Dr. Grinder seldom thought about the long process he’d undergone to acquire his education. Most of the people he’d worked alongside for the bulk of his career boasted at least two degrees, and a significant percentage of them were Ph.D physicists like himself. As the holder of two prime mover patents both in current use in the space industry, his position as Professor Emeritus at his small but prestigious midwestern technical university was in no danger of being challenged by anyone currently working in the field of physical science.
He insisted on teaching the freshman-level Introduction to Physics course himself. It still gave him great pleasure to search the faces of the young people seated before his lectern in the amphitheater especially designed for the first-year courses, attempting to discover which of the students would flourish at the school and which would “bomb out” before ever reaching their junior year. A handful of his teaching assistants were graduate students he’d first noticed in that very classroom, carefully taking notes as he spoke or in some cases, staring glassy-eyed toward the ceiling. After years of experience as a teacher, he’d learned not all of the ceiling-starers were disregarding his lectures. Some of those who appeared least interested in the fundamentals of physics were in fact as enthralled as he was at the way the Universe was put together. This circumstance goaded him into sharpening his questions to the class in general, then waiting to see who, if anyone, raised a hand to offer a response. Three of the initial “responders” were now graduate students, assisting him in his work regarding wormhole theory.
Gerald, Anisbeth, and Duncan, the three doctoral candidates who assisted Dr. Grinder, had immersed themselves in the study of quantum mechanics early on in their academic careers, and any of them could already teach courses in advanced mathematics, though none of them considered manipulating numerical data as anything more than a tool to be utilized when analyzing the mechanics of time and space.
The three graduate students spent a lot of time together. Aside from their endless work on their respective doctoral theses, they checked and re-checked the suppositions and proofs Dr.
Grinder created regarding the myriad aspects of the Wormhole Project. The work was not highly organized. Dr. G, as he was usually called, left the overall structure of the project up to his team. Their competence was already a proven fact. He saw no need to continually look over their shoulders at whatever they did to accomplish what they all knew would have to withstand the scrutiny of the scientific community at large, once the work was ready for publication.
“The theory we’re shooting for here is mostly just one of the natural derivatives of what may be considered mathematically as a tangent of the curve of the space/time fabric,” said Dr. G one day in the project lab. The three assistants murmured in response and continued studying the formulas displayed in living electronically-enhanced color upon their own computer screens. The professor sometimes wandered out of his office and rambled on about whatever topic popped into his head at any given moment. He was fascinated with Newtonian theory – though largely disproved by Einstein and his successors, Dr. G continued to be impressed by the formulations of the seventeenth-century genius.
“The Chinese have two computers located a hundred miles apart that purportedly possess operating systems internally infused with a form of quantum entanglement that makes them capable of performing the same complex calculations simultaneously, with error-free results,” he said. “Newton had a goose quill pen and a sheet of paper he probably made himself. Even Einstein and his buddies had chalkboards and pencils and Big Chief tablets.”
Looking out one of the wide-framed, louvered windows of the laboratory extension at the campus walkways below, Dr. G continued thinking aloud: “Of course, IBM still has the most advanced chips — those trained monkeys they’ve got over there eat boxes of qubits for breakfast instead of toasted cornflakes. If they ever toured our little torture cell here, they’d probably laugh in our faces.”
Duncan, his eyes still fixed on his computer screen, just shook his head. “IBM doesn’t pay those people jack-squat,” he muttered. “I have a couple of buddies over there who are
talking about dragging up and starting their own systems analysis outfit. Both of them told me they’re tired of homeless guys coming up to them on the street and offering them spare change.”
Gerald laughed. Though normally silently focused on the work at hand, his sense of the absurd side of human scientific study sometimes caused him to share a chuckle with his fellow interns. “No question about Sir Isaac’s intellect, Professor,” he said to Dr. G. “Anybody who can step off a chicken farm into a classroom and invent calculus in less than a year is a kind of walking computer, anyway.”
