Chapter 39

February 8, 1978

Snow is a rarity in Oklahoma City. It doesn’t take much snow on the ground to bring ‘the world’ to a halt. It’s a result of not having salt trucks, or snow removal equipment. Unfortunately, it’s seldom just snow, alone. It’s often preceded by drizzle, rain, or sleet. If the ground is cold enough for the snow to stick, it’s cold enough for water to freeze. The result is ice covered by snow.

The primary hazard of that kind of weather isn’t trip and fall accidents - although quite a few people slip and break bones - it’s the roads where the real danger lies. Put people who might drive on snow once every year or so behind the wheel of a car, and you have a recipe for an unparalleled number of car crashes.

Spot a snowflake on the ground, and schools will do the smart thing and close for the day. Businesses usually follow suit. The emergency responders and critical employees don’t have much of a choice. They have to go to work. One group of people who have to work, are those associated with providing essential services on a college campus. Thousands of students live in the dorms. They eat in the school cafeterias. Walkways have to be cleared, food has to be provided, and security has to be in place.

The result is that a campus can be a good place to be during inclement weather, such as a snowstorm. The libraries are open, the cafeterias are available, they play movies for entertainment in the theaters, and people go out and play in the snow.

Benny grabbed his chemistry book, and headed to the campus. He walked since the distance wasn’t far. It was actually a closer walk from his home to the science building than the walk from his parents’ home to the high school. There were others walking around going from one place to another. They were in pairs, groups of threes, and even larger groups. Benny was walking alone, but with a confident stride which made him stand out as someone who knew where he was headed.

“Hey! You! The guy with the red scarf around your neck.”

It took Benny a second to realize he was the guy wearing a red scarf around his neck. He stopped and looked around. A couple of bored people were looking at him. They were hoping to find something entertaining.

“Are you headed towards a party or something?”

“No. The library.”

“Never mind.”

Benny reached the library, and slowly walked along the rows of books, taking them in.

While Google may have changed the way that people accessed data, there was nothing like standing in the middle of the shelves of a large library. It was only here that one could truly appreciate the amount of effort that humanity had spent to develop to this level of civilization. Here were the physical manifestations of that effort, represented in thousands and thousands of books written by people trying to pass on some little piece of knowledge or wisdom to others.

Wisdom was supposed to have an ancient aged feeling to it. Benny smelled the air, taking in the scent of old musty books. The entire room smelled old. The books, some with old tattered cloth covered bindings, looked old with tattered and dogeared pages. A shiver went through Benny’s body while standing there.

He wandered over to the chemistry section, grabbed a book and took a seat where he wouldn’t be disturbed. Taking a deep breath, he opened the book and began to read. He was fortunate in his choice of book. The author had a good way of describing the concepts. Benny was pulled into the world created by the author.

Many people when reading non-fiction material with the intent to learn something make notes. If the book is theirs, they may underline important sentences, scribble commentaries in the margin, dog ear a page so that it can be found, and add various symbols marking things as important or opaque. If it isn’t their book, they might grab a pad of paper and make copious notes, copying whole paragraphs, noting comments, and ideas.

Benny didn’t do any of that. To him, just the idea of marking up book was the same was spraying graffiti in an art museum. It was an act that covered up and obscured the true pure art that was the whole purpose of the museum. He wanted nothing between him and the words on the page.

Benny didn’t learn things the same way as others. For Benny, learning was just a way of enlarging the world of ideas in which he wanted to live. He would take in a fact and integrate it into his world, making the fact a part of it. He would find where it best fit in, and how it modified the entire world, just through its existence. He didn’t care where the fact or idea came from. The original author was irrelevant. One doesn’t create a world of this kind for fame. It’s the beauty and the ability to add to that beauty that draws one to visit, over and over.

For Benny, this world wasn’t an abstract immaterial place, but was just as real as the physical world is to most people. He could walk through it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, taste it, and see it. He didn’t see himself as the creator of this world, but as its caretaker. It was up to him to wander through it, seeking out weak spots and places where things were tangled. He was to add material to strengthen the weak spots, and rearrange what was there to bring order to the tangles.

The most difficult times were when Benny walked off the known parts of the world to where everything was unformed. When he came across one while just taking a relaxing walk through his world, he would scream out in frustration that his world had such an ugly boundary; for that was where the nice orderly and peaceful world of his, broke down into a chaos of malformed half made things.

Finding the right book allowed him to meander through his world until reaching a boundary. There he could use what was in the book to bring order out of the chaos, to bring more beauty into existence, and make his world a bigger better place. It took time to turn chaos into order, lots of time.

Time in his world had a completely different meaning than it did in the physical world. He could walk miles though his world in seconds. In fact, his world supported teleportation. He could spend days appreciating some particularly intricate and delicate feature of his world such as the space of singularities. He was fascinated that jumps to infinity could encompass such subtleties in how they made that leap.

