Relativity
Mar. 31st, 2008 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I totally blame
flamingchords for this, and for requiring me, due to a set of coincidences, to write an entry involving relativity. The problem is that, even though in my day job I am a physicist, I have nothing really amusing to say about relativity. And nothing in the other job either.
Well, maybe one thing, even if it's not all that funny. But it is confusing.
Lord do I hate time travel.
This started with a man who, for reasons of a pending trial, I call George. I first met George in the same way that I meet most of the people I do in this line of work, namely by receiving an order to put his ass in jail the moment we caught up with him.
We caught up with him, in this case, outside the shed of his modest house out in Santee, on a clear, rather warm day in May, just as the doors to the shed shook with a bang and a flash of light spilled out. Following the light, although at a somewhat slower velocity, George spilled out of the shed, his polo shirt and khakis smoldering and smelling vaguely of engine grease.
"I did it!" he screamed, completely oblivious to the fact that Daren, Alice, and I were standing in front of the shed. He spun around, in a middle-aged man's imitation of a footballer celebrating a touchdown at the Super Bowl on national television. "I did it!"
"Er, what precisely have you done?" Alice asked, innocently. She was working on innocence then, as an alternative to sassy in her attempt to get a boyfriend who would not be horribly cursed,or mutate, or turn into one of the undead.
"Don't you see? I've done it! I've broken the paradox!"
"Which paradox?"
"I managed to make a machine that spins faster than the speed of light," he went one, ecstatically.
"That's not supposed to be possible," I pointed out.
"I found a loophole in relativity," George waved his hand dismissively, "I didn't believe it at first but it was in an old book I found at a bookstore, a way to beat the speed of light!"
I winced. I thought I had burned all the copies of that book.
"I had to find a specialty store to get some of the ingredients," he mused, suddenly approaching Earth orbit from wherever his mind had been wandering. "I didn't even know what they were, especially that Virgo-, Vir-"
"Virganus Menathus," I finished. No, not many stores would carry the menstrual blood of a virgin, extracted less than a minute after death by drowning. I was really going to have to find that damn book and burn it.
"Anyway," George, cheerfully ignorant of what he had probably paid a significant portion of his soul for, continued, "All I had to do was combine it all together and I was able to make a device that exceeded the speed of light."
"What does that get you?" Alice asked, putting enough sugar in the words that I distinctly heard a nearby diabetic collapse on the ground.
"It's all relativity," he seemed awfully taken with that word. "As you get closer to the speed of light, time slows down for you until you're almost unaging. But what happens when you cross over?"
"I don't know. What?"
George seemed to reach the pinnacle of mad-scientist-hood, "You start going backwards, that's what!"
"Is that true?" Alice asked.
"It's a theoretical possibility," I admitted, "the laws of physics get a bit shaky at that point."
"And I did it! I went back in time."
"Well," I said, happy that I had not even needed to do anything, "that sounds like a violation of UN Resolution Alpha-Twenty-Two."
"What's that?" George looked annoyed at the verbal speed bump I had inserted in his monologue.
"Restriction on Unauthorized Use of Time Travel Technology. And if there's any time travel device I've ever seen that's unauthorized, it's your little toy here. I'm afraid you're coming with us."
"But I can't," he giggled. "I'm not even here. You can't arrest me."
And then the madness he was experiencing caught up to me.
"Wait a minute, while you were in the past, what did you do?"
"Isn't it obvious?" he giggled, "I killed him."
"Killed who?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"That old bastard, the one who hated me!" he chortled, "my grandfather, of course, before he could make my father's life miserable."
I said something that was totally unacceptable in polite conversation.
"So you can't arrest me. I killed my own grandfather before he raised my father! I don't even exist! You can't-"
There was a nasty bloop, and then George was gone. In his place there was a George-shaped hole in...the universe. It's hard to describe, but try to imagine a point that you just can not look at, no matter how you tilt your head, or squint your eyes. There was not anything there, no gray spot, no darkness, you just could not look at it, because it was not there.
"Don't touch it," I said automatically before Alice's hand could get out of her pocket. I checked to make sure that Daren was not about to touch it either, but he was too busy being Emo.
"What do we do?" she asked.
