“For boys, the shoulders will grow broader.”
These girls do most of the work in the fields, while men pursue or evade vendettas.
“Your voices may become deeper.”
Here, an image of bare-bottomed men with bows and arrows.
“Both boys and girls will develop hair under their arms and in their pubic areas.”
Naked, dark-skinned women stood together staring out of the photograph and, it seemed to Meena, right at her, their bodies painted, breasts hanging flat against their chests.
Tom Hebert, in the seat behind her, tapped her on the shoulder. “What are you looking at?” he whispered.
“Shut up,” she hissed, whipping around to glare at him, her long braid catching him across the face as she turned back around.
“Girls will develop a regular menstrual period.”
The next page showed a group of women, their skirts pulled up, legs spread wide around the washbasins at which they worked.
“You will begin to feel strong emotions, and you may find yourself becoming frustrated, angry, or sad more easily.”
A woman standing in front of a hut, her nakedness hidden by cleverly arranged beadwork.
For Meena, it was as though two mysteries of the adult world were being revealed simultaneously to her—one by the book and one by the shocking news Ms Lessing was breaking to them all.
“Shall we talk about our questions, our concerns?”
Ms Lessing removed her eyes from the book and regarded the classroom full of students, their faces turned up toward her. Normally, the Free Learning Zone students were avid, if overenthusiastic, participants in class discussion, but now the classroom was weighted with a thick, awkward silence. Ms Lessing blinked out at the gifted and talented students for a moment as though trying to summon patience or courage or a little of both.
“Well then, let’s continue.” She plodded steadily forward through the overheads. “Now we will discuss sexually transmitted diseases,” she explained, placing on the overhead a particularly alarming image. “This is a chancre.” The students looked away, letting out an audible groan, almost in unison.
At the conclusion of the lecture, the class sat quietly in a kind of stunned silence. The lecture on their developing bodies had shocked both Lily and Meena, neither of whom had yet registered the possibility that this might happen to them.
For Lily, the careful notes she penned had been an academic exercise in keeping her anxiety at bay. Meena, closing her textbook and tucking The Secret Museum into her backpack, felt she had only just barely survived an arduous and terrifying initiation into near-adulthood.
CHAPTER 11
Atom Smasher
In the end, physics is an empirical science. It needs clever experiments; and such experiments need nifty devices. Without them, many beautiful theories would be merely that—beautiful. It is only thanks to tinkerers … that some of them also turn out to be true.
—OBITUARY: SIMON VAN DER MEER, THE ECONOMIST, MARCH 19, 2011
Physicists don’t like the expression “atom smasher.” It makes them think of what (for example) a watch smasher would do. Out of the collisions of watches and clocks, you would expect to find the components of watches and clocks: hands, springs, cogwheels, and frames. You would not expect to find from such collisions additional clocks, and certainly not clock towers. Incredibly, this is just what sometimes happens when two energetic subatomic particles are smashed together. New and more exotic particles emerge from the collisions.
—THE CHARM OF STRANGE QUARKS: MYSTERIES AND REVOLUTIONS OF PARTICLE PHYSICS
FOR SOME TIME, NEARLY ALL OF THE PARTICLE PHYSICS CONFERENCES Abhijat attended had been dominated by discussion of the need to conduct experiments at higher energy levels, and there had been rumblings, unconfirmed, of course, that it might be the National Accelerator Research Lab that would be chosen as the site for such an instrument.
The accelerator currently housed on the campus of the Lab was four miles in circumference, but it had become clear that in order to chase after the new questions that were emerging, to test many of the most recent and most fascinating theories, a new accelerator would be required, something much, much larger than anything that currently existed.
It was a hunt that had stretched out over the entirety of Abhijat’s career—each time the physics community thought they’d found the smallest, most elementary particle, something still smaller, still more mystifying emerged.
For some physicists, it seemed like a frustrating chase that might never end, each time the prize moving just beyond their reach. But Abhijat believed that this was an illustration of the supreme beauty of the universe. If there was a god, he had once told Sarala, then he must surely be a mathematician.
Anderson Hall was the Research Tower’s large lecture hall, reserved for the Lab’s cultural activities—plays, lecture series, performances by orchestras—and the occasional all-staff announcements made by the Lab’s director. One Monday, on a bright spring morning, the Lab staff were summoned to Anderson Hall, where Dr. Palmer, the Lab director, announced that the Department of Energy was, in fact, considering building a new, much larger accelerator, and that the Lab was, in fact, the facility under consideration to house it. If built, it would be the largest particle accelerator in the world.
For a moment, Abhijat’s breath caught in his throat. This was it, he realized. This was his chance at establishing his legacy. His chance at accomplishing what he had always hoped for, always worked toward—his chance to grasp, finally, what he had begun to fear might remain frustratingly just out of reach.
