Tag: E=mc2

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TIME MATTERS: CHAPTER 7: Desperately Seeking Subtitles

Einstein smiling next to his famous formula E=mc2

The Einstein lookalike was back in my apartment. That time I opted for a different approach. Instead of confronting him, I quickly shut the door and stayed outside blocking the exit while calling the security guard downstairs. The young guard came up and we entered the apartment. The old man had disappeared again!

We searched the apartment to no avail. Frustrated by the whole thing I asked the guard if he had talked to his superiors about the security tapes.

“Yes sir, I did. I was about to call you. They found nothing on the tapes sir.”

“What about today?” I asked.

“Protocol calls for our company to monitor the tapes closely for 72 hours after an incident like yesterday’s. There hasn’t been anything suspicious recorded at all today. And nobody matching your intruder’s description has entered the building while I’ve been on duty.”

At that moment it occurred to me that there might be something terribly wrong going on in my head. I had a flashback of me watching the movie A Beautiful Mind. You know, the one about the brilliant Dr. John Nash’s schizophrenia. I decided it would better to be alone for a while so, instead of pursuing the intruder matter any further, I thanked the young security guard for his help and dismissed him as politely as I could given my confusion. Once alone in the apartment I felt compelled to do something I can’t explain, even today.

I said out loud: “Ok, you can come out now.”

A dark figure in the balcony lit up a pipe and started walking towards me. The man with the uncanny resemblance to Albert Einstein was once again talking to me in my home.

“Is zat vat you zink zis is Ray? Ein schizophrenic hallucination?”

As soon as he started to speak, a funny thought crossed my mind: If I created this character, why did I give him such a hard to follow speech pattern? His heavy accent had me desperately looking for subtitles to understand him. I did catch the word Ray and asked once again how he knew my name. As soon as the words came out of my mouth I realized the question was academic. If this was indeed all happening in my mind, he would, of course, know everything about me. Duh…

I was half expecting another ‘doofus’ reference but instead ‘Einstein’ walked over to the console table were I kept my snail mail and picked up a letter.

“Ein man schould look for vat is, und not for vat he zinks schould be,” he said showing me the envelope. “I know your name becauze I zaw zeze letters addrezed to you ven I arriffed. Zee zecurity guards today und last night couldn’t zee me becauze zey vere not looking for me. You, on zee other hand, zummoned me. You vere looking for me.”

This guy had me doubting my own doubts. Was it all a figment of my imagination? The whole situation was getting weirder by the minute but I decided to roll with the punches and asked when had I summoned him.

“Ven you schtarted tapping on zee univerze’s informazion field,” he said.

The effort to understand him was giving me a headache. It reminded me of a meme about some people being so hard to understand that is was like trying to pick up a turd by the clean end.

“When the hell did I do that?” I asked wearily.

“Ven you began looking for anzers zat are not currently affailable in your vorld und you schtarted to look for zem in your head. By zee vay ven I zaid zat time is vat clocks meazure, vat I meant vas zat time is merely zomething humans uze to meazure zee days und organise zeir actiffities, it vas not ein attempt to define its nature. Anyvay, your zearch brought me here. Becauze zee door zat leads to zee anzer you zeek is E=mc2.”

“What answer? You sound like Yoda but with normal syntax… and a pretty heavy German accent,” I said.

“Funny you schould menzion zat becauze it zo happens zat zee man who dezigned zee Yoda character uzed his face und mine as models. Zo maybe I schould talk more like zis: Vat time really is, zee anzer you zeek,” he said in a lousy Yoda imitation.

I was about to ask him how he knew that, when all of a sudden the corresponding synapses in my brain came alive and I realized the relationship between the separate messages my subconscious had been sending me.

The Timekeeper’s assertion that what I sought was all about energy, and Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2, in which E stands for energy, was the way to understanding the true nature of time. I started to pace around the apartment trying to put it all together in my mind but the Timekeeper’s “future without time” element was still hanging there with no apparent connection, so I decided to ask ‘Einstein’ himself.

My unconscious pacing had taken me over to the bedroom and when I went back to the living room he was gone. Only the pipe smell lingered…

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 8: Time Out… Sh*t!

