Lost and Wanted(99)

Jack’s sullenness returned. “You did?”

“She told me.” I thought this was essentially true.

“But do you know what she uses it for?”

I was pretty sure Simmi hadn’t told Jack about our correspondence, and her behavior this morning had seemed to confirm it. Other possibilities occurred to me: shopping, pornography. There had been an incident in the third grade at Jack’s school last year.

“No, what?”

He got a little smile on his face, like when he’s going to try to sell me on something. “She doesn’t need the metamorphosis typewriter.”

“Metaphase. Why not?”

Now Jack had rolled up his sleeve, and was using the quill to scratch thin white lines on his arm.

“Careful.”

“She can talk to her mom on the phone.”

“I don’t think so, Bug.”

Jack nodded vigorously, contradicting me. “She showed me.” He was tugging on his ear.

“Maybe she was writing to someone else?”

“No,” he said, but he seemed to have gotten control of himself. It was only when someone refused to listen that he got really upset. “She wouldn’t let me see what she was writing, but she showed me the messages. It said, ‘Mom’ at the top.”

“?‘Mom’?”

“Yes.”

Something occurred to me, and my stomach curdled.

“And she showed me pictures.”

“Of her mom?”

    Jack shrugged. “Most are just her. Or her and her dad. One is even of you.” Jack looked up at me, gauging my reaction.

“Me and Simmi’s mom.”

He nodded. “Yeah. But that was a really long time ago.”





7.


Charlie died in June. Terrence and Simmi arrived in July, just before the memorial. In the middle of September, early one Monday morning, Gravitational Wave 150914 hit the machine in Livingston, Louisiana. Ten milliseconds later, it hit LIGO’s other machine, in Hanford, Washington. The wave stretched one arm of the L-shaped machine about one ten-thousandth of the width of a proton, and shrank the other arm by a corresponding amount. Its shape exactly matched the geometry for gravity that Einstein had described a century earlier, in November 1915.

Einstein showed us that space bends time, and Schwarzschild gave us the math to prove it. He wrote down the first exact solution to what we call Einstein’s field equations of general relativity in a letter to Einstein in 1915. Schwarzschild was at that time serving in the German army, and most biographies have it that he wrote the solution from a wet and frigid trench on the Russian front, and sent it to Einstein by diplomatic pouch: As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas. The letter itself was probably written from Mulhouse, in Alsace, although Schwarzschild may well have done the math on the front lines. The trenches were also where he contracted the rare skin disease pemphigus, which led to his death the following year. There is a crater named for him on the northern part of the far side of the moon.

Black holes were a consequence of Schwarzschild’s calculations, but neither he nor Einstein believed that they really existed. The wave Neel’s team recorded shows the last four rotations of two enormous black holes, just before they collided. The first was twenty-nine times the mass of our sun; the second, thirty-two. This happened more than a billion years ago, 1.4 billion light-years away, and so it’s just a coincidence that the technology Neel’s team built was ready to record it during a test run last September. The shape of the wave matches the theoreticians’ descriptions of such an event so perfectly that there is only a 1 in 3.5 million chance that they could be wrong.

    Physicists knew that gravity could stretch matter. We knew that a collision between enormously dense objects—black holes or neutron stars—was the most likely way we would be able to hear it. One scientist came up with a good Hollywood analogy—that the universe had finally “produced a talkie.” Actually, the universe has always produced talkies; it was only that we didn’t have the ears to hear them. Neel’s interferometers became the ears.

You can hear about something for a lifetime, though, even something you know is happening all around you, and still not really believe it—until it happens close enough to feel yourself.





8.


I called Addie and asked if we could have a cup of coffee. She suggested that I come over to the house the following Thursday, and I rescheduled a talk I was giving. This was early February, just after the LIGO press conferences. Neel had attended the most important of them, at the National Press Club in D.C. I had watched it in my office with Vincenzo and several of our postdocs. At one point I thought I recognized the back of Neel’s head in the audience, but I later learned that he’d been in another room, watching on a monitor with members of his team. The next day he left for India, to get married.

I turned into the Boyces’ driveway that Thursday a few minutes early. It took Addie some time to come to the door. Her face was exhausted, much more so than when I’d run into her outside the sandwich shop in September, but she was still beautifully dressed, in a dark orange cardigan, a brown wool skirt, and leather boots. The current set of terriers yapped around her feet.