Singularity
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Moving further off in time, there seems to have been something going on in the 1970s. Not only did that decade kick off with the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis itself (Albert A. Jackson IV and Michael R Ryan, Jr., “Was the Tungus Event due to a Black Hole?” Nature, vol. 245, 1:973), but it wound up with the publication of not one but three books on the topic, all in a two-year timespan. First out of the gate was John Baxter and Thomas Atkins, The Fire Came By: The Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion (Doubleday, 1976), sporting an introduction by none other than Issac Asimov; this one wholeheartedly embraces Kazantsev’s UFO-crash theory, as do Jack Stoneley’s Cauldron of Hell: Tunguska (Simon & Schuster, 1977) and Rupert Furneaux’s The Tungus Event: the unsolved mystery of the world’s greatest explosion (Panther Books, 1977) to varying degrees.
But if it’s real science you’re after, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper down through the decades—to E.L. Krinov’s Giant Meteorites (Pergamnon, 1966). This tome, by a veteran of Leonid Kulik’s first Tunguska expeditions, contains a 140-page chapter on “The Tunguska Meteorite,” replete with historical data, eyewitness accounts, and the then-latest research. The aspiring student of the Tunguska Event could do a lot worse than to start with Krinov, then jump into the recent journal articles.
BLACK HOLES
Nowadays black-hole books are thick as flies on an accretion disk, but I still remember when the idea was fresh-minted and new (to the general public, at least), and John Taylor’s Black Holes: The End of the Universe? (Avon, 1973) was about the only thing an interested layman could find on the subject. Then a dry spell of five years before Issac Asimov came along with his The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes (Pocket, 1978). Another five for George Greenstein’s Frozen Star (Freudlich, 1983). It wasn’t till the 1990s that the dam burst.
There’s no way my publisher’ll sit still for a recitation of every blackhole monograph in print, with or without the occasional side comment. So, instead, I’ll just give you some of the ones that I kept coming back to over the course of writing Singularity.
Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe by Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees (Scientific American, 1996) holds a special place in my affections. I picked it up one afternoon in the late nineties in the bookshop of the Monterey Aquarium, back when I still thought I might be able to evade the compulsion to art that resulted in Singularity, but was no longer so sure that I was about to pass up a likely sourcebook. In Gravity’s Fatal Attraction, Britain’s Astronomer Royal (and Stephen Hawking’s old classmate) Martin Rees, weighs in (no pun intended) on the topic. This one won the American Institute of Physics’ 1996 Science Writing Award.
Then there’s the man himself, Stephen W. Hawking’s Hawking on The Big Bang and Black Holes (World Scientific, 1993)—the first book I got after I’d begun writing the novel in earnest. This one’s the real deal: Stephen Hawking’s original papers on primordial black holes, black hole radiation, et cetera ad infinitum. Not for the innumerate, or the faint of heart.
If you’d prefer Hawking-lite, then Stephen W. Hawking, The Illustrated Theory of Everything: the Origin and Fate of the Universe (New Millennium, 2003) is your ticket. Chapter 4, “Black Holes Ain’t So Black” offers a nice, accessible introduction to Hawking radiation, as well as some background on Hawking’s vexed and vexing relationship with Jacob D. Bekenstein, the young Princeton post-doc who first started him thinking along those lines.
No black-hole bibliography, however brief, would be complete without a nod to the man who named the things: John Archibald Wheeler. Check out his A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (Scientific American, 1990) or his autobiography (with Kenneth Ford) Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (Norton, 1998).
COSMOLOGY
Where would primordial black holes be without the Big Bang? For that matter, where would we be?
Not to worry, Timothy Ferris has got it covered in The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (Simon & Schuster, 1997). Or, if you’d like to step back a little further, there’s always Martin Rees’s Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (Addison-Wesley, 1997).
Pride of place, though, goes to Alan H. Guth’s The Inflationary Universe: the Questfor a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Perseus, 1997). It was this one that got me started on the quest for magnetic monopoles. And it was Tom Banks and W. Fischler’s article “An Holographic Cosmology” (www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0111142) that brought me home. This is the one that predicts an era during which all the primordial black holes formed would have been magnetic monopoles as well—“black monopoles” as Banks and Fischler call them. Vurdalak, in other words. And here you thought I was making this stuff up!
CLOSED TIME-LIKE CURVES
It’s really a toss-up as to whether Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einsteins Outrageous Legacy (Norton, 1994) belongs here or back up under Black Holes. I vote for here (and I’m the only one voting). After all, there are shelves full of black-hole books, but until Kip came along, there weren’t many serious scientists willing to seriously entertain the notions of faster-than-light travel or time machines—not in print, anyway.
In Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip recounts the by-now familiar story of how Carl Sagan asked him to come up with a scientifically-credible means of faster-than-light travel for his novel Contact. And of how Kip solved Carl’s problem using wormholes, only to realize he’d also invented a time machine into the bargain.
