Rewinds with Ambrose

Ambrose waited for things to slow down so he could move his feet again. He watched unblinking, as time rewound around him. From the blurs around him on the sidewalk, this rewind was going fast. He’d have to make up days when things finally stopped. Thankfully he was close to his apartment when time, and life, stopped this morning.

As he waited and watched people go back inside, un-spill their coffee, and the like, he thought about the peculiar fact that his time travelling had been happening a lot more frequently of late. Used to be he would get to redo a chunk of time, usually minutes, about once a year. This one today, would be his thirty-second of the year. Thirty-two times in his thirty-second year. It had been happening since he was twelve, and his moments of déjà vu had helped him a lot in certain situations. How could he forget getting to respell the word that knocked him out of the spelling bee in eighth grade and then running the table and becoming school champion? Or “The Catch” in the championship game his sophomore year of high school. The opportunity to get to kiss Lina Solomonov again after not going for it after prom the first time had been quite exciting. Those were all great positives of his Rewinds.

 But, he thought, there were really only two Rewinds that had truly changed his life. The first was making himself stay awake to hear Mr. Ramming’s explanation of entropy during junior year physics class. By then, Ambrose had been Rewinding for five or six years. He hadn’t really ever thought much of how or why he was able to go backwards in time. He had just accepted it. Ramming’s explanation of entropy though, that was the gas that lit the flame. Ambrose had written Ramming’s commentary on entropy down word for word that second time: entropy is a measure of disorder, or more precisely, the number of ways a system’s pieces can be arranged. Things naturally move from fewer possible arrangements (order) to more possible arrangements (disorder). This is not because of some force pushing them, but simply because disordered states vastly outnumber ordered ones, so systems drift toward them by sheer probability.

Ramming a man in his fifties with stark white hair and an equally white bushy mustache, had then demonstrated two examples of entropy in action. Ramming was Ambrose's personal Einstein.

First, was the ice cube melting in a glass of water. The frozen water molecules locked in place, ordered.

"There are very few ways to arrange those molecules and still have 'ice'. Once melted, those same molecules would be free to move randomly through the liquid. There are an innumerable number of ways to arrange the molecules as liquid water compared to frozen ice”, Ramming had said. “That is entropy increasing and disorder increasing. The water molecules will never spontaneously un-melt back into a cube. not because physics forbids it, but because the odds of all those molecules randomly reforming a perfect lattice are so astronomically small it never happens in practice,” he had continued.

Ramming had then picked up a sealed and wrapped deck of cards. He explained that every new deck of cards came in one specific order: Ace to King, by suit. Ramming had opened the deck and started casually shuffling them. “The moment I shuffled these cards, entropy started increasing. I could shuffle the deck back into the original order, it is NOT impossible. But there is a factorial of 52 chance of doing so.” Ramming had looked at his class expecting them to be impressed by that number. No one was until he added, “That’s a one in an 8 followed by sixty-seven zeroes chance of doing so.”

It was reliving that class, those twenty minutes (and being awake for the full twenty minutes instead of asleep by the third) that Ambrose realized physics could maybe give him a path to understanding the nature of his Rewinds. It was an idea that became his obsession. Which led to him pursuing his undergraduate degree in physics and eventually a pursuit of a doctorate in Theoretical physics, specializing in Statistical Mechanics. It was this pursuit which, brought about the second truly life-changing Rewind for him.

Ambrose, in his diligence, paranoia, curiosity (it had many names, perhaps fear was what it should have been identified as), had prepared two doctoral thesis defenses. The one his advisor, Professor Anglin, had helped him on was the sure bet. It was a dissertation on entropy, thermodynamic time-asymmetry, and quantum decoherence. Essentially, he was proving why time-reversal is thermodynamically absurd. Entropy, disorder, always increases, therefore Time seems to move forward as well. It has been the Second Law of Thermodynamics since the mid-19th century for a reason, after all.

Ambrose had even folded his own, personal data he’d collected from twelve years of wearing Timmy into it as a thought experiment. Timmy was, of course, the custom-built chronometric instrument he’d built from a modified atomic clock his freshman year of undergrad to detect impossibly small discrepancies in time, his Rewinds, that didn’t match universal atomic time. Ambrose was quite proud of how he’d slipped it in: “If a localized decoherence event preserved a closed system’s internal state while its environment underwent entropy reversal, what would that look like?” If the board only knew he was describing his own life, dressing it up as pure theory…

That was the safe option, the sure bet. The second dissertation Ambrose had shown no one. It was the reverse of the first. He would use Timmy’s dataset to prove discontinuity, that he, Ambrose, was Entropy’s exception. He had the data. Ambrose had even chosen a committee safe title: Localized Entropy Reversal: A Theoretical Framework for Closed-System Time-Asymmetry Violations.

Ambrose presented the second dissertation. He had made it through his presentation in one piece, but the board eviscerated him on trivialities. Things like “No independent replication” and “used sing-source, self-recorded data with an obvious conflict of interest” and “no mechanism proposed that doesn’t violate thermodynamics as understood by the scientific community”. Ambrose had been disappointed that they didn’t seem to grasp what he was telling them: that time travel was possible! Ambrose had even pulled out a tooth and had it forensically scanned to show that it was closer to thirty-four years old than thirty-two, and the board still dismissed him.

Luckily his next Rewind occurred the next day and he gave his original dissertation, and received his doctorate. What came next were two years of working for a mid-level research lab, all passion having evaporated from within himself for his work.

And now, this year, his Rewinds were becoming more frequent. His birthday had happened on February 1st and every day since then he had had a Rewind. It was odd. This one felt like it was taking a long time too. Cars and trucks were whizzing past in reverse still. Maybe he could try figuring out what triggered his Rewinds? He’d tried before without success. Rewinds just happened randomly. But, oh how this was getting exhausting, having one every day. Reliving something again.

Suddenly, his foot fell forward onto the pavement. Sounds started creeping back into his ears, and air filled his lungs. The wind brushed his hair, and someone bumped him, accidentally knocking him into the street. A horn blared.

This works too, Ambrose thought.