Null Rocket
by Brian Ames
Today--
Fraü Planck bellows up the stairwell. Max’s
eyes roll--he is too busy for supper! Doesn’t
she realize that energy is radiated in discrete, tiny
units--quanta?
He rises from folios, universe unbound
thereon. This concatenation of theories--arithmetic,
ephemeral, rhythmic, sensual--may sum risk for Max
Planck of Berlin. Not yet.
Tomorrow--
A supper for party elite. Mostly Planck
will remain cerebral. Odd planets--clinking table-service,
ointmented saber-rattling, trousers-hoisting over
Lebensraum--will spin about in parabolas.
Max will watch politics across linen.
In time, he will raise crystal, sip champagne. The
room will slip away. There will be only moist forest,
hominids forming a holy circle. Striking deerskinned
tableaux: shapeshifters, radioactive decay, human
cloning, the disintegration of nuclei, weird scenes
inside the gold mine, paint, bone, recombination of
history, chimera, fiery abduction, hydrogen gone motherfucking
unstable. Non-linear. Lachrymal ducts feeding a final
tear.
“Quanta transcend all of this!”
he will blurt.
Egghead heretic: Der Führer will
have bent his mind on Austria and the Sudetenland,
unused to having this passion rivaled.
See the diminutive terror speak a half-Aryan
hex!
See the Reichstag strip Planck’s
duties!
Hitler! Whoreson!
Yesterday--
Class began. Weird-haired Albert lectured that lightspeed
in vacuum is the same to all observers, no matter
their relative motion. C--the speed of light--is C
no matter what. Furthermore, C is the cosmic speed
limit for articles of mass. Only mass-less, near-hypothetical
luxonic constructs such as gravitons and photons--perhaps
neutrinos as well--may travel at C. And a delicious
ideation: the speculative tachyon, swifter than C,
the anti-datum zygote of time-travel--that thing
particulate, but carrying no information, a null rocket,
that could not violate causality and bring all of
metaphysics crashing down in an all-altering paradox.
In which an assassin might travel backward in time...
Never--
Planck toys with a new law that improves on its previous
expression, describing blackbody radiation more comprehensively
based on the presumption that electromagnetic radiation
is quantized. Thus resolving the ultraviolet
catastrophe.
In other words:
R = 2hv^3/{c[exp(hv/kT)--1]}.
This glyph, to Planck, is as elegant
as a single drumbeat.
