Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (3 page)

Need quantum gravity to understand singularities
, I jotted down in my notebook.
To understand nothing.
It was kind of funny, I thought. You needed the theory of everything before you could have a theory of nothing.

It suddenly dawned on me that if singularities were nothing but placeholders on the map, then the big bang was nothing but a placeholder, too. It was an important theory backed by powerful evidence—but it wasn't the whole story. It couldn't be.

So we kept on reading. Eventually we stumbled on some articles by John Wheeler. I was instantly drawn to his writing—it wasn't like any physics writing I had seen. It was more like poetry: intellectually daring and provocative, full of whimsical yet powerful turns of phrase. Wheeler
emphasized that spacetime couldn't be reality's ultimate ingredient, because at its highest resolution quantum mechanics and general relativity conspire to destroy it, warping its geometry until it isn't geometry anymore. And in a bizarre twist, he suspected that it might not be possible to understand how the big bang happened—how the nothing turned into something—without considering the role of observers.
“Can one only hope some day to understand ‘genesis' via a proper appreciation of the role of the ‘observer'?” he wrote. “Is the architecture of existence such that only through ‘observership' does the universe have a way to come into being?” The idea sounded totally outlandish, but I knew that Wheeler was considered a genius, on par with some of the greatest physicists of all time. There had to be something to it. Still, we couldn't get past the most obvious question: if observers are necessary ingredients for existence, where do the observers come from? I was tempted to dismiss it as a nonstarter, but the idea was so strange that I couldn't quite let it go.
Wheeler says observers play a role in the big bang
, I wrote in my notebook.
Find out what the hell that could possibly mean.

Eventually, going out and partying with my friends seemed less exciting than venturing through the universe with my father. On nights that I did go out, I would come home at 3:00
A.M.
to find my dad still awake, reading, and we would sit at the kitchen table, snack on cereal, and talk about physics until dawn.

I was loving every minute of it—which was weird, considering I had never had much interest in science. In fact, when I really thought about it, there were only two instances in which I had ever considered science at all. The first was when I was seven years old and someone gave me a set of children's science books. I was only interested in one of them, the volume about air. For months I carried it with me, fascinated by the idea that what looked like nothing was actually something—something intricate and vital. The second was in tenth-grade chemistry class. My teacher, Mr. McAfoos, was one of those rare high school teachers who managed to be passionate yet cool—even the most cynical of his students (namely, me) found his enthusiasm bearable. On the day he taught us about the structure of atoms he jumped
up on top of his desk and did a little dance to illustrate the dynamics of electron energy levels, a twist that got a little bit softer now as the electron sank into a lazier level. But the part of the lesson that caught my attention was when he noted that more than 99 percent of the atom is just empty space. Not empty like air, which is made of atoms, but empty like nothing at all. “This desk,” he told us, grinning and pounding his fist on the wood to emphasize its deceitful solidity, “is mostly made of
nothing.
” For weeks I couldn't get that out of my head. This time I was amazed by the thought that what looked like something was mostly nothing. That behind the world was another world—behind the barely visible, something more invisible still.

Something about nothing had captured my imagination—maybe because it was the least likely thing to catch one's imagination, in the same way that “the most ordinary thing in the world” would, by definition, be extraordinary. How strange to find out that nothing had captured my dad's imagination, too. That all those times I'd looked over to see him lost in thought, he was probably thinking deeply about nothing.

But those two episodes aside, I had never cared about science—because until my cosmic adventures with my father, I had no idea what science was. No one ever tells you. You sit down in a classroom and the teacher starts hurling facts your way and you're supposed to memorize them and regurgitate them and you have no idea why. They present the whole thing as if it was a done deal, a list of facts that together constitute a kind of instruction manual for nature. But the instruction manual hasn't been written yet. Einstein said, “This huge world stands before us like a great eternal riddle.” Why couldn't any of my teachers have told me that? “Listen,” they could have said, “no one has any idea what the hell is going on. We wake up in this world and we don't know why we're here or how anything works. I mean, look around. Look how bizarre it all is! What the hell is all this stuff? Reality is a huge mystery, and you have a choice to make. You can run from it, you can placate yourself with fairy tales, you can just pretend everything's normal,
or
you can stare that mystery in the eye and try to solve it. If you are one of the brave ones to choose the latter, welcome to science. Science is the quest to solve the eternal riddle. We haven't done it yet, but we've uncovered some pretty cool clues. The purpose of this class is for you
to learn what clues we've already got, so that you can take those and head out into the world to find more. And who knows? Maybe you'll be the one who finally solves the riddle.” If just one of my teachers had said that, I wouldn't have taken meteorology.

Luckily, my father had let me in on science's secret. So while my teachers at school made me feel like just another unremarkable kid, at night I went home to a covert world in which I had been chosen for the ultimate quest, one that required intensive training, one in which nothing less than the universe itself was at stake.

