Down South Perspective

A note from AW: The following is a “love letter” to physicists, based on my research visit to the Stanford University Linear Accelerator (SLAC), a mammoth, wild ass device used to goose subatomic particles to near the speed of light then smash them into each other, the purpose being to duplicate conditions just after the big bang – the birth of our universe. The piece is to be published in Symmetry, a new physics magazine published out of Stanford University.

Point being: Since the piece is a love letter to physicists, to get the most out of it, best while reading that you pretend you’re a physicist. Okay? Also: It’s best if you scroll and read the footnotes as you go.

Why Physicists Are the Coolest People on the Planet*
*a dilettante’s view

by A.C. Weisbecker

The linear accelerator´s end point, where the little suckers collide and annihilate each other, reproducing conditions 14 billion years ago, at the birth of our universe. Wild stuff, no?

An odd occurrence, even by my standards. ¹

I’m touring the SLAC particle accelerator – I rated a private go round, expertly guided by two voluble, bright-to-the-point-of-luminosity, grad students, and set up by SLAC communications – and, apparently, my watch stopped. I say “apparently” (like “coincidence,” a dubious word, in my dilettante’s view² ) because I didn’t actually see the watch stop… wait… how does one “see a watch stop” under any circumstances?

You may already be getting an idea of what can happen to a dilettante as a result of hanging out with a bunch of folks whose life work involves the search for ultimate causes, i.e., What It All Means.

It can be disorienting.

But back to the matter of my watch. My accelerator tour done, I’m in my room at The Guest House and look at my watch – I have an appointment to interview theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander at 6 PM and don’t want to be late. My one-month-old Swatch reads 3:32, which I know is not correct; it’s later than that. Plus my watch’s second hand is stock-still. I look at my room’s digital by the bed. It reads 5:14 (I wrote down the times – my watch and the digital — intuiting that something odd may have happened). Working backwards in time (another disorienting concept that physicists take for granted) I calculate that my watch… malfunctioned… while I was in the bowels of the accelerator.

1. Coincidentally, this sentence is also the first sentence of the new edition of my novel, Cosmic Banditos, which, as you’ll see, plays a vital role in the chain of cause and effect leading to these words you are currently reading.

1a. On second thought, never mind “coincidentally” in the above. As a result of my visit to SLAC, I’ve become distrustful of that word. It’s become a dubious word, in my dilettante’s view. (This is a Time Travel Footnote (TTF). In other words, I wrote it in some dim future, after I realized some things, then stuck it in here. Cosmic Banditos is rife with TTFs, by the way.)

2. But not dubious enough to merit a footnote of its own.

###

Had my watch and me been exposed to some untoward subatomic debacle?

Thinking that I may have been exposed to some untoward subatomic debacle, I step to the nearest mirror to see if I’m glowing. No more than usual.

No biggie, I finally conclude. My watch happened to… malfunction… while I was in close proximity to a device meant to duplicate conditions immediately after the big bang — back before… I’m going to get in word-trouble again… before “time” had “started.” As I say, most likely a “coincidence.”³

Okay. I interview Stephon. It goes very well indeed – I can tell because as a result of speaking with him I reach a heretofore unscaled stratum of disorientation. (I’ll return to the interview in a moment.) Later, around sundown, Stephon is holding court with a group of Italian physicists at a picnic table outside the cafeteria. Stephon is insisting that we all go listen to reggae at a local club. Hesitation and excuses from the others. Stephon will not hear of it. He says in exasperation, “The problem with physicists is they don’t have enough fun!” Then he adds, “We’re here once and that’s it. Let’s make the most of it!”

It’s precisely here that I glance down at my watch to see what time it is, forgetting that it… malfunctioned. Yes, it still reads 3:32. Then I notice that the second hand is moving. So: it just now must have started up again.⁴ (As of this writing three weeks later my watch has worked flawlessly.)

3. In Cosmic Banditos I refer to the trouble we get in mixing words and physics as “The Problem of the Dangling Subatomic Participle.” Along with the aforementioned Time Travel Footnotes (TTFs), this should give you a hint about the tone of the thing.

4. If you’re skeptical that this actually happened, good for you. But: I have this stuff on tape, including my saying “Hey, my watch just started up!” immediately after Stephon saying, “We’re here once and that’s it. Let’s make the most of it!” Also: David Harris, the editor of Symmetry magazine, was there and will confirm this – I made a big deal out it. As a nonfiction writer I’ve been known to lie like a slug (all nonfiction writers do), but not this time.