The excitement in the Lab cafeteria following the announcement was palpable. At each table, physicists chatted animatedly, wondering what might be revealed by collisions at such high energy. Would it expose gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics? Would they be able to find the Higgs boson, a particle hypothesized but never yet observed, whose existence was essential if the Standard Model was to work? Would it allow for the discovery of a Grand Unified Theory? Was it possible that additional families of quarks and leptons existed?
Abhijat sat quietly among his colleagues at lunch, but beneath his calm exterior was more excitement than anyone would have suspected. This new machine meant that he might no longer languish in the murky middle of good physicists who had failed to be great. With this increased size came increased power, and with that, the possibility of finally testing the theories he’d been working on for years. His mind raced, a series of possibilities—theories tested, confirmed, and then, perhaps a prize. But—he caught himself—he should not allow himself to get carried away.
He had counted the hours, the minutes until he would return home for dinner and share the news with Sarala and Meena. In his office, he could hardly focus, playing his announcement out ahead of time.
“But with such a large circumference, where will they build it?” Sarala, seated beside him at the dinner table, had asked, after he shared the news. Watching him talk, she had thought of how she hadn’t seen him this animated in years.
“Part of it on the Lab’s campus—the accelerator, the particle detector, the experiment halls—and part of it stretching out,” he answered.
“Stretching out—to where?” Sarala asked, catching Meena’s eye, who, Sarala could tell, was wondering the same thing.
“Through Nicolet,” he answered. “Or rather, under it.”
“Yes, but under where, exactly?” Sarala asked.
Abhijat would later come to think of this moment—Sarala’s question, the concern in her voice—as the first moment he glimpsed the way this might sound to the rest of the community. “Well.” He found himself proceeding cautiously. “That is still under consideration.” But it’s unimportant, he’d wanted to tell her, hoping to redirect her attention instead to where his own lay: to the possibilities this opened for his work, his reputation.
In the cafeteria that afternoon, following the announcement, he and his fellow colleagues had been so
focused on the changes this would mean for the field, so excited by what this would mean for each of their careers, that it hadn’t occurred to them how such a proposal would be perceived in the community.
“I’m not sure this is going to go over well in town,” Sarala said gently, hating to put out the light of excitement in Abhijat’s eyes, but certain that ahead lay troubled times.
Sarala had been right. By the following morning, news of the proposed collider appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner, along with a proposed path for the collider ring superimposed over a map of Nicolet, showing the collider’s tunnels running under the town’s subdivisions, schools, and what the newspaper identified as “prime farmland.” ATOM SMASHER, the headline read in all caps.
Reporters have learned that the National Accelerator Research Lab is in discussions with the Department of Energy to build a large collider ring, called the “Superconducting Super Collider,” in an underground tunnel that will encircle the town of Nicolet, running under homes, schools, and farmland.
Sarala presented the paper to Abhijat as he took his seat at the table for breakfast.
“Abhijat, this map,” she said softly, after he had taken a moment to skim the front page. “It would go right under our neighborhood, under Meena’s school, under Heritage Village.”
“But this is only a proposed path,” he assured her. “It’s far from certain.”
“But,” Sarala continued, “I don’t understand why the Lab can’t build this on the property they already have.”
“It’s much, much bigger than the accelerator we have now,” Abhijat explained. “Much bigger than the property we have. The current advances in tunneling, though, mean the Lab wouldn’t have to acquire the land.” These points had been noted by the Lab director the day before in his announcement. Here, Abhijat’s voice took on a hopeful tone. “No one would have to give up their farms or homes as when the Lab campus was built. Now we can just tunnel under these things, and people can retain their homes.”
Sarala looked at him dubiously.
“Oh, but you must understand,” he continued. “This is not a machine to be feared. It is something we should be in awe of, honored to have built here. Think of the answers it will reveal to us. Think of what it might mean for our family.”
Sarala was thinking of that. “But under our town? Under our homes?” she asked.
“Yes, but there is no danger. What possible danger could there be?”
But Sarala did not have an answer for this.
By the time Abhijat arrived at the Lab that morning, the staff had been summoned back to Anderson Hall where, just the day before, they had received what had seemed to them to be happy news. Again, the Lab director at the podium. Again the restless chattering among the staff in the audience. Again the director’s hand held up to quell this, and then his voice.
“Many of you have likely seen the covers of today’s papers. This is not how we planned the information to be disseminated to the public, but here it is and we must make the best of it.”
The day the cover story about the collider appeared in the paper, Rose, at the tiny desk in the corner of the kitchen from which she ran her political career, had begun to imagine greater things. With an issue like this, sure to galvanize the voters, she thought, she might—if she played her cards just right—have a chance next year at the mayor’s office.
CHAPTER 12
Conditions at the Creation of the Universe
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. He is the God of order and not of confusion.
