Charmed Particles
Page 8
And he told her how for a time, for one of his articles, he had lived among the Tiwi tribesmen of Melville Island, who, during funeral ceremonies, donned false beards and face paint so that the spirit of the dead person could not recognize and harm them.
Rose was hesitant to intrude on these sessions. She sat at her small desk in the kitchen, and someone happening upon the scene might have guessed that she was, as it appeared, reviewing the minutes of the last city council meeting. In fact, she was listening as Randolph’s stories unfolded, his voice warm and familiar, and she was as captivated as Lily. Rose could remember how she, too, had come to life on their trips, her senses heightened. Getting close enough to smell an animal. The sound of the wilderness around them, like a lullaby, as they slept.
Their life here was good, though, she reminded herself in these moments. She had enjoyed her adventures with Randolph, but she was glad to be back. It felt right to be home, even though home was now so different.
For both Lily and Meena, the highlight of the fourth grade was the unit introducing them to the methods and techniques of research, which Mrs. Webster had unimaginatively titled “Writing a Report.” The unit began with an introduction to note-taking. They practiced creating outlines and studied the importance of visual aids. From there, the students were to break into pairs to research and prepare a short written report and presentation. Mrs. Webster had handed out a long list of preselected topics from which they might choose:
Creatures of the Sea
Good Nutrition
Illinois
Kinds of Birds
The Heart
The History of the Bicycle
The Shrimp
The Invention of Baseball
The American Flag
Flowers
How Trees Grow
But Lily and Meena had begged to be allowed to choose a topic of their own, and Mrs. Webster had, after much pestering and critique of her assembled topic choices on their parts, reluctantly agreed. Lily and Meena selected the life and times of Lady Florence Baker, explorer of central Africa and co-discoverer, with her husband, of Lake Albert.
For a week, the class spent the Language Arts portion of the school day visiting the small library around which the school’s classrooms had been organized. Mrs. Smedstadt, the librarian, introduced them to the large wooden card catalogs near the checkout desk and walked them through the complexities of the Dewey Decimal System. Lily and Meena loved leafing through the soft-edged manila cards of the card catalog. Together they assembled a list of books to gather:
916 Af The Great Explorers of Africa
917.704 Sp The Discovery of the Source of the Nile
910.82 Da Hints to Lady Travellers
917.76 Mi Baker of the Nile
916.76 Ha Lovers on the Nile
962.4 Ba Morning Star: Florence Baker’s diary of the expedition to put down the slave trade on the Nile, 1870-1873
It was, perhaps, not surprising that Lily and Meena were the only fourth graders to request materials from another library. They had been distressed to find that their topic received scant coverage in their World Books, among the several-page spreads devoted to American presidents, state flowers, and breeds of dog.
Together Lily and Meena read through their stack of books and filled a neat pile of index cards, color-coded pink for biographical details, blue for historical context, green for information on their subject—Lady Florence Baker herself—white for information on her husband, and yellow for notes on other explorers who had been their contemporaries.
So, while the other students’ index cards read like this:
Shrimp are a type of crustacean.
Shrimp are caught in nets.
There are many species of shrimp.
Shrimp eat plants.
Lily and Meena’s looked like this:
Born Barbara Maria Szász in 1845 in Transylvania.
Kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of four.
Raised as a harem girl in the home of a local merchant.
1859: put up for sale at a slave auction at the age of fourteen.
Two men bid for her. One—a servant of the pasha of Vidin. The other—Samuel Baker.
The pasha’s servant places the highest bid, but Baker bribes Florence’s attendant to allow him to take her. He and his friend, the Maharaja Duleep Singh (an Indian prince), escape with Florence.
1861: Samuel and Florence set out to discover the source of the Nile.
1865: Florence and Samuel Baker are married.
1866: Samuel knighted by Queen Victoria of England. The Queen refuses to receive Florence because of the scandal of Florence and Samuel traveling together unchaperoned before their marriage.
1916: Florence Baker dies.
Certainly Florence’s marriage to Samuel had been an unconventional one, and it had pleased Lily to discover this, feeling a sudden kinship with the couple. Lily loved the task of copying out the relevant passages of text onto her crisp note cards, enclosing them carefully in quotation marks and noting the source at the bottom of each card. At night, at her desk, she ordered and reordered them, imagining the best approach to organizing their report and presentation. Meena argued that the only sensible approach to organization was chronological, but Lily had wondered whether they might not start first with a key event of Florence’s adult life—being snubbed by Queen Victoria, perhaps—and then circle back through the biographical details chronologically, using the opening scene as a kind of bookend, as some of the more sophisticated biographies she had read tended to do. “Lady Florence Baker was born Barbara Maria Szász in 1845 in Transylvania.” Lily shook her head. She couldn’t bear that type of inelegant introduction.
The assignment had been to produce a three-page report and a five-minute presentation, including one optional visual aid. For their oral presentation, Meena had created a posterboard timeline noting the key events in Florence’s life, illustrated with photocopied pictures of Florence and Samuel and a map she had created, on which she had outlined the “Route of Florence and Samuel Baker’s First Expedition, 1861-1865.”
