The Fifth Slice

9

In Dublin, too, it had begun to rain. Rafael suggested the fireworks at  midnight might be a soggy affair. Perhaps instead they might find something to do indoors. It could be fun  to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was playing at the Odeon, and they were almost there. They were both virgins. It seemed a good idea to Min, who hadn’t put on her best hangnok to get it soaked. And so, two brilliant and reserved scientists found themselves surrounded by a crowd of enthusiasts with lighters and newspapers,  water pistols and noise makers, wearing fishnet hose and throwing rice and confetti and toilet paper at each other. They danced the timewarp, again.



10

There were parts of Ken’s theory that he himself didn’t understand. It was not even a theory that he could quite explain, and he wasn’t sure whether his experiment tonight would disprove it if he remained in the same time and place. He was not even sure that there was any advantage to his coming to Glastonbury to try it. Glastonbury did have a reputation for being a ‘thin space’ going back more than 2,000 years, a place where people traveled between the worlds. If Ken were right about being able to ‘surf’ on gravity waves, then this place was the Mavericks of timespace surfing. Maybe.

Most accepted laws of physics suggested that time is reversible. But that seemingly possible phenomenon had never been observed, or so it seemed. But if the reversal of time happened not in this universe but in a parallel one, one separated from us by a very small distance, it might be real but unobservable. Roger Penrose had thought such a thing might be possible, and might account for dark matter. Indeed, Ken thought, it had been encompassed by Newton’s third law. If one thought of gravity waves as breaking, as do waves of water on a beach, there would also be an undertow. Ken thought such a similarity was probably accurate, and that just as many other waves, when they collapse,
become observable as particles, gravity waves collapsed as observable ‘particles’ of time. Ken found it fascinated by how clearly some of the problems of understanding such things had been expressed as long ago as 1915 by Bateman in his Mathematical Analysis of Electrical and Optical Wave-Motion, as he wondered what ‘medium’ light and electricity moved through: ‘If we abandon the idea of a continuous medium in the usual sense, only two ways of explaining action at a distance readily suggest themselves. We may either think of the aether as a collection of tubes and filaments attached to the particles of matter as in the form of Faraday’s theory . . . ; or we may suppose that some particle or entity which belonged to an active body at time t belongs to the body acted upon at a later time t+T. . . .if particles are continually emitted from an active body they will form a kind of thread attached to it. . . . At present we are unable to form a satisfactory picture of the processes . . . .’ (Cambridge, 1915, pp. 4-5) Ken hoped that there were some sort of thread attached to ‘an active body’ because he hoped to be one of those active bodies, and he hoped, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, to follow the thread back home.