Sometime yesterday, I began my 27th trip around the sun.
I took a leisurely day, yesterday. Played some Rise of Legends, enjoyed some Uno on Xbox Live (housewives don’t expect you to talk smack, let me tell you), took some pictures of chimpmunks, ate some delicious cake. It was good. The weather and hills took their toll on my knee, but it was good.
When I woke up this morning, I felt much better. My knee, while still a bit sore, wasn’t sending daggers of firey love up my leg anymore.
Unusually, I wasn’t very hungry, either.
It wasn’t until I walked into the washroom that I realized what had happened.
You see, we are all made up of elementary particles, which, according to the Standard Model, form all larger particles in the universe:
…but things are not so simple in this world. The standard model does not answer all the questions science poses, and quantum theory has had to pick up the slack. And so, our understanding must continue to quantum particles:
Quantum particles, it is hypothesized, are simply bits of quantum material (strings or otherwise) which vibrate at different frequencies, giving them their unique properties. All things, in a sense, are made entirely of vibrations.
However, vibrational energy is quantized — meaning it can only equal certain discrete values, which correspond to discrete energy states.
I’m sure you all understand where I’m going with this.
After making some quick calculations on the back of my shampoo bottle and running them through the quantum harmonic oscillator model, I made some disturbing discoveries.
I tried to seek further answers via the Schrödinger equation, but Dirac’s bra-ket notation (as always) served only to make things clumsy.
However, I had learned enough. The state vectors of the energy eigenstate had shifted, but not via a complex phase. I know, it’s crazy, but it’s true.
Approximately 8 minutes before I completed my 27th trip around the sun, there was a powerful solar flare, sending deadly radiation hurtling towards the earth at unthinkable speed:
While our atmosphere protected us from the brunt of the blast, some stray radiation made it through, finding its way into the streets and homes of the greater Ontario area.
The rest of Ontario would not notice, however, for it was only I who had, at the precise moment the flares reached our planet, been in that precise position 27 years prior. I was perfectly aligned, and what happened next should come as no surprise.
The radiation did not pass harmlessly through my particles as they did everyone else. Instead, they knocked through them at a quantum level, spinning them much like a gutterpunk on PCP spins a New York subway turnstile.
This sudden change in force and pressure had dramatic consequences. The polarity of the particles shifted.
While still vibrating, my particles were now vibrating backwards.
I realized all this when I went to the washroom, and my stubble wasn’t there. My face had a slight shadow, but that was it. Certainly not what I should expect after two days without shaving.
That’s when it hit me: I’m travelling backwards through time.
To be more specific, my particles are. While I will move forward day after day, my particles are moving backwards, bringing me ever closer to that day, 27 years ago, when I was first in the position the solar flare found me in.
I know that you’re all as distressed as I am. Find solace in the fact that I am not without a plan, and I do not intend to take this lying down. I will be consulting experts on this matter immediately.
Tomorrow night, as soon as I am done work, I will be watching all three Back To The Future movies consecutively. In addition to an amusing tale of wacky hijinx, the BTTF trilogy is also a treatise on force amplification via the superposition of a number of time-evolving states, and Zemeckis received much scientific acclaim when the script was published in Nature.
I will keep you informed, true believers. Save heart, for I will not be bested by a foe so small as the sun.
