a startling discovery

Ever since my clock broke, I've been unable to keep track of time here in the lab. The sun never reaches my sanctum, my little shrine to science, and there's not even the constant sound of the clock keeping pace to give me the faintest sense of time. I don't know how long I've been here. Hours? Days? It must be days by now. I feel exhausted. But it eats at me. I'm so close to something important. I can feel it.

I must sound like a madman, but I swear by whatever is holy, the universe is actively changing, just to prevent my discovery. Any time my mind begins to wrap around something and it seems as if it must work perfectly, something goes wrong. Something changes. Some problem that never existed before arises, and I am forced to start anew. Progress is slow and tedious, if it even exists. Every time I find out about some new problem, I learn that it's been this way for all of history. There are scientific laws. Some of them bear the names of famous scientists.

I'm not an absent-minded man. I've studied these scientists, I've looked in the books that the laws are in before, and I swear they were not there before. I discover these laws as if for the first time, only to discover that someone else discovered them for years ago, that it is an elementary principle of science, that I somehow never learned in my studies. And before I have discovered these things I know that it was merely not the case.

Somehow, here in my lab, I alone am able to recall a time before such laws existed. I am not impervious to the ill will of the universe, but I am impervious to the wool it pulls over the eyes of the rest of the scientific community. I continue my study, knowing that perhaps it is all in vain, and suddenly I realise I have forgotten what it is I am looking for.