Meena and Lily’s report, “Lady Florence Baker: The Journey from Slavery to Exploration,” weighed in at twenty pages, not including endnotes, bibliography, and the following index, which Meena had carefully prepared:
Abduction
childhood and, 1-3, 5
Africa, 5-11, 13, 17
Albert Nyanza. See Lake Albert
Arabic
fluency in, 10
Baker, Sir Samuel White, 3, 4-9, 11, 13-17, 19
books by, 15, 17
knighthood of, 16
Blue Nile
origin of, 9-10
discovery of, 8
Bucharest, 3
Camels
bargaining for, 5
riding, 5-9
Cannibalism, 11, 15
Egypt
expedition to, 7-10
Gondokoro, 9-10
Harem
women in, 2
Florence’s experience in, 1-3
Samuel’s views on, 18
Homesickness, 5
Hungarian Revolution, 1-2
Ivory, 8
Khartoum
return from, 15
Lake Albert
discovery of, 9
Lake Edward, 7
Lake Victoria, 7
Nile River
map of, 11
Ottoman Empire, 2
Poison arrows, 9, 12
Porters
natives used as, 9-11
Royal Geographical Society, 17
Salt, 6, 9, 15
Singh, Maharaja Duleep, 2
Sudan, 16-18
Starvation and rumored death, 13
Victoria, Queen
and society, 18
and jubilee, 17-18
Vidin, 1, 3
White Nile
characteristics of, 4, 9
source of, 11-12
expedition to, 9-12
CHAPTER 9
Everything of Consequence for the Fate of the Universe
It was particle physics…that reigned supreme during that first dazzling microsecond [after the Big Bang], when virtually everything of consequence for the fate of the universe took place.
— To THE HEART OF MATTER: THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER, 1987
THE MEN OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD LEFT FOR WORK EACH MORNING dressed in sweaters and polo shirts, but Abhijat emerged each morning in a suit, his ensemble varying only in his choice of tie, a habit since his university years. It was a practice often mistaken for sartorial particularity, but in reality, the habit of the suit, its reliable, unwavering sameness, was comforting to Abhijat. He wore it almost like a uniform, and it was when he donned this uniform and prepared to leave for the Lab that he felt most at ease, knowing that he was headed toward the place where he felt most at home in the world.
Evenings, when he returned to Eagle’s Crest, he joined the great parade of husbands returning home, greeting one another with a raised hand or a nod as they made their way into the neighborhood and toward their homes through the maze of the subdivision’s circles, drives, and cul-de-sacs.
Each night, Abhijat parked the car in the garage and walked down the driveway to the mailbox to collect the day’s mail. Frequently, he found himself performing this ritual at the precise moment Carol’s husband, Bill, was doing so as well, and here they exchanged the kind of awkward greeting that passes between men who have little in common and know it, their conversations inevitably stilted and perplexing on both ends.
Abhijat felt most comfortable conversing with his colleagues, and he looked forward each morning to his arrival at the Lab. Unlike his neighbors and, he imagined, most Americans, Abhijat did not look forward to the weekends, for they were a time of forced exile (at Sarala’s suggestion) from the Lab. If he must work on the weekends, she had asked, couldn’t he at least do so from his study at home? Abhijat had agreed to this compromise, but it was time he did not relish because, as he worked, he was acutely aware that just outside his window, the other husbands of the neighborhood were at work in their yards and garages, on home improvement projects, playing catch in the yard with their children. And it was then that he felt so keenly different. So other.
The window of his study looked out over Bill and Carol’s garage, where Bill kept his antique sports car (with the exception of summer weekends, when he wheeled it out into the driveway to wax and polish it as gently as if he were bathing an infant). Each time Abhijat looked up from his desk, he saw Bill at work on the car or endlessly puttering in the yard. What, Abhijat wondered, did he find to do out there?
Abhijat had taken to working during the weekends behind a closed door, blinds twisted tightly shut against the reminder of this parallel world to which he did not belong.
Sarala had come to realize that, with the exception of Meena, Carol was the first friend she’d had in years. She had, of course, been friendly with Lily’s mother for as long as the girls had been friends, exchanging pleasantries as they dropped the girls off and picked them up at one house or the other. But Carol was the first friend who felt like she belonged to Sarala, a friend by choice rather than circumstance.
She spent her mornings now at Carol’s house sipping coffee while Carol filled orders and updated her clients’ product histories. “It helps me keep track of what they like and don’t like,” she explained.
Sarala sat beside her, leafing through a set of the flip charts Carol used to prepare for her Mary Kay parties—images of beautiful, sophisticated American women and the Mary Kay products that had helped them achieve that look. They were mostly white women, here and there a token black or Asian woman included. There were, as Sarala had come to expect, no women who looked like her. On the back of the photos were tips for the consultants: “Help your hostess feel special by gesturing to her as you say her name.”
“When does Abhijat come back from his conference?” Carol asked, looking up from the pink binder in which she was recording the minutia of her clients’ cosmetic preferences.
