by RP Halliway
“Yes. We ate quite well, actually,” Evie said, smiling to Silas.
“Good to hear. Are you ready for the twenty cent tour?”
“Sure,” Silas said, feeling much more comfortable than yesterday in the stranger’s home.
“Here is the relaxation center,” Roger said, pointing to the den with the TV and fireplace, “and here is the restaurant.” He pointed at the door to the patio and the small kitchen inside the home, finishing with his familiar laugh.
“Down there is the restroom and my bedroom,” he said, pointing down a small hallway, “and here is the entry to the lab.” The trio descended a small stairway off the kitchen/patio that led down to a large open floor plan basement. “In the back are three tiny offices for my assistants, and this,” he pointed to the main area, “is the computer room and research lab area.”
Silas noticed several whiteboards on the back walls, filled with large pictures and diagrams, instead of equations as he would have expected from a scientist.
“Nice,” Evie said, nodding her head at all of the facilities.
Maggie was the first to exit her tiny office and approach the group. “Morning all.”
“Morning, Maggie,” Evie replied.
“Hi,” Silas said.
“Maggie, would you like to explain your research and thesis?” Roger asked.
“Sure,” Maggie said, with an excited smile. “My research is to design an experiment that tests for change but not time.”
“How is that possible?” Silas asked, cocking his head toward her and the whiteboards behind her. The whole time/change thing was still pretty muddled in his mind.
“I’m still working that out,” Maggie said, with a shrug. “But I think I’m getting closer every day.”
“Maggie is examining the time problem in more detail,” Roger said, beaming at his student as he sat in a chair in the middle of the whiteboards. Maggie motioned for Silas and Evie to sit also and moved to the desk in front of them.
Maggie took a deep breath and focused on Silas and Evie. “In physics, there are seven standard units. Most people can name three or four of them easily. Can you two think of any?”
“Length?” Evie said.
“Excellent.” Maggie wrote it on a whiteboard.
“Time?” Silas said, figuring that must be one of them.
“Good,” Maggie said, adding it to the list, with a knowing smile. “Time is definitely one of the seven, so your answer is absolutely correct.”
“Mass?” Evie said, pulling on the memory of her old science classes.
“Good again,” Maggie replied, adding the third unit to the whiteboard. “Those are the first three most people get. Newton’s Law stating Force equals Mass times Acceleration is pretty drilled into most of us, and has units of kilogram meter per second squared.” She wrote the equation and the unit abbreviations on the board.
“How about volume?” Silas said, not entirely sure of his answer but knowing that volume was a very common science unit.
“Nope,” Maggie said, twisting the dry-erase marker in between her fingers with a small smile. “Volume is a derived unit of length—length cubed, to be exact.”
“Crap,” Silas said, and the others laughed.
“To spare any further embarrassment, the others are . . .” and she started writing, “Temperature, Electric current, Intensity, and Quantity.” She finished writing and smiled. “Many people recognize temperature, but few people understand that current, intensity, or quantity are fundamental units. All the units except Time share some fundamental similarities. For example, think about how you might explain to an alien race what these units represent. How would you go about to do that?” Maggie posed to Evie and Silas, smiling as she waited for them to respond.
“Um . . .” Silas started after a few seconds of thought.
Maggie reached inside the desk and produced a ruler. “For length, a good instrument would include a ruler or meter stick, with increments to show the different length segments. For quantity, I would include things that I can count and show a progression from smaller to larger quantities, such as representations of the counting from one to one hundred.”
“I get it,” Evie said.
“I’m getting there,” Silas added.
Maggie went on. “The others get more complicated—not because of the nature of the units, but because of their representations. Electric current and intensity—usually described as light intensity or brightness—would need specialized equipment to store a particular value, but it can be done. For example, looking at a star on an intensity chart could indicate a scale from one to ten.”
“What is intensity?” Evie asked. “I kind of recall it be something relating to power.”
“Good memory, Evie,” Maggie said. “Intensity has units of watts per meter squared. And it is the representation of the power distributed across an area.”
Evie nodded at the description as she tried to process the answer.
Maggie returned the board and made a check next to temperature. “Temperature would also depend on the surroundings and where the measurement is made, but is easy enough to measure with some sort of thermometer.”
“What is temperature?” Silas asked, looking for a more scientific definition.
“Temperature,” she answered, “is the measure of the average random molecular kinetic energy of a substance.”
“I thought it was just how warm it was outside,” Silas said, causing a laugh among the four participants. “But your description sounds way more complicated.”
Maggie shook her head. “Sorry, that’s the scientist in me. Basically it’s how much energy molecules have in a substance. Air molecules, for example, are bouncing around right now with a particular energy, and if the temperature goes up, those molecules will have more energy and bounce faster.”
“Ah, I get it,” Silas replied, and it was like a light switch turned on in his brain.
