“She might have been talking about telescopes, but maybe she just wanted to go up there, see the ghost for herself.”
I didn’t want to be guilty of manufacturing a comforting fiction, like the one Addie had told, or of allowing Jack to do it. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure that Jack thought of what he’d told me as a story about ghosts—or as a story at all. He had said only that he’d seen the woman in the picture, upstairs in my office.
“There’s a photo of her on my desk—now. Not when he said he saw her, though. Maybe they were just playing a game.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Have you gotten any more messages?”
I had told Amy when I got the call from Charlie’s phone, as well as the email and text message. She hadn’t suggested an explanation, but like Terrence, she refused to countenance that anything out of the ordinary was going on. That annoyed me, but I didn’t know why. What did I want her to say? That there was a ghost who was trying to contact me? I didn’t believe that either. I just wanted her to admit that it couldn’t be a string of coincidences.
“No—but I got three of them. What are the chances they aren’t connected?” I meant it rhetorically, but Amy wrote her thesis on probability, and she doesn’t get many opportunities to talk about it with people who understand her.
“Very high, I think. Just assign variables to each independent event and you’re in business.”
“Thanks. But they’re not independent. I would use a PBA.”
“Nooo—you would use a Poisson distribution. It’s exactly like the classic analogy with postal mail.”
Amy was warming up. I sometimes think about how infrequently my sister must find a high school senior who is genuinely interested in probability or statistics. By contrast, my students are the best in the country, and have already determined that they hope to make a life in physics. It’s a question of sorting the merely capable from the ones who are extraordinary.
“You receive about four letters a day from different sources. Some days more arrive, some days fewer—occasionally you may not receive a letter—but the probability mass function will peak at four.”
“If they’re independent events,” I said.
Amy sounded impatient. “Of course they’re independent.”
“Luvya lady?”
“Was there a link to nymphosonlinenow.com?”
“Why, yes—there was! Now why didn’t I think of that?”
“I’m just saying—it’s possible you see a pattern that you wouldn’t otherwise,” Amy said. “Because you’re grieving.”
“I think the word ‘grief’ is sort of like the word ‘diversity.’ It just flattens out the problem.”
My sister sighed.
“And how do you explain the emoji?” I continued. “There was a flower—a tulip—a wink, a syringe, and a Swedish flag.”
“A series of random digital images?”
“Not random—Charlie’s a big winker. And she was sick, and she was always very into fresh flowers.”
“What about Sweden?” Amy asked.
“I don’t know.” I had an idea about what the flag meant, but I couldn’t say it out loud to anyone, least of all my sister.
* * *
—
Amy would say I’m more competitive than she is. I would say that she has given something up. I still think about the fact that my undergraduate thesis was beaten out for a Hoopes Prize by Krzysztof Kapusniak’s “Angular Analysis of D+—Op+ Decay” and Jonathan Lieberman’s “Gamma Rays as Standard Candles.” I didn’t work with Arty for my undergraduate thesis, but with a quantum field theorist, Emre Aksoy, who reassured me at the time that it was his fault I hadn’t won the prize. He’d gotten a better offer from Princeton and was leaving, and Harvard wasn’t giving him any parting gifts.
I followed Emre to Princeton for my PhD, in spite of the fact that string theory was really the only game in town there at that time. Emre said it kept us humble, and on the defensive, and that those were good positions from which to do science. I think there’s a part of me that likes being in the minority—a particle physicist at Princeton in the nineties, a woman in this field at all. This is simply a personal preference, in the same way that I prefer running or swimming to team sports, and has no bearing on my genuine desire for more equity in the discipline.
Although I tend not to speak publicly on the subject, I have sometimes written about physics institutions and their problem with women. Recently I wrote a short blog post about hearing Chien-Shiung Wu speak soon after I arrived at Harvard in 1989. At the time I didn’t know who she was; I was a freshman studying in the Cabot Science Library when I ran into one of my teaching fellows, who excitedly informed me that I had the chance to hear one of the three greatest women in twentieth-century physics speak right that moment, and that I would regret it forever if I didn’t go.
