Clifford Read online

  I shook my head. Not too sure about that either.

  “Think about the sound of a car. You spent a lot of time hitchhiking, right? Remember when a car was approaching you, it sounded different from the way it did after it passed and was heading away from you? There was a difference in pitch?”

  Yeah, I remembered.

  “Well, that was because as the car came toward you, the sound waves it put out ahead of itself were shorter, and when the car was going away from you, the sound waves were longer, kinda stretched out behind it.”

  “So?” I wanted him to get to the point.

  “Well, light does the same thing. If an object, say a distant galaxy, is moving away from you, its light waves will be longer and will look red. If a star or a galaxy is moving toward you, its light will look blue.”

  “And?”

  “And so we look out at the universe and most objects that we see are red shifted. That means they are moving away from us. If they’re moving away, then at one time they were closer. If we go far enough back in time, they must have all been in the same place. We speculate that the beginning of the universe was at one time about the size of a pinhead. It’s this predominant red shift that we see that starts the big bang theory.

  “Now if we look at the theory and accept an infinite universe, we find that there are galaxies that were created at the big bang that we will never see because the light from them can never reach us. They are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.”

  “Impossible.” I knew this much.

  “Impossible that anything can move faster than the speed of light, you mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, they are not moving faster than the speed of light in relation to the space around them. The space in between us and them is growing.” He paused. Looked around the apartment, nothing there; looked out the window to his right at the tree in front of the building. “Think about ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ Remember Jack on the magic beanstalk and it’s growing really fast while he’s on it. The branch just above him is moving away, but not as fast as the branches farther up. And the very top of the beanstalk is growing away from him fastest of all.”

  I got the image. Maybe from a cartoon. But I could see it.

  “Like that. You’re on the beanstalk or you are in space and it’s growing. In relation to the beanstalk you’re not moving very fast at all.”

  “Okay, I get it. But what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You got it?” He nodded toward me, confirming.

  “Yeah.”

  “So since the big bang the universe has been expanding like a giant mushroom, and it is the space in between the galaxies that is growing, driving the expansion, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so. No argument yet?”

  “No, I accept what you say: the universe is expanding because space itself is growing exponentially.” As far as I could tell, my money was still safely in my wallet.

  “Okay, now let’s switch from the macro to the micro level. You are made of atoms, which consist of protons and neutrons that form a nucleus, and electrons spin around it. And the distance between the nucleus and the electron is relatively large, and the distance between the individual atoms is extreme. You are, in fact, mostly empty space. About 95 percent empty space.”

  I could feel myself losing my hundred dollars.

  “So if all space is expanding since the big bang, then the space between the atoms in your body is also expanding and you are larger than you were three weeks ago. We don’t realize that we are growing, because any ruler we have to measure ourselves is also growing at the same rate. It’s puzzled scientists as to why, if the universe is expanding, our galaxy doesn’t seem to be expanding too. They came up with the idea of gravity to explain it, that the mass of the galaxy creates enough gravity to keep it all together. They’re wrong. It just doesn’t look like our galaxy is expanding because the earth and the sun and all the planets are expanding at the same time.”

  He held out his hand.

  I paid up. It would have been easier if he didn’t have that smirk on his face as he took my money.

  Black Holes

  The memories come, one after the other, rapidly. Clifford needs to speak. The night is still, and I sit up, my back to the tree. The sleeping bag wrapped around me. Sleep is not happening. I wonder: Are these his memories that won’t leave me alone?

  * * *

  “What’s up with you?”

  Clifford seemed a little down. He hadn’t said much in the previous three days, lost in his own thoughts, wandering around the apartment. He’d even cleaned up, something that was not in his habit. To Clifford, dishwashing and floor sweeping and putting things away were too mundane; he usually had more important things to occupy his mind and his being.

  This morning when I woke up, he’d already washed the dishes. He hadn’t put them away; they were still in the drying rack by the sink, and the stack of books by his chair had been returned to the bookshelves. Something wasn’t right.

  “Worrying,” he answered with one word.

  “About what?” I hoped it wasn’t about money. I was running a little low.

  He stopped halfway across the living room and just stood there, looking out of place. He pulled at his beard, a bit of a tug that made his face even longer. He tilted his head slightly over to one side and said carefully and deliberately, “I think I might have accidentally brought about the end of humanity.”

  “Well, that’s good. I thought you needed money or you’d gotten someone pregnant.”

  “I’m serious.” He was facing me, his hands now on his hips. He still looked out of place, standing in the middle of the room. “I might have destroyed the earth.”

  He was sincere. I could tell that. It was obvious that he believed what he was saying. I wasn’t just playing along with another one of his crazy ideas when I asked, “So how did you start Armageddon?”

  “It’s not going to end like that. There isn’t going to be any last big battle and angels coming on winged horses with flaming swords. I fucked up. I think I might have royally fucked it.”

