A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  “You’re not being very welcoming to female students, are you?” asked another reporter accusingly. “Why should Professor Chen be allowed to wear sexist and misogynistic clothing? Doesn’t that deter women in STEM?”

  “I can assure girls, or boys for that matter, who may be considering STEM that there are far more challenging hurdles to overcome in your studies and potential career than the dubious fashion sense of your future colleagues,” Professor Graf added dryly. “As someone who has worked closely with Professor Chen, I can attest that I regard his questionable attire as an amusing idiosyncrasy, not a cause for alarm.

  “The unknown won’t discover itself,” Professor Graf concluded, “and we need to get back to our work. We will have no further comment.” She stepped down from the podium.

  Professor Graf’s press conference had burst the narrative bubble. The designated victim had refused to accept her victimhood and had thrown it right back at them. Having denied the administration an apology and resignation, Professor Chen remained on paid leave, “pending the outcome of an investigation.” That meant he could come in and work as much or as little as he wanted. The ordeal was not over, however.

  The following week, Professor Chen’s program manager flew in for an unannounced review. Citing inadequate progress and insufficient results, Professor Chen was advised that his research grant would not be renewed for the following school year. His remarkable discoveries counted for nothing, because they were not the stated goal of his grant application. We were behind on creating mirrors, and thus demonstrated ourselves unworthy of support. Professor Graf had been promised tenure on the strength of her work with Professor Chen. Now she was told her appointment would not be renewed either. In class, Professor Graf was close to her usual self, but she seemed more preoccupied and distant. She no longer smiled.

  Professor Chen and Professor Graf were not the only ones under pressure. Students who were not previously interested in social justice or my involvement in the movement, now discovered that social justice was nevertheless deeply interested in them – and that social justice wanted to make an example of a couple of their favorite professors. My fellow students had learned that previously ignored ideas and slogans had dramatic real-world repercussions.

  Word got around the physics department that I was one of the SJWs who’d been hounding Professor Chen and now, Professor Graf. My physics friends were suddenly “too busy” to discuss homework. Conversations stopped when I approached people I thought were friends. Replies were perfunctory and dismissive.

  I went to see Professor Graf during her office hours. She wore a poker face, and was clearly glad to be rid of me once she’d answered my questions. Sarah dealt with me the bare minimum she had to for us to accomplish our work, and no more. She found another place to study and no longer hung out in the mirror lab as before. Sarah made clear she blamed me for the persecution of her professors.

  I continued my work in the mirror lab, but it was obvious time was running out for the research group. One evening, I’d finished early with my homework, so I thought I’d take a moment to download the latest satellite data. “Permission denied,” came the error message. I tried a different data set. “Permission denied,” the database portal insisted again. Then, I went way back to the original data from last year that I’d used to establish the technique in the first place. “Permission denied.”

  I asked Sarah to take a look. “Permission denied.”

  “They’ve cut off our access to the earth-observation data,” she concluded. “Hey! They cut off our access to the astronomy data as well!” She glared at me. “If you want your data, you’ll have to ask your SJW friends for it!” Sarah gathered her things and stormed out.

  Some unexpected guests delayed that Friday’s lab meeting. They were speaking in private with Professor Chen and Professor Graf. “They want us to pack up and go to work for them in Nevada,” Professor Chen said. “Enough of that, though. Let’s get an update on the mirror inventory and review the papers we’ll be presenting at GammaCon.”

  I cornered Professor Graf afterward. She looked haggard and stressed – not her usual cheerful self. The pressure of having the rug pulled out from underneath her and losing her job was weighing heavily on her. “What did you tell them?” I asked her.

  “I told them, ‘no,’” she replied. “I will remain ‘mistress of mine own self and mine own soul.’”

  That sounded familiar, somehow. “Shakespeare?”

  “No,” she smiled sadly. “Tennyson.”

  * * *

  Amit was busy “entertaining” one of his young ladies in our room, so I spent my Friday night in the mirror lab, trying to make further sense out of MacGuffin’s manuscript.

