Star Trekking

By Frederic Golden

THE IRON SUN: CROSSING THE UNIVERSE THROUGH BLACK HOLES by Adrian Berry Dutton; 176 pages; $7.95

British Science Writer Adrian Berry is an incorrigible optimist. In The Next Ten Thousand Years he boldly disputed today's Cassandras by predicting that man would not only thrive but reach the far-off stars. Now Berry describes how earthlings might actually take that quantum leap. He advises the emigrants, literally, to jump into black holes.

Those galactic apertures are astronomy's latest rage. Cadavers of giant stars far larger than our scrawny sun, they have in effect crushed themselves out of existence after their nuclear fires guttered and died. Only their gravity remains behind, like the Cheshire Cat's mocking grin. No one has yet seen a black hole, since not even a single ray of light can escape the powerful gravitational grasp. But this fact has not deterred imaginative relativity theorists. Refusing to believe that anything can vanish into nothingness, they have argued that when matter drops into a black hole, it may actually be entering a twisting, Einsteinian labyrinth through space and time. According to this hypothesis, before an astronomer can mutter E = mc2, the material pops out in some distant place many light-years away--perhaps in another universe.

Few speculators would bet their Nobels on such musings. But Berry tosses aution to the solar wind. In two or threem centuries, he believes, a future NASA could launch a great fleet of robot spaceships to attract bits of free-floating iron in near by interstellar space, like children herding filings with magnets. Eventually so much matter would be gathered up that ,he particles would begin attracting one another by their mutual gravity and compress themselves into a black hole of some ten solar masses. The purpose of this iron sun? To provide instantaneous transportation across the heavens for anyone brave enough to take the plunge.

Berry admits that his first trekkies would not know where they might emerge or if they would ever get back. One possibility: they could construct a parallel black hole at their destination to bring them home. He also seems unconcerned about another hazard: his creation might explode in a supernova, spraying its builders with deadly radiation. Still, the author writes with such refreshing faith in science's ability to conquer all obstacles of time and space that even skeptics may be willing to suspend disbelief and join him in this dazzling armchair journey across the cosmos. Here, at least, they are guaranteed a round trip.

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