Seductively Quantifying the Ether in PL19

by beatvibe

Posted to Stories on 2002-03-24 20:38:00


Next to — and only minutely larger than — a janitorial closet in a basement of some East Coast (or possibly Midwestern) university is the Gravitational Physics Laboratory, PL19. Uneven green tiles cover the floor, and discolored ceiling panels are obscured by a chaotic matrix of pipes, ductwork, and cables. Quintessential academic environs replete with mismatched vacuum tube artifacts. In this dubious abode, an assiduous young woman devotes seemingly endless hours. Years ago, an indication of her perplexing intellect surfaced in a graduate-level colloquium on unsolvable differential systems. She quickly dismissed her revelation as trivial before anyone else noticed — able to do so because the beauty was so obscured by abstraction. But her singular perspective has haunted me since, disturbing in its fundamental provocations, with which she alone seems intimately familiar. In the dim light, her glasses reflect the terminal at which she stares so intently with those beautiful green eyes. (They may actually be brown or blue, but they are surely beautiful. And thoughtful.) In the corner is a large glass jar in which she keeps a sample of The Ether, and on occasion she removes small volumes for inspection. As her notes will corroborate, the elusive quality of the substance was never detected, although she has meticulously documented other revealing characteristics. Her passion has hardly gone unnoticed by the moderately-esteemed ranks of the Scandinavian Committee (despite their ceremonious dismissal of the fifth element, along with the Eisinbrüge-Strühiafe results of 1961). Indeed, their courtly regard would seem to impel her advances, though fruition might seem inevitable provided the arcane foundations allowed by a certain “trivial” axiomatic correction. Over the years, I have attempted to entice her with my clever mathematical observations — as she has seduced me with her science — but she has remained clinically unimpressed. (Almost certainly this is because there is no Nobel Prize awarded for pure mathematics; and, in that respect, she is no different from the rest.) Nonetheless, her predictably detached manner only serves to intensify my lust. And despite her apparent indifference, I remain confident that by century’s end our respective work will be published alongside one another in the perpetual solitude afforded by some obscure journal.


-Marc Weber (beatvibe@aol.com)



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