Love Story: In The Cloud

by Ken Renshaw

  I spent the early morning studying her paper. It explained eight–dimensional space and gave an abbreviated theoretical treatment of how it pertained to remote sensing. It gave a general description of the CIA's remote sensing program. I looked at the references. She had been writing papers about eight–dimensional space for over a decade.

  I spent time refreshing my memory on mathematical concepts with Wikipedia. I tried to read something about Relativity until my eyes glazed over.

  I googled Candice and found that she had been born in Louisiana and lived with, or was raised by, Native American relatives. It didn't show her personal history, but somehow she earned her PhD in math from Tulane University.

  At 10:00, Zaza buzzed me and said, "Your visitor is in the conference room."

  Candice is of average height and a rather frail build. She was wearing a long black, pleated dress, matching her long straight black hair. Her bronze complexion betrayed her mixed racial heritage. She had amazing light blue eyes.

  "Candice, how nice to meet you in person." I said. "I saw you present a talk on Statistical Optics last fall at a conference at Disneyland Hotel."

  She reflected a minute and brightened as she remembered the conference. "Did we meet there?"

  "No," I said. "There were only about five hundred people there. I don't know why you don't recall me."

  She laughed and said, "I kind of go somewhere else when I lecture,"

  "And you take your audience with you. I really enjoyed the lecture. Statistical Optics has never been the same for me since your lecture."

  When Candice looked at me, it was as though I was the most amazing person she ever met. Her wide light blue eyes seemed to portray a mix of great curiosity and admiration. I had seen that look when she lectured at Disneyland, and had wondered if it was the result of overzealous plastic surgery. She looked natural in person. She was radiating curiosity and interest, as though something unknown and good were about to happen, something mystical.

  While opening her eyes even wider she said, "Tell me about your science and math background to give me a frame of reference. Also, tell me about the case you are working on."

  I complied, described my undergraduate scientific education, and described my more technical patent cases. Then, I described the Colson case and mentioned that the trial would be in a court in Rocky Butte County.

  "It sounds like another Scopes Trial to me," she observed.

  "We call it The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes," I joked.

  "Well, in Tennessee, Scopes was guilty of challenging a belief system, Creationism, as described by the Bible, was challenged by a belief called Evolution. The Sheriff, who sounds like a redneck, probably has a high school science education, except for some forensic stuff in whatever sheriff's academy he attended. You are challenging his conventional belief system derived from what he learned in high school and has observed in his three-dimensional reality.

  "They will probably throw some technically obsolete scientists at you in the trial to show that 'there is no scientific evidence that....' Instead of a contest between the Biblical beliefs and science, as in the Scopes Trial, you will have a battle between the beliefs in physics from a couple of generations ago and modern physics."

  "I guess that is where you come in," I observed.

  "That is really where the Colson Foundation comes in. They hired me to write a script for a film that would expose people to higher–dimensional thinking. It is a way, we hope, to bypass the waiting for bastions of old ideas to die or retire in academia.

  "Lets get started," She said with a wide-eyed smile. "Tell me what you know about higher–dimensional realities. Give me a starting point,"

  "I was exposed to the idea that time is an illusion and that reality is like YouTube."

  Her eyes grew wide, and she said, "That is really interesting. I have never heard that analogy before. Please go on."

  I explained what Mason had told me about a movie only having an illusion of time. Then, I explained about The Cloud.

  "That is really good as an analogy. From talking to people who do remote sensing I have found that some have the belief that information is only accessible in space-time if there was a human observer, someone 'recording the YouTube video' so to speak. That relates to the old philosophical riddle, 'If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if there is nobody there to hear it?' Remote sensors can't observe the tree falling unless somebody heard it.

  "I like the idea of keyword assignment as part of the accessibility argument. I believe that much of our own memory recall may be the accessing of information from space-time. Physiologists haven't identified long term memory mechanisms in the brain with enough storage capacity to contain all we can recall from our lives. If you can recall the time when you were six years old and your dog Spot got run over by a car, there may be many keywords that can move you there. In The Cloud grief, tires screeching, dog yelping, screaming, red cars, dirt roads; all the sensory input you experienced at the time can be a keyword. Some would be stronger that others. The incident would have been of great enough interest to record. However, you probably wouldn't be able to recall feeding Spot his dinner the night before.

