s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

inside the Detention Wing. Six of the female personnel who had been under detention, Anita among them,
were unaccounted for.
 It was one glorious fuck-up from start to finish, Sirocco declared, tugging at his moustache as he and
Colman discussed the events late that evening.  Too many things went wrong that shouldn t have been
able to go wrong Nobody guarding the planes, nobody guarding the power room, several units ordered
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to one place and no units at all in others...And how did they get hold of the guns? I don t like it, Steve. I
don t like it at all. There s a very funny smell to the whole business.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
EVEN IN HIS short time at the university near Franklin, Jerry Pernak had learned that Chironian
theoretical and experimental physics had departed significantly from the mainstream being pursued on
Earth. The Chironian scientists had not so much advanced past their terrestrial counterparts; rather, as
perhaps was not surprising in view of the absence on Chiron of traditional habits of thought or authorities
whose venerable opinions could not be challenged until after they were dead, they had gone off in a
totally unexpected direction. And some of the things they had stumbled across on their way had left
Pernak astounded.
Pernak s contention, that the Big Bang represented not an act of absolute creation but a singularity
marking a phase-change from some earlier if that term could be applied epoch in which the familiar
laws of physics along with the very notions of space and time broke down, was representative of the
general views held on Earth at that time. Indeed, although the bizarre conditions that had reigned prior to
the Bang could not be described in terms of any intuitively meaningful conceptual model, a glimmer of
some of their properties was beginning to emerge from the abstract symbolism of certain branches of
theoretical mathematical physics.
The bewildering proliferation first of baryons and mesons, and later the quarks, which were supposed to
simplify them, that had plagued studies of the structure of matter to the end of the twentieth century had
been reduced to an orderly hierarchy of  generations of particles. Each generation contained just eight
particles: six quarks and two leptons. The first generation comprised the  up and  down quarks, each
appearing in the three colorcharge variants peculiar to the strong nuclear force to give six in all; the
electron; and the electron-type neutrino. The second generation was made up of the  strange and
 charmed quarks, each of them again appearing in three possible colors; the muon; and the muon-type
neutrino. The third generation contained the  top and  bottom quarks; the tau; and the tau-type
neutrino; and so it went on.
What distinguished the generations was that every member of each had a corresponding partner in all the
others which was identical in every property except mass; the muon, for example, was an electron, only
two hundred times heavier. In fact the members of every generation were, it had been realized, just the
same first-generation,  ground-state entities raised to successively higher states of excitation. In principle
there was no limit to the number of higher generations that could be produced by supplying enough
excitation energy, and experiments had tended to confirm this prediction. Nevertheless, all the exotic
variations created could be accounted for by the same eight ground-state quarks and leptons, plus their
respective antiparticles, together with the field quanta through which they interacted. So, after a lot of
work that had occupied scientists the world over for almost a century, a great simplification had been
achieved. But were quarks and leptons the end of the story?
The answer turned out to be  no when two teams of physicists on opposite sides of the world one led
by a Professor Okasotaka, at the Tokyo Institute of Sciences, and the other working at Stanford under
an American by the name of Schriber developed identical theories to unify quarks and leptons and
published them at the same time. It turned out that the sixteen entities and  antientities of the
ground-state generation could be explained by just two components which themselves possessed
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surprisingly few innate properties: Each had a spin angular momentum of one-half unit, and one had an
electrical charge of one-third while the other had none. The other properties which had been thought of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]