The Duality Duets

~ A Novel About The Joys of Exploration And Discovery ~

This is a work of fiction inspired by real experiences of my life. It includes passages of real events, people, places etc. as commentary, but the story itself is fabricated from my imagination in which all events, places and people–living, dead, or anywhere in between–are entirely fictional. The real stuff is clearly indicated as such at the beginning of each chapter, followed by nothing but fiction until the beginning of the next chapter. Why? I'm not sure. It just seemed the best way to get this story written. NOTE: Equations and other illustrated formulae or technical graphics presented in this novel are currently in use in the real world. In this work of fiction, they serve only to introduce and reinforce chapter imagery related to science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. For those interested, search them up on the internet using the associated descriptive text provided beside each equation, formulae, or technical graphic in the story. It's fascinating stuff even if the math is not understood. And don't blame yourself while reading this novel for not knowing every detail of the math. I certainly don't. Also, they just look so cool!

CHAPTER ONE

~ The True Stuff ~ When I really began getting into playing music, I enrolled in Junior High Orchestra playing cello and loved it. Symphonic music sent chills racing up and down my spine so intense they almost made me pass out. I was also starting to love playing guitar a lot. So much so that I frequently fell into a trance while playing. One day I was sitting on the front porch of our house playing guitar for a next door neighbor and fell into a deep trance only to be pulled out of it when he started gently shaking me by the shoulder saying "Hey! Hey, man! You're drooling on your guitar!", which I was. But he was cool about it, only commenting on how into it I was instead of ridiculing me for being a slobbering idiot. While living on a pig farm near the southern tip of Lake Michigan, I signed up for Junior/Senior Band after meeting the band instructor during summer orientation. He appeared to be a very staid fellow at first sight, but after talking with him a few minutes it became obvious he was anything but. Besides the usual concert and marching band  stuff we did, he organized a few of us into a dixieland band with me strumming banjo and later on that winter, three of us teamed up to form a bluegrass band. Near the end of the school year, he loaded us all up into a school bus and we drove up to Northern Illinois University in Dekalb to see Maynard Ferguson perform on his quarter tone trumpet with a pianist playing a quarter tone piano. That music was spacey enough, but then Maynard switched on a new device called a digital delay processor and started playing along with himself. Blew my freaking mind, and I began dreaming of doing something similar playing guitar. Having played cello, I imagined a fretless guitar played through a delay processor would be just the instrument to achieve that goal. I still drop into a trance when playing music–especially when composing a new piece, achieving an intense feeling of being transported far away from all of the bullshit society seems hellbent on stirring up and dealing out for no good reason. Recent casual study of quantum wave theory set me to speculating that these trances may be more than a mere dream state and I'm somehow tapping into a powerful means of telepathation. Yep, that's a made-up word.

~The Made-Up Stuff ~

Momentum of a photon.

Energy of a photon.

Momentum of a photon in terms of relativistic mass.

Kuel always kept these three simple equations scribbled on sticky notes attached to the top edge of his quantcomp monitor. On the bottom edge he kept another.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Key concepts essential to understanding his invention: the Quantum Contrapuntal Interspatial Synthesizer (QISS for short, but in no way a contemporary reference to that awful rock band of the 20th century KISS). QISS. A revolutionary musical instrument. QISS was now Kuel's focus in life. Also a starship of sorts. One without hulls, engines, life support, armor, shields, weaponry, galley, head or captain's chair. Instead of all of that useless crap, it leveraged wave particle duality to find and open paths Kuel could follow in an instant to any place and/or time he wished to go. A high-energy physics instrument for instantaneously traveling vast distances and timespans within any universe and for traversing across multiverse brane boundaries. Something no one has been able to achieve to date, even in the most powerful qwarpships. With QISS, Kuel was the ultimate traveler of space and time. QISS was his secret too. No one else knew of its existence.

Well, almost no one else.

Staring at the sticky notes on the monitor, he said a silent goodbye to them, to his trusty quantum computer, to his home and to everything and everyone he had ever known. He was about to become a hermit of the strangest sort–always keeping company and secrets of QISS with no one except himselves.

