Regrets from the pissy kid in physics class

I do have a day job, such as it is, and this job involves words. Most of the time, these words combine into things like annual reports, press releases, newsletters, and the like. Lately, however, they’ve taken a turn that is interesting in unexpected ways. I’ve had the chance to write about science: high level mathematics, particle physics, the cosmology of the universe.

It’s a funny thing to write on these subjects, two full decades since my last physics and math courses. Oh, how I hated physics back in high school! I didn’t get on with my physics teacher, Mr. A. Who can say why these things happen? Well, he probably can: I’m sure it had something to do with my pissy attitude, my copied (read: cheated) homework assignments, my many cut classes, the way I spent my time in the classroom writing notes to friends and rolling my eyes contemptuously. Maybe it’s got to do with the time he was demonstrating the principle of inertia and I muttered, too loudly, “Well, duh!”

Or, I dunno, maybe it’s got to do with the time friends and I toilet-papered his house while drunk one Saturday night.

Mr. A wasn’t a bad guy; in fact, the other kids gave him the affectionate nickname, “Big A.” I chose, instead, to refer to him as “The Big A,” which connotes something quite different.

(years later, Blair’s sister starred in a play with Big A’s son. I went to see it, and Big A and I kind of nodded at each other awkwardly but did not speak. The distance I had created between us was one that no performance of Fiddler on the Roof could undo, no matter how dramatic the Fruma Sarah dream sequence).

Truth is, Big A was just good guy trying to teach a classroom of teenagers about momentum and electromagnetic force. I didn’t want to learn physics, that’s all. It was so rote, so dull, so wholly uncreative.

Now, twenty years out of high school, I have returned to the subject. In the last several weeks, I’ve interviewed an astrophysicist/cosmologist, a theoretical physicist, an an abstract mathematician. My job is to communicate something about their work to a lay audience. As such, I’ve been brushing up on my particle physics, on my Big Bang, on my p. vs. np. I’ve learned plenty about these subjects, but the most important one is this:

I was wrong about these subjects. Just plain wrong. Because these subjects? They are stunningly, staggeringly creative. Did you know this? I did not.

The physicists with whom I have spoken spend their days trying to imagine things they will never see. They envision, for example, an invisible field through which particles move, gathering mass as they travel, the way boots get heavier when they slog through a muddy field. If this field exists — and no one knows for sure yet if it does — it is what allows particles to coalesce into all the things we know today: the chair you’re sitting on, the air you breathe, the hand resting upon your child’s sleeping back. If the field does not exist, then it is a mystery how these other things — chair, oxygen, hand, child — have come to be.

They picture neutrinos, tiny particles that move at the speed of light, passing through ordinary matter undisturbed. In this second — right now — there are fifty trillion neutrinos moving through your body. Now, another second: fifty trillion more. And again. They keep moving through you, these particles, cast off by the sun, moving as fast as anything can. Can you feel them? I can’t either. And yet there they are.

Here’s another: it is possible that every particle — every quark, every lepton, every electron — has a larger, heavier, invisible version of itself that moves through space, undetected by us. These supersymmetric particles — squarks, sleptons, selectrons, etc. — might comprise the majority of matter in our mysterious universe. They could bind together entire galaxies. And yet it’s equally possible they live purely in our imagination.

As I learn about these things, I begin to feel a little dizzy. Not “my brain is full” dizzy, but something quite the opposite. It is a kind of hunger, really, the same feeling I got when I looked — really looked — at a Degas painting, during my first-ever art-history course. It is the same feeling I got the first time I listened to Youssou N’Dour’s Li Ma Weesu as I drove along a country road in spring, the world waking up around me in vivid color. It the same feeling I get when I try to really understand what it is that allowed children to grow inside my body, their ten fingers, ten toes, beating hearts created by some miracle greater and lovelier than anything I should get to be a part of.

And all of these things remind me of an essay, Beauty, by Scott Russell Sanders, which I read a decade ago, when I lived in a small cement house in the middle of a village in the middle of West Africa. It had been published in the 1999 Best American Essays, and it has stuck with me through the years. The essay begins with the beauty of a family wedding and ends with the beauty of the universe. For it is all the same, isn’t it? All of that beauty that touches us, lights us up from inside, all of it linked by a common thread. But to even imagine this beauty — to conceive a Degas painting or dizzying supersymmetric dance, a musical composition or a muddy, mass-giving, life-infusing field — requires tremendous creativity, a creativity that I never fully realized was so integral to science.

(Read Sanders’s essay, but read it when you have time).

These are all things I couldn’t see back in 1988, when the most beautiful thing I could imagine was the act of driving away from high school as fast as I could, Diet Coke in my hand, with Poison’s Talk Dirty to Me cranked up on the radio. Had I bothered to look in the rearview mirror then, I might have noticed Big A talking with other students. Perhaps I could have stopped, listened in, learned something about the lovely mysteries of the universe, mysteries that are hidden behind words like force and gravity, motion and momentum.

I didn’t look back then. Now, twenty years later, here I am.