Anti-Matter

In the Milky Way, a new interstellar empire called the Web of Hercules sterilises or kills planetary populations by bombarding their upper atmospheres with anti-matter particles, thus generating lethal radiation.

In the Greater Magellanic Cloud, a New Earthman scientist sets out to construct an anti-matter artifact.

In intergalactic space, scientists on the moving planet He detect the arrival of anti-matter particles, thus establishing that the matter and anti-matter universes will soon collide.

Are these three occurrences of anti-matter a coincidence? No, such apparent coincidences happen as scientific knowledge advances.

When the Web attacks He at the metagalactic centre, Amalfi suggests retaliating with a burn-out overload pulse of the planet's spindizzies but such a pulse emanating from the centre would gravitationally disrupt the entire universe. Instead, the Hevians poison the Web's electromagnetic field by resonance, thus killing the Herculean spaceship crews by total nerve-block though not before everyone on He has received a lethal dose of hard radiation. Thus, both sides will die although those on He at least will survive until the universe ends in any case.

The spindizzies, graviton polarity generators, take Blish's characters through the Rift, intergalactic space and the metagalactic centre but, unfortunately, Blish did not know about black holes. Someone with a spindizzy - or with Wells' Cavorite - would be able to report back from beyond the event horizon of a black hole.

Cities In Flight, Volume IV

James Blish wrote The Triumph Of Time (alternative title: A Clash Of Cymbals) specifically to complete and conclude his Okie series, collected as Earthman, Come Home, making it impossible to write another sequel about this set of characters. Because the characters are physically unaging, Blish shows them surviving until the end of the universe. However, for story purposes, he brings this end much closer to the present than we would have expected.

This end of the universe is not its heat death but its mutually annihilating collision with its anti-matter counterpart. Thus, all cosmic matter is transformed into energy but the energy remains active - it does not become quiescent. Some of it will be transformed back into matter and will then continue on its way towards a heat death at a much later date. For this reason, one character, a philosopher, refers to " '...the period of Interdestruction...' "(Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 515)

However, he also refers to a number of dissimilar myths and philosophies that had allowed for:

" '...a break or discontinuity right in the middle of the span of existence...' " (p. 515)

Blish in conversation once applied the term "Interdestruction" not to a discontinuity midway between the monobloc and the heat death but to the period between cosmic collapse and a new monobloc as presented in Poul Anderson's Tau Zero - so the term "Interdestruction" does not seem to have one unambiguous meaning.

The Triumph Of Time is a good novel of endings and new beginnings after the endings. It begins:

"In these later years..." (p. 472)

- and ends:

"Creation began." (p. 596)

The characters hold a farewell dinner and walk for the last time through the city that they had flown between the stars. Every single physical action is eventually performed for the last time. The "...epitaph for Man..." is:

"We did not have time to learn everything that we wanted to know." (p. 596)

At the very end, a philosopher says, "I think-," but is interrupted by the end of the universe (p. 595).

Making it impossible to write another sequel does not rule out adding yet another prequel or earlier episode and Blish did this in A Life For The Stars, which is why the concluding novel is Volume IV, not III.

At The Metagalactic Centre II

In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time, why do the Hevians and their New Earthmen companions want to move the planet He to the metagalactic centre before the two universes collide?

I must ask some questions that are not raised in the text. First, is there an exact one to one correspondence between the two universes? Secondly, if yes, then does it follow that, when He occupies the centre of the matter universe, an anti-He will occupy the centre of the anti-matter universe? If that were the case, then the Hes would mutually annihilate simultaneously with the universes so that nothing would have been gained by travelling from the Greater Magellanic Cloud to the metagalactic centre.

Although this question is not posed in these terms, it does seem to be clear that no one to one correspondence is assumed:

" 'What we will be trading on is the chance - only a slight chance but it exists - that this neutral zone coincides with such a zone in the anti-matter universe, and that at the moment of annihilation the two neutral zones, the two dead centers, will become common and will outlast the destruction by a significant instant.' " (Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 577)

- although:

"This single many-barbed burr of a datum...was also sufficient in itself to endorse the existence of an entire second universe of anti-matter, congruent point for point with the universe of experience of normal matter..." (p. 513) (my emphasis)

The metagalactic centre is a "...neutral zone..." because it:

" '...is stress-free and in stasis because all the stresses cancel each other out, being equidistant. There, one might effect great changes with relatively small expenditures of power.' " (p. 577)

Because the metagalactic centre is as featureless as the rest of intergalactic space, complex instrumentation is necessary to detect it. Because the centre is stress free, instruments there will work at peak efficiency. Approaching the centre, needles recording external stresses fall while those recording outputs of equipment rise. On arrival, input meters operating at peak efficiency but detecting no incoming signals instead detect the signals generated by their own functioning. This is a sign that the centre has been reached.

If the two universes, even without a one to one correspondence, are counterparts differing only in electrical charge, then surely there is considerably more than "...a slight chance..." that there are corresponding neutral zones? But, in any case, what happens if there is a common neutral zone and if it is occupied at and immediately after the moment of cosmic collision?

