Forgetting Physics

- A short story by R. Ajaykrishna

“Thermodynamics. The one basic science that even Einstein agreed that will never be broken for millennia to come. Everything in this big, beautiful and beastly world comes under the roof of thermodynamics. Even in that, the second law governs how we perceive time. To make complicated matters simple, kids, I’m going to say this: Get a good grasp of the second law of thermodynamics, and you shall be the frontrunner for the next Time Lord” lectured Dr. Mustafa, while having a little laugh at the same time. Graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Physics a couple of years ago, Mustafa is the Current Assistant Professor at his alma mater, where he is currently conducting a series of lectures on their Thermodynamics paper. Considered one of the smartest people of his college, he never bragged about his achievements, mostly because he began to experience a few problems remembering stuffs. He didn’t consider it to be a big deal, blissfully unaware about the trials of his future.

As he walked along the corridors of his college, nonchalantly humming along to the radio mixtape of poems and motivational speeches, he was interrupted by one of his students, asking the question if time asymmetry was because of ever-increasing entropy, he answered, “You can defuse a bomb, not unblast it, right? There you go, champ!” and he trotted along his path, and as he slid into his chair, he looked at his whiteboard, and muttered to himself, “Unblast, huh? It would be fun to unblast stuff!” and laughed. A cosmic level of uncertainty was possible, thought Mustafa while images of a bomb being reversed in time was racing in his mind. “Nah. I’m too tired for this crap” yawned Mustafa, while receiving a call, and as he was leaving, he forgot his car keys at his office. Upon reaching the car, he realized it, and ran back to retrieve his keys. He never forgot the mundane tasks before. So why now? It was the question that Mustafa’s mind was crazy about while he was driving. And he wasn’t driving to any other place. It was the hospital, and its his daughter’s date of birth. As he rushed into the hospital, he checked into the neonatal ward and rushed to Room 113, while he saw a guy spinning fallen soda bottles to unform an explosion, and that put him on the path to science’s most important discovery: Entropy is reversible, and there can be time symmetry in both directions.

“Baby! I found it!” teared up Mustafa, as he saw his wife smiling and holding his hand, while his daughter, his second one, the one who will continue his legacy, was sleeping next to her. “We really hit the jackpot, didn’t we?” asked his wife weakly, and was almost asleep, when Mustafa sat next to her, gave her a big hug, and put forth the words that will affect humanity in the upcoming future: She’s the greatest person to have lived, and she’ll be righting my wrongs before we know it. “Also, honey, I think that I’ve found the next big thing in science: 2nd law is bullshit. Ha-ha” giggled Mustafa, and he forgot his gift to her in the car. Why the hell am I forgetting stuff, wondered Mustafa, and in that moment, he was at the crossroads between the happiest man alive, to being as scared as a cat.

Not one to procrastinate, he drove straight back to the college premises after checking his wife out of the hospital, in the middle of the night, to start his work. He hoarded chalk pieces, being an old-fashioned man, and started scribbling the units for mass, time, acceleration and other basic stuff on the board to stimulate his brain, and once he was in his zone, he erased them all, and started deriving various laws of thermodynamics at a quantal level, knowing full well that time asymmetry doesn’t exist there. An electron can be in a million places at the same time, and nowhere at the moment. It could be travelling at three-fourths at the speed of light, generating enough energy to light up a diffractor, or it can be moving in the speed of a motor wagon. It can be vibrating, it may be in a Keplerian path, it may move in swirls, it can beat Eddy patterns in being Eddy patterns. It is everything down below, because electron is an omnipresent being in the world of subquantum space, being its benevolent ruler.

“If there’s an order to this chaos down below, I’ll bring chaos to order” was the words etched on the top of the board, and while doing any physics equation, the first thing is to assign the variables and the constants. Micro-to-macro was his strategy, and so he picked the mass of an atom to be the constant, hitting his first roadblock. “You crazy idiot! What have you been thinking!” he berated himself for motivational anger to kick in, getting a hold of his composure only when he’s home with his daughter, who’s also exceptionally smart for her age, understanding the laws of motion by the age of ten. One day, he noticed changes in his gait, and his recent speech impediment was springing into action during one of his lectures, and he was immediately taken to the doctor, who suggested a neurologist. After various biopsies of the Cerebrospinal Fluid, the neurologist was ready to diagnose.

“Mam, I’m afraid that your husband might be having Alzheimer’s, based on the presence of the Amyloid accumulation in the CSF, and the patterns of dementia” the doctor told Mustafa’s wife, and she couldn’t hold back her tears, not knowing how to break to it to Mustafa, who is only a few steps away from disproving a law that holds our world from falling into a pit of ungoverned chaos. After a while, with thoughtful consideration, she decided to hold a big family dinner, at the end of which she can reveal to him about his dementia. The dinner went along fine, and at the end, a fantastic delicacy was being served to Mustafa, and without a warning, Mrs. Mustafa held his arm, kept her arm on his shoulder, and started crying. “What happened, dear?” asked Mustafa in a state of consternation, and she refused to talk further, and bowed her head down.

As he gently lifted her head up, he saw her eyes being crimson red in color, and the ominous foreboding words before the words were said: “I’m sorry, darling!” by the caring wife, who had a full-blown nervous breakdown at this point. She stared into his soul, and said that he has dementia, and it’s only expected to go worse over the years. He didn’t reply anything, but he was just staring at a singular window, and a small space through which a ray of light passed, lost in his thoughts. That night, he crawled next to his wife, and whispered, “I’m like my parents in a way”, and started to cry silently, so as to not wake up the little one sleeping adjacent to them. “I didn’t fare well in life so far, and just when I’m doing something to unravel something, mother genetics decided to mess it up!” was the silent screaming in his head, which was tearing his eardrums from the inside.

