Chapter 89: Media Interview

The winter holiday break had arrived. Virtually everything would be shut down for ten days and all work would stop, including the recruiting at the factory and Tamara’s engineering teams’ work at both her temporary commercial facility and the APL. In mid-December, Tamara had submitted to the APL leadership her request for approval to build the accelerator she had designed. She hoped for rapid approval so that she’d be able to begin planning its construction soon. This would be a large project and would involve several subprojects. Tamara assumed that she could get federal funding for a portion of it, so she had begun preparing research grant applications to be sent to the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. She would fund the preliminary planning work with a grant from her own foundation.

A major subproject would involve the design and construction of a particle detector and analyzer and she had determined that the best place for doing that work would be at CERN, where their engineers had plenty of experience with detectors. One of her physics “review panel” members from several years ago was a CERN physicist. She had consulted him for advice and he had recommended that she contact CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group. That department could arrange the terms for a collaboration with Tamara’s engineers on the design of a detector. Tamara also knew that she needed to build a much more efficient proton generator.

So before construction could actually begin on the accelerator device itself, there was plenty of additional advance preparation work to be done, including the search for a location to house the device. She needed advice about whether a new building was required or if an existing building could be repurposed.

Many of the Winsberg family traditionally gathered on Christmas Eve day for an early dinner; those who lived within a ninety-minute drive of the Winsberg Seniors’ home generally came, and an exchange of humorous gifts typically occurred then, too. There was a major difference in those attending this year. Barbara wasn’t there; she had gone to Texas with Terence to spend Christmas with his family. That was one expected difference for the people who were gathered this year. But something unexpected by everyone occurred.

After the family had finished exchanging their “gag” gifts and everyone was still laughing at the humor of some of them, Peter came over to Tamara, who had been quite creative in selecting some amusing gifts for other family members.

He went to Tamara and took her hand and she looked at him in amazement as he said, “There’s something more I’d like to do, now, and this time it’s not a gag. A lot of my family is here today and so are Tamara’s parents, who’ve become part of our family too. So I want to make it official.”

How was he able to keep this a secret from me? she wondered.

Peter went on, “Tamara, your coming into my life was the best thing that ever happened to me and you’ve made me a complete person. I’d like us to spend the rest of our lives together...”

Several family members gasped; after the gag gifts, Peter’s proposal was completely unexpected.

“ ... so will you accept this ring to symbolize my proposal for our marriage and can I say it’s a yes?” Peter asked as he showed her the ring he had palmed.

Tamara looked at him with tears in her eyes.

“Absolutely, darling,” she said, standing to embrace him as Winnie squealed in delight.

Peter slipped the ring on her finger as everyone applauded and then the couple was mobbed by the family in congratulation. And to check out the ring. It passed the critical inspection of all the women present.

“When will the wedding be?” Winnie asked, hopping with excitement.

Tamara laughed. “Sweetie, he just asked me. Peter, it’s okay to have the wedding after the spring term is over, right?”

“Sure. And you’re still not wanting a huge wedding, I guess.”

“That’s right; we discussed not planning anything big or elaborate. But how were you able to hide your plans from me, sweetheart? Usually I can feel your emotions and know something’s up.”

Peter chuckled. “When we first did that mind-speak thing, I learned a little about how to keep from broadcasting my emotions. But it’s hard to do with you ‘cause we’re so attuned to each other.”

Tamara was waiting for a quiet time to speak to Greta, and after the hubbub over the engagement had subsided, she got the opportunity. After discovering that she, Peter, and Winnie could speak mind-to-mind—but not always and many times imperfectly—Tamara had tried to teach the ability to her parents with no success. When she tried it with Greta, she got a slight response. So she had tried to come up with a possible theory about how that ability worked and wanted to see what Greta thought of it.

When they were alone, Tamara asked her, “Have you been able to get anywhere with the mind-speak ability?”