  "Are you familiar with channeling?"

  "Yes, I went to hear a channel last week. It was Herondus coming through."

  "I am not familiar with him. Maybe long-term memory recall is a person 'channeling' himself from a different space-time. Psychologists and physiologists are beginning to find mechanisms for synchronizing neural activity between people. Experiments have shown that people can synchronize heartbeats, for instance. Perceptual synchronization is still on the to-do list. The field is stunted because any effects observed at a distance are against the old laws of physics.

  "That brings me to the central thesis of my work in mathematics. Normal observation happens with one set of laws pertaining to four–dimensional physics. Information transfer happens according to complex eight–dimensional physical laws."

  "Nice segue," I observed.

  She laughed. "I guess I digress. I am a mathematician and not an experimental psychologist.

  "Let me start at the beginning. When Albert Einstein was at the Zurich Polytechnic, a school for training math and science teachers for secondary schools, his mathematics teacher was Herman Minkowski who didn't get along with Einstein very well because Einstein wasn't very interested in mathematics and often cut his classes. Z-Poly was a small school, with only seventy-one students, eleven of which were in Einstein's entering class.

  "Einstein barely graduated because he grew indifferent to the professors and courses offered. Since the head of the department refused to write the letter of recommendation required to obtain a teaching job, Einstein was unemployed for a couple of years, until a friend helped him get a job working in the Swiss Patent Office. Then, the hot technical topic for patents was synchronizing clocks throughout the railroad systems, so that all stations could have the same schedule. Einstein's office window looked out on a clock tower and a railroad track.

  "Some people who have studied Einstein's biography have placed him in the Autism–Asperger's syndrome spectrum: that he only could think, or at least was most comfortable with visual thinking. When he 'over-thought' the idea of synchronizing clocks at railroad stations, he came up with his Theory of Relativity. He could visualize trains traveling near the speed of light and visualize what would happen to the clocks on board. Einstein's wife, also a mathematician at Z-poly, helped him in the math of his famous paper on relativity. Some say she did most of the work of converting the visual thinking to a scientific paper.

  "The paper did not get much attention for a couple of years. Then, Minkowski who knew of Einstein's work took an interest in the theory. Einstein had been considering the three-dimensions of 'space' separate from' time' in his idea of relativity. Minkowski pointed out that time was also a dimension. He 'corrected' the math in the paper, in a way to make it compatible with other hot topics in physics, b
y making 'time' an imaginary dimension.

  "You remember about imaginary numbers?" She asked.

  "Yes, the square root of minus one.” I had been doing my homework.

  Shea continued, “To someone like Einstein who mostly thought in visual pictures, the idea of an imaginary number must have been a stretch. How do you visualize a train traveling at ten miles per (imaginary) second? It doesn't make any sense. Where is the train going?"

  She laughed and continued, "Minkowski almost hijacked relativity and took it into the realm of mathematics from Einstein's physics. Minkowski, the mathematician, would have taken it into abstract mathematics where nobody has to visualize anything, where everything can be formulas. Unfortunately, Minkowski got sick and died.

  "Einstein got to keep relativity. He didn't appreciate Minkowski's mathematical approach, which he described as 'too complicated.' He did keep the idea of imaginary time as kind of a dirty little secret in his mathematics. For instance, he couldn't have come up with his famous E=MC2 without using imaginary time. That expression wouldn't have become so famous if he had said, '...when time is imaginary, E=MC2.' Without Einstein's visual experiments, which became his hallmark, such as people on railroad platforms observing trains passing at near the speed of light, Einstein might not have become famous. His visual experiments made his ideas accessible to more people."

  "Not to me, so far." I added. "I spent most of the morning trying to get my head around some of his concepts."

  "Don't feel bad, you're dealing with a graduate level subject that requires lots of course units and a degree in mathematics or physics. The point about talking about all this is:

  "First, Minkowski is a reputable source for ideas, a mainline mathematician, someone who is more than a peer of Einstein, not one of the kooks on the Internet, the self proclaimed mathematicians, pushing some incompetent theory unifying physics;

  "Second, something can be true in physics although it can't be visualized, especially imaginary dimensions.

