OK. I think that there is an incoherence/absurdity/contradiction here but also that it could be removed from the text by the deletion of a single phrase, not even a full sentence. Then everything else would be able to remain as it is.
Yu Wenji, the engineer, refers to:
"'...the lowest energy level, the ground state.'" (p. 290)
She differentiates this lowest level from a higher level which is:
"'The unspent energy, the substrate, we borrow from it for our zero-zero drive.'" (ibid.)
Yu and Ajit Nathu Sundaram, the linguist and semantician, then discuss what they call "'...the state...'" (ibid.) I think that they are referring to the substrate, not to the ground state. In any case, what Yu says about this "state" is as follows:
"'The state can change. Collapse, fall down. Spontaneously, randomly, at any time, any point... A sphere of nothingness, expanding from that point at the speed of light, swallowing stars, galaxies, life - blotting them out -...'" (ibid.)
If she had stopped there, then her thesis would have remained coherent. And that would have been a big enough problem for the characters to worry about. The crucial point is that, according to an obscure interpretation of the Tahirian grand equation, the use of the zero-zero drive increases the chance of the state collapsing. So should human beings cease their zero-zero interstellar travel as the Tahirians and some other races have already done?
If we, just for a moment, skip past Yu's phrase that I find problematic, she continues:
"'It may already have happened somewhere. It may be on its way to us. We'll never know.'" (ibid.)
No incoherence yet but we have to turn back to that phrase that I have jumped over but I need a food break first, hoping that the universe will still exist when I return.
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