Topdrive: переводы

→The Sanskrit word naga has several other meanings. One is ‘king cobra’. Another is ‘elephant’ – probably a reference to the animal’s snake-like trunk. Although world-bearing elephants appear in later Sanskrit literature, they are conspicuously absent from the early epics. Wilhelm von Humboldt has suggested that the myths of world elephants may have arisen from confusion between different meanings of ‘naga’, so that stories about the world-bearing serpent became corrupted into myths about world-bearing elephants. This is, in any case, an attractive idea for a culture that routinely used elephants for heavy lifting. Classical Sanskrit writings include many references to the role of world elephants in Hindu cosmology. They guard and support the Earth at its four cardinal points, and the Earth shakes when they adjust their positions – an imaginative explanation for earthquakes. They variously occur as a set of four, eight, or sixteen. The Amarakosha, a dictionary in verse written by the scholar Amarasinha around AD 380, states that eight male and eight female elephants hold up the world. It names the males as Airavata, Anjana, Kumunda, Pundarika, Pushpa-danta, Sarva-bhauma, Supratika and Vamana. It is silent about the names of the females. The Ramayana lists just four male world elephants: Bhadra, Mahapadma, Saumanas and Virupaksha.

→Humans are hot on interpretation. It lets them wriggle out of awkward positions. In 2012, in a televised debate about sexism in religion and the vexed issue of female bishops in the Church of England, some months before the General Synod voted against the proposal, one participant quoted 1 Timothy 2:12-14: ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.’ It seems hard to interpret this as anything other than a statement that women are inferior to men, that they should be subservient and shut up, and that moreover, original sin is entirely the fault of women, not men, because Eve fell for the serpent’s temptation. Despite this apparently unequivocal reading, another participant stoutly maintained that the verses meant nothing of the kind. It was just a matter of interpretation.

→Scientific revolutions don’t change the universe. They change how humans interpret it. Many scientific controversies are mainly about interpretations, not ‘the facts’. For example, many creationists don’t dispute the results of DNA sequencing (3) instead, they dispute the interpretation of those results as evidence for evolution.

→Science is often thought to be a collection of ‘facts’, which make unequivocal statements about the world. The Earth goes round the Sun. Prisms separate light into its component colours. If it quacks and waddles, it’s a duck. Learn the facts, master the technical jargon (here being: orbit, spectrum, Anatidae), tick the boxes, and you understand science. Government administrators in charge of education often take this view, because they can count the ticks (Ixodidae – no, scratch that).

→The existence (or not) of the Higgs boson was the main reason, though by no means the only one, for spending billions of euros on the LHC. And in July 2012 it duly delivered, with the announcement by two independent experimental teams of the discovery of a previously unknown particle. It was a boson with a mass of about 126 GeV (billion electronvolts, a standard unit used in particle physics), and the observations were consistent with the Higgs in the sense that those features that could be measured were what Higgs had predicted.

→Next come six so-called leptons, also in pairs: the electron, muon, and tauon (usually just called tau) and their associated neutrinos. The original neutrino is now called the electron neutrino, and it is paired with the electron. These twelve particles – quarks and leptons – are collectively called fermions, after the great Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi.

→One of the main reasons for constructing the LHC was to investigate the final missing ingredient of the standard model, which despite its modest name seems to explain almost everything in particle physics. This model maintains, with strong supporting evidence, that all particles are made from sixteen truly fundamental ones. Six are called quarks, and they come in pairs with quirky names: up/down, charmed/strange, and top/bottom. A neutron is one up quark plus two down quarks; a proton is one down quark plus two up quarks.

→Neutrinos and photons were only the beginning. Within a few years there were more fundamental particles than chemical elements, which was a bit worrying because the explanation was becoming more complicated than the things it was trying to explain. But eventually physicists worked out that some particles are more fundamental than others. A proton, for example, is made from three smaller particles called quarks. The same goes for the neutron, but the combination is different. Electrons, neutrinos and photons, however, remain fundamental; as far as we know, they’re not made out of anything simpler. (1)

→All of the elements – hydrogen, helium, carbon, sulphur and so on – are made from these three particles. Their chemical properties differ because their atoms contain different numbers of particles. There are some basic rules. In particular, the particles have electrical charges: negative for the electron, positive for the proton, and zero for the neutron. So the number of protons should be the same as the number of electrons, to make the total charge zero. A hydrogen atom is the simplest possible, with one electron and one proton; helium has two electrons, two protons and two neutrons.

