Infrared, light and darkness

mark millman · 02 Dec 1999, 10:18 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: mark millman <millman at us.ncipher.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Infrared, light and darkness
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 10:18:12
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0569 at digest.urth.net>
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At 01:06 PM 01-12-99 -0700, mantis wrote:

> Well now, I didn't mean to imply that there=20
> was no cooling going on at all!  Just trying to=20
> de-couple visible light from heating light; to=20
> allow a habitable zone to exist where canon-
> ical astrophysics insists that it cannot be=20
> naturally; to allow a black sky at noon, yet=20
> breath-enabling atmospheric pressure (even=20
> in the mountains) and jungles of dying vege-
> tation (dying over a thousand years or more! =20
> This ain't no Nuclear Winter/killer meteor/
> sudden death scenario); etc.
>
> But it is just another idle thought, over-read-
> ing a simple romantic conceit, trying to en-
> vision how such a metaphor could be made=20
> concrete.

Whoops!  Sorry, mantis; I should have realized that you weren't
attempting to provide a complete explanation of the phenom-
enon.  I apologize for jumping on you so quickly.  Now that I've
thought about it, your idea does have certain merits, especially=20
if the sun's total energy output decreases, resulting in cooling,=20
while it also suffers a shift driving the spectrum toward the infra-
red.

> What Mark Millman wrote  about black holes=20
> leading to other universes (and the strictly hy-
> pothetical "white hole") is clearly the theory=20
> used by Wolfe in the early 80s for his muscu-
> larly retroscientification of a scenario glimpsed=20
> by H.G. Wells in the 1890s, developed by=20
> Clark Ashton Smith, and refined by Jack Vance. =20
> So at this point, we should just use the theory=20
> of the text as bolstered by the theory of its day.
>
> The black hole in Abaddon (subspace) leads to=20
> a white hole in Briah (normal space); the black=20
> hole in Briah leads to a white hole in Yesod=20
> (hyperspace).

My purpose had been to point out that the theory in the text is,=20
regrettably, undermined rather than bolstered by the theory of=20
its day.  The idea of the white hole was already on its way out=20
when Wolfe was writing SotT, to say nothing of UotNS.

Mark Millman



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