###

“Coincidence” is supposed to mean a lack of cause and effect between two events. This is undoubtedly the case here. I one hundred percent know that. ⁵

I need to tell you about Stephon Alexander, why I immediately liked him. First thing, I subjected him to the warning that I’m a dilettante – my usual opening with the folks I interviewed. Before I could get another word out, Stephon stopped me. “That word,” he said. “What does it mean?”

“Dilettante?”

“Yes. What does it mean?”

I told him it means I know just enough about particle physics to make a fool of myself in talking to an actual physicist.

“How do you spell it?”

I didn’t know. (You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find the spelling for this article. I was certain the second letter was an “e” and that there were two “l”s and no double “T”s. Point being that you pretty much have to know how to spell a word to look up its spelling. This doesn’t seem right.)

But my real point is: Over a lot of life experience and a lot of interviews, I’ve found that no matter the situation, you sit down with someone, their main concern, often their only concern, is how they will be perceived. In other words, ego rules in human interaction.

Not so with this fellow. I’m supposed to be interviewing him and right out of the gate he admits ignorance of something. Stephon didn’t care about how I might perceive him. He wanted to learn something from me.

Trust me that this is no small thing.

Here’s something I learned at SLAC, although I already suspected as much: Physicists, at their best, are different. ⁶

Speaking of which, here’s another thing Stephon said. Are you ready for this? Okay. I asked him why he became a theoretical physicist.

His answer: “I was angry at God.”

5. On the other hand, look at footnote #1a again… Back? Okay. It appears we’re on the horns of a conundrum, footnote-wise, no?

6. I include myself in the vast group physicists are different from. An example: During the interviews I conducted I got a lot of exercise nodding my head as if I understood my interviewees, when in point of fact I hadn’t a clue.

###

SLAC´s accelerator tunnel is two miles long. Subatomic particles are goosed to near light speed.

Which somehow brings me to what I was doing at SLAC in the first place – it’s about time I explained this, no?

My aforementioned book, Cosmic Banditos, is being developed into a movie by the good people at New Crime Productions (in L.A.), which is the actor John Cusack’s company. John got interested in physics while filming the movie Little Man and Fat Boy, the story of the making of the atom bomb. Aside from my authorship of the book, and given my background in movie and TV writing (I was one of the first writers on the old show, “Miami Vice,” among others), I’ve been hired to write the screenplay.

See, one of the main characters in my book is a particle physicist and – this will sound familiar to you guys⁷ – with the craft of writing I’ve found that there simply is no substitute for knowing the world of your story.

So I was at SLAC interviewing physicists and also just sort of creeping around the deceptively mundane-looking grounds, essentially spying, trying to get a handle on what physicists do and what they are like as people. (Oh: And having my watch stop while I was in the bowels of the particle accelerator, then have it start up again immediately upon a physicist explaining that we’re only here once and should make the most of it.)

Know the world of your story. Perfect example: Stephon Alexander became a theoretical physicist because he was angry at God⁸.

Hearing those words put me just a little-tiny-bit-quantum-pubic-hair’s-breadth closer to knowing the world of my story.

If you’re thinking that that doesn’t make sense, since being angry at God is so… unusual… so unrepresentative of the “normal” motivation for becoming a physicist, you’re mistaken in the essential goal in writing a good story. Or for that matter, in my dilettante’s view, doing good physics. Which is this:

To avoid cliches.

7. I use the word “guys” in the colloquial, trans-gender-esque sense. There are a slew of brilliant, disorienting female physicists out there.

8. In case you’re wondering why Stephon was angry at God (and I hope you are): Stephon grew up in a poor section of the Bronx N.Y. If you’ve ever been in a poor section of the Bronx, N.Y… enough said. (By the way. I forgot to ask Stephon if he is still angry at God.)

###

Isn’t that what, say, Einstein did when he came up with relativity? He avoided the cliché known as classical physics.

What a grand storyteller he was!

So: Our jobs, yours as a physicist and mine as a storyteller, are really one and the same⁹.

Another hallmark of the physicists I met as SLAC: If I asked a question to which they didn’t know the answer – which was rare and usually based on my asking a… a dubious… question – they didn’t hem and haw; they just said, “I don’t know.” When I asked Joanne Hewitt if she thought mathematics was invented or discovered, she said, “I don’t know… let me think for a moment.” So she thought for a moment.

