Temporal Exploring 101 - Cultural Immersion

II.3 A Fogg moment

"You can accompany Mira and me to visit Brandon Kippler's seminar talk this afternoon, Catherine," Sara told me. "Other than the three of us, there will be nobody else to attend his talk. I think you have not met Brandon before, have you? He is going to present his new results on the behavior of the Dursnip field in the neighborhood of a rotating black hole. The Srivenhurst problem, as it is called. It will probably be a bit over your head, but interesting for you nonetheless." She turned towards Natty. "Actually, you may come along as well if you like, Natalie. I am sure it will be a welcome diversion from being cooped up in this apartment, for all of us."

Of course, both Natty and I were eager to go.

Having spent the last two days in Sara's apartment, we were all beginning to suffer from a mild version of cabin fever. In order to avoid questions being asked about my premature return from my first temporal assignment, Sara had decided that she did not want Natty and me to be seen by my classmates or by any other people who might know me. At least not until results of the Deep Search on the Grid would come in.

Brandon Kippler turned out to be a heavyset, broad-shouldered guy, wearing a full beard and exuding an aura of supreme confidence.

I had heard of him, of course, but I had never seen him in person. Last year, he and Sara had chaired the plenary session on temporal physics at the ATR meeting together.

Kippler knew Mira already. Sara introduced me and Natty to him, giving our first names only.

"These are Catherine and Natalie, two students of mine."

Except for Kippler, we all took our seats.

Kippler's talk took about three quarters of an hour. He started out by presenting the system of coupled partial differential equations that described the Dursnip field in the vicinity of a spinning black hole. As he pointed out, those looked rather forbidding, a fact which served as a motivation for him to consider them in the weak field limit and solve them numerically in that approximation.

When he had shown and discussed his results, Sara thanked him and asked if there were any questions.

Mira had a technical question, about a certain feature of the code that had been used to solve the equations. Kippler answered her at length, with a benevolent if somewhat patronizing smile on his face.

I asked him if he planned to continue to investigate that particular problem, to maybe go beyond the weak field limit in some manner. He told us that he had applied for a grant to have a postdoc or a graduate student work on this.

Next, Sara asked him a couple of questions concerning whether or not a weak field approximation made any sense for this particular type of problem. Kippler and Sara had an animated discussion about that for about five minutes, a discussion that went even more over my head than Kippler's original presentation.

When they were done, Sara looked at the rest of us and asked: "Any more questions?"

Natty raised her right hand. "Yes, I have one question if I may."

When Sara nodded, Natty turned towards Kippler. "Why did you choose to take the weak field approximation rather than solve the original set of equations?"

Kippler gave her a condescending smile. He switched back to the slide of his presentation where the full system of coupled partial differential equations was displayed.

"I take it that when you refer to 'the original set of equations', you mean the complete system of the Srivenhurst equations here, young lady?"

Natty nodded. "Yes, those."

Kippler snorted. "You may not be aware of this, but the leading experts of our field have tried their hands at solving the Srivenhurst problem, without success."

Natty frowned. "Those equations do not look that intractable to me, at first glance."

Kippler focused on her, with a look of annoyance or even distaste. The way you might focus on some sort of insect that had just fallen into your bowl of soup.

"I suppose you think that you could solve them analytically, then?" With an ironic bow, he handed her the e-marker pen. "Go ahead, girl. Show us."

Taken aback by his unconcealed hostility, Natty hesitated for a second or two. Then, she accepted the pen and started to write on the e-board.

"Well, given that particular symmetry and boundary conditions, I suppose I would first change to local light-cone coordinates," she began.

Sara and Mira exchanged a worried look.

They did not know it yet, but I could have told them that they were about to witness what my classmates at St. Albert had labeled 'a Fogg moment'. As in, "Oh no! Another Fogg moment!"

That moment when Natty, intrigued by some mathematical problem, stepped up to the blackboard and started to attack it. The problem, not the blackboard.

Typically, her fellow students would roll their eyes or even groan. Which, of course, would never stop her. Natty would be totally oblivious of them, the way she was oblivious of the rest of us, now. I had seen her come up with what appeared to be completely novel proofs of well-known theorems, proofs that neither the teachers nor myself had seen before.

She muttered to herself as she was writing on the e-board. "Now what? A Laplace transform, perhaps? Let's see..."

At one point, she stopped and erased a major part of what she had written.

"No, that's wrong. The contour must be closed in the lower half-plane, of course." With that, she continued to scribble on the board.

"This is going nowhere," Kippler grumbled. He looked at Sara. "We are just wasting our time here."

"Shut up, Brandon." Sara did not even turn to look at him. There was a strange light burning in her eyes. "Just shut up and watch."

If he was offended by her harsh remark, Kippler did not show it. Rather, he followed Sara's advice and watched. Watched as the complicated set of coupled differential equations was being transformed into something much more simple, something beautifully simple.

"Fuck," he muttered, looking stunned. And a few seconds later, again: "Fuck. I can't believe this."

"Ah," Natty breathed. "I knew it. All the non-trivial components can be expressed in terms of generalized Bessel functions, nothing more complicated than that."

Smiling happily, she turned towards her audience. "See?"

"Einstein's eyeteeth!" Kippler exclaimed. "Sara, who is that girl?"

"I told you, Natalie is one of my students." Sara's voice sounded different. In her own way, she had to be just as shocked as Kippler by what we had just witnessed.

"Well, so much for the Srivenhurst problem." He laughed. "You have to get this published, of course. Immediately."

Sara cleared her throat. "We will. Natalie will be registered as a to-be-disclosed-later author of that article, to avoid undue publicity for the time being." She smiled. "I think this will be a good point for us to relocate to my office. I am sure everybody here needs a good strong coffee now."

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A/ N : Well yes, so much for the Srivenhurst problem :-)

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