Tag: fiction story

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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.

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 14: A Day for the Records

Image of the blue light wall through which Ray accesses the Akashic records

I sat on my bed watching the wall of light for what seemed like half an hour. The endless stream of  information was overwhelming, and I had no idea how to use it. My bafflement was interrupted by the iPhone’s wake up alarm. It had fallen on the floor and I was about to pick it up when I noticed the blue light of the wall flickering in unison with the alarm’s rhythm. That jump-started my mind and I began to connect the dots:

“Einstein handwritten note mentioned this wall of light was an energy field. The surge of energy in my iPhone brought up by the alarm had an effect on it. Over at the Professor’s, Matthew the ferret was able to feel the energy radiating from my brain. Crap! I had to go telepathic on this thing…”

The challenge was troublesome but I decided not to throw in the towel. However, before embarking on a crash course on telepathic communication with a very slim chance of success, I thought it would be a good idea to take a leak first. Once relieved I went for a much needed cup of coffee and while waiting for the coffeemaker to finish its thing I connected some additional dots:

“The first time the blue light wall appeared in my apartment, ‘Einstein’ had said he hadn’t created it but that he accessed it constantly. A short while ago he referred to this energy field as the Akashic records, and in his note he had asked me to look up his thought experiments. Professor Murdock had told me that some of Einstein’s public expressions suggest he was able to tap into the Akashic records during those experiments. Because of their nature, thought experiments lead to an increase of brain energy. The wall of blue light reacts to surges of energy in its vicinity. Bingo! No need to go mental! Increasing my brain energy should give me access to the records. Time to go back to the thought experiment approach.”

I moved the most comfortable chair I owned to the room and sat on it. Closed my eyes and drew a picture in my mind of a universe without time.

It was an energy field that extended infinitely in all directions. The energy was completely inert for it had no frequency. This must be what existed before the big bang. The big bang then must have been the moment when time came in contact with the original three-dimensional field of primordial energy. Time allowed movement, thus the energy came alive and matter began to appear.

I felt my brain unlocking. Answers came up fast and effortlessly. I figured that was the result of accessing the Akashic records. It was exhilarating! I couldn’t stop inquiring:

“So if what time does, as the fourth dimension, is add matter to three-dimensional space, then it can no longer be considered a path through which we move into the future. The nature of time is redefined as the dimension that allows the future to materialize. It adds a whole new perspective to phrases like ‘I need time to do this’. Of course you need time! But not the way it’s been thought about before. If you’re traveling from New York to Paris you need every step of the way to materialize in order to reach Paris. The trip becomes a construction process that requires approximately seven hours to be completed. Without time, the moment of you in Paris would not materialize. This would change what we measure as time. But new units of measure are not needed; it’s a matter of using the current ones in a new way. Instead of using them to measure the amount of time, we would use them to measure the length of the materializing process. For example, the materializing process of going from New York to Paris on a plane is seven hours long.”

The way the mind works when in tune with the Akashic records turned out to be intoxicating. I couldn’t stop. I had lost track of time when Bob called around noon.

“Hi Bob,” I said trying to sound as normal as possible.

“Hey buddy, are you OK? You haven’t been at the office for the last two days and we have this big presentation on Monday… I’m starting to get worried. What’s going on?” He sounded genuinely concerned.

“I’m fine,” I said trying my best to sound convincing, “there’s really nothing to worry about. I’ve been in touch with the creative team and everything is where it should be from my creative standpoint. The materials look fantastic; everything will go great on Monday. The time machine concept will blow their minds, you’ll see.”

“The presentation is not what worries me; we have a great team. It’s you bro. I can tell a mile away when you are not well. Talk to me Ray.”

“I’ll tell you, but not now; I wouldn’t be able to give you any details now anyway. Trust me, I’m dealing with something that requires my undivided attention and it doesn’t involve anything illegal nor life-threatening.”

“Listen, whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, I’ll respect you request for privacy, but remember that I’m here for you. Whatever you need…” he said.

“Actually, there’s one thing,” I said, “please cover for me at Monday’s presentation. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it. Just tell everybody that I’ve got the flu.”

“Will do buddy,” he said. “Good luck on whatever it is you’re doing and I hope some day you’ll explain to me the whole thing.”

We hung up and a short while later I got a call from Gina.

“Hey Gina, how are you doing?”

“Fine how are you?”

“I’m OK. Have you talked to Bob?” I asked.

“No, I’ve been on meetings out of the office all day and I’m taking the afternoon off to pick up the kids at my sister’s. Why do you ask?”

“Oh nothing. It’s just that I talked to him a short while ago and asked him to tell people I had the flu… which I don’t… Anyway, I thought you were calling because of that,” I babbled.

