Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [70]
“The three-dimensional surface of a very weird balloon. I call it the ‘perceived universe’.”
“And your ‘polyverse’ includes the inside of the balloon.”
“Right. Quantum dimensions, they’re called. They’re literally inside the perceived universe. I’ve been studying their orthogonality under Janatpour’s hypothesis.”
“And the speed of light?”
“Right.” She set the saltcellar next to the peppermill. “Mark off a kilometer on the surface of the balloon. Light will take, oh, maybe a third of a microsecond to cross it. The kilometer fixed to the balloon’s surface and a kilometer stick inside the balloon are the same. Blow up the balloon and what happens?”
“Umh. The distance on the balloon gets longer but the distance inside doesn’t.”
“And if light speed is constant in the polyverse, how far does the light get in a third of a microsecond?”
“As far as the original kilometer … Which falls short of your kilometer mark.”
“Right. So a beam of light takes longer to cover the ‘same’ distance than it did before.”
Tom pulled on his lower lip and studied the lamp again. “Cute,” he said.
She leaned farther across the table. “It gets cuter.”
“How?”
“I can only account for half the estimated decrease in light speed.”
He looked at her and blinked. “Where’d the other half go?”
She grinned. “Distance over time, lover. What if seconds were getting shorter? A ‘constant’ beam of light would cover fewer kilometers in the ‘same’ number of seconds. All that stuff about ‘rods’ and ‘clocks’ … They’re not privileged, not outside the universe. When I couple the expansion of space with the contraction of time and extrapolate backward to the Big Bang—I mean, the Big Clap—I get infinaly … I mean, infinitely long second—and in-fi-nite-ly fast light speed—at the decoupling; and tha’s … Well, it’s innersting, because of Milne’s kinematic theory of relativity. E-spare-men’ly … Ex-peri-men-t’ly, you can’t tell Milne from Einshtein. ‘Til now. Here’s t’me.” This time, she did toast herself, draining the last of her wine. When she upended the bottle over her glass to refill it, she found that it was empty.
Tom shook his head. “I always thought the years went faster as I got older.”
SHARON WOKE up with a headache and a warm, fuzzy feeling. She wanted to lie in bed. She liked the feel of Tom’s arm across her. It made her feel safe. But the headache won. She slipped out from under him—not that anything short of Krakatoa would wake him—and tiptoed to the bathroom, where she shook two aspirin into her palm.
“Newton,” she said to the tablets. She rattled them like dice, as she studied her reflection. “What are you smiling about?” She was a woman who put great store in her dignity, and she had behaved the night before in a decidedly undignified manner. “You know what you’re like when you drink too much,” she scolded her image.
Of course, you knew, her image smirked. That’s why you did it.
“Nonsense. You’ve got the causal arrows backward. I wanted to celebrate my discovery. What happened afterward was spin-off.”
Yeah, right. She swallowed the aspirin, washed them down. Then, because she was already up, she went to the living room and began gathering her clothes. The dishes in the dining alcove reproached her for the food hardened upon them. Now she remembered why she didn’t cook more often. She hated disorder. She’d spend all day cleaning now, instead of doing physics.
“Newton …” Now why on Earth was Sir Isaac on her mind? He was passé, the old clockwork physics. Einstein had made him a special case, just as she would make Einstein a special case. But Newton had said that a change in velocity requires a force to explain it.
So, if time were accelerating …
She straightened abruptly, scattering all her clothes. “Why, what a very peculiar place this universe is!”
IX
OCTOBER, 1348
The Freiburg Markets
DURING THE two weeks that followed Hans’s terrifying revelation, Dietrich again