pressing problems
“Pressing neubles isn't so easy,” Money said to Conrad against the backdrop of the hypermass. “If you just wrapped a blob of neutronium in an ordinary diamond, you'd get an explosion. The sad truth of it is, those neutrons would slip right through the diamond lattice, because there's nothing to hold them in. Pull this mass away from the black hole and you'd have the same problem: no confinement.”
“Well how do you make a neuble then?” Conrad objected. He had seen it done. He'd seen a neuble with his own two eyes: a two-centimeter sphere of diamond with . . . something inside. The color was difficult to describe: somewhere between light gray and mother-of-pearl and shiny silver superreflector.
Money chuckled. “It's one of those things, sir, that seem really simple until you try 'em. At the kind of pressures we can achieve industrially, we get only slightly past the drip line, which is the point where the neutrons start to condense. Where the electrons and protons are squeezed into neutrons, you see? They don't want to lose their identity that way. They fight it.
“I don't know about a neutron star or anything, but the neutronium we make is only about fifty percent neutrons by mass. Mixed in with that you've got superfluid protons and ordinary conduction electrons moving close to lightspeed, which is equivalent to a very, very high temperature. They want to fly energetically off into space, yah? This creates a phenomenal outward pressure, over and above the density of the neutronium itself. So the first thing you've got to do is pull the electrons out, and isolate them from the protons with a superinsulator.”
“Which diamond is not,” Conrad said. Because he did know some things about the behavior of materials.
“Which diamond is not, right. Actually, the insulator isn't a physical substance at all, or not precisely one. It's more like a quantum state which forbids the electrons from being on the other side of the barrier. Anyway, once you've got protons and neutrons on the inside, and relativistic electrons whizzing around on the outside, you've got what amounts to a gigantic atom. But it's unstable, yah? The attraction between the protons and electrons has a tendency to hold the thing together, but it's powers of ten weaker than the outward pressure of all those neutrons, which desperately want to fly apart. It's the mother of all atomic nuclei, and large nuclei are always unstable.”
“Meaning what?” Conrad asked. “That neubles can't exist? You're not making sense, Money.”
“Oh, they can exist, all right. But they've got to be a particular size. An atom is just a really small piece of neutronium, yah? Most potential atoms don't exist in the real universe, because they'd be unstable. Too big, too squishy. But stability islands occur all up and down the periodic table, and there's a strong one centered on atomic number 1038. That's a billion-ton atom, you see, and its mass equates to the Schwarzchild radius of a proton-sized black hole, which is a magic number. Gravitic engineering is full of numbers like that. Anyway, ‘stability island' is a relative term, because the thing still wants to decompose in a couple of picoseconds. It still wants to explode. But we've brought the pressures down into the realm that diamond can withstand. That's how a neuble is made.” Return to text.
Appendix B.
Glossary
Aft —(adj or adv) One of the ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.
AKA —(abbrev) Also Known As
Antiautomata —(adj) Describes any weapon intended for use against robots.
Apenine —(prop n) Province of the Luner nation of Imbria which includes the capital city of Timoch.
Apoapsis —(n) The point along an orbit at which gravitational potential is maximized and kinetic energy is minimized. The point of “maximum altitude” above the orbit's center.
Apoptosis —(n) The “programmed cell death” of eukaryotic cells in a multicellular organism as a function of time, location within the body, and external factors such as injury or radiation damage.
Archaea —(n) A domain of single-celled organisms characterized by methane recycling, the compounding of heavy metals, and high tolerance for extremes of temperature and pressure, including vacuum. Archaea are thought to be ancestral to both the eukaryotic and prokaryotic domains.
Astrogation —(n) Astral navigation. In common use, the art or process of navigating a starship.
AU —(n) Astronomical unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149, 604, 970 kilometers, or 499.028 light-seconds. The AU is the primary distance unit for interplanetary navigation.
Biometric —(adj) Of or pertaining to the metric analysis of living organisms. In common use, the authentication of identity through biometry.
Blish, James Benjamin —(prop n) American romanticist of the Old Modern period.
Blitterstaff —(n) An antiautomata weapon employing a library of rapidly shifting wellstone compositions. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.
Bootward —(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the positive yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to caps.
Brickmail —(n) An allotrope of carbon consisting of benzene rings interlocked in a three-dimensional matrix. Brickmail is the toughest known nonprogrammable substance.
Capward —(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to boots.
Cephalization —(n) A tendency in the evolution of organisms to concentrate sensory organs and neural aggregations in a forward head, typically including or adjacent to the mouth of the digestve tract.
Cerenkov radiation —(n) Electromagnetic radiation emitted by particles temporarily exceeding the local speed of light, e.g., upon exit from a collapsium lattice.
Chaotetic —(adj) Of or pertaining to the measurement of fractal periodicity in apparently random data.
Chondrite —(n) Any stony meteoroid characterized by the presence of chondrules, or round particles of primordial silicate formed during the early heating of a stellar nebula. Chondrites are similar in composition to the photospheres of their parent stars, except in iron content.
Chromosphere —(n) A transparent layer, usually several thousand kilometers deep, between the photosphere and corona of a star, i.e., the star's “middle atmosphere.” Temperature is typically several thousand kelvins, with roughly the pressure of Earth's atmosphere in low Earth orbit.
Collapsar —(n) see Hypermass
Collapsiter —(n) A high-bandwidth packet-switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. A key component of the Nescog.
Collapsium —(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Because the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a supervacuum permitting the supraluminal travel of energy, information, and particulate matter. Collapsium is most commonly employed in telecommunications collapsiters; the materials employed in ertial shielding are sometimes referred to as collapsium, although the term “hypercollapsite” is more correct.