When 1 = 2

(Grandma inspired short story time!)

We thought we were so smart.  We had the universe mapped out and explained.  We knew the life cycle of the very universe itself!  Or so we thought.  There’s so much to say, but so very little time left.  Where to begin explaining all this?

I suppose we’ll start with an example.  At the university where I teach part time as an advanced math instructor, each semester I make sure to run through the dangers of mathematical fallacies in their work.  In the example I start off by letting A=B, then by the end and some liberal use of mathematical principles, specifically using the variables of “A” and “B” to hide the fact that I divide by zero at one point, I end up with the answer that 1=2.  It’s a humorous exercise that’s always good for some chuckles and shocked expressions, but my point is what if you actually based your formula off this?  If you didn’t catch that you were letting 1=2 you could write massively complex formulas based of seemingly legitimate simple equations.  My application for them was to not be conceited and gloss over the basic algebra stuff just because they were in an advanced math class. How ironic that I failed to heed my own warnings! 

What does this have to do with anything you might be asking at this point?  I’m getting there, I promise, but first let’s go to the beginning when I first began to thing that something was amiss.

My first glimpse of the impeding disaster came in the 7th grade during science class.  I may teach advanced mathematics part time, but my passion is astronomy, and it started right in this class.  My science book explained how they had *proof* that the universe was expanding because they could look at the distant stars through a special telescope that analyzed colors and when they did so they saw every star had a shift in it’s natural color towards red.  This proved that the stars were getting more distant from one another.  In fact, the book said, a blue shift, a sign that the stars were getting closer had never been observed!  On the very next page, it told how the Milky Way, our galaxy, was approaching another galaxy and that in a few million years the two might absorb each other and become a single galaxy.

This news stopped me cold.  Oh I didn’t care that someday millions of years after I died the earth might be in peril.  I cared that they had just told me a galaxy was approaching ours, yet there had never been a blue shift, a sign of objects coming towards you, observed.  How could this be?

I should have left well enough alone, I should have continued in my pleasant ignorance with the rest of the world, but I had to have the answers and I charged ahead foolhardily!

I scraped and saved every penny I could from teach and devoted every bit of free time I had to building a series of small drones that would fly into deep space out beyond our solar system and perform high speed tests approaching and leaving one another at various angles.'

I should have grown suspicious when my lab was ransacked twice, and then seized by the government as suspected terrorist activity but I was too blinded to see the signs!  I went underground and through various secret donors completed my work for a fourth time.  I hid my drones on various private shuttle flights and waited patiently for the data to start coming in.

At first everything was going exactly as expected, as they approached one another there was a subtle blue shift and as the departed there was a red.  I wanted more though and so I sent them out farther and farther from one another and that’s when everything came crashing down.

None of the data made any sense anymore.  The drones were suddenly impossibly far from each other, then right next to one another. They couldn’t seem to travel in a straight line towards another it was if they thought they were headed towards each other then on the next signal find that they had passed each other or one was headed off into empty space.

Then they started slowing down.  The data showed their engines were running at the same speed, other drones could see the light from their engines, but they weren’t moving as fast as they should have and their internal time stamps were becoming corrupted often being weeks too fast or too slow than they should have been.

It wasn’t until I saw a picture of one of them suddenly being crushed when I realized what had happened.  Most people, when they think of space think of nebula and stars, galaxies and great distant planets, but the truth of it is most of it is black emptiness.  In this darkness with no light to absorb there is no way to see a black hole.

My little drones had flown right into a cluster of these behemoths each one having found a perfect balance pulling at and being pulled by surrounding black holes.

I made a new batch of drones, these equipped with delicate sensors to detect the slightest pull of gravity and sent them out mapping the space around our solar system.

We are surrounded.  There is no danger from them, oh no, they are in perfect balance.  Some of them are large, and some no larger than a penny, but we are surrounded.  It was then I realized that all our great knowledge about the universe was built on mathematical fallacies!  We thought we had mapped out the life of the stars, but it is a lie!  Black holes don’t just suck in matter they bend light itself.  All our constellations, the nebula, they are nothing more than the light of our own sun in its life being bent and refracted back among the black holes until they eventually find their way back to us.  The great white giants are just our own sun whose size and color is being distorted like a fish under rippling water.  All of our great assumptions built up about life in the universe were nothing more than bad math built upon an improvable assumption to give us the illusion of superiority, of being learned!  Those red shifts we see are just the result of the black holes stretching our the light as they bend and contort around the large black holes, or as the light is diffused by passing to close to one of the micro black holes.

It worse though.  So much very worse.  You see black holes distort time as well.  We are caught within a bubble of time being bounced and bent all around us keeping our sun forever young while the rest of the universe, vast and untamed, ages and dies all around us.  How many eons have passed the quiet earth by while the rest of the species of the universe grow smarter, while they war and rage against one another?  While their own suns die out?

What might a race who has survived to the very end of the universe do to keep from going quietly in that last night?  Might they learn to navigate the cluster of black holes that have kept us safe and isolated thus far?

And what might such a race do when they arrived in our time locked bubble and find such an ignorant and undeveloped species as ourselves.  A species that stands between them and a sun kept forever young locked in time?  What did man do to undeveloped species it encountered on its unending march of progress?

The government knew, they tried to stop me from finding out to let me live out my life in comfort and peace, but now my devices have let me see the truth too.  The north star isn’t a star at all.

We thought we were so smart, but in the end all our great knowledge was built on the belief that one equaled two.

When 1 = 2