快猫短视频

The Lure by Bill Napier, Headline, 拢18.99, ISBN 0747269238

DEEP beneath the Tatra mountains lies a still, pellucid lake, fed by water percolating through the limestone above. To reach it, you take a tiny bouncing lift to ride hundreds of metres down from the surface. Here, surrounded by thousands of sensors, a group of scientists wait for something, anything, to happen. They鈥檙e on the trail of 鈥渄ark matter鈥�, and hope that strange particles sliding through the Earth will register on their instruments and help them to solve the puzzle of the missing mass in the Universe. Or, failing that, to rewrite the law of gravity.

One day, their patience is rewarded. The lake glows with energy, a storm of particles floods through. Too many, actually, for the scientists鈥� comfort. They wake up to the appalling truth that this isn鈥檛 just data: it鈥檚 a message from the stars. A superior sort of puzzle-cracking mathematician and a planetologist join the party. And they begin to read the message.

OK, this is fiction, not fact. But it鈥檚 excellent fiction: a painless way to catch up on some physics and planetology while an entertaining and gripping story unfolds. Bill Napier is an astronomer at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, so the story has a gritty authenticity. A bit of a film script in the making, I thought. That lake of light under the mountain, the flight across the snow, trouble in Bratislava, the fire鈥攁ll very photogenic. All I ask it that they don鈥檛 dust down Bruce Willis and that old 鈥渨ife-beater鈥� white T-shirt for a role in this. Someone a bit more subtle.