The Writing on the Old Man's Wall

The Writing on the Old Man’s Wall

Hello fellow physicists. My name is Harry and my associate’s name is Sue. We are here to present to you how we were able to make our unbelievable discovery. We will begin with a story, in order that we can give credit where credit is truly due. In the language of baseball, we are the closers, not the one who pitched the first eight innings.

Our story begins two years ago. Neither one of us could believe that it was on the marker. Not only that, but it was at a price that, between us, we would be able to afford, just barely. It was the Old Man’s apartment. ‘Old Man’, that’s what we called him in class. He didn’t mind, and replied with ‘young woman’ or ‘young man’ rather than calling us by name. He was long past retirement age, but he kept on teaching until he died, just last month, at 85 the newspaper article said.  He was our favourite prof.

Another positive feature of the apartment was that it was on the edge of the university, so we could walk to class and to the library without wasting time, and money on gas.. That’s probably why he liked living there. He wasn’t fast on his feet, and he had lost his license years ago, and didn’t bother to try to renew it.

His lectures inspired us with the possibility of discovery of the near impossible through a combination of a strong background in physics plus a good imagination. That’s why both of us (who met in his class), applied for graduate school at the same university, both of us hoping that he would be our advisor, now, of course, impossible. But we both were accepted in the program, even though we had no ideas at this point what our thesis subjects would be. And we would be missing the Old Man’s direction in this matter.

As we stepped into the apartment, we found it to be completely empty.  It would have been nice if there was something of the old man’s that we could keep and treasure. A window was near the entrance, so we walked over to it to catch the view from this third floor apartment. As we looked out, we saw a Mourning Dove fly across the path of our vision, we both said at the same time, “One day we all shall fly.” We laughed, and flapped our arms shortly afterwards.

That had been the professor’s favourite saying in class. We were often greeted at the beginning of class with “Good day students. One day we all shall fly.” The two of us had initially interpreted that as some kind of religious reference to ascent into heaven, even though the professor never made any other statements that indicated that he was particularly religious. Science was his religion.

After a while, when our relationship was growing and we called each other regularly on the phone, we would say “Good day Harry or Good day Sue. One day we all shall fly.” When Sue got up the nerve one day to respond to his statement by asking him what he meant by that statement, he intrigued us more with the words “It’s a project that I am working on.” There was no response to that, just looks of wonder. No one in the class had the nerve to pursue the matter further.

The Writing on the Walls

           It was early clear to us that, while all the furniture and other items belonging to the Old Man had been taken out of the apartment, no effort had been made to clean the place up. There was a lot of dust in the place. Sue sneezed several times in what we knew had been the kitchen – the placement of the refrigerator and oven was clearly marked with black lines.

           Then Sue said to me, “Look, this is where his kitchen table must have been.” As I looked at where she was pointing, I could see why she had said that. There were numbers and a few words written on the wall. We had seen such writing when we went into the Old Man’s office. He had scribbled on the wall beside his desk.

           I jokingly replied, “I wonder whether there is any writing beside the toilet in the bathroom.” Of course we had to find that room to discover the answer to that question. To our disappointment, there wasn’t. Too bad.

           We then had to look elsewhere for professorial writing on the walls of the apartment. We found some in what had been his bedroom, that room marked by small dark circles where the legs of his bed had obviously been. On the wall nearby were the words, “tomorrow’s lecture – the mysteries of gravity”. We both remembered that lecture well. It was brilliant and had inspired both of us. It was one of the subjects that we were considering engaging in research on for our theses.

           There was another room beside the bedroom. So we had to check it out. We knew upon entering that this was his home office. The far wall was largely covered in written equations and formulae. Most exciting of all was the rough picture he had drawn to the right of all the physics and math. He had drawn a picture of a human flying. We had to copy down what was on the wall!

           On the farthest left we saw something familiar:

           M1 M2           

F = G  R2

It was, of course, Newton’s law of universal gravitation in which

 F = force

G = gravitational constant

M1 = mass of object one

M2 = mass of object two

R2 = distance between the centres of the masses

Our subsequent decisions were fast and frantic. We left the apartment to tell the landlord of the building that we were going to be his new renters. Then we signed the agreement. We then ran to the bookstore of the library to get pens and pads of paper. We copied down all the writing that was on the wall.

           We then went to the office of the Head of the Physics Department. We told her that we were renting the Old Man’s apartment, and that we had seen writing on his home office wall that could be part of his research. We asked whether his office had been cleared out yet. She told us that she had been delaying the inevitable in that regard. We asked if we could go inside to see whether there were any notebooks there that might contain some of the formulae that we had just copied down. The Old Man was not a big fan of computers. He called AI ‘antagonistic interference.’  She came with us, and we found the notebook we had been hoping to discover. From there our project would ‘take off’, and, of course, we mean that literally. Now for the physics behind the study.