“Trust me,” Maggie said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had to explain all this. You two are actually catching on way faster than most.”
Silas doubted that was true, but he appreciated her saying it.
“And don’t forget,” David said, walking out of his office, “that ‘average random kinetic energy’ is a term used to describe the statistical probability distribution of the velocities—which relates to kinetic energy—of a substance. George and I are working on a way to describe this for the textbook that would make it understandable, but we always get a bit too scientific. We’re trying to take lessons from Maggie.”
On cue, George walked out of the office behind him.
“And I’ve told you two not to start with ‘average random,’” Maggie said. “You need to explain it.”
David laughed. It was obvious they’d had this discussion before. “Right. Average . . . When molecules bounce around, they act something like pool balls,” David said, “When hitting another ball, the cue ball sometimes slows way down, or stops, or keeps going at a good speed, and the other ball also starts moving. Every air molecule collision can produce those type of results—but when ‘averaged’ the velocities even out to a constant number.”
“And random,” George added, “is just the natural air, without any external driving forces—like a fan or other means capable of imparting kinetic energy.”
“So it’s the average of just what is around us,” Silas said.
“Exactly,” David said.
George put up his hand. “But not just air,” he said. “Water, wood, the concrete in the floor, all of these have average random molecular kinetic energies that give them a temperature.”
“You just said temperature is kinetic energy,” Evie said, a random thought from science jumping into her head. “And power I remember being energy per second.”
Silas looked at her, wondering how she knew so much . . . and c
ould remember it so well.
“Correct,” Maggie said.
“But kinetic energy isn’t a fundamental unit,” Evie said, trying to put together into words her strands of thoughts.
“True,” David agreed. “Energy is a derived unit, usually in joules, which is a Newton-meter, and that breaks up into a kilogram meter squared per second squared.” David added the unit definition to the whiteboard. E = kg*m2/s2.
“If energy isn’t a fundamental unit,” Evie continued, finally figuring out how best to express her question, “how are intensity and temperature able to be fundamental units when they are energies? If volume isn’t a fundamental unit because it is a derived unit, then energy based units shouldn’t be fundamental units.”
“What a fantastic question!” Roger exclaimed, glowing with enthusiasm. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a student—much less a non-majored student—ask such a good question.”
Evie felt her face redden at the praise. All she could do was nod quickly to Roger and wait for the answer.
“The cop out answer,” Roger began, jumping in to aid his assistants, “is that, while they are energies, they are different enough ‘quantities’ of energies that the numbers would make calculations extremely cumbersome. For example, the kinetic energy of room temperature air is a number starting with zero and probably having twenty zeros after the decimal point before the first non-zero digit. Such as 0.00000000000000000000303.” Roger wrote the number out on the whiteboard. “It is much easier to just talk about temperatures as a whole. And temperature also takes into account the different masses of each molecule, so there aren’t individual calculations for all of the individual gases that make up the air we are sitting in.”
“That is a very interesting answer,” Evie said.
“And intensity shares the same problem,” Maggie said, picking up on Roger’s description. “The numbers are either big or small depending on the relative position of the observer. An observer close to the Sun, for example, would have a very large intensity number if computed in terms of power. But I don’t have any numbers to back that up at the moment.”
“But what you think is that different forms and calculations of energy can have ‘easier’ units such as temperature and intensity,” Evie said.
“That’s the theory,” Roger said. “But science isn’t as fool-proof as people are led to believe. A good example is the definition of length—a meter. One meter is defined as the length light travels in a fraction of a second. But we also measure light in meters per second, so a meter could be any length based on the fraction of time used. If using one millisecond, then light moves at one thousand meters per second, and each meter is one thousandth of a second long.”
Evie scrunched up her face and looked at Roger. “Isn’t that circular reasoning?” she asked.
Roger smiled and nodded at Evie. “My thoughts exactly. In order for things to work properly, each unit should be independently generated, not rely on itself.”
“To be fair,” Maggie said, “the new definition picks the fraction of a second to match the previous standard meter length. Nobody is trying to trick people by changing definitions.”
“That’s true,” David said, “the definition of a meter is how far light travels over that fraction of a second, which doesn’t depend on length at all.”
“Good luck putting a ‘meter light timer’ into a spacecraft,” George said, causing the group to laugh. “I don’t think I would understand what a timer that clicks off in 299,792,458ths of a second could be for.”
“What about Time? Why don’t you think that is a unit?” Silas asked. He wasn’t following along like Evie was, but if what they were saying were the case for two of the physics units, then would it be the same for all of them?
“Nice question, Silas,” Roger said, then he looked to Maggie to explain.
Maggie was ready. “Time is different,” she said. “Because how would it be shown? Can one second be stored in a spacecraft to be sent somewhere? No. Time is ‘used up’ the moment it happens. Can you put the twenty-second millionth second of this year in a box and send it?”