After building QISS, he had understood theoretically what to expect, but theory and practice are frequently two different beasts, especially in applications of bleeding edge high-energy physics. Hoping for nothing and believing in less as he fired it up and began playing the instrument for the first time, he found–as expected–that he was able to sense dualities in musical patterns produced by QISS correlating to dualities of waves and particles, and that he was actually able to manipulate those physical dualities through nuanced dualities of musical expression. As waves and particles became one at the crest of musically orgasmic waves, he was instantly quantum teleported to a parallel universe where another musician/physicist was composing for the first time on a QISS of his own invention. It was him₂. Not a doppelganger, but actually him in the other universe to which he had just successfully Qported.

Upon meeting, no time or energy was wasted on verbal introductions as they immediately set about collaborating in their music. Conversing exclusively in tonalities and resonance durations woven instinctively through actions applied to their instruments, they soon discovered compositional elements which allowed them to also cross brane world boundaries into parallel universes together. Upon conclusion of that first collaboration, they uttered a single exclamatory word of mutual satisfaction.

"Cool!"

Now they meet themselves in all of the universes they visit to collaborate, join forces and continue on their journey exploring the multiverse through quantumusical compositions which they call The Duality Duets. Because, after all, they are but one and the other. But because they are both one and many too; all the same and yet singularly varied; their duets become much more than that.

Through telepathation, they become–in deed (and indeed)–quantusymphonic composers of the cosmos.

CHAPTER TWO

~ The True Stuff ~ I took partial differential equations in college and somehow passed the course, although I cannot claim to have achieved any appreciable level of maturity in mathematics. Certainly not enough maturity to delve into mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics. So as I try to at least get a layman's grasp on the subject of quantum wave theory, I look at things like Schrödinger's equation which describes changes over time in physical systems in which quantum effects like wave-particle duality are significant and try to imagine visually what they mean through Gedankenexperiment (thought experiments) the way Albert Einstein liked to do. When playing a musical instrument I do something similar, rarely ever visualizing musical scores representing the music I'm playing in notes sprinkled over staves governed by clefs and signatures of key and time, instead visualizing the sounds of a musical piece in four-dimensional flowing, interacting waves of multiple colors. Sometimes, mere visualizations aren't enough, though, and other senses come into play, including sense of motion. Thinking of Euclidean n-space and n-vectors, the notion of n-dimensionality of music crosses my mind. Four-dimensions is pretty easy for my mind to handle in most thought experiments, but when more dimensions are considered, my mind balks and falters, wanting to take a break to kick back with a bowl of sugary cereal to watch a good Saturday Morning TV cartoon. Entanglement...

~The Made-Up Stuff ~

Schrödinger equation.

Feynman derivation of wave equation in three dimensions.

Dirac equation - relativistic wave.

Wave-particle duality...spatial and temporal frequency transformations...relativistic subatomic particle movement...a r r g h E N O U G H !

Kuel hated it when he dreamed in equations and solutions, always waking in a cold sweat. Much more preferable to don his augrealrig and mesh with appropriate community knowledge clouds for such exploratory thinking expeditions. Dream learning was iffy, at best. Enmeshed with CKCs through the ARRig he had received at age two–as every child did on their second birthday–never were. Enmeshment learning was a lot more fun too.

Swinging vertical in his suspensorbed, he levitated for a moment to yawn, stretch and scratch. He did not totally discount the damned dream, having learned to trust his subconscious mind's unstructured wanderings in the realm of mathematics as much as his waking mind's methodical wonderings in it. He had solved some hairy damned math problems while dreaming of them entirely intuitively, especially some particularly vexing Fourier Transformations of n-dimensional quantum wave forms. There were only a bakers dozen of CKCs in the mesh (that he was aware of and had access to) which could assist him with such transformations via quanputational modeling, and they could not hold a candle to the speed and efficiency of a deeply intuitive dream triggered in the constantly running supercomputer situated between his ears.

