Month: November 2017

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 17: Postgame Jam

Chapter 17 of Serial Blog "Time Matters" at imaginationgate11.com

I was more upset about having fallen asleep at Gina’s than by the game result. She was very gracious about it but still… not the best way to move a relationship forward. Felt like a total loser and apologized beyond what would have been reasonable. Once certain she truly wasn’t upset about it, I got down to telling her about the Timekeeper dream I had while sleeping on her couch.

“What about the energy thing of the previous dream? The one with the Timekeeper shouting ‘time out’,” she asked.(1)

“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. After you reminded me that  speed was distance over time, I went over to Professor Murdock’s…”

“Professor Murdock?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, he’s an old college professor of mine.”

“The old man with the bow tie at the office the other day?”

“The one and only. How did you guess?”

“I saw him leaving YO! and asked Tanya. She was the one who told me about him being an old professor of yours.”

“Oh, OK… so anyway, he gave me some additional information and I did the math. Once one takes time out of the Einstein equation it becomes clear that… are you ready for this? Time is the universal materializer.”(2)

“Hold it Ray, this sounds a bit familiar. Oh yes, I think I saw it in an episode of The Big Bang Theory.”

“No you haven’t, and the reason I know that is because I’ve seen every single episode of that series at least twice and that has never been in any of them. But it’s funny that you mention the Big Bang because that’s precisely the moment when time started interacting with the infinite energy field that existed before.”

“I’m a woman with above average intelligence…”

“You’re brilliant,” I interrupted.

“Whatever, but right now I listen to you and I can’t help but feel like Penny listening to Leonard on the show. Did you tell the Professor about this stuff?”

“Not yet, because to be honest, when I went over to his place he got worried about me maybe needing… professional help.”

“Maybe you do Ray. You’ve been working your ass off without a break for quite some time now. That takes its toll on the body and the mind. I hear you talking about recurring dreams with weird characters and, how shall I put this… unusual ideas about time… and I worry about your overall health.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I said deciding to keep the rest of the story to myself.

The conversation was interrupted by a call from Bob regarding the game’s final score and my side of the bet. We agreed that I would pay up the following Friday because I needed time to get me a pair of hipster red pants and red Converse tennis shoes. I was actually buying some time to try and get my life in order. After hanging up, Gina and I chitchatted about other stuff for almost an hour and then it was time for me to go home.

The drive back took a lot longer because of a car pileup on the expressway. Traffic was slow but my mind was spinning way beyond the speed limit. I felt like I was losing it. For the first time I dreaded getting home and facing the blue light wall, so the snail pace was a welcomed circumstance; it allowed me to do a lot of thinking.

Two things kept popping up in my head regarding the latest Timekeeper dream. The past being a physical construct and its potential relationship to the hypothetical dark matter was one – Professor Murdock had mentioned dark energy(3) before; I wondered if the two concepts were related. And the other one was the representation of the present as a materializing or construction process. All of a sudden, the notions of past, present and future, which I had always seen as a set of three mostly homogeneous stages of time, turned into three very different ideas: the past became a physical construct, the present a materializing process, and the future an energy field.

When I added the previous night’s musings on time travel, I came to a standstill. Within that train of thought I had come to the conclusion that one could travel outside of time in energy form(4) only. And that, since one is traveling in a timeless energy field, there’s no speed, and what takes the place of movement is a shift in our mind’s focus. In the dream the Timekeeper said that one could visit the past. But how can one travel to the past if it wasn’t composed of energy. That was a conundrum I needed to explore further.

The signal for a new voice message sounded off on my iPhone. I remember thinking it was odd because no calls had come in. I voice activated the retrieval of the message and almost hit the car in front when I heard an unmistakable electronic voice saying: “Raymond Young, you’re invited to look at my time travel experiment of 2009.”

 

(1) For the details of this dream go to Chapter 8: Time Out… Sh*t!

