Miguel stormed into the office area, where a dozen cubicles were arranged, one of which he shared with Angel. Angel was so absorbed in her computer work that she didn’t even notice as Miguel approached, urgent and gruff. “Ay Prima! Cual es tu problema?”
“Miguel! Oh shit! Sorry!” Angel had forgotten her meeting up at Stanford’s linear accelerator facility, SLAC, with contractors.
“Gary said he called you but no answer.” Miguel referred to the contractor’s project manager that was waiting for her at SLAC. “He called me and I had to bail on my other stuff to go cover for you. Damn girl!” vented Miguel, raising his voice. The office was empty except for the two of them. Angel reached for her phone.
“Ay! My stupid ringer is off. Lo siento Primo. My bad. I won’t do it again I promise.”
“Yah? Well this ain’t the first time. So why’s it gonna be that last time? You’re all messed up on your books and shit, physics and shit. Loca.”
“I can’t help it. But I won’t let it interfere. Hey, you like fishing right? You’re also crazy about the Raiders, right? That’s what it’s like.”
“Books? And the computer? That ain’t like fishing, or the Raiders. Ain’t no excitement.” Miguel tried but couldn’t contain a smile. “Loca, you know that? Something wrong with yer brain. You should read about that instead.” Angel smiled with relief, as she saw Miguelito soften.
“Okay, I will.”
“Now you can cover for me tomorrow. I need to go back and inspect my other job. I was supposed to finish it today when I had to cover your ass. Tomorrow, they got a new lab design review at the physics building.” Angel perked up. That was Sussman’s building. There was certainly no chance that she would miss that one. “Ten o’clock, don’t forget. Take good notes.”
“Si Miguel. Gracias.”
“Okay, I’m out. See you manana.” Angel stood and gave Miguel a hug. When he left the room, Angel returned to the computer and tried to finish the paper she was reading. It was titled, DOES THE INERTIA OF A BODY DEPEND UPON ITS ENERGY-CONTENT? By A. EINSTEIN September 27, 1905. Her readings spanned a great many areas of physics and cosmology as she tried to test the plausibility of her thoughts against as many phenomena as possible. Phenomena such as normal gravitational behavior, dark matter, dark energy and black holes. And then there were subatomic areas of interest like refraction, the two slit experiment, atomic structure, the periodic table, the array of subatomic particles discovered by the various colliders, string theory, and on and on. She saw no end to it. Pouring through the paper online, with her ringer now on, she was suddenly startled by a text message. It was Lola.
“Mama. When are you coming?”
“Coming now :)”
”:)”
Angel closed the browser and switched off the monitor and started to pack her things. She walked out to the main loop road to see if she could catch the free bus out to El Camino Real, where she would transfer to the county bus. During her trip home she took a mental inventory of what still didn’t make sense. The most nagging item that still confused her was the concept of intertia, which had led her to seminal articles like the one by Einstein, which was the basis for the infamous E=mc^2.
Her idea of energy consumption causing gravity made sense to her as a concept. She could visualize what was happening. But besides gravity, mass exhibited another behavior that was codified by Newton but observed and considered well before his time. Inertia. A property proportional to mass, causing it to remain at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by a force.
Angel felt that it could be irrelevant to her proof, using rates of timekeeping. But it was a concept about which she felt unsettled, and it caused her to dig and search for understanding. She knew that there wouldn’t be any explanation out there that would make sense to her. And there wasn’t. It was mostly about understanding the behavior but very little on the root cause of the behavior. Angel viewed it as fundamental, a piece of the puzzle, without which a complete understanding would not be possible.
A half hour later, when Angel walked through her door, she heard the drumming of Lolita’s footsteps, amplified by the thin floor above the empty crawl space below. Lolita hugged her mother. “Mama. I’m hungry. Sevy is at basketball practice. It started today.” Angel felt a tinge of stress, realizing that it was that time of year and he would be home late nearly every weekday for the next several months. Angel would have to step up and be a mother again, do the shopping and the cooking.
“Bueno. Let’s see what we can throw together. You want to help Mama?”
“Okay.”
They found some vegetables and some chicken. “We will bake these with some tomato and chiles. We have tortillas?” Lolita opened the bread drawer.
“Si Mama!”
“Bueno. Put those in the microwave dish. You know the one?”
“Of course Mama.” Lolita rolled her eyes. “I need to do my homework.”
“Okay darling. I will just put this in the oven and we can eat in about thirty minutes, okay?” Lolita was already at the dining table working on her problem sets. Angel sat down at the computer table just beside Lolita. After a while Lolita paused from her work and looked over at her mother.
“Mama, tell me again how you are going to make the time run at different speeds.”