Joanne guardedly thought mathematics was discovered. Which was what I was hoping she’d say. Because I think mathematics is the language of God.¹⁰ It’s there, with us or without us. So it was discovered, not invented. (Perhaps “deciphered” is better still.)

More God¹¹ stuff.

I asked folks what they might learn from recreating the conditions just after the big bang – I mean really really really really just after the sucker (speaking of quantum pubic hairs). Mike Woods’s answer left me in the dust (although, of course, I nodded a lot), but I ’d caught a vibe.

“ You mean there might be a message from God in there?” I wanted to know.

This made Mike smile. Then he said, “Okay.”

I can use that, maybe, I was thinking.

The world of the story.

9. An admission: I may be saying this in order to feel a bond with you guys, like we’re involved in similar missions. Which would in turn elevate my view of myself. But more about this to come.

10. I barely got past Algebra II, by the way. (For some reason I was at the top of my class in geometry. Go figure.) Point being, I don’t speak God’s language well. I admit it.

11. When I use the word “God” I do so… loosely. I mean, I don’t use it in the Judeo-Christian sense. I mean… Let me just blurt it out: I don’t know what I mean. Okay?

###

Mike Woods and his blackboard

I loved Mike Woods’s blackboard, by the way, for the childlike (not childish) drawings mixed in with his arcane equations. Later, talking to someone who knows Mike, I mentioned the childlike drawings. “That’s just the way he thinks about physics,” was the explanation.

I’m in awe of this sort of thing.

An operational example of my awe occurred while I was on the Stanford campus after my first interview with a physicist. Due to the disorientation factor, I got lost.

“ I’m lost,” I said to a student, a female. (Not wanting to frighten her, I didn’t bring up my disorientation.)

“ Where do you want to go?” the student asked.

“ I’m over at SLAC,” I said, and tapped my little security badge. Listen: I made this declaration as if I were claiming to be “with the band” at a Rolling Stones concert. (The security badge was my back stage pass — this notwithstanding that in large letters on the badge were the deflating words “Escort Required.”)

A related matter is the SLAC security gate. Generally I don’t like this sort of thing and, theoretically, I should have liked it even less here, given that SLAC is a pure research facility – no secret weapons or technology are being developed (not counting one of you guys accidentally coming up with an antimatter cannon or stumbling upon a wormhole portal to a bizarre branch of reality where George W. Bush can correctly pronounce “nuclear,” or the like). But I didn’t mind here. Maybe because the security guy would wave me right on through – I was, after all, with the band.

But what is the reason for the security gate and the passes (and subjecting me to the humiliation of the Escort Required caveat)? Why should anyone worry about the happy-go-lucky SLAC crew and their search for ultimate causes, their quest for…

Okay… I think I have it.

Picture this:

Washington, D.C. A secret underground bunker. The red phone rings.

###

“They’ve come up with The Meaning Of It All at SLAC!”

General panic in the secret underground bunker.

“ Call the security gate! Tell them to seal the place up!”

“ Find out who’s behind this!”

“ I bet it’s that guy who’s angry at God!”

“ The Meaning Of It All!”

“ We can’t let that get out!”

And so forth.

Another anecdote, although I’m not sure it’s relevant. We’ll see how it develops.

My first day at SLAC, just arrived, my first ride on the Stanford shuttle bus, on Marguerite (what a great name for a bus!), sweet Marguerite — I need to go find a phone card to call home at the end of the road at the bottom of Central America. There’s one other passenger, a studious-looking fellow with a briefcase. Being a nosy sort, I strike up a conversation, get right to the point, ask what he’s doing at Stanford. Maybe he’s a physicist. Hey: Maybe I can get disoriented while at the same time scoring a phone card. Kill two birds, etc.

The guy says he’s developing a computer program combining the classics of literature with some other stuff in order to solve the major problems of modern man: economic, environmental and social ills.

I dunno, I’m thinking, let me think about that.

I mean how would that work?

I tell the fellow that if there’s one thread that runs through classical literature, it’s that human beings are incapable of solving problems. In fact, if you read the classics, from Homer through Shakespeare right on up to Weisbecker, you’ll find that as soon as human beings try to solve a problem, they invariably make it exponentially worse. Hence the carnage, the suffering, the tragedy with which classical literature is rife. The incapacity for problem solving might even be the best definition of what a human being is. In other words: An organism that is a complete and utter screw up. If one meant to sum up the legacy of classical literature, some version of this thought would work pretty well, I opine to my sweet-Marguerite-fellow-passenger.

