Exceeding the Speed of Light

Mrs. Welch was the high school physics teacher in Kingston, Tennessee's famed Roane County High School, yes, the same school which produced the late great Bowden Wyatt, a member of the last college team to go through its season schedule undefeated, untied and unscored upon, three-time All-American, national coach of the year at Wyoming, then head coach at Arkansas and Tennessee before his unfortunate undoing by the bottle. Coach Wyatt is one of only three humans to be elected to the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. Bobby Dodd, another former Tennessee footballer and famed head coach for years at powerhouse Georgia Tech (in its Southeastern Conference days) was another. Whoever the third is, he didn't play at Tennessee, so I don't know him.

Before returning to Mrs. Welch and exceeding the speed of light considerations, I must comment on the only other player from Kingston to play at Tennessee by the time I entered the University of Tennessee. His name was Pud Jackson. Pud most often lined up as a tackle on offense but sometimes played fullback or blocking back, when the Yellowjackets employed the then-popular single wing. His most spectacular plays were when the left end stepped into the backfield and the wingback on the right side stepped onto the line on the right side, leaving Pud as a tackle-eligible player, either to receive a pass or to "pull" into the backfield for a statue of liberty play. I don't know how much he weighed back then, but by the time he got back to the line of scrimmage as a ball carrier, it took four or five guys from the other team to pull him down, and he was always good for five yards or so. And when the `Jackets got to the opponent's three or four-yard line, Pud lined up as fullback, and the opponents might as well just get out of the way, because he was going to score, and anyone who tried to stop him was in for some serious punishment.

Pud worked his way up to second-string defensive tackle for the Vols, and everybody from Kingston thought the U.T. coaching staff must be daft for not using him on offense. Boy, talk about dumb!

As a freshman at U.T., I was about to take down the opposing quarterback for a safety, but a blocker had other ideas, and he didn't mind being penalized half the distance to the goal to take me out but good with a vicious clip, resulting in my head being in about its normal position, except upside down 6' off the ground, and my feet straight up in the air. My helmet was knocked off and I hit the ground with the right side of my face, leaving it minus an epidermis long enough for it to re-grow under the scabs. Man, was I ever a sight! The coach made the entire freshman team line up and come by and shake my hand for the effort and apologize to me for not playing as hard as I did.

Lots of good it did me.

It was a little tough to get a date for a month.

Back to Mrs. Welch.

Mrs. Welch was a classy lady with high standards. I wasn't. Well, I never was a lady, but I never had high standards either. For about 45 years, I was often able to get by on my youthful looks, neat appearance, and charm. Maybe it was charm. Maybe it was guile and deceit. More than likely, it was pure deceit. When Mrs. Welch asked us to write a physics paper using all the imagination we had, but backed up with science, I wrote one which explained how the speed of light could be exceeded. Bear in mind that Albert Einstein had thoroughly covered the subject by explaining what happens to mass as it approaches the speed of light and what theoretically happens, should it achieve the speed of light (the mass becomes infinite), I wrote a paper, complete with illustrations, showing photons intersecting, with a photon moving northeast slightly clipping, from the rear oblique, a photon moving southeast, propelling it to a speed in excess of the speed of light.

As everyone knows by now, a photon (a particle of light) most often acts like a wave rather than a particle of mass, and in the scenario I described, the photons would most likely continue to act wavelike and pass through each other. That's what I thought back in 1962 when I wrote the paper. That's what I think now.

Mrs. Welch came to class a week later to pass back our papers, and she began to talk about a most exceptional student she had the privilege of teaching and that this student had written the most outstanding paper she had ever read, either in high school, in college, or in the professional field. I thought it was surely Don Hobgood (the eventual valedictorian) or Larry Howdyshell (the eventual salutatorian) or maybe Arnold Kenerly (an electronics wizard), but then she gave the name and asked me to stand.

Laughter filled the classroom, and Mrs. Welch was irritated.

I always could write a good game.

Mrs. Welch thought I was a good kid. That all changed about a week later when she entered the classroom after excusing herself to go to the office or somesuch and caught me throwing a pencil across the room at someone whose identity I no longer recall. In Kingston, the usual behavior when a teacher left the room was to throw and dodge paperwads, rubber bands, etc., and I was following normal rules of pencil-throwing, i.e., to throw in a manner so the rubber eraser was the nose of the projectile. The intended target ducked, and there was a collective gasp as it appeared that the pencil was going to hit Mrs. Welch. Fortunately, it hit the metal door-jamb next to her head and bounced harmlessly across the room, landing on her desk.

The classroom became very quiet.

Mrs. Welch just stood there, glaring at me.

After walking silently to her desk and staring down at the pencil for a few moments, she looked around the classroom and told us, "When I was a little girl, a small child, my mother told me that a pencil could be a very helpful tool when used properly. She also told me that it could put out an eye if used with disregard of my safety or the safety of others."

Then she sat down and asked me to come to her desk. I did.

"Pick up your pencil."

I did, and started back to my desk.

"Come back. I haven't dismissed you."

She handed me her tape dispenser and told me to tear off two pieces of tape.

I did as ordered.

Then she had me tape the pencil to the right upper corner of the blackboard (actually, they just painted them green a year before) and to sign under it, in chalk, my name. She had me print underneath it, in small letters, "This is a pencil. It is used for writing. If used improperly, it can put out an eye."

My pencil stayed there until the end of the year.

It may be there still.

I'm still looking for a way to propel a photon to a speed in excess of the speed of light. I haven't found it yet, but I think Mrs. Welch thought I already had.