Properties of Light, page 1
Properties of Light
A Novel
Rebecca Goldstein
* * *
A MARINER BOOK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK
* * *
FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Rebecca Goldstein
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections
from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin
Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York,
New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldstein, Rebecca, date.
Properties of light: a novel of love, betrayal and
quantum physics / Rebecca Goldstein, date.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-98659-1
ISBN 0-618-15459-0 (PBK)
1 Quantum theory—Fiction.
2. Physicists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.0398 P76 2000
813'.54—dc21 99-049994
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
* * *
In memory of my beloved, golden sister
MYNDA,
for as far back as I can remember
my source of light.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the Bogliasco Foundation, which allows artists and scholars of various disciplines to tarry a brief while on the Italian Gulfo di Paradiso, where much of this novel was conceived.
I am also extremely grateful to the MacArthur Foundation. It was only that shockingly unexpected phone call that made it possible for me to write again. Like so many others, I am deeply indebted to Joel Lebowitz.
I have recently become blessed with an agent, Tina Bennett, of uncommon multiple talents, and with Elaine Pfefferblit, who has been all that one could desire in an editor.
Once again, thanks must go to my daughters, Yael and Danielle, always my first, and kindest, readers. This novel grew out of a bedtime story I told Danielle one night some years ago.
My deepest gratitude is reserved for Sheldon Goldstein, whose passion for science and truth has always taught me much, and inspired me still more.
* * *
Then tell me, what is the material world,
and is it dead?
—WILLIAM BLAKE
I
The essential fact is that I hate her.
My hatred is my cause: material, formal, final. It makes my world for me. I have largely forgotten the feel of things unimplicated in its being. For them, I retain only the words, as empty as plundered graves. The diminishment bothers me less than I would have imagined, there remaining still so much to me, to the substance of my thoughts, the implications of my hatred being many.
Such hatred as mine might be described as obsessive, although the description would be false. Would an obsessive even pose the possibility of his own delusion? The stance of objectivity required in order to ask of oneself whether one is obsessing is unassumable for those who, in fact, are.
This is my first argument.
Does it lead to a more general result, namely that the answer to the question Am I obsessing! must be a logically certified no?
As a matter of fact it does. This is interesting, though not very. I have not produced, by any stretch, a result remotely on the scale of the sublime Descartes's analogously conclusive remarks concerning the question Am I existing! Formally, my argument and his share this feature: the very conditions that must hold in order for the question to be put at all determine its answer. In the case of the Cartesian question, the answer is affirmative, and metaphysics has produced, in the four hundred years since, nothing much better than this. It is not only interesting but supremely practical. What could be more useful than having the means of convincing oneself that one exists whenever the question should arise? Without it, I might degenerate into a very dubious modality of mind. I might go mad.
Here is my second argument, and it, too, is faintly redolent of the subtle rationalist. There is an affinity almost natural between the Cartesian condition and me. My second argument: Obsession connotes excess, and excess, in turn, un-necessity. If my hatred is obsessive, then it must be possible for me to exist, at least in principle, without it. And yet of all I once thought true of me, it is my hatred alone that cannot be separated from me. Of all else I know I can be deprived and still continue to be, since of all else I have in fact been deprived. But of my hatred? It might possibly be the case that if I ceased entirely to hate that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.
I am a real thing and really exist, but what thing? I have answered: a thing that hates.
My indifference to the world at large is absolute. Outside of my hatred, I care not what exists, nor how, nor why. Properties of matter and energy, of space and time? Less real to me now than the unseen object is said to be to the newborn tabula rasa. No pull left in these subjects to keep me put, I glide off.
I glide away.
My almost universal indifference is all the more remarkable considering that I am, by training, a physicist, once said by some (most certainly by me) to have inhabited a singularity of promise. I might have been expected to preserve some lingering interest in the ultimate constituents of existence. I have none. Were an angel of God to offer me the definitive description of the properties of light (for it was on them and their paradoxical duality, both wave- and particlelike, that my singularity of promise had once largely been focused) I doubt I'd even hear the cherub out. I can attend to nothing but the essential fact, its decoherent history, configurations traced impermanently among ill-defined confusions. One might have thought that I'd know more, one might have thought.
It is a warm night and windless. The air hangs still and heavy. One feels that one might float on it, as on a waveless sea. Above, the moon is hanging low, like a puckered-up bulge of a belly.
That was a repulsive simile.
I once thought that darkness was as real as light, was even more real. I figured darkness to be not the absence of light, but rather light the absence of darkness.
I was an inveterate and inventive theorizer as a child. Instinctively, I read the observable world as a system of coded signs. My theory of darkness was one of my earliest juvenilia, dating from a time while I still lived in the haze of unbroken-in consciousness. I had (still young) to discard it, however, for as a theory it had a flaw: it was untrue. Light is the something, and darkness its privation. I can no longer remember the precise reasoning that led to my rejecting the primacy of the dark. The distinction between truth and falsity has always mattered much to me.