“Raymond Young, have we met?” she said lightheartedly. “I babysit nieces and nephews, not grownup coworkers. I was calling to check your ETA tomorrow.”

As implausible as it might sound, I had completely forgotten about the BBQ get-together with Gina and her niblings. It took a couple of long seconds of awkward silence for all the forgotten information to come back so I could pull an answer out of thin air.

“I was thinking around 11:30,” I said. “Does that work for you?”

“That would be perfect. Oh and take care of that flu,” she said chuckling.

After hanging up I took a shower and went out to get all I needed for the BBQ. When I got back and saw the blue glow in my room I felt like a junkie in desperate need of a fix.

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 15: ‘Twas The Night Before YO! Bowl

The urge of going back to the Akashic records was overwhelming so I decided to set an alarm on my iPhone to avoid losing track of time again. I assigned it a never-used-before ringtone as a mnemonic for my date with Gina the next day. Yes, at that moment my fear of  forgetting the whole shebang again was very real.

I sat once more in front of the blue light field and closed my eyes. This time my mind automatically jumped to the topic of time travel:

“If time is what adds matter to the three-dimensional field of energy defined by the other dimensions, and getting to Paris from New York is a process that requires seven hours of materialization(1), then it is fair to say that we have been traveling in time all our existence. Granted, only in the present time and only in one direction: towards the future, but in time nonetheless. What we really want to accomplish when we colloquially say, “travel in time” is actually to step away from the present and travel outside of time.”

In the previous session I had concluded that only energy could exists in the absence of time. Therefore, traveling outside of time would only be possible if we eliminate all matter. Only pure energy constructs could travel from one point to another in three-dimensional space outside of time. And since there’s no speed because there’s no time, then the ‘trip’ becomes something different from what we are used to in terms of movement. So, how can one ‘move’ when there’s no speed? A voice in my mind urged me to look for something in our material dimension that could resemble the nature of a three-dimensional field of pure energy in a timeless environment. Thanks to the Akashic records the answer came fairly fast.

“The closest we can get to a field of energy devoid of time in our reality is the universe of our mind. It is filled with thoughts, ideas, emotions and memories. Each one of them occupies a position in the energy universe that is our mind. And going from one to another amounts to travelling through a space of pure energy. And how does one do it? By shifting focus. That’s how one goes from point A to point B in an energy environment unaffected by time.”

Then I pictured in my mind an entity of sentient energy traveling outside of time. The interaction with the universe would be quite different from what one experiences in a physical body:

“The energy entity would merge with its surroundings. Once it becomes part of the energy field, going from point A to point B becomes an instantaneous event. One guided simply by a shifting of its focus.”

But how can one consciously navigate that field of energy?

“The answer lies with the existence of our mind’s all-energy universe in our fourth-dimensional world. The transformation into an energy being doesn’t change the fact that within us resides the all-energy universe that is our mind. When transformed into an all-energy being, the only thing that will remain the same is our mind because it already was in the energy state needed. Our mind has been managing our physical body throughout our life and, since it remains the same in the transformation, it will continue to do so with our ‘new’ energy self. The key to moving as an energy being in an energy field is our ever-present mind.”

I don’t remember much more from that night other than the fact that I fell asleep on the chair until the need to empty my bladder woke me up in the middle of the night.  After taking care of business I continued my slumber on the bed. The iPhone alarm woke me up at 8:30 AM. The mnemonic worked and I started to get ready for a day with Gina and her niblings.

I took a long shower and afterwards, while looking at my reflection in the mirror to start shaving, I realized I looked like shit, with dark circles under my eyes and everything. Few hours of sleep will always do the trick. I Googled how to get rid of them fast and went with the cold compresses. They softened the Beetlejuice look but you could still see a remnant of the dark patches. That had to do.

When I got out of the bathroom and saw the blue light field again, the urge to connect came back. I fought it and proceeded to get dressed. The standard uniform for such a special day was my Notre Dame replica football jersey with jeans and tennis shoes. It was still early but Gina lived about an hour away from the city, and I wanted to be on my way with time to spare. So after gathering all the BBQ stuff I had bought the day before, my journey to suburbia got underway.

What I had no idea at the time was that this was not going to be your garden variety YO! Bowl.

