Yom HaShoah

I have learned more this year about the Shoah (Holocaust) then ever before.

As part of the 8th grade class trip, we went to the Holocaust museum in St. Louis.  Having a tour guide was an option, so I offered my "expertise" to lead my students.  I researched from 1935-1945, discovering and rediscovering things.  I though I was prepared.

When we got there, one of the staff informed us that there was a speaker, and if we wanted we could sit in on the remainder of his talk, as long as we were quiet.  So we walked into this small auditorium and sat in the back.  Up front was a Lithuanian named Mendel Rosenberg.  We got to hear the last five minutes before the group already there moved on.  As they did, I walked up.  I introduced myself, explain my class and why we were there, and asked if we could ask some questions.  He said he would check to see if he had enough time.  When he came back, he said he could give a shortened version of his story.

My class had never been quieter.

Rosenberg had survived Dachau.  He tells his story so that we do not forget.

The same reason why I teach history.

My 5th and 6th grade students got to learn about the Holocaust as well.  They were given an option between two books, and six chose "Number the Stars."  Since most had read it before, I gave them history research projects.  When they presented them, I taught a very condensed version of the Shoah.  Most of that lesson was on the policies and events leading to the Holocaust.  I explained the concentration camps.  Of the extermination camps, all I showed were the names, the number killed, and the gate at Auschwitz.  I told them I would not take them any farther.

A few of the pictures and stories still haunt me.

As a historian, I can give more information than you could want on the topic.  And much of it exceeds what would be considered acceptable for even the most gruesome rated "R" movie.  But I am afraid.  I am afraid that people are forgetting it.  The "final solution" was over seventy years ago.  Many would believe that it means nothing to us now.  It happened so long ago and on the other side of the world.  And most of the people involved are long gone.  Why does it matter?

One lie: Arbeit Macht Frei.  "Work makes you free."

The motto, officially or unofficially, of historians is from George Santayana: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

There are things about one of the darkest parts of human history that I did not tell my students.  Some of those things they are not ready for, yet.  And some of those things I will never tell them.  But I will never hesitate to tell my students that this horror happened.

Survivors like Mendel Rosenberg tells their stories so that we would never forget.  I pray that never happens, and that we never allow anything like the Shoah to happen again, ever.

Shalom.

The Story of Salvation

In 2009, I was given an assignment to write the story of salvation from my perspective.  While most of my fellow student-teachers personalized the Passion Week account or spoke metaphorically about how Good Friday and Easter effect their lives, I took a broader approach.  I started my story of salvation when The Story of Salvation starts: Eden.  I strove to compose an account that not only tells my story, but the story of all humankind.

~

It started with sin; perfectly harmless and quite pleasing.  Listening to the lies that had been told, the child of God had eaten from a tree that had been forbidden.  It was not forbidden so as to punish the child, but rather to protect.  And yet, the child thought that the Father was being unfair.  Now, the Father, being fair, had to punish the child.  And the punishment: eternal separation from the Father. 

The child, horrified, tried to fix the problem with the means available.  Sacrifices, piety, fancy prayers, festivals, religious services, self-mutilation, fasting, solitude; no mater what the child did, the Father was not satisfied.  Then the day came for the Father to punish the child.  The Father led the child to a hill with a Tree.  The child knew that the Tree was where those who sinned were punished.

When the child and the Father reached the top of the hill, both were brought to tears when they found the child’s Brother already there, hanging in the place of the child.  He had accepted His sibling’s punishment, even though He had not sinned.  Remorseful, the child knelt at the base of the Tree, vowing to follow in his Brother’s footsteps.  Both the Father and child left the hill, their hearts broken.  When they reached the bottom, the child looked up at the Father and asked why his Brother sacrificed Himself.

“Because I love you.”  The child turned to see his Brother standing there, alive yet scarred.  Embracing Him, the child begged for forgiveness, apologizing for the sin he committed.  His Brother simply smiled and said: “All is forgiven, left at the foot of the Tree.  Now, let Me teach you of a new Life.”

