Lingering on Equality

“In order to answer the question, I will need you to indulge me for a moment, if you wouldn’t mind…”

“Not at all, take all the time you’d like.”

“My thanks. I ask you to imagine a police officer chasing after a speeding motorist. If he drives fast enough, the officer knows that he can catch the motorist. Anyone who has ever gotten a ticket for speeding knows that. But if we now replace the speeding motorist with a light beam, and an observer witnesses the whole thing, then the observer concludes that the officer is speeding just behind the light beam, traveling almost as fast as light. We are confident that the officer knows he is traveling neck and neck with the light beam.

"But later, when we interview him, we hear a strange tale. He claims that instead of riding alongside the light beam as we just witnessed, it sped away from him, leaving him in the dust. He says that no matter how much he gunned his engines, the light beam sped away at precisely the same velocity. In fact, he swears that he could not even make a dent in catching up to the light beam. No matter how fast he traveled, the light beam traveled away from him at the speed of light, as if he were stationary instead of speeding in a police car.

“But when you insist that you saw the police officer speeding neck and neck with the light beam, within a hairsbreadth of catching up to it, he says you are crazy; he never even got close. To Einstein, this was the central, nagging mystery: How was it possible for two people to see the same event in such totally different ways? If the speed of light was really a constant of nature, then how could a witness claim that the officer was neck and neck with the light beam, yet the officer swears that he never even got close?

“Einstein realized that the world described by Sir Isaac Newton, in which one could add and subtract velocities, and that described by James Clerk Maxwell, in which the speed of light is constant, could not both be right.

“Newtonian theory was a self-contained system, resting on a few assumptions. If only one of these assumptions were changed, it would unravel the entire theory in the same way that a loose thread can unravel a sweater. That thread would be Einstein's daydream of racing a light beam.

“One day around May of 1905, Einstein went to visit his good friend Michele Besso, who also worked at the patent office, and laid out the dimensions of the problem that had puzzled him for a decade. Using Besso as his favorite sounding board for ideas, Einstein presented the issue: Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's equations, the two pillars of physics, were incompatible. One or the other was wrong. Whichever theory proved to be correct, the final resolution would require a vast reorganization of all of physics.

“Einstein went over and over the paradox of racing a light beam. He would later recall, ‘The germ of the special relativity theory was already present in that paradox.’ They talked for hours, discussing every aspect of the problem, including Newton's concept of absolute space and time, which seemed to violate Maxwell's constancy of the speed of light. Eventually, totally exhausted, Einstein announced that he was defeated and would give up the entire quest. It was no use; he had failed.

“Although Einstein was depressed, his thoughts were still churning in his mind when he returned home that night. In particular, he remembered riding in a streetcar in Bern and looking back at the famous clock tower that dominated the city. He then imagined what would happen if his streetcar raced away from the clock tower at the speed of light. He quickly realized that the clock would appear stopped, since light could not catch up to the streetcar, but his own clock in the streetcar would beat normally.

“Then it suddenly hit him, the key to the entire problem. Einstein recalled, ‘A storm broke loose in my mind.’ The answer was simple and elegant: time can beat at different rates throughout the universe, depending on how fast you moved. Imagine clocks scattered at different points in space, each one announcing a different time, each one ticking at a different rate. One second on Earth was not the same length as one second on the moon or one second on Jupiter. In fact, the faster you moved, the more time slowed down. Einstein once joked that in relativity theory, he placed a clock at every point in the universe, each one running at a different rate, but in real life he didn't have enough money to buy even one. This meant that events that were simultaneous in one frame were not necessarily simultaneous in another frame, as Newton thought. He had finally tapped into 'God's thoughts.' He would recall excitedly, ‘The solution came to me suddenly with the thought that our concepts and laws of space and time can only claim validity insofar as they stand in a clear relation to our experiences.... By a revision of the concept of simultaneity into a more malleable form, I thus arrived at the theory of relativity.’

“For example, remember that in the paradox of the speeding motorist, the police officer was traveling neck and neck with the speeding light beam, while the officer himself claimed that the light beam was speeding away from him at precisely the speed of light, no matter how much he gunned his engines. The only way to reconcile these two pictures is to have the brain of the officer slow down. Time slows down for the policeman. If we could have seen the officer's wristwatch from the roadside, we would have seen that it nearly stopped and that his facial expressions were frozen in time. Thus, from our point of view, we saw him speeding neck and neck with the light beam, but his clocks ...and his brain... were nearly stopped. When we interviewed the officer later, we found that he perceived the light beam to be speeding away, only because his brain and clocks were running much slower.

“First, in one masterful stroke, Einstein elegantly proved that if the speed of light was indeed a constant of nature, then the most general solution was the Lorentz transformation*. He then showed that Maxwell's equations did indeed respect that principle. Last, he showed that velocities add in a peculiar way. Although Newton, observing the motion of sailing ships, concluded that velocities could add without limit, Einstein concluded that the speed of light was the ultimate velocity in the universe. Imagine, for a moment, that you are in a rocket speeding at 90 percent the speed of light away from Earth. Now fire a bullet inside the rocket that is also going at 90 percent the speed of light. According to Newtonian physics, the bullet should be going at 180 percent the speed of light, thus exceeding light velocity. But Einstein showed that because meter sticks are shortening and time is slowing down, the sum of these velocities is actually close to 99 percent the speed of light. In fact, Einstein could show that no matter how hard you tried, you could never boost yourself beyond the speed of light. Light velocity was the ultimate speed limit in the universe.

