"Break! Judges call? I got two red! That is five red!" I heard my instructor yelling something, but he seemed too far away and seemed to be getting further and further away. Then there was no longer any light at the end of the tunnel.
The next thing I knew I was back home in my study looking at my whiteboard. There were tensor equations scribbled all over it. In the middle was an equation written explaining that spacetime curvature is proportional to energy per volume, which is proportional to mass times the speed of light squared divided by volume, which is proportional to electricity and magnetism divided by volume.
I had been writing this equation in various ways since undergraduate school and never could figure out how to change the proportionality symbols to equal signs. Nobody could. Einstein died trying, as have many others. The equation is a very simple explanation of the Holy Grail of physics. Einstein's General Relativity (GR) states that space and time or spacetime is curved due to energy. Energy and mass are interchangeable just by multiplying by the speed of light squared, c2. So, the curvature of spacetime is proportional to the speed of light in a way. Also, electricity and magnetism are forms of energy, somehow. Electromagnetic forces are most likely the cause of matter having form and in some way the cause of gravity where gravity is the curvature (sort of). The equation means that the spacetime is curved due to the amount of energy in a given volume or that a given curved spacetime causes a certain energy per volume. Each of these phenomena causes the other and this energy per volume can exist in many forms.
There was something else on the whiteboard that really caught my attention. On the bottom right hand corner of the board was the equation explaining that spacetime curvature is defined as the square root of stuff times electricity and magnetism divided by volume.
Of course, both of these equations were written in the Einstein tensor notation so they really didn't look like this. The actual equations take nothing short of years in graduate school sweating over tensor mathematics and things called Ricci tensors, stress-energy tensors, spacetime metrics, and the Cosmological Constant just to be able to read. Understanding them takes even longer. But, this is the general idea of what my lucidly dreamt whiteboard stated. Most importantly was that the proportionality symbol was changed not only to an equal sign but a "defined as sign," meaning that the equation was a fundamental equation describing the universe. After this equation was one that stated that stuff is "defined as" being equal to . . .
"Anson can you hear me?" Both of my instructors were yelling in my face and shaking me and I smelled something God-awful as I startled to consciousness.
"What happened!" I jumped up and felt a searing pain in my right side.
"Easy." Someone that I can only assume was the tournament paramedic started shining a light in my eyes. "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, let me up."
"Hold still, Anson, and let him check you out," one of my instructors said. My instructors are a husband and wife team. She is usually more verbally sympathetic.
I didn't care what the medic did. My mind was still swimming with the tensor math on the whiteboard in my dream and I wanted to read it more closely. I smelled that awful smell again and startled completely to this time.
"Okay, okay. I'm awake!"
"Where are you hurt?" the medic asked.
"I have at least two broken ribs on my right side, maybe more. Did I win?"
The husband member of my instructor duo laughed. "You got him with the ugliest spinning back kick I have ever seen in my life. But you won!"
"Cool. Help me up." I rolled up very slowly. The crowd cheered. "I'm going to change. Could somebody pick up my award and then drive me to the nearest emergency room?"
I didn't expect that a doctor could do anything for me other than prescribe some good painkillers. Doctors, or as I prefer to call them, physicians, databases, quacks, etc., haven't cured anything, not one damn thing, since polio, which was way before I was born. Come to think of it, they didn't even come up with a cure for that; they simply committed something akin to genocide on the poliovirus.
I'm not completely sure why the quacks haven't gotten anywhere over the last sixty years, though it's probably because they don't have to take enough physics and math in school. A physician depends on the miracle of the human body's ability to heal and adapt. Any good physicist or engineer will tell you, if you have a broken support strut (a bone) you either weld that damn thing back together or you replace it. You sure don't sit around and wait for it to fix itself in six weeks or so. The way the quacks deal with a more serious illness is nothing short of magic or alchemy. Whatever it is, it sure isn't science! "My magic book says that if you look this way, smell that way, and have stuff coming out your nose then you should take two of these pills a day for ten days while standing on one foot and praying to Hypocrites. If you don't get better in two weeks then come see me again. That'll be a thousand dollars please." No way that's science. The guy who invented the pill may be a scientist, but not the guy administering it.
An example of the physician's incompetence is aging. Why we still grow old and die is beyond me. All of us are infected with a genetic disorder that causes our genes to break down and start producing "old" cells or cells that are mutated to create the symptoms of old age. This process is either caused by cosmic rays, ultraviolet rays, or other radiation exposure, or maybe some chemical mishap within our own bodies. Maybe it is a statistics problem. But whatever the cause, it is a disease we're all born with.
Physicians accept this as a natural thing because they simply won't do their homework and solve the problem. Fix the damn broken genes or replace them! The local university quit letting me teach the beginner level physics classes the pre-med and business students take. The student evaluations claimed I was "too hard" and assigned "too much homework." You get the idea. If the first American in space were still alive today (old age got him), you could ask him if he would've wanted to be on top of several tons of ignited explosives that guys who complained about "too much homework" designed. Maybe I'm cynical because I have had broken bones before.
Jim Daniels, one of my teammates and best friend and student and teacher, all in one, got my stuff together while I changed clothes. I still couldn't shake the weird "punch drunk" dream that I had. I mentioned it to Jim a time or two. I think. I was still a little shaky.
I had to have help getting my shirt over my head. I wished that I'd brought a button-up instead of the pullover. Next we went to the hospital, then back to the hotel though I still don't remember a major portion of the transition.
I do remember one part of the hospital visit that reaffirmed my position on physicians. When it was all over the wizard at the emergency room said, "There isn't really anything we can do for broken ribs. You just have to keep them immobile and let them heal on their own. It should take about six weeks. I'll write you a script for the pain." What a surprise. Fortunately, my insurance covers emergency room visits.
"Hell man, I knew all of that. Why'd I need you? Oh yeah I remember now. You bastards have it lobbied so that you think you are the only people in this country smart enough to administer pain medication. I wish you were in my physics class you . . ." I get irate when I'm in serious pain and dealing with quacks.
"Anson, calm down!" Jim grabbed me and put a nerve hold on me that hurt worse than my ribs. That was his way of telling me to either shut up or he would shut me up. Did I mention that Jim was my friend?