  I could follow MacGuffin’s description of the energy density as the sum of the electric and magnetic energy density: ½ ε0|E|2 + ½ μ0|H|2. Then, he started to talk about the difference between them as well: ½ ε0|E|2 – ½ μ0|H|2. MacGuffin described something about how the quantity changed in space and how it was the same as the rate of change with respect to the velocity? Somehow the whole mess of relationships seamlessly segued into a discussion of ebbs and flows of qi and something called the great circle. It seemed some kind of physical manifestation of a universal great circle or wheel of life. The whole thing sounded vaguely Buddhist. I’d dismissed that particular section as incomprehensible mysticism the first time I’d read it, but I‘d deciphered enough of MacGuffin’s mystic prose by then to become confident there must be some deep physical meaning to it all.

  I’d worn myself out trying to translate the mystical prose into some kind of mathematical sense. I simply didn’t understand it. I had the equations strewn all over the chalkboard. I sat back and stared at them, as if I could intimidate my scribblings into revealing their hidden meanings to me. I was deep in a sense of futility and frustration when the door opened behind me.

  Professor Graf entered. “I saw the light on in the lab,” she explained “I was heading out to a club, stopped by to pick up...” Wow she looked hot! She was wearing a low-cut blouse that really accentuated her cleavage. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. “Hey!” she interrupted my reverie. “My eyes are up here.”

  Going out to a club while I was working late doing physics? I was tired. I was frustrated. I looked up at her eyes. Then, I deliberately looked back at her cleavage. “So that’s why you’re wearing that low-cut blouse,” I asked her, gesturing as if I were cupping her breasts in my hands, “to draw attention to your…” I looked her in the eye, “…eyes?”

  She looked shocked, then smiled guiltily and looked away. Finally she giggled and looked back at me. “You’d best not let your social justice friends hear you objectify me like that,” she replied with a delightful smile – the first I’d seen from her in weeks. She looked past me at the blackboard, full of my notes and equations from the MacGuffin manuscript – ideas that the Civic Circle would happily kill us both to keep secret. “What’s this?”

  “Some electromagnetics ideas,” I grabbed an eraser and moved for the board.

  “Hold on a minute,” she said, pointing at one of the mathematical tangles. “That’s the electromagnetic Lagrangian.”

  “The what?”

  “Lagrange reformulated Newtonian mechanics, taking the difference between the kinetic and potential energy as his starting point,” she explained. “And that’s the Hamiltonian.” She must have perceived the look of bewilderment on my face because she hastened to add, “It’s another way of approaching mechanics that takes the total energy, kinetic plus potential, as a starting point.”

  In her enthusiasm, Professor Graf forgot any concept of personal space. She squeezed between the desk and the blackboard to join me, her delicate fingers teasing the chalk from my hands. She added “H =” in front of my “½ ε0|E|2 + ½ μ0|H|2”. “That’s the Hamiltonian,” she said, standing so close to me a few stray strands of hair swept under my chin as she turned back to the board. “See, that confusion between H for ma
gnetic field and H for Hamiltonian is yet another reason why you ought to be using the B-field instead of the H-field. You’ve been picking up bad habits from your electrical engineering friends!” She smiled indulgently at me.

  “You may come to appreciate the advantages,” I said confidently, although I still really didn’t understand the point she was making. Maybe there was a benefit to the bad-boy mystique Amit tried so hard to cultivate, but I doubted any of his pick-up artist blogs ever suggested seducing a physics professor by throwing electrical engineering notation at her and confidently asserting the superiority of the approach. It was a bit like what Amit called a “neg,” an attempt to puncture self-esteem and create…

  Professor Graf interrupted my musing by appending “L =” to “½ ε0|E|2 – ½ μ0|H|2.” “That’s the Lagrangian… but this…” she looked up at me, “Whatever were you trying to do by dividing the Lagrangian density by the Hamiltonian density?”