A warm night and windless. Summer nights have qualities hospitable to habitations, by old memories and the like, all manner of insinuations carried weightless in thin air. A quiet night steeped deep in summer, yielding itself to all manner of insubstantialities, desires perfectly preserved in the bitterness of mind.
There are others I could hate as well, with all my soul, as I hate her, and yet I don't. My hatred, though essential, is essentially of her, and, in that sense, external. I was not a hating child. Hatred requires an attention that it was not yet in me to squander on people. I had other things to think about. So far as people were concerned, I was largely not concerned, with the sole exception of Jake Childs, who was my father, and Cynthia Childs, née Rosenthal, who was my mother. The world for me was fixed around them, and there was nothing in it for me to hate.
My parents and I were, from as far back as I remember, the best of chums, composing a perfect Platonic solid, so that the running commentary of my contemporaries—nerd! geek!— sounded faintly, like some far-off phantom choir. I suppose I was a nerd and geek, too nerdy and geeky to care. I think the words hardly signified at all. We were what we were, we three, with neatly overlapping interests: my father and I in abstract argument; my mother and I in beauty; my father and mother in me. We all understood one another with a perfect accord, which would have been as gratifying for a well-disposed outsider to observe as would his observance be disruptive of the very state to be observed.
This is a nuisance very central to modern physics.
It was a touchingly typical boyhood, mutatis mutandis, of course, for it is true that at an age when my contemporaries were having their this-little-piggy-wiggies wiggled, I was solemnly reciting the law of the excluded middle—every statement is either true or false, and no statement is both!— and constructing truth tables for propositions of first-order logic. And nights, it is true, would never find the three Childses—Papa Childs, Mama Childs and Baby Childs—huddled around the softly glowing television sets whose jumpy phantasmata were thrown off flickering from the windows of our neighbors. We owned no television but sought what spectacles we craved from the nighttime skies. It was our habit to arrange ourselves on our backs in our modest and mythical backyard, studiously murmuring, even in the chilly seasons lying on the unmade lawn and staring up at softly glowing galaxies, inhabiting a space measured out in units of time, delivered by the speed of light. My mother, her daytime diffidence shed beneath the stars, fingered constellations and supplied the ancient myths to go with them.
And yet, as these things go (they go, they go), we were not, after all, so very different from the huddling masses. Papa Childs, Mama Childs, Baby Childs: we were quite as safe as truth by convention could make us.
I have always lived in academic towns. My childhood home, white on the bottom, with green bumpy shingles on the top, was located in an academic town. It was called Olympia, so that we were, one and all, Olympians.
This is also an academic town, very famous, perversely high-toned. It is where she lives, the reason that, expressly unbidden, I have nevertheless come. Just for the moment I have forgotten its name, the emptied sound has slipped my mind. The stars are threshed, and the meanings are threshed from their husks. It will return to me shortly, the name of this place.
It is far quieter here in the summer than in the other seasons. Unburdened of its students, the university assumes its ideal form. In the silence before dawn, I have the campus to myself, no fear that I will suddenly be confronted by glassy-eyed youths, stinking from the quantities of drink and animal spirits in them. I am exquisitely sensitive to smells. The earth is a swarming confusion of scents, and quite a few of them are noisome.
The asphalt paths that crisscross the grassy lawns have gone a mercurial gray and slick with moon. I wander them to all my favorite haunts. It is said to be a beautiful campus, and even I now find it so. It is very beautiful to me.
When I first came here I had no eye for it, for beauty of its kind, gloomy and Gothic and grand. The massive stone and vaulting towers. They diminished me to near extinction. I hate it, quite generally, when matter presumes.
Now, though, I am very changed, and wind my way with something like love past the castellated undergraduate dorms, whose shady courtyards are special favorites of mine. A pool of water catches a fleeting glimpse of moon and me and ripples softly, water against stone.
There is a wooden swing that hangs from a long and yellow braided rope, like Rapunzel's plaited hair, an enchanted ladder a prince might scramble up to find his pleasure.
So let me find my pleasure.
The swing moves slightly as I pass, its slow creak trailing after me as I cross the street that once formed the natural boundary of the university, which has now been pushed outward by the vigors of the natural sciences and the other well-endowed departments.
The physics complex, its utilitarian thrust a contrast to the flushed romanticism of the older campus, is being added onto once again, bricks and mortar waiting on the shrinking polygon of lawn, for the funds keep pouring in, converging here like moths to light. It is a celebrated faculty, more so now than ever, three Nobel immortals and seven MacArthur geniuses, this grand university's most grand and favored spot. I can rarely return, but I must stop and stare awhile at the austere structure wherein the labyrinthian physics of the day is made.
I once was a physicist. I had my place here in this world. I was given an office up on the seventh floor, the starry seventh, where the brightest stars are constellated.
