Lost and Wanted(119)
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Good.” Neel smiled at Jack. “And I hope these guys got something out of it. I know I’m definitely not going to forget this visit.”
Jack touched Neel’s sleeve familiarly. “Tell her about the log.”
I looked at Neel.
“Oh,” Neel said. “Right—the data log. We’ll have to ask Simmi if she made an entry.”
I didn’t follow. “Simmi made an entry in your data log?”
“I had the log open on this machine,” Neel explained. He indicated the computer next to the one he and Jack had been using.
“It couldn’t have been Simmi,” Jack said. “I was here with her.”
“But maybe when you came back into the lab to get us, when you were worried about her?” Neel suggested.
Jack shook his head, and I had to agree with him. “I doubt Simmi would touch any of the other computers,” I told Neel. “Especially after what happened in the lab.”
“It’s no problem,” Neel said. “I just didn’t get why our data log was suddenly in Latin.”
“Latin?”
“More likely it was just random letters—someone must’ve leaned on the keyboard.”
“Random letters.” Jack was looking at me steadily. “Like the metaphase typewriter.”
“What nonsense are you feeding him?” Neel asked mildly.
“Which letters?” I asked.
“E-X-” But Jack couldn’t remember any more of it. “Maybe it’s a code word.”
“Can I see?”
Neel indulged me, scrolling up the log and pointing at the screen.
“E-X-E-U-N-T,” Jack read, leaning over his shoulder. Then he turned back to me.
“What does that mean?”
17.
The three chief scientists on the LIGO collaboration won the Nobel Prize in October 2017. Two weeks later, they announced the first detection of a neutron star collision. It was what I’d been hoping would happen, but I didn’t end up writing a book about kilonova after all. When I sat down to try, I found that what I started writing had moved further and further away from my original idea about the cosmic origins of precious metals, into what is for me entirely new territory.
I have been thinking, in particular, of Neel’s and my old argument about the mind and the brain. I still refuse to accept that there’s some ineffable essence hovering between our brains and the outside world—at least not something we’ll ever be able to study with scientific tools. We can know what’s possible only in the universe we’ve observed. But if LIGO has done anything, it has reminded us how little of what’s out there we’ve actually seen. To understand more of our cosmology, we’re going to have to admit that there may be laws so different from the ones we know, so seemingly counterintuitive, that it will take all our imagination to uncover them.
In 1979, in honor of the centennial of Einstein’s birth, John Wheeler delivered his famous lecture “Beyond the Black Hole” for an elite audience of scientists at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study. He began with an analogy about the “Iron Duke” Arthur Wellesley, who, among his many other military victories, was famous for defeating Napoleon at Waterloo. When he grew old, the duke liked to go for drives with a friend in his carriage, especially when they could visit countryside that wasn’t familiar to either of them. He would propose a game in which he and his companion each had to guess what kind of landscape lay over the next hill; not surprisingly, the duke nearly always won the game. He claimed that his strategy was to identify “strangenesses” in the terrain, surprising features; it was whatever was unfamiliar or irregular in the scenery that allowed him to predict what was coming next. Einstein, Wheeler proposed, used scientific strangenesses the same way. By studying paradoxes in our knowledge of the physical world, he was able to intuit startling new truths about the nature of light and gravity. Wheeler believed that it was the job of each generation of physicists to use the paradoxes in the physics they inherited to take the work even further.
Sometimes I have a feeling that Neel and I are getting close to a breakthrough with the rotor project. But it isn’t the same as it was when we first worked together. This work is harder than the modeling we did early in our careers, and it’s messier, too; it requires more guesswork, and more faith. Charlie was skeptical by nature, but I think she would have agreed with what her brother said at the memorial: that loss is different for each of us. A person dies, and a whole crowd goes out—not exit, but exeunt. And, if that is the case, then it must be possible for those essences (ideas, let’s call them) to return. To circle back around like Neel’s and my rotor: a pair of heavy things at a fixed distance, turning and turning forever.
This isn’t just analogy. Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It’s almost nothing—I can’t feel it—but it’s the same force that binds our planet to our star. That’s the very simple, very elegant purpose of the rotor: to hold a pair of tiny stars. Each time one of them swings toward the laser, spacetime bends just slightly; the laser must travel a slightly longer path to reach the mirror; a line spikes on one of LIGO’s screens. Even that silent signal could be enough to let us reimagine gravity, and the way it moves us on the human scale.