"Just wait a few moments, and it should-"
I was interrupted by another bloop sound as the universe sealed itself back up.
"-heal itself," I finished. "I hate it when they self-paradox themselves out of existence."
"So what, we just tell Charity what happened?" Alice asked.
"And deal with this time machine," I said.
Charity's image popped up next to us, suspended in midair. "Well, at least it could have gone worse," she said, in the matter-of-fact tone that told me that she had been listening to the whole damn conversation, "Come back to the office with the machine, and we'll see about that paperwork."
"Alrighty," Alice said. I ignored her.
"Why is your hair up?" I asked.
That even surprised Daren out of his emo coma.
"What?" everyone asked.
"Your hair," I pointed at Charity, "you're wearing it in a bun. I've never seen you do that."
She frowned. "I always wear it in a bun."
"It's true," Daren confirmed, staring at me like I had suddenly declared that I was a Martian, "it's always been like that."
"It wasn't always like that this morning," I said, in dawning realization. "God damn it. I hate it when this happens."
"What happens?" Alice asked.
"Your hair is down again," I accused Charity.
"Yes," she confirmed, nodding. "That's how I always wear it."
"But then what were we just talking about?" I asked.
"You were just talking about how her hair was never in a bun," Alice said, and then frowned, "but why did I think that was wrong?"
"Because she has always worn her hair down now," I said, peering inside the shed at the contraption George had erected. It looked like the result of a tornado winning a shopping spree at a Home Depot, "But back then, she had not always worn her hair down."
"What?"
"Temporal paradox," Charity interrupted, her shirt having changed from white to brown, "The timelines are beginning to change. I hate temporal paradox."
"But then why don't we notice?"
"Because the moment it changes, it's always been that way."
"Then why does he notice?" Alice jerked her thumb at me.
"Because changes to the timeline don't effect me," I said.
"You're immune to that too?" Alice complained. "Why do you get all the good powers?"
"I'd love to trade," I said, finding what I was looking for. "Let me see if I can fix this."
There was a dial, a simple one probably stolen from a gas main or something, near the bottom of the man-sized turntable that occupied the center of the shed, already cranked up to what I guessed was the correct setting. And there, on the side was a button, reachable from inside the turntable.
"Whatever you do," I said as I clambered onto the wobbling structure, "don't touch anything."
Then I pushed the button. There was a whir of motors, a distinctly unpleasant smell, and the turntable began to rotate, first slowly enough that I could count the grains of wood in the plywood wall of the shed, then faster, and faster, until images began to blur, and then began to transform, a solid sheet of color melded into its true essence, a sort of murky gray. Taking a deep breath, not waiting for the timetable to enter its final orbit, I stepped out.
It was gray, and mostly empty in that space, perpendicular to time, where you could spend an eternity between seconds, stuck between the ticks of the clock. It was quiet and peaceful here, it was always peaceful here, and had been for all eternity, even though eternity only lasted until the next tick. There was no floor, and there was no ceiling; you simply stood amidst the gray fog and wondered.
"What the hell are you doing here?" a voice that was, at one and the same time, both eerily familiar and strangely foreign.
"I suppose I could ask you that," I said, turning around and talking to myself. "I'm fairly sure I'm supposed to be here. But what brings you here?"
"Whole bloody time stream's come unplugged," I told me, "It's bloody annoying, that's what it is."
"Couldn't you have picked a better time," the two of us turned as a third me appeared out of the mist, "I was in the middle of having sex."
"With a woman?" we asked us incredulously.
"Yes," I looked rather put out.
The two of us looked the one of me up and down, confirming that he did inhabit the same body that we did, "You?"
"Okay, that was a lie," I admitted. "That's not the point though."
"Which part was a lie?" I asked, then thought twice, "No wait, I don't want to know."
"The whole thing was a lie," I protested angrily, waving my hands.
"And here I thought I would actually develop social skills," I grumbled to me.
"Come on, it's not that bad," the boasting me said, "I mean, it's not as if we were the last man on Earth that nobody would-"
"They wouldn't," a fourth me emerged from the mists, "I've been the last man on Earth twice now. It doesn't work out that well. Girls are still smart enough to avoid me. Us."