That day the child’s name was changed to Christian, the bearer of Christ.  The rest of the child’s life was spent taking Christ, his Brother, to everyone he met, so that everyone might know of the wondrous act of love that occurred that day on the hill with the Tree.

~

Happy Easter!  Χριστός ἀνέστη!

The Time Splice

What do H. G. Wells, Dr. Emmett Brown, and your's truly (Adam) have in common?

We've all invented (or discovered) time machines.  Yes, that's right, I have a time machine.  Two of them, in fact.  And they both work differently.

Okay, so one of them is actually just a pen.  Specifically its a Zebra F-301 Compact.  That might not seem important, but you'll see (maybe) that it is.  Anyway, yes, my time machine is a pen.  Why a pen?  How can a lowly pen be a time machine?

Well, with my pen I can write stories.  Stories about any time and place.  So, metaphorically, my pen is a time machine.

"But Adam, you said you have two time machines?"

Yes.  Along with occasionally speaking to myself in the third person, I do have a second time machine.  Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  I have a second method of building a time machine.  It's actually really nifty.

Now, I am an amateur internet archeologist and part-time mad scientist, so it should come as no surprise when I say this: I found the long lost and supposedly fictional notebooks of the infamously famous Quattrocento alchemist Eliseo Uroboros.

No, really, I did.

Eliseo Uroboros is the guy who claimed to have discovered time travel.  His notebooks include numerous techniques for using esoteric elements such as janusite, chronosite, aionite, and horaeum.  For centuries, most scientists, and even a few alchemists, dismissed work with these elements as dangerous.  Especially chronosite, which is know to spontaneously spark and even occasionally explode, if in large enough amounts.

But Uroboros was determined to prove that chronosite could be a power source for something.  What he discovered was completely by accident.  According to his notes, on January 13, 1432, he was conducting an experiment with aionite.  He was heating a piece the size of his thumb over a charcoal flame when the piece exploded.  One of the shards shot out and struck a piece of chronosite that was sitting on the workbench nearby.  The collision resulted in a very strange explosion.  Everything within ten feet of where the chronosite rested disappeared.

When Uroboros picked himself off the floor, he went about cleaning up the mess made by the explosion.  Well, he would have, if there was anything left by the explosion.  You see everything within ten feet was gone.  Not destroyed, but, poof, gone.  His notes, experiments, tools, and workbench were all gone.  What was left of his workbench had a ten foot wide circular hole.  The stone floor even had a dent in it, as if a giant sphere had fallen.

Without an explanation, Uroboros returned to his other experiments.  Nearly two years passed before he figured out what had happened that day.  He was trying to see if chrysoberyl could be used as a lens for a heat ray when a flash of bright light stuck his workshop.  At first he thought it was lightning, or that the local Dominican friar was right and God was trying to strike him dead.  As soon as the blurry spots left his vision he was greeted with the most amazing sight: a perfectly circular cutout of his old workbench, complete with all the tools, experiments, and notes that were on it.

Perplexed and intrigued, Uroboros investigated.  Everything that he had placed on the bench two years prior was right where he left it.  Except the chronosite.

After a bit of thinking (and a fair amount of his neighbor's wine to settle his nerves), Uroboros determined that, somehow, the combination of chronosite and aionite was able to transfer things through time.  Over the next five years Uroboros experimented with a variety of quantities and collision methods, determining how this time travel worked and how to control it.  His work was crude, but he was able to figure out that the combination of chronosite and aionite has a "range" of between 100 to 2,000 years.  His first device was designed to work like a gun.  After setting the date all one had to do was press the button.  Uroboros crafted many Time Splices, each using a different method of colliding chronosite and aionite.  A few of these were successful, while others were spectacular failures.

In his lifetime, Uroboros never figured out how, exactly, the Time Splice worked.  All he knew was that the explosive combination of the two elements allowed a person to travel through time.  Very few have tried to study his device.  But I figured out how it works.  What Uroboros did not know was astrophysics and nuclear weaponry.

What happens when a nuclear bomb goes off?  (Besides saying "it explodes, duh.")  The explosion creates a runaway fission or fusion reaction, depending on the type of bomb.