“Not really, dear. I get hints of it with Werner and more with you, but I can’t initiate anything; I just seem to be able to, ah, ‘receive,’ I guess you’d say.”

“I’d like to tell you my thoughts about how that ability may work. It must be rooted in nature somehow since there’s no magic involved. I believe that the ability is related to how memory works. Can I go into lecture mode? When I do, it helps me solidify my thoughts.”

“You can, provided you let me stop you for questions,” Greta grinned at her.

“Sure. So first, I did some digging into current neuroscience work on memory and that led me to some recent work on artificial intelligence. A recent theory is that memory is stored as a matrix, kind of like a mosaic. The old idea that particular parts of the brain stores each memory can’t be correct; each memory must be stored in many different parts of the brain. Brain cells die and are replaced all the time and if one or several of them die, the memory would be gone, and that doesn’t happen.

“The work I saw postulates that memory is stored as a matrix, like a hologram. Think of a mosaic with colored tiles. Let’s say you have one, and then you remove all the light blue tiles. You still can see the mosaic’s picture. So there’s this idea that memories are stored in a similar way to how holograms are stored. Holograms are three dimensional pictures of whole objects and in the way they are constructed, every part of the hologram contains the entire image. This is different from normal image storage, where the image is made up from an assembly of a pixel-by-pixel sequence. If you knock out a few pixels, the rest are no longer in registration, so that can destroy the image. Holograms are very different—cut one in half and the whole image is still there. It’s a little blurry, but it’s complete. Memory is most likely similar; each particular memory involves brain cells from different parts of the brain.

“This idea is very important for mind-speak, I think. The message isn’t composed of a stream of words like a phone or email. It’s received kind of like a holographic matrix and is stored in the brain and retrieved just like a memory. And that’s exactly how it feels too—like a memory appears but it isn’t your memory, so you know it’s external. And transmitting like that ensures that the whole thought is received; there are no partial transfers. It’s all there. Am I making sense?”

“Except for the incredible idea that some people have that ability, that makes a lot of sense,” Greta agreed. “But how is that ability possible?”

“Yep, that was my next problem. When I communed, and Winnie and I did together, with the energy being or whatever it was—oh, and I had some additional recent contacts too—I got this idea that I’ve been mulling over. You know the way my paired G-force coils work? How they seem to be coupled?”

“I do. You told me that it’s some kind of entanglement. You said it’s something that quantum mechanics predicts.”

“Yeah. I still don’t know exactly how that works on such a large, macro scale, but it’s simple to see with elementary particles, like electrons. And you know that matter and energy can’t be destroyed, but can be converted back and forth between them.”

“Yes. So you think that mind-speak is a kind of entanglement? How would that work?”

“I knew you were smart, Greta, you picked right up on that. Yep, I think that the energy that motivates everyone’s soul is part of the energy of the universe and is never destroyed. And remember, every atom of every person was a part of the world going back to when this planet formed. And before that, every atom was part of a star. My idea is that many of the fermions—the fundamental particles of matter—have become entangled over the billions of years they’ve existed, and like the energy being, these entangled particles also can assemble into collections of information, seemingly stored in a way like holographic information’s stored. In this way, all of the memories of our ancestors must still exist. But those memories are generic, that is, there’s no individuality attached to a memory.

“How mind-speak works, I think, is because between certain people, they contain enough of these entangled particles which are connected to each other. I’ve begun to believe that true ‘soul-mates’ are people who share enough entangled fermions that it allows the holographic memory from one person to be detected by another. And how the information is shared has to do with the brain structures that my MRI helped discover. So true and effective mind-speak requires a critical mass of shared entangled fermions plus an active limbic system.

“But just think of the myriads of people who have a partial ability—those people who sense that a loved one is in trouble or needs them. Or people who claim that they have the memories of a person who died a hundred years earlier.” Tamara laughed. “So that’s what I’ve figured out. I hope it makes sense. Now I need to figure out how premonition works. I have a feeling that won’t be easy to do.”