Anisbeth ignored the men. Though impressed with Dr. G’s commercial accomplishments, her secret opinion was that largely due to his age, the university had stashed him away in this unused lab to work on the solution to a problem that was usually reserved for graduate-level mathematics students. Nobody with any clout in the university system really expected a solid proof of Wormhole Theory. If a wormhole opened in the street outside, her personal thoughts about it ran pretty much as follows: A crew of city workers would shortly appear driving a flatbed truck loaded with orange traffic cones, sawhorse barriers, and solar-powered amber warning lights which they would use to barricade the seething cavity so that the ongoing traffic could continue flowing about it, unabated. Basically, it would just be another giant pothole in the street — the only difference from an ordinary pothole, of course, being this: Anything that happened to fall into this particular opening would immediately disappear forever.
Most of the tech colleges used a graduate student to teach freshman-level physics — it was one constant of the educational system. She agreed with the school that allowing Dr. Grinder to take the helm of the course was a good idea. The old man could teach more about physical science in three hours than most profs could in a week. Despite the overall pointlessness of their task from her point of view, she was glad to be a part of the assignment — it beat tutoring, any day.
“Now, when I utilize the word derivative,” Dr. G said, “–I’m not referring to the mathematical means of describing the sensitivity of the output of a function related to the value or magnitude of a particular force being imposed upon that function at a tangent point located on a graph of the function, which I’m sure you all understand. I’m talking about just good old-fashioned cause and effect. When Einstein and his buddy Rosen started playing around with the General Theory back when, they discovered that their equations were unable to account for all the energy that was bouncing around within the confines of their theoretical sample of the time/space fabric. Einstein tried making it all balance out by adding some sort of constant to the mix, though later on said he regretted doing so, because other mathematicians came up with better ways of accounting for the anomaly.”
Still looking out the window into the gathering evening, he adjusted the gold-rimmed reading glasses he usually wore while working in the lab, finally settling them on the bald spot a few inches above his eyebrows. “Wormhole theory entered the picture along about then, too. If Einstein had’ve simply quit playing with the numbers after formulating the General Theory, he’d still be revered forevermore, and with no harm done regardless of whatever iterations might have come along as the result of later work accomplished by using the original math as its context.”
Anisbeth glanced up from her monitor screen. “Dr. G,” she said, “–from what we’ve found simply by continued manipulation of the calculations already available to us, mainly we’ve just come up with fancier ways of describing what’s already known. We’re not creating anything. As exciting as watching two snazzy, overpriced quantum computers go through their paces can be, they’re not doing anything that wasn’t always possible — all that was needed was a physical means of capturing a natural process, utilizing gadgetry we humans designed and built ourselves. I’m not saying it’s not brilliant work, but…”
Dr. G smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s easy to fall for how impressive stuff like that can be, when all that’s really going on is a process that’s apparently as natural as the sunrise, and which in fact, may be occurring largely because of the sunrise. Our own sun is our main source of energy for everything that takes place on this planet, both beneficial and otherwise.” He sauntered away from the window, drifting gradually to the back of the room before re-entering his own cluttered office. From inside the office he called out, “No need for the three of you to work all night. It’ll all still be here tomorrow — you’re free to knock off whenever you like.”
“We’re afraid you’ll discover the Big Secret when we’re not here to claim a share,” Gerald responded. “That’s why we’re scared to leave.”
“No danger of that,” said Dr. G as one by one, the assistants gathered up their personal effects and left the laboratory.
With the assistants gone, Dr. G leaned back into the padded support of his swivel desk chair, while his feet in their canvas walking shoes rested on the only corner of his desk not already occupied by books or papers or envelopes. He used one hand to remove the reading glasses from his forehead, which he tossed unceremoniously onto a pile of yellow legal pads on the desk. The surface of the notepad resting atop all the others was almost totally covered with figures — equations and formulae for equating whatever with whosis, as he liked to refer to his calculations whenever he was caught up in working on them, or just if they happened to cross his mind. He found he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about Sir Isaac and the other philosophers of his day. Newton created a mathematical means of proving that the mechanical workings of the world he lived in were based on unalterable laws of mass, motion, and light. A trainload of decades passed with these physical axioms firmly in place as the foundation of virtually all science that existed, until Einstein came along and proved almost the exact opposite was in fact the truth. Then the quantum mechanics tribe moved in and decided to manipulate both general theories as a way of proving that smaller was indeed better.
