HW: Gig cycle tour

[M Holmes]

Rudich, Robert A writes:

> Anything like Monty Python's bike tour to Cornwall episode?   That got
> pretty strange and involved hallucinations.

It was quite a pleasant run really. The band passed us in Brock's car
somewhere around Frome. The journey out of Glastonbury was a nightmare.
It's a huge hill to get out and it was the hottest day that year.
Coupled to that, my girlfriend wanted to cycle to Bristol because it was
the nearest train station. No amount of argument concerning maps and
contour lines would persuade her to go back to Frome which was off the
main line back to Scotland and thus necessitated another connection. The
result was that we spent most of the day cycling uphill and tempers were
very frayed.

> You're right about the time dilation affecting the outside observer too.
>   Makes the concept less compelling.

The only real effect of time dilation would be that the folks in the
spacecraft would find on returning to Earth that more time had passed
there than they'd experienced (The "Buck Rogers" plotline).

It can also have interesting effects on other standard SF plotlines as Haldeman
showed in the effects on logistics and soldiers in "The Forever War".

Note that if you're gonna read this then you should first read
Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". Haldeman, who was a soldier in Vietnam
and doesn't share Heinlein's visions of military glory, is said to have
written TFW as a kind of antidote to that book.

And Calvert noted another possible effect on the beleaguered star
traveller in his line "Long dead by the time that I return to Earth".

By coincidence there was an article in today's Guardian concerning
wormholes. Current theory allows a kind of interstellar underground
where spacecraft can enter one singularity and come out of another one
at some distance. It seems that someone has worked out that "negative
matter" would be necessary at the entry and exit points (because
something which can powerfully repel is needed to keep the gates open
according to the article). They've also worked out what would happen to
the light from a star if one of these came between the Earth and a star:
there'd be a double dip in its brightness. As it happens there's already
a project underway which watches thousands of stars for brightness
fluctuations. They're looking for evidence of dark matter through
gravitational lensing of some of it getting in the way of a star
(gravity bends light like a lens) and have detected 11 instances of this
happening. They've now apparently agreed to also look out for
double-dips caused by any jumpgates left around by interstellar
civilisations. Nobody's holding their breath though I guess.

Anyway, that's the end of today's science bulletin.

> Rudy

FoFP