Hockey is the great Canadian game and whether it is watching the Cougars or Spruce Kings play on their way to professional or semi-professional careers or just a group of kids in the street with sticks and an old tennis, hockey runs through our culture.
I like to watch hockey when I can. But sometimes strange things happen at games and not just on the ice.
Recently, while sitting in the bleachers, a strange fellow sat down beside me.\With white hair and beard and an old mackinaw coat, he looked surprisingly familiar.
His eyes, how they twinkled. And his dimples were quite merry. His cheeks were like roses and his nose like a cherry. Perhaps not too surprising given the cold in our neck of the woods!
As I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help but wonder. Especially as he had a broad face and a plump belly, which shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.
So, putting aside the sceptic within me, I worked up my courage and asked, “Are you…?”
Before I even finished my question, he said “No. Of course not. You know I don’t really exist? I mean, how could I be? Especially in the world we have today?”
“But you look just like him,” I said “And there are so many questions I want to ask. Would you consider answering a few?”
“Go ahead and ask if you must,” he replied “and I’ll make some stuff up. Will that make you happy?”
“Well…” I said. I wasn’t really sure how to respond. Make up stuff? But then I noticed a twinkle in his eye and the smile on his lips. I knew this stranger must be St. Nick.
So, with some hesitation, I asked the most obvious question first: “How do you do it all in just one night? I mean there are billions of good children in the world. And you start at midnight! Even with all the time zones, you really only have 32 hours to deliver presents. And there are an awful lot of presents!”
He chuckled. And his belly shook. And he winked at me.
“Only one night if you believe in old Isaac Newton! Humph … he kept asking for a telescope every year. Anyway, Sir Isaac believed in linear time. A series of consecutive events. One following the next. He even thought if you could gather enough information, you would be able to predict the future! What a load of rubbish? I mean who could have predicted 2020? Really?”
“Are you saying time is not linear?” I asked.
“Well, of course it isn’t!” he replied “That is what quantum mechanics and relativity tell us. The world we see is not the world as it really is.”
“Huh…?” I must admit I was a little puzzled.
“Most of the universe is not visible to us. Haven’t your physicists calculated you can only see five per cent of everything there is? Dark matter, dark energy, photons … these are the things which really matter” he said.
I could tell by the smile on his face this was a subject he didn’t get much chance to talk about, so I simply said “Go on…”
“Well, everything is really made of energy. In its simplest form, energy travels as photons – as a boson – and they are elusive as all get out. But the one property they all have is they travel at the speed of light. Do you know what happens to time at the speed of light?”
“Yes,” I said, “it stops.”
“Absolutely, my boy!” he exclaimed. “And when time stops, well, you have all the time in the world to do pretty much anything you want. You also have all the energy in the world to do pretty much everything you want. After all, they are just two sides of the same coin. I have seen physics articles written by scientific Scrooges claiming I couldn’t fly fast enough or make all those stops but what they don’t understand is I have all the time in the world.”
“Except right now…” he continued “I have to go. I know there are many questions left unanswered. But that is what science and wonder are for, eh?” With that he got up, laid a finger aside his nose, and headed off down the row of seats. But as he got to the aisle, he looked back at me and said “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!”
Todd Whitcombe is a chemistry professor at UNBC.