(2) Ray reached this conclusion in Chapter 13: A Not So Silent Night

(3) The Professor mentions it in Chapter 11: The Professor Calling

(4) Read about these musings in Chapter 15: ‘Twas The Night Before YO! Bowl

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 18: The Time Travel Experiment

Holy shit!  Was that Stephen Hawking on my phone?  I played the message several times and it sure sounded like him. But why would he be calling me? What was going on? At that point, I really wanted to get moving and the traffic jam I was stuck in became even more annoying.

It took another hour to finally get home. When I entered my apartment ‘Einstein’ was sitting in front of my laptop with a silly smile on his face.

“Did you get mein mezage?” he asked.

“I got a message from somebody who sounded just like Stephen Hawking,” I said.

‘Einstein’ then typed something on my computer and the same voice I had heard on my phone repeated the message: “Raymond Young, you’re invited to look at my time travel experiment of 2009.”

“You know, zeze computers are amasing. I found zis vebzite zat reproduces vadeffer you vant to zay in ein Stephen Hawking imitazion. I zought zat vould get your attention,” he said smiling.

“You’re an asshole. You know that? And since when did you know how to use a computer? Never mind, I don’t want to know. Anyway, what’s that about a 2009 time travel experiment.”

“Zat year Hawking conducted ein experiment in vich he concluded zat time traffel vas impozible.”

While ‘Einstein’ talked I went over to my room and found the blue light wall gone.

“I zuggest you look it up,” Einstein said raising his voice so I could hear him in the bedroom.

“Hey, did you take down the information wall?” I asked while ambling back to the living room.

I got no answer; ‘Einstein’ was gone. I was really getting tired of his pop-in/pop-out routine.

Well, at least he didn’t take my computer. I made myself a cup of coffee, hurt my tongue blister again, cussed about it, and then started searching for information on Hawking’s experiment. I was expecting something fancy but instead found something so low tech, simple and downright silly that for a moment thought it was a joke.

In effect, in 2009 Dr. Stephen Hawking conducted an experiment in an attempt to prove whether time travel would exist in the future. He organized a party for time travelers and announced the time and location of the party after the event was over. The idea was that the only way to attend was to find out in the future and travel back in time to attend. Dr. Hawking concluded that time travel to the past was not possible because nobody showed up the day of the event.

After reading that I thought, “really? That was it?” But, hey, this was Dr. Hawking not some schmuck, so I checked my cynicism at the door and pondered his approach.

“If traveling outside of time is only possible in energy form,” I thought, “then the time travelers that made it to Dr. Hawking’s party could have only shown up as energy. Did anybody measured the energy level at the event? Was there any difference in the energy levels before and during the event? Would a time traveler disturb the energy level at its destination? What energy frequency should we be looking at?”

I started Googling different things until I found what I as looking for.

In his book Cosmic Evolution, Astrophysicist Eric J. Chaisson presented some interesting findings regarding our brain’s energy. According to his calculations our brain uses 75,000 times as much energy as the Sun.

The number was astonishing. That’s the amount of energy our brain uses, the organ that houses the energy universe that is our mind!

“With such an energy consumption associated to our mind,” I thought, “we should expect some type of energy signature to show up in a place where a time traveler has arrived. I mean, a ferret like Matthew seemingly perceived brain energy(1). Could that be what cats and dogs react to when there seems to be nothing there? Time travelers in energy form!”

Suddenly the absurdity of my previous doubts regarding traveling to the exclusively material past in energy form dawned on me. You may only travel in energy form but that form can exist in a material world just like all other types of energies. What can’t be done is travel to the past in material form, once you become energy you can go anywhere. I got up to get a glass of water and thought that maybe Dr. Hawking did get some guests to his party after all.

One conundrum solved, now, what about the past’s connection to dark matter?

 

(1) As seen back in Chapter 9: Hitting the Wall

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 19: Dark Past, Dark Future

.An abstract representation of the dark matter past, the present and the dark energy future

It was almost midnight and thanks to the embarrassing nap at Gina’s I was nowhere near to being sleepy. So, I started surfing the web for information regarding dark matter.