If you’re looking for a survey of the whole time-travel landscape, you couldn’t do better than Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (Springer, 1993, 1999)
Paul Davies’ The Edge of Infinity: Where the Universe Came From and How It Will End (Simon & Schuster, 1981) is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it still offers an excellent introduction to naked singularities, which Davies’ 1995 About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (also Simon & Schuster) updates as regards the possibility of using these bizarre objects as time machines. Even more to the point is Davies’ recent How to Build a Time Machine (Viking, 2002), a slim volume, made slimmer by the inclusion of many illustrations—but it does have blueprints for the machine itself (p. 70), if there are any gazillionaires out there willing to ante up. J. Richard Gott Ill’s Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: the Physical Possibilities of Travel through Time (Houghton-Miflin, 2001) takes an equally down-to-earth approach and covers much the same ground, before veering off into the terra incognita of the so-called “Carter Conjecture” (don’t ask).
Even assuming time machines are possible, though, could we use them to change the past? The “Conservation of Reality” principle which Sasha Bondarenko, rightly or wrongly, sets so much store by is propounded in Chapter 15 of Igor Novikov’s The River of Time (Cambridge, 1998). (Novikov called the inability to change the past the “self-consistency principle.” I took the liberty of renaming it—“conservation of reality” sounded a lot sexier to me.) You’ll also find the same issue covered from a more philosophical perspective in chapter 6 of Richard Hanley’s The Metaphysics of Star Trek (Basic Books, 1997).
Both Novikov and Hanley proceed from Sasha’s premise that if time travel is possible, then “it has already happened.” More generally, that everything that can happen has already happened—i.e., that the present state of the universe is the sum total of everything that ever took place, including any actions ever undertaken by any eventual time travelers. In other words, any closed timelike curves, and any purposes good or ill to which they might be put, have already been factored into the equation that gets us to where we are at this present moment. You can’t go back and change the past, because the past already includes the fact that you went back and tried to change it.
It’s a neat argument, but it’s always seemed like begging the question to me.
Finally, you’ll find much of the science behind Singularity presented in loving and lucid detail, in a series of “soapbox seminars” hosted by none other than Jo
hn C. (“Doctor Jack”) Adler at the website devoted to his “Vurdalak Conjecture,” www.vurdalak.com.
—BILL DESMEDT
MILFORD PA, 2004
Acknowledgements
TO THE MANY friends and total strangers I armtwisted into reading part or all of Singularity in manuscript—thanks. Without your generous advice, encouragement, and, above all, criticism, Singularity might never have seen the light of day.
Among your number, special thanks are due to:
–Paul Blass, architect and general contractor for Antipode Station;
–Norma Cernadas and Steve Kocan, consultant-warriors;
–Elizabeth Cochrane, who believed;
–Jeff DeSmedt, who critiqued it first of all, and gentler than most;
–Nancy Holland DeSmedt, for Marianna;
–Jake Elwell of Wieser & Elwell, friend and agent;
–Larry Finch (or is that Finley Laurence?), who piloted our heroes safely out of JFK;
–Roy A. Gallant, for tales from around the Tunguskan campfire;
–Georg Gerber, for lighting a fire under me over dinner at Green’s, by rubbing a pencil and a napkin together;
–Dick Guare, who knew just how different female action heroes can;
–Scott Hughes, for patching a theoretical hole in my extremal black hole;
–Albert A. Jackson, IV and Michael P. Ryan, Jr., for Vurdalak;
–Mark Joseph, taskmaster;
–Joanne Kalish and Joe DiMaggio, who kept Knox and Marianna afloat in their darkest hour;
–Jak Koke, freelance editor extraordinaire;
–Alan Leventen, for ultralights and RPGs;
–Marilyn Mower, who laid Rusalka’s keel;
–Catherine Nye, for telling me to quit stalling and write it;
–Tony Olcott, who fixed Singularity once, and kept on fixing it;
–Bruce Sterling, who really, really tried, all for the loan of a laptop powerpack.
Finally, to my wonderful wife Kathrin, who tended the hearth and fanned the flames, and whose desire to “finally read the whole thing all the way through for once” I hope I have now fulfilled.
About the Author
BILL DESMEDT HAS spent his life living by his wits and his words. In his time, and as the spirit has moved him, he’s been: a Soviet Area expert and Soviet exchange student, a computer programmer and system designer, a consultant to startups and the Fortune 500, an Artificial Intelligence researcher, a son, a husband and lover, a father and grandfather, an omnivorous reader with a soft spot for science fiction and science non-fiction, and now, Lord help us, a novelist. He’s tried to pack as much of that checkered history as he could into Singularity. Bill lives with his wife of 37 years in Milford, Pennsylvania, a town whose long tradition in speculative literature serves as a constant source of inspiration. He is currently hard at work on a sequel to Singularity entitled Dualism.
Colophon
The body of Singularity is set in Adobe Caslon, with Minion Cyrillic for the Russian. The display font is Gill Sans.
Singularity is printed on 55# Tradebook, with endpapers of 80# Rainbow Eclipse. The cover materials are Pearl Linen Deep Scarlet and 80# Rainbow Red. Jacket is 100# stock, matte laminated with a UV spot gloss.
Bill DeSmedt has been a Soviet Area expert and Soviet exchange student, computer programmer and system designer, and consultant to startups and the Fortune 500. He lives with his wife of 37 years in Milford, Pennsylvania. Bill is currently hard at work on a sequel to Singularity entitled Dualism.
Jacket design and illustration by Karawynn Long.
Author photograph by Joe DiMaggio.