  I could hear the hurt in his voice, but I couldn’t believe that my long-haired, hippy, eccentric brother had brought about the end of it all. It couldn’t be as bad as he was making it out to be.

  “So how’d you do it?” I needed to know before I could dissuade him of his obviously flawed ideas.

  “Remember that microwave rocket I made?”

  I looked at the empty space where the microwave used to be on the kitchen counter.

  “The way it worked was to cancel out space in front of it so that the space behind it pushed it.”

  “So?” I deliberately sounded skeptical.

  “Sit down and I’ll explain it to you. Pay attention. I’m only going to tell you once. You might have to explain it to someone else, so I’ll tell it very simply.”

  I took a chair. He stayed standing, like a professor in front of a class or maybe a prophet to the multitude.

  “Space is a thing. I showed you that it’s made of waves. The opposite of space is a void, and, no, I’m not thinking in binary terms. There are a multitude of ways of knowing, but to understand space, you have to understand no space. You either have space or you have a void. A void is nothing. Absolutely nothing, no dimensions, no time. Imagine a void…” He used his hands to mime what looked like a box in front of him: four sides, a top, and a bottom.

  “Here is a void. If I take a single photon of light — ” He held an imaginary photon between his thumb and forefinger and placed it inside the imaginary box. “When I put it in the void, it is both nowhere and everywhere at the same time, because in a void, there is no position. Now let’s place a particle in the void.” Again he made hand gestures, a particle between thumb and forefinger into the vo
id that I was beginning to see. “We don’t know how big that particle is. It might be as small as an electron or as big as the universe. We have no way of knowing because we have nothing to compare it with. Right?”

  I nodded. Yeah, I got it.

  “So we have to put another particle into the void twice the size of the first particle so that we have something to compare it with, but even then all we can say is that particle a is half the size of particle b. Either of them might still be larger than the universe, and we haven’t gotten anywhere other than to say that everything is relative. We don’t know how far apart the particles are because without space between them, they don’t have position. In a void they could be touching or infinitely far apart.

  “So space must be something. It keeps things apart. If there was no space, you and I would be touching because there would be nothing between us. Or we couldn’t carry on this conversation because we would be on opposite sides of the universe. So space does two things: it keeps us apart and it keeps us together. It gives us position. We are where we are only because space is real.” He paused for a moment. Collected his thoughts. “Now, for time. We have to go back into the void with our two particles. In a void there is no time. We don’t get time until we move one of the particles. Time and motion are the same thing. Without motion there is no time. But time only exists between two things. We can say that particle b is moving at a rate relative to particle a. If we add another particle and move it, then we change time again and we have two different times in relation to the third stationary particle. If we move out of the void into the universe with galaxies and stars and planets in orbit, time becomes very complicated.”

  “That can’t be right.” It didn’t make sense to me. “If every moving object has its own time, then you and I are moving and we have the same time.”

  “No. There is a time difference between you and me. It’s just so small that we don’t realize it. We’re both on a planet moving through the universe, and that bigger motion creates a bigger time that we are caught in. Anyway, that’s not important.” He waved away the idea with his hand. Discarded it. “What’s important is that we are not in a void; we are in space, and an object moving through space will create waves. Time is a wave, and the bigger the moving object, the bigger the wave; and all those waves are travelling across the universe like ripples on a pond when you throw in a pebble.”

  “So,” I interrupted, “what’s that got to do with you destroying the earth?”

  “Patience.” He held up a hand. “I’ll get to that. First I have to explain dark matter.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing. But I’m going to explain it anyway because it all fits together.” He took a step toward his right as though he were arguing from a different perspective. “Space is something, right?”

  “Yeah.” He’d already said that. More than once.

  “So, there’s outer space, we all understand that. But there is also space between the atoms. In fact, about 95 percent of matter is empty space. That Higgs boson thing, that’s a mistake. Even if the boson gives mass to particles, it doesn’t account for the solidity of the space between the atoms. That solid space is the missing dark matter that they are trying to figure out. It’s right there in front of them all the time.

  “You know about weather, right?”

  Of course I knew about weather. It was one of the things that I paid attention to. I was getting pretty good at predicting it too.

  “Well, you know about high and low pressure systems in weather.”

  I nodded. Yeah, I knew that.

  “Well, the same thing with space. Close to the earth space is at a lower pressure and farther out space is at a higher pressure. When the pressure of space becomes great enough, it starts to resemble mass. When we add more energy to space, the spatons turn into quarks and become real mass. Dark matter is when space itself is just really thick.”

  It was making sense. “Okay, I get the dark matter, and probably dark energy as well. That would be the driving force behind the expansion of the universe.”

  “Sort of but not quite. Ever heard of particle, antiparticle, emergence, annihilation?”

  “No.” I hadn’t heard this one.

