3 quoted lines
From:
Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
"A New Zealand atomic scientist assured me the other day that Christianity had received it's heaviest blow in 1945: a fundamental tenet of the Church, namely that Jesus's material body was immaterialized at the Ascension had, he said, been spectacularly disproved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - anyone with the least scientific perception must realize that any such break-down of matter would have caused an explosion large enough to wreck the entire Middle East." Could it cause a release of energy large enough to create a white fountain? Any takers for the pros or the cons?
No way. The White Fountain is a massive object, in both the physical and the prosaic senses. Converting Severian into energy and back into mass would yield no more than the original mass of Severian, while the White Fountain's passing causes floods and earthquakes.
I think it is more likely that Severian's body and the White Fountain are both some kind of eidolon originally projected from Yesod. Normally this would take gobs of energy, but if the White Fountain is a white hole in order to cancel out the black beans/black holes, it might even have a =negative= mass, an eidolon of which might produce energy rather than consume it. This would let Severian's mass-energy relate to the White Fountain, perhaps it's output was shunted into making up his bodily mass.
But an agency capable of making negative mass can make any amount desired, as long as they also produce positive mass, for a net increase of zero. Perhaps the positive mass is stashed inside Lune, increasing its gravity?
As for "immaterialization", I don't see that this requires convering Jesus into energy. He might just as well have been transubstantiated into a cloud, as at the end of THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD with Max Von Sydow, with only some mild light and warmth to account for the difference in molecular binding energies.
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson/gurps/ >
--