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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I started writing this book, science felt more foreign to me than any country I’d ever visited. I’m deeply grateful to the patient guides I met there, including the authors of the following wonderful books: The Universe, edited by John Brockman; Harry Collins’s Gravity’s Kiss; Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe; David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics; Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues; Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Higgs Discovery, and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs; Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps; Steven Weinberg’s To Explain the World. It’s great that curious outsiders can read the important physics being published today on the e-print archive (arXiv.org), without even registering a password.
No book can really give you the texture of what it’s like to work in a particular field of study, and so I’m especially grateful to the physicists who talked to me during this process. LIGO physicist Imre Bartos sat with me for hours in his office, and once walked through Riverside Park with a voice recorder in his pocket, trying to explain gravitational wave science to a former English major. Lisa Barsotti took me on a tour of the Green Lab at MIT, one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been. On a conference call from the LIGO detector in Livingston, Louisiana, she and Matthew Evans solved a plot problem for me off the top of their heads (in spite of what the narrator of this book might claim, physicists are actually smarter than other people). Which brings me to David Kaiser, an extremely busy person who gave me more of his time than I had any right to expect, patiently answering my questions about quantum entanglement, the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and life in a university physics department. I’m especially grateful to him for his early scientific read of this book; any mistakes are my own.
Outside of the physical sciences, I relied on Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger for its brilliant argument about the Enlightenment in Europe and its political repercussions today. I’m indebted to Paul Beatty, Brit Bennett, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Margo Jefferson, Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, and Colson Whitehead for work that helped me think about what race means and doesn’t mean to the characters I was trying to create.
Emma Freudenberger, Amy Waldman, Cathy Park Hong, Jasanna Britton, Alison Markovitz, and Vanessa Reisen read early drafts of this book quickly and critically when I most needed help—thank you so much. I’m very grateful for my generous and talented community of local writers: Kiran Desai, Monica Ferrell, Eliza Griswold, Katie Kitamura, Idra Novey, Meghan O’Rourke, Julie Orringer, Amanda Stern, Jen Vanderbes, and Monica Youn. I owe more thanks than I can express to Allyson Hobbs, for her comments and gentle criticism, for our ongoing discussions, and for being awake and on her phone when no one else is.
I’ve said it before, but Binky Urban is the best agent a writer could have: responsive, direct, and thorough. At Knopf, I’m grateful to Erinn Hartman, Julianne Clancy, and Rachel Fershleiser for all of their help and faith in this book, and to Susan VanOmmeren for an especially meticulous proofread. Annie Bishai went far beyond assistant editing, offering rigorous insight on subjects as varied as contemporary race and gender, iPhone technology, and the proper way to graph temperature. My most significant thank-you is to Robin Desser, for her tough editorial love. I am overwhelmingly thankful for the talent and wisdom she gave to this book.
Thank you to my dad, Daniel Freudenberger, for a helpful final read, and to him and his wife, Ruth Bloch, for Thursday afternoons at my desk. Thanks to my mom, Carol Hofmann, for all the other time, and for once even staying over during a snowstorm so that I could meet a deadline. Thank you to my children for the sign they posted outside my office door, telling themselves to go away, and for the Post-it on my computer encouraging me to persevere. Thank you to my husband, Paul, for being so loving and supportive, always, and for encouraging me to try something new this time.