Free Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker Page A

The floor under the legs bulged upwards, drawn by the shrinkage of space, and the VFG cones seemed to lean slightly towards the chair.
    Kurtowski upped the power. Now the floor had bulged several feet, holding up a tiny chair which seemed to taper to a point. The cones were definitely leaning over.
    Another power boost and the chair was all but invisible between the almost touching points of the severely distorted cones. "Now the other way," the Professor said, dialing back down to zero power. "Did you notice the clock?"
    "Was it going faster?" Vernor asked. "It seemed like the smaller it got, the faster it went."
    "Right, Vernor, conservation of perceived momentum, eh?" The Professor switched the polarity of the machine and began turning the power up again. Now the back of the chair was growing, the legs as well, but less drastically. The chair began to resemble a spike balanced on a depression in the floor. The cones leaned away, as if to make room, as the chair grew to some twenty feet in size.
    Somehow the space between the VFG cones seemed to be taking up most of the basement, and the enormous chair was almost overhead. The second hand of the clock on the chair was crawling, its motion barely perceptible.
    The change in time-scale surprised Vernor, but it was, after all, to be expected. Big things are always slower than little things—watch an elephant and a dog scratching themselves. Less metaphorically, when you shrink a watch, it's going to go faster if no angular momentum is to be lost. Professor Kurtowski turned the machine off.
    "So what is it good for, Vernor? You have, I think, a project?"
    Vernor collected his thoughts. "How small can you make something with the Virtual Field?"
    "There is no obvious limit. At first I was afraid that a great enough shrinkage might initiate gravitational collapse to singularity, but , as the local densities of the objects in the field do not actually change, this problem does not arise." The Professor was in good form.
    "So you think you could shrink forever?" Vernor asked.
    "This is not entirely clear. Quantum mechanics seems to say that when you've shrunk to a certain scale, you have to stop. But maybe they're wrong. Tell me what you have in mind."
    This was it. The idea Vernor had been nursing ever since his vision in the tree came tumbling out. "Professor, I think that if you shrink something enough it gets as big as a galaxy. I think that just as going West long enough ends with coming back from the East, shrinking far enough below normal size ends with coming back from larger than normal size." Kurtowski looked interested and Vernor continued.
    "The size scale extends out in both directions. Going down we have people, cells, molecules, atoms, elementary particles, and so on. Going up we have people, societies, planets, solar systems, star clusters, galaxies, groups of galaxies, etcetera. My idea is that maybe this size line is actually a huge circle. That is, maybe if you go three steps below electrons and three steps above clusters of galaxies you get the same thing. Usually the largest thing of all is called Universe, and Leibniz has called the smallest thing of all Monad. I suggest that Universe equals Monad. If you break anything down far enough, you'll find the whole Universe inside each of its particles." Vernor stopped and drew a breath.
    "This is a very strange idea," Professor Kurtowski said, lighting a cigarette. He was so old-school that he was still into tobacco. "A bizarre idea. In this world of Circular Scale you have no matter; this is nice, yes?"
    Vernor smiled. "The problem of matter is answered by the Circular Scale Theory. You take a rock and grind it into dust, grind the dust into atoms, smash the atoms into electrons and nucleons, break these into quarks and resonances, do it five more times and notice that what you're looking at is galaxies . . . which split into stars and planets, and the planets split into rocks . . . one of which is the same