Estou procurando uma pequena história que li em uma antologia nos anos 70 e lembro que era um livro bastante antigo na época.
"Gato de Schrödinger" , uma novela de Rudy Rucker , corresponde à sua descrição. No entanto, salvo a viagem no tempo, você não poderia tê-lo lido nos anos 70, em uma antologia que era "um livro bastante antigo na época", porque foi publicado pela primeira vez em
PS Obrigado ao OP por apontar que a matéria está disponível em site do autor .
Nele alguém inventa um tipo de tubo dentro do qual o tempo corre em sentido inverso. Ele a coloca no chão e aponta um trem de brinquedo para ela entrar no tubo.
É um carro Lego, não um trem:
The twins had brought the little car, a bright red-yellow-blue mass of Lego blocks. On the top was a battery-run motor, with a cogwheel linked by a black plastic chain to a gear on the single front wheel.
Klara examined our "time-tunnel" with interest. The core of it was the shoe-box-sized vacuum chamber made of phase-mirrors. You could see in quite easily. The thick loops of the guiding-field wires arched over the box like croquet wickets.
I removed the rifle from its mount on one end of the lab-table, and waited while Ion got the car from the little girls.
Then, bustling a bit, he lined up his three women in chairs against the wall, and set the car down at one end of the table. I cleared my throat, preparatory to telling them what they might expect, but Ion shushed me.
"First let them see, and then we'll discuss it."
I taped an iron nail to the bottom of the Lego car, and dialed the guiding-field's power up to some hundred times the level we had used before. The Lego car made a pretty big test-particle.
Quando o trem está à mesma distância do tubo quando o tubo é longo, um trem duplicado aparece no outro extremo, e eles se aproximam um do outro, cara a cara, até passarem um pelo outro no tubo. entrada.
In all frankness, I expected the experiment to be a failure. The car would roll up to the phase-mirror box, bump into the side and stop . . . nothing more. But I was wrong.
As the little car labored across the table towards the left end of the box, something happened at the right end. Seemingly out of no place, an identical Lego car pushed out of the right end of the tunnel and went chuffing on its way! "And there's one inside now, rolling left!" Klara exclaimed, leaning forward. She was right. For a few seconds there were three Lego cars on the table.
Car (1): The original car, still approaching the tunnel's left entrance. Car (2): The one moving in the tunnel, from right to left. Car (3): The new one moving away from the right end of the tunnel.
And then car (1) and car (2) met at the left-end mirror. They melted into each other . . . nose into nose, wheel into wheel, tail into tail. It was like watching a Rorschach ink-blot disappear into its central fold.
One of the twins squealed and ran to catch car (3) before it ran off the other end of the lab table. I took it from her and examined it closely. Car (3) appeared to be identical to car (1). We had already done this experiment with electrons and with small bullets . . . but one bullet or electron is much like another. Until now I had been unwilling to accept Ion's interpretation of our experiment. But it certainly looked as if car (3) really was car (1).
Então alguém faz isso de novo, mas desta vez, quando o segundo trem aparece no tubo, e os dois se dirigem um para o outro, ele pega o trem externo para impedir que ele entre no tubo, criando um paradoxo. , para ver o que acontece.
Ion had conducted a third experiment. The car was to roll towards the tunnel while he watched both ends. His plan was to stop car (1) if car (3) appeared, and to let car (1) go if car (3) did not appear. This meant that a car would come out of the right end of the tunnel if and only if no car came out of the right end of the tunnel. Yes if and only if no.
O resultado imediato é a cabeça dele se dividir em duas,
Question: When Ion actually ran the experiment, did car (3) appear? Answer: Yes and no.
I closed the lab book and looked around the room. The scattered bits of Legos . . . how many?
"What happened, Ion? Did the car come out of the tunnel?"
"Yes," Ion said, raising his head from on top of his arms.
"No," Ion said, uncrossing his arms and raising up his other head from under the arms.
The two faces looked at me, each of them a bit translucent, a bit unreal. The two necks merged into his collar, making a solid, tubular letter "Y."
[. . . .]
"I'm in a mixed state, William. I ran the paradox. It had to come out both ways." He turned the switch to power-up the guiding-field. It was dangerous to be restarting it without a vacuum in the chamber.
então quatro, repetindo até que sua cabeça é uma miríade de pequenos talos, matando-o.
There was a crash behind me. I whirled around. The time-tunnel was billowing smoke and the phase-mirrors had smashed into pieces. For a second I couldn't see Ion through the smoke, but then he came at me.
A tangle of twenty or a hundred thin necks writhed out of his open collar, and on the end of each tentacle-like neck rode a tiny grimacing head, and every little head was screaming at me in a terrible tiny voice. . . .
He dispersed completely after that. As different variants of Ion Stepanek split off into different universes, each corresponding head would shrink . . . get "farther away" . . and a copy of his body would split off with it, twisting and dwindling. I don't know how long it took; and I don't know how I could have seen it; I wish I could forget it. The horrible squid-bunch of necks, each little head screaming out something different . . . I hope he's really gone.