Image of a bizarre dream with the Timekeeper crying time out

After searching the apartment and confirming that ‘Einstein’ was really gone I turned on my computer and started the research on the time/energy relationship I was unable to do at the office. Two hours later I found myself at a dead end so I called it quits and went to bed.

I woke up 5 hours later startled after another bizarre dream with the Timekeeper. That time I was playing basketball for an unidentified professional team against Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs. To this day I haven’t found a single reason to explain that particular team’s presence in the dream. Perhaps it was because of their black uniforms… maybe because Duncan was a fellow Caribbean who had retired not that long ago… or that their coach Gregg Popovich had been in my social media feed recently… or maybe it was because they were considered the smartest team in the NBA at the time… I don’t know. Anyway, there was some sort of commotion in the dream. I couldn’t tell what was happening but the Timekeeper was frantically shouting “Time out, time out!”  The weirdness of the whole thing woke me up.

I got out of bed and went straight to the kitchen to brew myself a cup of strong Puerto Rican coffee. It was scalding hot and I burned my tongue with the first sip of the much needed morning infusion. While waiting for the coffee to cool off a bit, I pondered the idea of sharing what was happening with someone I trusted. For me the three obvious options were Gina, Bob and Professor Murdock.

I dismissed the idea of talking to Bob fairly fast. He had a tendency to overreact at times and I didn’t want him thinking his partner had lost his marbles. As for Gina, I wanted to discuss it with her, but talking about what I feared could be a schizophrenic episode with someone I hoped to have a romantic relationship with was definitely not the best approach to win her heart. The Professor was the safest route. It was still too early to call, so I sent him an email saying I had an urgent matter I wanted to run by him, and asking for a good time to stop by his office.

While I was writing, the ol’ professor was checking his email so his answer came fairly fast. He was going to be at his place all day and invited me to stop by any time. The weather forecast called for a rainy day, and dressing up for the office on a day like that was not in the cards. So I showered and put on jeans, tennis shoes and a Notre Dame sweatshirt.

When I got to the agency I ran into Gina who teased me about the attire.

“Well, good morning Mr. ND, aren’t you wearing the YO! Bowl good luck sweatshirt a little early?”

“To tell you the truth I didn’t do it on purpose, but the way they’ve been playing lately, any help is welcome. You know what they say, it’s only weird if it doesn’t work.”

“Did you know that the Michigan Wolverines’ distinctive football helmet was originally worn by the Princeton Tigers?” she asked me.

“What?” I said distractedly.

“Back in the thirties, the Princeton coach wanted his players to look like tigers so he had the helmets painted in orange and black. The unusual forehead wing and stripes were one of the reinforcement patterns used on the leather helmets of the time. He just painted them. They went undefeated and became national champions the very first year they wore them. Maybe that philosophy of ‘it’s only weird if it doesn’t work’ was the reason he took that particular paint job  to the University of Michigan when he became their head coach. Anyway, nowadays when people see the design they think of Michigan but it was Princeton who wore it first… Ray, are you feeling OK? You seem a little scrambled.”

She had this uncanny ability to see right through me. So even though I had decided not to mention anything to her, she opened a window and I jumped right  in.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” I told her. “Very weird dreams,” I added while thinking how to tell her about the ‘Einstein’ visits.

“Want to talk? My 9:00 o’clock  was cancelled, why don’t you walk me to my office and tell me all about it?”

I did. I told her everything except that, in my account, Einstein’s visits occurred in my sleep just like the Timekeeper’s.

“And you think this Timekeeper character is related to Einstein?” she asked after listening the whole story.

“I think so, yes. I know it sounds weird. But it feels like my subconscious is using these characters to help me understand in my sleep the information I seek while awake.”

“The human mind has been known to do stranger things,” she said. “So, the last thing this Timekeeper guy said was ‘time-out’? What does that has to do with Einstein’s E=mc2 formula?

“I don’t know,” I said a little discouraged.

“Did he say ‘time-out’ with a hyphen or ‘time out’, two words?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.

