Charmed Particles (14 page)

As she cleaned, she was surprised and a little sad to realize that his absence that week had hardly registered for her, nor, it seemed, for Meena. It was as though they had both come to think of Abhijat as a person who existed only in the mind rather than in their shared physical space.

Even the things he studied weren't really present in the physical sense, she thought. Their very existence was hypothetical. He and the other theorists were predicting that these tiny parts of the world existed. But ultimately, who knew?

Sarala had begun to think that, in this sense, Abhijat's work was not so very unlike that of the fortune tellers she had seen on the streets of Bombay, who might take your hand and, tracing the lines of your palm, hypothesize a future for you.

She had seen images of the paths created by the collisions of particles, paths which, by their arcing and turning, would tell the story of what they were. Muons, neutrinos, hadrons, gluons. It wasn't unlike magic, she thought, remembering something she'd heard one of the other physicists' wives saying a few months earlier at the Lab's Christmas party: “Well, you know what I always say when people ask what a theorist does. I tell them it's a kind of transubstantiation—they turn coffee into papers.”

When he returned home from the conference, Abhijat found himself distracted by the idle physics-world gossip that suggested there might be plans in the works for an even larger particle accelerator—one that would render the Lab's current accelerator as antiquated and obsolete as the Lab's old rusting and abandoned fixed-target accelerator.

Though he had never before taken much interest in the details of the accelerators, Abhijat had begun, lately, to think about this a great deal. The work he'd been doing had been well received, but if he were to make the kind of lasting legacy in the physics world he'd always expected to, then the theories he'd been working on would need to be confirmed by the experimenters. And the area of his work was fast outpacing the capabilities of the Lab's current accelerator.

Preoccupied, Abhijat found himself standing at his office window, looking out along the old fixed-target beam line, wondering what might be in store for the Lab in the future. He thought of the buildings of the old accelerator, now empty in disuse, which ran along the beam line out toward the boundary of the Lab's campus and the beginning of the town. He rested his head against the window, feeling the cool pane of glass against his skin.

Even if these rumors were not true, Abhijat realized, there would surely come a time when the Lab's technological capabilities were surpassed by those of another facility. And then what?

He returned to his seat at his desk, fingers drumming nervously against the desktop as he willed his eyes and attention back to the work at hand.

Near the back of the Lab's seminar room, Abhijat took a seat next to Dr. Cardiff, his colleague and contemporary, in one of the room's creaking orange chairs, which broadcast one's every stretch and repositioning. It was easy to identify the young man who would be the afternoon's presenter. He sat at the front of the room, beside one of Abhijat's colleagues in the first row, one leg crossed over another, foot bouncing up and down nervously, eyes on the door, watching to see who arrived to hear his talk.

Abhijat and Dr. Cardiff both made note of this, exchanging a smile. Abhijat could still remember being that young a man—junior scientist eager to share his work. He remembered how nervous he, too, had been.

But now, he had reached what could reasonably, statistically, be predicted as the midpoint of his life. Here he sat, with the job he had always dreamed of, at the world's premier research facility. And yet, much as he had wanted it; much as he had expected it; much as he had studied, read, and prepared for it; he had come to a point where he had begun to fear he might never be a great physicist.

He had always dreamed of one day ranking among his idols—Pauli, Dirac, Gell-Mann. Certainly he was a good physicist—strong international reputation, well respected at the Lab and throughout his field, impressive publications. But his work, while good—solidly and consistently good—had not been transformative. His theories had floated out into the world in the form of articles and papers he delivered at conferences. There were junior scientists who cited his work, colleagues who admired him, academics who taught his theories. But he had come to fear that, in the grand scheme of history, his would not be a name that was remembered. Since he'd begun his studies, his career, his greatest fear had been that he would be a failure. A B+ physicist.

The young speaker was introduced by Abhijat's colleague. A promising young man, Abhijat thought, listening—strong undergraduate pedigree, excellent Ph.D. program, already a number of well-regarded publications.

