A Change in time
Hello,
This email is a little longer because I'd like to tell you the story of my recently published paper, why it matters so much to me, and how you might connect to it too.
Do you ever notice patterns repeating in your life? Similarities from one job to the next, one boss to the next, or even one relationship to the next?
I’ve had recurring anxiety dreams (and real-life experiences!) where my instruments were unplugged, or my microphone was turned off.
On a positive note, this past semester as a teacher has been incredibly rewarding. Multiple students told me I was their favorite teacher! Repetition helps! Hearing that I had positively impacted these kids from multiple sources helped me address my inner critic and feel more relaxed at a deeper level.
Time is Cyclical
I understand time as cyclical or circular, looping back on itself to bring us to moments worth repeating. Maybe it's to learn from them? Maybe it's to find meaning and delight in life? I can't say for sure.
It can be as simple as when a friend casually brought up the Cenotes or Mayan caves in Mexico, and I knew about these only because I read Spy School with my daughter when she was eight years old. That was the setting for one of the books in the series, and it brought me right back to that special time with my kiddo!
I’m delighted to share that I just completed a paper, published after four years of work in the journal Quantum Reports, on the cyclical nature of time in quantum mechanics.
This technical paper isn't for a broad audience, but I’m excited because my strategy is to study the nature of time in various modalities: academic in journals, and how to apply it in my books and blog. This paper shows how time, even in mainstream physics, needs to be considered cyclical. There are practical benefits to this holistic view in applications like quantum computing, medical devices, and potentially even fusion power.
But the real benefit in my mind is healing our relationships to each other, to ourselves and to our experience of time itself.
A Bumpy, Cyclical Process
Getting this paper finished was challenging. I had the idea just as I finished my last research paper, Spacetime Paths as a Whole, on New Year's Eve 2020.
I didn't feel confident enough with my math skills, so I relied on my decades of experience with coding and graphics to convince myself the ideas worked. Spending my late 20s playing around with computer fractals (i.e. computer games) paid off!!
During the pandemic, I got active on Clubhouse, having great conversations and sharing my work. Yet due to a tough experience with a dismissive group of physicists, I gave up…for a while.
In early 2023 I reinvested my time into the research and had an important insight. I've always felt insecure in math, but I enjoy the math of music. Using music as an analogy, I finally understood how to apply this new idea.
When you listen to music, you are hearing waves in time. But when you store music, you have to use a different language, call the frequency domain. The process of swapping between time and frequency is called the Fourier transform, and I've been turned on by it since high school!
Physicists need to think about this relationship to understand time better.
In fact, my hope is that a new theory of time will inspire many of us! If we can refresh the way we think about our hours, we might see a rush of inspiration, gratitude, forgiveness, and appreciation for each other. We might be reinspired to trust the ungraspable flow of time.
We've reached the end of the road with linear time, which commodifies and devalues it.
Even just this afternoon, I felt dreary doing something I typically enjoy, but found energy again by drawing upon the past and imagining the cyclical future. (Shout out to friend and fan Suresh Eswaran for his book A Gratitude for Time!)
Holistic and Reductionist Can Work Together
Returning to the physics for a moment, the problem I tackled in physics is the second-order Schrödinger equation.
Back in the 1920s, great physicists did their best to develop a general solution for how things evolve in time. It works well but is an approximation. The first-order approximation is basic and inaccurate, while the second-order is more precise but laborious. However, it’s not exactly right because it’s still an approximation.
My paper's insight is that by carefully utilizing both reductionist and holistic perspectives for time and frequency, you can solve the problem more easily and gain insight into the underlying nature of space and time.
I submitted the paper to a number of journals, and finally landed on Quantum Reports.
Surprisingly—maybe synchronistically—they rejected it incredibly fast. Within two days I received a form email rejection, without explanation! I almost lost faith because it brought up insecurity in me. Is this paper not original at all? Am I totally clueless?
But I changed the narrative in my head and wrote them back for more information. They replied and said, “Actually, you just used the wrong template. You can resubmit.” I was so relieved, and glad I verified the story in my head!
So I resubmitted within a couple days and—get this—they rejected it again, without explanation, within 4 days.
Cyclical time, anyone?
This time I didn't doubt myself. I laughed! I wrote them back, and it turned out they were confused by my affiliation and my degree. Was I a student? Who is my advisor? That confusion is par for the course since I don't have a Ph.D and I don't work in academia. Anyway, we worked it out, I resubmitted, they got some reviewers to give me feedback, and in the end it was accepted!
History repeating itself, in this case, helped me overcome self-doubt and be persistent with something I care about.
To be transparent, this was a life goal for me, and I'm feeling really satisfied. Thanks for reading and sharing in my joy!
Sky
Welcome to a Leap to Wholeness
We are starting a new series of social media posts around my second book, Leap to Wholeness, How the World is Programmed to Help Us Grow, Heal, and Adapt. One of the big themes in the book is identifying the filters that color the way we look at the world and ourselves. When we can identify a filter or belief we have, without trying to change it, we naturally start to see it better and it's easier to see beyond it. I offer this as a way of healing our old patterns of behavior.