Page 79 of A Winding Wave of Magic
I didn’t respond. I was learning that he would either reveal what I wanted to know or he wouldn’t. He had already shared so much with me that I was feeling unusually patient.
“A singularity, in layman’s terms, is a mathematical term for anything that has to be measured in terms of infinity. It’s like this.” He grabbed an orange from the coffee table and tore open the skin. The rich scent floated through the room as he spoke. “I can divide an orange into eight pieces, see? Then what happens if I split one of these eighths in half?”
“It becomes a sixteenth. I may be a literary scholar, but I do remember fourth-grade fractions.”
“The question is, then, what’s the smallest piece of the orange that you could create, by continuing that process of halving, and halving again? It’s infinite, right?”
“The orange could be infinitely small,” I agreed.
“Correct. Grossly simplified, it’s essentially how particle physicists have tried to calculate the basic components of matter—of the universe. We figured out that an atom is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and we split them up to find elementary and sub-particles, and so on. The standard model includes sixteen. Seventeen if you count the Higgs-Boson.”
“Is that what you showed me on the mountain?” I wondered. “Some kind of particle?”
“Er, no,” Jonathan admitted. “I don’t know what I See. It’s clearly physical, but not something I’ve been able to render in my work. Yet.” He sighed. “No, we determine these particles theoretically, using mathematics. We calculate backward, back and back and back, smaller and smaller, trying to find that infinitely small point from which things began. Except an infinitely small point can’t be calculated, because that’s the nature of infinity.”
“Because anything you divide in half, you can still divide in half again,” I supplied and was rewarded with the same sort of nod a professor might give to a student’s epiphany.
“Exactly. The conundrum is called a mathematical singularity. It’s basically a representation of infinity that’s aplaceholder for whatever actually happens there. But we’ve also figured out that once we come closer to that singular point, things start to go a bit mad. An enormous amount of energy is unleashed during those divisions, more than should be there according to the laws of physics. It’s like chaos.”
“Chaos. Hmm.” I picked an orange piece from his proffered hand and popped it into my mouth. The tart juice exploded onto my tongue, and I hummed with pleasure.
When I opened my eyes, I found Jonathan staring hungrily at my mouth.
Quickly, I wiped away any lingering juice. “Er. So you’re trying to figure out what it is, the singularity? You and Stephen Hawking?”
He rolled his eyes. “You realize he figured out nearly everything I’ve just explained to you.”
“Sorry, sorry.” I held up my hands in mock surrender, which made my guest smile. “Is he a sorcerer too?”
“Not having met him, I couldn’t say. Rumors abound, though.”
“So, why do it? I mean, I get the desire to play God, to understand the origins of time and space and, well, everything that exists. But for you, personally, why do it?”
He toyed with the edges of the carpet as he appeared to consider his response. “What if the singularity is in us? Or rather, what if that’s what we are speaking to, as fae? The beauty of physics is that the fundamental laws are the same everywhere, except in these moments that defy logic. Just like magic.”
He got up then and squatted by the fire, where he took a piece of spare kindling and stuck it into the flames. It smoked until the stringy cedar caught. He pulled it out and turned to hold it between us. We both watched the flame, held rapt by the dancing, multicolored light.
Jonathan’s eyes began to shimmer in that way that had become familiar on the mountainside. He murmured an unintelligible word that sounded somewhere betweenignisandaqua, the Latin roots for fire and water. I watched as the flame died down and its smoke gathered midair, over our heads. When all he held was a charred stick, the cloud that had formed at the ceiling began to rain.
My gaze shot up as fat drops of water splashed my nose. I giggled—I couldn’t stop myself. More droplets tickled my eyelids and cheekbones before becoming a vapor that slithered back to the stick and immediately lit on fire again. The cloud disappeared. The flame flickered merrily as if it hadn’t just turned into a spontaneous sprinkle in the middle of the living room.
“Impressed?”
I looked over the flame at Jonathan, who was watching me with something akin to joy. His eyes were back to their luminous light green.
“Completely,” I admitted. “You just turned fire into water.”
“According to the laws of physics, that shouldn’t be possible. Not without some unbelievably strong energy that could physically change elements from one to another. Elements as different as carbon and hydrogen. So why did they listen to me? Why am I able to do that?”
He tossed the remainder of the stick into the fire and returned to his spot on the carpet next to me, though this time his thigh was maybe an inch from mine, close enough that I could feel the heat from his body.
“I have a theory that I’m trying to test,” he said as he rested his arms over one knee. “There are several projects at the Hadron Collider that are trying to recreate the Big Bang.”
“The one in Switzerland?”
He nodded. “That’s it. They want to know if the math is right, and maybe even to recreate the singularity. But I want to find the energy of magic, what’s beyond the physics of being. Maybe it’s the singularity. Maybe it’s dark matter. Maybe it’s superpartners—shadow particles to the standard model. I don’t know.”
“Anything so far? At the collider, I mean.” I wasn’t just asking. I was honestly fascinated, even if I didn’t understand it all.
