(urth) Problematic element in chronology - Red Giants

[Sergei SOLOVIEV]

You say it is not obvious - let me quote Wolfe (from "Return to the Whorl",
chapter "He took me with him" - written by Hoof -)

"The Red Sun was rising behind us, and the old falling-down city was between
us and it. It was so big and so dark, like a great big coal buried in ashes.
You could look right at it , and the whole city was dark against it (...) 
You could see how big that city was, and it was bigger than I ever imagined (...)
But against the Red Sun like that, you saw how little the city was,too. This
is hard to explain. The city was immense. Huge. (...) So it was all so big
that when you looked at it, it was hard to breathe. But the sun kept rising
and rising, and Nessus was little."

Severian may be so acquanted to his Red Sun that he does not think it
anything special. Hoof comes from the planet with ordinary yellow sun,
and he is immediately impressed. (It is possible, of course, that GW
didn't think too much about the size of the sun when he wrote TBotNS,
and decited to be more precise later - but I think this quotation proves
that he represents the Red Sun as a Red Giant.)

Also, somewhere in the "BotNS" it is mentioned 
A /Brief History of Time/  (written by Stephen Hawking, subtitled "From the Big Bang to Black Holes", but the author and subtitle are
not mentioned by Wolfe). One of artefacts of our place and time
in Wolfe's Solar cycle. (I would make a list
of such curiosities.) It means that Wolfe himself knew
the book, and probably knew well the science of black holes
of our time.

Best

Sergei



Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> From: "Sergei SOLOVIEV" <soloviev at irit.fr>
>> Dear Gerry,
>>
>> please, have a look at Red Giants (final stage of evolution of 
>> sun-like stars). Obviously,
>> the sun in the "BotNS" entered this stage - the atmosphere of the 
>> star becomes very large
>> and red (the temperature drops, but the total luminosity is much 
>> greater).
>
> I agree with Jeff that the red giant idea has a lot of problems, 
> especially when really the only thing it is needed to fix is a likely 
> small slip by Wolfe with regard to the visibility of Sol from Blue.  
> There is no evidence that the Sun looks especially large as seen from 
> Urth, and we have Typhon's assertion that the solar output decreased 
> rather than increased.
>
>
>> Possible explanation. In Typhon's time or earlier the technical power 
>> of humanity
>> seems to be sufficient to make the distance of Urth from the Sun 
>> greater, to
>> prevent its burning or swallowing by the Sun. Maybe it was done. 
>> Notice that in the BotNS there is
>> no clear indication how long is their year, I don't remember anything 
>> about
>> the names of the months, that there is 12 months (or other number, maybe
>> 17), how much days is in one month, how much days in a year, how much
>> hours in one day. There are watches - yes - but I think all concrete 
>> indications
>> are eliminated (deliberately?) by GW. The mass of the sun when
>> it becomes Red Giant doesn't change, so the orbital period for
>> more distant orbit has to be longer. By the way, if their year is 
>> longer,
>> it may explain the "too rapid" ascencion of Severian to power.
>
> Wolfe is indeed vague about time but mostly with regard to long times 
> (he even says so in an appendix - arguably defending himself neatly in 
> advance against threads such as this!)  Children don't seem to age in 
> a matter of a few years, though I cannot think of any specific proff 
> that years are much longer than now.  Nobody mentions it, though.
>
>
>> I think (I repeat myself) that GW tried to be very careful about 
>> scientific
>> details. Do not take for granted the idea that inside the old sun 
>> there is
>> a black hole. It is something that is presented as common idea in 
>> Severian's
>> times, but I don't see from the text that GW himself thinks that.
>> I sounds "mythologically" beautiful, but it was easily accessible 
>> information to GW
>> in 70-es, and even more easily later, that black hole will swallow 
>> very quickly
>> all the atmosphere of the red giant. It would by the way be an 
>> explosive process
>> that would burn everything a couple of light years around
>> (kind of supernova). An encounter of a real black hole
>> with a white fountain would be also extremely explosive - not just 
>> tides.
>
> Jeff has proposed some alternatives.  Personally I think the simplest 
> thing is to believe that there is indeed a black hole in the sun, as 
> everyone in the story agrees.  It may not be swallowing the sun 
> rapidly due to the formation of an accretion disk which pushes 
> infalling matter away from it. On first principles, one might expect 
> such a black hole to make the sun hotter, but it would be hard to 
> prove that no mechanism exists that could cause a reverse effect!
>
> As for the white hole, one might expect an explosive encounter, but 
> since white holes don't actually exist it is hard to be sure of one's 
> predictions in that regard.  Wolfe has also referred to a form of 
> anti- matter which is repulsive to gravity.  If such anti-matter 
> exists, it seemingly has negative energy, and it might be that the 
> White Fountain also does, in which case it might conceivably just 
> cancel out the black hole.when it collides, leaving only second-order 
> perturbatory effects.
>
>
>> Remark. I think that my views about the importance of human and 
>> psychological
>> side are slightly distorted on the list, I do not reject mythological 
>> and "gnostic" meaning
>> at all, I just don't agree when the abstract symmetry of these 
>> schemas does
>> contradict the truth of characters described by GW as I see it from
>> the text. (I'll try to develop it in another mail.)
>
> I agree with you in general, although I don't quite go so far as to 
> think that character studies are the major focus of Wolfe's work - I 
> think they are important to him, and theories that do violence to 
> character are proably wrong.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
>
>
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