  “That’s the newest theory. That a particle and an antiparticle emerge out of a vacuum spontaneously and then recombine and annihilate each other, and the force they give off drives the universe. It’s wrong because it’s too complicated. The universe doesn’t work that way. The universe is simple. What happens is that space itself coalesces and forms the basic element helium, the simplest atom. If you combine four helium atoms together, you get hydrogen; four hydrogen, and you get oxygen; and so on until you fill the whole periodic table.”

  He stepped back to where he had been standing originally. “But it’s not time or dark matter or dark energy that I am worried about. It’s space and putting a hole in space. That rocket that I sent up created a void in front of it and the space behind it kept trying to push it into the void.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I interrupted. “I thought you said, when you made it, that all you were doing was altering the space waves in front of the rocket. You never said anything about making a void.”

  He deliberately spoke slowly and clearly: “When you cancel out the space waves in an area, there is no space left. That is the very definition of a void. No space. It works on the same principle as gravity. Space pushes us down on the planet. Space pushed my rocket into outer space. Basically it was being pushed away from the earth at the same acceleration as gravity. So it was moving at about 9.8 metres per second per second. The thing is that it didn’t have anything to stop it, so it just kept going faster and faster without a limit.”

  “Until it got to the speed of light.” I knew something.

  “No, the speed of light depends on space. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second through space. If there is no space, light doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “So your rocket didn’t go anywhere either because it moved into the void in front of it.”

  “The rocket never went into the void. It was always on the cusp of the void, with space trying to push it into the void, so there was no limit on its speed. It would keep travelling and keep accelerating until the battery went dead. That’s the only thing I can think of that might save us. If the battery died before the rocket created too large a black hole.”

  “Now you lost me. A black hole is created by the collapse of a neutron star to a super-dense mass with extreme gravity. How can a void make a black hole?”

  Clifford shook his head. His face said, How can you be so dumb?

  “When a star goes supernova, it doesn’t collapse in on itself. It’s more like an atomic bomb. It’s an explosion. Not an implosion. And if it explodes with enough force, it can tear a hole in space itself. That’s what a black hole is. It’s a hole in space. It’s a void. The reason things disappear into black holes is because they lose their space. Any object falling into a black hole will lose the space between its atoms and disappear. All of the quarks that make up its protons and neutrons will be nowhere and everywhere at the same time. They lose their position. Even light. Remember, a single photon in a void will be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, which is an oxymoron because there is no time in a black hole.” He was starting to sound as if he was going into a rant.

  “Our galaxy spins around a black hole. It’s not being sucked in by the mass of the black hole. It’s being flushed by the mass of space beyond it. It’s like the black hole is the bottom of the toilet and our galaxy is just the turds spinning around and around.”

  “No, sorry, now you lost me. Why is the galaxy spinning around the black hole at its centre?” This wasn’t making sense. Or he was telling it too fast and I missed something.

  He paused, stood a full minute looking down at the floor, and seemed to be collecting his thou
ghts. Then he looked up, took a breath, and began to speak slower than before. “So you know the earth orbits around the sun, right?”

  Yeah, I knew that.

  “And all of the planets likewise orbit the sun in the same direction as the earth.”

  No, I didn’t know that. But now I did.

  “If you look down on the solar system, so the earth’s north pole points upwards, all the planets orbit in a counter-clockwise direction. And all the planets rotate on their axis in a counter-clockwise direction, and all the moons around the planets orbit their planet in a counter-clockwise direction, and the rings of Saturn spin around Saturn in a counter-­clockwise direction. And all the planets going around the sun are like the rings around Saturn — they extend out on the same plane. That’s because all the planets and all the moons and all the rocks in the asteroid belt are caught in a whirlpool of space around the sun.”

  “You sure about that? All of them orbit the sun in the same direction?”

  “Yes, I am sure.” His tone was as definite as his words.

  “And all the planets rotate on their axis in the same direction?” I needed to double check.

  “Except Venus. Venus rotates clockwise but that’s because it got hit by an asteroid or something that sent it spinning backwards. Venus’s rotation is slowing down. It will eventually stop and begin to rotate in the proper direction in a few million years. But it’s not the direction that’s important. Direction could be a fluke. What’s important is that they’re all on the same plane.”

  I was beginning to see it, beginning to see the solar system in a whirlpool around the sun. “But what causes it?”

  “Oh, same reason we have gravity on earth. Space waves colliding with the sun are consumed, creating low space pressure.” He was talking fast again. “Michelson and Morley…”

  “Who?”

  “Late in the last century, two guys named Michelson and Morley did an experiment with light that seemed to prove once and for all that space did not exist. Actually, back then they called it the Ether. They knew the earth was going around the sun and assumed that it was moving through the Ether. The result of the experiment was that the earth was not moving in relation to the space around it.” He scratched his head vigorously with both hands, maybe to massage his scalp, maybe to get more blood to his brain.