“It’s no problem,” Neel said. “I just didn’t get why our data log was suddenly in Latin.”
“Latin?”
“More likely it was just random letters—someone must’ve leaned on the keyboard.”
“Random letters.” Jack was looking at me steadily. “Like the metaphase typewriter.”
“What nonsense are you feeding him?” Neel asked mildly.
“Which letters?” I asked.
“E-X-” But Jack couldn’t remember any more of it. “Maybe it’s a code word.”
“Can I see?”
Neel indulged me, scrolling up the log and pointing at the screen.
“E-X-E-U-N-T,” Jack read, leaning over his shoulder. Then he turned back to me.
“What does that mean?”
17.
The three chief scientists on the LIGO collaboration won the Nobel Prize in October 2017. Two weeks later, they announced the first detection of a neutron star collision. It was what I’d been hoping would happen, but I didn’t end up writing a book about kilonova after all. When I sat down to try, I found that what I started writing had moved further and further away from my original idea about the cosmic origins of precious metals, into what is for me entirely new territory.
I have been thinking, in particular, of Neel’s and my old argument about the mind and the brain. I still refuse to accept that there’s some ineffable essence hovering between our brains and the outside world—at least not something we’ll ever be able to study with scientific tools. We can know what’s possible only in the universe we’ve observed. But if LIGO has done anything, it has reminded us how little of what’s out there we’ve actually seen. To understand more of our cosmology, we’re going to have to admit that there may be laws so different from the ones we know, so seemingly counterintuitive, that it will take all our imagination to uncover them.
In 1979, in honor of the centennial of Einstein’s birth, John Wheeler delivered his famous lecture “Beyond the Black Hole” for an elite audience of scientists at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study. He began with an analogy about the “Iron Duke” Arthur Wellesley, who, among his many other military victories, was famous for defeating Napoleon at Waterloo. When he grew old, the duke liked to go for drives with a friend in his carriage, especially when they could visit countryside that wasn’t familiar to either of them. He would propose a game in which he and his companion each had to guess what kind of landscape lay over the next hill; not surprisingly, the duke nearly always won the game. He claimed that his strategy was to identify “strangenesses” in the terrain, surprising features; it was whatever was unfamiliar or irregular in the scenery that allowed him to predict what was coming next. Einstein, Wheeler proposed, used scientific strangenesses the same way. By studying paradoxes in our knowledge of the physical world, he was able to intuit startling new truths about the nature of light and gravity. Wheeler believed that it was the job of each generation of physicists to use the paradoxes in the physics they inherited to take the work even further.
Sometimes I have a feeling that Neel and I are getting close to a breakthrough with the rotor project. But it isn’t the same as it was when we first worked together. This work is harder than the modeling we did early in our careers, and it’s messier, too; it requires more guesswork, and more faith. Charlie was skeptical by nature, but I think she would have agreed with what her brother said at the memorial: that loss is different for each of us. A person dies, and a whole crowd goes out—not exit, but exeunt. And, if that is the case, then it must be possible for those essences (ideas, let’s call them) to return. To circle back around like Neel’s and my rotor: a pair of heavy things at a fixed distance, turning and turning forever.
This isn’t just analogy. Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It’s almost nothing—I can’t feel it—but it’s the same force that binds our planet to our star. That’s the very simple, very elegant purpose of the rotor: to hold a pair of tiny stars. Each time one of them swings toward the laser, spacetime bends just slightly; the laser must travel a slightly longer path to reach the mirror; a line spikes on one of LIGO’s screens. Even that silent signal could be enough to let us reimagine gravity, and the way it moves us on the human scale.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I started writing this book, science felt more foreign to me than any country I’d ever visited. I’m deeply grateful to the patient guides I met there, including the authors of the following wonderful books: The Universe, edited by John Brockman; Harry Collins’s Gravity’s Kiss; Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe; David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics; Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues; Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Higgs Discovery, and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs; Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps; Steven Weinberg’s To Explain the World. It’s great that curious outsiders can read the important physics being published today on the e-print archive (arXiv.org), without even registering a password.
No book can really give you the texture of what it’s like to work in a particular field of study, and so I’m especially grateful to the physicists who talked to me during this process. LIGO physicist Imre Bartos sat with me for hours in his office, and once walked through Riverside Park with a voice recorder in his pocket, trying to explain gravitational wave science to a former English major. Lisa Barsotti took me on a tour of the Green Lab at MIT, one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been. On a conference call from the LIGO detector in Livingston, Louisiana, she and Matthew Evans solved a plot problem for me off the top of their heads (in spite of what the narrator of this book might claim, physicists are actually smarter than other people). Which brings me to David Kaiser, an extremely busy person who gave me more of his time than I had any right to expect, patiently answering my questions about quantum entanglement, the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and life in a university physics department. I’m especially grateful to him for his early scientific read of this book; any mistakes are my own.
Outside of the physical sciences, I relied on Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger for its brilliant argument about the Enlightenment in Europe and its political repercussions today. I’m indebted to Paul Beatty, Brit Bennett, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Margo Jefferson, Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, and Colson Whitehead for work that helped me think about what race means and doesn’t mean to the characters I was trying to create.
Emma Freudenberger, Amy Waldman, Cathy Park Hong, Jasanna Britton, Alison Markovitz, and Vanessa Reisen read early drafts of this book quickly and critically when I most needed help—thank you so much. I’m very grateful for my generous and talented community of local writers: Kiran Desai, Monica Ferrell, Eliza Griswold, Katie Kitamura, Idra Novey, Meghan O’Rourke, Julie Orringer, Amanda Stern, Jen Vanderbes, and Monica Youn. I owe more thanks than I can express to Allyson Hobbs, for her comments and gentle criticism, for our ongoing discussions, and for being awake and on her phone when no one else is.
I’ve said it before, but Binky Urban is the best agent a writer could have: responsive, direct, and thorough. At Knopf, I’m grateful to Erinn Hartman, Julianne Clancy, and Rachel Fershleiser for all of their help and faith in this book, and to Susan VanOmmeren for an especially meticulous proofread. Annie Bishai went far beyond assistant editing, offering rigorous insight on subjects as varied as contemporary race and gender, iPhone technology, and the proper way to graph temperature. My most significant thank-you is to Robin Desser, for her tough editorial love. I am overwhelmingly thankful for the talent and wisdom she gave to this book.
Thank you to my dad, Daniel Freudenberger, for a helpful final read, and to him and his wife, Ruth Bloch, for Thursday afternoons at my desk. Thanks to my mom, Carol Hofmann, for all the other time, and for once even staying over during a snowstorm so that I could meet a deadli
ne. Thank you to my children for the sign they posted outside my office door, telling themselves to go away, and for the Post-it on my computer encouraging me to persevere. Thank you to my husband, Paul, for being so loving and supportive, always, and for encouraging me to try something new this time.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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