[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

"That's spooky. Would you get, maybe, the last thing they saw before they died? Wasn't there some
nineteenth-century theory that by photographing a dead person's eyes the image of the last thing they saw
in life could be recovered?"
"Yes. There's a Kappling short story about it. But that's all sheer superstition. This is something entirely
different."
Not Kappling, you numbskull, you mean Kipling. But the word had been so clear and deliberate. Some
affected pronunciation? Some in-joke? No one was laughing.
"& a thing like this to be acceptable as legal evidence, I wonder."
"I'm no lawyer, but I do know that police all over the country are already trying it out. I think that sooner
or later it's bound to be accepted fully. The weight of accumulated evidence is going to silence the
objections."
"What objections are there? If you can obtain a good picture, as you say you can, doesn't that prove
you're right?''
"Well, a few pretty bright people were worried, at first, when they realized what we were doing. There
were arguments that what we were doing could start to unravel the whole fabric of physical reality.
There's a kind of resonance factor operating, and the more people you have doing similar
experiments-especially on similar subjects-the more likely it seems to be that there will be a
concentration, a focusing of the effects of many separate experiments upon one subject."
"How can that be?"
"We don't know. But if reality can depend in some sense upon human consciousness, then maybe the
existence, the form, of an individual human consciousness depends also upon the reality surrounding it.
Or the realities, if you prefer."
"You said there was no harmful radiation, though."
"Right. All the physical objections have now been pretty well taken care of. The main objection now is to
the fact that our best pictures are partially subjective. That is, we obtain the best readings from a human
skull when we use another skull, the observer's own, as a kind of resonator."
"The observer's own skull? Give me that again, will you?"
"All right." But there ensued a thoughtful pause, The scientist chewed his mustache.
The host, avoiding dead air time if nothing else, interjected: "With NMR you do project waves of some
kind into the body, into whatever's being examined-?"
"Yes. NMR scans are a proven means of probing inside matter. They've been used now for thirty years."
"And, tell me again, NMR stands for-?"
"Nuclear magnetic resonance. All that we actually project into the body, the specimen, or whatever, is a
strong magnetic field. This causes the nuclei of certain atoms inside the specimen to line up in certain
ways. Then, when the imposed field is removed, the nuclei flip back again. When a nucleus flips back it
emits a trace of radiation that registers on our detectors, and from all these traces our computer can form
a picture."
"No harmful radiation, though."
The scientist smiled. "Do you have a sort of a thing about radiation?"
"Most people do, these days."
"Well, no, it's not harmful. Now what we've discovered is that when the observer's own skull is used as a
kind of magnetic resonator, then pictures, images, are actually induced in the observer's own visual
cortex. He sees a finer, sharper version of what the computer can otherwise extract from the specimen
and put up on a stage in the form of a holographic projection. But we can't yet repeat the results as
consistently as we'd like. When you scan a specimen skull more than once, you're likely to get a different
picture every time. So the question is, is what the human experimenter claims to see really the same as the
blurry picture that the computer puts up on the hologram stage?"
"I wish you could have brought some pictures along to show our audience."
"By the time I photographed the hologram, and then you ran it through your cameras and so on here,
onto their sets at home, they would be seeing a picture of a picture of a not very good picture."
"Maybe next time?"
"Maybe next time. But as I say, it's not really all that informative when the first image is blurry."
"And you can't get the same picture twice?"
"The structure of the skull, the specimen, is changed minutely by the very act of reading it. There are
various interpretations of why and how this whole thing works at all. It surprised the hell out of a lot of us
when we first began to realize what was happening. And even worried a few people, as I say: can time [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]