(urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

[Jeff Wilson]

On Mon, September 9, 2013 00:19, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Seems reasonable.  It's certainly not from increased solar flux.  However,
> that would be a LOT of energy.  I'd wonder whether anybody at all could
> survive.

Indeed, the Yesodis don't expect them to survive, which is why they settle
the renewed earth with new people.

> I think that a black hole, even as currently understood, would cool the
> sun if it were significantly cooler than the temperature of the interior
> of the sun.  You can have some fun at <http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/>.

It's really not fair to hold Wolfe to the standards of another 3-4 decades
of theoretical physics. We no longer have the expectation of transcending
space and dimension as when the Book was being written.

> Wait, I thought the black beans grew into the sea monsters, which is why
> the woman had to throw them into the sea (instead of just dropping them on
> the ground) to make them effective.  Robert Borski speculated along these
> lines.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=HykyT4UQ9JMC&pg=PA93
>
> Anyway, it would make literary sense if whoever or whatever made the sun
> cool also stopped plate tectonics (if it's stopped), and if the process
> that fixed one also fixed the other.

I think it's a stretch when she throws them on the *sun*'s grave.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >