Lost and Wanted(75)
It felt like the only person who wasn’t fed up with me was Neel, who’d taken to coming to my office in the afternoons and attempting to drag me to the coffee shop on the other side of campus. One change in him since we’d last spent time together was his tolerance for luxuries like Italian coffee in the middle of the afternoon.
“They don’t have coffee in Building 22?” I teased him, but I was always happy for the excuse to get out of the office, where the atmosphere that January had become less than congenial even before my trip. Most recently, Vincenzo and I had begun arguing about the temperature on our floor. I thought the office was overheated, whereas Vincenzo walked around with a martyred look, in scarves knitted for him by his most recent girlfriend. Before I went to Europe, my postdocs and graduate students had taken my side, while Vincenzo’s had allied themselves with him, but on my return I found that both Srikanth and Bence had abandoned me. I’d initially been pleased that our preferences didn’t line up with gender norms—wasn’t it women in corporate offices who were always complaining about the air-conditioning?—but the problem got so bad that the plastic toggle on the thermostat actually snapped off, due to constant and vitriolic adjustment.
One night after Jack was asleep, I was catching up on email when I got a message from a graduate student in Vincenzo’s group, a joke in the form of a graph. It was a spoof on our recent paper on luminosity correlations of gamma ray bursts: the most powerful electromagnetic explosions in the universe. The part of this “appendage” that was supposed to be especially clever was the addition of a temperature function to the graph, and the text underneath identifying it as a “Clapp correlation.” The high-energy bursts as corresponded to temperature, of course, were supposed to be coming from me.
The email had been sent to my team of three postdocs and six graduate students, as well as to all of Vincenzo’s. Of those nineteen people, three were female, including me, and the more I thought of the message’s effect on my painfully shy grad student Chendong, or Vincenzo’s outspoken (but primarily Italian-speaking) grad student Giulia, the angrier I got. I contemplated firing something back to the entire group, but resisted that very strong impulse. I waited until Vincenzo arrived in his office the next morning, his neck passive-aggressively wrapped in a multicolored balaclava.
“That was a bit disrespectful last night, no?” I tried to modulate my tone, so as not to be accused of creating “high-energy bursts.”
Vincenzo glanced at his screen, as if to remind himself, but it was clear he’d been expecting my visit. He didn’t get up. “Email,” he said mournfully. “It has totally eroded the traditional relationship between teacher and student. When I was an undergraduate, at Sapienza, even the idea that we would’ve used a professor’s Christian name—”
“But it needs to stop right now.”
“Agreed.”
“So, we leave the thermostat at sixty-eight—several degrees above what is necessary for human beings indoors. And your student comes to apologize.”
Vincenzo waved his hand. “Done. That one’s an idiot, anyway—I’m going to unload him on Nagy next year.” He smiled at me. “My girlfriend tells me I’m more sensitive to temperature fluctuations in the early universe than I am to those naturally occurring in the women around me.”
I stared at Vincenzo. Clearly I had missed the whole (not very skillfully delivered) point, which wasn’t about cosmology but about me and my age—specifically the idea that I was having hot flashes connected to menopause. Never mind that I’m five to ten years from the average age at which women experience those symptoms; the whole office was now thinking about my menstrual cycle, and if I made more of an issue of it than I already had, it would be seen as evidence of my erratic, moody, essentially female behavior.
“It’s not about the heat,” I said.
“Of course not.” Vincenzo expelled a puff of air from his mouth, and regarded me with what he must still consider his arresting black eyes. “And as for me, I’ll simply put on another layer. The last thing I want to do is upset you, Helen.”
* * *
—
It was a relief to walk to Mass Ave. for coffee with someone who wasn’t a part of our group, and I took advantage of it as much as possible. It was also exciting to have an inside track on the events at LIGO, just before their big paper about the detection would be published. Now it wasn’t only other scientists, but journalists and academics from non-science disciplines who were starting to hear about what they’d done. Neel said that a professor at Juilliard wanted to write a chamber piece for strings based on the data, and PBS was planning a documentary. All of this attention would become even more frantic when the chief scientists won the Nobel, a prize for which Neel could justifiably claim some credit. It killed me that he might think my idea for the book on kilonova was another attempt to piggyback on his success.
One afternoon in late January, because we were finishing a conversation, Neel accompanied me back from Building 22 to my office in Building 6. It had continued to rain instead of snow, and the cold was wet and biting. Neel was talking about gravity. As was typical with him, he wasn’t talking about it in the abstract, but about a specific piece of equipment: a rotor that might be set up in proximity to one of the interferometers. The point would be to measure precisely the effects of gravity at distances we’re familiar with here on Earth: what we call the meter scale. For Neel, LIGO had never been about the big news of a gravitational wave detection. The detection was nice, but his passion had always been the ways we could use—he liked to say “misuse”—these fantastic machines in the future. The rotor experiment was a perfect example. If he could get the money, he wanted to set up two of these rotors—the technical term was “dynamic field generators,” or DFGs—one on either side of the laser. These would be rotating machines of extremely dense metal, like small windmills. They would be out of phase with each other, and would accordingly cancel out each other’s influence on the laser inside the interferometers. Neel stopped, but I understood where he was going, and it was fantastically exciting. The LIGO scientists had always said that the interferometers could go beyond detecting gravitational waves, to probe our fundamental physical laws. If the rotors didn’t cancel—if there was any disruption to the laser—that would change our understanding of the way gravity operates here on Earth. It would be nothing less than a refinement of relativity itself.