  "I think the problem you will have in convincing a jury will be getting them to believe in eight-dimensional space. The Scopes trial was about Biblical beliefs versus scientific beliefs. The Rocky Butte trial will be about a belief in science as taught in high school a generation ago versus modern physics."

  "Yes." I agreed, "But my cup runneth over Let's go have lunch and talk about something else for a while."

  Captain Ahab's is one of those theme restaurants from about twenty years ago, with antique diving helmets, worn ropes, fishing nets, and oars decorating the walls. Our table was made of a recycled boat hatch, covered with epoxy over a variety of seashells. I thought the informality of the restaurant would be a welcome break from our stern office surroundings and a good place to talk and develop rapport.

  We chatted as we read the menu and ordered. Candice declined my suggestion of wine. "Only on very special occasions, and, besides, I'm working today," she said, rolling her piercing blue eyes and chuckling."

  "I guess I should abstain if I am going to try to keep up with you this afternoon," I added. "Tell me what you do when you are not being a mathematician or teacher?"

  "We live right on the edge of the mountains of the Angeles National Forest in Altadena. We hike there and go to the Sierras when we have time."

  "We?' I said quizzically.

  "My significant other is Tom Watson. He is a Hollywood-type arranger and composer. He works at home most of the time on scores for films. We have lots of flexible time to enjoy being with each other. He also counsels people, helps them with their problems. We also meditate and have many close friends who are spiritually oriented. We have a wonderful life together."

  "That's wonderful! I like your distinction between 'do' and 'have'," I observed.

  She added, "I like to talk to attorneys, they listen to you. Many of my students seem to be in some other space-time when I talk to them. So, what do you do when you are not being an attorney?"

  "I spend a lot time in the desert in a place called CrystalSky. It is over the mountains, north from where you live in Altadena. I have a sailplane and a little mobile home at the airport. I often soar for hours a day. From the porch of my mobile, I can see a hundred miles on a clear day to the southern Sierras. I must say I have learned to really enjoy the desert, the open space, the flora and fauna."

  There was a pause. I felt that she was waiting for the "we" part.

  Then, she continued, "My grandfather was a Native American. When I was little, we visited him in Oklahoma for a few weeks in the summer. We used to hike together, and sometimes we would sit and watch the soaring birds. He said you could learn a lot from them. Those visits contributed a lot to who I am. I learned to appreciate the connectedness of us to nature."

  "How did that lead to a career as a mathematician?" I inquired.

  "Part of mathematics is the search for unity. I think I got that appreciation from my grandfather. My grandmother on the other side of the family was from Louisiana and was a shamanic sort of person, real old school, with lots of ideas about magic. She taught me the magic of how to make up my mind about something, following intuition or my heart, and then letting it happen. That also is of value as a mathematician, allowing yourself to be vulnerable."

  Vulnerable? That is having a weakness that someone else could exploit, I said to myself.

  She paused and looked at me with the expression I saw in Dore and Colson when they were sizing me up. I felt her mind switch gears.

  "Enough about me. Tell me more about you. It sounds like the soaring thing is important to you. Do you take people for rides? Were there pilots in your family?"

  "No. My father had a hardware store in a small northern California logging town where I grew up. My mother was a schoolteacher. They raised me with Midwestern Baptist values. Definitely, not a single shaman in the family.

  "About five years, ago someone gave me a glider ride for Christmas. He clipped an ad from the L.A. Times. I tried it once and was hooked. Soaring is esthetically very much like boat sailing, except a lot more is happening. Most sailplanes are designed to carry only a pilot. It is not a social sport. They have two seat gliders for pilot training and giving rides.

  "The International Aeronautical Federation has established badges, sort of medals, for different flight achievements, such as flying for five hours at once, gaining sixteen thousand feet of altitude, flying five hundred kilometers and things like that. I am working toward making an ultimate flight, achieving all badge goals in one flight. That flight will take skill, and a day with perfect weather. The trick is to be there, ready to go when that perfect day appears.

  "Sometimes, I can't make it back to the airport and have to get retrieved by a tow plane or a ground crew. There are survival hazards in landing in the middle of nowhere in the desert when it is about one-hundred degrees."

  Candice's eyes grew wide with interest or amazement as I talked excitedly. "You are passionate about this soaring thing! The possibility of ending the day on the desert in the middle of nowhere is an interesting vulnerability."