Abhijat had left earlier in the week for the International Workshop on Charm Physics, where he was delivering a paper on Hidden Charm. During his absence, Sarala had taken the opportunity to clean his study, a part of the house she rarely ventured into, being so infrequently invited. As she made her way into the room, she could sense the disturbance she made in the air, in the dust that coated the bookshelves and the spaces on his desk not covered in paper. Armed with one of Meena’s old cloth diapers and a bottle of Pledge, she had set about cleaning what she could without disarranging anything. Here and there she found triangles of desktop peeking out from among the lined white paper on which he had scribbled equations, and these she approached gingerly, with a fingertip, loath to move something out of place that might someday explain this enormous and astonishing world in which they lived.
As she worked, she found herself recalling with perfect clarity, much to her own surprise, something she’d read in one of her schoolbooks years ago: “A well-ordered home helps to make well-ordered men.”
What would Abhijat be like, she wondered, without his position at the Lab, without all of this. She looked out over his desktop. On top of the piles of paper that covered the desk sat a yellow legal pad covered with Abhijat’s neat, bold handwriting:
HOW MANY QUARK SPECIES ARE THERE?
HOW DO THE QUARKS BEHAVE WITH HADRONIC MATTER?
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE WEAK NEUTRAL CURRENT?
As she cleaned, she was surprised and a little sad to realize that his absence that week had hardly registered for her, nor, it seemed, for Meena. It was as though they had both come to think of Abhijat as a person who existed only in the mind rather than in their shared physical space.
Even the things he studied weren’t really present in the physical sense, she thought. Their very existence was hypothetical. He and the other theorists were predicting that these tiny parts of the world existed. But ultimately, who knew?
Sarala had begun to think that, in this sense, Abhijat’s work was not so very unlike that of the fortune tellers she had seen on the streets of Bombay, who might take your hand and, tracing the lines of your palm, hypothesize a future for you.
She had seen images of the paths created by the collisions of particles, paths which, by their arcing and turning, would tell the story of what they were. Muons, neutrinos, hadrons, gluons. It wasn’t unlike magic, she thought, remembering something she’d heard one of the other physicists’ wives saying a few months earlier at the Lab’s Christmas party: “Well, you know what I always say when people ask what a theorist does. I tell them it’s a kind of transubstantiation—they turn coffee into papers.”
When he returned home from the conference, Abhijat found himself distracted by the idle physics-world gossip that suggested there might be plans in the works for an even larger particle accelerator—one that would render the Lab’s current accelerator as antiquated and obsolete as the Lab’s old rusting and abandoned fixed-target accelerator.
Though he had never before taken much interest in the details of the accelerators, Abhijat had begun, lately, to think about this a great deal. The work he’d been doing had been well received, but if he were to make the kind of lasting legacy in the physics world he’d always expected to, then the theories he’d been working on would need to be confirmed by the experimenters. And the area of his work was fast outpacing the capabilities of the Lab’s current accelerator.
Preoccupied, Abhijat found himself standing at his office window, looking out along the old fixed-target beam line, wondering what might be in store for the Lab in the future. He thought of the buildings of the old accelerator, now empty in disuse, which ran along the beam line out toward the boundary of the Lab’s campus and the beginning of the town. He rested his head against the window, feeling the cool pane of glass
against his skin.
Even if these rumors were not true, Abhijat realized, there would surely come a time when the Lab’s technological capabilities were surpassed by those of another facility. And then what?
He returned to his seat at his desk, fingers drumming nervously against the desktop as he willed his eyes and attention back to the work at hand.
Near the back of the Lab’s seminar room, Abhijat took a seat next to Dr. Cardiff, his colleague and contemporary, in one of the room’s creaking orange chairs, which broadcast one’s every stretch and repositioning. It was easy to identify the young man who would be the afternoon’s presenter. He sat at the front of the room, beside one of Abhijat’s colleagues in the first row, one leg crossed over another, foot bouncing up and down nervously, eyes on the door, watching to see who arrived to hear his talk.
Abhijat and Dr. Cardiff both made note of this, exchanging a smile. Abhijat could still remember being that young a man—junior scientist eager to share his work. He remembered how nervous he, too, had been.
But now, he had reached what could reasonably, statistically, be predicted as the midpoint of his life. Here he sat, with the job he had always dreamed of, at the world’s premier research facility. And yet, much as he had wanted it; much as he had expected it; much as he had studied, read, and prepared for it; he had come to a point where he had begun to fear he might never be a great physicist.
He had always dreamed of one day ranking among his idols—Pauli, Dirac, Gell-Mann. Certainly he was a good physicist—strong international reputation, well respected at the Lab and throughout his field, impressive publications. But his work, while good—solidly and consistently good—had not been transformative. His theories had floated out into the world in the form of articles and papers he delivered at conferences. There were junior scientists who cited his work, colleagues who admired him, academics who taught his theories. But he had come to fear that, in the grand scheme of history, his would not be a name that was remembered. Since he’d begun his studies, his career, his greatest fear had been that he would be a failure. A B+ physicist.