The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [31]
However, in 1960 a Leningrad engineer named Yuri Artsutanov read Tsiolkovsky’s book and quickly saw that the plan wouldn’t work. It was a lesson the ancient Egyptians had learned long ago—as had the Maya, a few thousand years later and on the other side of the world. The lesson was that there is a limit to how tall you can build a tower or a pyramid, and that limit is set by compression.
In a compression structure—which is to say, any structure that is built from the ground up—each level must support the weight of all the levels above it. That would be hundreds of kilometers of levels, to reach low earth orbit, and no imaginable structural material could support that weight without crumbling.
Artsutanov’s inspiration was to realize that compression was only one possible way to build a structure. Another equally viable way was tension.
A structure based on tension—one made up of cables attached to some orbiting body, for example—was a theoretically elegant but practically unattainable notion when considered from the point of view of an engineer who had only mid-twentieth-century materials to make the cables out of. But, Artsutanov contended, who was to say that the advanced cable materials that might be developed a few decades on wouldn’t be up to that challenge?
When at last Ranjit got himself to go to bed that night, he was smiling—and kept on smiling even in his sleep, because for the first time in quite a while he had found something that was really worth smiling about.
He was still smiling the next morning at breakfast, and was counting the hours (there would be almost a hundred and forty of them) until the next session of Astronomy 101. There was no doubt in Ranjit’s mind that his astronomy sessions were the brightest spots in his academic year….
That being so, why not change his major from math to astronomy?
He stopped chewing long enough to think that over, but not to any successful conclusion. There was something in his head that wouldn’t let him take the official step of giving up on math. Rightly or wrongly that felt too much like giving up on Fermat’s theorem.
On the other hand, it was pretty strange—as his guidance counselor had pointed out in the one session he had been willing to allow her—to be a math major who wasn’t taking any mathematics courses.
Ranjit knew what to do about that, and he had a whole free morning to do it in. As soon as the counselor was in her office, Ranjit was there to clear up his status with her, and by noon he was officially registered as a late entry into the course in basic statistics. Why statistics? Well, it was, after all, a kind of mathematics. But entering the class so late, how would that work? No problem, Ranjit assured the counselor; there was no undergraduate math course that he couldn’t pick up in no time at all. And so by lunchtime Ranjit had solved at least one of his problems, even though it was a problem he hadn’t really thought important enough to be worth solving. All in all, Ranjit attacked his boring lunch quite cheerfully.
Then things went bad.
Some fool had left the radio news on at high volume instead of the murmur of music the college students were willing to put up with at their meals. Nobody seemed to know how to turn it off, either.
Of course, it was inevitable that the principal news stories that day were exactly the sort of stories Ranjit didn’t want to hear, because that was pretty much all the world news there was.
Now that the news was on, however, Ranjit dutifully listened to it. Predictably the news was bad—all the little wars were still thriving, and new ones were being promised, just like always. And then the news turned to local Colombo stories. These were not of much interest to Ranjit, until one word caught his attention.