“Your friend is knowledgeable,” Dan said. “I’m telling him about the stuff we used to cook up in grad school.”
“I only remember you guys doing that the one time,” I said. “And nobody actually tried it, thank god.” I turned to Terrence. “More important would be his small molecule immunotherapeutics—cancer drugs.”
“That was also worthwhile,” Dan acknowledged. “But it’s been more thoroughly publicized.” He called to Neel across the room, patting the place next to him. “Come here, my little monkey,” he called, but there wasn’t really room for Neel on the couch. He came over anyway, and settled on the floor at the conjunction of two leather sectionals. He stretched out his legs and grinned at Dan:
“Dude, I’m not your monkey.”
Roxy made her way across the room and sat on the coffee table, facing Terrence. She shook her head at Neel.
“What are you doing down there?”
“I’m so comfy,” Neel said. He’d had a good smoke, I could see, and was ready to talk. He kept looking from me to Roxy, Roxy to me. I thought that for an apartment like this you needed money, and that the money would have had to have come from Roxy’s family. Neel wasn’t the kind of man who minded that; in fact, I thought he probably appreciated the irony that some people who’d stayed in India over the past generation could now support those who’d immigrated to America. Where he was sitting, he was so close to me that if he’d leaned just slightly in one direction, his shoulder would’ve been against my leg. I could have reached out and touched his hair.
By contrast, Roxy seemed perfectly sober. She was asking Terrence about surfing with what seemed like real interest. Could she really learn? Even if she was not at all athletic? Where could you go around here, or on the East Coast in general? What did he like about it?
Terrence had taken off his jacket and was leaning back into the couch. He began in his laconic way, intensified by the weed, to describe a point break he’d surfed with his brother in Peru—the longest left in the world. For the first time that evening he seemed to be having fun.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Neel said suddenly, turning away from them.
I could tell that he finally wanted to talk about LIGO. “Do you really have a detection?” I asked.
Neel put one arm on the couch next to me. He was still skinny, his face a little sallow from too many hours in the lab. His features had always been very open and pleasant, handsome even, but he was nothing like as good-looking as Terrence. I’d always thought that the thing that brought Neel and me together was conversation—about our work and everything else. We loved talking, and words in general, more than any of the other physicists we knew.
“September 14, 2015,” Neel said. “Two-fifty a.m., Pacific Standard Time.” He raised his eyebrows theatrically. “Where were you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Asleep, probably.”
“Me, too. And then that morning I was running late, and so I called into the weekly telecon. I’d already looked at the logs and saw that there was a candidate event, lots of speculation—but I mean, we weren’t up and running yet. This was ER8—the last engineering run. The first advanced science run had been postponed a week, because they were still tweaking. So there weren’t supposed to be any blind injections.”
“What’s a blind injection?” I asked.
“Sometimes the technicians insert a false signal in the data stream, to test the way we would respond to an actual detection. September is storm season, lots of microseism that interferes with the machines. It was just a frustrating time to be getting off the ground. Both sites were having trouble locking, and so that’s why we weren’t taking data yet. Blind injections would’ve been an unnecessary distraction, but that’s what everyone assumed it was. The alternative was too exciting to wrap our heads around, at least at first.”
“So you’re sure?”
Neel tapped his left hand on the couch twice. “I get on the call, and I’m still sort of waking up, haven’t had coffee, and I hear Alan talking to Mike—Mike Landry, at Livingston—and he’s like, ‘Mike, can you say that again?’ And Mike says—” Neel lowered his voice. “He says, ‘This was not a blind injection.’ ”
“Wow.”
Neel smiled.
“When are you publishing?”
“Not until February.”
It was hard to know what was more exciting—the fact that Neel’s team had actually detected a gravitational wave, or that they’d achieved the first direct observation of a pair of black holes merging.
“It’s amazing.” I could hear the stiffness in my voice. I imagined Neel could, too, and was enjoying it.
“I thought we would do it,” he said. “Just not so soon.”
“Wait a minute,” Roxy said, catching the end of that. “You’re telling people now?”
“Helen isn’t ‘people.’ ”
“Well if you are, I don’t see why I can’t.” Roxy turned to Terrence. “Neel has discovered gravitational waves.”
“Me and a thousand other people,” Neel said, reaching up to shake Terrence’s hand. “We didn’t really meet.”
Terrence introduced himself and congratulated Neel and Roxy on their engagement.
This time Neel didn’t speculate about the nature of marriage, but just nodded seriously. He seemed even more earnest than he might have been, had he been sober. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Charlie was extraordinary.”
“Thanks.”
Roxy was the only one who didn’t understand what was going on.
“My wife passed away earlier this year,” Terrence said.
Roxy turned all of her attention on him. I notice that she didn’t react, or say anything right away. In other words, she wasn’t concerned about how her own reaction would appear to others.
