Solid Uncertainty

A Story by ZackOfBridge

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The professor resembled an endangered bird. He had a large stomach, and long neck that led to a head with hair that retreated from the middle and what was left was crazed like feathers. He threw his gaze generously, like the stuttering of a pigeon, and he did so without casting his glasses from the bridge of his nose. A reoccurring speck of tortilla appeared, saturated with spit, on the center of his lower lip before the point of his tongue abducted it. He propped his foot onto the seat of an empty desk and maintained his lecture in Napoleonic stature and with a voice prone to fluctuate from manic, reaching passion to a whisper of epiphany which he happened upon and repeated to each class.

“It was Heisenberg who formulated the uncertainty principle,” the professor started on, his first mistake must have been discussing scientific theory amongst a class largely comprised of English majors, the escapists of science, mathematics, and engineering. But of course much of twentieth century literature and theatre, especially that which follows the second world war had to be taught alongside split atoms, mushroom clouds, and an uncertainty that quivered at a cellular, molecular level. To teach the absurdity within Ionesco’s Bald Soprano or Rhinoceros what else could serve to illustrate the insanity of an irrational reality but scientific theory and amateur quantum mechanics? “Perception of reality changed utterly when we discovered that this,” he set his palm onto the surface of an unfilled desk at the front, where all desks were without students. He scrunched his fingers on the desk, and tapped it like a child molests a piano in the parlor, “is not solid.” He smiled, his teeth like sundown on a cityscape. He spread his eyelids manually with his fingers. Red worm veins surrounded his brown eyes. “Insane, right?”

I sat kitty-corner and to his right. His demonstration, though animate, was mostly in vain. A majority of the students had gone for beer before the class and now their eyes fell onto their own desks, which looked solid, and for some, doubled. The rest diddled with their thumbs or were infatuated with the screen of their laptops. The professor, with eyebrows brought close creating a sort of map of lines about his forehead, and with lips moistened, the tortilla speck holding on, continued, “theoretically it is possible for my hand to pass through this desk and both the desk and my hand remain intact. The truth is that there is more space in the universe than matter, much more space. Most of what we see as solid is actually mostly space, and it is possible for the space and the matter to align just so that they my hand and the desk never touch.”

He backed away from the desk and pointed to it like a pale maiden points to the village witch, but his gaze came up and went over the class and saw their heads down and smelled the thick sour of the beer and his face became red and the red washed like a river of blood into his baldness and his teeth that did not align gritted.

“Its f*****g insane isn’t it! If I slapped this desk about 5 billion times there is a chance my hand could pass through. Imagine what that does to these writers’ heads.”

He brought his hand high as if to put it through the desk intact or otherwise. He forced it down, changing it to a solid fist before impact. My face tightened, tensed, he’d break the table and be fired or penalized, but relief that was no true relief relaxed the muscle’s in my face. There wasn’t impact, no slam of his solid flesh to the solid desk. It went right through, and he looked around and saw only my eyes on him and he just dropped it, and started on about the upcoming research paper. The point of his tongue took the tortilla speck back into his trembling mouth. The paper was due next week

© 2015 ZackOfBridge

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Chadvonswan

This was rad (90s term). But how does one space apart the spaces in between matter? Solid writing, some liquid equations presented. I liked this one a lot. There's something about the physiology of desks that just gets me. Maybe the Michaels grew this specific one.