“The 1930s called,” Jason muttered. “They’d like their slide rules back.”
“Sorry,” a voice said from behind him. “I didn’t catch that?”
“Professor!” he cried, jumping at the sound of Lachlan’s voice. Jason’s eyes were wide with surprise. He turned to see Professor Lachlan standing behind him smiling.
“Ah, nothing,” Jason continued, almost dropping his paper. The loose sheets slid in the manila folder and he grabbed at them, catching them before they fell.
The professor was of Asian descent, and Jason had often wondered how a Scottish surname had entered the mix. There had to be quite a story behind that union. A warm smile lit up a kind face. Well, Jason thought, a kind face if you were doing what you were told. Deviate from the norm and Professor Lachlan could be as tyrannical as Joseph Stalin. Ah, that was an exaggeration, he thought, but Jason did wonder if his various professors knew how intimidating they could be with their vast intellects. It seemed decades of lectures to snotty nosed teens had shortened the fuse of everyone on the faculty. Today, though, the professor seemed delighted to see Jason, greeting him with a hearty handshake as though he were catching up with a student from years past.
Jason stood there awkwardly, not sure how to respond. In the background, a teenaged girl rode by on a bicycle as a young guy chased her playfully on roller blades. They called to each other, laughing and smiling. At least someone was enjoying the holiday.
Lachlan pulled a set of keys from his pocket and fiddled with the lock on the door.
“Come in,” he said, stepping into the lobby and punching a key code to disable the alarm. He was holding a cardboard tray with two drinks in styrofoam cups. White plastic lids hid the content. “Mocha Latte, right?”
“Oh,” Jason said, accepting the cup from the professor. “I’m quite fussy, sticking only to high-brow brands like International Roast, but… I’m sure I can make an exception.”
Lachlan grinned.
They walked along the polished wooden floor, past the staircase and over to the professor’s office at the back of the physics lecture hall. Lachlan opened the door and signaled for Jason to step in ahead of him. The office was unusually cramped, being wedged between two lecture halls and was shared with another professor as a prep room.
Jason knew Lachlan had a more luxurious main office on the second floor, one that was spacious, with green palms and brown leather seats, the kind of plush seats with brass buttons pinning the stiff leather in place at regular intervals. He liked that office, it had an air of importance about it, but this room between the lecture halls was little more than a long storage room or a tiny corridor. A mop and bucket wouldn’t have been out of place.
The chairs inside the long room had to be pushed into the desks before he could squeeze past. For such a narrow room, the ceiling was absurdly high, reaching up over thirty feet. The ceiling height matched the lecture halls on either side with their raised, theater seating, and made the prep room seem even more claustrophobic than it already was, as though it were modeled after a deep desert canyon from an old western. The dust on the shelves reinforced that notion.
“Grab a seat,” Lachlan said warmly.
Jason pulled out a desk chair and rolled it back against the narrow window at the far end of the cramped room. He sat between the internal doors that led out to the lecture halls on either side, feeling the warmth of the sun on his back. The chair squeaked as he rocked slightly, settling into the seat. It was an old wooden framed chair, like something from the 1930s, just like the imaginary slide rule he’d ascribed to Professor Lachlan.
“Einstein taught here, you know,” Lachlan continued, taking a seat in a similar chair between the two desks.
The desks were more like waist high work benches, lacking drawers and their finishes were worn and scratched.
“Einstein gave a lecture here in 1948 on how gravity warps space-time. Beforehand, he sat in one of these chairs. No one’s sure which, but like some lost Roman Catholic relic, these chairs are destined to be honored forever. Silly, huh, how even scientists can cling to such irrational, meaningless objects as though they could somehow impart a mystical power the man never had?”
He laughed, adding, “I tried to get rid of them. You wouldn’t believe the backlash I got from the head of faculty. I should have just thrown them in the dump without telling anyone and been done with it, but the Dean is determined that this tiny back room remains pretty much as Einstein saw it in the 40s. I think Einstein would be horrified to see that this room has become a sort of shrine.”
“I think it’s pretty cool,” Jason said, not afraid to contradict Lachlan. He didn’t feel he had to agree with the professor. Lachlan was never one for ass kissers, Jason thought, and he respected those that had confidence in their own convictions. Jason had picked up on this quite early in his time at the university, and the professor’s mature attitude gave him enough leeway to feel he could be himself around the old man. There were no airs or pretenses with Lachlan.
Lachlan smiled.
Jason glanced around the room, trying to imagine Einstein reviewing his notes. The tiles on the ceiling were decaying and probably dated back to well before Einstein’s lecture. Pulley ropes were visible on both walls, connecting with moveable blackboards inside the lecture halls. They were whiteboards now, but Jason could imagine Einstein standing in front of dusty chalkboards, his air of confidence unmistakeable, with his wild hair tossed carelessly to one side. With a stub of chalk in hand he would do battle with the blackboard, defining reality in white strokes hastily buffed against the darkness, revealing secrets hidden since the dawn of the universe.
“Maybe it’s…” Jason ventured, but he stopped mid-sentence, doubting himself.
“No,” Lachlan said, “Go on.”
“I know there’s no authority figures in science, but I’d like to think Einstein would see this tiny room for what it is, an attempt to retain the heart of the times, to capture the spirit of theoretical physics reaching beyond the technological limits of the day. He saw more in the scratchings of chalk on a blackboard than anything we could see until we put telescopes in space. Perhaps he would be pleased to see us learning from that.”
Lachlan smiled warmly, saying, “You’re right, and yet there’s more to Einstein than exotic formulas. His genius, his brilliance lay in seeing the obvious. Some eighteen years before he formulated the theory of relativity, two scientists, Michelson and Morley, demonstrated that the speed of light never varied regardless of motion. All the clues were there, plain for all to see for the best part of two decades, but it took Einstein to put it together, and do you know why?”
“No,” Jason confessed.
“Because everyone else looked to explain away the result. Everyone else became embarrassed by what looked like an inconsistency, a mistake, but not Einstein. For Einstein, inconsistencies were a red flag, the key to unlocking a greater understanding of the universe. For Einstein, the contradiction was the answer. He realized scientists had been asking the wrong question. Many a good idea has been brought low by observations. Einstein understood reality is not subject to our theories, our whims and desires, it is reality that must define them. He started with the assumption that reality was right, it was our thinking that was wrong, and then it was just a case of figuring out the relationship described by reality. I don’t mean to say his reasoning and equations were some blithe, simple step, but the hardest part of formulating his theory was letting go of what he’d previously assumed was true.”