Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
"Again, Deconstructing
Barry "
by Quentin Long
[NOTE FROM UNCA CHEEKS: Depending on whether or not Unca Cheeks' profoundly limited understanding of the inherent intricacies of HTML coding prove sufficient unto the task at hand: the first paragraph of The Good Per'fesser's article, below, will contain either --
a.) a hypertext link to said gentleman's e-mail address; OR --
b.) a nigh-incomprehensible string of alphanumeric gobbledygook.
In the (likely) event that it turns out to be the latter of these two: Unca Cheeks would like to take advantage of this golden opportunity, once again, to remind one and all that The Per'fesser can be (and should be) most easily reached at:
Cubist@aol.com
Unca Cheeks knows absolutely nothing concerning the mystery- shrouded doings of protons; electrons; chemical reactions; relativistic speeds (whatever the heck those are); gravitational fields; or How PopTarts Really Work.
You're all simply wasting your bloody time, asking me these things.
Again: Cubist@aol.com
It's clean.
It's simple.
And -- best of all -- it means that Unca Cheeks needn't fritter away
the pitiful remnant of his allotted years, puzzling laboriously over phrases
such as "meta-dimensional."]
I don't get a whole lot of email here at <A HREF="mailto:Cubist@aol.com">Multiverse 101 central</a>, so -- on those occasions when a message does come my way -- I pay attention. Case in point: The e-missive from little Marty Shoemaker, who doubtless does very important (and lucrative) business as "Emerald Software, Inc. -- Custom Software and UML Training [http://www.EmeraldSoftwareInc.com]".
Young Martin
writes to ask, "[I]f Barry experiences time at a faster rate, shouldn't
he have keeled over from old age long before CRISIS?"
The answer
to Marty's question: Barry's Time-control allows him to speed
up...
... and slow down.
Think of it as making deposits and withdrawals from the First Allen Bank of Time. If Barry spends 1 second at a Time-rate of 3600:1, in effect he's just withdrawn 1 hour of Time from his account; if he spends 10 hours at a Time-rate 90% of normal -- which would make him age only 9 hours while the rest of the world ages 10 -- in effect, he's just deposited 1 hour of Time into his account.
As long
as the deposits and withdrawals add up to a grand total of zero, Barry
won't age any faster or slower than normal humans do.
I suspect
that Barry, being a highly intelligent person, figured this out very early
on; he may very well have spent all his hours of civilian life at a slightly
reduced Time-rate -- say, only 90-96% of normal. Not only would this
have the benefit of effectively depositing 1-2 hours into his Time account
every day; but it would also help Barry maintain his reputation
as the Slowest Man on Earth -- one of the most potent tools he had for
maintaining his secret identity.
And on any
occasion when the Time-cost of Barry's extracurricular activities threatened
to exceed his standard daily deposit of 1-2 hours per day, he could always
drop to a Time-rate 10% of normal (or even less) during the night,
when he'd be (ostensibly) sleeping.
Another
message I've recieved came from our genial host, Cheeks the Toy Wonder.
It seems that more than a few of you are clamoring for explanations of
those Flash-y feats that I "left as an exercise for the reader" last time
around. So be it!
Running on water and other unusual surfaces -- Ordinarily, Barry allowed his Time-field to sort of "fuzz out" at its boundary; anything that entered the Time-field would thus be "brought up to speed" (you should pardon the expression) in a gentle, gradual manner. A "fuzzy" Time-field would explain why the wake of Barry's passage typically consisted of comparatively gentle breezes, rather than hypersonic shockwaves.
However: Barry could also make his Time-field hard-edged; dropping in strength from 100% to zero instantly, like a square wave. And whereas a "fuzzy" Time-field could be as soft as plush, a hard-edged Time-field would be more unyielding than granite, or osmium.
So: if Barry hardened up that part of his Time-field which covered the soles of his feet, he then got as much traction as he could desire from pretty much anything; be it water, a plume of smoke, or whatever else.
Wind-blasts -- Barry often windmilled his arms at superspeed, thus causing massive airflow that he could direct wherever he pleased. By careful hardening and reshaping of the Time-field surrounding his arms, he could greatly heighten the efficiency of such efforts.
Interdimensional travel -- Okay... this is going to need a bit of background, so bear with me.
Thanks to Mr. Einstein, we know that Time and Space are two sides of the same die, or two faces of the same coin, or whatever analogy you like; they're intimately intertwined, and you can't hardly talk about one without the other. This is why scientists speak of our Universe having four dimensions -- three of them spatial, and the fourth, temporal.
Another thing scientists speak of is the interesting possibility of extra spatial dimensions, beyond the three we normal humans are familiar with. Indeed, certain versions of the (currently unproven) hypothesis called "string theory" are true; our Universe -- yes, I do mean the real world, "Earth-Prime," the cosmos within which thee and me dwell -- has eleven spatial dimensionss!
It's not at all clear how many space-like dimensions the DC Multiverse has... but: if we regard each individual timeline as a unique four-dimensional object, it's fairly clear that they all have to co-exist within an X-dimensional space, where X is at least 5.
What all this means to the Flash: his ability to mess with the Time dimension must include some ability to mess with spatial dimensions.
In particular, the Flash's Time-control includes the ability to alter which "direction" his own "Time axis" points towards; thereby rotating his own personal frame of reference.
