Physics Can Be Fatal

PHYSICS CAN BE FATAL

Elissa D. Grodin

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are a few people I would like to thank.  Aubrey Andersen read the earliest drafts of the manuscript, and pointed the story in the right direction with her invaluable notes and suggestions.  Dennyse Gunts read a later draft, and ferreted out various inconsistencies which I had overlooked.  Harvard physics postdoctoral researcher, Cindy Keeler, provided essential insight into the heart and mind of my protagonist (Thank-you, Professor Strominger, for putting her in touch with me).  And finally, my editor, Patricia Rockwell, guided the manuscript to completion with the keenest of observations and ideas.

Chapter 1

     Absorbed in thought, Edwina Goodman stood in her small office staring at a chalkboard covered with mathematical equations.   Professor Donald Gaylord hovered in the open doorway looking amused.

     “Adding a dimension?” he chuckled flirtatiously.

     Edwina turned her head to look at Donald.  She held a piece of chalk in mid-air, waiting.  Her other hand remained buried in the front pocket of her jeans.  Her wavy, chin-length, ash-blond hair was tucked behind her ears.  Lips pursed in concentration, Edwina’s longish bangs fell onto clear, hazel eyes.

     “What’s up, Don?” she replied, regarding Donald evenly.

     Edwina was by now well seasoned in Donald Gaylord’s excessive use of charm.  Along with countless other students over the years, Edwina had developed a crush on the disarmingly handsome Professor Gaylord in her undergraduate days.   For his part, Donald Gaylord made a hobby of flirting, and was very good at it.  Donald was a married man, and as far as the grapevine had it, he remained faithful.

     Eventually Edwina made the discovery that Donald’s habitual practice of conferring compliments and endearments was nothing more than standard operating procedure.  Edwina’s crush was short-lived.  Her father would have probably called Donald Gaylord a snake oil salesman.

     “Helen asked me to stop by,” Donald gushed.  “Have you heard the news? Alan Sidebottom has agreed to come to Cushing for the semester – it’s all very last minute!   I’m picking him up at the airport on Friday.  Helen wants to know if you’ll organize a department cocktail reception for Friday evening?  If you’re not busy?”

     “Sure thing, Don,” Edwina said.

     “Terrific.  I’ll email you a list of stuff to order from Blackwell’s.  They’ll take care of the food and the booze.  Make the thing for 7:00.  Tell them it’s for about fifty people, and put it on the college account.  Thanks a million, kiddo.  You’re a doll, you know that?” 

     Edwina listened to the rapid metronome of Donald’s expensive Italian shoes clicking down the marble hallway.  She turned her attention back to the mass of equations on the board, and put Alan Sidebottom and the cocktail reception out of her mind for the moment.  Pushing her bangs out of her eyes in a familiar gesture, she returned to the engaging intricacies of the mathematical model on the chalkboard.

     Bishop Larkin, one of the Department’s most gifted students and a particular favorite of Edwina, knocked at her door.

     “Come in,” Edwina said without looking up from the chalkboard.

     “Dr. Goodman?” Bishop said.

     “Hi, Bish, come on in.  Have a seat.”

     The gangling young man with dark, curly hair and tender eyes sat down rather awkwardly, his long limbs dangling from the chair like a great spider.

     “I think I might be having a breakdown or something,” he said in true earnest.  “Not a breakdown, exactly.  More like a crisis of confidence, or a kind of––”

     Edwina regarded the young man sympathetically.

     “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?” she said comfortingly.

     “Yeah.  Well.   I’m not really sure,” he said, looking at the floor.  “I’m not sure I should even be doing physics.  I mean, I know I’m good at it, and I like doing it, but my dad’s the one who persuaded me.  I was thinking about studying comparative religion, maybe even going into the clergy.  Just because my dad is some sort of famous chess genius everyone assumes he’s brilliant in general––even when it comes to deciding what his kids’ futures should be.  I don’t know if I’m doing physics for him or for me, or if maybe I might be missing a higher calling.”

     Bishop Larkin continued staring at the floor.  He was having a conversation with himself.  Edwina grasped this, and did not wish to interrupt.

     “I’d probably feel horrible if I dropped out of the program,” he continued.  “I’m sure I’d feel like I was letting down a lot of people.  Most of all, my dad.  Maybe I’d be letting myself down, too.  I’m not sure.  It just bugs me that my dad thinks of me as his ‘report card to the world’––his prize brainiac, as if my sole purpose in life is to show everybody what a wonderful person he is––you know––reflected glory and all that.”

     Bishop fiddled with his shoelaces.  Finally he looked up.

     “What do you think, Dr. Goodman?”

     “I don’t know, Bish,” Edwina said, pushing her bangs to the side.  “I’m pretty sure a lot of parents encourage their kids in certain directions, and all parents want their kids to do well.  I think that’s in the parents’ manual.  Maybe nudging you toward studying physics was your dad’s clumsy way of letting you know how highly he thinks of you.  How proud of you he is.  In any case, I wouldn’t focus very much on that.  Focus on yourself, independent of your dad.”  Edwina let her words sink in. 

     “And as far as physics goes,” she continued, “speaking for myself, now––I enjoy spending my time thinking about nuclear particles that only exist for a billionth of a second,” she grinned.

     Bishop smiled.

     Edwina pointed to a printout of a favorite quote she had framed and hung on the wall of her office.

