Lost and Wanted(43)

    Jack and I looked at an FFG member’s website, and I showed him a sentence the metaphase typewriter had created:

WIRN OF ACERIONINE SE IND BE B WHAD ATHE OROVESSOUNDRO



He laughed, because there’s nothing so amusing to children as the failures of adults, and even a second grader could see that the “words” were nonsense.

“The machine printed a common letter when the thallium released particles at a normal rate, and an uncommon one when the rate was more unusual. It worked the way it was supposed to,” I told him. “It’s just that there aren’t any ghosts floating around out there, trying to talk to scientists.” I said this on purpose, to clear up any confusion that might have been brought on by Charlie’s death, and Jack really seemed to understand.

He nodded, and said, “Right.”



* * *



—

I talked to Andrea, and as I’d guessed the last time I’d seen her, she and Günter had no plans to leave the apartment. I was afraid Terrence would be even less inclined to seek me out once I told him, but in fact the opposite was true. He’d texted right back that it wasn’t a problem—he was looking around and would certainly find something soon. We made plans to get the kids together after school, and then we began texting about them, first in brief, and soon at greater length. He was one of those people who put each thought in a different bubble, and sometimes there were six or seven of them chiming into my phone at the same time. I always wrote back, always with the same feeling of eagerness, a feeling that I had no desire to examine, or to discuss with my sister.

    I was scrambling a little that semester, between the Relativity seminar and a Physics II survey I was teaching for undergraduates. I had my postdocs and my graduate students to advise, including two who were close to completing their theses, and I’d been invited to speak at a conference outside Vienna just after Christmas. The physics institute at P?llau wanted me to talk about my second book, Into the Singularity, which was being reissued, an invitation the German publisher encouraged me to accept. It occurred to me that going to the conference in January would preclude another big trip in February—to India, where Neel was getting married.

I told Vincenzo Goia, my colleague down the hall, that I was going to P?llau, and that I could stop in at CERN on the way home, which would be useful for our current project: a paper about exploring electroweak symmetries in the Large Hadron Collider. It shouldn’t have been an especially difficult paper to write, but Vincenzo and I often disagree about language. My colleague tends to sprinkle his written work not only with Italian, but with French and German words as well, possibly to impress the postdocs with the (admittedly impressive) number of European languages he speaks fluently. Vincenzo thinks of himself as an especially stylish writer of physics papers; if there is anything that writing the trade books has taught me, it’s that the words we choose have real consequences for the version of reality that we’re describing, and that it’s almost always best to go with the simplest possible option. According to Vincenzo, this preference is symptomatic of a certain American obstinacy on my part.

I shouldn’t have been thinking of anything but the paper and my academic responsibilities, but the reissue of Into the Singularity activated a part of my brain that had been dormant for a while. I’d made a kind of promise to myself when I had Jack that I would put aside writing for a lay audience, at least until he was in high school. I would be on sabbatical in the spring, though, and it didn’t seem worth rearranging our life in order to travel somewhere for just a couple of months. I thought I could use those months instead to start work on a new book: an astrophysical history of precious metals. I would be betting on the idea that LIGO would record not only the gravitational waves from colliding black holes, but from pairs of neutron stars, exploding in what is called a kilonova. The most massive elements in the universe are created in kilonova explosions; without them, nothing heavier than iron would exist on our planet.

    I thought I would call the book Kilonova: A Cosmic History. I hoped the subject would have an element of human interest, in the sense that the metals created in a kilonova explosion—gold, silver, platinum, and uranium—are the most precious materials on Earth. (The gold in any wedding band, for example, came from a long-ago stellar explosion, millions of light years from Earth.) The fact that their cosmic infrequency is what makes them valuable, and even beautiful, I thought added a philosophical element to the science. I thought I could point out an irony as well: that these explosions create not only human wealth, but also the most powerful weapons we use to fight for it.

This was in October, and like everyone, I’d heard the rumors about what was going on at LIGO. The first clue was in Neel’s email—I have something else to discuss with you, he had said—and when I saw the tweet from Bob Wertheim at the University of Colorado, I knew. Everyone was furious at Wertheim because the scientists on the project were taking such dramatic measures to keep the detection quiet until they could be sure. LIGO had had several false alarms in the past, but all of the information that was leaking out of the collaboration suggested that this was the real thing.

If the rumors were true, LIGO’s first detection of a gravitational wave had happened even before the billion-dollar experiment had officially started, during one of the final test runs. Ten milliseconds apart, the two interferometers had recorded a major gravitational wave signal. All the work the scientists were doing was to confirm the signal as the first record of a gravitational wave, as well as the first direct evidence that black holes actually collide in space. A confirmed signal would surpass even the Higgs discovery, and the three architects of the project would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.