Years went down the line, and so did his mental status. The erratic behaviors and dementia progressively got so bad that his wife has to be by his side for every moment of his life, and his equations devolved from majestic pieces of art, to a child’s scribbling. The only thing that mattered in his life was the singular notion that time symmetry is possible in both axes even in a macroscopic state, if not on a level of the cosmos. His wife plodded on to assist him, tearing up every time she sees her husband, because this wasn’t the Dr. Mustafa that remembered the first 1500 digits of pi, while writing his thesis on absorption of energy from turbulent flow. This wasn’t the Dr. Mustafa, who came up the idea with disproving thermodynamics. This is the husk of that person.

The 2nd daughter, now named Nadia, was excellent in her studies, and just like her father, decided to go into the sciences. It was only after his slow, painful and agonizing life, death was granted, and on that day, Nadia decided to fix her father’s destiny from a man who almost got it, to the man who held the world in his palm, and she set off to work. She wrote a letter to her dead father talking about their fondest memories, and how he’s been wronged by this world, and the ways in which she’ll clean up his legacy. She studied harder than anyone, worked for more hours, and according to her mother, she was punishing the world for it did to her papa.

Nadia traced on the same path as Mustafa, but cleared enough to break new ground. She married a handsome mathematician, and by the age of 28, a baby boy was born, and so did the end point of the question that Mustafa posed. She found out the paradox, and hence the loophole that circumvented the law was found. It was almost near the end, when she started having similar bouts of forgetfulness, starting from forgetting to take up a chalk piece while writing, all the way to forgetting the route to her home, and ending up in the middle of a railway intersection. Her husband decided that Nadia being in her home is the safest, and that she’s a potential threat to herself, if not her most dangerous.

But locking up a rebellious bird like Nadia is not easy. Her forgetfulness caused some genuine conundrums inside the house, and her internal demons weren’t too friendly with her either. One day, out of nowhere, she yelled, “Pa! Why did you leave me in this place? I’m ending up like you! Pa! Pa? Where are you? Please come home. Please come home! Please…” and went on a full-blown verbal assault at everyone and everything until she passed out on the couch. When she woke up, she started to hallucinate her father’s presence around her, which helped her advance in her field of time- reversal, but didn’t help out in any other regard.

As the days went on, Mustafa was the only figure she remembered, the only voice she could recognize, and the distrustfulness became more and more obvious. After some time, she cooped up in her room, believing no one and nothing, and the only possession she accepts is a set of chalk pieces and a black board, gifted to her by her late father. She tried hard, harder and there was nothing else to stop her, not even a major catastrophe could stop her from jotting down physics left and right, and after an endurance run of nearly 7 months, she finally got it. “Pa! Dad! I’ve got it! Gibbs was the odd boy out!” she ran out of the house without any semblance of orientation, leaving a trail of papers as she ran out of the house like a horse with no blinders, racing against time, as her memory faded into obscurity.

She did it. She finished it, and her world was perfect again. But the only catch is that it really wasn’t. The only thing that was left in her brain was the thermodynamics, and the fond sting, that was her father guiding her during every collision of each atom with every other atom in the cosmos level. Now, she doesn’t know anything and anyone anymore. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but ignorance without their conscious choice is a form of torture only a selected few in this unforgiving world will understand. And even fewer will have the willpower to push through, and not resign to the damnation, and only she could do the impossible: Disprove Einstein’s words.

In the following 15 years, it turned from helping a person with personal troubles, to raising a child, rife with temper tantrums and the such, yet the only thing that calmed her down was something that isn’t found in this blue planet. Things turned to be better in the physics field, when she was selected for the Nobel Prize for Physics, under the topic Applied Physics in aid of planetary disturbance and chronological disturbances. Her paper became the most sought-after in all research websites, even pirated in various other mediums. It was the grand night of the Nobel Ceremony, when her family made a difficult, yet a necessary decision that she shouldn’t attend the ceremony. She didn’t really listen to them, and was actually fixating on a bug that was flying across the room. As her husband swatted it to get her attention towards the issue at hand, she yelled, “You monkey! No-good nincompoop! Whoever you are, get away from me! You psychopath!” and took a pillow next to her for defense. He understood that she wasn’t in her normal state, and unanimously decided that he will talk in her place.

That evening, when the awardees were announced, over 16 million people on TV were there to witness the majesty of a ground-breaking physicist win something that she was way too overdue, almost 30 years overdue. Nadia’s entire family, barring her mother, was there at the ceremony, gasping for breath as her husband got a scholarship and a prize from the Royal King of Sweden, and then he gave a speech that will forever be etched in the annals of history, reading a tearjerking letter that Nadia wrote on the day of her father’s funeral, about her promise to the world and how to push through the pain, and ended the speech with his own experience with Nadia, to an audience which gave a standing applause for twelve minutes after that. It wasn’t all beds and roses, though, as the happiness was short-lived. The Nobel Prize was given to Nadia by her husband in a small private ceremony attended only by their family members, and she freaked out, because according to her, a group of strangers are surrounding her with an unknown object. She grabbed the medal, threw it on the floor, and held up a board next to her for defense.

The world was not ready enough for that night, as the basic fibers of physics were torn apart, string by string. There were a lot of feelings that night. For Nadia’s husband and some others, it was pure unbridled pride in his wife. For her mother, it was bittersweet because she missed Mustafa at the time. For Nadia herself, it was sheer terror as she slept into the forever, and as the world around her went dark, the last words that she mumbled was “Ther…. Mo….”, and as she saw the name Mrs. Nadia Mustafa on the prize, with all the remaining strength, uttered “Papa?”