Christmas and interdimensional physics

From the diary of Professor James Higgins of MIT (2007-2072)
Date: December 25th, 2053

Dear Posterity,

At first, I hated my parents for leaving me and sending back a book. They went off to live their lives in Wonderland and "all I got was this lousy T-shirt." But then my parents were not normal, and neither was I. They knew I had the IQ, 190, just in case you were wondering, to build on their formulas.

My parents were physicists specializing in quantum mechanics. Their love language was algorithmic and I was probably conceived while they debated interdimensional physics and points of contact! My father was entirely devoted to the mission of his intellectual vision. Like me, he was tall, dark-haired and many would say handsome. But he was lucky to have been hunted down and captured by a woman whose intellect matched his own and whose heart animated his life with a rare warmth and wisdom. Without her, he would have lived and died alone with only the occasional forays from his solitude into libraries, lecture halls and conference rooms. When my mother laughed she lit the world on fire. With her beauty, she could have had any man but she wanted the brightest and the best and knew how to cultivate that excellence also.

My lessons in quantum mechanics started when I was five. Mum told me to play with the light switch. I switched it on and off and she said look it is either dark or light depending on whether it is on or off. That, she said, is the essence of the digital world, which is built on transistors. A transistor is just a very small on-off button. Then she took me into another room where we had a dimmer switch with a dial and she told me to turn the dial. She showed me that there were an infinite number of different states between dark and light. She then said that the world they would teach me about had no limits. She taught me to love physics while I worshipped my father from afar. It was only in the last years before they left that I was worthy of his conversation.

As I grew up, I learned linear algebra, complex numbers with imaginary elements, and probability theory. Mum homeschooled me and by 16 I had my place at MIT, where my parents were professors. It was not parental favoritism since I maxed out my SATs. Big money backed my parents' research, which promised an exponential increase in computing power and a more efficient model of computing in an era where the number of transistors that could be lithographically inscribed on silicon was reaching its maximum. The prospect of a ceiling to the digital world and an end to the dramatic progress of Moore's law was what terrified them most.

I found out in December that I was starting MIT in January. On Christmas Day, we all went for a walk in a snowy forest 11.3 miles away from where we lived. The trees were black gnarled shapes against a grey sky only dimly lit by the street lamps of a nearby town. We followed a path of white pebbles into a forest glade.

I could see a campfire burning to my left. The snowflakes started to look like stars. The vision of the woods and the vision of the stars overlaid each other. Strange tendrils of smoke crisscrossed our field of view, moving from right to left but not in harmony with one another. It got to the point where I was not sure if I was in the woods or another place, filled with stars, wherever that might be. My parents said something to me about interdimensional portals. They tied a rope around each other's waists so that they were joined at the hip and then waddled toward the light, telling me to pull them back after a count of five. They disappeared in a flash. I counted to five and pulled on the rope. There was another flash of light and the stars all disappeared—like I had just pulled the plug on some special effects display. On the end of the rope was a leather-bound book entitled "For Jimmy."

I waited a few hours for my parents to come back, but they never did. That annoyed me and unable to drive I walked home in the ice and snow. It was not the first time they had simply left me alone, hence my being mad with them rather than sad about losing them. Previously, they always came back. This time was different and the sadness grew with time. I went back to the forest many times after that. It became a special place for me when I could think things through in peace. But my parents never rejoined me there.

Later I read the book. There was a letter on the first page, "Dear Jimmy..." It was my father's handwriting. It was the only time he ever wrote to me.

"Dear Jimmy,

You just saw us disappear into what is best described as 'Wonderland.' Time works differently here and I am writing this to you near the end of my life. The portal remained open for fifty years in our world but we quickly worked out that would have only been five seconds in yours. We have had a lifetime since we left you to bring our reflections together and make this book our final Christmas gift to you. We are sorry that we were not there to see you graduate from MIT or for the inevitable Nobel Prize that you will win when you have mastered the formulas in this manuscript.

Love Mum and Dad."

The book described a space-time-energy tunnel linking Bloch sphere coordinates. The coordinates were only snapshots of quantum states in motion, just moments in the movement of wavefronts.

Some suggested I should have developed dark emotional damage as a result of the abandonment but only because they did not understand genius at all. My parents left me with the best possible challenge for my budding intellect that would push me to the excellence that they thought I was capable of. Another physics professor took me in while I carried on with my studies at MIT. My parents had thought of everything. Let losers drown in their emotions; winners use them as fuel for their projects.

