up after the ‘jolt’.”
A ‘jolt’, he called it.
“Since you are so kind…. Thank you.”
The Alkenian ice cream was superb, he had never eaten one like it. By comparison, the ones on Earth were pale imitations. It really had been a pick-me-up, and now he felt more relaxed and in tune with that unknown planet.
“Are you really from here?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you leave for Earth?”
No answer.
“You would have had to have left at least forty Earth years ago. Incidentally, how long does an Alkenian year last?”
He knew perfectly well. It was just to keep the ball rolling.
“Around 407 Alkenian days, that’s 378 Earth days. There’s not much difference with Earth, and so it doesn’t take long to get used to it.”
<
br /> “Why do you want to accompany me to the Center?”
Silence.
“How do you know my name?”
“It was on the passenger manifest.”
“Did you offered to accompany all of the passengers?”
“No.”
“And so you left here at least forty Earth years ago. You arrived on Earth, you found that I was coming here and you decided to accompany me? Doesn’t that strike you as absurd?”
“More or less.”
“That’s not a very precise answer, wouldn’t you say?”
He was silent for a moment, and then murmured, almost to himself, “There’s the trick.”.
“What trick?”
The question was ignored. He finished his ice cream meticulously and went to pay. Then he motioned to Helias to go out with him and in the doorway, putting his glasses back on, said “You will know in due time.”.
Any electromagnetic signal, such as light pulse or, for the sake of simplicity, a single photon, travels in empty space—a vacuum—at a constant speed c of around 300,000 km per second. This speed is independent of the motion of the light source and of the motion of whoever or whatever receives the photon. All observers who measure the speed of light, regardless of their state of motion, will always measure c.
Though it seems to contradict what we think we know about “everyday physics”, this is the way things work. If a projectile—a bullet, say, is shot from a moving vehicle and in the direction of the vehicle’s motion, its speed will be greater than if it were shot from a stationary position. Likewise, if the target is moving toward the bullet, the impact will be received at a higher speed than if it were moving away from the bullet’s motion. And if the target is moving away at a higher speed than the bullet, the bullet will never catch up with it. But photons are not like bullets: with photons, you can run but you can’t hide. Even if you try to escape, at any speed, the photon will always reach you with velocity c.