Epilogue

So I'm back in the rainy city, having just missed a big snowstorm in Denver that sauntered in after I left.  Thank god for that, though at times I still wish I was there.

Here is where bills need to get paid, where my taxes still need to be done, where I need to get to work on time.  There was where I got to wrestle in the snow with tiny Peyton, where some days all I had to do was laundry, take a walk in the sun and decide where to go for dinner.

Back here I'm researching the General and Special Theories of Relativity, for OMSI's next exhibit on Einstein.  It's interesting, but it makes my head spin and I have a hard time keeping everything straight.  Mostly this: that if the speed of light is constant (and, so far as we've been able to test, it is) no matter the position or distance of the observer, then in order for this equation to be true -

Speed = Distance / Time

(and as far as we can determine, it should be) - then Time is the thing that must be variable in proportion to distance in order to keep the speed of light always the same. 

Wha--?


Yeah.  Time passes - not seems to pass, but actually passes - ever so slightly slower for astronauts in spacecraft going really fast relative to us here on Earth.

Einstein said, "...[T]he distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."  If that's true, it's mind-blowing, but there's also a kernal of comfort in it.  It means I can always have the time in downtown Denver at the end of the 7K when my legs felt like Gumby and my lungs could breathe in all the atmosphere.  I'll never be far from that moment in the parking lot when Peyton put her mom and me in a simultaneous headlock and started shakin' her booty when 'Single Ladies' came on the car radio.  The feathers from that deteriorating comforter in the guest room will always be mid-air, and I'll always be half-muzzy with sleep watching them drift.


And I suppose I'll always have Relativity as an excuse when I'm late for work.




Also, did you know Einstein moved back in with his parents after University, when he couldn't find a teaching job?  Yeah.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Ha!