Fired from BBU

Ding! He opened his email and read the message. “Dear Dr. Klein, On 3/4/21 the promotion committee reviewed your tenure application. Based on the letter from the committee chair, and my review of your file, I am afraid I must inform you that tenure has been denied. In accordance with the University's governing regulation you …”

“Not fair” he said and punched the laptop. He watched the crack in the screen as it snaked from the top-right to the bottom-left and divided the pixels into halves of bright and dark. He scrutinized the newly-attached BBU property sticker on the keyboard of the recently-purchased 13” Macbook Pro. “Not fair” he said again as several startled faces turned towards the disheveled, unshaven professor and bizarrely vandalized computer.

He looked through the small window adjacent to his favorite seat on the library's top floor. He starred downwards at the random splashes of the rain drops on the curved asphalt path and the students maneuvering between the accumulating puddles. He listened to the beat of the wind and the water on the copper roof. He felt the hurt and anger as it streamed through his body. His breath was rapid and shallow. He shouted again “Not fair” to the now-vacant, top floor.

He'd arrived at BBU with dreams of success. But geometry is a notorious graveyard of the mathematical romantics. A branch of math in which the low-hanging fruit were cleaned-up by nineteenth century aristocrats and twentieth century apprentices and new ideas are unthinkably rare. His choice of field was clearly a mistake -akin to panning for gold in the bathtub or the toilet. He'd become one more dreamy-eyed victim of the Math Illuminati.

Klein got his BBU job based on a paper he had written on the idea of a dimension of space within a dimension of space. But actually the idea was never his idea. A doddery, senile professor at his previous postdoctoral institution had inadvertently dropped the little nugget into Bob's conscious just prior to dying from a fall down the department's stairs. Klein snatched it and milked it. A series of papers, a series of talks, and some recognition for his conception of a space within a space. His modest moment of Euclidean fame.

But at BBU he failed to generate any creative ideas or original thoughts. He spent excruciating days just sitting in his dingy, claustrophobic office or the stale, sweaty library with the reoccurring hope of an idea emerging from his unconscious. But that's not the way it works. All that happened was the intrusive thoughts of the stolen geometry, the dead profressor, and Dr. Klein the grand imposter.

He stood and snatched his crippled laptop - awkwardly bumping his twelve-ounce coffee. He watched the paper cup in slow motion, it tilting, then falling, then emptying a flood of Guatemala across the polished tabletop of the library desk. He watched the wave of coffee until at the far-side of the tabletop it struck an unfortunately-located, oversized book. “Damn,” shouted Klein. First denial of tenure, now desecration of books.

He grabbed a pile of napkins that he'd gotten from the cafeteria during his lunch. He stretched over the table and reached for the book. It had clear plastic film over its glossy front cover. The cover had survived the flood but the interior pages were soaking up dark roast like blotting paper soaking up india ink.

It was a curious book of origami artwork. On the front cover was a mesmerizing design of folds in paper that resembled patterns of exotic tiles that Klein recognized from islamic art. The book was entitled “The origami art of Sinichi Akira - from sea to land” The cover described the awards and honors that Akira had received for exhibits and creations in origami tessellations. Akira was obviously a distinguished paper folder.

Klein's thoughts rebounded to the pressing issue of the interior pages of the origami book. It looked like a costly limited-edition. He went into action with his paper napkins on the coffee-stained pages in a attempt of a rescue.

Page three was entitled “Ocean Waves.” The caption described Arika's work with blue-gray elephant-hide paper. It explained the use of two folds, a triangular pleat and a triangular twist, on a painstaking grid of triangular mountain and valley creases. From these folds the crests and troughs of waves in blue and gray had emerged and swept from the top left to the bottom right of the elephant hide.

Page five was entitled "Aztec City." Similar to "Ocean Waves" the artist had engineered an intricate landscape of temples, pyramids and other buildings from folds of hexagonal pleats and rectangular twists on a fine grid of yellow-brown, water-soaked, rhino paper.

But most startling of all to Klein was page seven. An unnerving, tangled, tessellated, human mask entitled "Eternal sadness" . It was staring straight from the glossy page into Klein's, dark, disappointed eyes. He wanted to weep but couldn't.

Klein did his best with the coffee shop napkins to minimize damage to Arika's beautiful designs. He was amazed by the emergence of the art work from the simple folds on the paper sheets. He was struck by the transformation of featureless, two-dimensional, paper into seascapes, landscapes and the soul of a human.

Deep from Klein's unconscious arose the intriguing thought of a universe emerging from the folds of space and time. Images appeared of twists, pleats and knots in spacetime as being the building blocks of earthly things. He imagined the knots as the entities from which the periodic table is made, from which our living cells are made, and from which our thoughts and emotions are made. He imagined our existence as knots in space and time.

He grabbed his notebook from the front pocket of his dilapidated backpack. He'd instantly understood that pleats and twists of triangles and rectangles were the building blocks of the two-dimensional world of the origami artist. And he visualized its extrapolation to pleats, twists and knots in the real world of space and time. He jotted down the possible folds in abstract mathematic language that to Klein were like pictures of the universe.

The number of twists, pleats and knots in space and time were almost a perfect match to known particles - electrons, protons, and so on. What had he discovered? The true nature of all matter as knots in space and time? His body was sweating, his pulse was rapid, his mind was running with thoughts and ideas.

Klein worked feverishly through the night in his cramped, untidy office. By morning he'd written a paper "Origins of matter from spacetime knots". It described the progression from possible folds in a toy two-dimensional world to possible folds in a real four-dimensional world. It described the properties of the spacetime knots and how they precisely matched the properties of known particles.

However, there existed an exception. One extra knot in Klein's work. It didn't match any known particles. It was a knot that was present in a different grid than other spacetime knots. It was a prediction of a new particle in a new world.

At 5:30 am Klein submitted his paper to the electronic archive. It would be read by mathematicians and scientists world-wide. His life was about to change.