“Someday, when we find the answer to the universe, we should write our own book,” my father said one night as we were scouring stacks of newly acquired cosmology books. “We're reading all these books in search of answers, but maybe the book we're looking for hasn't been written yet. Maybe
we
need to write it.”

“A physics book?”

“You've always wanted to be a writer.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but I want to write poetry and short stories.”

“What could be more poetic than the answer to the universe?”

I couldn't help grinning at the prospect. I wasn't sure whether my father really believed we'd find the answer to the universe someday, but his optimism was contagious. Not long before, my whole world had been steeped in insignificance and apathy. Now every atom in the universe was a mystery, every word a clue. In the blink of an eye my father had turned my world into a treasure hunt, and now, as if that weren't good enough, he had revealed the twist: we'd have to draw the treasure map for ourselves.

“When we write our book, I'm going to clear out every last one of these,” he said, motioning to the hundreds of books in the room with the sweep of his arm, “and replace them with ours. We'll have a whole library just for a single book.”

The intellectual excitement I felt learning physics with my father made high school feel all the more mind-numbing by comparison. I grew so bored with the place that I racked up enough credits to graduate a year early. My big plan was to move to New York City to become a writer
while continuing to hunt reality with my father on the side. I applied to the New School, enamored with their alternative liberal arts program that didn't require students to take any math. My mother, who had adored the experience of touring sprawling green New England campuses when my brother had visited potential colleges several years before, was anxious to accompany me to New York to visit the New School. For the grand campus tour, we squeezed into a small elevator with a handful of other prospective students who sported a colorful array of dyed hair, tattoos, and piercings. The entirety of the tour consisted of four sentences flatly mumbled by our androgynous guide: “This is the first floor. This is the second floor. This is the third floor. Any questions?” My mother started to cry. I was sold.

Back at home, I didn't bother attending graduation. Finishing high school didn't strike me as enough of an achievement to warrant a polyester gown. Still, my parents threw a little party at our house to celebrate. In the midst of the festivities, my father pulled me aside and handed me a blue folder.

While everyone talked and laughed in the next room, I sat down on the stairs and opened the folder.

I grinned. He had written a kind of Beat-style poem, a nod to my literary tastes at the time, and it chronicled my childhood: the time I learned to read, the night I ran away from home, all the books and ideas that made life seem worthwhile.

A few days after my seventeenth birthday I packed up my things and moved from suburbia to New York's East Village. At the New School, students don't “declare a major,” they “choose a path.” I chose two: philosophy and creative writing. I was interested in ideas: in Plato's forms, Spinoza's God, Wittgenstein's things of which we cannot speak. I was interested in how one can take these ideas and weave them into story, how to use narrative to bring meaning to the universe.

The Gefter family circa 1998: Warren
,
Brian
,
Marlene
,
and me
Harry Bergelson

At the New School, my philosophy classes were inspiring, but my writing classes were saturated with a postmodern sociopolitical agenda that was too liberal even for me. The secular Jewish household in which I'd grown up had been ultraliberal, but we still held to some basic standards—like “facts” and “spelling.” When a professor handed one of my stories back to me with a big red circle around the word
women
and a note instructing me to spell it as
womyn
so as not to perpetuate the misogynistic patriarchy of the English language, I decided I had had enough. I transferred to the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, located just a few blocks away. When I graduated, I resigned myself to a life as a starving writer, but to keep me in snacks I took a somewhat dubious job at the little-known but fortunately named
Manhattan
magazine.

When the weekend of the Science and Ultimate Reality symposium rolled around, I took an early train from New York to Princeton. My father met me at the station. Together we drove to the conference center, gearing up to ask Wheeler our burning question.

We strolled confidently into the lobby. Having never been to a physics conference, I didn't know what to expect. Still, with the all-star lineup of speakers, I had assumed there would be some kind of audience. A crowd of ordinary, subgenius people. Throngs, perhaps, of fools gaping at the physicists milling about with their danishes and coffee. But no. There were only two.

We just stood there, two dumbfounded deer caught in Mensagrade headlights. We were clearly the only outsiders in a room full of the world's leading physicists and legit journalists qualified to cover the event.

“Journalists,”
I muttered to my father. “Remember, we're journalists.”

He nodded. He looked handsome and proper in his navy suit. Looking at him now, it occurred to me that he didn't exactly stand out in this homogeneous sea of white, middle-aged men. Surely his most incongruous feature was the jittery twenty-one-year-old girl standing next to him, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Don't we need some kind of badges?” he whispered.

“Badges! Yes. I'll get the badges. You stay here.”

I knew if questioned I could stick to my
Manhattan
magazine story at the press table, but I had no idea how I'd explain him.
This journalist? Why
,
yes
,
it is weird how he looks exactly like me. Old enough to be my father? You think?