by Karen Boroff & Nancy Enright

I’ve come to hate the tuning fork. The germ of the hate began when I was a youngster. I’d watch the piano tuner, Mr. LaDuca, adjust our piano with a tuning fork. He’d let me sit next to him on the piano bench while he struck keys and plucked wires. He’d hit a key, listen to the fork, nod or grumble, and continue onward, fingering all the keys, while wrenching the piano pins. I looked forward to his coming, eyeing his every move, even trying to feel pulses in my ears, as he worked his craft. Who even uses a tuning fork nowadays? If LaDuca had not been so old-fashioned, him with the damned fork, I’d not be facing my dire future now.

The fork is what introduced me to vibrations. In grade school, I could not get enough of waves, sounds, and frequencies. Then came sine curves, pressure waves, resonance, damping, hertz, cycles, gravitational waves, pulses, synchronous reflections—these commanded my attention and little else. Vibrations dominated my studies, my doctoral work, my academic research, and eventually my life. But they won’t for much longer.

“Everything in life vibrates,” said Einstein. Nikolai Tesla urged that if you wish to understand the universe, think of energy, frequency, and vibration. I did. I studied particles. They vibrate. Electrons vibrate. Molecules vibrate. I found a way to reconstruct all the vibrations that rested on objects into sheets of interactions over time. These vibrations, this energy, I mapped, as well as the disturbances that altered any object’s steady-state vibration, with an added dose of time sequencing. Nothing really unique as a concept—I just extended the work of geologists with their soil sediment deposits over time or botanists with their rings of a tree revealing climatic events years before. The vibrations, always there, were just like layers of bedrock and stratification in the soil. All I had to do was reconstruct those layers. True, I needed to create huge computer maps, but how easy it was to find programmers! Who wouldn’t want to work with me? I modestly admit I am a Nobel Laureate (yes, twice honored), which my university has touted all the time. With my clever device, I was able to make walls talk. I was able to make any inanimate object tell its secrets. I created my own all-knowing weapon, one, by the way, that I never got around to naming. Too many double-entendres with sex toys. Tesla was right. I was able to understand the universe, but I was not ready for what I would find. I doubt anyone could be.

Today, I carry my weapon down the stairs of my home to my laboratory. Years ago, I knew that developing this thing at the university was not going to work. Too many eager graduate students and jealous faculty members and, even worse, spies of every sort at every turn. And, of course, there would be all the residual vibrations in my office walls and floors at the university, so it was a no-go working there. The grand computers and software I needed were easily funded with slop overs and hidden dollar lines on research grants that were practically thrown at me for anything I did, and it was mostly good stuff. None of my vibration work was inherently evil. After all, this thing did not kill anyone, or cause climate change, or modify genes, nor was it a biological weapon. But it could destroy. It destroyed my marriage, and now it could destroy institutions and, in only a few minutes, the whole world order. No alternative now but for me to destroy it and myself. Someone else can re-create my weapon, but to build it anew will take some time, unless there is another genius like me. Luckily, Mozarts and Einsteins don’t come, but once in a while. Let that prodigy live with the burden of destruction—I certainly cannot.

My wife—easy enough to extract off the walls the residue of vibrations she and her lover left, making vivid her infidelities and her disgust of me. (Sadly, I learned from the walls of the house that previous owners also had infidelities, so I wondered if prior vibrations could then infect new owners with adultery, but I’m done with vibrations.) When I was at the Pentagon to give a debriefing of my latest grant effort, I could create for myself the conversations that took place over time. Place the device on a rock at Stonehenge—these formations were just time-keeping devices. Go to Nuremburg and the pain was overwhelming from the trials. Bits of rock saved from Spandau Prison revealed the dark secrets of the likes of Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess.  Anytime I walked into a room, my weapon came with me, extracting untold multitudes of interactions the walls watched, the doors detected, or the floors felt. Private faculty meetings were hysterical to reconstruct, and sometimes a record from one year was just like the imprint of a meeting twenty years forward. Wherever I went, I’d record. I’d take my data back to my laboratory, and reconstruct business lies, political fraud, judicial horse-trading, and the scheming of scientists. Nothing was safe—not the public history, for sure. A vacation anywhere just became an after-the-fact denouncement of the false history the tour guides provided. 

It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, I learned the truth was the truth. What joy there was revealing the moments of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. And Americans did land on the moon. But it was “the rest of the story” that could diminish a hero. The collateral damage from the speaking walls was too much for anyone to bear. It wasn’t my obligation to reveal secrets, was it?

The final straw came when I was invited to lecture at a university in the Middle East. While there, I toured the Holy Land, and a place called Golgotha. This is where Jesus Christ was supposed to have been killed, buried nearby, and then rose from the dead. Tourists are always told not to touch anything, but that rule meant nothing to me. I just would bend down, fake tying my shoelaces, and let the device touch the floors or corners, gathering up the vibrations left behind by voices, noises, or anything. Golgotha was no different. I got my readings and continued on with the tour.

Back home, I launched my Golgotha runs, and the program sorted out time layers and residual vibrations. There were a few people coming and going in that space some 2000 years back, but the residual rocks and the sand had been kicked too much about, making interpolation difficult. I could string together some voices and heard sobbing and then silence, but nothing really definitive about a person specifically named Jesus who was buried there. I could not detect vibrations of a big stone that was moved, purportedly to seal the tomb. But, there was something. That something was a layer of an energy pulse that left an imprint for about one hour in duration in the tomb back then, some 2000 years ago. The vibration was one that I called white light, but that was just my name, a kind of placeholder. You see, I had not ever mapped such a vibration. It was some mighty irregular hertz or, crazy agnostic me, a heavenly frequency that I had never sequenced nor had any scientist ever described. An unexplainable energy could be detected through the vibrations in this secluded place, an ancient tomb, 2000 years ago.

Evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ? What chaos! What disruption! Whole institutions upended. Did I want to be responsible for sharing these findings with anyone—to tell the world something about an anomaly in a grave some 2000 years ago? True, I could omit this one discovery, but it would not take too long for someone else to try. It frightened me to find scientific proof for something I had at best only half believed in (as a child) and at worst denied (as an adult). Now was the time to destroy my instrument and the whole laboratory. But, I stopped. “What am I afraid of,” I shouted out to no one. If this is the truth, didn’t this very Jesus say, “The Truth will set you free.” To be honest with myself, I had to admit I was embarrassed to admit anything supporting faith, even though the science I had served all of my adult life seemed to be doing exactly that. Wasn’t I supposed to follow the science wherever it led? Wasn’t that part of the bargain I’d made when I became a scientist at the age of eighteen?

I reviewed the vibrations quietly once more, confirming their impossible message, and then I quickly, impulsively, dialed the number of one of my colleagues at NASA. Let the chips fall as they may; vibrations have led me to a path I never thought I would take.

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Karen Boroff is a professor of management at the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University.  Her research works, well over 60, have been published and presented in an array of outlets, all academic in nature, in the field of business. She teaches religious education classes at her parish church in New Jersey. 

Prof. Nancy Enright Enright is the Director of the Seton Hall University Core and also serves on the Board of Advisors of Catholic Studies at the University. Her works have been published in such outlets as The Chesterton Review and Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.