Anyway, I digress. Let us get back to interdimensional physics. The book described three kinds of quantum states represented by three interlocking, dynamic Bloch spheres on each side of the space-time-energy tunnel. One sphere represents interdimensional time coordinates, the other energy peaks, and the other a physical location. All three distinct spheres needed to be in alignment for the tunnel to be activated. A useful analogy was how water, ice, and steam all behave differently but share the commonality of being H2O. There is something transcendent about genius-level math when it all comes together like that, corresponding with the very essence of reality and linking two magical moments in two different universes. It took the building of a quantum computer to be able to make these probability calculations. I found that the crucial synchronicities that resulted in a portal only occurred every fifty years on Christmas Day. The next one was due in 2073 on a mountainside in California.

Alright, I admit that at first, I was filthy angry with my parents, they had fifty years of an open portal to return to me. Other kids got to go camping, sailing, or on a beach holiday with their parents. I got a physics manual. I was never going to admit that to the micro-brained psychologists that the university assigned to counsel me, though. All their phony compassion and nosey concern did for me was to train me how to fake it with “normals” so that they just minded their own business and gave me the time and space I needed to get the real work done. I mean, come on, a Ph.D. in psychology is a joke, right? They wallow in an imaginary space, which they label a patient's inner life, and then verbosely rationalize why they cannot do anything with what they find there. I missed the miracle, mystery and majesty of my mother's warmth but how could they understand my loss?

The more I read the formulas in the book, the more they resonated with my soul. My PhD at MIT demonstrated how this model of understanding the quantum universe could work. However, I never told my fellow physicists that I changed the world with physics from my parent's autobiographical version of Alice in Wonderland. It was not a source that I could quote in peer-reviewed papers. Later, I developed implications for safe fusion power generation from these insights and that is how I earned my reputation and won my own Nobel Prize. No, I am not going to explain that one here and now.

The book was the key to unlocking the secrets of space-time energy, but it was a mystery why the portal only ever opened to planet Earth on Christmas Day every fifty years. I mean, it even adjusted for leap years and for those turn of the centuries in the Gregorian Calendar that are not divisible by 400 when the leap years did not occur. The portal only ever opened on Christmas Day!

I reflected that the universe was a grand mechanism, like a watch. Every law was precisely measured and synchronized with every other to produce the perfect machine. Newton's watch had just been a little primitive, but if you allowed for quantum mechanics and interlocking inter-dimensional matrices for time, energy, and location, then there was a predictable "clockwork" quality to reality. I became a deist for a season, believing that God set things in motion and that now everything was on a preset path. But then I became an atheist shortly after that because it seemed to me that a deistic God simply did not care that I missed my mother and that even if I followed my parents to wherever they went decades ago, they would be long gone. Right now I think I am a believer again, it is all too amazing to have happened by chance.

I plan to use the Californian portal to post my updated manuscript to Wonderland. Since the portal remains open on that side, after being opened, for fifty years, I could go with it and look for someone on the other side who could understand it, maybe even a relative. Maybe Wonderland is a kind of heaven which would explain why my parents never came back. I will be 66 on Christmas Day 2073. My parents left in their forties. It is such a shame they never got to see me move beyond them in my research. In my family, that is the ultimate form of revenge and also love, if you know what I mean.

I never married, my mother had set an impossible standard and I never found a woman that came remotely close. There were a great many warm beauties who looked my way and also colder giantesses of the mind but no one who was both warm and brilliant and determined to make me hers, never anyone who persuaded me to put my books down long enough to smile at her. The human heart is full of so much silliness, sin, and even sickness and only the kind of intellectual brilliance my parents possessed truly knows how to filter out these things leaving a place for the birth of true genius. I hope my mother had other children than just me in that other place. It is her voice that calls me from Wonderland, even if she is long gone by now.

This is a lot to take in and I am not sure I fully understand it even after decades of trying. I think only the Great Clockmaker Himself understands it all. But the main takeaway is that it has something to do with Christmas. Happy Christmas!!

W/C: 1982 at the time of competition.

SURVEY

Short Shots: Official WDC Contest  (ASR) Use the photo to inspire your creativity. Write a short story and win big prizes! #1221635 by Writing.Com Support