Heat of Ascension

Jeff Wilson · 07 Mar 2003, 09:13 · from urth-v0303.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Subject: (urth) Heat of Ascension
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2003 03:13:39 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0303-3026 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0303/3026.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> From:
> Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>

> "A New Zealand atomic scientist assured me the other day that=20
> Christianity had received it's heaviest blow in 1945:  a fundamental=20
> tenet of the Church, namely that Jesus's material body was=20
> immaterialized  at the Ascension had, he said, been spectacularly=20
> disproved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - anyone with the least scientific=20
> perception must realize that any such break-down of matter would have=20
> caused an explosion large enough to wreck the entire Middle East."
> Could it cause a release of energy large enough to create a white=20
> fountain?  Any takers for the pros or the cons?

No way. The White Fountain is a massive object, in both the physical and=20
the prosaic senses. Converting Severian into energy and back into mass=20
would yield no more than the original mass of Severian, while the White=20
Fountain's passing causes floods and earthquakes.

I think it is more likely that Severian's body and the White Fountain=20
are both some kind of eidolon originally projected from Yesod. Normally=20
this would take gobs of energy, but if the White Fountain is a white=20
hole in order to cancel out the black beans/black holes, it might even=20
have a =3Dnegative=3D mass, an eidolon of which might produce energy rather=20
than consume it. This would let Severian's mass-energy relate to the=20
White Fountain, perhaps it's output was shunted into making up his=20
bodily mass.

But an agency capable of making negative mass can make any amount=20
desired, as long as they also produce positive mass, for a net increase=20
of zero. Perhaps the positive mass is stashed inside Lune, increasing=20
its gravity?

As for "immaterialization", I don't see that this requires convering=20
Jesus into energy. He might just as well have been transubstantiated=20
into a cloud, as at the end of _THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD_ with Max=20
Von Sydow, with only some mild light and warmth to account for the=20
difference in molecular binding energies.

--=20
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson/gurps/ >

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net