I found out the term refers to a hypothetical substance that scientists have never been able to detect but believe should exist to account for the gravitational forces prevalent in the universe. They estimate that 80% of the mass of the universe is composed of dark matter. In other words, for gravity to make sense across the universe we would need 80% more matter.

In the Timekeeper’s dream at Gina’s, he mentioned that once materialized, the past stays there for anyone to visit. Like a museum with every instant of existence frozen in an endless stream. “Its mass affecting the present from an unseen source.” And went on to postulate that the theoretical dark matter is in fact the mass of the past. Could this be possible? Can the mass of the past account for that 80% of missing matter in the universe? An image of Marty McFly in Back to the Future saying “Whoa, this is heavy Doc” came to my mind. I found myself smiling at the unintended pun.

Einstein’s theory of relativity stated, among other things, that gravity was so powerful that it could bend the fabric of the space-time continuum. This included bending light and in extreme cases, like in the equally theoretical black holes, not allowing it to escape the enormous forces of gravity present. My research took me to territory reserved for knowledgeable physicists and I started to get lost.

The bottom line was that everything regarding dark matter was hypothetical. Nothing has been found, and physicists’ opinions are split up with some of them feeling uncomfortable with the concept. They are divided in their visions of what accounts for the missing mass in the universe.

Some say it has to do with dim brown dwarfs, white dwarfs and neutrino stars. Others add the hypothetical supermassive black holes to that mix. And there are some who go fully theoretical with exotic particles such as WIMPS (I’m not making this up), an acronym for ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particle’. These have ten to a hundred times the mass of a proton, but have such weak interactions with “normal” matter that they are difficult, and so far impossible, to detect. For some, the foremost candidates are the neutralinos, massive hypothetical particles heavier and slower than neutrinos, although like all other hypothetical particles none have been spotted.

My feeling at the time was that for such a proof-based scientific community, they relied way too much on unproven concepts. I thought for a moment that if that was the case, then the hypothesis of the mass of the past accounting for the missing mass in the universe was as good a concept as all the others. And since some physicists have been able to both date the universe and calculate its overall mass then maybe it would be possible to determine the mass of the past.

Satisfied at the moment with the information on dark matter, I then switched my attention to the concept of dark energy. As was the case with dark matter, dark energy is a term used to describe an unknown force. One that causes the universe to increase its expansion rate. In layman’s terms, a mysterious force that makes the universe expand more rapidly. Physicists estimate that the universe is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% normal matter. In other words, everything we have observed on Earth and throughout the cosmos is only 5% of the universe. The nature of everything else is up for grabs.

The numbers caught my attention and I wondered… What if the 27% corresponding to dark matter was the mass of the past? Couldn’t the 68% of dark energy be the energy of the future? Energy that, as we sit here, is fueling the materializing process that is the present.

“Could that be what’s accelerating the expansion of the universe?  The ever increasing area of the present?” I said out loud. “The present is like a factory that keeps expanding, the more it creates the larger it becomes. The larger it becomes the more it produces. And the rate of expansion increases because the manufacturing footprint keeps on growing.”

“Zat’s a bold schtatement Ray.”

I jumped when I heard his voice.

“Don’t you ever knock? You scared the shit out of me.”

“Zorry, but I understand you’re now dealing vith ein specific topic fery dear to me.  I zought zat maybe I could be of help.”

“Are you going to stay around this time? Because you fled a while ago after directing me to Stephen Hawking’s time travel experiment. Which reminds me, did you take down the information wall?”

“It dizipaded becauze you nein longer needed it. It vas alvays meant to be zomething of ein vizual aid.  To help you master zee ability of accezing zee Akaschic records. You’re perfectly capable of doing zat on your own now.”

“I wish I shared your confidence in me,” I said and then proceeded to share with him my thoughts on dark matter and dark energy, and their relationship to the past, present and future.

