Outing myself: I am a time traveler.

I am from the past.

DeLorean Time Machine

But then, so is everyone else. We are all from the past. Yesterday. Last Thursday. A year ago. Or maybe 1949, my personal time travel limit. Possibly 1948, depending on your views of fetal development. Or perhaps much, much earlier, depending on the likelihood of reincarnation.

H. G. Wellsian Time Machine

In any event, we are all literally (and I mean literally in the literal sense) traveling through time. Even more, we're doing it the hard way: we're traveling through space-time. So, not only are we having to move along a linear time line at a sixty seconds to the minute clip 24/7, but we're also covering vast distances on a spinning globe while orbiting on a ninety-three million mile radius, and at the same time whirling around the outer reaches of a stellar spiral arm of a galaxy which, itself, is traveling at an ever-accelerating cosmic velocity! Just accounting for the earth's rotation and our orbit around the sun, you're moving at over 67,000 miles per hour and at 3,600 seconds per hour, even if you're sitting in your recliner at home.

My Time Machine

We're not only time travelers, we're space travelers, to boot.

[?]

I get it!

Again! It's happened again! I just figured out something that's had me stumped for years: the difference between wattage and amperes and voltage. (Hey, I didn't say it was a difficult concept, just that I'd always had trouble with it.)

Volts are like, uh ... you know, like how much. And amps are like, well, sort'a like how much, too. And if you, um ... take pi times the square root of the hypotenuse ... or something ... you get watts, I think. (I didn't say I could explain it, just that I figured it out. For myself. It's personal. Very private. I'm sure you understand)

OK, let's look at it like this; it's more familiar territory - -

Take two bottles of the same kind of booze. Just to avoid confusion, we'll say it's rye whiskey. One bottle is 80 proof (meaning 40% alcohol), the other is 100 proof (50% alcohol).

- Volts -

The proof amount is the voltage.

- Amps - 

How hard you're slugging
it down is the amperage.

- Watts -

And the effect it has

on you is the wattage.

Works for me.

[?]

Breakthrough

Were I in the midst of a religious meditation, I might have referred to it as a revelation or an epiphany. But I wasn't.

I was watching a PBS Digital Studios video on YouTube entitled, The Speed of Light is NOT About Light. And, at about 03:37 in that vid, triggered by the comment, "We don't measure magnetic field, we measure its effect," some very elementary physics concepts clicked into place for me; I actually felt a wave of relief wash over me. It was eerily similar to an experience I once had in a graduate statistics class when the prof, during his lecture, reformulated a hypothesis which instantly resolved what had been, for me, a week of confusion and growing desperation.

Look at it this way ....

But, as usual, I'm not really writing about physics. Rather I'm writing about how I experience its esoterica. In fact, I'm not sure I could even define what concepts I found to be suddenly more clear. All I know is that, over the course of a few seconds, what the presenter was talking about began to make more sense and some terminology took on new meaning—at least for me. And all because of a unicorn pony on rollerblades.

In any event, I highly recommend the PBS Digital Studios channels for your consideration.

[?]

Being there

I don't get quantum mechanics—haven't got a clue. Wouldn't know a quark if one popped up in front of me coated in a buttery Béchamel.

Of course, my main problem is that I'm not a physicist. Nor, strictly speaking, any sort of scientist at all, if one discounts a rank amateur's interest in a wide range of natural phenomena.

photo credit NOAA &
Wikimedia commons

But then, one doesn't have to be a geologist to appreciate the grandeur of the mountains or a meteorologist to be awed by a towering anvil thunderhead.

[?]

Alternating currents

For that matter, how would you know if you’d moved into a parallel universe?

I mean, think about it. If—and I’m a little hazy on the physics here, but then, who isn’t—if every decision point creates the opportunity for an alternate reality, who’s to say I’m in the reality I’m supposed to be in? Maybe I tripped or sneezed or got a raspberry seed caught under my dental plate, something to distract me just enough that I made a decision I wouldn’t have otherwise and here I am—divorced from someone I shouldn’t be, driving the wrong car or even standing in the wrong checkout line at WalMart.

What’s more, if my decision created this universe by mistake, and if all of you people are in this universe too, then all of you are also in the wrong place, just because I belched up a bad taste from my chili last night and was distracted as I was playing solitaire on my computer.

Even worse, I’m in my sixties now. That means I’ve had a lifetime of opportunities to stumble around from one bad decision to the next (and I can recall quite a few without even trying) creating and then abandoning one wrong universe after another. I could’ve left hundreds of thousands of billions of people in utter confusion and despair as I slipped seamlessly from one sinking ship to the next.

Oh, you think entering a parallel universe wouldn’t be that easy, huh? Well, I said seamlessly and I’ll stick to it. There is nothing I have found in the literature that guarantees it takes some sort of catastrophically explosive tear in the so-called fabric of spacetime to connect alternate realities. As a matter of fact, any reputable physicist will admit that the “rules” governing such occurrences may be entirely outside our known laws of physics.

In light of that, I feel quite confident in asserting that the nature of such rules, I’ll call it exophysics, pretty much does guarantee that the inter-universe connections occur in ways we have not even imagined.

You want proof? Okay, here’s an experiment. First, pick out a technical field of which you have absolutely no knowledge, like brain surgery, rocket science or guaranteeing your privacy on the internet. Now, assuming you’re not a brain surgeon, rocket scientist or the operator of some on-line social network, tell me how to go about removing a brain tumor, landing on Mars or keeping your email address from some erstwhile Nigerian “prince.” Go ahead, take your time. Use the back of the page if necessary.

You haven’t got a clue, have you? So what makes you think you know the first thing about exophysics?

And even if you could guess the exophysics outside of this universe, that would be absolutely no help in guessing about the exophysics outside another universe, especially if I’ve plunked you into one of my wrong universes to begin with.

All I can say is, I’m really, really sorry. Sorry for creating another wrong universe in which you’re now trapped and sorry for ending the last paragraph with a preposition. I can only have hope. Perhaps, in the next universe, it will be acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition.

[?]