Wick and the Cricket
by Austin P. Torney
Copyright 2012 Austin P. Torney
Smashwords Edition
Wick began this inspiring tale on ToeQuest,
The likes of which may never be seen again,
For it was the rarest of happenings unplanned.
Crick, Kit, Carmel, and LabelWench soon joined in.
It takes place “somewhere/sometime”
In the English countryside.
Chapter 1: The Bamboo Cage
Far from the Many Worlds Pub, on the outskirts of town, a path winds its way into the hills overlooking the lights of the city below. The path terminates on top of a high hill, where several massive flat rocks gather warmth from the sun by day and release the warmth by night. A spring of cool water issues from beneath one of these rocks, giving rise to the pleasant music of water bubbling up from the earth and spilling down a narrow bed of smooth stones. Quaking aspen trees, rustling in the darkness, gather around the spring, where watercress and pepper grass grow in profusion.
It was to this place Wick resorted to sit in the moonlight and open the bamboo cage. It was his intent, to converse with the cricket, to establish once and for all whether the human race was free or not. He needed to know. It was a matter of conscience.
Softly, he crooned the words of his song to the bamboo cage. “Anything your heart desires will come to you.” He strained to see into the cage, but the shadows were far too deep to reveal their contents. “I need my heart’s desire, cricket!” Wick whispered.
The speed of light troubled poor Wick. It seemed like a chain that held the whole of the human race in a spacetime thrall. Wick’s children had learned well the lessons of light speed and of relativity—a determinate universe! His children struggled with such a concept at first, but then embraced it. If the universe were determinate, if all events were ascertained at the moment of the Big Bang, then how could anyone be held responsible for their actions. The universe as a whole held responsibility for all things. There could be neither evil or good. There could only be one truth—namely exactly what was.
And while this idea seemed liberating for his children (We can do what we want! There is no law but one! All things are lawful! The universe has declared it!) Wick felt the pangs of sorrow and of guilt. He did not want to abdicate responsibility for his sins to the universe. He did not want to live in a universe in which all things were lawful. He wanted to live in a universe of limits, a universe that held its occupants accountable for the joy or the sorrow they unleashed. He hope that the cricket might lead him to such a universe.
Yet, while he was a deeply moral man, Wick was also a man of very limited intellect. Who but a fool would confiscate a cricket with the sole intent of asking the insect the greatest mystery of all? Who but a fool would actually anticipate an answer from said cricket? And who but a fool would place said cricket in a bamboo cage with gaps so wide?!
Wick bent over the cage, with the door open. “So cricket! I’m told that the determinate universe was born of two parents—the Constancy of Physical Law in All Reference Frames and the Constancy of the Speed of Light. Which of these two parents must I murder to become free of their tyrant son—the Universe? And how can I free my children, from the pretense of liberty that such a Universe offers them?”
He paused, but there was no answer… not even the occasional chirrup of cricket song inspired by the rapturous cool color of the moonlight. Only silence issued from the cage. The aspens quivered. The water chortled. But no cricket raised its voice in answer.
The rider and horse stood motionless on the hill, as the man knelt in front of the cage, engrossed as he was communing with that which remained hidden within.
The red mare, responding to her rider, stepped closer to the supplicant.
…“Seek not the seeker, seek rather what they sought”, said the rider, by way of introduction.
Wick, like his namesake in ‘The Secret Garden’, knew nature inside and out and could communicate with all the species.
The cricket whispered to him in cricketese:
“Wick, you must be careful what you ask for. Do you wish that your actions of decisions not depend upon what lies before and beneath them, such as your personality, inclinations, memories, learnings, and associations?”
“Well, Cricket, I’m uneasy with determinism.”
“Yes, it sounds like all is set in stone, but it really isn’t; however, know well that the lack of determinism would be of unfounded undetermined actions.”
“That sounds very scary, too; undetermined actions would, well, have no basis behind them. Sounds like randomness.”
There was a silence as this other shoe dropped.
“There are some ways out of this,” the Cricket encouraged. “What do you think they could be?”
