The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(26)
Philip smiled, marveling at her certainty. “If you don’t look at subatomic particles and see at least some magic—at least a sense of wonder—then what are you doing here?”
“Magic? Next, you’ll be using the term God particle. How many years have passed now with no real results? Just a bunch of nerds going on about elegance? If string theorists continue to fail at producing experimentally measurable results, while at the same time discouraging rival theories, they’ll soon be unworthy of the name scientist.”
Philip had heard all this before, of course. He didn’t tell her that he’d been following an online forum devoted to discussion of her phony paper. “Where are your predictions? Where are your verifiable results?” she had asked in one of the forum’s threads. The replies were sneering:
“For a start, Ms. Durov, string theorists have already predicted something called gravity. So, um, there you go.”
To which she responded: “Oh, really, and what are you going to predict next? Heliocentrism? That the sun will rise at dawn? Next time, you might try predicting something we haven’t all agreed upon in advance.”
By his second martini, Anitka was still ranting. “Sometimes I think high-energy physics exists only to provide artists with existential metaphors, as if we’re all here just to make a few shitty playwrights feel smart.”
Philip wondered if she really was as reactionary and unromantic as she wanted everyone to believe. “You know what your thing is, Anitka?”
She was leaning forward in such a way that told him they were both well on their way to getting drunk.
“You lack the imagination for this stuff.”
“Oh, is that what I’m lacking?”
“Okay, so your snow job with that journal showed a hell of a lot of imagination, but the hours you put into that silly paper could have been channeled into real mathematics.”
Her face seemed to be getting closer by the minute.
He looked down at his near-empty glass and signaled the bartender for another. “I’ll say one last thing. You could be a great scientist if you would stop throwing rotten fruit at the rest of us and take an honest look at your own work.”
His third martini appeared, and after a couple of swallows, something very strange happened, something he instantly wished hadn’t: Anitka blossomed right in front of him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her beauty before—Anitka’s good looks were not purely a result of gin and vermouth—it was just that he had never bothered to look at her long enough to take her in. She’s a departmental irritant, remember? A pest! She also tended to downplay her appearance by dressing in accordance with the sartorial rule of academia: the more subjective the discipline, the better the fashion sense; or to put it another way, the more poorly one dressed, the closer one was to the Mathematics Department.
But tonight, with the peach sweater against her skin and her hair pulled from her face, she was indisputably radiant. Those smooth Slavic cheeks and large, languid eyes—and that Russian accent. A flower in the Siberian tundra. Seriously, Philip, what is wrong with you?
As he strived to keep his eyes from straying below her neck, he had a sudden insane thought, one that hadn’t crossed his mind in thirty years of marriage: I could start a love affair right here and now. I could reignite my passion for life and beauty and science. And why not? Because something has to change. Something has to restart this broken-down machine.
He longed to ask her, “How does someone so beautiful get into theoretical physics?” But Philip wasn’t impaired enough to start asking such clumsy questions, and besides, he could guess the answer. Anitka had grown up in the Ukrainian countryside, where beautiful girls were everywhere, six-foot goddesses hatching out of the ground like white turnips. And they weren’t suffocated with praise as they are in the States; they weren’t told from the age of five how lovely they were, because beauty had little value in a country where one was just trying to survive to the next week.
“Isn’t your wife expecting you for dinner?”
He cleared his throat. “She doesn’t really wait anymore.” He didn’t mean for it to sound so pathetic.
“I would wait.”
Philip responded by folding a napkin into increasingly small triangles. Anitka alleviated the silence by opening the cocktail menu. “I want my next drink to be exotic. Should I get a Heisenberg Highball?”
“Hmm. Uncertain.”
She hid her smile in the menu. “That is terrible. How about an Oppenheimer’s Manhattan?”
“I’ve had that one. It’s quite good.”
“No way! They make an Einstein on the Beach!”
As she rattled off a few more punny cocktails, Philip started to build a case in his mind for infidelity. There was, after all, a long history of scientific breakthroughs fueled by the intense combustion of this or that love affair. There was Robert Oppenheimer stealing away to see his lover Jean Tatlock one last time before leaving with his family for New Mexico to begin work on the atomic bomb, and Soviet physicist Lev Landau’s steady extramarital activity as he labored on his theory of quantum liquids. Einstein’s infidelities, of course, were lifelong and thoroughly documented, boring even in their transparency.
Perhaps most spectacularly, there was Erwin Schr?dinger, who, while married to his wife, Annemarie, had one affair after another, each romantic intrigue corresponding to a vigorous period of output and discovery. Schr?dinger had done his best work on his quantum wave equation in December 1925 during an extended stay in an Alpine cabin with one mistress whose identity still remains a mystery. The equation he had produced so feverishly between their lovemaking sessions would later win him the Nobel in physics. Schr?dinger’s good friend the mathematician Hermann Weyl—who, incidentally, was back home fucking Schr?dinger’s wife during said stay in the mountain cabin—said of Schr?dinger, “He did his great work during a late erotic outburst in his life.”