The lecture took place in a small auditorium in the Chinese Department, where there was standing room only. Wu began her talk not with physics, but with the story of her life. She was seventy-seven years old at the time, wearing a gray silk jacket with a high collar. She said that she’d left China at twenty-four to pursue a PhD at the University of Michigan, but had chosen Berkeley over Michigan upon arrival, after hearing that women weren’t allowed to use that university’s front entrance. She described her struggles to secure an academic position as an Asian woman in America, followed by her recruitment onto the Manhattan Project by John Archibald Wheeler and Emilio Segrè. Segrè had remembered Wu’s thesis on the decay of radioactive uranium isotopes just in time to avert a crisis at the new B reactor at Hanford, Washington (where one of the LIGO interferometers is today). Her sensitive work during the war, as well as political events in China, prevented her return home in the fifties; her parents and her brothers were killed in the political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, and she never saw them again. As we sat listening to the thin but still strong voice of the brilliant woman on the stage, my teaching fellow leaned over and whispered: “She gave up everything for science.”
As I write this, Wu has been dead twenty years. Had she won the physics Nobel in 1957, she would have been only its second female recipient. Her very difficult experiment undermined the physical law of conservation of parity: the idea, according to one biographer, that “the world reflected in the mirror appeared no less possible than the world in front of it.” Wu conducted her famous experiment using cobalt; when a radioactive cobalt nucleus decayed, conservation of parity dictated that it should shed electrons both with and against the nucleus’s spin. In fact, the electrons showed a marked preference for moving against the direction of spin. The idea that nature did indeed have a left and right preference—called “non-conservation of parity”—earned Wu’s theoretical collaborators, Chen Ning Yang and T. D. Lee, the Nobel in 1957; in spite of the fact that the Nobel can be given to three scientists at once, Wu wasn’t included.
When I was pregnant with Jack, I swam at MIT’s Z Center. As I grew larger and more unwieldy, I no longer had to compete for lane space; I was given a wide berth, almost as if I were contagious. But I’ve rarely felt more productive and alive than I did pulling the two of us through the water, thinking about the rippling pattern in the images then being collected by the WMAP satellite. Those ripples were left over from the shivering movement of the very first light in the universe, like tiny footprints in spacetime. I swam my twenty laps, trying to imagine the moment when that remnant heat was released, the journey it had traveled to reach our satellite today. I didn’t experience pregnancy brain (whatever that is) but published my second-most-cited paper with two collaborators near the end of month six.
After my sister and I hung up, I looked at the email again. The Swedish flag couldn’t be an accident. It made too much sense. And so, breaking that down:
= Charlie’s favorite flower, or: an example of the kind of luxury most peopl
e don’t bother with, which to Charlie was essential.
= Don’t worry.
= The medications she had been taking, or perhaps, the last one of which she’d availed herself.
= The Nobel Prize in Physics.
= Remember: it is a race and you don’t get points for anything but performance. Or in other words, do it for me.
I didn’t actually write those explanations down, but that was the way I thought of them. I thought for a good amount of time, with the cursor hovering impotently around “reply.” But once I decided, I wrote and quickly sent:
I know you’re there.
Ghost or thief or explicable internal glitch, how much damage could I do with a single sentence?
16.
Exit Charlie, she used to say sometimes, when she was going out. When she was in The Tempest our sophomore year, she would say Exeunt omnes, which she explained was Latin for when everyone—including the freshmen pressed into service as Reapers, Nymphs, and “strange Shapes”—left the stage together.
I have enough colleagues at Harvard that I’m there at least once a month. One afternoon in early September, I went to see Arty at his office on Oxford Street; it was a meeting we’d scheduled knowing that each of us would soon be swamped with a semester’s worth of work.