What happens when a star dies?  Sometimes, the matter collapses into a super-dense area that has immense gravity - a black hole.  Other times the star explodes, creating a supernova.

What happens when the Time Splice is activated?

The Time Splice is a nuclear fusion device.  Yes, a Renaissance era alchemist accomplished what numerous modern scientists cannot.  Don't start thinking that this can be used for the making of unlimited electricity.  Time Splices are both inherently unstable and self-destructive to a degree.  Let me explain how it works.

The combination of aionite and chronosite in the core acts as both the fusional material and the “portal” for time travel.  When engaged, the Time Splice will go through a near instantaneous four part process.

1. The Time Splice core is “spun up,” with the aionite colliding with the chronosite.  This creates a “point” of nuclear fusion in the form of a micro star less than 1 cm in diameter.
2. The micro star reaches critical mass and collapses, creating a micro black hole, roughly ten feet in diameter.  This black hole is what severs the traveler’s timeline.
3. The micro black hole self-detonates and expands outwardly, creating a white hole.
4. The white hole collapses, splicing the traveler’s timeline.

The black hole is what “destroys” or “collapses” the local space-time, thus severing the traveler’s timeline.  The white hole is a “reversed” black hole that “explodes” outward in the local space-time, thus “splicing” the traveler’s timeline sometime else.  Everything within the ten feet of the time splice is transported.  This makes using the Time Splice somewhat problematic.  For example, if you were to use a Time Splice while in the back seat of a car, the driver will be upset that his car looks like a shark tried to eat it.

There are three types of Time Splices: gun, torus, and globe.  These types are similar to nuclear weaponry.  Gun, or rod-type, is similar to the "Little Boy" bomb.  An aionite "bullet" is "shot" at a cylindrical chronosite crystal.  This is most similar to the accidental Time Splice created in Uroboros's lab.  Torus, or ring-type, is like the current experiments for nuclear fusion.  It uses a circular shaped chronosite crystal.  The aionite is collided in the same way as a particle accelerator.  Torus-type Time Splices tend to be the safest.  They have more range than the gun-type, which are often "one-way."  The collision of aionite and chronosite, like almost all things nuclear, results in the destruction of the material.  This means that either the time traveler needs to bring extra fuel along, or use a gun-type as a "back up" device.  Torus-type Splices can be used more than once before the chronosite is fully depleted.  The globe, or ball-type, is rare.  They have the longest range, due to being similar to implosion-method nuclear weapons.  Also, since they are large, they are less convenient to use.

Time Splices can be made to look like anything.  Except perhaps a DeLorean.  Most gun-type Splices look like a pen, such as a Zebra F-301 Compact.  Torus-types often are seen, ironically, as watches.

There is a catch to using Time Splices.  Unlike the fictional time machines, the Time Splice cannot change date or hour, only the year.  So, if you want to see the opening of "Macbeth" in the original Globe theater, you will need to travel to London and be there on the correct date.  Once there, select the destination year and go.

When Time Traveling, there are no sights or sounds.  It is instantaneous.  One second you're in 2014, the next your in 1492.  The most often side-effect is a sense of vertigo.

That's what I've discovered so far.  I'm not sure what all the limitations are yet, but I did find a note that suggests that time travel only works from a later time to a lesser time.  What I mean is I can travel back to the past but not forward to the future.  I am also cautions because of the possibility of changing the past.  Under no circumstances am I going to try to go back in time and stop (insert significant historic event here) from happening.  If "Back to the Future" has taught us anything it is to not keep your parents from meeting.  The consequences could include erasing that one random photograph of you and your siblings that you have, and even having your hand start to disappear.

If you want, I can write about my adventures across time.  Or even better, I can tell you the adventures of a friend of mine.  He was researching the Second World War.  Maybe I'll write a story about it some day.

(In case you were wondering, yes, this is fictional.  Except the metaphorical "pen as time machine."  I've said that before.  All of this is foundational stuff for a story about a time traveler researching the Holocaust.  I don't know, I felt like writing something, and this is what was open on the desktop at the moment.  See you all next week, maybe.)