###

The fellow nods uncertainly; he doesn’t say anything. (If a light bulb went off over his head, it was a dim and depressed one.)

So – I’m on a real roll now – plugging classical literature into a program meant to solve the major problems of modern man might in fact be the cause of the final apocalypse.

Okay, I didn’t say the last bit about the fellow’s life’s work causing the final apocalypse – he seemed a nice enough fellow. I’m just thinking of this now. And getting cranky. The final apocalypse could very well affect me personally.
Believe it or not, I don’t think I’ve wandered off-subject with this anecdote. The related point, the connection (or maybe it’s more like an entanglement) is this: You guys, as physicists, are the exception to my human-beings-being-complete-screw-ups assertion.

I emphasize as physicists above because I suspect that when you’re not doing physics you manage to screw up as catastrophically as the rest of us. But let’s not dwell on a depressing subject. Let’s look at what you do in your work, from my dilettante’s view.

Try it this way: What do you think about my sweet-Marguerite-fellow-passenger’s theory of using the classics of literature to somehow solve the major problems of modern man? Think it has merit?

The correct answer (in my dilettante’s view) is this: Probably not.

I emphasize probably because as physicists (scientists) you would hold off final judgment until you know more – my description of the fellow’s work was meager at best, and was, of course, second hand. You’d want the fellow to produce evidence that his program, his theory, works. And the evidence would have to be just so: it would have to be provided via the experimental method. Okay. You guys, being physicists, are way ahead of me here – no need to explain to you what the experimental method is, or that the fellow’s theory might not even be testable with it. (Which ipso facto makes it a non-useful theory, if not outright hokum.)

###

Thing is, what I’m so briefly alluding to here – also known as the scientific method — is not just a way of doing your jobs as physicists. It’s a whole way of seeing (in the broadest sense). And what that whole way of seeing does is solve problems. It is, in short, a way for human beings to quit screwing up. Look: Even when you physicists screw up, i.e., come up with a non-useful theory, you don’t really screw up – you learn something; sometimes, based on your screw up, you intuit a path to not screwing up. Plus, some great scientific advances have been made as a result of you screwing up.¹²

As I’ve more or less said, but bears repeating: The problem is that the scientific method is tough to transfer to everyday life – or to solving the major problems of modern man, for that matter. Hence my observation that you guys, in your everyday lives, can screw up just like the rest of us — I bet that there are a few physicists out there (but not too many) who believe there might be something to astrology, or that the reason the United States invaded Iraq has anything to do with freeing the Iraqi people.

But, again, let’s not dwell on a depressing subject.

This problem of transferring how you do physics to everyday life — it seems to this dilettante – is in defining the problem to be solved, the question to be answered. Mathematics – the language of both physics and God – provides real answers, but more importantly, real questions as well.

In talking to one of you guys, and in bringing up the question of What It All Means (via the search for ultimate causes), I got this answer: 42, i.e., What It All Means is the number 42. This is an old physics joke, I suspect – but what makes the joke significant is the subtext of it. Which, I think, is this: Whatever you find after the good old Higg’s particle… or if that’s not the last little bugger, after whatever does come last, if it’s mathematical, it won’t be meaningful (at least to us humans) in terms of ultimate causes.

Going out on a dilettante’s limb: You’ll never really find that ultimate cause because that cause won’t, can’t, be mathematical. Which in turn means that in your life’s work, in the end you’ll pretty much… screw up.¹³ And I think you damn well know it.

But you’re giving it a shot anyway. ¹⁴

I love that about you.

Physicists are the coolest people on the planet.

12. In a sense, Newton screwed up about gravity (general relativity corrected him), but look at all that was accomplished via his equations. (Even if quantum physics proves to be a screw up, it has nevertheless led directly to technological breakthroughs that have changed our lives, from ultra-high speed micro-computers to some revolutionary new heat-seeking, cordless sexual aides.)

13. Do me a favor. If I’m wrong and you guys don’t screw up — if you find a message from God somewhere, and if it’s that little email smile, keep it to yourselves. I don’t wanna know.

14. A TTF. Having thought I’d finished this article, I slept on it. I awakened with a (dilettante’s) epiphany: Perhaps The Meaning Of It All is some version of the above sentence — “But you’re giving it a shot anyway.” In other words, maybe God just wants to keep us busy and out of trouble. (Especially you physicist guys.) Like giving a problem child an advanced (and maybe slightly defective) jigsaw puzzle then leaving the room. That kind-of-a-thing.

[ E N D ]