Then a comic-book concept, Wormhole Theory, entered the picture. The first time he’d ever encountered it was while reading one of his best friend’s sci-fi magazines back when the two of them were kids. The hero of the story he’d found was a teenage boy who hated school, but happened to discover the portal to a wormhole in his grandmother’s attic. Finding himself able to pass virtually unhindered through the portal (represented by spiraling lines and symbolically whooshing fog by the comic artist) the teen was able to travel both forward into the future and backward, usually to medieval times. The central thread of the story was, the boy was able to get almost all his homework done effortlessly because of his new ability to enter the future, and to ace his history tests by whizzing into the past and observing actual historical events as they occurred. He became an A student and thus a stunning success among his youthful peers, while simultaneously dazzling his teachers by daily exhibiting knowledge they, with their sadly limited perception, could only suppose was the result of a complete change of heart and habits with regard to the attention paid to his studies.
And now, I’m charged with coming up with a sustainable proof of this gobbledygook, thought Dr. G. He was aware that the three grad students who shared his lab considered the task little more than a silly waste of time, though he was touched by their obvious respect for him and his successful patents, along with his encyclopedic knowledge of the science that suffused their daily lives.
Because of the constantly-shifting nature of the energy contained within even a theoretical wormhole, along with what had been calculated as its likely infinitesimally-tiny diameter and shape, Dr. G was tempted many times to simply abandon the work entirely. He would have his assistants organize his hundreds of pages of notes and equations into a semblance of progressively-ordered chapters, then prepare the sum total as a book-size work no one with any sense would ever trouble himself or herself to read. He would include the three students’ names as co-authors of the thing if they wished. He owed them at least that much just for sticking with him for so long, building the thousand-page comic book.
Glancing in the direction of the two broad windows behind his desk, he was a little surprised to notice that it was night. Something entered his mind — the realization that black holes were invisible. So were their reflections, waggishly (as he couldn’t help but consider them) known as white holes. The two could be connected by a single wormhole or by several wormholes, or not necessarily connected at all. A white hole forcefully expelled matter and energy. A black hole sucked these things in — with a force of gravity so powerful that whatever size the matter or radiation was when it entered the space so occupied, it almost immediately compressed to a size so small as to nearly fail to exist, physically. Yet a space traveler, assuming one was imbued with the power to travel through such a place, would be ripped to shreds in less time than would be required to move a single centimeter should he or she collide with any such particle trapped inside. Why the hell am I doing this? thought Dr. G.

The legal pad, its top page filled with calculations, lay within reach, and he lifted it off the stack of other papers. It was a new tablet and only the one page had been used. This he carefully tore off along the perforations at the top of the sheet. The now-unused tablet he placed in his lap on a clipboard. The single sheet of calculations was returned to the pile in the center of his desk. Using a fiber-tipped pen from the central desk drawer, he began to write:
1. A primary reason for the existence of wormhole theory stems from an anomaly that is sometimes found enmeshed within the mathematical calculations utilized as proofs of the Generalized Theory of Relativity.
2. Because gravity affects everything that exists within the entire Universe, it’s reasonable to conclude that it affects the structure of any wormholes that exist, as well.
3. The anomaly mainly consists of the fact that for a wormhole to exist between two parts of the time/space fabric located at extreme distances from each other, an opposing force must also exist within the wormhole itself that is sufficient to offset the force of gravity that is acting upon the space contained therein.