"We never see these bizarre distortions in our experience because we never travel near the speed of light. For everyday velocities, Newton's laws are perfectly fine. This is the fundamental reason why it took over 200 years to discover the first correction to Newton's laws. But now imagine that the speed of light is only 20 miles per hour. If a car were to go down the street, it might look compressed in the direction of motion, being squeezed like an accordion down to perhaps one inch in length, for example, although its height would remain the same. Because the passengers in the car are compressed down to one inch, we might expect them to yell and scream as their bones are crushed. In fact, the passengers see nothing wrong, since everything inside the car, including the atoms in their bodies, is squeezed as well.

“As the car slows down to a stop, it would slowly expand from one inch to about 10 feet, and the passengers would walk out as if nothing happened. Who is really compressed? You or the car? According to relativity, you cannot tell, since the concept of length has no absolute meaning.

“Einstein then pushed further and made the next fateful leap. He wrote a small paper, almost a footnote, late in 1905 that would change world history. If meter sticks and clocks became distorted the faster you moved, then everything you can measure with meter sticks and clocks must also change, including matter and energy. In fact, matter and energy could change into each other. For example, Einstein could show that the mass of an object increased the faster it moved. Its mass would in fact become infinite if you hit the speed of light—which is impossible, which proves the unattainability of the speed of light. This meant that the energy of motion was somehow being transformed into increasing the mass of the object. Thus, matter and energy are interchangeable. If you calculated precisely how much energy was being converted into mass, in a few simple lines you could show that E = mc2, the most celebrated equation of all time.”

“Well,” Jan Hensen began with just the hint of a chuckle. “That is all very interesting,… fascinating in fact. But,... um… I’m having trouble understanding how it relates to the question," she laughed, a hint of embarrassment in her eyes.

“Apologies,” the voice from the monitor responded, it’s gleaming surface displaying various and enhanced video images of the speaker in action, captured from various sources. Here, extending a ream of glimmering, plasmic non-substance from himself to redirect the heat and concussive force of an explosion harmlessly up into the air, away from nearby civilians. There, soaring through the sky, flying escort for Air Force One. Another shot depicting him in the process of levitating several toppled cars of a derailed commuter-train to assist the rescue efforts of several dozen police and fire personnel. The footage was always from a distance of at least a half-mile away from the subject. Thus he appeared, greatly zoomed-in-upon and processed with various video-filters to enable as much detail as possible. The voice went on; “I do tend to be a bit long-winded, I'm afraid. But, in this case, I believe it necessary to explain how the theory of relativity came to exist within human consciousness.”

“Ok…” Ms. Hensen answered, with a tentative smile and a raised eyebrow.

“You asked me,… what, precisely I am,” the voice said.

“Yes,” Hensen replied.

“A more direct, and after much pondering, the most accurate phrasing I have been able to devise as an answer to the question is,… In the equation E=mc2,… I live,… exist,… inhabit, if you will,… the reality contained within the equality-sign.”

“So, are you material or energetic in nature?” Hensen asked.

“If I answered either way,” the voice replied. “I would be both right and wrong in equal degrees. I *am* the point at which the one becomes the other. My state-of-being relative to the question of 'matter-or-energy?' is the nebulous grey-patch that you would perceive just behind your eyes after staring at a Yin Yang for an extended period of time without blinking. When I glide through space from one location to another, for example, I don't feel the wind coursing over or through me, as air is purely matter. However, I also perceive its coursing proximity to me.”

“So you feel it, and you don’t?” Hensen asked.

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” the voice replied. “It is as if the rushing of the wind is a feeling I’m… eavesdropping on. The sensations, the interactions of the air-molecules, the friction, the velocities spinning and flowing along with one another,… they are a conversation in the next room,… a part of my reality that does not directly involve me in its process, but which I experience, or at least... am aware of.... nevertheless.”

Hensen allowed that idea to hang in the air for a moment. Her pause was not for the benefit of her viewers. She found herself fascinated in earnest by the concept, taken so completely by it in fact, that she lost track of what she was doing.

Noticing quickly that her mind had wandered, she blinked, glanced across the studio at her producer, who stood glaring at her, a cat's hard-stare at its owner when dinner is two-hours late, from beside Camera-2, and stammered,…

“Thank you for agreeing to this interview.”

“It was my pleasure Ms. Hensen,” the voice answered. “My apologies for the impracticality of appearing on your program in person.”

“Not at all,” Hensen replied with a smile.

Show-Producer Mark Rubio, a look of relief replacing anxiety-stricken frustration, pointed three fingers toward Camera-1, then two, then one and he clenched his fist in a single downward, pounding gesture. The angle switched from a two-shot of Jan Hensen and the plasma-screen across from her, to a close-up single-shot of the anchorwoman herself.

“In the year-and-change since USMRC Team-3 has gone into active duty,” Hensen began, “they have been directly responsible for the rescue of over a thousand lives and assisted in the saving of several hundred more. Of course these are only the numbers we, in the general public and media are aware of, as much of their work is still highly classified in the interest of national security.”

The music accompaniment for the show’s closing credits, a brisk, ‘evening-news’ arrangement with something of 'world-traveler' and just a pinch of 'Unsolved Mysteries' thrown in, began to play softly in the background.

“On behalf of Meta-Views, and MSNBC, we thank USMRC and Operative-11, Code-Named: ‘Phantasm’ for granting us this rare interview opportunity. I’m Jan Hensen. Wherever you may be in our rapidly shrinking world; Goodnight and stay safe.”


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