“I suppose that your reasoning makes sense. What’s difficult is your initial assumption, but I’ve accepted the proof that what you do is possible. And I certainly agree that keeping that ability secret is essential. The world’s governments aren’t ready to accept people who can communicate mind-to-mind, even if it’s such a limited ability. That’s about all I can think about now; wrapping my head around those ideas is giving me a headache. So to completely change the topic, where’s your new school planning at now?”

“We’ve got the state certificate of approval process under way. The accreditation will come when we begin to get a structure together—things like curricula, staff, school facilities and administration. We have a mailing list of possible student parents drawn from the resort’s mailing list and we’ve encouraged word of mouth publicity too. We can fill the administrator positions with two resort members who have the certifications and we have half of the teachers. We think that we’ll be okay there since the Westphalia Ed School is circulating the job descriptions for the open slots. So far we’re on target to open next fall, using the resort clubhouse and some trailers.”

“That’s good; enough of the serious stuff. Let’s join the others and catch up on the gossip.”

And at another family gathering the following week on New Year’s Eve, Terence proposed to Barbara. The two couples quickly got together and decided that they wanted to have a double wedding and they’d do it at the nudist resort. To Winnie’s delight, both Tamara and Barbara asked her to be their maid of honor.

Then Claire and Greta pulled all of the women aside, and they went off to the family room. Nadine, Angela, Shelly, and Janice joined Tamara, Barbara, and Winnie there.

“You sure you both want a nude wedding? And a double one?” Claire asked and Nadine nodded.

Tamara thought about it for a second. “Oops. Nudist resort. Mom and Dad aren’t into that, right. Mom?”

Nadine nodded as Claire continued, “There are others in the family who aren’t nudists either; you know that, Barbara.”

Barbara responded with an unhappy nod.

“Let me tell you a bit of history,” Greta broke into the conversation. “It’s true that the resort is nudity-mandatory, but there have been occasional weddings at the resort, you know. We have ways to deal with the photography issue and the management relaxes the rule for wedding guests; I suppose you didn’t know that. Of course, the clothed guests would be mingling with the nude folk, so that could be an issue for them.”

“For Wilson and me, that wouldn’t be a problem,” Nadine said. “The two of us are simply too set in our ways and conservative to be naturists ourselves. But we don’t mind if others have their own customs.”

“Mom?” Barbara asked. “You know that neither Tamara nor I want to have a ton of wedding guests. With a double wedding, that automatically almost doubles the guest list...”

“Barbara, my family is just us,” Tamara interrupted. “And we have mostly the same friends too. I don’t know about Terence’s family, though.”

“He’s got three younger sisters and the youngest is now starting as a college freshman. There’s one aunt and uncle on each side, plus his parents and grandparents. And they’re members of this enormous Baptist church; it’s got over 10,000 members. That church organized pickets around all the high schools in the city when they were running the Naked in School Programs there, so the church is violently anti-nudity and so are Terence’s family members. Except his sisters; they’re cool with nudism. So Terence’s parents will sure be pissed. I asked him just after he popped the question about having a nude wedding, before I mentioned it to Tamara, and he’s all for doing it.

“When we visited for Christmas and I met his family, that’s when he came out and told them that he goes to a nudist resort. They almost threw us out of their house then. So he told them to ditch the past; it’s not returning, and start living in the twenty-first century. It got very tense after that so we returned to Maryland two days early. So I’m certain that his family will boycott the wedding. His sisters will definitely come, though. But his parents and grandparents? No way. And I’m sure that not having a Baptist minister do the wedding would be a further insult to them.”

“My family is nominally Catholic,” Tamara said. “Most Haitians are. And many weddings there are in private homes, but the ceremony is also done in the churches. Mom, I remember you doing a few Vodou weddings too.”

