Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Time Trials – A Short Story About Losing Nothing (Part 1)

“The isogonal conjugate of the circumcircle is the line at infinity, given in trilinear coordinates by ax + by + cz = 0 and in barycentric coordinates by x + y + z = 0.”

The clock ticked forward in an increasingly delayed metronomic rhythm as Dave tried time and time again to grasp something Рanything Рthat Professor Lundgren was saying. Being a non-traditional student, he had thought, would give him an advantage in his post-graduate work on quantum linear application engineering. He had already been proven a genius via his regular IQ testing, his work on updating the Time-Independent Schr̦dinger Equation to include dilation fields in and around massive gravitational anomalies, and his Stephen Hawking Fellowship where he had proven gravity was not a true constant as had been previously thought, but a relative constant based on the quantum shift of electrons in mass at various densities.

So he was smart, an otherworldly intelligence mixed with a mental sense of humor. He had a social life. Indeed, his head wasn’t swimming from the content of the class, but more of a reminder that possibly Tuesday nights before class were not the best to get into endless rounds of bar dice and ginger-brandy shots.