“I don’t know, the dream had no captions,” I said sarcastically but apologized immediately. “Sorry, I was just trying to be funny, I know you are trying to help. The context of the dream means that it should be ‘time-out’ with a hyphen, but then this is such a odd character, created by my subconscious, who absurdly happens to be managing an NBA basketball team, so I guess it could also be time out, two words. Where are you going with this?”

“Just wondering, that maybe what the Timekeeper was trying to tell you was to take time… out of the Einstein equation,” she said signaling with her hands the separation between the words ‘time’ and ‘out’ to make it clear she meant eliminating time from the equation and not taking a break from it.

“There’s no time in E=mc2,” I said

“It’s energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared,” she said. “Speed is distance over time.”

“Shit…” was all I could utter at the time.

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 9: Hitting The Wall

Image of the building where the Professor lives during a rainy day

I thanked Gina for the help… and rushed out of her office. The first stop was with my creative team. I had to make sure everything regarding the presentation was on track and that, in the process, they hadn’t strayed away from the concept of the Chronologix piece being a time machine. You know, something to help you manage your time better so you can travel better through time. I checked their work, gave them my input, mentioned I was late for a meeting with Cyril Murdock, a former professor from college, and left.

On the way to the Professor’s I decided to stop by my apartment for a raincoat. It had started to sprinkle and the sky had gotten darker. It was only 10:00 AM but it looked like dusk and it sure seemed like I would be needing way more than just an umbrella to face the music.

Before entering the apartment, I noticed the strange bluish glow at the bottom of the doorway I thought I had seen the night of my first encounter with ‘Einstein’. Once inside I found myself standing in front of a wall of blue light floating in the middle of the living room. It looked like a giant computer screen with formulas, pictures and all sorts of information flowing through it at a fast pace. The wall was translucent and I quickly spotted ‘Einstein’ standing on the other side of it.

“Did you do this?” I asked him fascinated by the scene in front of me.

“I didn’t create it, if zat’s vat you mean,” he said, “but I access it constantly.”

“What is it?” I probed further. By this time I was already talking to ‘Einstein’ as if he was a real person and not a hallucination. My sentiments towards him had evolved rather quickly into those akin to a newfound friendship. Even my ears were growing accustomed to his accent; it didn’t sound so heavy anymore.

“Zis is a phyzical reprezentation of the univerze’s informazion field,” he said. “You’ve been unknovingly scratching its zurface for zee past couple of days. Now it’s time to for you to step into it zee vay I uzed to vay back ven.”

“Wow, you mean I can enter it…” was the last thing I said as I walked into the field of blue light. I woke up on the floor four hours later with a bump on my head and a note in my hand that read:

“Doofus! Don’t you know the meaning of a figure of speech? Don’t ever walk into an unknown field of energy like that. Look up the Akashic records and my gedankenexperiments. And go into E=mc2.”

I was signed simply “A.” followed by a symbol I couldn’t recognize. It looked like a weird “Z”.

I stayed on the floor for what seemed like half an hour listening absentmindedly to the rain outside. A pretty loud thunder got me out of my post-shock daze. I looked at my watch and realized I still had time to see Professor Murdock so I called and told him I was on my way.

It was raining cats and dogs and the traffic was hectic. It took me forever to reach the professor’s abode over at the university district. The place was a small apartment in a brick structure with a mansard roof and classic moldings. I rang the intercom bell and the professor let me in. When I reached his apartment he was waiting for me at the door. I was shivering from the cold rain and he was wearing a warm cardigan with Matthew perched on his shoulder.

“Come in, come in. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please, I would love some. Hey Matthew how are you,” I said to the pet ferret extending my arm to make a bridge between the professor’s shoulder and mine. Matthew crossed over enthusiastically and decided it was time to closely examine my head of hair.

“You must have a lot in your head,” said the professor.

“Why do you say that?”

“Matthew does the same to me when I’m in a state of deep thought,” he said. “My theory is he can detect the energy we radiate when our brain is hard at work.”

“Matthew, you rascal, you’re a little mutant”, I said to the ferret while stroking the neck area under its chin.