In fact, three possibilities are considered:

(i) that the neutral zone is empty at the collision;
(ii) that it is occupied by an inanimate object;
(iii) that is occupied by a survivor with volition and maneuverability.

(i) Two answers are given here. One is that " '...history repeats itself. The universe is born again...' " and continues towards heat-death for matter and monobloc for anti-matter (p. 579). This does not sound like destruction to me? It is even suggested that the protagonists might live as before although in the anti-matter universe and without being able to tell the difference. I am not sure whether this means that they would repeat their previous lives exactly, thus with no memory of having lived before, or simply that they would live again but without being able to tell that they were now composed of anti-matter? In any case, this possibility is dismissed as unlikely. The more probable result is simply reduction of all matter to neutrons " '...and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem.' " (p. 579)

" 'The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons from which all else emerged...Ylem in cosmogony is like "zero" in mathematics - something so old and so fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it.' " (p. 579)

I am not sure about that. I understand that the mathematical zero is a far more sophisticated concept that the straightforward "one, two, three..." of counting visible objects. The Romans had no symbol for zero. The Indians significantly contributed so-called Arabic numerals with the decimal point and the zero symbol. Surely the cosmological equivalent of zero would be not a flux of neutrons but empty space and/or mere nothing?

It is taking much longer to analyse this section of The Triumph Of Time than I had anticipated. The characters keep mentioning what seem to be mutually incompatible hypotheses from:

" 'Nothing less,' Retma said evenly, 'than the imminent coming to an end of time itself.' " (p. 505)

to:

" Retma shrugged. 'Then...history repeats itself. The universe is born again...' " (p. 579)

I have so far discussed only (i) and must leave (ii) and (iii) until a later post - but this does at least seem to enumerate all the possibilities. (To be continued.)

The Augustinian Age

"...in a universe of normal entropy, the monobloc is intolerable and must explode; in a universe of negative entropy, the heat-death is intolerable and must condense." (James Blish, The Triumph Of Time, London, 1981, pp. 510-511)

So, if entropy periodically reverses, can each universe cyclically become the other?

"And out of one universe might come the other..." (p. 510)

However, Blish immediately seems to contradict this:

"What the visible, tangible universe had been like before the monobloc was, however, agreed to be forever unknowable." (p. 511)

He quotes St Augustine's joke. What was God doing before he created the universe? He was creating a Hell for people blasphemous enough to ask such questions! The joke has a point. If our universe is the first, then, by definition, there cannot be any record of anything previous to it. Again, if our universe is not the first but if the process of cosmic destruction and re-creation involved the reduction of mass and energy to their most basic components, then there cannot be any organised state of mass or energy that would constitute a record of previous cosmic states. So, although there are no questions that should not be asked, maybe there really are some that cannot be answered?

But we can still speculate that, before the monobloc, there was a negative entropy universe winding down.

I have not reread this far yet but, at some point, Blish's characters posit that each of them might be able to survive the cosmic collision in an isolated, sensorially deprived, bodiless form. This strikes me as both impossible and undesirable. Then they seem to forgot this idea and plan for something else. Some of the discussion is not meant to be understood by the lay reader. It simply shows us that those of the characters who are scientists are grappling with their task. But there are other times, like this, when the discussion seems to me to be internally inconsistent.

Another example: the Hevians first think that continuous creation seems to prove divine creation although Fred Hoyle, who originally postulated it, did not think that. However, the Hevians have a history of religious speculation so it is comprehensible that they would see it that way.

What Is The End Of The World?

(A Clash Of Cymbals was the Faber & Faber edition of The Triumph Of Time.)

In The Triumph Of Time (Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 506), Dr Schloss says that, philosophically, either the universe will end or it will not. If it is going to end, then all that remains is to fix the date and, in the novel, the Hevians have begun to do this. He adds that cyclical theories are hedges.

If that is the case, then the entire novel is a hedge because the characters immediately pass from discussing the end of time itself to discussing an unexpected catastrophe at the midpoint of a cosmic cycle. However, on reflection, I see their point.

We must distinguish between:

(i) any ending, eg, an individual death, the fall of a civilisation, the end of all life on Earth etc;
(ii) the heat death of the universe, cosmic quiescence, when all the energy has run downhill and cannot (?) be made to run back up again;
(iii) a cessation of all existence.

Conservation laws teach us to expect (ii) though not (iii). Life teaches us to expect many cases of (i), ultimately, for each of us, our own individual deaths.

In the novel, the expected collision between matter and anti-matter universes is neither (iii) nor even (ii) but a spectacular example of (i). Matter will not cease to exist but will be transformed into energy on a scale to dwarf even the monobloc (p. 515). Because all the energy will remain not only existent but also extremely active, this event is not the heat death of the universe but must be midway between the monobloc and the heat death.

However, it is certainly an end to all life, consciousness, civilisation, organised matter and historical records - except that the interstellar empire called the Web of Hercules, by controlling matter-anti-matter interactions, does manage to leave a record. Blish has already quoted from a subsequent history of the Milky Way so would be contradicting himself if he did not explain the existence of this history.