“I could learn more things,” said Wick, “and then have a wider range of choices, perhaps choosing differently tomorrow than I would today; but wouldn’t that choice still be determined?”
“Yes, but your life would be richer. What else?”
“Use the learning by tapping into it.”
“Wouldn’t that be automatic?”
“Well, yes, but only if you also had the inclination to learn, plus the learning to ponder responses, for that is what is the difference between just reacting and discovering a more creative solution.”
“I see. Like pausing to consider the scenarios, but isn’t that just a modicum of free will?”
“Yes, but it’s more than we might have had before. But still, we can’t really will that which does the willing, although we can kind of tell it to go off and solve a problem and then get back to us.”
“But all the results will still be dependent on who and what we have become.”
“Yes, but is that so bad? Would you want it any other way?”
“Maybe there is some randomness in the quantum realm, or simply when something happens in nature that is so close that there is no preference or determination, such as 50-50?”
“Could be, but what of that from then on; it still goes as it goes. However, we don’t know enough about the quantum or the brain, yet. But, what would it be that lets events not be determined? And would that mean some strange ‘surprises’?”
“I can predict many reactions from people.”
“Many of us can do that, but, of course, some people are unpredictable, but I mean in a good way.”
“They just know more and get into many diverse areas.”
“True. There’s learning happening again.”
“What if any one of Hitler’s ancestors did even one slight thing differently?”
“Well, if they did, and if they could have, then there would have been no Hitler.”
“Tough stuff to think about. But why shouldn’t all prior events contribute to the next?”
“I don’t have an answer for that? It is tough to ponder and I wish I knew a real way out; it’s a paradox of sorts, but we have whatever we have and that’s the main thing. Life is presented to us all. We must deal with it; we must live it.”
Chapter 2: The Red Mare
The red mare stood motionless and flicked her ears forward in response to the chirruping and rasping sounds coming from the man by the cage. There were two distinctly different intonations, although there only appeared to be one person. Without moving her hooves, the mare arced her elegant neck slightly. Aha, the second insect voice was coming from the cage, for as all her kind, the mare had a basic understanding of all things, although this species of insect was little known in the far north from whence they had journeyed.
The rider, greeting unrequited, sat quiet and observant upon the horse, allowing her mind to follow the thoughts of the trusted creature. There was no immediate danger here and the sight and sound of a fellow being engaged in a seemingly deep philosophical conversation with a species that she had been advised tasted like peanut butter when baked, even better if dipped in chocolate…
This was mildly intriguing. It would do no harm to wait a little longer and observe the outcome of this uncommon conversation…
Chapter 3: The Frozen River
Wick could smell a horse, somewhere behind him, perhaps even a horse and rider. There was no sense of malice in the smells that came softly on the wind, so Wick stared intently at the cricket and the moonlight that washed over the rock. He felt a little bit like someone had been putting words in his mouth.
Determinism? Could that feeling that he was being manipulated also be a sign that the universe was indeed deterministic.
And he felt a slight edge of suspicion that this cricket knew about Hitler. Somehow it didn’t seem right that a cricket should know about one of humankind’s ugliest representatives, especially given the fact that Hitler had died late in April of 1945. How many generations of crickets had come and gone since then? Did crickets have some kind of amazing oral tradition? Is that what they chirped about all night? Hitler? In all his days, Wick had never heard a cricket mention any dead human.
And this cricket seemed to have misunderstood.
Wick was not concerned about the kind of determinism that follows from the consequences of the past. He was fine with that. What troubled him was the structure of the universe. It wasn’t so much Hitler. It was another German. It was Einstein.
“Cricket, I think were talking past one another. I’m not concerned so much about the consequences of our action. I understand that there are certain events which follow as a natural response to what has happened before. That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not even what I call determinism.
“When I use the word determinism, I’m talking about the structure of spacetime, not about the formative nature of past consequences upon the present and future.