Normally I wouldn’t have gone through the Yard, but I had a little time before our meeting, and I’d promised to buy Jack a certain type of eraser, popular among his classmates. I parked in front of Arty’s office in Jefferson and crossed the old quadrangle, where I hadn’t been since the memorial service. It didn’t occur to me until I was right outside Thayer Hall that I’d done it because I wanted to look up at the first room Charlie and I had shared. The two blank third-floor windows produced no reaction in me, but when I jogged left around the southern edge of the building, avoiding a knot of tourists in front of the John Harvard statue, I heard her voice in my head, very clearly: Lough Derg.
For a moment the words meant nothing; then I knew. The year we lived in Thayer Hall, Charlie had written a term paper on something called “The Black Hole of Lough Derg.” Unlike its astrophysical corollary, this was an actual hole—a pit in the ground in Northern Ireland popular among medieval pilgrims because it was reputedly an entrance to the underworld. Sleeping in that damp, cold recess overnight was supposed to shorten your time in purgatory. “They really believed that they might be bound to wheels of fire, or hung by their necks from fishhooks for years at a time,” Charlie told me. “They were terrified. Isn’t that amazing?”
Charlie learned about Lough Derg in an undergraduate Shakespeare lecture about Hamlet meeting his father’s ghost on the ramparts of Elsinore. She did think at one point about writing a Shakespeare thesis, but Pope advised her to choose the “relatively untrodden territory” of Laclos. That was a valid argument, and Charlie was flattered that he would take an interest. This is maybe an opinion I’ve developed since becoming a teacher myself, but most of us are humble. Or at least, most of us aren’t arrogant in the way my father’s parents assumed when they called him “professor”—poking fun at him, because he said he wanted to go to college. It’s more like the arrogance of priests, robed in humility, the secret belief that one has dedicated one’s life to something pure. And the concomitant idea that this entitles one to little leeways, pleasures, indulgences, small things in comparison to the great work: the life of the mind.
* * *
—
My own mentor has won almost all of the big prizes, including the Wolf and the Kavli, but he would be the last person to feel any such entitlement. The university has bestowed on him even more honors, as well as time, money, and a parking space a few steps from Jefferson’s entrance—which normally sits empty. I’m sure that this must annoy his less decorated colleagues, and also that Arty is unaware of this fact, as he cheerfully preaches to them (as he has done to me) about the benefits of doing physics while walking. Even though he lives in Newton, about six miles from his office, he often commutes on foot.
The first time I met Arty, I thought he reminded me of my father. I was a nineteen-year-old redhead from Los Angeles, and while that provoked different reactions in the other faculty members I encountered (dismissal, mild flirtation, or embarrassingly chummy encouragement), Arty was the only one on whom my physical person seemed not to register. Arty himself is unremarkable-looking, with a large, boyish face; gray hair that he wears too long; large, square glasses; and a habit of raising his shoulders toward his ears. His smiles are sudden and slightly out of his control, in a way that could be either charming or off-putting depending upon your point of view.
On that afternoon in September, after I bought Jack his erasers, I went to Arty’s office in Jefferson. He’d asked me to come and discuss a paper one of his postdocs had coauthored on Advanced LIGO detection of black-hole binaries in globular clusters. It was a fashionable topic: when LIGO detected a gravitational wave, it would be the biggest news of twenty-first-century physics, and theoreticians everywhere were scrambling to get in on the action, even before a detection had actually occurred. I was sorry to see through the window in Arty’s door that the postdoc had arrived already; he was sitting with his back to me, wearing a T-shirt and a knit ski cap; his bike lock was clipped to one of his belt loops. In general I don’t care what people wear—you can do physics in a bathing suit, if you want—but it was seventy-three degrees outside, and the air-conditioning in Jefferson has never been such that you need to put on outerwear indoors.
“Helen!” Arty said. “Come in, come in. Meet Jason. You both have classical Greek names.”
This was typical Arty, awkward but effortful. He has told me that the most difficult part of socializing in a group for him is the need to come up with “topics,” by which I think he means topics outside of the physical sciences. Arty carries the kind of suppressed excitement that you sometimes find in people who’ve just fallen in love, an almost maniacal focus on one thing, and a just barely concealed desire to turn any conversation to that subject.
