Evariste Ryba was never a normal child. That is if we take the definition of “normal” as something characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine. He was none of these. Everyone called him Fish with the one exception of his mother who lovingly called him “Eva”. Fish started to show symptoms of a disorder before he was one year old. He used to line up his toys and other objects and would throw a complete hissy fit if someone came along and changed the order. He could already count by his first birthday and was obsessive about numbers and counting, yet he was a late developer when it came to language. Whilst being able to count in the thousands, he was unable to hold a simple conversation.
The symptoms continued during childhood, and he was given numerous tests and various examinations before eventually being diagnosed as having Autism spectrum disorder or ASD. He had trouble with social communication and interaction and would seem completely uninterested in relating to other people, even in his own family. However, he would absolutely love talking to anyone, even strangers about numbers and mathematics which he was completely obsessed with. The problem was that he could talk about it for hours on end, and it was the one and only subject available in his very limited conversational repertoire. People got bored very quickly listening to him rabbit on about calculus or derivative functions. Ironically, Fish found that the more math he learnt and understood, the more inadequate he would feel. It was like a never-ending road that he needed to travel down, and the further he went, the more distant the ending appeared. He found it incredibly frustrating.
Imagine being deaf. You really can’t tell the difference between an expert concert pianist and someone that is just banging on the keys, since it all looks the same. But if you are able to hear just a little, then you start to realize how good mathematicians are, and Fish wanted and needed to be good. But there are also different levels of “good.” There is a difference between listening to Mozart, being able to play Mozart, or being able to compose like Mozart. Once Fish started to understand higher-level math, it was the equivalent of not only being able to play Mozart but actually composing like Mozart. Ironically, Mozart’s musical prodigy may have been a manifestation of ASD very similar to the mathematical talent of Fish.
Judita Ryba wanted the best for her prodigious son, but she also didn’t want him ostracized and labeled a freak. So she sent him to the local elementary school, hoping that the normality would help him to integrate into a society that generally refused to accept a child with his unconventional inabilities. It was here that the 5-year-old Fish met the 5-year-old Nathan.
Fish was distinctively different. He wore thick glasses and was incredibly awkward and unable to communicate with the other children. Five-year-olds interpret different as weird, and with a name like Evariste, he was an easy target. He soon became known as “Weirdo” and was the epitome of a misfit. Seen as weak, he was immediately singled out and picked on by the other boys in his class. Bullies lack empathy and foresight and have contempt for the weak and Fish with his oddball looks, and even stranger behavior was meat and drink to Steve Wilson and his gang of infant followers. Even at the tender age of 5 and three-quarters, Steve Wilson had all the traits of a degenerate lout. An implacable, brutish personality that set him apart from most other children, but not in a good way. He would tirelessly ridicule Fish during the breaks and would taunt him for cheap laughs, and everyone would laugh because Steve was popular and Steve was someone the kids looked up to. He was the ring leader. It is essentially similar to a virus that spreads from one kid to another. The bully treats someone badly, another kid sees it and thinks it’s okay to do it, and it becomes a chain reaction. They don’t even know WHY they are doing it, they just have a general idea that Steve has a good reason-so that becomes a good enough reason for them too. Steve was strong and invincible, Steve was tough and no one challenged Steve. No one until Nathan hit him in the face during recess one Friday morning and broke his nose. Steve cried like a baby and his onerous, juvenile tyranny came to a crashing end as he was taken away howling and screaming for his mummy.
Nobody bullied Fish again, and Nathan wound up sitting next to him in the classroom for the next 6 years. A remarkable, unanticipated, and unconventional friendship began between them that was still going strong 20 years later.
Wednesday night was pizza night. They always went to the same place, The “Pizza Palace” and they always sat at the same table. Fish always ordered the same pizza with the same topping. Cheese and Tomato Pizza with 18 green olives. He loved green olives but wasn’t keen on black ones. It had nothing to do with taste, but it was all about the color. The Pizza was always pre-cut into 6 even slices and Fish made sure each slice had the required 3 olives on each slice, without exception. Once his pizza fulfilled each and every specification, he would begin to eat it. It was his favorite meal of the week. His preferred drink was a soda as he declared that they went together like cookies and milk, however, he wasn’t so pedantic about his soda choice.
Recently, he had found himself alternating each week between Coke and Dr.Pepper, and this week he decided to order a Dr.Pepper simply because last week he had ordered Coke. Maybe this was a new rule that he was inadvertently implementing. Nathan deliberately tried to order something different each week, if only to try and demonstrate to Fish that life goes on regardless of choices, but he knew it was a futile gesture. Fish would never change, and Nathan recognized that you shouldn’t even attempt to try to change a person with ASD, one just had to accept their differences, which he did.
