Chasing a Light Beam – Prologue
Chasing a Light Beam
It is always best to think of reality as perfectly normal. Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened.
-Eliezer Yudkowski
PROLOGUE
I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.
-Bob Seger
The problem most likely began when I first learned that it is impossible to catch up with a light beam. That, and a lot of other implausible things about the universe that are apparently facts. From there, everything began to unravel. I say “began”, but that just shows how easy it is to slip back into simple convention. It turns out that time is a spatial dimension with no direction: it neither “begins” nor “ends”. It just is. To make things worse, of the billions of people alive on the earth — I started to say “in the world”, but of course that would ignore the billions of other planets out there with their own life forms —only a tiny percentage have ever heard this, and most of those think it’s crazy, in the unlikely case that they ever think about it at all. There’s no sense even bringing it up to my mother, because she knows that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and that’s all she needs to know.
Is it possible to overrate the happiness of ignorance? I wonder. Is the happiness of stupidity optimal — is it the most happiness a human can achieve? No matter. For me, it’s moot. It’s impossible to unsee what you have seen, to forget what you know. On the one hand, it’s nice to discover that each breath I take probably contains an atom once breathed by Marilyn Monroe, but that doesn’t completely take the edge off an existence bathed in Darwinian purposelessness.
Even though time apparently is a dimension, like space, and not a line, like yesterday and tomorrow, if I’m going to make any sense out of the problem, I’m going to have to “start” with what seems to me to be in the “past”. And the thing that comes to mind right away is the time I asked Leslie Batson to go to the Park Shore freshman prom.
The students at Park Shore Junior High came from “feeder” elementary schools, back in the days when no one went to private schools, and you lived where you learned. I didn’t have much experience with kids from the “haves” neighborhoods; I was a “have-not”. I don’t mean I was homeless or raised by beggars, but I didn’t know anyone with an air-conditioned car or wall-to-wall carpets. It didn’t take long to learn that the “haves” ran the school, but there were more of us than there were of them. The have-nots were just waiting to be inspired. I played on the chronic disgust and unmitigated jealousy they had for those to whom things came easily, and I got myself elected freshman class president. And editor of the newspaper, a position that kept my name before the masses. And “Best Citizen”. But I was short. Really short. Shorter than any of the girls. And I only had about three pubic hairs — actually, it was exactly three, as I knew from careful and frequent inspection.
The freshman prom was the biggest social event of the year, and I didn’t have a date. About two weeks before the dance, after an intense internal battle between lust and sensibility, bad judgment stepped in. I cornered Leslie Batson by the book lockers and blurted in a pubescent voice that squeaked on the word “prom”, “Will you go to the prom with me?”
Leslie was the head cheerleader, a big-time “have”, and a fifteen-year-old goddess. She was in several of my classes, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know her. I had even talked to her from time to time. As I waited for her response, I wish I could tell you that she went all gaa-gaa and gushed, “I’d love to!” Hell, I wish I could even tell you she said, “No.” But the truth is, she didn’t dignify me with any verbal reply at all. Her head just sort of fell back in an act of incredulity, her blond ponytail waggled in the space between her shoulder blades, her blue eyes squinted tightly, her mouth opened and her iridescent lips turned upward at the corners as she began laughing. Her orthodontic appliances sparkled as she shook. Her maroon and white cheerleader outfit emphasized the vastness of what I’ve come to know as the “time-space dimension” that separated us, and the “Warriors” logo emblazoned across her chest bounced on her never-to-be-seen-by-me teenage breasts with each guffaw. True, she never did actually say she wouldn’t go with me, but as she walked away with her “have” friends, the pleats in her short skirt bouncing back and forth across her society derriere, I got the feeling she wouldn’t. In point of fact, she clichéd the event by going with the football quarterback, who later played for the Atlanta Falcons.
Of some comfort regarding the lovely Ms. Batson was the episode in our ninth-grade English class, the one where I got an “A”, taught by the infamous Mr. Hughes. Mr. Hughes did not follow the school board’s approved freshman curriculum in our class, but instead taught creative writing. He preached that all writers worth their salt were alcoholics and had suffered severe personal tragedy. He made it clear that he intended to become a writer worth his salt. He taught that all worthy writing had “scenes” and was grounded in first-hand experience. He often conducted himself in class as if he may be psychotic, but I am almost certain such conduct was voluntary and designed to create experiences and tales worthy of a proper writer. He seemed determined that he should never be perceived as “normal”.
