This virtuosic game irritated Albert, who had never been, as he liked to say, a mathematical prodigy. He admitted that as an adolescent he had been bored stiff in math class, and his teachers had never seen any particular sign of talent in the slouchy youth.28 Faced with my husband’s work, he displayed the coy modesty of an old class dunce to avoid challenging him on the essentials. Kurt had pushed his extrapolation to the point where it resulted in a model of time at odds with Albert’s philosophical tenets. But it displeased Albert to air this kink in their friendship publicly. He twisted a strand of hair by his ear, looking for an acceptable way out.
“Our friend has a head for heights. He has had the most extraordinary fun with his mathematics.”
Kurt pushed his plate away and folded his napkin in a square. The frivolous tone of the conversation irritated him, making light of his irreducible quest for precision. Oskar supplied a measure of soft soap.
“Enlighten us, Kurt. We’re all friends here, and we know you won’t hold our amateurism against us. We’re truly curious.”
“I don’t see why I should have to explain myself to an audience, half of which can’t understand objective terminology. You know that this is not simply a theoretical game, Herr Einstein. I am counting on someone to find empirical proof for this cosmological model. In point of fact I’ve calculated the values for the speed of travel quite accurately.”
“Did you remember to pack sandwiches for the trip?”
My remark landed with a leaden thud. Robert squashed his cigarette end and drilled my husband with his radioactive gaze.
“I don’t cast doubt on your perfectionism for a single moment, Gödel. But neither you nor I can corroborate the possibility with the technology at present available.”
“I expect to confirm my theory from a study of astrophysical phenomena. The first lead is to establish a movement of orbital precession among all galactic systems.”
Robert emptied his glass before lighting a fresh cigarette. He loved to have the last word. And those that came before.
“Let’s stop there. Kitty is unhinging her jaw with yawning. Your rotating universe is going to finish her off.”
“We had a rough night. Toni had nightmares. You know how much fun that is, Lili.”
“They have morbid anxieties at that age. When she was five, Hanna would wake me up to see if I was alive.”
I had no appetite for listening to a conversation where I had even less to contribute.
“I’ll bring some coffee.”
“Good and strong, Adele! Oppie likes it black as pitch.”
When I returned with my tray, the guests were still arguing over time.
“If I could travel into the past, I’d go back and kill Hitler.”
Kitty, whose eyelids always grew a little heavier when science was discussed, helped herself to a large cup of coffee.
“What a good idea, Lili! Let’s play What If!”
“My very beloved friend, if you had killed that monster before he dragged us all into the recent nightmare, we would not be here together in Princeton and ipso facto you would not be thinking of performing such charming acts.”
Lili frowned. If she’d been looking for a father figure in Albert, she had certainly found one.
“It’s a time paradox.29 An insurmountable obstacle to my dear friend’s theory of time travel.”
“A paradox is not an impasse, Herr Einstein. Just a challenge. I consider paradoxes as doors to be opened onto bigger universes.”
Oppenheimer drained his cup in a single gulp, then poured himself a second. Kurt could never have swallowed even a drop of that coal tar without whimpering about his ulcer.
“You’re a mathematician. Facts concern you very little.”
“Mathematics is the skeleton, where physics is the flesh, Robert. The first has no embodiment without the second. But the second would collapse without the first.”
I registered the physicist’s skeptical smile. Oppie knew about my husband’s ambition to support the theory of relativity with a systematic mathematical approach, just as Newton had been able to quantify the theory of gravitation. Although it was the IAS’s mission to encourage such ambitious work, the project seemed to him if not presumptuous, at least fairly risky. As Herr Einstein had just said, no one other than its originator and a few astronomers were still interested in relativity. All the physicists at Princeton worked on quantum mechanics. Kurt had always had a taste for impossible quests. Or outmoded ones. It wouldn’t be the “rotating universes,” which had everyone at the Institute laughing up their sleeves, that would pay off our mortgage.
“The possibility of time travel is not just a pleasant anecdote to be served up during society dinners,” said Kurt. “The philosophical implications strike me as much more captivating.”
“The two of you are squabbling over a toy that no one understands.”
“We’re not arguing, Adele. We’re discussing.”
Albert, entangled between his convictions and his desire to show kindness to his friend, took shelter in flattery.
“Study in general, and the pursuit of truth and beauty, are fields that allow us to remain children all our lives. Your husband has the wonderful quality of looking at every new object with fresh eyes, without a priori knowledge.”
“And of refusing to go outside and play with the big boys!”
Oskar choked on his coffee.
“Don’t use these superb metaphors for venting your domestic quarrels, Adele. Your husband is motivated by an admirable ambition, even if to your way of thinking it is not particularly salable. He wants to prove the nature of time by using mathematics. I see nothing puerile in that.”
Kitty, with her long acquaintance of drawing room disputes, decided it was time to draw the fire on herself.
“Dear Oskar, you remind me of my philosophy professor back at the Sorbonne. The students all called him ‘Kant-adoodledoo’! He looked like an old bedraggled rooster.”
Lili pursed her lips, and even Dorothy made an effort to keep from smiling so as not to wound her man. It was rare to see Morgenstern so thoroughly mortified.
