From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu>
Subject: (urth) Maybe it's not a black hole
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 13:31:50 

On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, mark millman wrote:

> Regrettably, it seems that Wolfe was using science obsolete even at
> the time of his writing when he came up with the White Fountain
> idea.  (This is the part of UotNS I perhaps like least.)  There had 
> been a theory that the energy absorbed by black holes was some-
> how shunted into other dimensions or universes via what came to
> be known as wormholes, but the "missing" energy was adequately 
> accounted for when the polar X-ray jets that black holes emit were 
> discovered.  We know that the White Fountain was meant to be 
> the output of a black hole from another universe from Severian's
> experiences in Yesod--I believe (though I'm not sure, and I don't 
> have the book here to check) that Apheta tells him how the White
> Fountain is to work.  

Does Apheta or anyone else use the words "black hole" to describe the
other end of the White Fountain or the thing eating away at the sun?

Perhaps there is some other phenomenon, unknown to 20th century
astronomers because it doesn't emit jets of x-rays, that is not a black
hole but is a rift between universes where energy is sucked out of one
universe and emerges as a White Fountain in the other.

-Rostrum


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