Rather than use the assigned textbook, mostly syntax and such, Mr. Hughes had each of us to buy a copy of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. He felt it was one of the greatest novels ever composed, not the least reason being its richness in symbols. Some of Hughes’ interpretations of the symbols were so off the wall that most of the class could not conceive of Stephen Crane having intended such meaning. Hughes’ answer for this doubt was that the symbolism was the mark of literary genius, valid even if the author himself was unaware of its use. Whatever.
Near the end of the school year, apparently there had been a number of complaints by parents about the extemporaneous curriculum, for one day Mr. Hughes began teaching from the textbook. He was attempting to diagram a complex sentence on the blackboard. Truly, he must have possessed something similar to eyes in the back of his head, because he somehow noticed a note being passed from one girl to another. His actual eyes were deep in his skull, and he had a scowl that appeared criminally evil, especially to ninth-graders. He leveled that scowl at the girl who had received the note and said very menacingly, “Miss Jackson, please bring me the note just passed to you by Miss Batson.” Leslie Batson grabbed the note, tore it into a zillion tiny pieces, threw them in the trash-can, and sashayed her cheerleader butt back to her desk. Hughes instructed the class to continue silently studying the textbook for the remainder of the period. He then emptied the trash-can and spent the rest of the hour methodically piecing together the note. When the task was completed, there was a hint of a sneer, and he snorted several times, quietly. He read from the scraps, just loudly enough for the class the hear, “I can teach this class better than he can.”
He rose and began strutting slowly around the room, aimlessly examining first the ceiling, then his shoes. As he passed Leslie Batson’s desk, he suddenly swirled, produced a hidden wooden paddle, and crashed the paddle down on her desktop with such force that it sounded like an explosion. I will never understand how the girl–or any of us–maintained her continence. He then screamed, at a volume worthy of a banshee, with his face that of a maniac, “TEACH!!” He continued to scream that single epithet every five seconds until eventually the sobbing girl was in front of the class trying to reproduce the lesson. In a small segment of the time-space dimension, she was down to my level.
Yeah, that was some comfort, and the fact that her quarterback prom date is an unemployed druggie today. But it would be even more comforting had she married him.
It couldn’t have been just that I was short, could it? Maybe it was the name. On my Florida birth certificate, it says “Benjamin Robert Boyle, Junior”, but my folks thought it would be cute to distinguish me from my father by calling me “Ben Bob”. Maybe the alliteration was too unsettling: “Why, I’d just love to, Ben Bob Boyle!” may have seemed to her a little over the top. On the other hand, the alliteration-handling skills of females of her ilk improved significantly once I became a surgeon–my surgery professor said, “If you can remain single until you get into white pants, you can get into any pants” — but that’s getting ahead of the story. Or maybe it’s not, if there’s no future or past, but just a block of time-space without direction. Which seems to suggest that this cheerleader debacle could happen again. And again. It’s tough to put things into perspective when the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle” keeps reminding that there is no truly accurate perspective. And that’s worrisome, because I really need to put things into perspective. But if the perspective isn’t accurate, what’s the point?
Up until Leslie the Rejecter, things actually had been pretty straight-forward. Oh, there were a few glitches: my parents divorced and I had to move away from all my friends and live with my grandparents, and my grandmother had cancer and slowly died over the first two years, and my grandfather cried all the time, and my mother had to work at a job she hated and came home angry most of the time, and my father kidnapped me so that I could live with him, but my mother came with a policeman and took me back, and they changed the school district boundaries when I started high school so that all the people I had conned into a little recognition at Park Shore went to another school and I went to one where no one knew what an outstanding human I was, and none of the cute girls even bothered to laugh at me.
But what held it all together was my religion.
I’ve heard it said that when thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy; when emotion changes your mind, that’s faith; when facts change your mind, that’s science. There are all these physicists and cosmologists and evolutionary biologists and such always searching for new and deeper explanations, more accurate pictures and concepts of the nature of the universe, more bricks in the road to ultimate truth. For scientists, the closest thing to a fact is a potentially falsifiable theory that has been tested in every way imaginable yet never disproved. Find one exception, and it’s not a fact. They keep dreaming up better ways to look at things within the confines of what is already thought to be true. When I was in school, atoms were the building blocks of matter. Now, they’re the buildings, because the blocks are all quantum particles with weird names like quarks and bosons that are everyplace at once and exist in multiple states simultaneously. The outcome is that apparently nothing is the way it seems. Almost everything you can see — or think you see — is empty space, and almost everything you think you know is wrong. Even if it works most of the time. Newtonian physics got men to the moon and back, and it’s wrong.