  I had no idea what MacGuffin was up to, of course. I was just trying to follow the poorly marked path he’d laid out. Fortunately, she didn’t wait for me to answer. “Oh, I see,” she bubbled forth excitedly from her delicious-looking ruby-red lips, “you’re using the Hamiltonian to normalize the Lagrangian. That’s what this is!” she brushed against me again as she pointed to a jumble of symbols. “Clever,” she turned again and smiled, gazing intently in my eyes before returning her attention to the board. “For radiation, the electric and magnetic energy balances, so your normalized Lagrangian goes to zero. In static cases, it goes to +1 for electrostatic fields and to –1 for magnetostatic fields.”

  Now that she mentioned it, I could see how the math was analogous to the way the microwave reflection coefficient went to +1 for an open and -1 for a short. “It’s analogous to the way microwave reflection coefficients behave,” I confidently asserted, but her attention was already drawn to the other side of the board.

  She pressed her back against me as she squeezed past me in the enclosed space, her hair tickling against my mouth and nose…

  “This here,” she pointed to another tangle of symbols, “you must mean the Poynting vector, but it looks as though you were writing it as a scalar product instead of a vector product… but you appear to be assuming the fields are orthogonal, so it doesn’t matter. And then, you’re dividing by the Hamiltonian, or more generally, the total energy density, and you’re dividing by the speed of light.” She placed a hand on her hip, her sleeve sweeping the board and collecting chalk dust. She turned back to me, her other shoulder brushing against the board. “You’re trying to write an expression for the energy velocity? The Poynting vector divided by the energy density? And you’re normalizing it by the speed of light?”

  Is that what I was doing? “That’s what I was doing,” I said confidently, “but I’m not sure it’s working out correctly.”

  “Your notation is just… clunky,” she said. “Look, let’s call this normalized energy velocity, ‘gamma,’” she wrote out “γ = S / c H =” in front of one of the mathematical tangles. Then, she slid past me again to go back to the other side of the board. I placed a hand on her shoulder to guide her strategically past me. She didn’t appear to notice my touching her. “And let’s use script ell for the normalized Lagrangian.” She added “ℓ = L/H =” in front of the mathematical tangle she had dubbed the normalized Lagrangian.

  All the worries and tension of the last few weeks seemed to evaporate as she put them out of her mind to focus on the problem. I watched as she deftly manipulated the symbols, dancing back and forth, brushing against me, becoming more excited as she teased out the hidden meaning behind MacGuffin’s relations. The chalk dust mingled with the smell of her hair. Finally, the blackboard full of mathematics reduced to a simple relation: γ2 + ℓ2 = 1, the equation for a unit circle – a circle of radius one.

  “It all works out to a circle, after all,” I murmured. “The ‘great circle’…” I added, recalling MacGuffin’s words.

  She looked at me, nodding, “That’s amazingly elegant.” She stared at the board as if reverence, soaking up the meaning and the implications of what she’d derived. “You could say the electromagnetic energy velocity is in a kind of quadrature with this normalized Lagrangian of yours.”

  She looked at me as if really seeing me for the first time. I could see her finally realize she was standing right next to me and I was blocking the way out. She took a step back. “I’m covered in chalk dust,” she said, looking at her fancy clothes.

  “Looks good on you,” I replied, holding my ground and maintaining eye contact. There was a long pause as we looked into each other’s eyes.

  She blinked first. She looked at the chalkboard, then back at me, shaking her head in disbelief. “How did a smart guy like you get tangled up with those social justice freaks?”

  “It pays the bills,” I shrugged.

  “There have to be easier ways to pay the bills,” she countered.

  “You might be surprised how little effort it takes to string together the appropriate jargon in the approved fashion,” I replied.

  “I meant easy on your conscience,” she chided me, “not easy on your effort.”

  There wasn’t much I could say in answer to that.

  She looked at the board again. “I’m so frustrated with… with everything. I wanted to get away from it all, just for one evening. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she smiled, “but I honestly haven’t had this much fun in ages. Thanks.” She looked into my eyes.

  The moment was right. I leaned in to kiss her.