→You can hang around waiting for atoms to emit new particles, you can encourage them to do so, or you can make them an offer they can’t refuse by bashing them into things to see what breaks off and where it goes. In 1932 John Cockroft and Ernest Walton built a small particle accelerator and memorably ‘split the atom’. It soon emerged that atoms are made from three types of particle: electrons, protons and neutrons. These particles are extremely small, and even the most powerful microscopes yet invented cannot make them visible – though atoms can now be ‘seen’ using very sensitive microscopes that exploit quantum effects.

→Particle physics began with small equipment and a big idea. The word ‘atom’ means ‘indivisible’, a choice of terminology that was a hostage to fortune from the day it was minted. Once physicists had swallowed the proposition that atoms exist, which they did just over a century ago, a few began to wonder if it might be a mistake to take the name literally. In 1897 Joseph John Thomson showed that they had a point when he discovered cathode rays, tiny particles emanating from atoms. These particles were named electrons.

→It is much the same in Roundworld – and not only for universities.

→Ponder Stibbons has two reasons for wanting a Great Big Thing. One is the spirit of intellectual enquiry, the mental fuel on which the High Energy Magic building runs. The bright young wizards who inhabit that building want to discover the fundamental basis of magic, a quest that has led them to such esoteric theories as quantum thaumodynamics and the third slood derivative, as well as the fateful experiment in splitting the thaum that inadvertently brought Roundworld into existence in the first place. The second reason opened the previous chapter: every university that wants to be considered a university has to have its very own Great Big Thing.

→The LHC cost €7.5 billion – about .6 billion or $9 billion – to build. Not surprisingly, it is a multinational project, so big politics gets in on the act as well.

→The latest and greatest is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ‘Collider’ we know about, ‘hadron’ is the name of a class of subatomic particles, and ‘large’ is fully justified. The LHC is housed in two circular tunnels, deep underground; they are mostly in Switzerland but wander across the border into France as well. The main tunnel is eight kilometres across, and the other one is about half as big. The tunnels contain two tubes, along which the particles of interest – electrons, protons, positrons and so on – are propelled at speeds close to that of light by 1,624 magnets. The magnets have to be kept at a temperature close to absolute zero, which requires 96 tonnes of liquid helium; they are absolutely enormous, and most weigh over 27 tonnes.

→Some areas of science are unable to function at all without Great Big Things. Perhaps the most prominent is particle physics, which has given the world a series of gigantic machines, called particle accelerators, which probe the small-scale structure of matter. The most powerful of these are colliders, which smash subatomic particles into stationary targets, or into each other in headon collisions, to see what gets spat out. As particle physics progresses, the new particles that
theorists are predicting become more exotic and harder to detect. It takes a more energetic collision to spit them out, and more mathematical detective work and more powerful computers to compile evidence that they were, for an almost infinitesimal moment of time, actually present. So each new accelerator has to be bigger, hence more expensive, than its predecessors.

→Big science can be traced back to the Manhattan project in World War II, which developed the atomic bomb. This was an extraordinarily complex task, involving tens of thousands of people with a variety of skills. It stretched the boundaries of science, engineering and, above all, organisation and logistics. We don’t want to suggest that finding really effective ways to blow people to smithereens is necessarily a sensible criterion for success, but the Manhattan project convinced a lot of people that big science can have a huge impact on the entire planet. Governments have promoted big science ever since; the Apollo Moon landings and the human genome project are familiar examples.

→However, there can also be a more admirable motive for huge scientific projects: big problems sometimes require big answers. Putting together a faster-than-light drive on the kitchen table using old baked bean cans may work in a science fiction story, but it’s seldom a realistic way to proceed. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

→Great Big Things have a seductive allure, to which Roundworld’s scientists are by no means immune. Most science requires relatively modest equipment, some is inherently expensive, and some would finance a small nation. Governments worldwide are addicted to big science, and often find it easier to authorise a ten-billion dollar project than one costing ten thousand – much as a committee will agree to a new building in five minutes, but then spend an hour debating the cost of biscuits. We all know why: it takes an expert to evaluate the design and price of a building, but everyone understands biscuits. The funding of big science is sometimes depressingly similar. Moreover, for administrators and politicians seeking to enhance their careers, big science is more prestigious than small science, because it involves more money.

→But noblesse oblige was a crushing imperative even for a tyrant, especially one who valued his self-esteem, and therefore, two hours later, a well-fed Lord Vetinari stood in front of the huge humming thing, feeling rather concerned. He made a small oration on the need for mankind to further its knowledge of the universe.