As it happens, the act of rotating your frame of refrence in this way necessarily involves exchanging your Time axis for one (or more) of your spatial axes. And this is how Flash travels to Dimension Z: he rotates his frame of reference until his personal space-like axes are pointing along whatever directions he needs, in order to be able to physically move into Dimension Z.
Once he's crossed over into Dimension Z, he again rotates his personal frame of reference; this time to make his personal spatial axes line up with the ones of Dimension Z proper.
In the published stories, Barry always described this process as involving "vibrations" of some sort. This is odd, because the art usually depicted Barry as spinning in place (rather than vibrating) whenever he went dimension-hopping. Perhaps the "vibration" terminology was not to be taken literally, but was (instead) merely as close as Barry could get to describing the uniquely peculiar sensations of frame-rotation.
Running up walls -- This is another way to exploit the frame-rotation trick. Barry rotated his own personal "up/down" axis until it was parallel to what a normal human would think of as the "right/left" or "forward/backward" axis; always being careful to keep his Time-axis aligned in the same direction as that of the world around him.
Time
travel -- Using frame-rotation,
Barry moves just outside the timeline he's currently in. At
that point, he starts moving "parallel" to the timeline; using his Time-control
to outrace the common one-second- per-second rate of ordinary Time-flow
by some ungodly large factor. Once Barry reaches the specific
moment in Time that he's interested in, he slips back into the timeline.
When time-jumping,
Barry generally used a device he called the "cosmic treadmill".
Although he was always perfectly capable of moving through Time unassisted,
the treadmill may have served Barry as a navigational aid -- functionally
equivalent to a ship's sextant -- in order to ensure that he arrived at
the exact moment he was aiming for, not [X] number of days/years
away from his intended destination.
The treadmill may also have served as an automatic retrieval device. In the published stories, Barry's time travel was portrayed as being somewhat unstable; supposedly, Barry always had to maintain a particular "vibratory pattern" in his body while playing tourist in the past/future, lest he be inexorably drawn back to his proper point in Time.
This characteristic of vibration-based time travel was exploited in several published stories, even though it clearly doesn't apply to the technique Barry really used. If the cosmic treadmill was indeed an auto-retrieval device, it probably incorporated a variety of sensor devices that took readings on Barry's energy levels when he ran on it; a frame-rotation gadget, to both:
[a] ... let its sensors continue to keep tabs on Barry, whenever he was; and --
[b] ... travel to Barry's location in spacetime, pick him up, and return to its point of origin; and a set of sophisticated pattern-analysis subroutines to determine when it should do the retrieval thing.
Pass through solid objects -- Although this power was always described as a function of Barry's "absolute control over his body's molecules," I have an alternate explanation.
Barry's molecules are "vibrating," alright. Thanks to frame-rotation, they're moving back and forth along one of the "extra" spatial dimensions, in a sort of dimensional cycle with an exceedingly short period.
One problem with this whole vibrate-through-objects schtick is that you really don't want your body's molecules to react with those of whatever substance you're passing through; Barry, being who and what he was, presumably decided that the solution to this problem was to make sure that his molecules were never in the timeline long enough for any such chemical reactions to occur.
As it happens, chemical reactions are typically finished within several femtoseconds. (For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, one femtosecond is a ridiculously small fragment of time: it's one one-billionth of a microsecond; or 10 ^ -15 seconds; or roughly the amount of time it takes a photon to travel 1/3 of a micron [micrometer].)
At any rate: that's why I suspect Barry used a vibration period on the order of 1 femtosecond (if that much) when passing through solid objects. With that sort of vibration period, Barry's molecules don't exist within the timeline long enough for any undesirable reactions to occur.
At this point, some of you may be asking yourselves, "How come Wally West (the current Flash) has so much trouble with the vibrating-through- objects trick? How come the stuff Wally vibrates through goes 'BOOM'?"
According to the published stories, these explosions happen because Wally leaves mass quantities of kinetic energy behind in the molecules of whatever substance he passes through. Considering that Wally is a far less technically competent person than Barry was, this is probably because Wally just doesn't have Barry's infinitesimally fine control.
Either Wally hasn't mastered the art of femtosecond-scale vibrations (i.e. Wally's molecules stick around just long enough to transfer energy to the "foreign" molecules); or he can't restrict his Time-control field to a small enough radius around each of his body's molecules (i.e. the "foreign" molecules get jazzed up by Wally's Time-control).
Absolute control of his body's molecules -- According to the writeup in WHO'S WHO IN THE DC UNIVERSE, this power is separate and distinct from Barry's super-speed.
That said: it's possible to interpret this "molecular control" power as a measure of how fine-grained Barry's Time-control actually was. If Barry was able to adjust the Time-flow of individual molecules -- with all that implies -- he could send them forwards and/or backwards along their individual "trajectories" in the spacetime continuum; as well as use frame-rotation to control their behavior.
With such power at his disposal, Barry could conceivably undo any sort of transformation that was inflicted on him; and -- by a remarkable coincidence -- that's the second most common use (aafter the vibrate-through-walls trick, which, as detailed above, is actually unrelated to control of individual molecules) to which Barry put his alleged power of molecular control.
Note that molecular control of this variety is no easy task. The human mind can only pay attention to a small number of individual items at once; typically, no more than nine at a time. For Barry to exert control over the God knows how many trillion separate molecules of his body, therefore, would be a mental feat on the order of reciting all the positive integers from 1 to 10 billion; in order; with no mistakes at any place in the sequence. At this point, I think it should be fairly clear why Barry never used his molecular control for frivolous purposes.
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