Lost and Wanted(34)

I had thought that I would call Terrence right away, to tell him about the message. By the time I got home, though, I’d changed my mind. If it was shocking for me to receive these things digitally, how much more disturbing would it be for him? Simmi had suggested to her father that she wanted to see Jack again, and I hoped that the next time we got together, I could bring it up in a natural way. I took screenshots of the two messages and emailed them to myself. Then I went back to work. My responsibilities that day were mostly bureaucratic—having to do with the resumption of classes—and I completed them with only half my attention.

    I didn’t answer the text about the end of the universe, but I did think about it. Having a child Jack’s age challenges me to put what I do into the most basic terms, something I always tell my students is a valuable exercise. As far as universe formation goes, I am partial to Andrei Linde’s “balloons producing balloons producing balloons” model: the idea that there are many universes pressing up against each other, each having expanded from a tiny region of space. There is also Paul Steinhardt’s Cyclic Universe: growing, collapsing in on itself, and being born again as a new entity. Neither of these were ideas I could explain in a text message, however.

What I used to say—that we don’t know for sure where the universe ends, because none of us was around to see its beginnings—is not exactly true anymore. Ever since the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe’s data was published, in 2012, we have actually been able to see a real picture of the oldest light in the universe. This brightly colored pattern—the googly-eyed version of which usually rests against Jack’s pillow alongside a hypoallergenic polar bear named Bruce—is like any temperature map. The fact that there are an equal number of hot and cold spots confirms the simplest and most beautiful version of inflation. We now know that our universe is almost certainly 13.77 billion years old, and that it expanded more than a trillion trillion times in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its life. The tiny variations created during that wild beginning are the seeds of the galaxies we see today.

That’s what I would have told Charlie about the universe’s origins, if it had really been Charlie asking. She had a way of nodding when I talked about physics, in college or even after we lived on separate coasts. Her eyes would get just slightly wider than usual, and she would do a convincing impression of someone who was really paying attention. Once we were at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston seeing Alfred Stieglitz photographs with her mother—this might have been in our sophomore or junior year—and Adelaide had given us a little lecture about Stieglitz’s landscapes (which I’m ashamed to say I later reproduced, almost word for word, on the exam for the class I took to fulfill my Literature and Arts B requirement). Charlie listened to her mother in the same way she listened to me talk about neutrino mass parameters, and then joked with me later that she found Stieglitz’s bare tree branches as boring as O’Keefe’s flowers.

    “I can’t really get interested unless there are people in it,” she said.





18.


N: Arty told me your news (both parts). And then Mark over at LIGO basically confirmed (the move, not the wedding…I’m going to take that on faith). Belated congratulations, although I have to admit I’m surprised. If I were accepting a job at Caltech, for example, I’m pretty sure you’d be among the first to know. I can promise I’ll be more forgiving about your other big announcement, especially if you give me some details. And I promise not to spread them around among your new colleagues. I’d advise against making a confidant of Arty in the future—he’s utterly reliable in every department except secrecy. Actually I think that’s part of his fundamental decency…it probably never occurs to him why anyone would want to keep something a secret.

What’s going on in L.A.? Is everyone going to drink each other under the table at that hole on Figueroa in honor of your departure? Or do you not get a going-away party when you’re moving within the cabal? I’m busy here with the electroweak paper I mentioned (my postdocs are the best I’ve ever had) and with Jack. He’s still obsessed with Legos, and now that he’s outgrown his asthma, he’s getting pretty good at penalty kicks, too. They say he needs to volunteer more in class discussions, but I tend to be more and more on his side. Talk is cheap, which I guess is something you realized a long time ago.

Cheers, H



I wrote that on the evening of the day I met with Arty, but it was more than two weeks before I received a response. At the time I didn’t know what was going on at LIGO; even Arty didn’t know, until a physicist at the University of Colorado started speculatively tweeting about it. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the LIGO scientists might detect a powerful gravitational wave even before the machines were officially taking data, during one of the final test runs—but that is exactly what happened. As it turned out, Neel got my email just a few days before LIGO detected its first gravitational wave. The scientists were thrown into a frenzy of activity, confirming and reconfirming the data, and for months afterward—until they published their historic paper the following February—all of those in the collaboration must have put off answering a lot of email. Because I couldn’t have known about the detection, I simply assumed that Neel was silent because he was afraid his more personal news had hurt my feelings. That made me furious—or maybe what made me furious was the fact that I couldn’t disabuse him of that idea until he deigned to write me back.