“But I can put something lasting one second in the box,” Silas challenged, gaining a little confidence.
“Yes, you can,” Maggie said. “But is that Change? Or is it Time?”
Silas really thought about it. It could go either way. “Maybe time?” Silas said, not sure anymore.
“Maybe,” Maggie said. “And that’s the essence of my experiment. I’m trying to come up with a way to differentiate between Change and Time. There are some qualities of Time that seem to make it not a unit. One quality that may disqualify it, is that Time has no zero. You can’t have ‘no’ Time. I can have no mass in a situation, no current, no intensity, no length, and so on, but Time moves on, no matter what?”
“No temperature? Everything has a temperature,” Silas added.
“Good point,” Maggie said. “But I can also control temperature in ways. I can control all the other units in different ways for an experiment, but Time just goes on and on. Time also only moves in one direction, whereas I can measure length in any direction, and current can alternate or flow in either direction.”
“One other quality that makes Time different is the concept of ‘observation,’” George said. “One of our theories of Change vs Time is that Change needs an observer, while ‘Time’—or at least ‘science’ definition of Time is that it has been progressing from the beginning, the Big Bang, without needing to be observed.”
“Like with your flight,” David said, jumping in, “or when you were sleeping last night into this morning. You didn’t know how much Time passed because you weren’t able to observe it. The only measure of how much Time had elapsed was the clock, or the Sun’s position.”
The more they talked, the more excited the two assistants got. Maggie cut in. “If I cut a board, can you tell how long each half is without observation?”
“And does turning on a light brighten a room if there is no observer?” David added. “These are examples where observation of things is necessary, but ‘science’ makes Time out to always be known without an observer.” He made air quotes around ‘science’ for effect.
Watching the three of them bounce back and forth with ideas was dizzying. Evie could hardly keep up.
“This doesn’t mean that Time isn’t important,” Maggie said. “Time as a means of keeping track of change is very important in every field of study. But for the purposes of this understanding, Time is a made up unit that is based off of Change. Thinking about the aliens again—there are a number of ways to show Change, but no way to show Time. Could you successfully tell someone where the beginning of Time is, or where in the entirety of Time we are living this very second?”
“Not to mention that Time itself is a symbolic human creation,” David said.
“Symbolic?” Silas asked.
David nodded. “We humans, not including any potential aliens among us, create and use symbols for all of our thoughts. For example, language is a totally symbolic creation—both in vocalization and in written form. Each symbol, such as the alphabet, is a building block for constructing something bigger, ending up in representative thought. So are numbers for that matter. Mathematics is just a broader logical system composed of those symbols. Take Roman Numerals versus the Arabic numbering system. Both have concepts of addition and subtraction using different symbols. And calculations with an abacus yield results by using quantization along with symbolism. Much like language, Mathematics establishes a system with a set of rules, and when obeying the rules, no matter what symbols are used, the answers will still be logical and consistent.”
“Language rules?” Silas asked. He tried to think of rules that language followed. “You’re saying like grammar and stuff?”
“Exactly,” David exclaimed. “In language, the rules aren’t meant to be broken
, but can be. All you have to do is speak English to know that. But math, on the other hand, is very unforgiving if you try to bend the rules. Yet in any replacement symbolic system, whether binary, or hexadecimal, or a number system using stars, moons, and horseshoes, if the rules are consistent, any set of symbols will produce consistent results.”
“So is Time symbolic like numbers and letters?” Silas asked.
“Kind of,” David said. “A ‘year’ is defined as the time it takes for Earth to revolve around the Sun. The ancients used a specific counting system for keeping tracking of Time—sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and twenty-four hours in a day. Each of those divisions is completely symbolic.”
“And Change?” Silas asked, encouraged by his recent deduction.
“Change requires an observer,” George said. “Right at this moment, you are experiencing a change. And then another one, And another one. All of these changes put together create this symbolic representation we call Time, but Time falls apart when the change is not observed, unless the ‘science’ standard is adopted, which states the ‘Time always exists and moves forward’ and behaves exactly like now for all of the past and will for all of the future.”
“How can Time fall apart?” Silas asked, “I remember yesterday. And the day before.” Those were the days he talked with Evie. He would never forget those.
“Your observation makes ‘yesterday’ exist,” Maggie said. “But suppose you were in a coma, did ‘yesterday’ exist?”
“For everybody else it totally would.”
“And they are observers,” Maggie said, giving Silas a friendly smile.
The overload of physics information was starting to make Evie’s head hurt. And they still hadn’t gotten to the thing she’d been dying to know. She didn’t want the overly-excited assistants to lose energy before it was explained. “All this is great. But what does it have to do with the Theory of Everything?”
Chapter 9
“You want the big reveal already?” Roger asked with a laugh. Then he gave a nod to Maggie.