“So, tell me what happened yesterday at the lab”. Fish looked confused
“What do you mean? You were there, you saw what happened”
“OK, I saw a mouse disappear and I saw an old home movie that suddenly had a white mouse run across the screen, but how did you do it? It was a trick, right?” Fish tried hard to think of an answer.
“No trick, I’m not a magician. I don’t know how to do tricks” Nathan raised his eyes, a look of puzzlement on his face.
“So you’ve invented a time machine that can transport mice back to 2004?” Fish thought for a minute.
“Well, not just mice and not specifically 2004. I sent a paper clip back to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 1963, that was the first time. Then I sent a pencil to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida on September the 11th 2001, but I bought them back, so they only stayed there about a minute”. Nathan stopped eating, trying to digest what Fish was saying. He smirked “You’re pulling my chain right?”
“What chain?”
“You’re teasing me. Making fun at my expense” Fish looked genuinely confused.
“No, I’m not”
“So you’re trying to tell me that you have invented a machine that can send things …. and Mice back in time?” Fish paused to think.
“Yes. I suppose that is correct. The math itself is quite complex, but it boils down to something fairly simple. You have to focus on closed time-like curves called CTCs, as long as just two pieces of an entire scenario within a CTC are still in “causal order” when you leave, the rest is subject to local free will. CTCs are compatible with a range of dynamic processes. Traversable acausal retrograde domains in spacetime may seem impossible but in actual fact it is mathematically viable. " Fish was in his own world “It is like having a bubble of space-time geometry that carries its contents backward and forwards through space and time as it tours a large circular path called a closed time curve. Sending an object back in time is mathematically feasible, and it has been done many times. BUT the major breakthrough was yesterday when we sent a living thing back in time. This means that the possibilities are much wider than we first thought” Nathan looked perplexed.
“Fish I can’t pretend to really understand this, but what I think you are saying is that yesterday was 100% real. Not a trick, no illusion. 100% authentically real?”
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“Of course it was, why would I make it up. Anyway, you saw it. And if you go home and play the DVD again, you will see the mouse run across the kitchen”
“But I thought you bought them back”
“Aaah with an inanimate object like a paper clip or a pencil that is possible, but with a live mouse, we can’t”
“So number 3 mouse is dead?”
“Nathan. It was 2004. 18 years ago. Of course, the mouse is dead. Mice don’t live for 18 years you know, they’d be lucky if they lived for 18 months. Surely you know that.” Nathan’s head was spinning.
“So let me get this absolutely straight. You could send any living thing back in time but only objects can return”
“Well yes and no. In theory, we could send any object or any living thing back in time and hypothetically, we could bring any living thing back too, but the CTC only lasts 585 seconds so that is less than 10 minutes. If we went past that CTC deadline then we couldn’t retrieve any object or living thing sent to the past. It would have to remain there”
“Why only 585 seconds?” asked Nathan, Fish found it difficult to explain abstract and complicated mathematical theorem, but he also knew that to speak in mathematical terminology would be senseless, and so he tried to think how he could explain in a straightforward and uncomplicated way to his friend.
“Imagine a piece of elastic, an elastic band, and let’s say it is 6 inches long. If you were to pull it and stretch it to its absolute limits, then maybe it would stretch to 12 inches. But it is impossible to stretch it another inch. It would either break or snap. Yes?”
“Ok I’m with you so far”
“Well, that extra 6 inches is like a CTC curve. It will stretch to 585 seconds but it won’t stretch any further. THAT is its mathematical limit. It means that we have just 585 seconds to retrieve any object or thing we send back in time. If it goes beyond that then we lose it… Forever”
“So why didn’t you bring mouse number 3 back. Why did you leave him there in 2004?” Fish looked amused.
“Experiments like this work on precise calculations. It’s not just about time it’s also about the position.” Fish took out his wallet and unfolded a black and white photo. It showed President Kennedy sitting at his desk in the oval office. Hiding under the desk looking mischievous was John Kennedy Junior. His father, John senior, the president of America was sitting in his chair studying a document. On the desk was a large array of objects, a lamp a couple of photo frames, and some ivory tusk ornaments to name but a few. He handed the photo to Nathan. “This was taken on May 25th 1962. If you look closely on the Presidents desk you will see a small plastic fish.” Nathan examined the photo.
“OK I see it”
“It’s actually a pencil sharpener in the shape of a fish, you gave it to me when we were kids” Once again Nathan was astounded. He remembered the pencil sharpener, blue and shaped like a Fish.
“I remember”
“Well in an early experiment we sent it back to a precise location. If you use longitude and latitude then it will give about 7 decimal digits of precision, which equates to about a meter of precision., which if we implement this in a GPS map is perfectly adequate. But we operate with 128 decimal digits. This gives us a nanometer of precision. With this type of precision, I could distinguish the position of adjacent mitochondria in a skin cell on the scalp of a person sitting in a sports stadium.” Nathan was trying hard to digest this information but it was all so bewildering.
