We continue to follow the career of Dagny Beynac. Now she is Mayor of Tychopolis and has been tracked down by her first and illegitimate son, Lars Rydberg. We already know that she and he will be remembered as "The Mother of the Moon" and as "The First Rydberg," respectively although, of course, he has received his surname from Swedish foster parents, thus giving that country another role in Anderson's fiction.
I cannot conceptualize the Lunar centrifuge described on pp. 182-183:
Dagny and Lars descend the staircase winding around the elevator shaft;
they step across a series of narrow bands, each rotating more rapidly than the last;
reaching the primary disc, they get onto a passing pathway, grasping its left or right rail;
the great wheel endlessly turns on silent maglev under a simulated Earth sky;
the path spirals and cants to stay underfoot;
walking outward through changing centrifugal weight, they reach Earth weight at the flange;
almost perpendicular to the horizontal, "it" (the flange?) bears a wide, circular, duramoss road;
there is a walking lane and a running lane and there are frequent bays for physical exercises;
across the path, the disc is ringed by compartments, their continuous roof visible from the center, their doors from "here";
anyone can use the circle but the compartments must be paid for.
Can you visualize it as unclearly as I do?
(It has become clearer through writing about it. I think.)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Here we see Anderson giving hard and serious thought to the problem the Moon's light gravity will pose to humans living there. Loss of bone mass and weaker muscles are merely the beginning! Something like this centrifuge would be necessary if unmodified humans are to live on the Moon for long periods of time.
And of course we see genetically modified Lunarians living and having children on the Moon without such problems.
Sean
I knew the name Rydberg was somehow familiar to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Rydberg
I had to look it up. I haven't done enough with quantum physics for a long time.
As for the centrifuge, I had seen discussions of such things elsewhere. It would be a rotating paraboloid dish, with the shape & rotation speed matched so the vector sum of lunar gravity & 'centrifugal' force is perpendicular to the surface at every point.
An alternative for a 1 earth gravity gym on the moon would be just the outer part of such a paraboloid, with a ladder, an elevator, or a staircase from the center of rotation to the 1 g section at the rim.
Kaor, Jim!
That "alternative" might be suitable for a newly founded colony on the moon, with the larger one built later.
Ad astra! Sean
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