“From what?”
Terrence hesitated a moment. “Complications from lupus. Encephalitis.”
“That is terrible,” she said. “You poor thing.”
“It’s been really rough—but we’re managing.”
“You have children?”
“One—she’s eight.” He seemed much more comfortable accepting Roxy’s condolences than he did Neel’s, either because she was a woman or because she knew how to give sympathy in an inherently professional way. I could imagine that doctors got inured to death, but I could also imagine the opposite—that you would become obsessed, start to think about nothing else.
“What did you discover?” Terrence asked Neel, maybe to change the subject.
“It’s boring,” Neel said.
“It isn’t,” Roxy said. “It’s, like, the one time your work isn’t boring.” It was both skillful and generous, the way she suddenly turned everyone’s attention to Neel, teasing him, and gave Terrence a break. Neel needed only a little encouragement.
“Like I said, there are more than a thousand of us on the team,” he said. “And no one ‘discovered’ anything.”
“We’re talking about gravitational waves,” I told Terrence. “Einstein predicted them. He basically saw that the laws of motion that apply here on Earth—classical Newtonian laws—don’t work on other scales. Not when you’re talking about tiny things, subatomic particles, or giant things like stars and planets. He figured out different rules, especially for gravity, because of the way that large astronomical bodies curve spacetime. Before Einstein, we didn’t know that space and time are one thing, like a fabric. The waves Neel is studying are like ripples in that fabric.”
“But can you surf them?” Roxy asked.
Terrence smiled.
“I think it would be more like them surfing you,” Neel said, “if that makes any sense.”
“It doesn’t,” Roxy said. “You should always let Helen explain.”
“I’ve been reading about spacetime,” Terrence sai
d.
“In Helen’s books?” Neel asked politely.
I knew what Neel thought of my books. They weren’t inaccurate; it was just that there was no reason to write them.
Terrence shook his head. “An author named Robert Lanza. He says that time is just a human invention, and so there’s no real past, present, and future. Everything is just nows. So even after your body dies, your consciousness is just in another now. Einstein said that, too.”
“I think Einstein said just the opposite,” Neel said. He had a way of jumping in and correcting people, as if he expected they would also take pleasure in being contradicted, as soon as they realized he was right. “He believed that the universe has an objective reality that scientists study. A lot of people say he was religious—God doesn’t play dice, and all that—but his notion of God was really just physics. He thought there was a sublime order in the way the universe is arranged, and he was awed and inspired by that. But he thought the idea that we outlive our physical body was ridiculous.”
Terrence was looking at Neel in a way that worried me. I realized that I wanted them to like each other, maybe because of how much I cared what each of them thought of me.
“I think Terrence is talking about a version of the anthropic principle—an explanation for why our part of the universe is so perfectly calibrated to support human life.” I addressed this to Dan and Roxy, since Neel obviously knew what the anthropic principle was, and I didn’t want Terrence to think I was talking down to him.
“Philosophy,” Neel said, “not science.”
“Lots of scientists you respect embrace it.”
“Yes, okay,” Neel said. “But that’s a very weak form of the anthropic principle—Penrose’s or Susskind’s. Not a biologist like Lanza who writes scientific best sellers, and fancies himself another Einstein. No offense, Helen.”
“None taken. I don’t fancy myself another Einstein.”
Neel smiled. “I meant the best sellers.”
“Only one of them was on the best-seller list. For about ten minutes.”
“Go back to the black holes,” Dan said. “What happens when they crash into each other?”
Roxy nodded. “Yes, please.”
Dan winked at her. “I used to go for moo shu pork with these two guys all the time, so I had to learn how to distract them. Otherwise they’re at each other’s throats.”
Neel picked up two olives from the bowl on the table, and moved them along two ellipses, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, getting closer and closer to each other with each rotation. “The black holes are inspiraling, like this. They’re attracted by each other’s enormous gravity, and also pushed apart by angular momentum, and so they circle each other for centuries, getting just a tiny fraction closer with each rotation. Finally they come together with the most terrific noise you can imagine.” He smashed the olives together, then popped them into his mouth. “If you think of the energy of the sun, and then multiply that by a billion trillion, that’s how much energy is released—more than anything since the Big Bang. But it’s released as sound, not light. If it were possible for a human being to be close enough, we could actually hear the sound. The combined black hole is still wildly spinning after it comes together. It releases wave after wave of energy as it goes around—each one slightly less powerful than the last. The sound becomes quieter and quieter, like a bell.” Neel drew the wave in the air with his right hand, its amplitude diminishing as it got more distant from the source: “That’s the ringdown.”
“That was pretty good,” I told him. “You should write a best seller.”
