There were no questions at that point, so Clifford continued. “A particle can appear spontaneously anywhere in the universe with equal probability. When it does, it will emanate a minute gravity pulse. The figures indicate something like one particle creation in a volume of millions of cubic meters per year; utterly immeasurable—that’s why nobody has ever found out about it.
“On the other hand, a particle can vanish only from where it already is—obviously. So, where large numbers of particles are concentrated together, you will get a larger number of extinctions over a given period of time. Thus you’ll get a higher rate of production of gravity pulses. The more particles there are and the more closely they’re packed together, the greater the total additive effect of all the pulses. That’s why you get a gravity field around large masses of matter; it isn’t a static phenomenon at all—just the additive effect of a large number of gravity quanta. It appears ‘smooth’ only at the macroscopic level.
“Gravity isn’t something that’s simply associated with mass per se; it’s just that mass defines a volume of space inside which a large number of extinctions can happen. It’s the extinctions that produce the gravity.”
“I thought you said the creations do so, too,” Massey queried.
“They do, but their contribution is negligible. As I said, creations take place all through the universe with equal probability anywhere—inside a piece of matter or way outside the galaxy. In a region occupied by matter, the effect due to extinctions would dominate overwhelmingly.”
“Mmm . . .” Edwards frowned at his knuckles while considering another angle.
“That suggests that mass ought to decay away to nothing. Why doesn’t it?”
“It does. Again, the numbers we’re talking about are much too small to be measurable on the small scale or over short time periods. As an example, a gram of water contains about ten to the power twenty-three atoms. If those atoms vanished at the rate of three million every second, it would take about ten billion years for all traces of the original gram to disappear. Is it any wonder the decay’s never been detected experimentally? Is it any wonder that the gravity field of a planet appears smooth? We have no way of even detecting the gravity due to one gram of water, let alone measure it to see if it’s quantized. You could only detect it at the cosmological level. At that level, totally dominated by gravity, conservation laws that hold good in laboratories might well break down. Certainly we have no experimental data to say they don’t.”
“That means all the bodies in the universe ought to decay away to nothing in time,” Edwards pointed out. “They’ve had plenty of time, but there still seem to be plenty of them around.”
“Maybe they do decay away to nothing,” Clifford said. “Don’t forget that spontaneous creation is going on all the time all over the universe as well. That’s an a awful lot of volume and it implies an awful lot of creation.”
“You mean a continuous process in which new bodies are formed out of interstellar matter by the known sequences of galactic and planetary evolution; the newly created particles provide a source to replenish the interstellar matter in turn.”
“Could be,” Clifford agreed.
At last Edwards had drawn Clifford into an area in which he was unable to give definite answers. He pressed the advantage.
“But surely that requires some resurrection of the Continuous Creation Theory of cosmology. As we all know, that notion has been defunct for many years. The overwhelming weight of evidence unquestionably favors the Big Bang.”
Clifford spread his arms wide in an attitude of helplessness.
“I know that. All I can say is, the mathematics works. I’m not an astronomer or a cosmologist. I’m not even an experimental scientist. I’m a theoretician. I don’t know how conclusive the evidence for Big Bang is, or if there are alternative explanations for some parts. That’s why I need to publish this paper. I need to attract the attention of specialists in other areas.”
The string of admissions gave Edwards the moment he was looking for, a moment of weakness that could be exploited. It was time to move in the hatchet man. He half-turned toward Corrigan.