"Since I don't remember that," I tried to get myself back on track, "I suppose that you're from my future."
"No," I said, "I'm from your past. Things have gotten even more screwed up since you stepped into that damn thing. It was highly unstable."
"I can tell," I said, as a dozen more of me appeared in this gray regime. "All right then, all we have to do is sort this out. Where do we start?"
"Finding the root divergences from the main timeline and eliminating them should do the trick," one of me said.
"Should?" I asked.
He shrugged. "This is the fourth time I've been here."
"And this is the time after that!" somebody hollered in the back.
"All right, so we spread out through the timesphere and find the divergences and eliminate them before space-time gives at the seams and we end up with parallel timelines. Is that all?"
"Yeah," fifth-timer smirked, "All."
"I don't like the sound of that."
"Wait until you're me."
"Will I still be as much of an asshole?" I asked.
"Yes," I answered me in chorus.
"Let's just go," I sighed, hiding my face in my hand. I knew that today was not a good day to get out of bed.
Possibly thirty minutes later, or possible sixty years later (I was getting a bit confused) I stumbled back in, having successfully prevented Napoleon from going under the guillotine before he could become Emperor, having survived a fight with a large crowd of French people. The whole damn timestream was coming apart, and all the holds that we had used to nail it back together the last time around were coming undone.
"Are you there?" my image appeared in midair, speaking to me.
"Who else would be here?" I asked wearily.
"Any number of me," I replied, "But I thought you should know that I just nailed the Tang dynasty back in place. I think. There's some funny stuff at the end, so I better check around the Southern Song to see if anything came of it."
"Have fun," I said, crossing Imperial China off my list of things to check. Then I paused. "Why are you so stretched out."
"Relativity. I'm in transit, so I'm suffering from length dilation," I said.
"And why is your hair green?"
"Relativity," came the answer.
"Strange," I paused, "I don't remember that side effect of rapid travel."
"Just trust me," I rolled my eyes. "It's easier that way."
Then it was back to making sure that the Intercontinental Railway got built across North America, although I have to admit that I let my sympathy get the best of me, and because it did not seem to change much, I let the Sioux win the Battle of Little Bighorn. After taking a brief break in the Carri bean to wash the dust out of my throat, I went back to work to stop Che Guevara before he could ignite the Brazilian War, barely making it in time. Then it was back to the gray place between times, only to find a pair of myself waiting.
"Looks like Africa is back in place," I reported, "It was a bugger of a time. I kept wanting to let them get ahead, but it's now the same miserable place it's always been. Or always has been now."
"Excellent," I said, crossing that off my list, "But why are you both wearing clown noses?"
"Relativity," I said in answer.
"Now I'm damned sure that there's nothing in Einstein's equations that says-"
"Trust me, it's relativity," I said. "Look, temporal mechanics was never your strong point, so it would take too long to explain it to you."
"But that means it was never your strong point either," I pointed out logically, "which means-"
"If you don't get back to work right now, I'm going to shove my boot up your ass!" my voice boomed back to me from somewhere out of sight.
"Right, right," I swore at myself for being an impatient bastard. "I'm going."
But we were winning now. Time was flowing, if not straight, then somewhat less than crooked. At least it was going in the right direction now - and the divergences were soon small, leaving me with nothing to do but make sure that old peasant grandmothers got their mail and assisting in the odd murder or two. Slowly, the world I was in began to bear more and more resemblance to grubby old Earth. The Earth of this morning, or a thousand years ago, or something.
And then, with a solid click, time was back in order, and the turntable had stopped spinning, and I was stepping out of the shed again.
"That should have fixed it," I said.
"Great," Alice and Daren were both staring at me, or rather, above me, "But why are you wearing a duck on your head?"
I paused and opened my mouth in order to explain the complex social phenomenon that had led Princess Grace to began wearing hats made, not out of the fur of dead animals, but actually encompassing live animals in their construction, and the attendant social status that came with being able to afford to take care of your own personal head-crapper, and how it had eventually spread throughout all of high, and then low, society. Then I realized just how ridiculous the whole thing sounded.
"It's because of relativity," I said helplessly.
"Really?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered weakly.
"I don't remember that part in my textbooks," she murmured to herself.