“That’s why for most of the twentieth century, we thought we’d never be able to measure a gravitational wave,” Neel said, ignoring me. “Finally we have machines sensitive enough to do it. You can translate that incredibly quiet vibration to an audible register, and the computer spits out an actual, billion-year-old sound: a rising tone—we call it a ‘chirp.’ ”
For the first time, Terrence looked astonished. “This thing with the black holes happened a billion years ago?”
Neel nodded happily. “And now our detectors can hear it.”
“What’s the point?”
I didn’t know whether this was a challenge or not. Terrence’s way of talking was so casual, so Californian, that it was sometimes hard to tell.
“Ah,” said Roxy. “Now we’re getting to it.”
Neel took a drink from a bottle, some fancy microbrew. “It’s less about a practical application than it is learning more about the universe. Combining our data with data from traditional, light-based astronomy.”
Terrence looked skeptical.
“Scientists have been dreaming of finding these waves—hearing them, I should say—for a hundred years.”
“You never know, though,” I said. “Lasers came out of pure physics. Not to mention MRI machines, the microwave, and a lot of today’s encryption technology.” I wasn’t sure if I was defending Neel, or my profession in general, but it was important to me that Terrence understand that what we did had real-world applications.
“Not to mention the atomic bomb,” Neel said.
“What I’m saying is that you do the science for its own sake, and things develop from there.”
“How much does it cost?” Terrence asked.
“The interferometers?” I asked.
“All of it,” Terrence said.
LIGO’s total expenditures to date was a number I happened to know, and I thought it might sound less preposterous coming from someone who wasn’t directly involved. “One-point-one billion.”
“So far,” Neel added.
Terrence looked at us. Then he exhaled sharply and shook his head.
“Okay, it’s a little nuts,” Neel admitted. “But what’s so cool—at least to me—isn’t the detection. It’s the future. It’s like until now we only had one sense—we could look up at the stars, but that was it. Then we learned how to measure X-ray and radio waves. And now all of a sudden we have ears, too. We can hear gravity.” Neel looked around at all of us in wonder. “All of this means that instead of building these really expensive and time-consuming machines on Earth, we can let the universe do more and more of the work for us. Black holes are actually the biggest particle accelerators in the universe—they’re spinning these tiny pieces of matter around and around faster than anything we could ever build at CERN. And they’re totally free.”
Terrence looked at Roxy. “Imagine what her organization could do with that much money.”
“True,” Neel said. “But I just read that they spent 445 million making The Force Awakens, and our government’s defense budget was 601 billion this year. So, you know, money doesn’t always flow to the noblest cause.”
Terrence nodded, as if in agreement. “Sometimes it flows into black holes,” he said.
5.
I drove Terrence back to Charlie’s just after midnight. In college I’d gone home for Thanksgiving my first year, and then saved money by spending the next three with Charlie’s family. My father was an only child, and my mother had a half sister; sometimes our paternal grandmother would come from St. Louis, but in general when I was a kid, the meal was a quiet affair, very much focused on the food. I had been amazed by the long table and tall, elegant chairs—rented, I learned later—the garlands of gold leaves, the bottles of red wine on the sideboard, and the catered meal. The Boyces were upper middle-class, but with two children in college they didn’t normally behave this extravagantly. The Thanksgiving meal was a significant occasion, a long-standing tradition with extended family and friends, and I felt honored to be included. “I love a holiday that has nothing to do with God,” Addie would say. And then add breezily: “But I don’t cook for more than ten.”
She would spend time in the dining room on Wednesday night though, laying the table and “doing the cards.” Ther
e was one year—our junior or senior—when she seated me next to a television producer who was doing a segment on female scientists and wanted to ask me some questions. Charlie sat beside the editor of a well-known literary journal. Even when we were undergraduates, Addie treated us not only as adults, but as women with a certain value to add, and I think we both strived to justify that confidence.
“Thanks for coming,” I told Terrence as I turned off the car. “I know that was all kind of nerdy.”
“It was different.”
There was a light on in the living room, but otherwise Charlie’s house was dark. “They’ll be asleep, right?”
Terrence shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We don’t really speak unless we’re around Simmi.”
“It’s that bad?”
Terrence gave a short, unamused kind of laugh. I’d never noticed how far his brow extended over his very deep-set eyes; it made his profile even more striking than it would otherwise have been.
“Do you know why?” I asked.
“Same deal.”
I had more questions, but it was unclear how much I could ask. Terrence made no move to get out of the car.
“About the letter she wrote her parents?”
“And where she got the drugs—yeah.”
“Was it hard to get?”
He looked surprised. “The Seconal?”
“I didn’t know what she used.”
“Her doctor prescribed it for pain. We just hoarded it until she had enough. He knew, though. He once gave us the name of a doctor in Oregon, when she asked about it. But it wasn’t like we were going to pick up and move Simmi, just so the death certificate would say something else.”
“What would it have said?”
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