Angel ripped open the box like a wild animal, such was the intensity of her desire to examine its contents and take the next step toward answering the questions that burned in her mind. As she rifled through the bubble wrap, seeking the prize within, she smiled, remembering when little Severino y baby Lola would do the same thing on Christmas morning. Fragments of thrills from her own childhood flashed through her mind and she laughed as she got a grip on several smaller packages within.
She removed nine small packages, each beaming the Casio name in bright blue. They were digital wrist watches. Casio F91W’s to be exact and each one had set her back $9.95. She had picked this model because of the price but mainly because it was nicknamed the “Obama watch” because Obama was often seen wearing the same model. It was a classic, basic model and Angel was thrilled as she unwrapped and examined each watch carefully.
She was very familiar with inexpensive digital watches and without the need to even glance at the tiny instruction booklet, she started to set each one. The first one she set precisely to the time displayed on her old iphone with its slightly cracked display. After that, she set each watch in turn, a minute ahead of the real time and then waited and hit the mode button precisely to start the watch ticking with the iphone. She botched it a couple of times and could see that the watch was off by maybe half a second. She started over in those cases until she felt satisfied that all nine of them were moving in concert.
Angel had considered using old iphones instead of the watches. Iphones were unique as far as she could tell, in that the stopwatch kept going for millions of hours. Other phones and watches would have a limit of one hour or best case, ten hours. But the iphone would just roll over to the next digit by shrinking the font. She was excited by the discovery but then she realized that phones were a hassle because they needed power constantly.
Angel wasn’t sure if that would be workable since she wanted to deploy these timing devices to different points on Earth and she worried that they might lose power. So her latest strategy was to buy these nine, cheap, simple bulletproof Casios with their ten year batteries, as another way to measure time. The downside of the Casios was that the stopwatch recorded hundredths of a second, but maxed out at one hour, and the normal watch function only displayed whole seconds. Iphones, on the other hand recorded hundredths of a second on a virtually limitless stopwatch.
While Angel was working with a dozen old iphones for the past few months, she realized that they all ran at different rates. Once she noted which one ran the fastest, she used that iphone as a reference and started tracking the elapsed time difference between each phone and the reference phone. To her delight, the rate difference for each phone was very consistent.
Angelica’s machinations drew looks of concern from Sevy and Lolita but they mostly found it humorous. And sometimes, Lolita especially became inquisitive.
“Mama. What are you doing with all of these phones. Don’t I get one?”
“Mija, you are not old enough but soon I will give you your own.”
“Will I get one of these? I like the blue one,” said Lolita pointing at an old iphone 5C with a light blue case.
“No, no darling. I will get you one even better than these. Next year you turn thirteen. Then you can have a new one, just like Sevy. Okay?”
“Si Mama. Now what are these for?”
“Ay muchacha. Okay lemme explain.” Angel took a deep breath and sighed, trying to think of what to say. “Alright. I keep these all lined up in a special order. Remember I told you kids to never touch them?” Lola nodded. “Every week I take a picture of them, altogether. But the camera has be fast because you see how fast the numbers change? That’s one hundred times every second. So I put that bright light bulb in. I know you guys hate that one, but I need the light. Then Uncle Miguel let me use this good camera. With the good light, I can take the picture very fast. Let me show you.” Angel flipped on the light switch and Lola immediately squinted and made a whiny protest. “Mira.” Angel lined up the camera and focused and then snapped about five pictures in rapid succession. “Mira.” She brought up the photo on the camera LED and then zoomed in on one of the phone displays she had captured. “You see? There. You can’t see those numbers moving with your eyes but the camera can freeze them.”
“Yes Mama, I see it. Good job!”
“Okay then. Are you satisfied?” Lola nodded in the affirmative but somewhat half-heartedly. She could sense that there was more to the story, but she had already reached her tiny attention span limit.
Now, months later, Angel was arranging her new watches, alongside the phones in order to understand if they were the same as each other, or different. It was all in order to make possible an experiment. A grand experiment designed to prove a point.
A year earlier, Angel lingered near Roy Sussman’s office. She could hear through the door and it sounded like shouting. There were a few others in there with him and she glanced at her watch noting that she had already waited nearly forty five minutes. Finally the door opened abruptly and a scraggly, red-faced research assistant stormed out followed by two other similarly ruffled young academics. Angel was suddenly afraid to approach, likening the open office door to a fresh crime scene. But she quickly put any hesitation aside and marched toward an imminent interaction, however brief, with a world renowned expert in quantum physics and apparently a real hard-ass.
Angel knocked on the door jam as she peered in to see Professor Sussman looking down, poring over something of interest. He glanced up and normally, upon seeing a familiar face would immediately go back to what he was doing, while making his visitor wait an uncomfortable amount of time, as if meting out punishment for the interruption. But without the immediate recognition, he had to pause and process. He lowered his reading glasses to gather better data. “Yes? Can I help you?”
