05-02-2018, 06:10 PM
A Lot to Process
Define Dexter: sharp, lanky, bespectacled, linear. All complementary angles and golden ratios. A mathematical specimen. That last word—linear—commanded a certain resonance in Dexter’s life. It was perhaps the one that described him best.
In elementary school, Dexter realized life is linear. Every person started their life at one point, ended it at another, and the only thing that caused any deviation from that path was collisions with the paths of other people. Everything could be determined, Dexter supposed; all a person needed was the initial positions and velocities of six billion or so people, and then to—click!—run the simulation. The world could be resolved into one gigantic Fermi problem.
Growing up, Dexter experienced life in numbers the way others did in colors or sounds. When people spoke to him, he busied himself counting the number of words, the number of letters per word, the syllables. He calculated averages and searched for patterns. People often accused Dexter of being distracted—of ignoring them. They did not seem comforted when presented with his findings.
At home, Dexter saw thermodynamics at work. When his parents argued, heat was supplied to the system. Excess energy boiled to the surface, either dissipating gradually or turning into some other form of energy: the kinetic energy of a thrown teapot or ceramic plate, for instance. After a time, entropy settled in and the house returned to an inert state. Heat could not flow spontaneously from a colder location to a hotter one. The energy could not last forever. Dexter took solace in that last fact.
Dexter always knew there was a formula for everything, from shooting free throws in basketball to designing spacecraft capable of orbiting the Earth. For most applications, the calculations were simple enough he could do them on paper. A formula for everything, he supposed, except love. To him, love was an abstract and ephemeral concept. It was formula immune. Sometimes, it ended without warning and no one could explain why. Dexter could not reconcile himself with its transient nature.
Love was not worth Dexter’s time.
Dexter grew up near Lake Chelan, Washington, but remembered little of his childhood. The lune-shaped lake was a vague blue afterimage on his memory. What he did remember was the science fair in his senior year. Dexter managed to model data of a population reacting to a crisis in terms of Fourier’s heat equation. He received top marks.
Early on, Dexter could determine the path his own life would take. He spent hours drawing it out in flowchart form. It did not factor in the potential for love, and so he was confident no collision would be forceful enough to impel him from his chosen course.
Once decided, Dexter’s steps to follow that path were, as always, logical and linear. During the middle of his senior year he applied to the University of Washington; at the end of his senior year he was accepted; and, four months later, he moved to Seattle. Dexter’s first impression of the city was that of a gigantic brain, each building a lobe thrumming with constant activity. The university, he thought, was its frontal lobe.
To Dexter, the campus was foreign at first, the wet weather a stark contrast to the dry autumns of Chelan. He adjusted quickly, though. He soon found that everyone was obsessed with grades and class averages. Dexter considered their obsession in error. He merely gravitated toward the subjects that interested him most, barely passing English, excelling at calculus and physics. Whereas physics in high school always had tangible applications, the physics he learned in college dealt with distances astronomically large and small.
Dexter could sense something underneath it all: a single theory at the root of everything.