“I must zay, I like zee vay you zink Raymond Young. A hypothezis like zis has countless ramifications.”

“I know! Just listening to myself telling you all this I realized a couple of those ramifications. For example, what if your wormholes were just points in the universe untouched by time? Places completely devoid of matter. Areas of pure energy through which one could instantaneously travel long distances outside of time. And at the other end of the spectrum, what if black holes were very old areas of the universe. Places where the mass of the past was such that its gravitational forces go off the scale?”

‘Einstein’ looked at me blankly and started talking in the language of physicists. This time I couldn’t understand a single word he was uttering, not because of his accent but because I had no idea what he was talking about. I heard terms I didn’t know existed in the English language, and names I had no idea how to spell. He was just thinking out loud but I felt like a little kid who had just told a grownup that he had learned to tie his shoes.

At one point he addressed me by name and just said:

“Ray, can I uze your compuder?”

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 20: The Time Particle

Image of the Time Particle

‘Einstein’ monopolized the computer and his concentration was such that it vanquished me from his reality. The tiredness associated to the day’s events finally caught up with me so I went to bed leaving my distinguished visitor to his cerebral pursuits.

I laid down on my bed for some sleep but my eyes kept going to the point in the room where the blue light wall had been before. A question popped up in my mind: does time have a tool for the materializing process? I remembered the Timekeeper saying that time interacts with the energy of the future(1) in what constitutes the materializing process that is the present. I wondered what did time use to create the future? It definitely wasn’t the staff-like thingamajig the Timekeeper carried around. But while on that line of thought, I mulled over whether the sparks coming out of it were a clue to finding the answer to such a question.

Tiredness finally won, and as soon as I nodded off I found myself back in the Anteverse.

“Well, well, well… good to see you’re back to finish our conversation,” said the Timekeeper twirling the sparking stick while tipping his glass hat. “Where were we?”

“You said the constant humming I hear in this place is the sound of time building the future. And I was wondering what, if anything, does time uses as a tool to do its materializing?” I asked.

“The tool, as you call it, is a primordial particle that infuses energy with mass. Scientists in your reality named it the Higgs boson, the mass giver. I believe you might have heard of it by its most common name: God’s Particle. A designation disliked by physicists but one that is understandable in the cultural context of the creator god when you take in consideration that this particle creates matter where there isn’t any. The term is really a misnomer for the boson has nothing to with God and everything to do with time. It should be called Time’s Particle.”

I woke up…

I had no idea how long I had been in bed. All I knew at the time was that it was still dark and I was too excited to sleep, so I went straight to my computer and found ‘Einstein’ gone. Not the kind of surprise that would give me a heart attack, but it would have been nice to have him around to talk about the Higgs boson being time’s particle. Sans Einstein, the only option left was Mr. Google.

My search revealed that the term boson pays homage to the Indian theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, best known for the quantum mechanics work that provided the foundation for the Bose-Einstein statistics. By that time it didn’t surprised me anymore that Einstein’s name kept popping up everywhere I went.

The Higgs boson was named after Peter Higgs, the British theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of this particle way back in the sixties. Its presence was initially recorded in 2012 at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and finally confirmed in 2014. There are several types of bosons and all of them have an integer spin, but the Higgs boson is the only one with zero spin, and it’s the one responsible to give mass to other fundamental particles. But, what I found to be the most interesting fact about the Higgs boson was that they break apart in approximately a ten-sextillionth (10-22) of a second. At the time I thought that number could very well be the time it took the present to materialize!

I sat for a long time staring at the computer screen. I wasn’t expecting a finding like that. Holy crap! I had stumbled into a possible measurement of the instant that is the present. I don’t know how long I sat there motionless. All I know is that at one point I fell asleep on the chair. The sun came up and a tiny ray hit me straight in the face. I woke up and stumbled to the couch where I continued my slumber.

It was way past noon and I was still asleep when I heard the knock on the door.

 

(1) Check out the full extent of what the Timekeeper said in Chapter 16: Bowl Time Revelations