—SIR ISAAC NEWTON, QUOTED IN TO THE HEART OF MATTER: THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER, 1987
IN THE WEEKS SINCE THE ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT THE NEW accelerator, Sarala noted that the front page of the Herald-Gleaner featured a steady march of articles on the history of the Lab, its safety record, and its scientific accomplishments. There were articles on land acquisition and the power of eminent domain, on the various methods that might be employed for tunneling beneath the homes and farmland of Nicolet. On the necessity for the Lab to secure the support of elected officials at the local, state, and national level if the project were to move forward. On subatomic particles like quarks and gluons. On the paradox of needing so large an instrument to study something so small. Abhijat had been surprised, then alarmed, at the amount of coverage the collider plan was getting in the news, not all of it good.
The decision about whether or not the super collider would be constructed was to be made, the citizens of Nicolet learned, not by them, but by the Department of Energy, which would conduct and then circulate environmental impact studies, feasibility studies, and would endeavor to gauge the response of the community to the idea by hosting a public hearing on the matter.
Representatives from the Lab and the Department of Energy were quoted, insisting that the path that had been outlined on the front page—in which the tunnel traveled west from the Lab’s campus, running under homes in Eagle’s Crest, under Heritage Village, and out into the surrounding farmland before arcing back around and making its way back to the Lab, passing under still more farmland, more homes, the elementary school, the junior high, and the high school—was only one of several possibilities still under consideration.
These same officials cited the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN on the French-Swiss border, which had been constructed under French farmland, as a model, and as proof that there was no reason to fear living on top of such a facility.
Not long after the articles began to appear, Sarala noticed that the Editorials and Letters to the Editor sections of the Herald-Gleaner had begun, slowly, to be taken over entirely by the issue of the collider. Gone were scraps over increases in property taxes, rogue candidates for school board, and complaints over the noise produced by the cannons set off each summer during Heritage Village’s annual Revolutionary War Days event.
The editor of the Herald-Gleaner would later come to remember the day of the super collider cover story as the last day the editorial pages featured content unrelated to the collider. From that day forward, letters about the collider began to arrive, at first in a slowish trickle, but that had been deceptive and unrepresentative of what was to come.
Throughout Nicolet, suspicion grew among the citizens as to just what the Lab was up to out there, whether they’d been planning this further takeover of the town’s land all along. In place of the usual sorts of letters to the editor were diatribes questioning whether all of the public activities at the Lab—the cultural events, the butterfly gardens, the hiking trails—had only been naked attempts at improving the Lab’s public image, luring in the wary public, who now eyed the Research Tower from their bedroom windows and imagined the superconductor snaking beneath their rec rooms, God-only-knows-what whizzing around below them as they slept. And then, once they collided, once they “succeeded,” what then? The end of the world? Dark matter? A black hole that would swallow Nicolet whole, leaving a gaping crater of nothingness in the prairie?
Since the announcement of the collider issue, Lily’s letters to Randolph had begun to focus almost exclusively on the subject, providing him with updates and articles clipped from the Herald-Gleaner. The local unions, she explained, argued that building the collider would bring thousands of construction jobs to the area, and were thus in favor of it. Local realtors worried that the location of the collider tunnel under homes would decrease property values in the area, so they had come out against it. Most teachers, Lily wrote, supported the project, as did many of the citizens who worked for computer or high-tech companies. These people, she explained in her letters, surely understood the research possibilities the collider would bring. But farmers, Lily noted, were split on the issue. There were those who were grateful for the Lab campus, for the way its land, returned to prairie grass, was the only land for miles that had not been swallowed up by suburban sprawl. But other farmers, remembering the land that had, yea
rs ago, been taken to build the Lab campus, were wary of the assurances that they’d still be able to own and farm the land under which the tunnels would be constructed. And on it went, the town divided.
To Lily, it seemed obvious that the collider was not only a good idea, but in fact an essential one. She found herself perplexed by the response of community members who did not support it, and had begun to feel as though she were living among foreigners whose strange customs she’d only ever half comprehended. Sitting in the wing chair in her father’s study, she wondered if that was how her father felt during his explorations. But, she realized, looking around the room at his photos and collections, he seemed to find these differences exciting rather than worrisome.
Randolph read Lily’s letters with a mixture of amusement at this strange, curious daughter he and Rose had produced and concern that she seemed so entirely uninterested in the things one might expect from a girl of her age.
He wrote to Rose: How do you suppose we might interest Lily in some of the more conventional preoccupations of young women her age?
But Rose, having never been particularly conventional herself, had been able to offer no fruitful suggestions. She remembered her own parents’ letters about the construction of the Lab years ago, the newspaper clippings her mother had sent in the letters she’d posted to wherever Rose and Randolph were due to arrive next. For Rose, out in the world, in the midst of her adventures with Randolph, the whole thing had seemed like a story that was happening to someone else.
CHAPTER 13
Expeditions through Unmapped Territory
As the quantum physicist Finkelstein said: “As well as a Yes and a No, the universe also contains a Perhaps.”
—PAOLO NOVARESIO, THE EXPLORERS
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