Aphelion

Gino is up to his typical stuff with this one, but I thought the characters behaved erratically, and the dialog was shrill, especially Alex's.

Strangely, the topic matter struck me as old news. The ending had no surprises, and the lead-up to it was just what I was expecting.

Gino, I think you're trying too hard. Let go of that Crichton-style timestamp; relax, and slow down. Let the readers catch their breath, and then you can whack 'em with a real surprise when they're off-guard.

gino_ss wrote:What if somebody stood in proximity to Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider when gold ions were run together at nearly the speed of light. Would that person be absorbed into the plasma of quarks and other subatomic particles and transferred to the parallel timeline?

gino

I rather think they'd have to be inside the reaction chamber to be affected -- not a friendly environment, I'm sure . . . and why gold ions? Do you mean nuclei of gold atoms? I'm not sure whether a whole nucleus of anything can be accelerated to relativistic speed; maybe too much mass -- that's Bill's bailiwick, and I hope he shows up to comment on it.

Gino, none of those links got me anywhere, but since you did look up a reference, I'll take your word on it, I just didn't know.

Thanks, I checked it out, but -- to quote from their page:

But since the heavy ions in RHIC collisions are so small, the actual impact of the speeding ions on each other is about the same as the impact of a mosquito hitting a screen door on a summer evening. And, RHIC collisions last only a few billionths of a second.

RHIC collisions may be super-fast and super-hot, which makes them interesting to physicists, but they're too small and too brief to be dangerous.

So it would seem unlikely that any effect of any sort would be felt from the collision. It seems more likely to me that you'd feel more of an effect from the superconducting magnets that power the reaction.

Subatomic stuff seems to be extraordinarily robust; otherwise, we might all be transiting between parallel universes (or worse) several times a day. "Hmm . . . I could have sworn my car was a different color this morning . . . aw, damn, the sun just went out again. I hate when that happens . . . "