“Einstein’s relativistic universe stands like a frozen river. There is no flow. Even the source of this river, the Big Bang, is frozen in place. It has its place in spacetime. That ancient singularity is still there. It exists and remains there eternal and unchanging. And if we were to go back in time, we would see it, just as it unfolded so many billions of years ago. But so too is my birth and all the things I thought were decisions, choices, freedoms. But if Einstein’s universe is the true universe, then there are no decisions, choices or freedoms. All we have is illusory liberty.
“I refuse to believe in such a universe. We are free! There is occasional chaos. The river is not frozen. We are in motion, cricket!”
A slight shift in the wind, and in the energy of the person before her, made the mare and rider aware that their presence had been noted. They awaited an introduction, perhaps, or some further acknowledgment.
Not all beings were able to perceive them, and of those who could, not all were interested in making their acquaintance. The real/surreal aspect of spacetime was troublesome for most humans in this particular universe, although it troubled the mare not in the least.
It was she who had taught her rider about the journey, introducing an entirely new perspective to endurance riding! You just find yourself a time portal and pop on in for a look-see. Some of the finest grazing was to be found on these sojourns… the mare’s thoughts turned to her stomach…
Meanwhile, the rider was was gently reaching out with her mind, trying to get a sense of what the individual before her was contemplating.
There was a great deal of circular energy, a sense of puzzlement, a broad central question, with several asides, impatience, an affirmation of sorts! Although neither horse or rider was fluent in the language of the chirping ones, they had discovered that the energy of time and place often permitted understanding on many levels, independent of language. Empathy? Telepathy? Communication without words, the connection between all things…
What the heck am I doing talking to a cricket?
A chirup answered him that said “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Hello Cricket; how do you know so much?”
“I look back into time with a telescope; I am close to the early days. Its light is just arriving here.”
“And so you saw Hitler and Einstein, too.”
“Yes, and even some ‘I Love Lucy’ episodes.”
“Do we live in a frozen river of such snapshots?”
“I don’t know, but the deep past is arriving. I just write it down.”
“Can we move?”
“It seems so, unless it is really just a living film of frames.”
“What’s between and beneath the living film?”
“You are straining my brain. I just woke up.”
“Let’s take a short break from all this deep thinking. Who are your favorite poets?”
“Percy Shelley, Keats and Lord Byron, for the first explored both science and unveiled the spirit, the second enchanted the senses, and the third revealed the earth’s majesty.”
“Thus, they constitute the eternal golden braid of the romanticism of all life’s things. Any gems I might not know of?”
“Maybe, here’s a fragment by Shelley about a frozen river:”
ON KEATS,
WHO DESIRED THAT ON HIS TOMB
SHOULD BE INSCRIBED—
‘Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.
But, ere the breath that could erase it blew,
Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,
Death, the immortalizing winter, flew
Athwart the stream,—and time’s printless torrent grew
A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name of Adonais!
Wick was getting impatient with the cricket. A telescope that sees into some human past? The cricket would have to be a might smaller for something like that to work, not to mention that light would have to be a might slower.
He jumped from the rock to think for a moment, plucked up a few nice bundles of alfalfa for the horse and a handful of watercress for the rider. He wasn’t sure the rider would like watercress, but that was all he had.
The alfalfa and watercress, he placed on the rock, reserving a few sprigs of watercress for himself, then returned to the cricket.
“Show me your telescope, cricket.”
The cricket looked sheepish.
“Well, I...I...I...I don’t have it with me. I...”
“Didn’t think so.”
“Well, I...”
“Don’t have such a telescope, do you, cricket?”
“Well...no...but telescopes do look into the past.”
“Yes but not to earth’s past, silly cricket. You’d have to be half way across the universe to see earth’s past.”
The cricket’s eyes darted from the moon, to the watercress, to the penetrating eyes of Wick, and back to the moon again. His nervous wings twitched, producing a high pitched squeak that sounded to Wick curiously like cricket flatulence.
“You saw the ‘I Love Lucy’ episodes at the pub, didn’t you? And all this stuff about Hitler and Einstein, your just twittering back snatches of conversation you’ve heard from Robert and Leskey and the others. Come on cricket... come clean...”
