Special Relativity
Written by: Adam Webber (October 2015)
One day, my mother and I went to the Laurlhurst house to clean up before my grandparents returned from Palm Desert. I have always liked dusting because it is a cleaning job that requires the least heavy lifting, and I get to play with that fun wand with the feathers on it. Dusting around their massive family bible, an old piece of paper slipped out. An honorable discharge form marking Norman’s safe return from Japan.
When I was young, to keep me from the evils of cigarettes, my mother often told me one particular story about my grandad. As a teen, he spent summers lounging by a local lake. There were no iPads back then. One summer, he had developed a rather nasty habit of smoking cigarettes. On the mirrored pond, Norm watched as a man swam laps from one end of the lake and back, and he remarked, “Gee, I wish I could swim like that. Though it was none of her business, an old woman shouted to him, “well you’ll never be able to do it if you keep smoking those damn cigarettes.”
December 17, 1994 - As a young hellion, I ran around the hangar, being sure to avoid the maze of safes stacked on the opposite side. After a few short trips around, staring up at the big propeller clock on the wall, my grandad picked me up and bounced me on his knee. Here, he spoke to me about air flight and, along with so many other members of our family community, instilled upon me a (perhaps unhealthy) love of science.
In H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, he writes that “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and–Duration... There are really four dimensions, three of which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”
And the prevailing scientific theory of special relativity agrees with this. A fact that my iPhone-loving grandfather, who couldn’t buy the latest piece of technology fast enough, would probably enjoy. What this means is that, though we are in a moment of loss, at the end of a life, all of time still exists and is etched on eternity. And because all of time exists all at once, Norman is still swimming laps at the lake in the town where he grew up, he is receiving his letter of honorable discharge, he is returning home with a baby who would one day become my mother, and he is still in that hangar, in 1994, bouncing me on his knee, talking about airplanes.
As we live our lives, we permanently etch ourselves on this universe. What a marvelous etching my granddad has made.