"Just trust me," I said weakly, removing my duck hat and freeing its annoyed occupant, "It makes my life a whole lot easier."
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Well, maybe one thing, even if it's not all that funny. But it is confusing.
Lord do I hate time travel.
This started with a man who, for reasons of a pending trial, I call George. I first met George in the same way that I meet most of the people I do in this line of work, namely by receiving an order to put his ass in jail the moment we caught up with him.
We caught up with him, in this case, outside the shed of his modest house out in Santee, on a clear, rather warm day in May, just as the doors to the shed shook with a bang and a flash of light spilled out. Following the light, although at a somewhat slower velocity, George spilled out of the shed, his polo shirt and khakis smoldering and smelling vaguely of engine grease.
"I did it!" he screamed, completely oblivious to the fact that Daren, Alice, and I were standing in front of the shed. He spun around, in a middle-aged man's imitation of a footballer celebrating a touchdown at the Super Bowl on national television. "I did it!"
"Er, what precisely have you done?" Alice asked, innocently. She was working on innocence then, as an alternative to sassy in her attempt to get a boyfriend who would not be horribly cursed,or mutate, or turn into one of the undead.
"Don't you see? I've done it! I've broken the paradox!"
"Which paradox?"
"I managed to make a machine that spins faster than the speed of light," he went one, ecstatically.
"That's not supposed to be possible," I pointed out.
"I found a loophole in relativity," George waved his hand dismissively, "I didn't believe it at first but it was in an old book I found at a bookstore, a way to beat the speed of light!"
I winced. I thought I had burned all the copies of that book.
"I had to find a specialty store to get some of the ingredients," he mused, suddenly approaching Earth orbit from wherever his mind had been wandering. "I didn't even know what they were, especially that Virgo-, Vir-"
"Virganus Menathus," I finished. No, not many stores would carry the menstrual blood of a virgin, extracted less than a minute after death by drowning. I was really going to have to find that damn book and burn it.
"Anyway," George, cheerfully ignorant of what he had probably paid a significant portion of his soul for, continued, "All I had to do was combine it all together and I was able to make a device that exceeded the speed of light."
"What does that get you?" Alice asked, putting enough sugar in the words that I distinctly heard a nearby diabetic collapse on the ground.
"It's all relativity," he seemed awfully taken with that word. "As you get closer to the speed of light, time slows down for you until you're almost unaging. But what happens when you cross over?"
"I don't know. What?"
George seemed to reach the pinnacle of mad-scientist-hood, "You start going backwards, that's what!"
"Is that true?" Alice asked.
"It's a theoretical possibility," I admitted, "the laws of physics get a bit shaky at that point."
"And I did it! I went back in time."
"Well," I said, happy that I had not even needed to do anything, "that sounds like a violation of UN Resolution Alpha-Twenty-Two."
"What's that?" George looked annoyed at the verbal speed bump I had inserted in his monologue.
"Restriction on Unauthorized Use of Time Travel Technology. And if there's any time travel device I've ever seen that's unauthorized, it's your little toy here. I'm afraid you're coming with us."
"But I can't," he giggled. "I'm not even here. You can't arrest me."
And then the madness he was experiencing caught up to me.
"Wait a minute, while you were in the past, what did you do?"
"Isn't it obvious?" he giggled, "I killed him."
"Killed who?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"That old bastard, the one who hated me!" he chortled, "my grandfather, of course, before he could make my father's life miserable."
I said something that was totally unacceptable in polite conversation.
"So you can't arrest me. I killed my own grandfather before he raised my father! I don't even exist! You can't-"
There was a nasty bloop, and then George was gone. In his place there was a George-shaped hole in...the universe. It's hard to describe, but try to imagine a point that you just can not look at, no matter how you tilt your head, or squint your eyes. There was not anything there, no gray spot, no darkness, you just could not look at it, because it was not there.
"Don't touch it," I said automatically before Alice's hand could get out of her pocket. I checked to make sure that Daren was not about to touch it either, but he was too busy being Emo.
"What do we do?" she asked.
"Just wait a few moments, and it should-"
I was interrupted by another bloop sound as the universe sealed itself back up.
"-heal itself," I finished. "I hate it when they self-paradox themselves out of existence."
