About a month ago, I read two articles by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times that kind of blew my mind. I keep thinking about them. And now Dennis Overbye’s on my list of must-read columnists/reporters.
The thing is, science is fascinating. (Hence, my love for RadioLab on WYNC.) Physics is especially fascinating, because it’s also a little crazy. I never got to take a physics class in high school or college, though I would’ve liked to, but what very, very, very basic knowledge of it I have seems to say that it’s largely based on the question “What if?” Which is the question that leads to the most interesting answers, and stories.
One article, “Setting Sail into Space, Propelled by Sunshine,” is about an organization that’s planning to launch satellites that will sail on sunlight once it is in orbit. Like boats sail with wind. Because “light carries not just energy but also momentum–a story told by every comet tail, which consists of dust blown by sunlight from a comet’s core.” Tell me that is not super cool.
The other is an essay about the Large Hadron Collider, “The Collider, the Particle and a Theory about Fate.” This is the one that I kind of can’t get over. It talks about how the hadron collider–an experiment in Switzerland that is trying to cause protons to crash and show how the Big Bang may have occurred–is basically sabotaging itself. Through time travel. Which is a legitimate vein of research. For reals. There are scientists who say that these particles colliding “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” So because what results from the particles colliding might be so bad, that result is somehow traveling through time to stop itself.
I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, and yet I also can’t get it out of my mind–and so I guess it makes sense that A Wrinkle in Time and The Time Traveler’s Wife have had the same effect.
In school science classes, the general take on science always seemed to be that it’s the opposite of magic. It’s orderly. It’s explainable, and classifiable, and cut and dry. But I never really bought that. Sure, we can go smaller and smaller from organism to cell to parts of a cell to atoms to protons and neutrons and electrons. We can give everything a name. But does that really explain anything? We can ask “Where did the protons come from?” And maybe we’ll even have an answer to that eventually, if the hadron collider stops sabotaging itself. Still…will we ever truly know why one thing happens instead of another? Why one molecule forms instead of another? It’s all still magic, even if we put a name on it.
Even time is fluid. That article quotes Einstein: “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”
I think maybe I like physics because there’s a sense of wonder, and a sense that a crazy theory just might be the right one. It reminds me of a quote by Roald Dahl that I’ve always liked:
Above all, watch with glittering eyes the great world around you, because dreams are always hidden in the most unlikely of places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
