Gnarlodious: I was thinking about you this AM. Your recent fascination with electromagnetism
atlas84: Yeah... Well, I wanted to be an electrician when I was studying weather.
Gnarlodious: Oh really?
atlas84: All because of a physics class.
Gnarlodious: I didn't know.
atlas84: EM is a fascinating phenomenon. It's all around us.
Gnarlodious: We are wiring the house for ethernet, and you have to keep them 8 inches from AC wires because the AC field interferes with the digital. It’s like a tube surrounding the conductor. A wormhole, as it were.
atlas84: Huh, didn’t know that. A real-life wormhole.
Gnarlodious: So, I was wondering if a superconductor is like a wormhole.
atlas84: I was wondering if you could travel at the speed of light using EM, since it emits photons. I bet you could make a wormhole out of one.
Gnarlodious: I was thinking that an electron is negatively charged, so shouldn't an atom also behave like an electron? With a suitable conductor, why can't atoms travel at the speed of light? Maybe they do inside a neutron star.
atlas84: Well, the proton is positively charged and it keeps atoms in place. Conductors have valent electrons that create current.
Gnarlodious: Like a carbon nanotube?
atlas84: If you turned mass into pure energy, a wormhole would be possible. I bet it would be similar to the atomic bomb... It would be like a chain reaction.
Gnarlodious: If copper is a good conductor for electrons then what is a good conductor for protons?
atlas84: Great question.
atlas84: The invisible Higgs Field? I have no idea.
Gnarlodious: ‘Cuz I wanna get off this planet. LOL.
atlas84: Lol, me too. I said that at the end of my last blog.
Gnarlodious: We are lost in the phlogiston.
atlas84: phlogiston?
Gnarlodious: I mean, ether.
atlas84: Oh ok. I googled it- it was a hypothetical particle.
Gnarlodious: Maybe it’s a wavicle.
atlas84: But yeah, a current of protons, hmm. Maybe it would require electrons to remain static.
atlas84: That’s probably how antimatter works. Repulsive gravity. Maybe that’s why galaxies can recede faster than the speed of light.
Gnarlodious: Oh good one. You’re on a roll now.
atlas84: Just being creative. You always get my cylinders firing.
Gnarlodious: I do that too; break all the rules
atlas84: Yeah. I’m glad I’m your son. I'd hate to be boring. Thinking outside the box is always exciting.
Gnarlodious: That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.
Daytime in Boston is as patriotic as any. Bald eagles soar above I-90 off the Massachusetts Turnpike, bobbing their heads to-and-fro. The radiosity of the sun subtends various angles of heat transfer. Rich Harvard frat-boys hawk loogies over Eliot Bridge, calculating their trajectories in mid-air. Fenway Park is a magical ellipsoid, seeping the smell of hot dogs and frizzy beer that penetrates through the windows of Carter’s van, shooing him away from the unruly baseball crowd as it’s done so many times before. The Neo-Greccian dome of the MIT courtyard shines like a nickel over wavelets of flags governed by the Navier-Stokes equations; one of them red-white-and-blue, tall and proud, saluting itself eastward over the Alumni Houses way off towards Bunker Hill.
He’s seen it all before; the political atmosphere of a city historically dedicated to undermining the order of things; the mathematical certainties that obtain states of motion, shifting and transfiguring random objects that are being harassed by dynamical systems, never quite free yet never quite controlled. It’s as if the almighty hand of Chaos had played a sick joke on the creatures of Earth, teasing them with predictable patterns yet never revealing which pattern will actually show. Only probabilities of patterns. The same old quantum conundrum.
He beats his hand on the dashboard and yells at a driver who cuts him off by swerving into his lane with a jerky sinusoidal maneuver. Something about this place just brings out the best in people, he thinks. The un-groomed beard on the man’s face is a forest of dead fiber optic cables. Carter gives him the finger, but the man’s too busy rockin’ out to a Grateful Dead tune to pay him any attention. Typical back-country inbreeds: don’t know how to drive through a civilized metropolitan setting.
Then a magnificent aberration appears ahead, right up above the skyline skirting Boston Harbor like a dandy whose hands shouldn’t be on the hem of a farmer’s daughter. Black cumulus coals had accumulated above the skyscrapers, rebellious and angry at the computer models who hadn’t forecasted their appearance. Da fuk? he thinks to himself. FORTRAN called for steady sunshine, not a cloud to be seen. Surely there’s some unseen mechanism driving such mysterious forces; forces that rain on parades and spell disaster. The state of unpredictability is a largely inherent phenomenon, and he’s spent his whole young life in the shadows of disappointing theories that integrate all mathematical equations into one; failed theories that were spurned by natural forces, only to become obliterated by the flaws of mathematical computing.
But he hasn’t given up yet. He has one of these inane ambitions to spend his entire life pining for something that can’t be obtained. Most of the people like Carter spend hours scheming on revenge tactics against their enemies, or how to win the love of their life back. He’s even worse, because the quest to find the Theory of Everything isn’t only more unobtainable than the aforementioned scenarios, but probably the most difficult thing to cog in the world. That’s why he loves it, and that’s why it keeps him going. Unconsciously, his mind is forever striving for something it can’t attain because it’s been so abused and neglected that it feels like it must prove everyone wrong by doing something no one else can. He’s been forced into a shell of bitterness that can only be found in the most sick of souls: the souls of people who are so sick of life that when they wake up in the morning they can’t think of any other reason for getting out of bed than for the reaching this unattainable summit- a hopeless quest that keeps them moving, helping them eek their way through life as if it couldn’t end until the riddle were finally solved.