  Lunch came, and we chatted only about the meal and food for a while.

  I felt that I had to question Candice about vulnerability. "I am a little puzzled about your use of the term, vulnerability. I always think of it as a weakness that someone can exploit. In presenting a legal case, there may be logical or factual vulnerabilities in your arguments that can be attacked by the opposition. If a person had a burglar alarm installed in their house, and the kitchen door was not included that would be vulnerability. How does that pertain to being a mathematician?"

  Candice though for a minute and then replied. "When I write papers, there are a couple of ways I can go. I can write a paper that is armored with footnotes and references to prove I was not doing anything innovative. And, if I worked at a university with a rigid review process, I would submit it to a faculty review process to further assure that I had not done anything the technically conservative head of the department would dis
agree with, and then I would submit it to a peer review journal and spend another two years dealing with comments and objections, some of which were from technically conservative guys who don't like new ideas, and then it would be published.

  "There is very little vulnerability in going on that route. Few will criticize a paper that has been so expertly scrubbed and there is little danger to one's academic reputation.

  "Or, if I teach at a state college, where the emphasis is more on teaching, and they kind of let me publish what I want, I can write a paper and publish it in any of the high quality journals that don't have the innovation-squeezing peer-review process. Then, I can move onto something else.

  "There is a vulnerability in this process because, if you openly do something innovative, you are open to personal and professional criticism from many people. I publish what I believe in, and if people disagree with me that is their problem. If the work is useful, some people will build on the ideas. If the work is of no value, it will be forgotten."

  She said with some apparent pride, "I have been doing papers on the implications of complex eight-dimensional Minkowski space for more than a decade. The Colson Foundation decided the subject was useful for explaining things like ESP and remote sensing.

  "My students often scoff and object to my broaching the subject of ESP in discussions of eight-space. I tell them they can believe it, or not believe it as they wish, but eight-space will be on the final exam.

  "Many of my papers reflect my grandfather's heritage by taking on subjects outside the normal scientific realm like ESP.

  "By the way, when Einstein submitted his paper on Special Relativity to the university as a doctoral thesis, it was rejected by the 'old white guys' in the university as too far out."

  I thought for a minute and then said, "I understand your philosophy here on the subject of professional papers. I am not sure how this would work in a trial. We always try to present an invulnerable case."

  Candice replied, "Tom, my significant other, counsels many people on vulnerability. It is a frequent topic in our house. I have learned the value of being vulnerable in personal relationships."

  "I don't understand," I admitted.

  "It is somehow easier for women to understand than men. For example, I have told you a lot about my personal life, like how I feel about my Native American heritage, its use it in my everyday life, my philosophy of teaching and writing papers, and why I teach at a state college instead of a major university. I have exposed much of who I am and how I feel. In doing so, I could have been risking your judging me, or somehow changing my relationship with the Colson Foundation. That is vulnerability. I felt that I was safe with you. It is important that, if we are to have an extended professional relationship, you know who I really am and what is important to me. I didn't want to work with you for a few weeks, and then have you judge that I was irrational because my grandmother was a witch doctor. I don't have time for that."

  She gave me a soft smile that seemed to say, I am your friend.

  I replied with a smile, "Your gamble, if it was that, paid off. I understand a lot about you and think we can work wonderfully well together."

  I contemplated starting to tell her some more about myself. Then, the check came.

  "We should get back to work," she said. "Ready for some more mind stretching mathematics?"

  At my office we returned to the conference room and Candice began describing her movie.

  "The Colson Foundation asked for me to write a movie script for an animation short film, for a TV show, a NOVA or Discovery Channel kind of thing. I wrote the script, and then turned it over to a professional screenwriter. The animation has been done, and the film is in final editing. I am supposed to review the final cut this week. I think it will be ready when the trial comes up."

  Candice described the movie [included here as an appendix] to me in detail and then said. "What do you think?"

  I replied, "I think that is an elegant explanation of an esoteric subject, quite suitable for a sophisticated audience like those that watch NOVA or the Discovery Channel. I understood it fully because I have had a lot of mathematics. I am sure that many of today’s high school students would understand it. But, it might send a jury, particularly those who 'hate math,' into a spin of confusion."