“I wouldn’t go that far. Everything around us is energy, and animals are more in tune with that aspect of reality than we humans. Besides, if Matthew were a mutant then that would make me Professor X,” he said with a smile in obvious reference to the X-Men character from the Marvel comics and movies, “or maybe Professor M…”

The professor brought the tea, I took a sip and the blister on my tongue came ablaze. The professor noticed my grimace and asked if the tea was too hot for me.

“No it’s perfect. It’s just that I have this sore on my tongue that’s been pestering me all day,” I said.

We had tea and chitchatted for a while, literally talking about the day’s weather, before getting to business. I then proceeded to tell him everything about my encounters with ‘Einstein’ and the weird Timekeeper dreams.

“What worries me the most about the whole thing,” he said with a concerned look on his face, “is that you may be right about all this being… let’s not say schizophrenic but… an intense experience created by your mind.”

Then I showed him the note…

 

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 11: The Professor Calling

take Image of the Professor calling Ray's iPhone

It was dinnertime, and having being unconscious through lunch I was ravenous, and a pretty nasty headache was creeping up. Before heading home I stopped at a deli near the university and proceeded to devour a hearty Reuben sandwich. I enjoyed being among college students and remember thinking that maybe the professor was right about not delaying my interest in teaching.

I stayed at the deli for a while trying to put my thoughts in order. Gina had opened my eyes regarding the E=mc2 formula.  I needed to take time out of it and see what happened. Also, I had to check out Einstein’s thought experiment approach and the possible access to the mysterious Akashic records. Since what started all this was my search for the true nature of time, my area of inquiry was pretty much defined.

I was very tired and wanted to lie down for a while so I decided to try my luck first with the directed meditation process to access the Akashic records.

Before leaving the place, and out of pure curiosity, I Googled ‘Akashic records’ on my phone. It so happens that Akashic comes from the Sanskrit word Akasha which means sky, space or aether – a term that has been interpreted in some sources as ‘primary substance’. Moreover, I found out the records could also be accessed through dreams.  I wondered if the Timekeeper episodes were a manifestation of that.

Traffic was still slow due to the heavy rains so it took me quite some time to get home. Once in the lobby I asked Alastair, the security guard, to add Gina Caulder and Cyril Murdock to my file as people to call in an emergency. I thought that, being now aware of what was going on, it would be a good idea for security to call them if the need arose.

To my surprise, ‘Einstein” had taken the night off, although I had my doubts when I entered the apartment. The pipe smell had taken residence in my place. I made a mental note to ask my distinguished visitor to refrain from smoking inside my home.

I took a warm shower, settled myself comfortably on the bed and started to go through the directed meditation steps the professor had outlined. Frankly, I couldn’t clear my mind at all. After a while I just gave up and went over to my computer to work on the E=mc2 equation. That’s when the professor’s call got through.

“Raymond, sorry to call you at this time but I felt this shouldn’t wait till morning,” he said before I could even say hello. “I did a quick research and found out the strange looking ‘Z’ in the signature is actually the way Einstein wrote the capital ‘E” when signing. But what worries me the most is that the handwriting on the note matches Einstein’s handwriting,” he said and I could detect a trace of deep concern in his tone.

“Professor, are you telling me this guy is really Einstein?” I asked him getting a little worried. Up until that point I had come to terms with the fact that this character was real somehow. But I hadn’t entertained the idea that he was Einstein himself. How could he be? I started to look for his note but couldn’t find it.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions, your mind is not out of the woods yet. First of all, there have been cases in which a person has been able to channel somebody else’s handwriting. The people who have studied this type of occurrence claim it’s a sign of spiritual channeling.”

“Oh shit, spiritual channeling as in what a medium does?” I asked with disdain.

“Yes, Raymond. The practice of channeling, where a spirit takes over a person’s body for the purpose of communication, has been around for centuries. Channelers, sometimes known as mediums, claim to use what they call ‘spirit guides’, kind life forces who assist them through the course of their spiritual journeys. Many so called mediums are charlatans, granted, but there are documented cases of people who were able to truly access that otherworldly dimension.”

“So now you’re saying I’m a channeler?”

“It’s a possibility, no doubt, but in cases like this, I like to go with the Occam’s razor approach.”

