Love Story: In The Web of Life (10 page)

"You should be very careful with her: she is
very vulnerable," she cautioned.

"Vulnerable? I don't understand. Is she weak?
Do people take advantage of her?"

"We probably should have stayed to hear
Herondus for the whole weekend. That was one of the things he is
talking about. Men, particularly, need to understand the idea; it
comes naturally to most women.

"I should have said emotionally vulnerable.
Being emotionally vulnerable, for women at least, means being
willing, or able, to put themselves out there emotionally and go
into the depths of feeling, It is like playing Texas Hold'em poker
and being able to go all-in. They are willing to bet all the chips,
except they are emotional chips."

She saw the confused expression on my face and
said, "Next time Herondus does a workshop we will have to
go."

Back in my office, Monday, I had an email from
Dore saying that she had contacted Candice Montgomery, and she
would be giving me a call.

****

At mid-afternoon Zaza buzzed me and said,
"There is a Candice Montgomery calling. I don't know which one she
is."

I picked up the phone and said, "Hello, this is
David Willard."

"Mr. Willard, I am Candice Montgomery, a
consultant for the Colson Foundation. Dore Hamilton asked for me to
call."

"Pleased to meet you," I replied. "I am working
for them also. I will be representing them in a civil case
involving remote sensing. Are you familiar with remote
sensing?"

"Yes, I did a paper with one of the former
members of the CIA remote sensing program a couple of years ago.
That paper resulted in me being called on by the Colson Foundation
to do some more work. We have had a nice relationship."

She sounded rather formal, possibly defensive,
so I explained, "They seemed in awe of your work. I have spent most
of my career as a patent attorney working in the high tech area.
The only thing I know about remote sensing is what I read in a book
by Steve Manteo. Colson said they wanted me because they thought
starting with a clean slate on the subjects would allow me not to
be prejudiced by other beliefs on the subject. They said talking to
you would be a good starting point. I am your student. I also may
want to use you as an expert in the civil case."

"That is good to know. I find it hard to deal
with some people who have made up their mind that quantum mechanics
is the explanation for remote sensing and ESP. But, I don't think I
can do a good job talking about my research on the phone, without a
blackboard, or visual aids. It is quite a way for you to come up
here beyond Pasadena. I have some other business in your area first
thing Monday morning. Can I meet you at your office about
ten?"

"That's fine with me. Let's make it a lunch
too," I replied.

She agreed and said she would send me the web
address for her paper on remote sensing. She would be at my office
at 10:00 tomorrow.

I downloaded her paper and thought, 'Teacher is
assigning me homework.'

****

I spent the early morning studying her paper.
It explained eight–dimensional space and gave an abbreviated
theoretical treatment of how it pertained to remote sensing. It
gave a general description of the CIA's remote sensing program. I
looked at the references. She had been writing papers about
eight–dimensional space for over a decade.

I spent time refreshing my memory on
mathematical concepts with Wikipedia. I tried to read something
about Relativity until my eyes glazed over.

I googled Candice and found that she had been
born in Louisiana and lived with, or was raised by, Native American
relatives. It didn't show her personal history, but somehow she
earned her PhD in math from Tulane University.

At 10:00, Zaza buzzed me and said, "Your
visitor is in the conference room."

Candice is of average height and a rather frail
build. She was wearing a long black, pleated dress, matching her
long straight black hair. Her bronze complexion betrayed her mixed
racial heritage. She had amazing light blue eyes.

"Candice, how nice to meet you in person." I
said. "I saw you present a talk on Statistical Optics last fall at
a conference at Disneyland Hotel."

She reflected a minute and brightened as she
remembered the conference. "Did we meet there?"

"No," I said. "There were only about five
hundred people there. I don't know why you don't recall
me."

She laughed and said, "I kind of go somewhere
else when I lecture,"

"And you take your audience with you. I really
enjoyed the lecture. Statistical Optics has never been the same for
me since your lecture."

When Candice looked at me, it was as though I
was the most amazing person she ever met. Her wide light blue eyes
seemed to portray a mix of great curiosity and admiration. I had
seen that look when she lectured at Disneyland, and had wondered if
it was the result of overzealous plastic surgery. She looked
natural in person. She was radiating curiosity and interest, as
though something unknown and good were about to happen, something
mystical.

While opening her eyes even wider she said,
"Tell me about your science and math background to give me a frame
of reference. Also, tell me about the case you are working
on."

I complied, described my undergraduate
scientific education, and described my more technical patent cases.
Then, I described the Colson case and mentioned that the trial
would be in a court in Rocky Butte County.

"It sounds like another Scopes Trial to me,"
she observed.

"We call it The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes,"
I joked.

"Well, in Tennessee, Scopes was guilty of
challenging a belief system, creationism as described by the Bible,
with a belief called Evolution. The Sheriff, who sounds like a
redneck, probably has a high school science education, except for
some forensic stuff in whatever sheriff's academy he attended. You
are challenging his conventional belief system derived from what he
learned in high school and has observed in his three-dimensional
reality.

"They will probably throw some technically
obsolete scientists at you in the trial to show that 'there is no
scientific evidence that....' Instead of a contest between the
Biblical beliefs and science, as in the Scopes Trial, you will have
a battle between the beliefs in physics from a couple of
generations ago and modern physics."

"I guess that is where you come in," I
observed.