The young physicist moved across the half-circle stage as he spoke, framed by the floor-to-ceiling chalkboards. (Abhijat had yet to witness a speaker kneeling on the floor to utilize the bottom third of the available chalkboard space, but he felt sure that someday he would, that space becoming valuable real estate as the rest of the wall filled with equations.) As the young physicist became more and more nervous, his voice reached higher and higher into his register and began, here and there, to crack, betraying his youth, his sense of awe, of panicked reverence at addressing this group of scientists assembled before him.

“Afterward, there is of course propagation in a background,” the physicist said, looking out into the crowd as though to test his own certainty on the matter. “And now this complicated equation that we will forget about,” he said, smiling, trying his hand at a bit of levity. He had pulled down the screen that hung in front of the chalkboard and was now making notes on an overhead projector, his equation magnified on the screen behind him.

Abhijat began, without realizing it, to shake his head almost imperceptibly. To think that this young scientist was nervous partly because of him, because of the room full of scientists just like him.

“This shows great promise,” the speaker continued, animated. “They are highly desirable and very strange,” the young physicist said, smiling again, the overhead projecting onto his face as he moved in front of the screen.

What warmed Abhijat's heart was the way this young scientist seemed to harbor such enthusiasm, bordering on genuine affection, for the particles, for the equations that predicted their existence.

“Oh, and this is my favorite one,” the young physicist said, his face lighting up.

Abhijat could remember being possessed by that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of energy, but it occurred to him that it had been quite a long time since he had felt it.

Since he had arrived at the Lab, the theoretical particle physics community had begun moving into an area of such high energy that the Lab's current accelerator was unable to verify or disprove many of the most cutting-edge theories. And so, Abhijat, like many of his colleagues, found themselves stuck in the frustrating position of waiting for a machine of high enough energy to confirm these theories so that they might know whether they were on the right track or not.

What was at stake: the great prizes, the ones that ensured a place in the history of physics. For a theory that wasn't proven by the experimental physicists was nothing more than an interesting idea.

Abhijat thought again of the rumor of the larger, faster accelerator. It could mean confirmation, validation of his work. Until then, almost all of the important physics prizes, eligibility for which required that the theory be confirmed by experiments as well as by standing the test of time, were out of reach for Abhijat and many of his colleagues.

He knew that some of his older colleagues had begun to wonder if they would live long enough to see their theories confirmed and their work recognized. And that many—including, Abhijat suspected, his friend and colleague Dr. Cardiff—had long ago let go of their hopes of this sort of recognition, of a Nobel or a Wolf. Abhijat, however, had not.

Dr. Cardiff seemed to Abhijat to be at peace with this. For Dr. Cardiff, it was the work, not the recognition, that seemed to bring him happiness, and at times, Abhijat found himself envious of such peace, though equally confused about how one might so easily set down the burden of one's ambitions.

In this, Dr. Cardiff sometimes reminded Abhijat of his mother, who had always insisted that one could best find success by first finding peace and contentment.

At the conclusion of his presentation, the young speaker, as expected, took questions from the audience. They came rapid-fire. Some, Abhijat could tell right away, were attempts to trip up the young physicist. These were usually delivered by the speaker's peers, who might use the opportunity to try to impress one of their senior colleagues. (Dr. Cardiff liked to joke that one could always spot such questions, for they inevitably began: “Let me preface my question by saying…”) Others were less a question and more a demonstration of the questioner's familiarity with the work he referenced. When a good question came his way (these usually came from the older scientists, now eager to encourage their young colleagues), a smile floated across the face of the young scientist, and Abhijat watched how he paused in answering, as though trying to rein in a racing mind.

Days at home in the empty house, Sarala had begun practicing a flat, Midwestern accent, having studied her neighbors' smooth
Is
, hard
Ds
, and clipped
Ts
. She watched herself in the mirror as she spoke, willing her mouth around the round, nasal As: Chic-ah-go.

Since her arrival in the country, Sarala had replaced her wardrobe of saris with jogging suits and seasonal and holiday-themed sweaters she ordered from QVC.

The wooden box of her mother's recipes had been pushed farther and farther back into the cupboard, behind her collection of Tupperware, and had been replaced with new cookbooks recommended by Carol and the neighbor ladies Sarala now power-walked with each morning, doing laps around the mall before the stores opened—
Betty Crocker, the Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook, Microwave Cooking Made Easy
.