Chapter 59 — A True Superpower
The Curve of Time, Chapter 59 —— A True Superpower, in which Wassily posits a theory about Saskia’s super strength.
Followed by some musing on context.
Listen to full episode :
— 59 —
A True Superpower
“Impulse is force multiplied by time.” Wassily was laying the groundwork for his theory. “It’s how physicists measure change in momentum. It got me thinking: when you’re slipping in time there are two possible measures of time.”
Saskia frowned at Wassily and turned to Mica who shrugged back at her.
“The way time moves for everyone else,” Wassily elaborated, “and the way you experience it.”
Mica cocked her head to one side, considering.
Saskia nodded. “If I slow time down, I exert a bigger impulse with the same force? Relative to someone holding my hand at the ordinary flow of time.”
“For them to match your impulse, they’d need a greater force. It’s like a lever. Everyone else is acting at normal speed, but you get to spend twice as long applying your force. You get the power of the inverse relationship.”
Saskia nodded her head slowly. Wassily’s line of reasoning explained a lot. It made sense of the moment, way back at the Santa Anita racetrack, when she was holding Mica’s hand and turned time around. She turned to Mica, who gave a pensive lip press and bobbed her head.
“That totally makes sense,” Mica agreed. “If I’ve got to move a sack of potatoes up from the cellar, I could make one big Herculean lift, or I could make a bunch of trips with a few potatoes each time. Normally that wouldn’t work because it’d take longer, but if you——if I were you, I could slow time down. I’d have plenty of time to make the extra trips.”
Saskia cocked her head at Mica. “Who’s moving a sack of potatoes from a cellar?”
Mica laughed at herself. “I’ve got no idea what made me think of a sack of potatoes, but you guys are always talking about ants. Point is: when you slow time down you effectively give yourself more time to counteract whatever anyone else is doing in the normal flow of time. The slower you go, the more powerful you became.”
“Until she goes backwards in time,” Wassily interjected. “At that point her clutch engages and, for a moment, she has no effect on her environment. At the racetrack, her hand simply slipped through yours.”
“Weird,” Saskia mused. “You’d think speeding time up was the superpower. But that brings on a bunch of headaches. It’s like traveling really fast. You know, racing down a hill on a bike or skis——you have less time to react to objects popping up in front of you. Worse, everything around you gets super heavy.”
Wassily bobbed his head in acknowledgment. “But when you slow time down, you get super strong. And you can move in bullet time, compared to everyone else.”
As Wassily expanded on his theory about Saskia’s super strength, an idea percolated in Mica’s mind. It was a proposal she felt uncomfortable sharing with Wassily still there, but Saskia was still engaging him.
To Saskia, there was something about her clutch move. Something on the tip of her tongue. About its relationship to her asymptotic approach to frozen time. It niggled about, in the back of her mind. Then, all at once the tumblers aligned: Back in Dallas, when she’d been holding the one pen above the other that was sitting on the dresser, and the pen on the dresser had spontaneously disappeared. Perhaps that was an instance of a clutch move, but one in which she hadn’t stopped time.
“It’s not the clutch move that creates the instability,” Saskia announced.
“Maybe it’s not like a normal clutch,” Wassily suggested, orthogonally to Saskia’s assertion. “Maybe it takes you to another timeline for a moment? Another dimension.”
Mica placed her hand on Saskia’s shoulder, and the act momentarily knocked Saskia off her train of thought. Mica slid her hand across to Saskia’s far shoulder. It was a claim of ownership, and an open hint to Wassily that it was time for him to leave. She noticed Wassily stiffen as her index finger lingered on the nape of Saskia’s neck. There was an added power that came from the touch of someone you cared about. In this instance, though, it seemed as if Wassily might be experiencing the power even more than Saskia, who was physically connected to the touch. It was strange how we valued what we could see over our other senses——touch in this instance. Ancient peoples might be more connected with these factors than modern society——animals too.
Mica believed in the existence of other dimensions, though they weren’t something she’d readily admit to Saskia, who would no doubt see the idea as woo-woo. But those dimensions were as real as those she could tangibly touch. Love was one. As was envy. And she understood that the various dimensions interacted in ways we didn’t understand, maybe never would.