"That is really where the Colson Foundation
comes in. They hired me to write a script for a film that would
expose people to higher–dimensional thinking. It is a way, we hope,
to bypass the waiting for bastions of old ideas to die or retire in
academia.

"Lets get started," She said with a wide-eyed
smile. "Tell me what you know about higher–dimensional realities.
Give me a starting point,"

"I was exposed to the idea that time is an
illusion and that reality is like YouTube."

Her eyes grew wide, and she said, "That is
really interesting. I have never heard that analogy before. Please
go on."

I explained what Uriel had told me about a
movie only having an illusion of time. Then, I explained about
R-Tube.

"That is really good as an analogy. From
talking to people who do remote sensing I have found that some have
the belief that information is only accessible in space-time if
there was a human observer, someone 'recording the R-tube video' so
to speak. That relates to the old philosophical riddle, 'If a tree
falls in the forest, does it make a sound if there is nobody there
to hear it?' Remote sensors can't observe the tree falling unless
somebody heard it.

"I like the idea of keyword assignment as part
of the accessibility argument. I believe that much of our own
memory recall may be the accessing of information from space-time.
Physiologists haven't identified long term memory mechanisms in the
brain with enough storage capacity to contain all we can recall
from our lives. If you can recall the time when you were six years
old and your dog Spot got run over by a car, there may be many
keywords that can move you there in R-Tube: grief, tires
screeching, dog yelping, screaming, red cars, dirt roads; all the
sensory input you experienced at the time can be a keyword. Some
would be stronger that others. The incident would have been of
great enough interest to record. However, you probably wouldn't be
able to recall feeding Spot his dinner the night before.

"Are you familiar with channeling?"

"Yes, I went to hear a channel last week. It
was Herondus coming through."

"I am not familiar with him. Maybe long-term
memory recall is a person 'channeling' himself from a different
space-time. Psychologists and physiologists are beginning to find
mechanisms for synchronizing neural activity between people.
Experiments have shown that people can synchronize heartbeats, for
instance. Perceptual synchronization is still on the to-do list.
The field is stunted because any effects observed at a distance are
against the old laws of physics.

"That brings me to the central thesis of my
work in mathematics. Normal observation happens with one set of
laws pertaining to four–dimensional physics. Information transfer
happens according to complex eight–dimensional physical
laws."

"Nice segue," I observed.

She laughed. "I guess I digress. I am a
mathematician and not an experimental psychologist.

"Let me start at the beginning. When Albert
Einstein was at the Zurich Polytechnic, a school for training math
and science teachers for secondary schools, his mathematics teacher
was Herman Minkowski who didn't get along with Einstein very well
because Einstein wasn't very interested in mathematics and often
cut his classes. Z-Poly was a small school, with only seventy-one
students, eleven of which were in Einstein's entering
class.

"Einstein barely graduated because he grew
indifferent to the professors and courses offered. Since the head
of the department refused to write the letter of recommendation
required to obtain a teaching job, Einstein was unemployed for a
couple of years, until a friend helped him get a job working in the
Swiss Patent Office. Then, the hot technical topic for patents was
synchronizing clocks throughout the railroad systems, so that all
stations could have the same schedule. Einstein's office window
looked out on a clock tower and a railroad track.

"Some people who have studied Einstein's
biography have placed him in the Autism–Asperger's syndrome
spectrum: that he only could think, or at least was most
comfortable with visual thinking. When he 'over-thought' the idea
of synchronizing clocks at railroad stations, he came up with his
Theory of Relativity. He could visualize trains traveling near the
speed of light and visualize what would happen to the clocks on
board. Einstein's wife, also a mathematician at Z-poly, helped him
in the math of his famous paper on relativity. Some say she did
most of the work of converting the visual thinking to a scientific
paper.

"The paper did not get much attention for a
couple of years. Then, Minkowski who knew of Einstein's work,
because he was still working on his doctorate, took an interest in
the theory. Einstein had been considering the three-dimensions of
'space' separate from' time' in his idea of relativity. Minkowski
pointed out that time was also a dimension. He 'corrected' the math
in the paper, in a way to make it compatible with other hot topics
in physics, by making 'time' an imaginary dimension.

"You remember about imaginary numbers?" I
asked.

"Yes, the square root of minus one. To someone
like Einstein who mostly thought in visual pictures, the idea of an
imaginary number must have been a stretch. How do you visualize a
train traveling at ten miles per (imaginary) second? It doesn't
make any sense. Where is the train going?"

She laughed and continued, "Minkowski almost
hijacked relativity and took it into the realm of mathematics from
Einstein's physics. Minkowski, the mathematician, would have taken
it into abstract mathematics where nobody has to visualize
anything, where everything can be formulas. Unfortunately,
Minkowski got sick and died.

"Einstein got to keep relativity. He didn't
appreciate Minkowski's mathematical approach, which he described as
'too complicated.' He did keep the idea of imaginary time as kind
of a dirty little secret in his mathematics. For instance, he
couldn't have come up with his famous
E=MC
²
without using imaginary
time. That expression wouldn't have become so famous if he had
said, '...when time is imaginary,
E=MC
²
' Without Einstein's
visual experiments, which became his hallmark, such as people on
railroad platforms observing trains passing at near the speed of
light, Einstein might not have become famous. His visual
experiments made his ideas accessible to more people."