Kindle Notes & Highlights
As far as anyone knows, there’s never been an animal population that was stable in the absence of predation, famine or disease.”
He needed to grow up and accept her autonomy,
It would be painful for both of them to pass the day with this quarrel hanging over them, but she had to let Tamaro feel the sting of it.
“I’ve burned all your holin,”
Either she’d agree to let him trigger her, and she’d give birth to his children
Or she’d stay here, without holin, until her own body betrayed her. She’d give birth alone, and her sole victory would be to have cheated her jailer and her children alike of the bond that would have allowed them to thrive.
If the luxagen wave did have an energy of its own that depended on its amplitude, the discrete energy steps that were the theory’s great virtue would be erased.
Nothing was making sense any more.
No kidding.
With one word he could have had the signal shut off, but Carlo wanted to see this final stage play out; even with the probe misaligned it could tell them something useful.
Love the desire to learn.
The greatest risk that remained, then, was that word of her supposed fate would spread beyond her colleagues and their immediate circle.
It was surreal just how sincerely he clung to his right to express disappointment in her.
He wasn’t her co any more, he was just her jailer,
“I make them as simple as possible,” Carla replied. “But no simpler.”
“If you imagine a particle and a wave moving at the same speed, the energy of the particle will be proportional to the frequency of the wave
“So your model’s inadequate?” Assunto suggested. “Yes,” Carla conceded. “But a model of the entire solid would just be intractable.
The only way we can get anywhere is to try to find a rule of thumb that lets us extract useful predictions from the things we can model.”
the square of the proportion of the wave that’s trapped as the probability that the luxagen will remain trapped
“Almost every process looks linear on a short enough time scale,
Assunto said, “I’ll give you the sunstone for one more experiment, but that’s it.
What was there to celebrate, really, in this minuscule advance in the theory of solids?
Indeed.
Tamara gave birth. This is her replacement, Ada.”
Why should lizard skin be sensitive to infrared light?”
“I wanted to see the children,”
they’re quarantined with blight.”
Carla said, “Ada’s offered me a place on the Gnat.”
now he had to face up to the purpose of the mission: capturing a mountain-sized mass of fuel by setting it alight.
Orthogonal rocks that no one understood sprouting flame wasn’t the worst-case scenario—it was the whole plan.
not one woman had ever attained that office.
“I’ll show you where the key is,”
luxagens in a solid can only occupy certain definite energy levels.
Quanta.
“But light, undeniably, is a wave. Giorgio and Nereo showed us how to measure its wavelength from the interference pattern it makes when it passes through two or more slits.
this wave is always accompanied by a suitable entourage of particles
the gap between each level and the next will be equal to Patrizia’s constant times the frequency of the light.”
that gap is precisely the energy attributed to each photon associated with this light wave!”
the fact that the wave can only change its energy in discrete steps no longer requires the peculiar fiction of a swarm of particles following the wave around, like mites caught on a breeze.”
The number of photons associated with each wave is really just a label for its energy level, found by counting the steps up from the lowest level. It’s not a count of things you could hold in your hand.”
“Only changes in energy are detectable. The actual value is a meaningless concept:
photons are really just steps in the energy levels of a light wave,
“A light wave isn’t all that different from a wave on a string: the higher its peaks, the more energy it carries.
“If we had sufficiently accurate clocks,” Carla mused, “we could find our distance from each beacon using the time it takes for the light to reach us.”
GPS
“Light that elicits light that elicits still more light?” Ada joked. “That’s starting to sound like the Eternal Flame.”
Title.
no plant ever gave us a liberator for calmstone.” Ada said, “How elusive can the answer be, once we have a mountain of orthogonal matter to play with?”
“We’ve been playing with ordinary matter for generations,” Tamara pointed out. “And we don’t have all the answers there.”
The light from the beacons and the stars formed a grid of intangible guide ropes, transforming the void around the mountain into a solid, traversable realm.
the sky from the Peerless need never be flat again—need never revert to the kind of painted dome that befitted a pre-scientific culture.
Whatever triumphs or disappointments the Object had in store, if they could just retain the hard-won benefits of parallax, at least her generation would have that much to its name.
“Four different kinds of rock, at least!” Ada declared excitedly. “Different hues, different textures, different albedos.”
wouldn’t it be perfect if just one of these minerals set calmstone on fire, and the others were inert? Then Silvano could have his new farms out here, alongside the liberator mines.”
Tamara closed three eyes and pressed the fourth to the instrument.
The ellipse was now a crisply rendered, idiosyncratic oval with a pinched and tilted waist. About a third of one lobe was as red as firestone, but the rest bore patches of brown, of gray and of white.
