Researchers in the department of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Tubingen, Germany have developed a speed-of-light simulator, that takes you through the streets of Tubingen in southwest Germany, at near light speeds. It opened on May 7th through the end of 2005 as an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, Munich providing museum-goers the opportunity to hop on a stationary bike, accelerating to 30km/h to witness the effects on perception of travel at 99% the speed of light as the view is projected on a large screen in front of you in real time. The engineers have created a correlation between traveling 30km/h on the bike and witnessing light speed on the screen. That provides the seedling idea for this thought experiment.
Everyone knows that six-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong can ride a bike forever at incredible speed. He reaches speeds in excess of 75km/h on descents. So what would happen if we put Armstrong on the exhibition bike and instructed him to tide forever at incredible speed? Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity provides some clues.
For example if your spaceship were to leave earth traveling at 98% the speed of light, the pace reached by any biker experimenting with the Tubingen simulation, and you took a one year journey, when you returned five years on earth would have passed. But that's taking us in the wrong direction. While it might be interesting to explore participation in an accelerated future, what about journeying to the past? Aren't the technical challenges insurmountable? And why might we want to do this, especially if we were only able to navigate the winding cobblestone paths of little Tubingen?
There are likely countless good reasons why visiting this German town in the past on our light bike could be interesting and enjoyable. Near the borders of Switzerland and Austria and overlooking the Neckar and Ammer rivers, Tubingen is richly vested in history and an ideal site for time travel. For our purposes we will concentrate on two key personalities who touched ground in the town, already connected over boundaries of time and space - the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and author Herman Hesse.
But first just how possible is our little thought experiment?
We are after all speaking of generating an infinite source of energy to drive our infinite mass (as objects approach the speed of light mass increases with velocity, going to infinity at the speed of light). Also approaching light speed means that thoughts, heart beat and movements would slow as well. But we were never thinking very quickly anyhow and surely there is nothing more massive than Lance Armstrong's thighs. Plus we have already seen Captain Kirk, Superman and even Chubaka of Star Wars fame reverse time with a flick of a switch or cape so it is clearly possible, despite what any 'earthbound' physicist might say.
Those physicists who dare to explore thought experiments in violation of the laws of physics, like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, suggest that if we could exceed 140% of the speed of light time will go faster than the stationary frame, in effect reversing time. With Armstrong traveling furiously over 200% the 30km/h speed of light requirement in the German museum we look well set to exceed that threshold. And now for the real kicker. He would pedal backwards, clearly a recipe for taking us backwards through time.
So that's sorted out and now on to our personalities. Pope Benedict XVI is already 78-years-old so we'd be unlikely to encounter him if we started Armstrong speeding back to the future. He's probably a fairly interesting character to meet in current time 2005, setting the stage and foundation of beliefs for over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But to truly understand the essence of the man who would be pope we might need to travel back to 1968, a point in history often signaled by biographers as a critical juncture in the development of his philosophical perspective.
Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was teaching at Tubingen when Marxist student protests broke out in the late 1960s, the European equivalent to the student protests in Italy, France and the US at the same period. As power was questioned in all its forms Ratzinger was scared by the upheaval and became gravely concerned with the consequences of a system free of a strong hand of structured order. He called the revolts "a radical attack on human freedom ... a deep threat to all that is human".
Shortly after he is said to have adopted the Conservative views that led him to his taskmaster position in the Church under John Paul II, effectively the Party Whip.
Charles Moore in the Daily Telegaph muses that "his experience of the subsequent turmoil in the Church has taught him that Western culture is profoundly hostile to the message of Christianity".
According to Moore, Pope Benedict XVI is said to be fascinated with Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, with its portrait of Harry Haller embracing the meaninglessness of life. If this is true, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, perhaps Ratzinger feels special affinity for the character who balances self-affirmation with self-destruction and individuality with convention.
Perhaps he also feels special affinity for author Hesse who apprenticed for four years at the Buchhandlung Heckenhauer (still standing today in Tubingen on the Holzmarkt Square) from 1895-1898, in a common practice for young writers. Hesse led a wandering life but, like Ratzinger, was crucially formed by his contemplative years in the Black Forest bordertown before the start of WWI, against which Hesse furiously spoke out in Switzerland. Ratzinger deserted the German army during WWII and was briefly held by American forces as a POW.
Hesse received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 after his works had been put out of print in Nazi Germany from 1939-1945 by authorities. His literary canon is defined by a range of beautiful texts but it is Siddhartha, a fictional account of the early spiritual wanderings of Gautama Buddha, and Steppenwolf that must have touched Ratzinger.
And so it is with great ferocity that Armstrong pedals our lightspeed bike backwards to 1968 to find the young theologian deep in a Martin Luther-like trance, driven to action but now feeling the weight of consequence, searching for a reconnection to God.
In a Time Magazine interview with a friend, Wolfgang Beinert, working in Tubingen at the time, Ratzinger's dilemma emerges:
"Ratzinger had advocated -- was known for advocating -- a greater openness and a loosening of ecclesiastical authority, the Tubingen strikes triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."
Did he clutch Steppenwolf to his chest and chart a new path of authority and strict convention, his reputation as a institutional disciplinarian strengthened with each new promotion within the Church hierarchy?
Perhaps we should accelerate Armstrong's reverse still further, calling for one of his mythical climbs on Alpe d'Huez to take us still further back to Hesse, sitting contemplative, a lonely figure publishing his first poems in 1898, "melancholy neo-Romantic lyrics expressing Hesse's uneasiness with the world".
But a closer look sees figures clasped hand in hand across a table and over Hesse's shoulder, shadowed faces flickering in the firelight. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha sat cross legged speaking in turn.
SW: Our whole civilization is a cemetery where Jesus Christ, and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy.
SH: All the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together is the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life...then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection
Hesse doesn't seem startled by our presence: "We won't bring them," motioning towards his characters. "Ratzinger already knows them."
A whirl of the pedals and Armstrong has us on our way back to unite the characters of our Tubingen time-traveling drama, over time and space. Ratzinger doesn't seem startled by our presence.
Hesse: People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest
Ratzinger: Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.
Hesse: Yet it is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard
Ratzinger: Because in today's world the theme of truth has all but disappeared, because truth appears too great for man, and yet everything falls apart if there is no truth. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.
Hesse: Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.
Shortly they fade from view and earshot, walking arm and arm, no longer two isolated, inspirational men but now joined forces, stretched by lightspeed over Tubingen.
One can't help but think that commuters in the congested cities of the world like London, Tokyo, Los Angeles or Mexico City, might benefit more from getting around on a 'bike' traveling at light speed than the 85,000 residents in this idyllic old town. But the next time you visit Tubingen allow your senses to open and seek the Om that came that day when Pope Benedict XVI and Hermann Hesse met and walked together, speaking in turn, listening all the time.
As for us, we sped off on our lightspeed bike in time to get it back to the Deutches Museum before opening the next morning. It's there waiting for you when you're ready to conduct your own thought experiment. But you better get out practicing on your bike as Lance Armstrong has a seventh Tour de France to win this summer and he's a little busy.
Labels: literature, religion, science