“Mija, right now, I don’t know. I thought about putting a clock on the front and back of a long, high speed train. But I think that’s no good. Maybe if the whole train was made of solid lead. But that’s impossible. But I got a new idea. I found these things online. They are high speed flywheels. I thought maybe I could make a special one where the flywheel is, … I don’t know.” Angel exhaled with a sigh of frustration. “I got to figure something out. All I need is some big mass moving fast through space, then I measure time at the front and the back at the same time and see if they are different.”
“Thanks Mama. You can do it.” Then Lola went back to her chair, not having understood any of what she had just heard. A half hour later, as Angel was just pulling out the wonderful smelling dish she had prepared, a tired looking Severino walked in. He suddenly felt such happiness and relief to see his mother cooking for him, and not the other way around. The three of them sat down together and enjoyed their meal as a family.
The next day, at the office, Angel was just about to leave for her meeting, using the university vehicle, when she saw a text from Miguelito. “Reminding you, Prima.”
“I got it!” she keyed in quickly as she scurried out.
Angel walked passed the lecture hall and peered in to see if Sussman was teaching, but the hall was empty. She went downstairs to the lab where they were to meet and discuss the new project. When she entered, there were two men talking. A woman followed her into the room.
“Hi, I am Angel from facilities.”
“Hi I am Justin and this is Amy. We are from Guerrero Construction.”
“I am Javier. I am working for Professor Singh and I will be representing the department for this project.” Angel noted Javier’s accent and placed him immediately as either Chilean or Argentinian. She also placed him as very good looking and not too young. Hmm. After discussing the details of the project, the contractors left but Angel lingered, wanting to find out more about Javier. After all, they were both on the Stanford side of this lab renovation and would be working together.
“Javier, nice to meet you I look forward to working with you.”
“Please, call me Javi. Where are you from?”
“Mexico. I came here as a teenager.”
“Are you DACA?”
“No, I got citizenship a long time ago.”
“Oh, that’s great. I will try to do that but it will be a long road.”
The fact was that Angel did come in with relatives and overstayed, for eighteen years. When they announced Deferred Action for Chilhood Arrivals under Obama, many of her friends decided to register. But Miguelito and others decided as a group to go another way. They were afraid of DACA. Their path to remain in the country legally was to do so with fake papers. Angel had no choice because she didn’t want to be the cause of the others getting exposed for not only overstaying, but also forging papers. So she lived with this secret and the deep seated fear that one day there could be a complete disaster, especially if she were busted before Lola or Severino were out of school. Fortunately the papers were good enough to pass scrutiny even at Stanford.
“I am from Buenos Aires,” declared Javi with a proud smile. They broke into Spanish and the conversation was suddenly much easier and more comfortable. Angel always felt clumsy and stupid when she spoke English, but in Spanish she was witty and articulate and had her sense of humor. It was all working and Javi was immediately charmed.
There wasn’t much cause for Angel and Javi to interact frequently on this project, perhaps once a month. But somehow, they found reasons to have to meet at least twice a week. It didn’t take long for the conversations to become very personal. And while she didn’t dare discuss her immigration status, she was completely forward about her history and her children. Javi was twenty eight and she was thirty three with a sixteen year-old son and a thirteen year-old daughter.
“Wow. You were only seventeen. But maybe it’s nice to be a young mom.”
“I do like it that way. They are great kids. How about you come over for dinner this week and you can see for yourself?” proposed Angel.
“I would like that.”
Two days later, after dinner, Angel and Javi took a walk and had their first kiss. Angel hadn’t felt the thrill of new romance in so many years. She put aside her infatuation with physics for a moment and enjoyed the teasing from Lola and Sevy that night as they peppered her with questions like, “when is he moving in?” or “how did you find a guy that speaks Spanish and is taller than you?” Angel was happy that Javi was tall. She recalled that in Mexico, her family were like giants compared everyone else. In the U.S., at five foot eight she felt tall but not unusual. It was also good for Sevy and his basketball, as he now towered over her and sometimes affectionately called her mamacita.
Apart from so many factors that drew Angel and Javier nearer, there was also the subject of physics. It was Angels’s obsession but so it was for most physicists, including Javier. He was caught completely off-guard when the subject of their discussions finally yet invariably spiraled toward physics. By now they were very intimate and each contemplating whether they were in love again. It was Angel that completely shocked Javier with her book collection and her base of knowledge.
“I can’t believe you. I thought I was talking to a beautiful facilities woman. Now, you are blowing my mind.”
“Well now you know my deep, dark secret so I’m gonna blow your mind some more. I need your help.”
“Am I being set-up? You want me only for my mind? Ay caramba!”
“No Javi, it’s just a coincidence. I think it’s a beautiful gift that we both have these things in common.”
“Yes carina, pero I am shocked and, well, really happy about it. So what is it you need help with?”
“I have this theory. Well, maybe it’s a hypothesis. Maybe just a guess, I don’t know. I have a feeling. I dream about it - how things work at the subatomic level. So, I had some talk with Professor Sussman….”
