Timeline - Michael Crichton [54]
“Why? What is quantum foam?” Kate said, stifling a yawn.
“It’s a remnant of the birth of the universe,” Stern said. He explained that the universe had begun as a single, very dense pinpoint of matter. Then, eighteen billion years ago, it exploded outward from that pinpoint—in what was known as the big bang.
“After the explosion, the universe expanded as a sphere. Except it wasn’t an absolutely perfect sphere. Inside the sphere, the universe wasn’t absolutely homogeneous—which is why we now have galaxies clumped and clustered irregularly in the universe, instead of being uniformly distributed. Anyway, the point is, the expanding sphere had tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out. They’re still a part of the universe.”
“They are? Where?”
“At subatomic dimensions. Quantum foam is just a way of saying that at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles. But the foam is smaller than an individual atomic particle. There may or may not be wormholes in that foam.”
“There are,” Gordon said.
“But how could you use them for travel? You can’t put a person through a hole that small. You can’t put anything through it.”
“Correct,” Gordon said. “You also can’t put a piece of paper through a telephone line. But you can send a fax.”
Stern frowned. “That’s entirely different.”
“Why?” Gordon said. “You can transmit anything, as long as you have a way to compress and encode it. Isn’t that so?”
“In theory, yes,” Stern said. “But you’re talking about compressing and encoding the information for an entire human being.”
“That’s right.”
“That can’t be done.”
Gordon was smiling, amused now. “Why not?”
“Because the complete description of a human being—all the billions of cells, how they are interconnected, all the chemicals and molecules they contain, their biochemical state—consists of far too much information for any computer to handle.”
“It’s just information,” Gordon said, shrugging.
“Yes. Too much information.”
“We compress it by using a lossless fractal algorithm.”
“Even so, it’s still an enormous—”
“Excuse me,” Chris said. “Are you saying you compress a person?”
“No. We compress the information equivalent of a person.”
“And how is that done?” Chris said.
“With compression algorithms—methods to pack data on a computer, so they take up less space. Like JPEG and MPEG for visual material. Are you familiar with those?”
“I’ve got software that uses it, but that’s it.”
“Okay,” Gordon said. “All compression programs work the same way. They look for similarities in data. Suppose you have a picture of a rose, made up of a million pixels. Each pixel has a location and a color. That’s three million pieces of information—a lot of data. But most of those pixels are going to be red, surrounded by other red pixels. So the program scans the picture line by line, and sees whether adjacent pixels are the same color. If they are, it writes an instruction to the computer that says make this pixel red, and also the next fifty pixels in the line. Then switch to gray, and make the next ten pixels gray. And so on. It doesn’t store information for each individual point. It stores instructions for how to re-create the picture. And the data is cut to a tenth of what it was.”
“Even so,” Stern said, “you’re not talking about a two-dimensional picture, you’re talking about a three-dimensional living object, and its description requires so much data—”
“That you’d need massive parallel processing,” Gordon said, nodding. “That’s true.”
Chris frowned. “Parallel processing is what?”
“You hook several computers together and divide the job up among them, so it gets done faster. A big parallel-processing computer would have sixteen thousand processors hooked together. For a really big one, thirty-two thousand processors. We have thirty-two billion processors hooked together.”
“Billion?” Chris said.
Stern leaned forward. “That’s impossible. Even if you tried to make one . . .” He stared at the roof of the car, calculating. “Say, allow one inch between motherboards . . . that makes a stack