From: mark millman <millman@us.ncipher.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Infrared, light and darkness
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 10:18:12 

At 01:06 PM 01-12-99 -0700, mantis wrote:

> Well now, I didn't mean to imply that there 
> was no cooling going on at all!  Just trying to 
> de-couple visible light from heating light; to 
> allow a habitable zone to exist where canon-
> ical astrophysics insists that it cannot be 
> naturally; to allow a black sky at noon, yet 
> breath-enabling atmospheric pressure (even 
> in the mountains) and jungles of dying vege-
> tation (dying over a thousand years or more!  
> This ain't no Nuclear Winter/killer meteor/
> sudden death scenario); etc.
>
> But it is just another idle thought, over-read-
> ing a simple romantic conceit, trying to en-
> vision how such a metaphor could be made 
> concrete.

Whoops!  Sorry, mantis; I should have realized that you weren't
attempting to provide a complete explanation of the phenom-
enon.  I apologize for jumping on you so quickly.  Now that I've
thought about it, your idea does have certain merits, especially 
if the sun's total energy output decreases, resulting in cooling, 
while it also suffers a shift driving the spectrum toward the infra-
red.

> What Mark Millman wrote  about black holes 
> leading to other universes (and the strictly hy-
> pothetical "white hole") is clearly the theory 
> used by Wolfe in the early 80s for his muscu-
> larly retroscientification of a scenario glimpsed 
> by H.G. Wells in the 1890s, developed by 
> Clark Ashton Smith, and refined by Jack Vance.  
> So at this point, we should just use the theory 
> of the text as bolstered by the theory of its day.
>
> The black hole in Abaddon (subspace) leads to 
> a white hole in Briah (normal space); the black 
> hole in Briah leads to a white hole in Yesod 
> (hyperspace).

My purpose had been to point out that the theory in the text is, 
regrettably, undermined rather than bolstered by the theory of 
its day.  The idea of the white hole was already on its way out 
when Wolfe was writing SotT, to say nothing of UotNS.

Mark Millman



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