  "The jury doesn't need to care about or understand those mathematics. They do need to know that a valid, scientific, paradigm exists for the many kinds of information shortcuts we use and observe. I could submit the movie as evidence and have you testify that the theory presented by the movie is valid. Maybe one of the jurors will understand the movie and convince the rest of the jury it is OK."

  Candice said, "Maybe we should 'cut to the chase,' explain what it all means. I like the metaphor of The Cloud. Outside of The Cloud, we have normal reality, four dimensions. Inside The Cloud, eight dimensions, there are shortcuts between places. We can call these Cloud Distances.

  Let's try this. If Bob is in New York and his wife, Alice, is in San Francisco, their separation is about 2,500 miles. Their Cloud distance is not the same. There is a shortcut through The Cloud that is zero miles for mind-to-mind communication. If Bob sends thoughts of love to Alice, because of their bond she can instantaneously get them. They don't need to use the cellphone.

  "We all have something I call the 'Magic Mirror of The Mind,' that operates through The Cloud. In fairy tales, some witches or sorcerers have magic mirrors that they can command to get information for them. You remember, 'Mirror-mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?' Well, the one we all have is more limited. We can say, 'What did I have for breakfast?' and our Magic Mirror of The Mind makes an information shortcut in The Cloud, from where you are now, to when and where you were having breakfast You might think it is a memory stored somewhere in your brain, but it isn't. Scientists with their MRIs can pinpoint areas in the brain active when you try to recall breakfast. However, they have not found any area that has the possibility of storing all the zillions of bits of information you can recall. This is a new idea. There is not much research on this yet because we think it is simply a memory stored somewhere in our brain. This shortcut idea does not fit the current four-dimensional scientific paradigm.

  "Conventional scientists such as physicists, engineers, chemists, medical researchers, and others who believe that reductionist science has all the answers, are reluctant to believe that any psychic phenomenon can be valid, because it doesn't fit the four-dimensional scientific paradigm that is the basis for their belief system. They will have heard many anecdotal tales of people experiencing psychic phenomena, but will dismiss it as superstition, ignorance, or lack of education. ‘Skeptic' organizations strive to debunk any claims of psychic phenomena. They are absolutely right. Psychic phenomenon can’t exist in their four-dimensional belief system. However, they can exist in the eight-dimensional Cloud.

  “One may say that The Cloud is a dark cloud over the validity of four-dimensional science.

  "In the film, we show interviews of a few people who report their own psychic experiences.

  "The first interviews are with people who inexplicably changed their routines and avoided accidents. We inserted some clips of normal people perceiving some event in future time, that we would call a premonition.

  "One is a businessman who refused to board an airliner because of his visions of it crashing. The airliner did crash on takeoff, and everyone was killed.

  "The second clip is a housewife who, for no apparent reason, decided to pick her daughter up at school. The school bus that her daughter would have ridden was hit by a drunk driver, and several children were badly injured.

  "The third clip is of a farmer who related that, on his way home from town, he decided to take an alternate route that he never used, past a lake. As he arrived at the lake, he saw a car with a woman and a child go off a bridge and plunge into the water. He was able to save them.

  "Then, we have an extended clip of experiments at SRI with people remot
e sensing targets in the Stanford area. I believe you know about those experiments.

  "Many university laboratories have done experiments with psychics and other people to test the ability to perceive things in space-time. Little of that research is highly valued in the academic community. Largely, these studies document, and compile statistics about observable psychic phenomena. That is, stuff that simply happens that has no scientific basis. UFO sightings fall into the same general category of studies. If there is no scientific basis, the subject can be ignored by the scientific community at large. Conventional science is an ostrich, hiding its head in a four–dimensional sand."

  "OK," I replied, "I get the idea that shortcuts in The Cloud can be demonstrated by mathematics, and in experiments. The idea can be confusing to people without the mathematical training. I'll have to take some time to assimilate all this."

  "I understand," said Candice, "This is quite a bit for one lesson. This is probably enough for one day."

  I agreed. I walked Candice out of the conference room to the lobby to make sure she had her parking validated.

  "Thank you so much, this has been enlightening."

  "You might also like to spend some time with Tom, my significant other. He has quite a good business in counseling that involves space-time perceptions." She dug into her purse for a second and then said, "Here is his card."

  "Thanks," I said, and she left.

  Carolyn cheerfully gave me her "I am available after work" smile.