“The simplest explanation tends to be the correct one,” I said.

“That’s right, other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones. In this case the simpler explanation, I’m sorry to say, is that you’re having a schizophrenic episode. But it could also be that you are channeling Albert Einstein’s spirit in your search for the true nature of time, a topic very dear to him.

“What’s more, in 1917 Albert Einstein added what he called the cosmological constant to his theory of general relativity. I’m not going to go into the details but suffice it to say that later on he abandoned the constant. He called it the ‘biggest blunder’ of his life. Recently, scientists have revived Einstein’s cosmological constant to explain a mysterious force called dark energy. One that seems to be counteracting gravity causing the universe to expand at an accelerating pace. Maybe his channeling through you has something to do with this. You say he claims you summoned him.  Well, maybe he wanted to come back and you were the open door to this dimension.”

“Wow, you’re right, the simplest explanation is that I’m a schizophrenic.”

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 12: Scent of the Phantasm

Image of something resembling a phantasm in the background

It took me forever to fall asleep after the professor’s call. The prospect of suffering from schizophrenia was serious shit. First I thought that the fact I could smell the pipe scent was my way out of that scenario but then I found out that smells could be part of a schizophrenic episode. I actually learned that an olfactory hallucination is called phantosmia and I couldn’t help thinking the term was funny. I had been smelling a phantasm!

Don’t remember falling asleep but it didn’t take long for the stress caused by the professor’s news to wake me up again. The sun hadn’t come up yet, but it was useless trying to go back to sleep. I took my laptop to the balcony but just sat there sipping my coffee. My tongue still hurt, and that was pissing me off, but somehow, without even realizing it, I started a process similar to Einstein’s thought experiments.

While gazing at the still dark cityscape I asked myself how would a world without time look like. To answer that I first had to come up with a working hypothesis of what time was. That’s when I strayed from the pure mind experiment protocol and started writing. Maybe Einstein could do all this stuff in his head but I was no Einstein… obviously.  So, I wrote this down:

Time is the fourth dimension in our space-time continuum. But if time is a dimension, what does it add to the other three? With one dimension we have a line. With two dimensions we have a flat plane. And when we add depth to that plane we have three-dimensional space. What happens to that three-dimensional space when we add the fourth dimension we call time? What are we adding?

I stopped writing and sat back on my chair while the first sunrays of Thursday began to shine behind the buildings across the street. In my mind I started to answer one question after another. If there’s no time there’s no speed because speed is distance over time. If there’s no speed then movement is impossible.

The idea that what time added to the other three dimensions was movement didn’t satisfy me so I kept grilling my mind. What happens when we make movement possible in the universe? Stop, stop, stop, I thought, let’s visualize first the universe without time. A universe without movement…

The images that kept creeping into my mind were caricatures of galaxies, stars and planets just frozen in time, like still pictures. I couldn’t move past that, so I decided to go for a second cup of coffee. On my way to the kitchen I found ‘Einstein’s handwritten note on the floor. I must have dropped it the night before and that’s why I couldn’t find it when talking to the professor. I picked it up and read it again.

“Doofus! Don’t you know the meaning of a figure of speech? Don’t ever walk into a field of energy like that. Look up the Akashic records and my thought experiments. And go into E=mc2.”

The last sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. E=mc2.  Energy.  Energy has frequency.  Frequency is oscillations over time… It was time to take time out of Einstein’s famous equation. I remember seeing the face of the Timekeeper in my mind laughing.

I lost track of time while immersed in the task at hand. My trance-like concentration was interrupted by a call from the office. It was Joann, my senior copywriter, asking at what time I was going to stop by the office. The team wanted to show me the latest Chronologix materials. I told her to email them because I was going to be working from home all day. She suggested a video conference but I didn’t want to interrupt what I as doing so I came up with a lame excuse that I knew wouldn’t win me any brownie points with the team. About an hour and a half later they sent me the materials. I looked at them very quickly, didn’t catch any disasters and sent them an email saying everything looked good.

