Relativity (19 page)

Ethan put his fingers in his ears. “Mum! Stop! It hurts.”

She continued to sing, one hand tapping on the steering wheel.

“Hey, did you get my joke?” he asked. “It hurts. Hertz is the unit for measuring frequency of sound. So in your case, bad singing.”

“Very funny.” His mum smiled. “You're too clever for your own good.”

At the children's hospital, Dr. Saunders had set up a dark-blue ping-pong table in the middle of his office. He bounced a ball on a paddle. “Good morning, Ethan,” he said, keeping his eyes trained on the rebounding orange ball. “Have you ever played ping-pong before?”

“Couple of times.” Ethan replied, squinting one eye.

“Good, we're going to play right now. Usually this table lives in my garage.” He handed Ethan a tired-looking paddle; its red rubber coat was peeling at the edges, its handle was discolored and scuffed. “I should warn you, I was a ping-pong champion at university. Won the Table Tennis Tournament three years in a row. Bit rusty these days, but watch out. You're in for a thumping.”

Ethan grinned. This was going to be fun, although he couldn't figure out what this had to do with his brain. Dr. Saunders served and Ethan returned the ball with a gentle tap. They hit the ball to each other a few times like this—back and forth, tap to tap—until the ball rolled on the floor.

“Okay,” Dr. Saunders said, kneeling down and reaching for the ball. “So far, I've been going easy on you. Ready to step this up a notch?”

“Yep!” Ethan widened his stance and prepared his paddle.

The doctor took out a bowl full of orange ping-pong balls and put it on his side of the table. One by one with a snap of the wrist and paddle, he served the balls to Ethan. Now Ethan missed every shot. The balls were curving and spinning—bending erratically in sudden twists and turns—so even though they looked aimed in his direction, they flew off at another angle.

Ethan studied the balls carefully, the way they veered away on unexpected paths. Eventually he saw it: their trajectories. They were deviating, and he was almost sure he knew why. Dr. Saunders hit another ping-pong ball. As it crossed the net, it swerved to the left. Ethan held his paddle out. Tap. He struck the ball.

“Wonderful!” Dr. Saunders said. “How did you figure it out?”

“Figure what out?”

“I was serving you curveballs.”

Ethan paused for a moment to consider his answer. “Air. It was happening because of the air.”

“Go on,” Dr. Saunders urged.

“Well,” Ethan began. “Ping-pong balls are light, so they have a small mass and low density. So air has more of an effect on them.”

“But why does that make them curve?” The doctor held his paddle out to serve another ball. “Would you like to see again? I'll do a topspin serve this time. Tell me what you see.”

Dr. Saunders served another ball. The rubber paddle grazed its surface. Ethan watched the ball glide over the table. It was spinning on an axis. The top of the ball was going in the same direction as the ball, but the bottom of the ball was moving in the opposite direction to the motion of the ball.

“Air pressure,” Ethan said quickly. “It's because of the air pressure. Gravity and spin work together to make the ball drop. Because the air pressure below the ball is lower, topspin reduces lift and that makes the ball dip downward.”

Dr. Saunders held out another orange ball. “What about with backspin?” He hit the ball. This time the top went in the opposite direction to the movement of the ball, while the base moved in the same direction as the motion of the ball. It gave the ball lift, sent it upward unexpectedly.

“Lift and drag,” Ethan said. “When you did the topspin, the air pressure at the top of the ball was high and at the bottom, the air pressure was low. So at the top, the ball's velocity is low and at the bottom, it's high. It drags the ball downward.”

“Exactly!” Dr. Saunders held his paddle triumphantly in the air. “And backspin?”

“The opposite,” Ethan said, breathless with enthusiasm. “Gravity and backspin work against each other. High velocity and low air pressure at the top, and low velocity and high air pressure at the bottom. So it lifts the ball up.”

“And you could see it, couldn't you?” Dr. Saunders put his paddle down. “You could see the air pressure and the velocity. With your eyes.”

Ethan gave him a cautious nod. “It looked like a comet.”

“It's called the Magnus effect. You described it perfectly. People have taken photos of the Magnus effect on a golf ball underwater, and it did look like a comet. Come take a seat, Ethan,” Dr. Saunders said. “There's something important I need to tell you.”