“You had a talk with Sussman? You’re still alive? Wow! You are super woman.”
“I know, right? I was proud of myself. I just went into his office and told him some of my ideas.”
“Hahaha! You are unbelievable! No te creia! That takes such cajones.”
“Well, he wasn’t all nice. He was basically polite. But he told me I need prove for my ideas because they are going against some heavy dudes like Einstein.”
“Whoah. Whaoh. Hold on. You are messing with the big E? No, do not go there. That is like a dead-end.”
“I don’t want to mess with anyone. I just want to try to prove something.”
“What do you want to prove?”
“That space can be non-uniform, non-homogeneous. And when space is rarified in density, time runs slower.”
“How do you know where to find space that is less dense? If you know where that is, then you can try to measure time there, right?”
“Exactly! But I don’t know where to find it. I suspect if a mass is moving fast, then the trailing edge of it is an area of rarified space. So I thought of things like a fast moving space probe – measuring the front and the back. But the mass is very small, even if the speed is high. It needs to be massive.”
“Why?”
“Because my theory. Or, my guess, is that the cause of the rarified space is energy consumption. And it is proportional to matter. So you need a lot of matter, moving fast, so that the trailing edge is rarified close to the mass, before space has a chance to redistribute.”
“So matter is consuming space?”
“Matter is consuming particles in space. Physics now regards these particles and the underlying space as the same thing. It’s not much different than the idea of the quantum vacuum. Except I am saying that the idea of “fields” like the Higgs Field, is wrong.”
“Wow! Now I’m getting excited.” Javier wrapped himself around Angel to diffuse the intensity of the discussion, as he was a little intimidated, but in reality he was getting aroused over her intensity and confidence, in just coming out with such a bold idea. Angel softened, realizing there was time for physics later. Right now, her focus was on erasing more than a decade of solitude and selflessness and giving in to her feelings for Javier.
The next day was a Sunday. Javier had slept over for the very first time, but he left early because he had a commitment to go on a mountainbike ride with some friends. Later that day, Javier called Angel. He sounded excited and impatient.
“Angelita! When I was riding, I thought about the things you said. I have an idea. You know the planetarium?”
“Yes.”
“I have a friend there. I want to show you something. Can you come over? Wait. I’ll come pick you up,” Javier said, realizing that she would have to Uber or take a bus.
“Okay, thanks. I have time Javi.” In reality she did not have time, as she had already committed to take Lolita shopping for school clothes that day. Lolita was about to start high school and it was a big deal to her. But in the moment of excitement, she was swept up by romance and a passion for physics and totally forgot. Lolita was just waking up when Angel jumped into Javier’s car and they sped over to the Standford planetarium.
“I asked my friend to play the solar system simulation and the milky way.”
“Really? Why is that related to my ideas?” Angel responded, somewhat disappointed that it was some kind of misunderstanding.
“You’ll see,” said Javier confidently.
The two of them sat down in ideally situated reclined seats, looking up into the large domed screen. They comprised the entire audience on this quiet Sunday morning in the middle of August.
“Okay Gabby. Ready!” called out Javier. The lights suddenly dimmed and despite her feeling of disappointment, Angel suddenly felt a twinge of excitement. The earth appeared, alone, a solitary object in a cold, empty universe. Then, the earth started to shrink as they were now seemingly speeding away, leaving earth abandoned in the distance. But suddenly the Sun appeared off to one side. Shortly after that, Angel and Javier nearly grazed Mars while continuing to travel deeper into the solar system.
As the sun and planets grew distant, the orientation of the view changed and they were now in the plane of the galaxy.
Angel could see the arrow referencing our sun’s position in the milky way. It was about half way out from the center and just outside of one of the bright, spiral arms, indicating our lonely place within the expansive galaxy. Now that our solar system’s position was established, the view once again magnified and moved closer to the solar system. This time, the galactic plane, with its high density of solar systems, was still in view. Our solar system was still illuminated as to its location but at this scale it appeared as only a pin of light. Then suddenly the viewed expanded, once again depicting our solar system, this time showing the planets orbiting the sun as the sun traveled around the galaxy.
How interesting, thought Angel. The solar system is so tilted compared to the galaxy. Specifically, the solar system was tilted toward the direction of travel by about sixty degrees such that the sun’s north pole and those of the earth and most other planets, were also tilted toward the direction of travel. Angel smiled at this new information and the beauty of the visual spectacle and the novelty of having a private showing of such an awesome display of technology. Then her smile evaporated and her mouth dropped open as her eyes widened. She abruptly turned to look at Javier who had been waiting for her reaction and was looking at her. He was thrilled to witness her sharpness and instant realization of what she was seeing. She was suddenly excited beyond measure and looked back at the simulation one last time before pouncing on Javier uncontrollably, right in the middle of the great open dome.
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