- 15 Reasons Why You Should Date a Physicist | The World: An Idiot's Point of View
- Theoretical Physicists Suggest A More Precise Date For The End Of The Universe
- Encouraged submissions
- …when idiots tried to be curious.
A bottle of wine is making the rounds. The meal feels like what it is: He wore wire-framed glasses and was smiling too. Actually Sarada Rajeev was always smiling, although his smile had several variations. There was the default smile he had on now, a smile of surprise that lifted his glasses in synchrony with his eyebrows, and a smile of discomfort where his eyes gave his true feelings away.
Rajeev was an assistant professor of physics in his early 30s, just five years older than me. Rajeev had arranged the lunch, having gathered all of his students and postdocs to welcome me into his group. I was thrilled, even though I knew little about Rajeev.
15 Reasons Why You Should Date a Physicist | The World: An Idiot's Point of View
Like Don Quixote, I was propelled on my quest by books, New Agey ones like The Tao of Physics and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and biographies of physics greats like Einstein and Feynman, books that gave me the very welcome news that there were still frontiers to explore, even in the late 20th century, even for a bookish sort like me. I staggered back into the hallway punch-drunk from all the new concepts that had just been pounded into my head.
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Zeta functions, or elliptic functions, or something like that. Trying to follow was like learning a new game, with strangely shaped pieces and arbitrary rules. What does any of this have to do with physics? After a couple of hours, Rajeev turned to me with a look that I later realized must have been heightened scrutiny. So it was only as I stepped out of Bausch and Lomb altogether and back into the bright of the quad that I added two and two together and got four. My desk was in the bedroom and my pacing creaked the floorboards, which periodically prompted the boom-boom-boom of her broom on her ceiling as a rebuke to my stirring past the 11 p.
Eventually I settled down at my desk, and tiptoed whenever I had to get up for coffee or the bathroom. It was a little as if someone had just introduced you to right triangles, but not the Pythagorean theorem, and then asked if you could find some relationship between the sides. Solving it would take a creative spark. Am I stupid to keep trying or stupid to not be done yet?
All of my classmates had taken up with advisors who were, like most physicists, experimentalists, the researchers who do the hands-on work of, say, smashing particles together at accelerators to see what comes out.
Theorists like Rajeev, or for that matter Einstein and Feynman, who instead do the noodling necessary to explain the results of experiments with math are fewer and further between. I made another pot of coffee and brought a mug back to my desk. I scribbled ever deeper into my yellow pad. I got more and more nervous and it got harder and harder to sit still. Every once in awhile I padded to the window, for a view that no longer changed. Stray thoughts fluttered like butterflies through my mind, scattering my mental constructions to the wind.
Sometimes they morphed into more sinister things, little black spidery things that hissed with a hectoring voice ….
Theoretical Physicists Suggest A More Precise Date For The End Of The Universe
Pinpricks of sweat pierced the back of my neck and hands. My throat went dry. Quitting my cushy California job. Sending the experimentalists away. Waiting to start this damn problem until after dinner. When the idea finally came, it was like a faint breath over my shoulder, unexplained magic from an unseen direction. I felt in my gut it was right, but still had to prove it.
I was too excited to sit still. I held myself down in my chair. The damn thing was solvable after all. I was wet with sweat when I finished. When I looked back up at the window, it was glowing a rosy morning gold. A year later, at the Faculty Club lunch, I was finished with classes for good and chomping at the bit to start research with Rajeev.
After lunch, we all filed out of the club and into the sunlight and shimmering green of campus. I held back tears.
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This was my happiest moment, and not just with work, but ever. There on that path with Rajeev and thinking to myself, for the first time in my life: Rajeev had just told me over dessert that the first project he wanted me to work on with him was a problem in quantum gravity. T hat summer, I moved. Its concrete walls seeped with damp. The bed was a mattress on the floor, with a plastic tarp under it to keep it dry. I kept a pair of running shoes next to it, for whacking the giant centipedes that regularly wriggled by.
Dad, who never seemed bothered by sleeping on the shared cots in his dingy police station, or by nights spent in the rat-infested warehouses where he moonlighted as a security guard, was incredulous the first time he came. The first was how much Rajeev already knew about the problem, even before we started. If you were to picture Rajeev and me as explorers in the high country, facing some misty mountain range that we needed to cross, Rajeev was the one scanning the landscape, making mental calculations, and pointing the way.
What struck me most was how he somehow knew that our ultimate destination, call it a river, lay on the other side. That made me the scout. Thus research advanced, by a system reminiscent of the directions on a shampoo bottle: Have you ever been happy?
…when idiots tried to be curious.
I knew she was talking about work, but And here came the second surprise of my first research experience: I learned my lesson. There was no time to stop just to appreciate the scenery. This was yet another surprise: Despite how knotty our project seemed to me, our conclusions were of extraordinarily limited scope.
The paper we wrote did indeed flesh out a consistent theory of quantum gravity, one in which the concept of distance is defined by the phase of a quantum mechanical wavefunction. It even predicted black holes. This, I learned, is what becomes of a colossal conundrum like quantum gravity after plus years of failed attempts to solve it. All the frontal attacks and obvious ideas have been tried.
Every imaginable path has hit a dead end. Therefore researchers retreat, set up camp, and start building tools to help them attempt more indirect routes. Toy models are such tools. The hope was that some side stream of one of its many tributaries Virasoro, Yamabe … would. Rajeev, I believe, just liked doing the math. The thing was a puzzle he could solve, so he solved it. For him that was enough. O ne morning in , Einstein gazed out his Swiss Patent Office window at the skyline of Bern and imagined what it would feel like to fall off a roof.
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Weightless was his answer, and that rapturous realization led him to the general theory of relativity and its radical reinterpretation of gravity as a consequence of curved spacetime.