Ethan sat down. Behind the doctor's chair were lots of certificates: degrees, honors, certifications with gold embossing and his name written in ink.

“I've been thinking a lot about what you said, how you saw the red and blue shift. At first I thought maybe you had synesthesia, but I think it might actually be far more complex and exciting than that.”

“What's that?” Ethan asked. He tried to repeat the word but struggled to pronounce it correctly.
“Sin-ess-thee-sia?”

“A neurological condition. Synesthesists mix up their senses. Someone might see the number one and think it's green, or see smells and sounds as colors. Taste a roast dinner when they read a map. Do you remember when I spoke to you in the hospital about how the brain rewires itself?” Dr. Saunders asked. “About neuroplasticity?”

“Yeah.” Ethan's foot jiggled involuntarily. He pressed his palm hard against his knee to keep himself still.

“While we don't know exactly what causes it, when someone has synesthesia their brain gets cross-wired. So if the neural pathways between the area in the brain associated with numbers and the area associated with space get cross-activated, then it might cause a synesthesist to see numbers as shapes. But I don't think you have synesthesia. Your symptoms aren't consistent with it. What I suspect you may have is extremely rare. You can see waves and pressure and velocity—the forces of physics. Stuff nobody else can see with the naked eye.”

“Like how mass causes inertia? How it looks the same as energy?”

Dr. Saunders opened his notebook and wrote on a blank page. “Can you really see all that? Have you always been able to see these sorts of things?”

Ethan thought back. There'd always been something: a shimmering line, bursts of light, electricity powering lightbulbs, the clarity of distance between stars in the night sky. Flashes that sharpened over time—Ethan learned to understand them—like how squiggling lines of sound were wavelengths, how the fireworks he could see were just forces doing their job.

“For as long as I can remember,” he said.

Dr. Saunders hesitated. “Newborn brains are remarkable. They've already formed millions and millions of neurons in the womb. At birth, most of these neurons aren't connected yet, but when babies see or taste something for the first time, it creates a burst of electrical activity that connects their neurons. That connection is called a synapse, and during the first two years of an infant's life they form twice as many synapses as they'll have as an adult.”

Ethan imagined bolts of lightning flashing inside his gray brain, connecting neuron to neuron. Electrical storms in his mind. “What happens to the other synapses?”

“Some of the weak connections die off, while the frequently used synapses get stronger.” Dr. Saunders paused. “How old are you again, Ethan?”

“Twelve.”

“When you had your brain injury, you were still forming synapses at an astounding rate. The contusion in your cortical tissue—like a bruise inside your brain—meant that instead of forming synapses in that particular region, you were forced to make them somewhere else. So connections developed in other parts of your brain. I think your brain injury has uncovered something latent in unexplored regions of the brain. And connections have strengthened over time.”

Ethan was confused. “What does ‘latent' mean?”

“Something hiding. Let me tell you about a similar case. A ten-year-old boy was hit hard in the head with a baseball. It knocked him unconscious, fractured his skull and caused a hemorrhage. The boy went to hospital, recovered and then went back to his normal life. But he was different after his brain injury. Suddenly he saw equations and numbers everywhere. He became a mathematical genius overnight. He could calculate impossible sums in his mind in a flash, recite pi up to twenty thousand decimals.”

“But how'd he know how to do those calculations?”

“That's what I meant by something hiding. All this information might have already been hardwired into his brain—we call that ‘genetic memory.' Turned out, the boy had ancestors who'd studied mathematics and the brain injury made him able to access this hidden treasure trove imprinted inside his brain. He even saw equations as fractals.”

“Me too,” Ethan said. “I can see fractals too.”

“Could you draw one for me?” The doctor handed Ethan a sheet of paper and a pen. “This boy who was hit in the head was diagnosed as an acquired savant. Do you know what a savant is?”

Ethan shook his head. He'd never heard that word before. But the existence of a word that might describe him was brightening, immediately made him feel less alone. He wasn't imagining it. He wasn't a freak. The pencil trembled in his hand. Ethan drew a rough image of the geometry inside his head. Sweeping patterns of recurring line after line; unraveling labyrinths of snowflaked galaxies; knotted angles that crystallized into the tiniest chaos.

