Sine of the Time

Oh dear. Now I’ve done it.

Well, I’m not sure how, exactly. Or what, exactly. But it seems three weeks have elapsed since I posted my atomic riddle of, apparently, yesterday. Three weeks my time, but only twenty-four hours of yours.

I’ve played with time, and lost.

Let me explain.

My last vivid memory was yesterday afternoon, on my way to the hospital for a lung scan, driving through Paterson. The red hieroglyph “Check Engine” light came on at a stop light. Never a good sign. Even worse when it happens in Paterson.

Suddenly, the Rav4 stalled and would restart. Suffice it to say I drew a lot of attention as well as a crowd of quite unsavory thugs. They said they’d call a tow truck and then offered me hospitality which they would not allow me to refuse. I expected fully to be robbed, and I hoped that would be the worse of it. Before I knew it they led me into what I guess you’d label a “crack house,” where I spotted, of all things, a young ethnic gentleman tapping on a laptop.

“Excuse me,” I said, hoping to buy time, “but do you by chance visit The Recovering Hopper website?”

They appeared incredulous. Apparently, they did not.

I asked to show them. L-Dog had a silver-gray automatic pistol in his hand, but soon was so rapt in “yesterday’s” atomic riddle that he placed it back in his waistband. He whispered to a couple of his gang members, and before I knew it, they left, leaving me alone with L-Dog and Operator, the guy at the laptop.

In a flash L-Dog went to a shelf, reached behind the Sean John vodka bottle and the bong, and pulled out a gnarled paperback. A Case of Conscience, by James Blish! The man’s popularity transcends ethnicity! In few minutes we were deep in discussion over the hole-in-a-hole-through-a-hole theory of atomic structure. L-Dog lost plenty of sleep attempting to reconcile Feynman’s sum-of-histories-over-time approach to Blish’s comment, and we bonded over Feynman’s observation: If an electron always takes the path of least resistance, how does it know which path to take before it takes it?

Another example of the power of physics to transcend race, class, and the vicious self-feeding cycle of poverty!

Then L-Dog riffed through his well-worn copy of Blish’s book to chapter 10, the first chapter in Part II. He cleared his throat and quoted:

… he was slowed down to an hour a second, then whipped up to a second an hour, then back again, and so on along a sine wave …

Whoa. Dangerous stuff … to one’s sanity. But we were game.

First, imagine a sine wave. Like this one, here:


Now, at every trough, you experience an hour’s worth of time every second that passes by in the real world. That means you’ll live twelve and a half days for every five minutes that every single human being perceives. Wow. You can get a lot done at that rate.

Conversely, at every peak, the reverse is true. Every twelve and a half days that passes in the real world, only five minutes go by for you. In effect you’re slowed down, so I think Blish has his verbs mixed up. I think.

But the kicker is that it is not constant. When you cross the horizontal axis, you’re experiencing the passage of time at the same rate as everyone else. So after a full sinus cycle has completed, 360 degrees in a linear direction, the same amount of time has elapsed for everyone, including you.

So time – let’s label it capital-T Time, remains constant. You are sped up and slowed down at a ratio of 60:1 and 1:60.

Now: how can we visualize that?

The first image that came to my mind was some kinda gear system you might find in a car. You know, something like the differential gear, which can allow two wheels on the same axle to turn at different rates. I don’t know; I’m not mechanically-oriented. Neither is L-Dog, but he brought in a fellow member of his social club, Sway, who worked off-and-on at a Jiffy Lube. We sketched out something that involved a half-dozen gears that sat on a horizontal plane that would move a figure at the appropriate ratios following a steady vertical sinusoidal tracking motion.

At least, we think we did.

When observed from above, it gave the impression of something of a sawing motion. L-Dog thought it reminded him of a bow across violin strings. After a moment we both came to the realization that what we built was simply a three-dimensional graphical representation of the periodic acceleration and deceleration of subjective small-t time.

Sway noted that the dual horizontal and vertical sine wave traveling through time looked remarkably like a sketch he’d seen of an electromagnetic wave in an old physics textbook he once stole.

Truth be told over those three weeks our work was interrupted several times. Once by the Paterson PD, once by the ATF, and three or four times by rival gangs. There were plenty of false alarms, too. Once two of L-Dog’s girlfriends needed to be rushed to a local EmergiMed. Don’t worry; they’ve slept it off. In any event, by day 20 we had some Rube Goldbergian contraption that might be a physical representation for Blish’s Conundrum.

But was the contraption a physical representation-slash-metaphor for the metaphysical mechanism necessary to toy with time the way Blish describes? Or better yet, just how close did it approximate what we labeled MetaTime? That is, the objective Time field in which these subjective Time fields move? I know the map is not the territory, and what we were grasping for was something more than a map. Maybe a small-scale model mock-up would be a worthier goal.

Eventually, the fun had to end with these difficult questions. I realized I had to get back to my regular life and my regular responsibilities. L-Dog promised to back me up with a phone call if I needed it; he’d tell my wife that I was held hostage for twenty-one days. I macho-hugged each member of the gang, kissed their ladies’ hands, ruffled the hair of their babies. Then I stepped out into the hot street and my pimped out Rav4 and drove home.

Except, inexplicably, it was now April 15, and not May 5. I discarded my sombrero, the tacos, and the Feliz Cinco de Mayo banner I just bought. Then, I realized what happened.

I’d been hitching a ride on the sinusoidal metaTime wave.

Somewhere in the afterworld, James Blish is laughing …