4. This notwithstanding, The General Theory has been empirically proven several hundred times, at least.
5. Would it be possible to communicate with someone living in the past by using a wormhole? Bear in mind that as far as that individual was concerned, the person on the other end of the wormhole would most likely exist only at a future time.
6. Keeping No. 5 in mind, the individuals who exist in the past would probably believe they were communicating with some sort of universally-acceptable entity — a god, for example. The reason for this is, of course, only a god could be considered to possess the ability to live forever. Ordinary people would simply live out their (often quite brief) lives, then die.
7. So, considering the little that is truly known about what conditions would be required to form a time/space tunnel, could the prophets of old have discovered wormhole portals and conversed with an individual far in the future relative to themselves, thus imagining they were speaking to a god? Could human voices even be heard at either end, as the space contained within the wormhole would be an airless void?
8. Could the religions of our own space/time have originated in this way?
9. Does it matter?
10. Re 9, above — if it matters to you personally, it matters.
11. Injecting the religious component into this theory defies all logic, of course. Even the medieval scholars of their day agreed upon this. It was common knowledge among the religious orders even then that religious belief should have nothing to do with logical thinking. All such belief was based on personal faith, heavily enforced by the teachings of the Church.
12. So, in all fairness to the process of scientific inquiry, the researcher must ask himself or herself, what does a person do when they are faced with what appears to be an insurmountable, dangerous event — a threat to life itself? One of the first things many people do is murmur, God, help me. People who adhere to a belief in the Almighty will not find this peculiar. Many others, most of them of a more agnostic or atheistic bent, might still mutter the phrase. Given the overall quirkiness of the likelihood of receiving life-preserving assistance from an omnipotent yet personally-involved Lord of Heaven, one might find this particular habit amusing, at best — or pathetic, seen from a point of view unaffected by the bonds of faith.
13. So… It can be said, allowing the assumptions of logical thought to hold true, that it was not God who created Mankind. It was poor confused, terrified Man who created God.
14. Back, however, to the task at hand. Suppose myself and these three bright kids do come up with at least mathematical proof of our hypothesis (that wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges) do in fact exist? We’ll publish the calcs and risk our reputations as at least a third of the scientific community will immediately set themselves to endeavoring to prove us wrong.
15. I think we’re safe. Nobody will ever prove this stuff — not physically, anyway. It’s like proving there’s a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. From a distance, it’s beautiful. Children see a rainbow and spontaneously start dancing with joy. The closer one gets to the place where the rainbow ends, though, the less distinct the exact spot becomes. What we need to do is…
Here Dr. G stopped writing his notes. Even Sir Isaac had drawn the line when the crux of his conjectures appeared to indicate that “action at a distance” was a real phenomenon. Einstein referred to quantum theory as “ghost physics”. Schrodinger’s cat lay trapped in its theoretical box, silently mocking the necessity for observation of whatever might or might not occur inside. The human brain, he thought, is the only organ capable of impelling a living creature to experience dissatisfaction with its condition on this earth, accompanied by the belief that something can be done about it by the creature itself. At one time, it was possible for people to do exactly that by packing up as much of their belongings as they could and moving to a new place to make a new start. Now, with communication possible to virtually any place on the surface of the planet, leaving one’s troubles behind was fading as a solution to almost anything.
After lowering the window blinds, Dr. G folded his lunch bag, picked up the page of notes he had just written and tucked it into the zip-up notebook he carried into the lab every day, arose from the desk chair, and walked out of the office. Reaching behind himself, he closed the office door. Noticing he’d left the desk lamp turned on when his shadow dimly appeared on the door’s white plastic sheathing, he stepped back inside the office and switched it off, then once again stepped through the doorway and into the lab itself.
The assistants’ computer screens exhibited either screen saver animations or simply appeared to be turned off. All three of their work tables were neat and orderly. The building was quiet.
