The Time Travelers Dilemma – (3) Tangled

From a lecture by Dr. Nakey: Early theoretical physicists hypothesized that the behavior of hyper-dimensional interactions in time are analogous to how light travels through space. They believed they had the following characteristics in common:

• First, in any given portion of the universe, time (as measured locally) progresses at a constant rate.
• Second, both light and time traveled as waves and could be described as either wave interactions or ray-path interactions when approaching boundaries in their media of transmission.

As a way to visualize this, reconsider our pencil and rubber band illustration, and pay particular attention to the tangled portions. These form a boundary of sorts between different times in the universe. Time can propagate in a variety of ways at this boundary, similar to the variety of ways light acts when approaching boundaries. For example, dependent upon the localized permittivity tensors of the different media, light will either reflect, or pass through, or get trapped on the edge of the boundary. If the boundary is irregular, time will propagate similar to the way light travels through experimental slits or an old fashioned window screen. The effect will be an occasional reinforcement of the time wave, or if the geometry is exactly right, the waveform will reconstruct as a standing wave, for a brief moment creating an alternate universe.

The effect is similar to the interaction of coherent waves in holography. We now call it an echo in time.

There was to be one last meeting before the boy and the vacationer parted ways. This meeting was more of an argument this time than a fight, over the simplest of things. The vacationer thought that he lived in South Chicago, based on the name of the elementary school near him, South Elementary. The boy and his sister didn't go to that school, but instead attended Yeager Elementary and Neal Junior High. All three schools were located near each other. The life-paths of the children had become intertwined because the music band was hosted at Neal Junior High, just up the road. In any case, the argument at the end simply was about “you don’t even know where you are”, for indeed we were not in South Chicago, we were in North Chicago.

The visits are only part of the story. The boy's mother had been born and raised in D.C. His mother's mother had been raised in Kentucky, and was raised according to the all the customs, religious attitudes, and biases of early 20^th century Kentucky. His mother's father had been born in Connecticut, and had been raised with all the customs, religious attitudes, and biases of early 20^th century Connecticut. The grandfather had come to work in D.C. about the time of the First World War. He worked for the U.S. War Department and retired from the Department of Agriculture in the late 1950’s. He then worked for the School of Agriculture teaching Photography. The grandmother arrived in the 30’s not too long after the Great Depression. By the time the visits occurred, both had retired, but they had developed many long-term friendships with many other long term residents of D.C. They had established near lifelong memberships in their church and societal groups. Of note was the grandfather’s membership in the Washington Centennial Lodge. Also of note was the grandmothers’ friendship with long-time employees of the National Security Agency. None of this was known by the boy, nor was he aware of it until much later in life.

Let me say again, the mother had been born and raised in D.C., her father a government photographer, one of her brothers a member of the Capitol Police. They often cared for her by taking her with them, a tag-along as they pursued their duties. As consequence, she had been exposed on a regular basis in the 40’s and 50's to various events and attitudes of our political movements and to the activism that was part of those times. Imagine if you can, a child overhearing the unguarded conversations of our elected officials as she wandered the Hill, or hearing unfriendly political groups through the open windows of a brownstone discussing strategies of overthrow or violence, or a child viewing some of the horrendous photographs of the second World War before the public knew what had happened at the concentration camps, and then, being told to not speak of it. The long-term effect stayed with her through her life. Nearly anytime she spoke of it, she would ask the boy to touch the spot on her head where she had been grazed by a rifle shot of someone passing by the government building that she was in, evidence she carried with her that what she spoke of was true.

The family of the boy whose subconscious I had landed in had enemies, purely because of the circumstances of time and place of birth of the mother and the childhood events that had occurred as she was growing up. Not just your typical enemies, but enemies such as the Communist Party who too late learned to close the windows, corrupt government officials who too late found someone had heard their discussions, Nazi sympathizers seeking to ignore or change the facts who too late found out that someone had seen those photos as they were being developed. Later in life, on a bad day she would rant or shout on the streets where she lived, when she no longer lived in D.C. The neighbors would simply dismiss her as a nut. They could not believe that any one person could have been exposed first hand to all these experiences. These stories were only the tip of the iceberg. Others will be mentioned, and even more will be hinted at later.

This was the 60’s, violence was everywhere and took many different forms. Many parents, involved on one side or the other of the various groups had one value in common, “protect the children”. It turns out that the methods used were not without consequences. They either led to life-long misunderstandings, or led to suspicion much later in life, when the protected children grew.

Members of the high government positions at that time would often receive threats of various forms, sometimes directed against their children. One technique to protect them was simply to try to confuse any who might be watching about who was with who. A threatened family might cross paths with another child whose family was aiding in the protection, and the families would temporarily exchange children. Longer term protection might involve continuing changes of names and locations, similar to how Witness Protection operated in the late 20^th Century.

You might be asking at this point, what does all this have to do with the vacationer? It turns out that the vacationers fears regarding his father had been taken seriously. Whether they were taken seriously by government or by those familiar with protection techniques is not clear. But the result was the mother (born and raised in D.C.) ended up discussing how to go about protecting the vacationer. Aware of ‘the walls have ears’ nature of the Navy Housing complex, she concocted a rather elaborate switching scheme, but when not at that location the real plan was exposed, which was simply 'let’s not, but say we did'. From that point on, many of the events that affected the boy resulted from this tangle in time.

You might ask why this was done. Quite simply, those involved were Christian, more specifically, New Testament Christian. They believed that the child should not be held responsible for the acts of the father. This is different from those who follow the Old Testament, who would hold the descendants responsible until seven generations later. Those who studied history in later centuries regarded this as one root cause to cultural hatred so prevalent in the Middle East. The protection was adopted for the simple reason that the vacationers father’s religion was believed to hold more closely to the Old Testament, and the belief that this meant the son was in danger.