She didn’t think of herself as particularly touchy feely in her beliefs, but she did believe in a spirituality. Mother Earth was a real entity. As was the power of a lover’s touch, both on the partner she was touching and any external observers. Though she didn’t regard Wassily, with his history with Saskia, as entirely external.
∞
Mica’s claim left Wassily feeling like a third wheel. He did, however, have one last observation that he wanted to leave his hosts with. There was a problem with the causality of physics in everything that Saskia described: gravity didn’t shoot everything up into the air when time ran backwards. Sure, equal and opposite actions appeared to hold when time was reversed, but gravity only flowed one way through time. It was perhaps the biggest paradox of continuous time travel.
Then again, what law of the universe specified that causality should run just as happily either way through time?
“It wouldn’t be the first time we, humans, made some arrogant and wrong assumption,” Saskia agreed. “People used to think that the earth was the center of the universe.”
“Then again, maybe we’re being too modest,” Wassily complicated his own argument. “Maybe another way of thinking about the universe is that each of us——of our life curves——is at the center of the universe.”
“Multiple centers?” Mica asked skeptically.
“Sure.” Wassily turned to Mica. “Different frames of reference.” In Mica’s eyes though, he sensed a tension. He could sense that his welcome was expiring. Maybe not for Saskia, but for Mica, and there was definitely a transitive quality to the concept of welcomes.
He didn’t want to jeopardize his prospects of a return invite, especially having just rekindled his relationship with Saskia, and he was buoyed by how that connection reached through time. Better not to spend his every last chip of political capital today in order to eek out a few extra minutes in Saskia’s company right now.
∞
Almost as soon as Saskia had closed the front door on Wassily, Mica turned to her. Saskia and Wassily’s rapport had clearly been informed by a closeness from yesteryear and Mica was keen to redirect that attention elsewhere. “I have an idea,” she said. She then paused and bit her lower lip. Her idea wasn’t without risk.
That was chapter 59, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
It’s funny how context matters in everything we do, and moreover how we see new things with new context. Reading this week’s chapter, I was struck by how perfectly the line about the geocentric versus heliocentric view of the universe fits with a fascinating fact I learnt just a week or so ago. The fact was so cool that for a moment I considered trying to shoe-horn it into this chapter, even if it was obviously a distraction to our story. Happily, instead, I have you all as an outlet!
The fact came to me courtesy of one of Grant Sanderson’s videos (or at least a work in progress; the final video is here). The video was made in collaboration with Terrence Tao, an Aussie mathematician now living in LA (the coincidences abound).
Anyway, here’s the story: Aristarchus of Samos, who was born around 310BC, was in fact the first to suggest that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa (not Copernicus, two Millenia later, who at least had the good grace to acknowledge Aristarchus). So, how did Aristarchus come to his conclusion? Well, with the aid of some ingenious calculations and observations (it’s well worth watching the video!), he estimated that the sun had a diameter about seven times that of the earth; the true value is more like 109 times, but you really can’t fault Aristarchus for his estimate as doing better required a timepiece better than a sundial (which doesn’t work well in the night), or water clocks (which are apparently notoriously unreliable).
In any event, on the basis of this size discrepancy, he reasoned that it didn’t make sense that the sun revolved around the earth. Unfortunately, the other Greeks dismissed Aristarchus’ conclusion. But don’t hold that against the other Greek philosophers; their reasoning was pretty reasonable. Essentially, they noted that if the earth did move about the sun (and both were just sitting in amongst the rest of the stars in the sky), then the position of the other stars relative to one another ought to shift since we, on earth, would not be staying fixed relative to them. This, in the same way that looking out at a crowd of people their relative left-right positions with respect to one another will change if you move about (someone much closer to you will shift their position in the group much more from your perspective than someone much further away). But, of course, the other stars keep their same relative positions in the night sky——otherwise the whole concept of constellations in the night sky wouldn’t make any sense.
So what went wrong? Well, imagine all those people you were looking at were standing on the other side of a distant field … in that case you moving about a bunch probably won’t change who is to the left and right of who. The point being that if the objects you’re looking at are a really, really long way away, relative to your movement, then they don’t change their relative positions, and the stars are much, much further away than the Greeks ever considered possible.
Fun, huh! Even with the mathematical insight on solid ground, the wrong conclusions can be drawn if you have the wrong context. Like I said, context matters.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
