Why not?
* * *
After lunch, Morelli conducted them to a large building, situated on the far side of the Institute, to let them have a look at the GRASER—Gravity Amplification by Stimulated Extinctions Reactor. They entered an area of conventional office suites and from there proceeded through a labyrinth of corridors and instrumentation labs to the heart of the project itself.
They found themselves standing on a metal-railed catwalk, looking down across a large, windowless, concrete-walled area, most of which was crammed with a chaotic tangle of machinery, electronic equipment racking, cables, and pipework. At the center, a spherical metal construction reared up out of the mess, caged in steel lattices and festooned with electrical harnesses. A bright silvery tube, about three feet in diameter, connected the sphere to an enormous and complicated rig of some kind, which in turn appeared to be only part of something larger that was built through the far wall. About half a dozen technicians and scientists were engaged in various tasks about the floor. Morelli was pointing toward the tube and talking in a louder than usual voice to make himself heard above the background of whining and humming.
“The beam is formed and accelerated in a generating setup located next door,” he said. “We use hydrogen as our starting material; the feed-stock is held by the side of the building in big tanks that you may have noticed as we came in. That tube conveys the beam into the annihilation chamber. Actually, the core of the tube—where the beam itself is—is only six inches in diameter. The rest of the thickness that you see is mainly made up of focusing and control coils. The chamber is shielded inside that sphere; we get a fair amount of heat and radiation as a side effect of the process.”
“Have you got a black hole in there now?” Aub asked. Morelli shook his head.
“Not at the moment,” he said. “They’re only doing some calibration tests this afternoon. Pity you won’t be around next Tuesday; we should have one then.”
Clifford was leaning on the guardrail and looking thoughtful. After a while he turned toward Morelli. “The radiation you mentioned just then, Al—does it come simply from losses inside the chamber, or is it produced by the annihilation process itself?”
“There are some losses, sure,” Morelli answered. “It’s pretty straightforward to calculate what they are. But on top of that, yes, there is a residual amount left over that must come from the annihilation process.”
“So you not only create a gravity effect; you generate other kinds of radiation as well,” Clifford checked.
Morelli nodded and replied: “That’s correct. From what you said this morning, it’s what you’d expect from your own k-theory. Why—what’s on your mind?”
Clifford appeared not to hear the question but went on. “What about when you go all the way to a black hole . . . what happens then?”
Morelli raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly. “It’s funny you should mention that,” he said. “That’s exactly one of the things that’s been bothering us. When we set up a black hole in there, we detect a definite radiation flux emanating from the hole itself. According to classical relativity, that shouldn’t happen; nothing should be able to escape from a black hole—energy, radiation, light—nothing. But . . .” Morelli shrugged and spread his arms, “there it is. No question.”
“Hawking Effect?” Aub suggested, referring to the idea of quantum-mechanical tunneling, first proposed by the English theoretical physicist Steven Hawking of Cambridge, back in the 1970s. The theory postulated a method by which black holes might be seen effectively to emit radiation. It required the spontaneous production of a particle-antiparticle pair somewhere in the vicinity of the black hole. Occasionally one particle of the pair might fall into the hole while the other escaped in the opposite direction to be detected by a distant observer. The net effect that he would observe would be a flux of particle radiation apparently produced by the hole itself.
“We thought of that too,” Morelli replied. “You could be right, but I don’t think we’ve got enough data yet to be certain one way or the other. That’s one of the things we mean to look into.” He looked at Clifford. “What does your theory say about it?”