"So what, we just tell Charity what happened?" Alice asked.
"And deal with this time machine," I said.
Charity's image popped up next to us, suspended in midair. "Well, at least it could have gone worse," she said, in the matter-of-fact tone that told me that she had been listening to the whole damn conversation, "Come back to the office with the machine, and we'll see about that paperwork."
"Alrighty," Alice said. I ignored her.
"Why is your hair up?" I asked.
That even surprised Daren out of his emo coma.
"What?" everyone asked.
"Your hair," I pointed at Charity, "you're wearing it in a bun. I've never seen you do that."
She frowned. "I always wear it in a bun."
"It's true," Daren confirmed, staring at me like I had suddenly declared that I was a Martian, "it's always been like that."
"It wasn't always like that this morning," I said, in dawning realization. "God damn it. I hate it when this happens."
"What happens?" Alice asked.
"Your hair is down again," I accused Charity.
"Yes," she confirmed, nodding. "That's how I always wear it."
"But then what were we just talking about?" I asked.
"You were just talking about how her hair was never in a bun," Alice said, and then frowned, "but why did I think that was wrong?"
"Because she has always worn her hair down now," I said, peering inside the shed at the contraption George had erected. It looked like the result of a tornado winning a shopping spree at a Home Depot, "But back then, she had not always worn her hair down."
"What?"
"Temporal paradox," Charity interrupted, her shirt having changed from white to brown, "The timelines are beginning to change. I hate temporal paradox."
"But then why don't we notice?"
"Because the moment it changes, it's always been that way."
"Then why does he notice?" Alice jerked her thumb at me.
"Because changes to the timeline don't effect me," I said.
"You're immune to that too?" Alice complained. "Why do you get all the good powers?"
"I'd love to trade," I said, finding what I was looking for. "Let me see if I can fix this."
There was a dial, a simple one probably stolen from a gas main or something, near the bottom of the man-sized turntable that occupied the center of the shed, already cranked up to what I guessed was the correct setting. And there, on the side was a button, reachable from inside the turntable.
"Whatever you do," I said as I clambered onto the wobbling structure, "don't touch anything."
Then I pushed the button. There was a whir of motors, a distinctly unpleasant smell, and the turntable began to rotate, first slowly enough that I could count the grains of wood in the plywood wall of the shed, then faster, and faster, until images began to blur, and then began to transform, a solid sheet of color melded into its true essence, a sort of murky gray. Taking a deep breath, not waiting for the timetable to enter its final orbit, I stepped out.
It was gray, and mostly empty in that space, perpendicular to time, where you could spend an eternity between seconds, stuck between the ticks of the clock. It was quiet and peaceful here, it was always peaceful here, and had been for all eternity, even though eternity only lasted until the next tick. There was no floor, and there was no ceiling; you simply stood amidst the gray fog and wondered.
"What the hell are you doing here?" a voice that was, at one and the same time, both eerily familiar and strangely foreign.
"I suppose I could ask you that," I said, turning around and talking to myself. "I'm fairly sure I'm supposed to be here. But what brings you here?"
"Whole bloody time stream's come unplugged," I told me, "It's bloody annoying, that's what it is."
"Couldn't you have picked a better time," the two of us turned as a third me appeared out of the mist, "I was in the middle of having sex."
"With a woman?" we asked us incredulously.
"Yes," I looked rather put out.
The two of us looked the one of me up and down, confirming that he did inhabit the same body that we did, "You?"
"Okay, that was a lie," I admitted. "That's not the point though."
"Which part was a lie?" I asked, then thought twice, "No wait, I don't want to know."
"The whole thing was a lie," I protested angrily, waving my hands.
"And here I thought I would actually develop social skills," I grumbled to me.
"Come on, it's not that bad," the boasting me said, "I mean, it's not as if we were the last man on Earth that nobody would-"
"They wouldn't," a fourth me emerged from the mists, "I've been the last man on Earth twice now. It doesn't work out that well. Girls are still smart enough to avoid me. Us."
"Since I don't remember that," I tried to get myself back on track, "I suppose that you're from my future."
"No," I said, "I'm from your past. Things have gotten even more screwed up since you stepped into that damn thing. It was highly unstable."