“All right there’s no telescope....”
“And the “I Love Lucy—”
“Pub television...”
“And the Einstein...?”
“Max and David... and Farsight... and...”
“And Hitler...?”
“A copy of “Mein Kampf” someone threw into the blackberry bushes at the bottom of the hill...”
“You mean you can read German!!” Wicket was dumbfounded. And the poets...”
“It’s amazing the snatches of poetry you hear when an eclectic bunch of toequesters over do it on the whiskey... Take Austin, for example...”
“So basically nothing you’ve said so far is true...?”
“Well I wouldn’t...”
“Some conscience!” Wick was a bit irritated. “Let me tell you something about light...”
A sound of hooves on the turf caused Wick to turn his head slightly. The horse smell was growing stronger. The mare approached.
He felt no malice from the approaching mare and rider, and now he was fairly certain the rider liked watercress, so he continued his conversation with the cricket, this time in English:
“So you understand English as well?”
“Yes English and German, a little Russian...”
“Can you speak those languages, too?”
“Certainly, my observations at the pub have taught me a great deal!”
“Good, chirping in your language is murder on my lips and its beginning to cause a facial tick in my left eye. Besides I suspect two others are about to join us. I only hope the horse speaks English as well as you do.
“Now, as I was saying, just because light comes to us from the past bringing information about something observed “back then” need not imply that the universe is determinate. Light is only information. It is not the person or thing observed. It is only a signal from the person or thing observed. What the observed subject choses to do from moment to moment, assuming the observed has agency, is really up to him or her.
“But perhaps more importantly, much that goes on in the universe—very, very much—happens in the relative cover of darkness. Shall we disregard such happenings simply because no signal of light disclosed the information of that occurrence to our eyes or our instruments? And setting aside those things that happened under the cover of natural darkness, we must also take into account those things that happen under the cover of an apparent unnatural darkness—the darkness associated with dark matter and dark energy—though given its relative commonness, I suspect this ‘unnatural darkness’ is very much more natural in the observable universe than light is.
“As you probably know, it is considered a matter of fact that well over 95% of all that happens in the universe happens in the dark. Over 95% of what’s real CANNOT BE OBSERVED.”
The cricket pondered Wick’s observation for a moment, as the smell of horse breath and bruised alfalfa drifted across the warm rock through the night air.
“So you’re saying that we need to find a new constant? One that applies to everything in nature that has darkness as a natural property?”
“Yes. The velocity that we attribute to light can be blinding if we afford it more value than it’s worth. We make our theories, we rest on the laurels earned by others, we create our necessities of thought, our a priori givens, and then when the universe refuses to cough up her mysteries based upon what we consider ‘practically law’, we build systems filled with quantum retromotion, dimensions upon dimensions, time paradoxes and quantum foam—the ‘epicycles’ and ‘eccentrics’ of our current theories are every bit as prevalent today as they were back when we believed in Ptolemy’s geocentric universe.
“Perhaps the so-called speed of light is not worth the interferometer it was measured with! This is certainly true if we fail to understand what that mysterious velocity means.
“If light appears to propagate at a constant velocity in relation to all other objects in the universe then one of two things is true. Either light is indeed moving in this mysterious way, or the universe is moving in relation to the light.
“We have not even begun to consider the second possibility. We marched pell mell into the first possibility because we couldn’t bring ourselves to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, the universe is moving!! That there is a spatial axis along which the universe is moving which we have not yet observed or intuited—an orbit of sorts, through a space greater than the one we have heretofore imagined.
“Now if I have properly sensed the thoughts of the horse and rider behind me, they are both of the opinion that time is a navigable medium. But if I am right and the universe is moving, time is no more a navigable medium than is a warm rock or mouthful of watercress. If they are right, then I am the same fool I always was and no harm has been done to the universe. But if I am right, then all four of us are fools together!”
Chapter 4: The Offering
“An offering! This is at least a civilized place for all of the speaking in tongues.”
The rider smiled at her mount’s turn of phrase. For a creature that understood far more about the workings of space and time than herself, the horse was most honest and direct, particularly in matters culinary and tactile.
