In Which Time Stands Still by Bill Hibberd - HTML preview

4

That evening, while Helen went to the gym, David went home via the local all night supermarket picking up a sandwich and a couple of beers en route. His evenings were a haphazard collection of launderette, moving things around in his home which he referred to as ‘tidying’, day dreaming, reading and internet surfing while, simultaneously, watching TV and listening to his radio or playing CD’s.

Always busy, never bored, David could sleep where he landed or work on into any number of nights appearing the next day exactly as normal – slightly crumpled – as though dressing were an afterthought and, mentally, sharp as a knife.

He enjoyed his lifestyle and given the apparent jumble of his home was actually extremely well organised.

Tonight though, David was rather more pre-occupied than normal. His lunchtime exploration of dimensions with Helen, though superficial, had started to grow in his mind so that he was now considering aspects of the subject well beyond what he had started with Helen.

David normally entered into debate because he could. He would normally get a subject kicked off and then just prod and goad people into exploring an idea with no more effort on his part than by strategically placing counter points as they offered the building blocks for the argument. Today, though, something was different. Today he felt as though something bigger was to be expected.

As the germ of his idea began to maturate in David’s mind, he started to measure the implications of what he was thinking against some of the most puzzling of science’s questions.

Thinking that it would be great fun to tease today’s dimensions subject into a full-blown saga, David reached for a pencil and hunted for a sheet of paper.

He began a list of discussion topics that he fully intended to wrap into the subject.

With a bit of luck others would join in.

This is the list as produced by David.

• Is time travel achievable?

• What is time?

• What is dark matter?

• Where is all the matter that is mathematically supposed to exist given the current thinking on the creation of the universe?

• What is gravity?

• Can the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ forces be properly identified and even harnessed?

• What really happens within a black hole?

• Is the current theory on black holes and their event horizons accurate?

• What of light speed? Is it really as fast as it is possible to travel?

• If everything that we know of the universe can really be put down to ‘the big bang’, what went bang?

• What if the story of the universe being created in seven days is a metaphor that can be placed into a greater context?

• If there is a god, where is God hiding when we send space ships into what was once considered to be heaven, God’s domain?

• Are there aliens? And, Do those aliens visit planets – Earth included?

David looked at his list and sat back to contemplate what he had produced. Shaking his head he almost threw the paper away, reflecting that he was getting more and more like Helen with every passing day. But he couldn’t bring himself to throw this away.

His idea was beginning to embrace all of the items on his list and the notion that one theme could be adapted to embrace all the areas he had written down was very compelling, very compelling indeed.