    
Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~ Howard Thurman

     “You can’t tell me doing physics doesn’t make you come alive, Bish, because I’ve seen it time and again.  I see it every time you’re in the lab,” Edwina chided.  “I think physics can be sort of a spiritual thing for some people, maybe we’re our own brand of clergy.  Carl Sagan said a great thing about science being his informed version of worship.  I think that’s how I feel about it.”

     Bishop thought this over for a moment.

     “I guess I do, too,” he said. 

     “As for studying comparative religion,” Edwina continued, “the funny thing about that is, those guys you like to read––Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell and company––those guys end up with the same conclusions physicists do.  That everything in the universe is connected.  That we humans are––what does Brian Cox say?––we humans are ‘the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”

     Bishop stared at Edwina.

     “Don’t be too hasty about turning your back on this stuff, just because you’ve got some issues with your dad,” she said.  “Separate the two, your love of physics and your resentment toward your dad.  Think of yourself as a physicist with father issues,” she laughed.

Bishop Larkin stayed for forty-five minutes longer, chatting and laughing with Edwina.  By the time he left her office, he was feeling decidedly sanguine.

*

       Edwina Goodman was one of those fortunate creatures who stumbled across her true nature and felt in concert with it at an early age.  Luckier, still, was having parents who did not put obstacles in her path.  Her Uncle Edward, after whom she was named, gave Edwina a compass on her eighth birthday.  Once the notion of the magnetic North Pole was introduced, Edwina became obsessed with investigating the unseen forces that operate the universe.  She was the only child of doting parents who encouraged her every endeavor, even dismantling household objects in order to observe their inner workings.  The things Edwina did not understand excited her the most. 

     Sometimes teased at school for being a tomboy or for having her ‘head in the clouds’, Edwina took little notice.  The tomboy criticism registered no negative meaning to young Edwina, since she scarcely knew what was meant by it.  According to her view of things, if you couldn’t climb trees, build forts, run like the wind, and catch turtles and frogs, what was the point of it all?  As far as having her head in the clouds, Edwina assumed it was a state to which everyone aspired, since what better place to get a bird’s eye view of the world than up in the clouds?

     It’s true she could, at times, seem preoccupied, but this was because her focus was often directed toward some problem related to the invisible workings of the physical universe in all its glorious connections.  The difficulty in this way of seeing the world was that she had a habit of tuning people out.  Edwina would simply stop listening at the drop of a hat, if an idea worth thinking about caught her fancy and demanded attention. 

      Edwina was a devotedly ‘glass-half-full’ sort of person, like her father.  Nathan Goodman owned a small fabric store and had never missed a day of work.  He derived satisfaction from his relationships with the regular customers, and took pleasure in catching up with all their news, year-in and year-out.  When Edwina was little he would bring home a beautiful button from time to time––one with a fake pearl, or a sparkling piece of jet––Edwina considered them as precious jewels and kept them in a prized box along with her compass.    

      Edwina’s positive outlook was as much in emulation of her father as it was in reaction to her mother, who became increasingly languid as Edwina got older.  Sarah Goodman napped a good deal during Edwina’s teenage years.  She went through the motions of being a homemaker while in a state of detachment which neither Edwina nor Nathan could interpret.  She gradually stopped sharing her thoughts and feelings, and Edwina grew tired of asking, eventually thinking of her mother as a
depressimist
, someone for whom not only had the glass of life become half-empty, it was chipped and dirty.  But true to her nature, Edwina put her focus on other things, more engaging things.

     “It took years for your mother to get pregnant,” Nathan once confided to his daughter.  “The doctor didn’t know why, or why she couldn’t get pregnant again.  Finally, when you were born, she was so happy ––we both were.  She doted on you––do you remember?  All those tea parties with your stuffed animals, and cupcakes your mother baked, and her best teapot filled with real Indian tea . . . and do you remember the campfires in the back yard on snow days home from school?  Your mother would bundle you up and make a big thermos of hot chocolate, and the two of you would go on an expedition, roasting marshmallows and building a snow fort.  Do you remember all that, Edwina?” Nathan asked. 

     “One time she sewed a little papoose out of a piece of blue dotted Swiss fabric I brought home, so you could carry your favorite stuffed animal with you––a bunny rabbit, I think it was?––you wanted to take him along when you and your mother packed picnic lunches and hiked in the woods along the creek in the summertime.”

     “Of course I remember,” Edwina replied.  “It was all great fun.”

     Nathan had a way of looking at Edwina when she knew he wasn’t really seeing her at all.  He was flipping through a photograph album in his mind’s eye.  Photos of Sarah and Edwina, when she was a little girl, when Sarah was happy.  The years filled with the pleasurable commotion of child rearing.

     “Any-hoo,” Nathan sighed, staring off into the distance.

     Crickets.

     “I suppose she just didn’t quite know what to do with herself,” he continued after a long pause, “after you grew up, and there were no more children to look after.  She so wanted more children.  I tried to get her interested in this and that––helping out at the store; charity work with some of her women friends; classes at the college––things like that, but nothing stuck,” he trailed off.

     “Well,” Edwina said, “we all had a lot of fun back then, Pops.  A lot of fun.  And maybe Mom will find something, yet.  Maybe something working with little kids?  Something to really interest her, and get her going again.  I guess it’s never too late.”

     Nathan slowly turned to look at his daughter.