When nothing at all is the way it seems, there’s a problem.
It was a lot simpler before Einstein told me — truth be told, I never met Einstein, but fortunately, he wrote it all down — about the inapproachability of that light beam. Back then, I was a Baptist, and a goddamn good one. Sang in the choir, went to Sunday School, Training Union, church services morning and night on Sunday, Wednesday prayer meeting, Royal Ambassadors, church summer camp, and Harmony Bay choir retreat. The Bible was my companion, and I was the champ in Sword Drill. Sword Drill was a delightful demonstration to the faithful, involving the pastor telling the young folks to “draw swords” — this meant to place your hands on the top and bottom covers of your Bible — then giving some Biblical clue and saying, “Charge!” The first one to find the appropriate reference would win the Sword Drill. I always won. I was the “Youth Week Pastor”, the top banana. Thinking about it now, it hardly seems possible that person could have been me.
Those were happy days, mostly because they were simple days. There weren’t any perplexing questions about time dimension or the universe, or my purpose in it. It was all right there in black and white, in the Bible. All you had to do was look it up. Want to know why we have mosquitoes today? Just “charge!” on over to the sixth chapter of Genesis and there it is: because Noah put a pair of them on the ark. Or if you didn’t want to look it up, you could just let the pastor explain it to you on Sunday in forty-five minute sermons that intensely analyzed three or four sentences of scripture at a time, all one hundred percent true and straight from the mouth of God. Forty-five minutes can be a long time for a kid, and sometimes it was necessary to draw P-51 Mustang fighter planes in mortal combat with Nazi Messerschmitts on the back of the church bulletin, but God didn’t seem to mind, so long as you were quiet. In the end, it really didn’t matter anyway, if you already had professed your faith and been baptized and saved, because Baptists knew that God does not recognize backsliding.
So that’s how it was: you lived in God’s world, over which you had dominion by design, and in the end, you went to heaven for eternity. Baptist time is different from cosmologist time: it has a beginning, but no end. This is a really good feature if you make it to heaven, but especially unattractive if you don’t. Baptist heaven is perfect. Of course, only Christians are there, so there’s no dealing with Islamic terrorists, godless intellectuals, and other riff-raff. It’s also individualized: one man’s heaven might have Mozart and another’s might have ZZ Top (but not the sacrilegious part about “Jesus just left Chicago, and he’s bound for New Orleans“). You don’t miss any loved ones back on Earth, because that wouldn’t be perfect. Nothing can be wrong at all, and it goes on forever. It’s a tantric orgasm and hot-fudge-sundaes-without-getting-fat for eternity. Every Baptist I know wants to go there, yet none of them seems to want to go today. Still, what a comfortable, happy concept!
Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that it’s true. None. Nada. But that’s actually the source of its strength. Those comfortable years of philosophical safety for me were based not on the falsifiable evidence of science, but on faith: belief without evidence. In Baptist society, the more unlikely the premise, the more reward received for believing it, because it requires greater faith. The ultimate faith comes when you believe that the responsibility for every bad thought or action–in Baptist jargon, “sins” — that humans have ever perpetrated, or ever will perpetrate, has been charged to just one individual, that being a man conceived asexually and spontaneously revived three days after his death, who then rose into the sky and disappeared, destined for his father’s house, which had many mansions. If you look it up in the Bible, you’ll find that a man named “Thomas” asked for evidence that the risen man was the same one who had died (Thomas may have been from a science-oriented family). Anyway, he was allowed to place his hand inside the man’s abdomen, through a spear wound. He was satisfied with the identity, but he was severely chastised for not believing without the evidence. To this day, no Christian wants to be a “doubting Thomas”, because God loves best those who believe without any evidence at all. And one other thing the Baptist God loves: ten percent of your income, cash or check.
So what happens when God looks the other way while a heartless cheerleader crushes the ego of his full-of-faith disciple, and ultimately that disciple discovers the impossibility of catching up with a light beam? That’s the story not of the way things seem, but of the way things are, and of Ben Bob Boyle, a traveler whose itinerary has been altered, but whose journey bears narration, if only because of the destination. It’s also my story, not because my story is similar to his, but because my story is his. Quantum mechanics teaches that matter exists in multiple forms simultaneously. Ben and I are one.