Today he was visiting the part of his world that was chemistry. Walking with his guidebook, the book he had taken from one of the library’s shelves in hand, he strolled past the simple playground of multidimensional teeter-totters for chemical balances. He paused at the Molecular Ball Room, a place where chemical reactions occurred in a never ending dance with exchanges of partners and transformations from one molecule to another. It was a dark room with the atoms shining a soft silver giving definition to the molecules of which they were a part. Reactions were accompanied by flashes of light, small changes in the density of the blackness, or changes in speed of the resulting molecules representing that energy and momentum had to be conserved.

From there he went through the titration room. It was a room full of test tubes. In each test tube, a drama was being played out. Free molecules were bumping into other molecules creating a reaction. The resulting molecule would slowly float to the bottom of the test tube like a snowflake in a snow storm to join others of its kind. Then it would end and start all over again. These molecules had labels on them like badges with names.

To a certain extent, Benny didn’t like this part of his world as much as he loved the area of mathematics. That part of his world was light, ephemeral, delicate, and glowed with a kind of beauty that didn’t exist in the physical world. The part of the world in which chemistry resided, was much too like the physical world he despised. While the individual dances were intricate, the overall impact seemed somewhat harsh. It was a region where things were in a constant state of transformation, moving from one form to another. Molecules being created and then coming apart, releasing or consuming energy in the process.

He could understand why some people might find this part of his world fascinating. It was like watching a dance of sorts with the dancers making intricate movements and rhythms, even while they were undergoing costume changes. He envisioned a crowd of chemists watching the performance like they were at a ballet.

He glanced down at his guidebook and headed to the next part of this world. It was the energy space where the energy balances of chemical reactions played out their dramas. It was like watching tightrope walkers traversing an incredibly complex web of tightropes that went from one height to another. Two walkers collide, and are bounced up or down from one tightrope to another. Yet he knew by watching, that he was seeing only one aspect of this display. There were millions of tightrope walkers covering all of the tightropes who were banging and slamming into each other. Some sped up and others slowed down. Directions were changed. Energy and momentum were conserved or expended. That speed of motion along the tightrope was a measure of kinetic energy. And when one of those tightrope walkers slammed into a support, it either dropped off some of its energy, or absorbed some.

Only the fact that he could project some of the mathematical part of his world onto this space made it understandable to him. It was living statistics. It was only through the lens of statistics that he could fully appreciate what was happening here. He had not yet stumbled across the name Gibbs Free Energy in his guidebook, to allow him to name what he could see; but he could see it, and he could understand it.

How big was this world of his? That was impossible to say. At times a place might seem infinitesimally small, and then explode in size to seem infinitely large. It didn’t matter to Benny, with just a thought he could move to anywhere in this world instantaneously. Still, he occasionally would pick up a guidebook and wander through areas he already knew. Sometimes - though not very often - the guidebook would point out some underlying feature that he had missed and suddenly something that had been seemingly simple would demonstrate that it was exceptionally complex. He reveled in those moments, finding that he was understanding more about his world. The more he understood, the more he appreciated the beauty of it

The guidebook was taking him to the electronic structure and periodic properties of atoms. This was territory that was new in this pass through life, but this region was not empty or totally unstructured. In his first pass through life, he touched upon the subject enough to have established a rough outline to the world. He knew Maxwell’s equations and Schrodinger’s equations, not as a physicist, but as a mathematician. He could visualize their solutions under various boundary conditions.

For most of the chapter, his guidebook frustrated him. It was light on details and was mostly informally descriptive rather than providing the precise and factual details necessary to grow his world. Still, he followed the guidebook paragraph by paragraph, looking at what was in his world and comparing what he could see with the pathetic description of it in his book. He trudged through a whole bit about electromagnetic waves, with wavelength and frequency, which from the details presented in the book was an absurd exercise since anyone who had passed analytic geometry knew all about the mathematics of those concepts.

When he hit the Bohr model of the atom, he felt that the book had truly turned superficial. It presented an equation describing differences in energy levels without any discussion of where that equation came from. It was useless in sculpting his world. His world already had that stuff in it. He wasn’t only wanting to add to his world, but to complete the blank spots and fill in the details of what was already there.

He sat there, disappointed. Not about his world, but in the guidebook he had been following. He withdrew from his world and shut the book he had been reading. He set the book aside, and searched for a different one, hopefully one that explained some part of his world that he didn’t already know. He found one and returned to the chair he had been using. In seconds, he had reentered his world from a new point of view, established by his new guidebook.

A hand on his shoulder pulled him out of the book he was reading. He turned to look into the face of the campus security officer. Puzzled, he asked, “What?”

“The library has been closed for two hours.”

“Okay,” Benny said. He turned to resume reading his book.

“You’re going to have to leave.”

“I’m reading.”

“You can come back tomorrow and read. You have to leave now. The library is closed.”

The security guard, a friendly fellow by the name of Bobby Joe Mills, had run into kids like this before. There weren’t very many of them, but they weren’t all that unique or rare. They would come into the library and start reading some book in their major. If you knew what to watch for, you could see them leave time and space behind them. They’d get lost in the material they were reading.