Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2003 03:13:39 -0600
From: Jeff Wilson 
Subject: (urth) Heat of Ascension

> From:
> Lisa Schaffer-Doggett 

> "A New Zealand atomic scientist assured me the other day that 
> Christianity had received it's heaviest blow in 1945:  a fundamental 
> tenet of the Church, namely that Jesus's material body was 
> immaterialized  at the Ascension had, he said, been spectacularly 
> disproved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - anyone with the least scientific 
> perception must realize that any such break-down of matter would have 
> caused an explosion large enough to wreck the entire Middle East."
> Could it cause a release of energy large enough to create a white 
> fountain?  Any takers for the pros or the cons?

No way. The White Fountain is a massive object, in both the physical and 
the prosaic senses. Converting Severian into energy and back into mass 
would yield no more than the original mass of Severian, while the White 
Fountain's passing causes floods and earthquakes.

I think it is more likely that Severian's body and the White Fountain 
are both some kind of eidolon originally projected from Yesod. Normally 
this would take gobs of energy, but if the White Fountain is a white 
hole in order to cancel out the black beans/black holes, it might even 
have a =negative= mass, an eidolon of which might produce energy rather 
than consume it. This would let Severian's mass-energy relate to the 
White Fountain, perhaps it's output was shunted into making up his 
bodily mass.

But an agency capable of making negative mass can make any amount 
desired, as long as they also produce positive mass, for a net increase 
of zero. Perhaps the positive mass is stashed inside Lune, increasing 
its gravity?

As for "immaterialization", I don't see that this requires convering 
Jesus into energy. He might just as well have been transubstantiated 
into a cloud, as at the end of _THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD_ with Max 
Von Sydow, with only some mild light and warmth to account for the 
difference in molecular binding energies.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson@io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson/gurps/ >



--