An interesting turn of events. The audible flow between the man and the cricket had transitioned to English, an open invitation to participate. She gave the mare permission to approach and partake of the gifts, unshod hooves making but slight impression and sound on the turf.
They were at the periphery of man and cricket, her horse keeping the rock between the beings and herself, while affording easy access to the fresh greens.
“Alfalfa! My favorite! And Nasturtiums!” The horse, so patient in other matters, lipped up a large mouthful of the grass and most of the watercress.
“Rather spicy in this place,” she conveyed to her rider.
“Thanks, Caramel, I believe the cress was intended for me, but glad you’re enjoying it. It may cause you a bit of grief later, but this small bit should do no harm.”
“Sorry”, the mare mumbled with her mouth full, “here, you want some too?” She picked up the remaining cress and turned her flexible neck back in the direction of the rider’s knee.
“Quite alright. Well maybe just this sprig that you haven’t managed to drool on, you intergalactic glutton. It appears that our hosts are of the opinion that we are most likely just figments of their imagination. Which in all probability is as a good a theory as many that abound. Shall we join in, now that you have partaken of their offering on our behalf?”
Suddenly, the mare’s head shot up, ears pricked forward in her ‘far-seeing stance’. “Sorry to eat and run, but we have to get out of here, pronto! There is a shift happening at the time portal and the others are trying to tell me something. There’s something happening back on our resident timeline. Hang on!”
“But can we find this place, these beings again?” the rider asked the horse.
“I knew you’d ask, as intrigued as you are by such mysteries! I’ve already tagged their thought patterns. Unless they actively seek to avoid detection, we’ll be able to rejoin them. Aren’t I a good horse?”
“Simply the best, Caramel.”
As her horse performed a 180 degree rollback, and accelerated to 40 km/hr in three strides, the rider gave a wave and a nod to the man and the cricket.
“Thank you, and I’ll be back”, she said, before they were lost to view.
Chapter 5: The Ptolemic Will
“Hi, Wick,” chirped the cricket. “Yes, My ‘telescope’ was just my looking at some Hubble photos on the internet. The internet’s data as well as all libraries and books are an extension of my mind.”
“Interesting, that mind and knowledge are not merely of the internal.”
“Yes, I can’t keep everything in my internal memory, so I often dip into the vast external memory and knowledge.”
“It’s another storage medium that supplements the brain. So, what’s new?”
“Well, not New York, for that is old now.”
“What’s old, then?”
“Ptolemic type ideas such as that the sun and the other planets revolved around the Earth.”
“Yes, they had to do quite a reversal on that one.”
“Such, too, as your reversal of light to be no longer moving. This reversal approach is a good way to produce and examine new ideas.”
“What other ways are there?”
“Well, one can take two separate thoughts and combine them into a new thought, such as the quantum realm plus that of classical biology could be the secret of life—the élan vital.”
“You read that in another thread on ToeQuest.”
“Like, I say, my little cricket brain plus the world’s knowledge is what I am, for that is what I amount to in the end result of my actions.”
“Why are you wearing a red plaid shirt with green striped pants?”
“We don’t have color vision—no need to evolve it.”
“But you can see patterns. Plaid with stripes?”
“I got dressed in the dark. We come out after the fireflies have gone to bed.”
“Ah, you only work the night shift; sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, it’s tough work, but it’s only for three seasons, and the summer nights are rather short.”
“Well, that’s not a bad job. What does ‘Katy did it’ mean that you all seem to say.”
“I shouldn’t really gossip, so I won’t.”
“And towards the end of autumn, I only hear ‘Ka—’”
“We are so cold and shivering that that’s all we can say.”
“What other reversals might we make?”
“Well, to continue the Ptolemic one a bit deeper, why was it that they all wanted Earth to be the center of not just the solar system but also of the universe?”
“They saw themselves from only their one point of view.”
“Yes, and while we are presumably rare, the universe is a big place and is mostly of stuff that is not us.”