Angel was temporarily paralyzed and she could see his glare immediately sharpen with lack of a prompt response. Andale loca.
“Professor, my name is Angelica Villasenor.” Her voice was a bit shaky and she suddenly noticed how thick her accent sounded. She was normally not self conscious about such things but she realized the risk of any misstep.
“Good! Now we know one another. What can I do for you?” Cut in Sussman as he raised his bushy eyebrows in expectation.
“I have a question. Sorry to bother you. How can I get my theory for gravity…? I mean who in the physics department is interested in theories of gravity?”
“Young lady, any physicist is interested in a better understanding of gravity. It is still an unsolved mystery. Excuse me, who are you? Are you here at Stanford?”
“Yes, I work here at Stanford.” Uh oh, here comes the question and he won’t like my answer one bit.
“I don’t believe you are in the physics department are you? So….mathematics?”
“Facilities.” Oh shit.
“Facilities?”
“Yes sir.”
Sussman just stared, bewildered, reading glasses barely clinging to the end of his long nose. There was a long pause. Then suddenly his expression lightened. What looked like standing waves on his protruding forehead flattened out in a sign of de-escalation.
“Okay miss….what was it?”
“Angel,” she replied, dropping out all parts of her name that made it sound less English.
“Okay Angel, what is your theory of gravity?” His tone sounded patient but somehow loaded with sarcasm.
“You said in your book, ‘Gravity alone, has propelled many a theorist or mathematician to conceive wildly speculative or complicated theories to explain how it is that such a pervasive and fundamental physical property ties together with the quantum world.”
“Thank you.” Sussman pushed up his spectacles and looked toward his reading as if Angel had never been there. He was insensitive to the monumental degree of courage and composure it had required for her to clearly restate the passage, which she meant as an ice breaker - a lead-in to what she really meant to say. She stood not knowing what to do. But she resolved not to leave until she stated her point. After a long uncomfortable moment, of the kind that only Sussman was so practiced in creating, he looked up again. He stared at her. But Angel was no longer nervous. She had flushed out the butterflies completely by this point and her expression was calm, even and determined. He sensed her composure and was impressed.
“I asked about your theory and you did what everyone tries to do, which is kiss my ass. Now, have you got something? Angel, from facilities?”
“Gravity is not a fundamental force. It’s a secondary one, a result of matter consuming energy.”
“Oh really? And why on earth would matter consume energy?”
“Exactly!” Angel blurted out, feeling excitement rise within her, as it always did when she considered the possibilities in her new found passion. “You said, ‘Why on earth.’ Earth’s matter is big. It needs a lot of energy. That energy is space. It consumes the space and then, it pulls it in cuz it needs more. We are caught up in the flow. The bigger the planet or star, the stronger the flow.”
“Again, you didn’t answer my question. Why would matter need to consume energy? Why would you assume that?”
“Why would you assume it wouldn’t? Everything needs energy to survive. Why is it people assume E=mc^2 means that the matter is energy instead of the matter needs the energy?”
“Are you saying Einstein is wrong?” Sussman glared with a hint of outrage.
“No. I don’t know. I think a lot of these formulas are proven but maybe the idea could be different than what people always thought.”
“You are right! Angel from facilities! Any theory can have any number of interpretations. To say that your interpretation is different does not represent a new theory. Now, if you could prove that E=mc^2 is wrong, then you have a new theory.”
Angel dropped her head slightly, a sign of weakened resolve and an all too familiar signal to Sussman that it was time to go in for the kill.
“I suggest you further your understanding and remember, some theories will require an enormous burden of proof if they are even to be called into question.” Normally, Sussman would have asked her to leave, perhaps impolitely so that he could get back to peer reviewing a fascinating new paper. But something stirred his curiosity. “I’m very busy miss. I do wish you the best of luck with your new theory. If you have proof of your assertions then please let me know. But I do have one question. The energy that is consumed by matter according to you. You said it is space. What form does that energy take?”
Angel looked up, shocked and grateful for the reprieve. “They are electromagnetic particles. Fluidic, like water. They redistribute. When they get sucked in. But it gets less dense and flows faster near the surface. The faster flow causes the gravity. The lower density causes time to slow down. There is an energy constraint.” Angel’s vocabulary had exploded in the past year, with all of her reading, writing and consumption of YouTube lectures. Her words sounded completely incongruous with the way she spoke, with her thick accent. She was one of those people whose accent they were just not able to change even after eighteen years in the U.S.
Sussman was now even more intrigued but suddenly uncomfortable to continue. He had registered every word she had just said but behaved otherwise. “Very interesting. Thank you. Good luck,” ended Sussman with traces of condescension. “Remember, proof is everything.”
Roy Sussman was being very disingenuous in his final remark, knowing full well that highly respected physicists were routinely making wild claims without proof. It was part of the very fabric of new discovery.
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