All this was really another way of stating Clifford’s laws of hi-wave propagation, which showed that the hi-radiation produced by any event of creation or annihilation would manifest itself instantaneously all through space, the intensity decreasing sharply with distance. Indeed, the equations describing the two processes were soon shown to be mathematically identical. What the astronomers had done was to compute the amount of conventional radiation that would be produced at every point in space by the process of hi-particle interactions. When this quantity was integrated across the whole volume of the universe, the result showed that the total amount of energy produced throughout this volume equaled the amount originally destroyed. Hence the new conservation laws followed.
It was just as well that it worked out this way. The rate of destruction of mass sustained in the GRASER was far higher than that attained in the largest H-bomb. Only a tiny proportion of its energy equivalent was delivered back into normal space within the reactor sphere however, the rest being distributed across billions of cubic light-years of space. Had it been otherwise, they would easily have blown Massachusetts off the map the instant they switched on.
The pattern of return energy therefore explained the observed radiation from Cygnus X-1. When Clifford examined the forms of the equations derived by the scientists on Luna, he discovered that they included terms which made allowance for the distribution of matter in the surrounding volume of the universe—terms which he had neglected in his own treatment of the problem. Using the more comprehensive equations, he recalculated the radiation that should be expected from an artificial black hole in the GRASER—the quantity that had previously contradicted both his own predictions and those based on classical quantum theory and the Hawking Effect. This time it came out right. K-theory, it appeared, was well on its way to being fully validated.
In the course of all this experimentation, Clifford developed a regular working relationship with the astronomers and cosmologists at Joliot-Curie, and together they began to explore some of the deeper implications of the theory that Clifford had not thought very much more about since his days at ACRE. From the Japanese model of quasars, it was evident that these objects were the scenes of mass annihilation on a truly phenomenal scale. According to the new conservation principles, the energy equivalent of the mass being destroyed ought to be returned into normal space, most of it being concentrated around the quasars and the rest of it diffusely scattered everywhere else. Throughout the ‘everywhere else,’ therefore, there ought to exist a steady background flux of particle creations attributable to distant quasars. But all the annihilations taking place inside the ordinary masses and black holes scattered throughout the universe would, by the conservation principles, contribute to this background flux as well. Thus there were three known mechanisms for destroying mass: quasars, black holes, and spontaneous annihilations, most of which took place inside masses. Also, there was one known mechanism for creating it: the universal background of spontaneous creations. The crucial question was, did the two balance?
It was important to know this because the very fabric of spacetime itself—the lo-domain aspects of Clifford’s k-functions—came into the equations. It was possible for one of these two quantities to exceed the other without violating the conservation principles provided that the volume of the universe adjusted to compensate and maintain a constant average density. In other words, in a universe heavily populated by quasars, the rate of mass annihilation implied would be too large for return energy alone to provide the balancing mechanism, and space itself would grow to accommodate the excess. The expansion of the universe followed directly from k-theory, and came about as a consequence of an earlier cosmic epoch of quasar formation.
So, was the universe still expanding? Nobody knew because all the data that told of the fact—red shifts of distant galaxies, for example—came from millions of years in the past. Were there quasars still there now? Again, nobody knew, for the same reason. Could the balance be tested? How many black holes were there in sample volumes of the universe? Nobody knew. But the new science of k-astronomy enthusiastically anticipated by Aub and Morelli promised a means of answering all these questions.