“I didn’t mean to imply a physical resemblance, Oskar. Our host is trying to resolve the ancient quarrel between idealists and realists, isn’t he?30 Does time have objective existence?”
I thanked Kitty with a quick wink. How I’d have liked to be one of those women—almost able to enter the discussion on an equal footing. I watched them closely, envious of each for some aspect of her character. There was Kitty, a small, sparkling brunette with a hard glance but a dazzling smile, enviable for her husbands, her studies, her children, and her sumptuous house. There was Dorothy, who was young, beautiful, and hopelessly in love with her big patrician beanpole of a husband. And I envied Lili her strength. Mine exploded in acid eruptions, while with hers, she rocked the world in her arms.
“I have proof that time really and truly does exist. And gravity. My eyelids are drooping!”
Oppenheimer took his wife’s face between his hands to kiss her wrinkles one by one. I was touched by this spontaneous gesture of affection. Kurt was embarrassed by such shows, which he himself never performed in public. And not often in private. He called us back to order: “Yet some philosophers suggest that time, or rather its passage, is an illusion that derives from our perception.”
“Time is kinder to you men. That’s my theory of relativity.”
“That’s entirely beside the point, Adele! Special relativity demonstrates that the simultaneity of two events is relative.”
“Darling, what I find relative is your sense of humor.”
Albert, absorbed in relighting his pipe, choked with laughter.
“You’re wrong, Adele! Your husband has a very subversive sense of humor. Under your gentleman’s guise, dear friend, you are an anarchist. You slip out and place your little bombs, unnoticed.”
“Kurt would never hurt a fly!”
“Follow my thinking. If you go back to some moment
in the past, the intervening moments have never occurred. Time hasn’t passed. Consequently, intuitive time doesn’t exist. You can’t relativize a concept like time without destroying its very existence. Gödel has assassinated the great clock! It wasn’t enough for him to blow up the positivists’ dream!”
“Mother of God! Can I not leave you alone even for a moment, darling?”
“If I were traveling in the past and came face-to-face with Hitler, I would have no memory of the intervening experiences I had lived? I wouldn’t try to alter them?”
“To tell you the truth, darling Lili, I really don’t know for sure! Maybe we could relive all the good moments ad vitam aeternam and avoid the bad.”
“What about you, Professor? What would you change?”
“If I were young again?”
Albert drew on his pipe, staring at Oppenheimer, and muttered, “If I had to choose how to make my living, I wouldn’t try to become a research scientist. I’d become a plumber! It’s less threatening to mankind.”
Everyone around the table protested. But Albert wasn’t veering off into self-criticism, he was taking particular aim at Robert’s political friends. The military’s influence over science worried him to an extreme degree. He believed that Truman lacked Roosevelt’s stature. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to the paranoiacs and opportunists who infested Washington. The newspapers were already vomiting the allegations of a certain Senator McCarthy, the elderly physicist’s new bête noire. Kurt and Robert believed that Congress would not back McCarthy in his reckless and defamatory course. Albert was afraid that the warmongers in the Pentagon would turn the skirmishes in far-off Korea into an atomic testing ground. Robert, who had left the Manhattan Project but was a consultant for the federal Atomic Energy Commission, was ambivalent on the subject of nuclear armament. Albert was pressuring him to use his influence to stem the headlong flight into madness. Oppie wasn’t oblivious of the dark clouds ahead, but he thought himself able to navigate these troubled waters, even through heavy squalls. Time, even if it didn’t exist, was to give him a severe lesson in humility.
“Why not choose the future? Why lose yourself in the past and its impossibilities?”
Oskar glanced at my husband out of the corner of his eye before answering Lili. He didn’t want to upset his friend and spend days paying for his frankness.
“Death also contradicts the idea of time travel.”
“The fear of death is totally unjustified, dear Oskar. There is not the slightest risk of an accident once you are dead.”
I smiled. Albert was rehashing one of his favorite aphorisms, but he went on to develop a more substantial response.
“Death is just a final consequence of entropy. A broken cup won’t glue itself back together. We go from point a in childhood to point b in old age. The idea of before and after has an irrefutable physical existence on the scale of our human lives. That this evidence might lose its irreducibility through mathematical concepts pushed to their limits, I can conceive … But maybe we should exclude them. Just because they contradict our physical experience.”
“Yet you once said if the facts don’t agree with the theory, then change the facts.”
“Your memory is too good, Gödel. And I talk too much. Allow an old man to be occasionally wrong. Nothing can fight entropy. It is my most intimate enemy. It puts the ground a little lower every morning.”
“Opposing an objective demonstration with an experiential argument hardly strikes me as very rational, Herr Einstein. You surprise me.”
“Oskar, I find reason tiresome. My intuition has been my guiding light for years, and it has never steered me wrong. The intuitive faculty is a sacred gift. The rational faculty is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
“It worships the appearance of rationality,” said Morgenstern. “Its livery.”
“We agree on that point. Scientific research is a subtle balance between intuition and reason.”
“An equilibrium not to be forgotten along the way, Herr Einstein. We live in the age of calculators. Intuition plays no part in their functioning.”
