Properties of Light - Softcover

Goldstein, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618154590 ISBN 13: 9780618154593

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2001

Synopsis

With Properties of Light, the award-winning author of The Mind-Body Problem gives us “one of the magnificent performances in contemporary fiction, a fusion of the imagination and intellect . . . achingly beautiful, moving, and intriguing on every page” (Charles Johnson). This mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion, three physicists grapple with mysteries of science as well as mysteries of the heart with consequences not even their finely honed intellects can predict. “Luminous, incendiary . . . Properties of Light is a novel of cool grace and dark lyricism, lit by the imaginative fire of physics and its improbable cosmologies” (New York Times Book Review).

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of four novels, including THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM, and a collection of short stories, STRANGE ATTRACTORS. Her work has won numerous prizes, including two Whiting Awards. In 1996, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, where her work was concentrated in the philosophy of science and was supported by a National Science Foundation fellowship. She resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Properties of Light

By Rebecca Goldstein

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2001 Rebecca Goldstein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618154590

Excerpt

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, unnecessity. 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.



Continues...

Excerpted from Properties of Lightby Rebecca Goldstein Copyright © 2001 by Rebecca Goldstein. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618154590
• ISBN 13: 9780618154593
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256