“Um, mammals, and, er, insects and all life are not the center and purpose of the universe?”
“Well, we don’t know, but that’s what comes out of the reversal. Of course, not all reversals are appropriate. However, in considering the species, we are not really the Kings of the Earth either. Nor were the dinosaurs.”
“What was/is?”
“Bacteria, for we need them, but they don’t need us, and they were among the first and foremost of life. We would die in two minutes without them. Plus, they labored for two billion years to make most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, as well as many of the carbohydrates.”
“They do seem so important as well as long lived.”
“Some of them are rather indestructible. They can even gorge on plutonium, the deadliest substance ever known.”
“Yikes!”
“So, what are you working on now?”
“A quantum computer, for then I can follow all paths at once.”
“That could be how the brain works.”
“I know, but my brain is small and I need help, for the internet is too large for me to sort out all the boloney.”
“GOOD LUCK!”
“Not so loud—you may disrupt the quantum state.”
“ok”.
Wick weighed what the cricket seemed to be saying, then decided to alter course a bit:
“Perhaps, the universe isn’t about anything living. I mean why should we assume that bacteria or any organism is ‘king’. I am of the opinion that law is king. I mean think about it. We are sitting here on a rock warmed by a sun and that sun is a few billion years old. But neither you or I matter at all to the rock or the sun, we are simply come to this point of the universe at this time to sit here and talk. But were it not for specific laws, the existing rules of order that established the sun which warmed the rock, the moon which now brings us light, the cress in the nearby stream, you and I would likely not be having this conversation.
“If we are here, talking together, we are here because the law has brought us here. The question I’m trying to understand is this: Is free will sustained by universal law, or is it only a ruse—an imaginary prison that puts on the pretty face of liberty while holding all in chains. If the free will is a ‘legal status’ in this universe, then it must be at least partially indeterminate. If free will is not a ‘legal status’, then determinism is the law and all of us stand at the beckoned whim of spacetime.”
The cricket thought for a moment, trying to reestablish the quantum state Wick had disrupted with his outburst, then asked, “Does this mean that you can imagine a universe in which there are no humans or ‘thinking’ beings.?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you are not of the opinion that God created this universe for the express pleasure of man?”
“I don’t currently find that particular question interesting. But if God did create the universe, I’m interested in knowing whether He created a universe of freedom, or a universe of constraint. Perhaps I even wonder if God was free to create the universe or was that creation a universal imperative. I would ask the same question even if there was no God. In other words, assuming there is no God, is the universe required to look in an already determined way tomorrow? Does that predetermined configuration of the universe already exist? Or will that configuration be a universal surprise?”
“I like to think it won’t be too surprising.”
“Why?”
“Because I want the sun to rise soon... I’m getting cold... And if the universe were to reconfigure in a surprising way, tomorrow there might be no sun.”
“That’s not the kind of surprise I mean. I’m talking about the little things… whether the sunrise will be orange and magenta, or whether it will be all shot through with gold, or whether it will be a snowy, sun-obscured day. I trust there can be a supreme law without necessarily implying constraint. Children play soccer, for instance, in accordance with a set of rules, and the rules maintain order in the game, but the rules do not determine the direction the ball goes at every moment of the game. The rules are a framework within which the game flows. But the game flows nonetheless. The rules do not make the game determinate. If they did, no one would play... no one would watch.
“Am I making sense, cricket?”
…The mare stepped through the portal with caution, time and space having moved since her last visit. She looked above her, at the placement of the moon and stars; this appeared to be the correct locale. She had yet to discern the cricket and Wick and wondered if they lingered still.
She slowed her breath and listened, reluctant to leave herself vulnerable by using her talent of mind touching, alone as she was at present. Ah yes, they were in discourse by yonder stream near the big rock. The mare approached on silent hooves taking in the new course of the conversation and making her appearance just as Wick inquired, “Am I making sense, cricket?”
Sensing her approach, Wick intoned, “Greetings, Caramel. That is your name, is it not? Why are you come alone?”
