Lost and Wanted(5)
When Charlie died, LIGO’s massive gravitational wave detectors were about to make their first science runs. LIGO isn’t an observatory in the traditional sense, but rather a pair of L-shaped interferometers—detectors with concrete arms two miles long, down which beams of light bounce between the most high-tech mirrors in the world. The fifty-year-old project had been one of the most technically difficult in science; now that the machines were finally operational, no one knew how long it would take to detect a gravitational wave, but Neel believed it was only a matter of months. The interferometers were located in remote parts of Louisiana and Washington State (there was also one in Italy), and there were teams of LIGO scientists at universities all over the world: in the U.S., Caltech, Columbia, and MIT were the most significant. As LIGO got closer to a detection—which everyone predicted would earn them a Nobel—I was glad Neel wasn’t on the East Coast but three thousand miles away at Caltech. We’d been competitive from the moment we met each other, as college freshmen, and now that we weren’t working together anymore, I found that rivalry more distracting than inspiring.
In our discipline, we’re taught to think about time with a flexibility that transcends the ordinary experience of it. The conventional wisdom was once that this kind of abstract thinking came more naturally to a twenty-year-old than to a forty-year-old. Einstein thought that a scientist who hadn’t achieved a breakthrough by age thirty never would, and that was basically true before 1905. But in the last century, the age that great scientists do their best work has steadily increased, so that the average Nobel Prize–winning physicist is now forty-eight. People give various reasons for this—students earn their doctorates later, rarely before twenty-five; there’s more to learn before you can do original work. I have sometimes wondered whether our more advanced age influences the science that is being done today—whether our conclusions, especially with regard to cosmological time, are different because we are older.
* * *
—
I met Charlie on the first day of freshman orientation in 1989, when our proctor organized a game of “Two Truths and a Lie” for the students on our floor. The point was to get acquainted by offering three pieces of information about yourself, among which a falsehood wouldn’t be immediately obvious. We sat in the common room of a suite whose inhabitants had already decorated it with a rubber Bart Simpson, a lava lamp, and a velvet Elvis.
I hadn’t visited Harvard before I arrived there from California. I’d seen plenty of pictures, but in my head the august professors I had read about were lecturing in front of green chalkboards in the hot, run-down classrooms of my public high school in Pasadena. I, a Harvard student, was still sitting at an undersized desk pushed together with others to accommodate as many students as possible, struggling to ignore the muffled shriek of Def Leppard or Poison from someone’s concealed headphones, the drone of a decrepit and ineffectual air conditioner. I knew Harvard was going to be different, but until I walked into the Italianate brick-and-sandstone freshman dormitory for the first time, right in the middle of Harvard Yard, it had seemed impossible that it would really look as perfect as it did.
Our Freshman Proctor was an energetic grad student in biology named Lynn who had sought me out the moment I arrived, and kindly invited me to the first meeting of a group she was starting: Women in Science at Harvard (WISH, naturally). I knew better than to join a group like that (at the time I couldn’t even see the need for it) or evince any enthusiasm for her game. As it happened, though, Lynn called on me first, and so I didn’t have much time to think. I pretended a sort of world-weary patience, and began:
“I like the Pixies.” (This was true, although I liked several less respectable bands more.) “I’m from California. And…I’m a witch.” I thought this was clever, since it revealed nothing important, and made it clear that I wasn’t even trying to play the game, telegraphing my disdain for the kind of enforced socialization that I thought I’d left behind in high school. Harvard wasn’t any more inclined toward this type of activity than most of its students, and after a week of word games, trust falls, and ice-cream socials, we were left to fend for ourselves.
A skinny white kid in a dog collar and Doc Martens gave me a knowing look. “You’re not really from California,” he guessed. “Otherwise you would’ve said where.”
Charlie went next. She said that she had lived for a year in Paris, that her mother had been a model, and that she didn’t like to lie. Her tone was calm and self-possessed, not bragging but simply stating a series of facts.
Lynn the proctor contributed something to the effect that honesty was a wonderful quality, but that for the purposes of the game, Charlie needed to give one false statement.
“I did,” Charlie said.
The proctor was confused, and so Charlie looked around the room.
“Are you people going to guess?”
“You didn’t really live in Paris?”
Looking at Charlie, it was hard to believe someone in her family wasn’t a model. She was nearly six feet tall, with skin the color of— Charlie once pointed out the way brown skin is described almost exclusively in relation to food or spices, things you can eat, and so I won’t use that type of analogy. She was a medium-skinned black woman, thin, and at that age, gangly. Her eyes were large and far apart, and her mouth was perfect, as if she’d drawn around it with pencil, even on the rare occasions when she hadn’t. On that warm September day, she was wearing flared white jeans and a sleeveless top, of a sort of lime-green brocade, with leather, cork-bottomed sandals. Her hair was pulled back into a smooth chignon, and her ears were decorated with square diamond studs.