“But what has this got to do with your fish-shaped pencil sharpener sitting on President Kennedy’s desk in the oval office?”
“Usually when we tried these experiments we would look at photographs from the past and date them precisely, not just to the day but the hour and the minute, even to the second. We would then work out the precise position in the picture that we wanted to send an object, only then would we proceed. Once we had verified the diametrical journey had taken place, we would then simply reverse the mathematics and bring the object back.”
“So why is this photo important?”
“Well in that photo we reversed the process and attempted to retrieve the object but it never came back. My pencil sharpener remained in 1962”
“But why did it fail to come back?”
“There is only one explanation. During the 30 seconds, we took to verify the procedure. Someone moved the Sharpener and as I explained our measurements are so precise that even a slight shift in position can cause the operation to fail”
“So that’s why mouse number 3 couldn’t return?”
“Yes, it would be impossible to get a mouse to return to a precise location. I knew that once he traveled back to 2004 he would have to stay there” Nathan’s mind was running away with various thoughts and he was struggling to keep them all correlated.
“What about a human? Couldn’t you send a human back in time?” Nathan held his breath.
“Too dangerous” Fish replied immediately “Too many things could go wrong, too risky”
“What could go wrong? Tell me all the things that could go wrong” Fish pondered this question.
“Well, the first thing would be finding a location. Can you imagine a man suddenly appearing on President Kennedy’s desk?”
“So it would need to be an isolated place where no one could be spooked”
“Yes and then there is the time aspect. 585 seconds is all we have and any man sent back would have to return to the same location at THAT precise time”
“OK …. but that is over 9 minutes right?”
“9 minutes and 45 seconds actually, and there is no more to these timings. We could do less time but we can’t add more time”
“I understand, it can’t be more than EXACTLY 585 seconds”
“The biggest risk are the coordinates. We could modulate the coordinates a little but even so, a man would need to stand in exactly the same place we sent him. We couldn’t have a circumference any bigger than 141.37 centimeters”
“what do you mean?”
“The circumference is the length of the boundary of a circle. If we were to cut open the circle and straighten it then the length of the boundary would be called the circumference.” It was not easy for Fish to try and explain elementary mathematics in simple language.
“Ok, I understand so how big would circle with a 141-centimeter circumference be?” asked Nathan
“141.37 cm actually…. A circle is made up of many points arranged equidistant from a single central point and The point is known as the center of the circle. The distance between the center and any point on the circumference is known as the radius of the circle and the diameter of a circle is the maximum distance between any two points on the circumference, so it is twice the radius.”
“I know this is easy for you but in rudimentary terms how big a circle do you mean”
“A circle with a circumference of 141.37 cm would have a radius of 22.5 cm, and its diameter would be double that, so 45 cm” Nathan was trying to digest this information.
“45 centimeters is about 18 inches? Is that right?”
“45 centimeters is 17.7165 inches actually” the reply was instantaneous.
“OK OK” Nathan bit his lip as he concentrated on what he was about to say “so is that big enough for a man” Fish pondered his response
“Hold out your arm and stretch your fingers” Nathan did as he was asked “If we were to measure from the tip of your middle finger to the end of your elbow that would be approximately 45 cm” Nathan looked at his outstretched arm and considered this
“That’s big enough for a regular-sized man to stand in”
“OK let’s consider this, If you drew a circle on the floor that was 45 centimeters in diameter then a man would need to return and stand completely within that circle exactly 585 seconds after he arrived in the past or he would never return.” Nathan was trying to work out all these risks in his head.
“so it’s not inconceivable? you could work out the coordinates for the location. calculate the time precisely and as long as the man returned to the EXACT same spot and stood within the measured circle 585 seconds after he left then it should work?”
“Nathan, I’m a research scientist I don’t like to work with the conditional tense. Should isn’t a word we like to apply to any scientific experiment, especially when using humans. We do not work with hypotheses. Researchers work to reject, nullify or disprove hypotheses, we strive to come up with an alternate hypothesis, one that will explain a phenomenon. It’s just too early to think about using a human test subject” Nathan felt discouraged
“But surely all experiments and discoveries need to overcome that element of uncertainty. I’m sure the first space rocket that sent an astronaut into space carried some risks, Nothing can be completely infallible, but research and experimentation limit the risks until it becomes necessary to take that next step, and surely sending a human back in time is the next step in this procedure” Fish found it difficult to disagree and consequently said nothing.
There was a long pause and nobody spoke. Nathan made a decision to speak
“Listen Fish …….. I want to go back. I want to go back in time” Fish looked genuinely stunned.
“What? …. Why?”
“Please Fish. Let me do it. just once.” Nathan was deadly serious and looked his friend in the eyes.
" I want to go back to August 8th, 2007”