“Yes, and we’ve discussed what you wanted to do at your own wedding,” Nadine said. “Now that it’s a joint wedding, do you still want to have some of those traditional Haitian elements?”

“I need to talk to Barbara about that,” Tamara replied. “I like the processional dance, the ribbon ritual, and the broom-jumping ritual.”

The other women wanted to know what those were, while Barbara told her, “I haven’t thought much at all what I wanted in my wedding. I assumed that we’d just do the vows and have a civil rather than a religious ceremony. I wouldn’t mind having Haitian parts in the ceremony—except no animal sacrifices,” she chuckled.

Nadine shook her head. “No Vodou sacrifices. Those are only to invoke the spirits. But Tamara and I were thinking about incorporating the customs she mentioned. We like to dance down the aisle in the bridal party entrance. Usually the bride and bridesmaids come up with a unique walking choreography, a dance-step walk to the music and the wedding party winds up forming a corridor for the bride to walk through as everyone sways to the music. It marks the joyful occasion and we Haitians love to dance.”

Barbara was smiling broadly. “I just love that idea! What else do you do?”

The other women were smiling too.

“I mentioned the ribbon ritual,” Tamara said. “I always loved watching that. Just before the vows are recited, the maid of honor and best man use a ribbon to bind the couple’s hands together to symbolize their being joined together and their promise to support each other throughout their marriage. And there’s a Haitian folk custom called ‘Jumping the Broom.’ After their vows are exchanged, the couple jumps over a broom. That’s meant to represent their commitment to overcoming any obstacles they face in marriage and to work together to build their new life as a couple. I asked Peter about us doing those rituals and he wants to do them.”

Everyone was excited by Tamara’s description of those rituals and then their discussion turned to how it would work with two couples involved.

While they were discussing how to adapt the wedding elements into a joint plan, Tamara laughed. “You know, it looks like I just can’t get away from Jane Austen’s literary influence. In her novel Pride and Prejudice, she arranged a double wedding for two of her characters—the Bennett sisters, Jane and Elizabeth. It’s really funny.”

Barbara chuckled. “You know they made that into a zombie movie? In it the Elizabeth character is also a martial arts expert...”

“Barbara? Really?” Tamara asked, laughing. “You’re a fan of that ... um ... I won’t say garbage, but...”

“Hey. Not a fan. I saw it with some friends when I was, um, 13 years old at a sleep-over party when I was in middle school,” Barbara replied. “It wasn’t so good, as I recall. A chick-flick. Some dumb, campy humor. But I thought that the Elizabeth character was way cool so when Peter asked to take martial arts after his awful Program experience, I was all for doing it with him.”

“You didn’t mention that you also wanted to make sure that Peter didn’t get hurt,” Claire grinned at her.

Barbara nodded, “Yeah, that too.”

“While you’re talking about famous double weddings, do you know who also had a joint wedding?” Angie chuckled. “Just because I know about this. Famous advice columnists. The creators of the ‘Dear Abby’ and ‘Ask Ann Landers’ columns were actually twin sisters, and they had a double wedding. My mom loved those columns and got me to start reading them.”

Barbara and Tamara had plenty of questions to ask about the preparations for the wedding and were happy for all the information and advice that they received.

Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland: two months later

In mid-February, a number of important things happened, very close together. First, the APL management had given the approval to begin planning work on the G-force collider and had selected an area on their property to build a structure to house it. The building wouldn’t need to be elaborate; just a weatherproof steel-frame skeleton with metal curtain walls would suffice; interior offices and labs could be built as free-standing structures inside the outer building.

Second, Tamara learned that her paper to Nature had been fast-tracked and would be published before the end of the month and her engineering paper was getting similar treatment. And third, she had gotten favorable news from both federal granting agencies that her proposal had been advanced in the review process and that both agencies’ review panels wanted to schedule a local site visit to determine whether the device was feasible to build. They also wanted to confirm that her proof-of-concept cyclotron device could perform as her grant application had claimed.