“My companion is on our resident timeline, taking her rest. She believes me to be in the stable yard with the others, enjoying our hay and resting likewise. Might I interpose that there is both constraint and freedom? There are the constraints of the certain natural laws that you are only just beginning to comprehend your relationship to and within. Still, there is much freedom of choice, many which are available to each being or form.” The mare spoke English quite plainly in a low and slightly husky tone.
“And while we are at it, perhaps you might enlighten me why the concept of a teleporting equine is any harder to accept than a pub-crawling, multi-linguist cricket”, she added as she settled in to a more comfortable stance, resting her hind leg.
Wick almost felt that the mare was testing him. This was quite irregular.
“Come cold cricket,” suggested the mare. “Jump up on my my back and warm yourself. If I must leave for any reason, I shall give you sufficient notice of my departure.”
“Now where were we?”
“Hi Crick,” said Wick. “Did I wake you?”
“No, I’m just having trouble getting up from this heavy bed gravity.”
“Well, you’re counteracting the gravity of the entire earth to get up out of bed.”
“Hey, ya. I’m pretty strong, aren’t I?”
“Yes, in a way, but you did get up rather easily and so perhaps gravity is rather feeble.”
“Oh, well maybe it is that matter is very lightweight compared to how big it looks since all is mostly empty space. Thus, gravity doesn’t have to be so powerful.”
“True, a lucky thing for us, I guess, plus some entities are massless anyway.”
“Is there some extra bed gravity that makes it really hard to get up on some days?”
“No, that’s just a way of putting that it’s hard to move when one is still groggy.”
“I have to pick out some shirts to wear. Can you shine your flashlight so I can get a better look?”
“Sure, I’m pointing it to your collection of shirts.”
“Ok, let’s see. Oh, ugh, not that one. Hmmm, just wore this one. Oh, there’s a spot on this one. Oh, wore a similar color yesterday. Ah, here’s some good ones all about the same. Ill just close my eyes and pick one. Doesn’t matter which.”
“What was that ‘ugh’ about?”
“Oh, that’s all that a part of my nonverbal side of my brain could get out. It means ‘no’. It didn’t really tell me the details. I’m just saving that shirt for Halloween, I suppose, or I’d throw it in the trash.”
“Did you use free will to pick out a shirt, then?”
“No, but I used free choice from what I know and from what shirts were available. One cannot will that which does the willing.”
“How come?”
“The ‘will’ happens subconsciously, during brain analysis that we are not privy to.”
“Not privy?”
“Well, it’s just that the result is not available until the brain completes its analysis, that’s all, but when it’s mostly done, it gives us a peek at the result. We can still veto it, using a higher brain, if we have one and we pause to use it. This is called ‘free won’t’.”
“So, perhaps a lessor simpleton brain area says to do something and so this surfaces on the mind in consciousness, as usual, but then some kind of global review says ‘nope’?”
“Something like that.”
“But isn’t this ‘veto’ thing still determined by your brain and not really free will?”
“Yes, but it makes us think that our will is free.”
“Can we predict the outcome of a soccer game?”
“Maybe in theory, but in practice there would be 10**100000 calculations, so, we can never know the future. Life would be totally boring if we could know all of the outcomes.”
“What if we videotaped the Super Bowl, learned the score somehow, and then watched it later?”
“That’s different, plus knowing the outcome might take some of the excitement out of it.”
“So, what is the light that we see?”
“It’s the visible part of the wide electromagnetic spectrum. The non-visible contains x-rays, ultraviolet and all that other great stuff that gets used for something.”
“How do electromagnetic waves get someplace?”
“They are a self-renewing disturbance of electrical begetting magnetic begetting electrical… This discovery doomed the ‘required’ aether medium, but, ironically, electromagnetic waves are a kind of aether in themselves.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I Google.”
“There is a lot of junk out on the internet.”
“I know, so I just use stuff that has been proved. For example, although quantum mechanics sounds weird and counterintuitive, they’ve used its principles to manufacture stuff that works great, so I believe in it.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“I have some interviews with some blind dates.”
