Tag Archives: physics

On the periphery of participating in the scientific revolution

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Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

There’s an age-old story about Albert Einstein that discusses his experience when he was young and in school and asked a teacher about how light could be viewed as both a particle and as a wave. The teacher remarked that obviously he had much more to learn as light was ONLY a wave, and once he learned that he would be able to understand the nature of that particular issue in science. Einstein spent his early adult years proving the teacher wrong and that light could be both a particle and a wave. It kind of changed science forever. Kind of cool.

When I was in grade school, I remember a similar kind of situation when I was first taking physics. And strangely enough, it involved the nature of light. The topic was about the scientific speed limit (the speed of light) and how nothing could go the speed of light, and that all attempts to achieve the speed of light would forever fail. I asked about light itself, indicating that obviously IT could go the speed of light because it was, in fact, light. Therefore, as it was a substance (specifically a particle, according to Einstein nearly eighty years before), then that meant a substance could achieve the speed of light. As scientists would eventually start to realize, light doesn’t approach the speed of light. It IS light and thus, always travels at the speed of light.

And then in the 1970s, there was a huge breakthrough in the concept of antimatter and tachyon particles. Antimatter, for clarification, is anything that is the opposite state of matter, meaning it has the same mass as matter but is in an opposite charge to that of matter. Antimatter particles (referred to as antiparticles) combine to create antimatter just as Matter particles combine to create particles. Tachyons, for those not familiar, are particles that move at speeds above the speed of light, which according to some mathematics I was playing around with at the time, I determined could not reach the speed of light from the opposite direction (the negatives proving to be the same opposite problem from the opposite side).

During this questioning period I was undergoing, I started to believe that I understood what tachyons really were and conjectured that what we know in our universe consists of matter that is incapable of achieving the speed of light. Therefore, in an antimatter universe, the antiparticles would consist of tachyons that would travel above the speed of light, but never be able to reach the speed of light from the other direction. It seemed pretty simple to me. The only thing missing was the simplicity of “where is it then?” We know where matter is because we see it, but we don’t know where antimatter is because we don’t see it long enough to determine that it’s really there (or are capable of stabilizing it before it dissipates in our own universe). This led me to believe that perhaps there’s a buffer substance between the two types of matter (positive and negative). And a simple matter of deduction gave me the theory that, unfortunately, I’ve never been able to completely disprove.

And that’s the Theory of Neutramatter. Neutramatter is a buffer substance that you would need to separate both matter and antimatter, which by simple definition would have to separate particles going below and above the speed of light. It almost seemed too simple because the substance that would need to separate the two universes is the most obvious substance known to man, and that’s light. As we know, light travels at the speed of light (which is kind of duh realization), which then indicates that as it is the buffer substance, the one thing that separates the two universes is the presence of light.

And as we know that light consists of more than just the visible spectrum, there are all sorts of properties that make up the wavelength frequencies that would separate this light across its spectrum, and thus, keep both matter and antimatter from ever crossing into each other’s specific realms.

The strange thing is: I was watching the latest episode of Cosmos with Neil Degrasse Tyson last night (taped from the night before that), and the focus was on the properties of light. It reminded me completely of this theory I had so long ago, and it almost seemed like the science of that show was about to make the, well, quantum leap to the theory itself, as it still seems to fill in the gaps that we still have. A couple of the questions that Tyson brought up (that mankind still has) fit directly into that theory.

It kind of makes me wish I would stuck it out with physics and continued on that path. I still believe there’s something to it, but when I was proposing it back then, string theory was the new kid on the block, and no one really cared about light at the time. I still think there’s something there, but today I’m a novelist who does nothing in science (aside from science fiction). And I wonder if I completely missed my calling.

My One Day as the Kingmaker of San Francisco

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Me on my usual throne before becoming a kingmaker

Some years ago, I had a pretty unimportant job as an investigator for a major hotel chain. I happened to be in San Francisco, working for one of the properties of that chain, when there was a major political event taking place in the city. The election for mayor was taking place, and this was the evening of the results. The man who was going to be the future Mayor of San Francisco was holding his election rally in the hotel where I was at, so the big convention was taking place in the Grand Ballroom of this hotel.

This meant that everyone that was involved in security needed to be part of the crowd control. As a security investigator, I sort of fell under that umbrella, and while I could have opted out, I figured I’d help out and stood at the top of the escalators where the mayor was holding the big get-together. Well, like most bad television sit-coms, this is where everything sort of fell into place.

It turned out that one of the main advisors to the future mayor was someone I knew. He and I had met at the college where I had gone back to school after getting out of the military. He just so happened to be my physics instructor at the time, and we had gotten along greatly, although that had been a few years ago. Well, he was walking up the escalator with the future mayor, saw me, and immediately steered that future mayor over to me and said: “I wanted you to meet one of the men instrumental in helping you get elected.” And I was then introduced to the future Mayor of San Francisco.

You see, this professor of mine mistook his recognizing of me as a recognition of someone who was actually involved in the campaign. He saw my recognition of him, and his eyes lit up, and he sort of filled in all sorts of false past events because he probably couldn’t remember why he recognized me. I was fine with it, and personally I thought it was kind of funny.

Things sort of escalated from there. The number one man in this mayor’s campaign heard the exchange and immediately looked at this guy in a suit and figured he was important enough to continue a conversation. He pulled me aside and asked me to walk with him into the ballroom, because he wanted to hear my ideas for when the mayor took over the city.

So, not believing this was really happening, I went with him and spent the next half hour outlining what I would do if I was to take over as mayor. The man hung on every singlel word I said.

Then he introduced me to the future mayor to have a small conversation with while we waited for the returns to come in. So I stood there, in front of a lot of very important people, and I outlined what I thought this mayor should do if he became the leader of the city. He listened to every word, asked me a bunch of poignant questions, and then listened to my responses to every one of these questions. I must have spent an hour talking to him before the returns came in, and this man was announced as the next Mayor of San Francisco.

He then turned to me, handed me his business card with his private phone number on it, and then told me to keep in touch, because he valued his friends well.

So, I shook his hand, took a business card from his campaign manager, and then went back to work, helping the security staff take their lunch breaks by filling in for them.

But for that one moment, I was listened to by some of the more important people in the city. They’d never listen to me again, but for a few hours, I was one of them and the one to whom they listened to every word spoken.

I can only hope that I made a difference to the city that one day.

(this is a reprint of one my old articles from last year)