  “No, Peter,” she turned her head. “We can’t. I’m your teacher. And I’m your boss, at least while Professor Chen is still under his ridiculous suspension. And it’s late.”

  I so wanted to... I took a deep breath and stepped back. “Shall I walk you to your car?”

  “Yes,” she smiled. This time she noticed my hand on her shoulder as I guided her past me, but she didn’t seem to mind. I locked up the lab.

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to do something crazy?” I asked when we got to her car.

  “Yes,” she smiled, opening the door. I took a step toward her. She turned to face me and interrupted my progress with a slender chalky finger on my lips, her fingers on my cheek, her forearm against my chest. I lit up from head to toe, aching to pull her the rest of the way against me.

  She paused a moment, in thought. “No.” She pulled her finger down yet remained tantalizingly close, looking up into my eyes. “Everything that’s been happening lately. You’re in the middle of it. You’re not what you seem. I can’t figure you out.” She paused, looking straight through me. “I don’t trust you.” She gave me a sad smile and got in the car.

  “I could…” I started.

  “No, Peter. Not tonight.” She added with a hint of a smile, “I’ll see you around,” and she drove off.

  My head was spinning so fast I could hardly walk. Was this what Amit felt with all his girls? I went back up to the lab. I needed to copy down the formulas and erase the board before I got someone else in trouble for knowing pieces of the hidden truth. That thought reminded me I needed to have a chat with Professor Graf before she shared her work with anyone else. I caught her after class on Monday.

  “About the other night…” I began.

  “I’ve been thinking about that interesting result,” she replied. “About how energy propagates at the speed of light for radiation where the impedance is 377 ohms but slows down when the balance is disrupted and you have an excess of electric or magnetic field intensity.”

  Not exactly the part I’d found most memorable, but it segued nicely into what I had to ask. “Would you mind keeping all this confidential for the time being? It’s part of a project I’ve been working on for a long time, and I’d hate for it to get out before I’ve had a chance to complete my study and write up the results.”

  “I understand,” she smiled. “Let me know if I can lend a hand. It’s an interesting approach, and I’d love to help, ev
en after I’m gone.”

  That sounded disturbingly fatalistic. “Have you decided what you’re going to do next year?”

  “I have a class to teach here over the summer. After that… well, I have applications out. These things are usually not so rushed, or so late in the academic year.” Her uncharacteristically cheerful expression quickly dissolved. She was back to the neutral, resigned look that had become her new baseline the last few weeks. “I’ll have a chance to network at GammaCon in a couple of weeks. There may be an opening at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Professor Glyer wants to speak with me at the reception. I may find a lead on other new jobs there, too. It’s finals week, but if you’re done early, you should attend. It’s right up the road in Chattanooga. Our budget can cover a room and gas for you.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about finals.” I took a deep breath. “You know, we could go out some evening, if you’d like to talk. I know a nice fondue restaurant…”

  She held up a finger, interrupting my proposition. “Peter, I’m sorry about the other night. That was… inappropriate of me to lead you on or give you the wrong impression.”

  “Have you heard me complain? What happened to sexual autonomy in the workplace?”

  She smiled. “I’m your teacher and your boss. That’s all… I did enjoy working on your physics problem with you, though. Maybe we could do that again sometime. During business hours.”

  Shot down. The next class was already coming into the room, and I needed to be going anyway.

  The remaining weeks of the semester were a grind. With everything that had been going on, I was behind in too many classes and working too hard to notice how I’d been ostracized by my physics classmates. They’d accepted my social justice activities as a fellow student’s amusing quirk, like Sarah’s participation in the climbing club, or the group that dressed up in period costumes and went to the Atlanta Renaissance Festival together. Now though, the stakes had become clearer and lines were drawn. The people I most liked and valued wanted nothing to do with me. What troubled me even more were the creepy sorts who suddenly wanted to be my friend, latching on to me as if by association they could exploit my patronage in the coming social justice order. At least Professor Gomulka had no more brilliant time-sucking ideas for implementing social change on campus. He seemed a bit subdued after his two defeats.