Entry: 10/16/2012
Carter Jablonski
A human swallows a pill, and over time he or she becomes someone else. It’s been happening for years now, and at the Secret Service Parapsychology Department (SSPD), the wheels are finally in motion: an investigation is underway. I always suspected something was hidden deep inside the bowels of our government. A dark secret, waiting to be revealed to me- something that would finally make life less ordinary and give it meaning. But why do they need a math expert? I’d always expected it would be cryptography, or some other combinatorics analysis for which they’d need help from the top MIT graduate to decipher. As far as I’m concerned, parapsychology has about as much in common with mathematics as a bar of soap does with a rank bum.
Psychiatrist Emily Bryant, lead researcher and mental therapist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, is reading off stats from an uber-fat dossier. Looking at me makes her pussy itch, so she tries not to. Instead, she focuses most of her attention on the wildly eccentric physicist she’s just met. A physicist. Damn, more surprises. And what’s even more surprising is his over-the-top name, Sir Scissor the Wizard. Not doctor or mister, but sir. Scissor- not a Christian name, or even a creative hippie one, but a junk drawer appliance. And wizard? Well, the man certainly looks like one. His eyes are slanted below the droopy wrinkles of an ancient forehead that, without a doubt, holds the files of many strange thoughts. His most striking feature is his Einsteinian hair, which stands up and fans out like an electrical storm: presumably an effect from all the seismic activity going on in his oversized head. He speaks so fast that you can barely make out what he’s saying, and it’s always in riddles, puns, and proverbs, so that you never know exactly what he means. I’m shaking my head in disbelief. This is no Einstein, and if it is, it’s an Einstein on crack.
“A plague of nightmares inside a mental asylum? More like a plague of the obvious.”, says the Wizard.
Nobody quite knew what to say to that, so Ms. Bryant continued her monologue. There have been rumors about a mysterious increase in nightmares among the mentally ill. But they’ve always had those; the relativity of the matter is what’s important. Their nightmares aren’t too extreme: stuff like being followed, ghostly beings whispering secrets, and other such hauntings of paranoid schizophrenics. I’ve had nightmares of my own lately, but I don’t ascribe them to any mental illness; I blame them on society and my parents. The same way I blame them for all my problems.
Then there’s Gomez, the biochemist who looks as plain as a Sunday afternoon. His presence here is anybody’s guess. The last two individuals at the end of the table are the program director and a woman so colorful and obtuse that it looks like she’s just escaped from a Dali painting.
Psychiatrist Bryant brings up some mumbo jumbo about a particular drug and how it’s connected to the epidemic of ghost stalkers. I’m not really paying attention to the details; I’m just wondering if I’ll get a chance to discuss the latest discoveries in particle physics with Sir Scissor over there. And maybe take Mrs. Bryant out for pizza and coffee down by the Smithsonian. She isn’t bad looking for a psychiatrist; she has straight, shoulder-length hair, just the way I like it; calculating eyes that twinkle whenever they roam in my direction; a calm demeanor, hairy arms... Wait... Dafuk? Oh yes, little peachy stubbles are barely noticeable just beneath the hem of her suit. What’s this chick been eating lately? I’d love to find out. An intelligent woman is always worth talking to, even if she’s got hair growing out of her pits the size of Don King’s afro.
And what’s this, did Scissor just drool on his dossier? Gomez has a disgusted look, like he can’t believe they made him sit next to such an ungodly specimen. Aw Christ, the old man’s just bored. Give him a break.
“... potential side effects of Setraloft include nausea, vomiting, weight gain, increased irritability, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, headaches, insomnia, seizures, suicidal ideation, and a susceptibility to unexplained psychic phenomena which may include telepathy, vivid dream precognitions, and, *ahem*, possession. Originally a variety of Zoloft, Setraloft has become the most prescribed SSRI anti-depressant on the market...”
I’m starting to yawn myself, but I stop once I remember that I might have a shot with this hairy doctorette. The director interrupts it anyway, in a booming voice with proud bravado: “Thank you, Emily. Now I’d like to introduce you all to Saturday, our most... accomplished medium in the department.”
I recall working at a fast-food joint when I was teenager. All the flirtatious Latinas would call me Senor Sabado because I only worked on the weekends. But this Latina, who really was named after Saturday, was something entirely different; her English was broken, yet she got her point across more clearly than any immigrant I’d ever known. Her dress of embroidered kiwi olives and trigonometrically challenged mariachi instruments were complemented by various Aztec pendants hanging from her neck. She exuded a type of charisma that inspired me to finally pay attention to what the Hell was going on. Saturday spoke of her guided meditations, and what she’d found going on inside the inner workings of the mind. So, the government was not only cracking down on drugs, gays, illegal aliens, and basic civil rights, but on the various irregularities of the psychic realm too? No surprise there, chief.
I look over at Scissor, who has a sly grin on his face. He just stares back at me, without blinking an eye. When is this bullshit going to end? I want to go outside and get some of that Abe Lincoln action. The hottest women always visit the biggest statues, right?
“Carter Jablonski. Graduate in mathematical modeling at MIT. Part-time cable repair-man, part-time engineering consultant. Worked in combinatorics for Unified Field research. You’re here because we’ve got a special assignment for you. All the top minds in your field have recommended you as the premium dynamics advisor in the nation. They say there’s never been a system you haven’t modeled with a percentage error over .01%. Boy, have we got something for you; even our top codebreakers can’t touch this one.”
“Piece of cake,” I mutter, finally letting go of my yawn.
No comments:
Post a Comment