I worked non-stop until 7:00 PM that Thursday. Even forgot to eat lunch. I remember thinking that it was impossible for all that was happening to be the result of schizophrenia because people with that condition usually have a hard time organizing their thoughts, and, at the time I felt like I was intellectually “in the zone”.

Feeling suddenly famished I went to the fridge, grabbed some leftover Chinese food from like a week before, ate it cold and went to bed without showering.

I collapsed exhausted and slumbered… until the pipe smell woke me up.

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 13: A Not So Silent Night

.Image of the night visitor behind the pipe smoke

The smell of the pipe tobacco smoke woke me up and I saw ‘Einstein’ in my room. He had brought with him the blue light wall again and seemed to be pondering something regarding the information flowing on it.

“Vee haffe access to zo little of vat zee unifferze has to offer,” he said. “Can you imagine zee amount of knowledge vee could acquire if efferybody had access to all zee informazion in it?”

“Could you please put out the pipe,” was the first thing that came out of my mouth.

“Oh, I’m zorry, old habit, zey didn’t haffe zee smoking concerns zey haffe now ven I vas young you know.”

“Why are you here? It’s…”, I said while looking unsuccessfully for my iPhone to check what time it was, “…whatever time it is, it’s too early. In some places being up at this time is considered uncivilized.”

“I’m an old man Ray. People mein age don’t sleep much.  Maybe it’s becauze vee are clozer to zee end of our stay in zis dimenzion and unconsciously vant to get zee most out of zee time left. But I digress; I’m here becauze I understand you haffe delved into mein equazion. Vat haffe you found zo far?”

He wasn’t going away so I rubbed my eyes and got up, being careful not to step into the blue light wall again. I opened my laptop and showed ‘Einstein’ what I had done so far.

“I started by envisioning a universe without time,” I said. “No time means that the equation for speed would be a division by zero; an operation that produces and undefined result.”

I shared with him a simple example that I had found on the internet which explained very plainly why a division by zero is considered undefined. He looked at me like I was nuts explaining such simple concepts to him but I asked him to bear with me. I actually told him that I needed to go through all that because, unlike him, I was no Einstein.  A remark he found particularly amusing. Anyway, this is what I showed him:

If  8 ÷ 4 = 2, then 8 = 2 x 4

But if we substitute 4 by zero then we would have:

8 ÷ 0 = what?  and thus 8 = 0 x what?

It’s impossible to have a number that multiplied by 0 would give a result other than 0, so the equation 8 ÷ 0 = what?  has no answer.

“After establishing that, I went to the formula for speed,” I said as I showed him what I had done next:

r = d ÷ t  where r stands for rate of speed, d stands for distance and t is time.

If time doesn’t exist, then t becomes zero and the formula produces an undefined result

r = d ÷ 0 = UNDEF

“This led me to a significant finding about time’s effect on our universe, and here’s where your equation E=mc2 comes into play. If we substitute time in the speed of light by zero,” I said as I showed him the math behind my calculations,*  “we end up with a result like this:

m = (E ÷ 1) x 0

Mass equals the amount of energy multiplied by zero, hence mass equals zero:

m = 0

In the absence of time there is no mass! Or in other words, matter needs time to exist!  That’s what time adds to the other three dimensions.”

“And if we go back to the equation and start with zero mass,” I continued, “we end up with a result that can be interpreted as an infinite amount of energy. A concept with many interesting ramifications both scientifically and philosophically.”

‘Einstein’ looked at me and smiled.

“You might be on to zomething here Ray. I vould haffe to do all zee complex math to be zure, but I like vere you’re going vith zis. It might effen haffe an impact on zee zearch for an explanazion on vy zee graffitazional forces in zee cosmos are zee vay zey are, effen though zere’s not enough phyzical mass to zupport zem.”

His words energized me and somehow I stopped feeling tired.

“I’m going to go now but I’ll leaffe zis here,” he said pointing at the blue light wall of information, “zere’s no better vay to access zee Akashic records. But pleaze don’t step into it.”

He left and I found myself alone with what amounted to the greatest source of information in the universe. I wondered if it had Google…

 

*I didn’t include the full math in this chapter but, if you’re interested, you can check all of it here as part of an essay the author wrote on the subject.