"I can tell," I said, as a dozen more of me appeared in this gray regime. "All right then, all we have to do is sort this out. Where do we start?"
"Finding the root divergences from the main timeline and eliminating them should do the trick," one of me said.
"Should?" I asked.
He shrugged. "This is the fourth time I've been here."
"And this is the time after that!" somebody hollered in the back.
"All right, so we spread out through the timesphere and find the divergences and eliminate them before space-time gives at the seams and we end up with parallel timelines. Is that all?"
"Yeah," fifth-timer smirked, "All."
"I don't like the sound of that."
"Wait until you're me."
"Will I still be as much of an asshole?" I asked.
"Yes," I answered me in chorus.
"Let's just go," I sighed, hiding my face in my hand. I knew that today was not a good day to get out of bed.
Possibly thirty minutes later, or possible sixty years later (I was getting a bit confused) I stumbled back in, having successfully prevented Napoleon from going under the guillotine before he could become Emperor, having survived a fight with a large crowd of French people. The whole damn timestream was coming apart, and all the holds that we had used to nail it back together the last time around were coming undone.
"Are you there?" my image appeared in midair, speaking to me.
"Who else would be here?" I asked wearily.
"Any number of me," I replied, "But I thought you should know that I just nailed the Tang dynasty back in place. I think. There's some funny stuff at the end, so I better check around the Southern Song to see if anything came of it."
"Have fun," I said, crossing Imperial China off my list of things to check. Then I paused. "Why are you so stretched out."
"Relativity. I'm in transit, so I'm suffering from length dilation," I said.
"And why is your hair green?"
"Relativity," came the answer.
"Strange," I paused, "I don't remember that side effect of rapid travel."
"Just trust me," I rolled my eyes. "It's easier that way."
Then it was back to making sure that the Intercontinental Railway got built across North America, although I have to admit that I let my sympathy get the best of me, and because it did not seem to change much, I let the Sioux win the Battle of Little Bighorn. After taking a brief break in the Carri bean to wash the dust out of my throat, I went back to work to stop Che Guevara before he could ignite the Brazilian War, barely making it in time. Then it was back to the gray place between times, only to find a pair of myself waiting.
"Looks like Africa is back in place," I reported, "It was a bugger of a time. I kept wanting to let them get ahead, but it's now the same miserable place it's always been. Or always has been now."
"Excellent," I said, crossing that off my list, "But why are you both wearing clown noses?"
"Relativity," I said in answer.
"Now I'm damned sure that there's nothing in Einstein's equations that says-"
"Trust me, it's relativity," I said. "Look, temporal mechanics was never your strong point, so it would take too long to explain it to you."
"But that means it was never your strong point either," I pointed out logically, "which means-"
"If you don't get back to work right now, I'm going to shove my boot up your ass!" my voice boomed back to me from somewhere out of sight.
"Right, right," I swore at myself for being an impatient bastard. "I'm going."
But we were winning now. Time was flowing, if not straight, then somewhat less than crooked. At least it was going in the right direction now - and the divergences were soon small, leaving me with nothing to do but make sure that old peasant grandmothers got their mail and assisting in the odd murder or two. Slowly, the world I was in began to bear more and more resemblance to grubby old Earth. The Earth of this morning, or a thousand years ago, or something.
And then, with a solid click, time was back in order, and the turntable had stopped spinning, and I was stepping out of the shed again.
"That should have fixed it," I said.
"Great," Alice and Daren were both staring at me, or rather, above me, "But why are you wearing a duck on your head?"
I paused and opened my mouth in order to explain the complex social phenomenon that had led Princess Grace to began wearing hats made, not out of the fur of dead animals, but actually encompassing live animals in their construction, and the attendant social status that came with being able to afford to take care of your own personal head-crapper, and how it had eventually spread throughout all of high, and then low, society. Then I realized just how ridiculous the whole thing sounded.
"It's because of relativity," I said helplessly.
"Really?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered weakly.
"I don't remember that part in my textbooks," she murmured to herself.
"Just trust me," I said weakly, removing my duck hat and freeing its annoyed occupant, "It makes my life a whole lot easier."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-01 05:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-01 02:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-01 05:40 pm (UTC)