Jason stood up. “It’s great to meet you,” he said. His T-shirt said, I’d rather be lost in the woods, and he had heavy muttonchops, with a soul patch, that may have been intended to distinguish him from less style-conscious colleagues.
“I can’t remember who Jason was,” I said.
“The captain of the Argonauts,” Arty supplied. “Husband of Medea, the sorceress.”
“The one who kills her kids.”
Jason smiled. “And Helen caused the Trojan War.”
“She was the scapegoat,” I said. “I don’t think she caused it.”
“My wife is a chef,” Jason said, “which is sort of like sorcery. But we don’t have kids, thank god. Are you married to a physicist, or—”
“I’m not married. But I have to pick up my son after this, so we should start.”
Jason looked slightly taken aback, probably by my tone, which can sometimes be a little short. Arty swiveled his screen toward us and started in happily:
“We were looking at redshifted chirp masses before you came in—red is high metallicity here and blue is low.”
After I started working as Arty’s research assistant during my final undergraduate year, and we began spending more time together, I realized that it wasn’t my father he reminded me of so much as myself. If there were a way to strip us of our genders and synchronize our birth dates, Arty and I would be people with the same frame of reference, the same interests, and the same way of relating to other human beings. It’s just that being female makes it more difficult to blurt out whatever comes into my head without seeming rude or crazy. Whereas people generally find Arty’s eccentricity winning—if not a sign of genius.
We sat down and Jason began explaining the way that previous studies had relied on simplified globular cluster models and assumed a static mass for the black holes in each group. Jason’s team use
d a Monte Carlo approach to generate more realistic models of dense star clusters in the Local Group. The idea was that those clusters would be a likely place for black holes to exist in revolving pairs—and to collide with each other, producing the powerful gravitational ripples that LIGO’s interferometers could detect. The paper was impressive, and I began to like Jason while he was talking about it. I’ve been aware recently that I’m getting older, and making the kind of judgments I used to despise in my parents, as if complicated facial hair could predict whether or not someone was serious about his or her work.
“He reminds me of Neel,” Arty said, when Jason was finished. “When you were first working with me.”
“Really?”
“Who’s that?” Jason asked politely.
“Neel Jonnal,” Arty said. “Her collaborator on the Clapp-Jonnal.”
“Oh, yeah—of course. I never knew his first name.”
“He’s at LIGO now,” Arty said.
Jason’s expression changed. “Really? Lucky bastard—I’d love to be there.” He looked from me to Arty. “How long do you think before they get a detection?”
“Neel thinks soon,” I said. “But he tends to be optimistic.”
“Is he at one of the sites, or—?”
“Caltech,” I said.
“Wrong!” Arty said, grinning in the way he does. “Or soon to be wrong—he’s coming back.”
I must have been staring at Arty; I couldn’t help it. What he’d said didn’t make sense. Neel and I had emailed about one of my grad students just last week, and he hadn’t said anything about coming to Cambridge, even for a visit.
“Coming back to Boston?” I said. “But not permanently?”
Arty nodded, still smiling.
I didn’t have to ask which university, since the only LIGO team in Boston was at MIT. My first thought was that I must have overlooked a message in which Neel told me this momentous news. From the time we were undergraduates we had talked about our eventually landing at the same university. It had happened temporarily here at Harvard early in our careers; the result had been some of the best work of our lives, not to mention the adult friendship we had now. That had tapered off a bit when I had Jack, but there wasn’t any reason it couldn’t pick up again now that he was older and Neel was moving back. As a LIGO research scientist, he’d be attached to MIT’s Kavli Institute rather than holding a professorship like mine, though that distinction hardly mattered. We’d attend the same lectures and colloquia; be at the same department-wide events; run into each other at the coffee shop. I just couldn’t understand why Neel hadn’t told me.
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