His fifteen-year-old Volkswagen was the only car in the faculty lot when he got there. After situating himself in the driver’s seat, with his notebook occupying the shotgun-side location beside him, he started the little car and headed for Faculty Row, an older neighborhood inhabited mainly by tenured professors and their spouses. Sometimes when the weather was nice he allowed himself the pleasure of walking to and from the school, but the night was warm and muggy and he was glad he’d driven the car.
The house was dark when he got home. His wife Jen was visiting her sister in another state, so he was on his own for a few days.
He slipped out of the canvas sneakers and lowered himself into the recliner in the little den, after pouring himself an ounce of aged Irish whiskey into a glass to sip while the horrors of the day were broadcast into the room. With the TV’s volume set barely loud enough to be heard and after watching a couple of industrial explosions followed by an account of the latest governmental malfeasance, Dr. G slipped into a light doze. In a few minutes he was sound asleep.
Sometime in the very early morning, a dream formed in Dr. G’s subconscious mind. It was an almost-totally visual fantasy, one he’d first encountered when he was a little boy. As nearly as he could ever enable himself to recall, he’d been about five years old the first time he’d awakened and been able to remember what he’d seen.
There were no people, not even himself, visible in the dream. He must have been standing atop a high place though, because a great distance below him and equivalently far away from his vantage point lay a huge, treeless landscape of barren land covered with rusted, broken machinery scattered haphazardly here and there, as if all had been dumped then forgotten.
His eyes searched the horizon for what seemed to be several minutes. Nothing moved. The sky was cloudless and some color other than blue, though had someone asked him what color it was, he would not have been able to tell them. All he could see was there was light all about him similar to daylight, but the sun was not visible as its source. Everything that was visible stood out sharply, but was so far below him he could not name any single object that lay within view. Indeed, at the age of five, most children would not possess a vocabulary sufficient to identify the individual hulks of dream wreckage that could be seen.
Then something happened. From the horizon to his right and approximately midway between his point of sight and the distant juncture of land and sky, came a sound — a kind of low hum, like a small motor might make. Shortly after the sound became audible, a small single-engine airplane appeared, flying alone above the wasteland.
The little plane passed before his eyes unhurriedly, not altering its elevation, speed, or direction. No pilot was to be seen, though a tiny silhouette of the flyer’s head was just barely visible through the cockpit window. In no more than a minute or two, it disappeared. All became as it had been when the dream began.
Dr. G stirred in the recliner, then attempted to turn on his side. Cocooned between the overstuffed armrests of the chair, this turned out to be nearly impossible to do. Semi-conscious as he began emerging from his sleep, he noticed the light coming from the flickering television screen and sat up. Fumbling about with one hand until he located the remote controller on the floor beside the chair, he switched off the TV.
Though the room was dark just a hint of the first light of dawn was beginning to show itself around the perimeter of the window shades. He got up, walking a little unsteadily to the nearest window, where he peeked outside by pulling one edge of the blinds a couple of inches away from the glass. The street lights were still on, but day was coming. Feeling stiff from the hours he’d spent in the chair, he stretched his neck from one side to the other, listening to his upper spinal bones creak underneath his skin. Damn, he thought. I need a shower.
He recollected the imagery of the dream, his old dream that kept returning to his subconscious every few years — sometimes every two or three years but then, sometimes lying dormant for as long as a decade. Shaking his head at the fact of the resurrection of the vision concocted within his own mind, a more insistent thought came to him: We’ve got to keep trying.
“There’s got to be more to it all than just this,” he said aloud, causing the sound of his voice to create wavering echoes inside the empty house.
Outside, the streetlights switched off. A car passed by in the street, its parking lights on. Its driver was on the way somewhere — a grocery store maybe, or perhaps the nearby college. It was simultaneously a tiny particle traveling in a gigantic elliptical orbit through infinite space, attached as if by magic to the surface of a hurtling spherical stone thousands of times its size that revolved rapidly about an axis set not quite vertically, relative to only itself. It’s real destination was neither known nor felt by the person at the wheel. The nearest star shown light on approximately half of the spheroid’s girth. The other half slumbered in various shades of darkness, in shadow.