When the lesson was over, as she dismissed the class for recess, Mrs. Hunnte said, “Odibee, will you stay a few minutes, please?” When all the students were out of the room, Mrs. Hunnte said “Odibee, will you come up to my desk, and bring that piece of paper with the extra math you’ve been working on.” Rankin walked up and handed Mrs. Hunnte the paper. She looked at it, recognized nothing, and said, “Odibee, tell me about this, please.”
Rankin, the hard-headed troublemaker, lit up. He became instantly animated. “Mrs. Hunnte, thanks so much for letting me tell you about this. It’s so exciting. I read about this last summer at the library. Four hundred years ago there was a mathematician named Lascap Tamref. He was a very smart man. The smartest man of his time, I think. He told people he had developed a proof for a corollary to the Wilbeck equation that was considered unsolvable.”
Rankin was talking, spewing out facts so fast that Mrs. Hunnte interrupted. “Odibee, slow down…slow down, young man, we have all the time you need.”
“Yes, Ma’am, Mrs. Hunnte…Mrs. Hunnte…Mrs. Hunnte,” he stammered on, “four days after Tamref told his friends he’d solved the equation he died in an accident. It was really bad. He was out hunting for garduls, I think. He liked to hunt them you know, and fell off a cliff. Everybody knew how smart he was. They looked through his house and couldn’t find anything. They call it Tamref’s Last Theorem. I’ve read almost fifty of the papers written since then, and nobody has been able to solve it, nobody in four hundred years. Look, here, see,” as he pointed to some symbols, “I almost have it, I know I’m really close. There’s only one variable that doesn’t fit.”
Mrs. Hunnte was stunned. All she was able to say was “Odibee, can I have this piece of paper?”
“Sure. I don’t have any copies,” said Rankin, “but I can write it out again if you want me to. I know it really well. I have it memorized.”
“I’m sure you do, Odibee, I’m sure you do,” she replied.
At lunch time Mrs. Hunnte gave the paper to the school’s math teacher and said, “I’ve always dreamed I would be fortunate enough to have a student like this, and if one came along I would be able to recognize the child as such.”
The next week Rankin was enrolled at the provincial university. Before he died, Rankin paid tribute to Mrs. Hunnte as, “Outside of my family, the most important person in my life. She was the first one to recognize my potential.” Rankin himself donated the money to fund the Hunnte Chair of Education at The University of DiGamma in honor of his second grade teacher.
The piece of paper Rankin handed Mrs. Hunnte is now one of the most treasured artifacts in the Rankin archives.
Hundreds of mathematicians from around the galaxy have studied it for centuries and concluded that Rankin was in fact,, correct: the corollary is unsolvable. It appears that Tamref was a better braggart than he was a mathematician.
Not surprisingly, at the University, Rankin was immediately attracted to physics. Later in life, he loved to tell his children and grandchildren of the day when he was eleven years old, walking back to his dormitory after spending the afternoon in the library, when he said to himself, “I want to study the black hole.” After a while, his family tired of hearing the story, but telling it brought the great man such obvious pleasure that they always did their best to listen intently.
Before Rankin’s time it was believed that no particle, wave, or entity, anything, nothing could escape what was considered the most powerful force in the Universe: the gravity of the black hole. Study of the black hole beyond the event horizon was thought impossible, the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, could escape. But Rankin noted that the field equations describing the behavior and relationship of energy, light, mass and gravity did predict the possibility of virtual photons, and it would be the virtual photon that would allow him to study the black hole.
A good number of Rankin’s instructors dismissed his ideas as that of an admittedly very brilliant but equally naïve, young, just-turned teenager boy who was out of his league. They’d seen prodigies like this before: some were destined for greatness, some were destined to flip hamburgers, or drive a taxi, or overdose on the drug-of-the-week, only to be remembered when their obituary appeared in the local paper. But Rankin did what comes natural to all true leaders—what makes them leaders—which seems to be an inherent sequence in their DNA: he was willing to challenge authority, to question accepted dogma, to consider what was previously considered impossible.
By a novel solution of the field equations, he proved that virtual photons do indeed exist. His insight, in retrospect, was obscenely simple: use a minus sign instead of a plus sign. For example, 2 x 2 = 4. But: (-) 2 x (-) 2 also = 4. A “virtual” photon can be quite real.
Solving such a mathematical problem is no small feat, but it was really just numbers and figures on a piece of paper. Rankin had to be able to produce virtual photons. His second stroke of genius was applying a lesson he learned from playing card games. Everyone knows the percentages; the winners knew when to play the cards as no one else would. It gave Rankin the idea that the only way to produce a virtual photon was to assume it was not an absolutely exact perfect opposite of its real photon partner or they would immediately annihilate. There must be a subtle difference, an asymmetry. He would use this asymmetry to produce virtual photons that could stand alone, that could be separated and survive apart from their other virtual, but now real, self.
Energy density fluctuates spontaneously in space. Rankin discovered that at the event horizon—the rim, edge, border of the black hole—vacuum fluctuations can be dampened so that an area of negative energy could be created, and more importantly for his purposes, sustained. This represented energy borrowed from another area of space, necessitating a corresponding area of positive energy. From these areas of negative and positive energy, Rankin was able to produce, respectively, virtual and real photons.
In nature, this pair would instantaneously annihilate, and thus in reality could never be measured. But Rankin posited that if the pair was produced immediately adjacent to the event horizon, the virtual photon could be induced to cross the event horizon into the black hole before the pair could annihilate. The virtual photon would have a real existence in time and space.
Once past the event horizon, the virtual photon would be like everything: drawn instantly toward the churning, a million times hotter-than-the-sun soup of sub-atomic particles called the singularity at the center of the black hole.
But negative energy is gravitationally repulsive. Rankin predicted that the virtual photon would come to within one ten-million-billionth of a meter of the singularity, but would then be forced back out through the event horizon where it could be measured and quantified. This would allow Rankin to do what was never done before—what was previously thought impossible—to study the inside of the black hole. The black hole, the darkest, most enigmatic, mysterious, and powerful inhabitant of the cosmos, was about to unlock the secrets of its limitless power to a teenager who still shaved only once a week whether he needed to or not.
Rankin’s work had a profound impact on the concept of time. He proved conclusively that time-travel, travel either backwards or forwards in time, was impossible. His theories have been universally reconfirmed; so that time travel is no longer even contemplated (at least until the next Rankin comes along).
Previous theories suggested that time would come to an end inside the black hole. Rankin showed that time does not end but actually begins at the singularity (It is now a generally accepted concept: to break new ground, do what is the opposite of what everyone else believes.) His theory is consistent with and confirms the concept of time as an infinite line progressing only in one direction. As black holes continue to swallow up all visible matter, dark matter, dark energy and other black holes, there will eventually be only one black hole and one singularity in the Universe. The inevitable result is that when the entire mass of the Universe is at the singularity, there will be another big bang, with the continuation of the infinite and unidirectional line of time.