It would not surprise me in the least if there were souls within as sleepless as I, even now, at this unpeopled hour, pacing the hallways in feverish cerebration, launching tenuous calculations into the well-kept mysteries of matter's true nature. Some graduate student, perhaps, or very junior faculty member, too alone to have any idea of how lonely he is, as I, too, used to work my way straight through to the first light, astonished to look up and discover that it was dawn.
It's best like this, with the dormitories emptied, the rowdy routed, the vacuous evacuated. (I have become a phrasemaker. I have the time.) Those who remain can hear themselves think, as I hear myself think, as I am thinking even now, if you can call this thinking, if you can call this now.
The passage of time is nothing real. It is a chimera spun out of gauzy consciousness, and nothing more, a frightful apparition tossed up by our mixed-up minds. We know this from Einstein's physics, which shows us a time as stilled as spread space. Time is static, the flow unreal: it is Einstein's truth, and it is the truth, falling straight away from the conditions of perfect symmetry imposed on the geometry. The ebb, which seems so terrible and real, which seems to carry off one's every treasure, leaving one like a chest spilled open on the waves: unreal, unreal.
On Saturdays in winter, which in upstate New York are long and hard and character-enhancing, my father and I would take from their peg on the wall in the "mudroom" (for so we called it) the antique wooden skis that he and his older brother, Freddy (killed in a world war I can now no longer name—the first, the second, the third), had used as boys, and head for the gentle hills of Olympia's country club.
The change of season enmagicked the golf links, expunging all traces of the pampered scampering after the battered balls of summer. (I have the time.) The transformation rendered these our very own Elysian Fields, recast in winter light, the smell of snow on sugar pines, and my father and I, otherwise ill at ease in our long and graceless bodies, were here become as gliding gods.
Within a copse of sheltering pines, we unpacked the ambrosial bologna and mustard sandwiches, slightly crunchy with crystals of ice. The sweetness of hot cocoa that poured out of the red-and-green plaid-patterned thermos into the red plastic cup that cunningly unscrewed from its top derived some portion of its sublimity from the touch of its heat on frozen lips and cold-parched gullet. These were sensations of the body I can recall with perfect clarity and calm. Exquisite pleasures, yet with no a posteriori retchings of the soul. While we ate, we put aside our shared passion for abstraction and produced only such utterances as applied to the progress of our pleasures. "Another sandwich, son?" "Cocoa's gone."
And so, sustained on ecstasy, my father and I would return to the white music of our glissandos, until the early-falling dusk turned the silvery landscape into lead and revealed the cruel edge in the cold.
With something of the godlike still clinging to our forms, we would tramp through the doorway of our little boxy house, my boyish cheeks a burnished tingle, the strange buoyancy associated with the earlier phases of exhaustion floating my arms and my legs.
There would be my mother, her heavy black-framed glasses steamed to white opacity above the trapezoid inscribed between her nose and lips, her two nonslender hands reaching out to me the cup of perfect cocoa, mounded with the sheen of the glarey ethereality known as Marshmallow Fluff. We were very fond in my family of Marshmallow Fluff, a versatile foodstuff that could even serve, when combined with peanut butter between slices of bread, as a main course. The recipe came helpfully printed on the label, on which it was dubbed a pfeffernuss. This was, I believe, my first foreign word, spoken before the age of two. How exquisitely incongruous it must have sounded trickling off my infant tongue, and how my parents must have gloated in the love of precocious me, they did, they did. It is an item in my master list of facts.
Winter has always seemed to me to be the time of our greater undiscontent. Our desires contract with the mercury. Even rapists are appeased. Summer is the ravishing season, releasing the unstaunchable longings. Desire rises up like lubricious water, up, up, and over your head. Learn to breathe it or you drown, alone, alone, your scream unheard.
It is summer now.
It was a blessedly uncomplicated boyhood, as dull as doughnuts. I possessed precisely the blunted consciousness that a child ought to have. Subtlety did not come naturally to me. It is suffering that has tenderized me, pounded me like a piece of choiceless meat. The world, to the child that I was, seemed as straightforwardly self-evident as my meticulously constructed truth tables; no counterfactuals to wreak upon us of regret and longing. There are no Proustisms hulking here on my memory's floor, embedded like an anchor, to be yanked up by a taste. Marshmallow Fluff plumbs no sunken depths.
I come to know of Proust by way of my mother. Each year she reread the entire seven volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. It was a habit that made my father and me intensely proud. Who do you think her favorite writer is! he would ask people who had only just met her.
Little boys are said to think their mothers beautiful, but I could never bring myself to discern the traces of a beauty that was not there, the difference between truth and falsity having always mattered much to me. Mixed in among the sheet music, from which she and my father played their duets for euphoniums, were a few pictures of her as a girl, looking earnest, fat and sad.