 

(1) For all the details read Chapter 14 – A Day for the Records

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 16: Bowl Time Revelations

Dreamlike image of Ray's ecounter with the Timekeeper during the Notre Dame/Stanford game

The drive to Gina’s home was almost uneventful. On the way I realized I had forgotten to buy some beer for the adults to chase down the BBQ food so I stopped at a convenience store and bought a six-pack of one of those fall seasonal craft beers that looked like it could do the job. The checkout lady, who had an uncanny resemblance to one of the alter egos of Melissa McCarthy’s character in the movie ‘Spy’, looked at me funny and said:

“Honey, are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. But I know I look like crap.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I mean you being a customer and all, but yeah, you look like you could use some rest… and maybe some chicken soup too.”

“I’ll do just that. Have a good day… oh, and thanks for caring,” I said and the lady’s face beamed with a smile.

I finally made it to Gina’s and as soon as she opened the door the first words that came out of her mouth were: “Ray are you okay? You look like shit.”

“And a good day to you too,” I said.

“Sorry I didn’t mean to… you know, it’s just that I haven’t seen you since Wednesday morning and you look like the rest of the week piled up on you,” she said apologetically.

“Don’t sweat it, my bathroom mirror and the checkout lady at the convenience store agree with you. I just haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Still having those weird dreams you told me about?”

“Sort of… but today is all about indoor camping, BBQ and some Notre Dame/Stanford football, not about weird dreams. What do you say we get this tailgating going?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Chris, Mel, come on over. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Christian and Melanie were Gina’s niblings. He was six years old and she was four. I was surprised at how well mannered they were. Gina introduced us and Christian extended his hand to shake mine while saying: “Nice to meet you.” In my mind I questioned whether this kid was for real. Melanie was a little shy so she just said hi while grabbing Gina’s thigh.

Gina led the way to the kitchen and helped me unpack all the goodies. I had brought hamburgers and hotdogs for the kids and some Italian sausage and ribs for the over-21 crowd. The ribs were the unpack-and-heat-up kind; I wasn’t such an accomplished BBQer. As it turned out, the kids had had hot dogs the night before and little Melanie loved ribs so the menu was set at one hamburger for Christian, ribs for everyone else and Italian sausages as appetizers for Gina and me. I added one cheeseburger for me simply because I loved them, although I didn’t know how I would be able to eat all that stuff.

The BBQ in Gina’s backyard was in excellent condition and everything turned out delicious. I hurt my sore tongue with a hot sausage but I solved that with a cold brew. After eating to our heart’s content, Gina and I sat down to watch the game. I recall watching the opening kickoff and not a single down after that. Without warning I found myself in the company of the Timekeeper in the place he called the Anteverse.

“Welcome back to my domain,” said the strange creature over the constant humming that permeated the featureless place(1).

“What is this place… this Anteverse?” I asked.

“It’s the place that exists an instant before your present,” said the Timekeeper. “It exists between the construct of the past and the energy of the future.”

“What do you mean by the construct of the past?”

“As you have discovered, time is the universal materializer, and that means that what you call the past is a solid construct. Something like frames in a movie with each frame being a moment in time. The moments exist forever, unaltered, created by the effect of time on the three-dimensional space of energy, and spilling over into your present. See, you are actually living ‘in the past’. Everything that surrounds you is a remnant of the past; an existing past construct that spills over into your ‘now’. An that ‘now’ is the edge of creation.”

“So, if the past is a physical construct, then it has mass… Can it be visited?” I asked.

“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.”

The Timekeeper went on talking about how the theoretical dark matter is in actuality the mass of the past, but I was more concerned with the nonstop whirring.

“What’s with the constant humming?” I asked.

“That’s time interacting with the energy of the future,” said the Timekeeper. “What you call the present is a materializing process and the humming you hear is the sound of time creating your immediate future.”

I had many questions and had lost track of time when a distant voice started to warp the Anteverse.

It was Gina pulling me out of the Timekeeper’s domain.

“Ray, Ray wake up. Hey Ray. Earth calling Ray. Come in Ray…”

“What… oh crap I fell asleep. Is it half-time already?” I asked groggily.

“The game’s over Ray, you slept through it. I tried to wake you up earlier but you were sound asleep and snoring like a bear in the middle of winter. I think there’s a video of you sawing wood in YouTube now. Sorry, the kids’ idea, and I thought it was pretty funny.”

“Oh well, I hope it goes viral. Who won anyway?” I asked.

“Not Notre Dame,” said Gina grimacing. “What was your bet with Bob?”

I took a deep breath and started to feel the pain of what was coming to me. “Must go to the office all dressed up in red and every time somebody mentions my name I have to say I went to Notre Dame because I wasn’t good enough for Stanford.”

Gina burst out laughing and said: “I’m going to have so much fun that day.”

 

(1) For more on the strange Timekeeper character go to Chapter 6: The Timekeeper, and Chapter 8: Time Out… Sh*t!

 

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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