A quick visit to the head and a long, hot shower set him to reflecting on his first days with his ARRig. His parents had presented it to him with marked nonchalance along with other birthday gifts. A few of his neighborhood friends had already received theirs and had told him about them. After the cruelty of compulsory education and all of its horrors–not the least of which included teacher bias–had been outlawed, no child needed prodding to don their ARRig and begin the astounding journey of discovery only self-directed learning expeditions into the world's CKCs could spark. Thanking his parents for the other birthday gifts, Kuel recalled ignoring them and eagerly donning his ARRig to begin his own learning journey.

Within a matter of weeks, music had become central to his learning experiences and he began requesting access to various musical instruments. CKC ArtifIntAdmin had checked his learning stats and had approved acquisition of the instruments which were delivered within a matter of a few days. Kuel had progressed rapidly, learning not only how to play the instruments but the basics of music theory as well as practice and performance technique and had then started exploring the mathematical foundations of music. By age four, he had settled into his professional niche entirely of his own, self-directed learning accord–a budding PhysiMusician determined to positively change the world with his music.

Drying off with an old-fashioned terrycloth towel and starting the autoshave, he chuckled at his childish thinking patterns.

"Change the world, lol."

He hoped what he and himselves were now doing across universes would bring about positive change, because there apparently wasn't anyone or anything standing in their way as they composed the music of the cosmos.

CHAPTER THREE

~ The True Stuff ~ In the late 1990s I began tinkering with multitrack recording using a Roland VS-880 Multitrack Digital Recording Workstation and CD Burner, producing thirty original compositions and songs with it before the turn of the century. It wasn't long before I decided to delve into the world of audio spectral analysis and manipulation using a software application called Sound Forge on my recordings. Especially useful was its Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) feature which I used to analyze and fix inevitable glitches introduced by the crappy Wintel personal computing hardware and OS I was using at the time. Prior to getting my hands on the VS880 and Sound Forge, I could only dream of building a home recording studio because the equipment costs were so enormous. With this set of digital audio recording and analysis tools I spent every minute I could on nights and weekends recording and mastering original musical works I had been composing for years prior to emergence of such affordable, home studio toolkits. And as this happy hobby time progressed through the end of the 20th century into the 21st century, a lot of the mathematics I had struggled to learn in cold isolation of infuriating textbook-to-test method of study employed in college coursework began to reveal clearly and meaningfully in practical applications which were of specific interest to me. This was when it finally dawned on me that project-oriented learning was the best way for me to gain and expand knowledge in any subject matter.

~The Made-Up Stuff ~

Fourier Transform in terms of position space.

Fourier Transform in terms of momentum space.

Waiting for the QISS to power up, initialize and run through its built in tests, Kuel composed a farewell letter to his surviving family members and sent it off via delaymail to arrive in their inboxes in a couple of days. Eventually, he would travel back in time to tell those already dead about the journey upon which he was about to embark, especially his maternal grandparents who played a key role fostering development of his keen interest in music by replacing his inexpensive CKC-provided starter model musical instruments with professional quality models costing a great deal more. They did this five years before he would begin earning his own income at age ten–a gift of generosity he had only been able to thank them for by performing professionally with the instruments and always making sure they had front row seats at every recital and concert they were able to attend before they were killed in the NeoCon attacks.

The QISS beeped softly after power up and BITs had completed. Kuel inserted its binaural mics and let them attune and adjust to his especially complex ear canal topology. He wondered sometimes if he had been born with more normal ear canals if he would have ever taken the course of study and profession he had chosen to pursue or if he would have ever invented the QISS. Doctors examining them had admitted they were particularly torturous but scoffed at the idea they enhanced his musical abilities, but then doctors were consummate scoffers in regards to patients' intuitive notions of their physiology–a very limiting, arrogant form of bigotry in his opinion.

Picking up the QISS and plucking at its string clusters, he allowed it a few more seconds to automatically adjust gains as he prepared for "takeoff" by silently thanking everyone and everything which had enabled him to reach this key moment in time and space. Then he played in a style of improvisation well suited to inducing telepathation through ultra-fast Fourier Transformations of aural patterns he performed into relativistic position and momentum space quantum wave forms. The effect was mesmerizing and as wave/particle dualities emerged he could feel them through the feedback mechanism of the QISS as a deep thrumming which resonated throughout his body very much like a heavy-lift quantpter's sonic effects on huge volumes of air felt in flesh and bone as it approached at low speed and altitude. A quick tweak of QISS's quantum compass calibration to adjust to the planet's constantly shifting magnetic field, a subliminal flash of light and burp of atmospheric disturbance and he was there, looking at himself holding a QISS looking back at him. Kuel₂ smiled and nodded at him and without further delay they began composing their first Duality Duet, aiming to travel backward in time to visit with his grandparents and grandparents₂.