“Will that ‘ugh’ first impression thing guide you?”
“Yes, I hope so.”
“You know cricket, sometimes we take the most obvious things for granted. Take the horse you’ve been sleeping on. Here you and I have been talking and we have left poor Caramel out of the whole exchange. I’d be interested, Caramel in what you have to say, but I must say that what you think you did, and what you did seem completely different to the two of us.
“For instance, you thought you went through a time portal, but what I saw was you galloping (and a might slower than you thought) over the hill. There was no portal, no vanishing act, and your rider, I think is lying asleep in beneath one of the aspens over there. I still hold that time is not a navigable medium. People might think it is, they might convince themselves it is, but time is none of that.”
Caramel looked a bit taken aback, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. I maneuver my way through time as a matter of course. Its what I do!”
“Come with me, Caramel. Let me show you what I mean.”
Wick jumped from the rock and made his way along the stream to the stand of aspens with Caramel behind him and the cricket riding on the mare’s back. The leaves trembled on the dawning air, which shimmered with a silvery mist. Wick carefully laced his way through tall nettles and several clumps of leathery looking mushrooms until he finally found what he was looking for.
There in the grass lay the rider, sleeping in a bed of dewy grass, breathing deep and steady.
“You see, Caramel, I watched the whole thing. You were here all the time. You never left us. Now I’m not saying that you’re an untruthful horse. I’m only saying that what you perceive and what I perceive are different things. To date I have never seen a time traveler. I doubt I ever will. I don’t think the universe permits such motion.”
The cricket looked down at the sleeping rider.
“By the way, Cricket,” Wick added, “Most scientists describe light as anything that moves at the so-called speed of light. That includes all electromagnetic effects—radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma ray--they are all light. They all travel at the velocity ‘c. What’s more, there are many animals which see beyond the “visible” spectrum. Snakes for instance see in the infrared spectrum and certain birds see in the ultraviolet spectrum. You are another example. Visible light for you includes primarily the spectrum of green and ultraviolet. Most other kinds of light are not well understood by you, which is partly why you’re having so much trouble with your clothes. Talking about light as if it were only that light in the visible spectrum is very misleading. We classify a phenomenon as light because of its behavior, not because of how it is perceived by various species. The peculiar behavior of all light has to do with the way it moves. Light moves through space at the assumed velocity ‘c’ in relation to all other things.
“What’s more, you should not deceive yourself into thinking we know what light is. We don’t. We do a pretty good job describing its behavior in terms of motion, speed, mass, neutrality, etc. But that is like describing a man by his motion, speed, mass and neutrality. We can have done that and still fail to understand what the man is. We know almost nothing about what light really is. If anyone tells you otherwise, he has allowed arrogance to blind him to his blindness.”
“Visible light is the rainbow that a species can detect among all the other frequencies,” said Crick.
“Other frequencies may be detected, too, but don’t show up as visual.”
“Yes, we both have a motion detector that lets us duck out of the way of things like a diving bird, but in crickets this is an even better one, as it has to be.”
“How few photons can we see?”
“Humans can even make something out of about 3-5 photons?”
“Why is the speed of light the constant ‘c’?”
“That’s how fast protons spin, so that’s the speed that photons are thrown off at.”
“How were your blind dates? Did you have to go out with them as soon as you met them?”
“No, they were actually blind and could not see.”
“Is this OK?”
“Of course, I am fair to all, but I must say, that, um, they will never be able to see the messes that I might make around the house.”
“And so they couldn’t nag you to clean up? But they could feel around for the messes and then ask you to tidy up.”
“Well, I told them that I was deaf.”
“You wouldn’t do that, and neither would Austin!”
“I know, but this is just a story. You do know about how many marriages don’t work out.”
“Sure.”
“Well, this would be the perfect marriage since I couldn’t hear what she says to do and she would mostly not know about my messes.”
“Not to mention that she could hear you and then have to take all direction from you. Oh, Crick!”
“Um, you’re right. I’ll tell her the truth and we’ll make it work. I’ll be neat and we’ll converse both ways.”