“A savant is someone with extraordinary skill. Like being able to memorize the phone book. Calendar savants can tell you the day of the week when you mention any date. Often people with savant syndrome are autistic,” Dr. Saunders explained. “They sit somewhere on the spectrum. Some of them can't tie their shoe but can recite every prime number. Extraordinary skill is sometimes compensation for an extraordinary deficiency.”

Sitting on the spectrum made Ethan think of a row of chairs running along a rainbow. “Newton's third law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” he said, not looking up from the paper.

Dr. Saunders looked at Ethan's fractal drawing. “You're left-handed, how interesting. Anyway, because you had such severe developmental delays as an infant, we kept a close eye on you. Did a lot of diagnostic testing when you were small. You didn't meet the criteria for autism.”

“Okay,” Ethan said. Testing, lots of testing. He didn't recall any of that.

“On the other hand, acquired savant syndrome happens when these savant skills emerge after a brain injury or sometimes because of disease. Like the boy who got hit with a baseball. He wasn't born with it, but something made his brain change. It's exceptionally rare. There are only fifty cases in the world and none yet in Australia. If you have this, Ethan, it would be groundbreaking to say the least. You're the most interesting brain-injury case I've ever seen. You can see physics! Neurologists all over the world will want to meet you.” The doctor looked at Ethan intently for a moment, as if he'd forgotten how to blink.

“Einstein said it wasn't that he was so smart, he just stayed with problems longer,” Ethan said.

The doctor spoke hurriedly. “Of course, we'll need to do some more tests before I write anything conclusive. But this is potentially very exciting stuff. You'll be in journals, maybe the subject of documentaries, and mentioned in books. Physicists will want to speak to you as well.”

Ethan looked up from his drawing. “Like Stephen Hawking?” He imagined flying to Cambridge to shake his hero's hand; that would be huge. But Stephen Hawking was getting old now. How much longer would he still be alive? Newton's third law—it always made Ethan feel sad. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction for famous cosmologists too. As Hawking's mind advanced, his body declined.

“May I keep this drawing? Remarkable.” Dr. Saunders studied the fractal for a moment, then glanced at the clock on his wall. “We'll have to continue this next week. I need to show this picture to my colleagues. Thanks for the game of ping-pong.”

“Can I have this ball?”

“Of course,” Dr. Saunders said absentmindedly. He didn't look up from the drawing, lost in the center of the fractal's topography.

Ethan put the ping-pong ball into his pocket and returned to his mum.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

He nodded.

They walked out of the doctor's office and into the blue day. Summer was almost here and even though it was only morning, the warmth of ultraviolet rays pierced Ethan's tingling skin. Frangipanis had fallen on the footpath. He looked up at the white burst of the cancerous sun, felt its retina-burn, before turning to his mum.

“Mum, the sun has 99.8 percent of our solar system's total mass.”

His mum looked ahead. “I didn't know it was so heavy.”

“Yeah.” Ethan held his arms out in front of him. He glanced quickly at the sun's chaotic mix of hot plasma and magnetic fields. Up there, he knew space-time warped. The sun's huge mass bent radio and light waves nearby.

Ethan threw the ping-pong ball in the air. The orange ball hovered for a moment in front of the sun—like the corona of a solar eclipse—but on the way back down, the ball didn't fall in a straight line. Its trajectory warped. The ball landed in his hand. Ethan knew it. Even though Earth's mass was only 0.0003 percent of the solar system, space-time curved down here too. And he could see it.

Ω

MARK AND TOM
caught the train to Circular Quay to meet the lawyer. His firm's office building had won design and innovation awards; it was spaceship-like with curved cosmic steels, cylinder-shaped with a glass façade. One of those five-star, green, sustainable buildings—low emissions, recycled water system, zero waste. Sydney loved a trend and sustainability was its current craze. Mark found it weird. The city he'd known was built on excess and now conservation was the hottest thing. Sure, the science of climate change was solid. But all the hysteria about environmental equilibrium? The laws of physics didn't work like that; you couldn't have simultaneous balance and change.