Refracting light
fiction
I always sat behind Emily during lectures, watching reflections from her copper hair like shattered glass refracting light.
But today, it was raining, and the LED light made the world inside these walls feel dull and monodimensional. Everyone chatted among themselves because the professor hadn’t shown up yet. Except I was talking with physics. I started by writing the Schrödinger equation of quantum gravity. It’s been two weeks since I started my attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. I felt I was so close to understanding. But students around me were making too much noise.
Time does not exist as we perceive it. I closed my eyes. Time was the key to reconciliation. What if we remove time from the equation?
As I opened my eyes, Emily caught my stare. Instead of being intimidated, she smiled and came to my side.
“I loved your notes. They’ve been really helpful for passing the Quantum Mechanics class.”
How did she know it was me?
I didn’t reply, and I held my breath.
“You call yourself Le Bohr, right? You are a legend here, dude. Why do you hide yourself?”
“How… how do you know?”
I’d told the librarian not to reveal my identity after she’d scanned my handwritten notes, which explained quantum mechanics better than the professor’s textbook ever could. When she asked me what name to use, I said, without thinking much, “Le Bohr.” She’d written it with no comment—maybe she hadn’t understood, or perhaps everyone who shares notes thinks of themselves like the great physicists.
Emily gave me a confident smile, but didn’t reply immediately. That made me uncomfortable. She took a bite from a green apple, holding my gaze.
“Relax, I asked everyone. You’re the only one who got scared by my question, and that confirmed my theory. By the way, I’m Emily.”
“Lucas.”
As we shook hands, the professor walked in, and everyone went quiet. She left the bitten apple on my desk. I took a bite of the apple. She tilted her head, and I could tell she smiled.
The sun returned, and I kept taking notes while light reflected again on her copper hair like shattered glass refracting light.
We are left with energy and our relationships with the forces of physics that our systems have adapted to, through cycles of events of ordinary and extraordinary consequences. Time in the sense of a clock is a mechanical construct to measure the solar cycle weqwa to, in effect, dominate that system. Time in the sense of an interstellar object of elemental nature may exist in a physical form through a cycle of one occurrence that was measured in some form. Enter into another cycle and have a whole new meaning and physical form of existence and measurement as the elements coalesce or resist. Time is relative as was previously understood. When particles and ions of elemental nature act, the scale of their effect and the magnitude has given the quest for meaning all life and origins of existence in simple, familiar, and complex ways of being.