“One day, machines will be able to solve every problem, but never will a machine be able to pose one!”
I thought of our friend von Neumann. Using the ENIAC, he had just calculated π to the 2,037th decimal. The Oppenheimers’ babysitter had given us a detailed account of it, ignoring little Toni, who was tugging at her skirt. The first “electronic” computer, in operation since 1946, was a thirty-ton toy that took up the space of a good-sized apartment. Its thousands of resistors, condensers, and other diodes allowed it to compute five thousand operations per second. Though skeptical of the usefulness of this gigantic abacus, I’d been touched by the young student’s enthusiasm. Maybe this new world would give greater scope to women. In the meantime, entropy hadn’t spared the logical monster that sprang, in part, from von Neumann’s cannibalistic brain. His engineers spent more time replacing parts than calculating: insects were constantly drawn to the vacuum tubes, where they fried in the heat.31 It always reassured me to see these big brains brought back to reality.
Albert rescued us from becoming too serious by rising from the table, giving the general signal for departure.
“My friends, I am going home before I self-destruct in front of your appalled faces. Adele, thank you for the charming lunch. I am leaving you with all these dirty dishes. Only women still have the courage to fight entropy.”
Kurt and I accompanied our friends to the door, after which he eclipsed himself. I brought the house back to a semblance of order, relishing the silence. Before meeting Kurt, I had never asked myself metaphysical questions. There was God, there were men, and there was the daily quest to put food on my plate. All these discussions allowed me a glimpse of the vast expanse of questions I had never asked myself. But in the end, was it the nature of the world to be complex, or was it man’s questioning that made it so? Kurt had no simple answer for me. By choosing to follow him, I had had to abandon the comfort of ignorance. I was willing enough, but I lacked the capacity for metaphysics. I realized very late that the temptation to metaphysics is not overly concerned with religion or nationality, with types or cultures. It is freely available to all, but the luxury of enjoying it is given only to a few.
What did their philosophical acrobatics matter in the context of daily life? If they had any capacity to listen, I would have told them, I would have given them my opinion. I knew the order of time: in the linking of stitches to make a hem, in dishes washed and put away, in precise rows of ironed linen, in a perfectly browned pie that fills the house with its scent. When you have your hands in flour, nothing can happen to you. I liked the smell of yeast, its hint of a fertile order. I believed in this order of life, for want of giving it a meaning.
My husband queried the stars, whereas I already had a well-ordered universe. A tiny one, to be sure, but protected, and on this earth. They left me alone to battle entropy. Thanks a bunch! If men swept the floor once in a while, they’d be a lot less unhappy.
37
Anna hesitated before entering Mrs. Gödel’s bedroom. Adele was in lively conversation with Gladys, whose pink angora sweater and spangled vinyl bag seemed in no hurry to leave. Raising her arms to rearrange her beehive, she exposed two repulsive yellowish stains. Anna looked away.
“We were waiting for you. The shower is all clean, we have washed it especially for you.”
Adele pointed toward her tiny bathroom. Not quite sure what was happening, Anna took the towel and the lemon that were handed to her.
“Wash your hair! Gladys is going to give you a little haircut.”
The young woman stared in terror at Gladys’s surrealist puffball.
“Don’t worry,” said Gladys. “I ran a hair salon for more than thirty years.”
With a melodramatic gesture, Adele clasped her hands to her breast.
“Don’t try to argue with us or I’ll have the v
apors.”
Anna complied with a deep sigh. Kneeling in front of the plastic basin, she wondered at her passivity. To what lengths will you go for those damned archives? The question as she had formulated it sounded false. She had no time to think it through: Gladys appeared in the bathroom.
“The lemon is to rinse with. I would have washed your hair myself, but you know how it is with my bad hip …”
Anna raised her head and the foam burned her eyes.
When she returned to the bedroom, the hairdresser was waiting for her behind the only chair, scissors and comb at the ready. Anna sat down with visible anxiety.
“What will it be next time? A course in putting on makeup? Do you take me for a toy?”
She cried out. Her torturer was yanking the comb through her hair, while Adele looked on with a big smile of satisfaction.
“You’re one of those dolls that cry when you tug on their hair.”
Anna had always hated those plastic simulacra. She preferred playing with Leo’s Erector set, even if he showed greater talent at it. Still, every Christmas brought its cargo of disappointing dolls, which she undressed, daubed with paint, and tossed in the garbage without a second thought. Rachel had dragged her off to see a psychologist, afraid that her daughter was uncomfortable with her femininity. The therapist had smiled and advised the mother to encourage her daughter’s artistic leanings.
“Your hair is like a pile of straw! I should have gotten some vegetable oil from the kitchen.”
“Let’s make one thing clear! You’re just trimming the ends!”
Gladys tilted Anna’s head forward peremptorily, humming as she worked. The young woman watched the pile of hair at her feet grow by leaps and bounds.
“Don’t worry. I’m a professional. I know what men like. Shall we listen to a little music?”
Gladys skipped over to the radio, waving her scissors in the air. A blast of brass instruments invaded the room. Anna shuddered as she sensed the capillary artist, armed with new energy, quivering at her back.
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 24