Saturday 11 April 2015

The Metastable Universe

Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999).

"'...if the cosmos is in fact in such a metastable condition...[i]t's possible to tap energy from the unexpended substrate..." (p. 10)

Metastability is neither stability nor instability so what is it? Do you think you know until you are asked? I had to google it. Again, what is a substrate? Something underneath something else?

"'I'm glad you know the difference between a scalar and a vector.'" (ibid.) (I still don't.)

"...slopes spalled by frost..." (p. 20) (Sounds painful!)

"Life on Earth took three billion years to venture from the seas to the land. Our giant Moon, a cosmic freak, may well have hastened that by the tides it raised." (p. 21)

(I think of a billion as a million million but the American meaning, a thousand million, has taken over.)

Three billion years! That is how long a process can take when it is unconscious and unplanned. Is our giant Moon a cosmic freak? A knowledgeable friend has told me that Earth-Moon-like double planets have been detected in extrasolar systems.

Just another day in a Poul Anderson universe!

1 comment:

Jim Baerg said...

"difference between a scalar and a vector."

For those who still don't:
A scalar is a property that has only magnitude eg: the mass of an object.
A vector has magnitude AND direction eg: the velocity.
The vector can be expressed as a magnitude & angles from some reference directions, or magnitudes of the components in each direction, eg: North-South, East-West, Up-Down.