For this trip through time, the dueling QISSs required significantly larger amounts of power and drew it directly from dark energy sources detected and drawn upon as the newly composed duet's form solidified. No one else could hear the duet as Kuel and Kuel₂ composed and performed it on the fly, but their QISSs recorded every musical element of it for future reference and reuse. The two Kuels wondered in tandem if someday the recordings might end up in a CKC of their own design and construction for future generations of PhysiMusicians to appreciate and learn from. They grinned at each other, knowing that goal would someday become a project they would enjoy working on together.

Their QISSs pushed spent energy as dark matter out exhaust ports to maintain dark energy/matter balance in their respective regions of the universe pair they were now traversing through time in. It would not do to allow any imbalance to develop from their quantuphysical activities. The outcome of such carelessness would bring an untimely end to themselves and to everything else in existence. Their mission was positive creation of possibilities for others, not total destruction in an abrupt, unannounced collapse of time and space. For the two Kuels, the trip was instantaneous and they each appeared before their grandparents with a soft buffeting of air expanding outward about their point of arrival that lightly disturbed the hair of their beloved lost relatives.

Speaking as one to grandparents and grandparents₂ in each of their respective universes, they told them of what and how they had accomplished their goal in life to return through time and space to tell them how much they appreciated their generosity and devotion to life and happiness of their grandson and grandson₂.

"It would not have happened without your influences," Kuel told them. "Not just the pro-level instruments, but your patient, deliberate knowledge sharing too."

His grandmothers nodded. "So you were listening. Paying attention," she complemented with a warm smile.

A puzzled expression crossed Kuel's face. "Sometimes you seemed so frantic to get back to the music, we wondered," his grandfather added. "We weren't sure much of the math and physics were being absorbed."

Smiling and bowing his head in shamed respect, he admitted it was difficult. "Gaining maturity in mathematics wasn't easy. Not like the music was. More natural talent there than in math and sciences, I suppose. But your lessons in rewards of perseverance helped. As soon as thinking mathematically became more intuitive, the physics were easier to grasp, though none of it is ever a cinch."

They laughed with their grandson over this honest declaration. "It never is," his grandfather said. "But damn, the achievement effect is fun to experience, eh?"

Since his grandparents were well versed in quantum mechanics and wave theory themselves, they were not so very shocked by appearance of an adult Kuel and Kuel₂ telling them these things when they had just seen their preteen Kuel and Kuel₂ performing with the Quark Interplanetary Symphony Orchestra the evening before. They were very surprised at how he had leveraged his knowledge and skills, though, and expressed their extreme pleasure with his astounding accomplishment, first hugging and kissing him with deep delight then examining his QISS with deep curiosity.

"It's so light," his grandmother observed. "How did you accomplish that?"

"It carries material resources to manufacture mechanisms and fixed parts only needed occasionally on the fly, then recycles the materials. Not a lot of heavier moving parts otherwise, most of those needed only to provide haptic feedback."

"Ah, then no magic involved," she said.

"None whatsoever," he replied. "I may be an entertainer in the realm of music, but I'm horrible at method and effect in the art of distraction and slight of hand conjuring, not to mention severely lacking in persona without an instrument in my hands."

They decided to prepare a meal and eat while discussing details of it all together at their leisure rather than try to absorb it in an intense, impersonal cram session. It wasn't important, after all, for them to retain any of the information, even if it were possible. After dining and talking, he informed them they would not remember anything about their reunion or anything they had talked about upon the moment he departed. Only impressions of emotion might remain, depending on how deeply felt during their time together. They all understood the temporal implications of such memories and accepted them without protest, simply enjoying the time together while it lasted.

"Any idea when you'll build and mesh the first CKC?" his grandmother asked.