The streetlamps marked even spaces like Doric columns that I could nod my head to, and their light rolled over us like amber waves followed by a trough of shadow before the next glowing cone pushed toward us. Seams in the highway pulsed through our seats in a rhythmic reminder that we were in contact with the road. It was a Sunday night, and my dad was driving us home.
We were on the highway crossing town from the west side to the east. Glowing on the dashboard, the digits of the clock challenged me to predict the precise time we would pull into home, a game I found easy to cheat because as soon as the clock reached the time I had chosen, I would reason like a diviner that since we had exited the highway, the final stage of the journey had been reached, and I could therefore be called correct. I can imagine, recall that route in my head, not as a map but as a corridor of actual space in my city from starting point to home point. A matter of space, and the time it took to traverse it.
My dad looked down at me and flashed dark and light in the rhythmic shadows. He asked me about school, and I most likely described something I took for granted but that he had never learned, something wretched like geometry. Out of his league but unwilling to concede, my dad uttered his usual excuse for not being skilled in the basics of grade school math and without letting another streetlight go by extolled the wonders of physics, a subject he had actually paid attention to. I had heard this before, and I loved it. One of the few things about school I ever heard him talk about was the experiments that he had conducted in his high school physics lab: the motion of waves through water; the production of magnetism from electricity and vice versa; the chemical reaction of alkaline metals in water. In the dark world of a child’s mind, I was speeding through the night, catching glimpses of brilliance that would take me years to realize.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time in isolation thinking about the world, face in a book. My friends didn’t care about the mountains of the Moon nor find it funny that Long John Silver was the quartermaster under Captain Flint—his parrot. Together, we played a lot of football and discovered music and girls. But I didn’t get a sense of family from them; I didn’t feel related. Among my family, I was also pretty weird. My sister was much cooler than I and used to beat me up a lot. I countered by scotchtaping Satanic signs on the door of her bedroom. For some reason she found that disturbing. My mother had to put up with us on her own, and she struggled to feed us, let alone encourage my precocious curiosities. It wasn’t a warm, big-family upbringing, and I didn’t have a strong sense of what relatives were. I felt separate: an absolute.
As I explored the cosmos more and more, I couldn’t see myself in it. The questions of where I came from and where I belonged became troubling and disorienting, even as I learned more and more. I enjoyed learning for its own sake, but it seldom led to anything I could call meaningful. It was that beautiful moment of innocence, that existence when you’re sure of being at the center of the universe and the top of the food chain, just before the anger and the angst descend into the adrenal glands and go marching through the veins. I was to focus henceforth on the questions, not the answers.
As certain as he was about the electromagnetic field, my dad struggled deeply with one idea in particular—Einstein’s Special Relativity. On the amber-lit highway driving home, I knew it only as Relativity, and my dad turned to me and asked why the light beaming from the headlamps wouldn’t add the speed of the car to its velocity, as a stone thrown from our car window would, or a baseball thrown at my head at 90mph would smack my skull at 60mph if I was running away from it at 30mph. Relativity is an odd beast, and it’s founded on the fact that light travels at a constant speed, 186,000 miles per second whether you are moving or not.
And now that rapt young boy will turn to his dimly lit father as a grown man and shed some light on Relativity: no matter how hard you try to chase after a light beam, it still retreats from you at the speed of light.
Einstein tried to imagine riding on a beam of light. If you could ride the lightning and you held a mirror up to your face, would you see your image? Yes, because light always appears to travel away from the observer at the same speed. You would still see your face in the mirror. If I was going nearly 186,000 miles per second with a lightning bolt between my legs, and I switched on a flashlight, would its light be traveling twice the speed of light? No, because as your speed increases, your time slows down to keep the speed of light constant. Why does time slow down? Going from one place to another involves the distance and the time it takes to cross that distance. Einstein showed us that space and time are relatives. Increase movement, time slows. Decrease movement, time races. There is no absolute place and no absolute time.
Dear reader, you are on the side of the road on a Sunday night, waiting for my dad’s car to pass by carrying me in the passenger seat and my sister in the backseat. When the car passes you, my dad will turn on the dome light which is equidistant between me and my sister, and you need to tell me who the light from the dome light reaches first: me in the front, or my sister in back. From inside the car, my dad will try for the same observation. Click! the light goes on and my dad sees the light reach my sister and I simultaneously. All is well then. But wait, what’s that you say? You didn’t see it the same way? As we passed you in the car and switched on the dome light, you would observe the light coming on, but since my sister is traveling toward the light source, the beam of light has a shorter distance to cover to reach her. And in contrast, since I in the front seat am moving away from the light source, the beam of light has a longer distance to travel to reach me. What you saw was my sister light up first and me slightly after. So whose observation is correct? My dad’s, who saw the light reach us at the same instant? Or you, dear reader, who stood beside the road and as we passed saw the light reach my sister first and me after?
The cosmos contains no shortage of truths. It contains multitudes. It is literally true that both observers are correct; for those riding in the car, time ticks slower than for you on the side of the road, allowing for discrepancies observed in space and time. Don’t believe it? GPS accounts for these discrepancies of Relativity to triangulate your position from satellite. GPS uses Relativity! If it didn’t correct for time passing slower in orbit, the satellites would drift out of position 98,000 feet per day!
Reality maintains its frustrating quality of uncertainty not because it has no meaning. But because it contains a multiplicity of meanings that complicate and contradict. I am all of the brothers Karamazov; I am both innocent and guilty. And I have found, dad, relativity in one another.
As I predicted. The dashboard digital reads : and we are nowhere near home. Long ago we emerged from the dark, confusing night, and I am still trying to catch that beam of light.
