Chapter 45: An Unexpected Call

The next night after dinner I was working on a paper when the phone in my dorm room rang.1 Im not sure I remember that particular phone ever ringing before. People didnt call me much. Hello, this is Henry, I answered. Hey, Henry, said Mrs. W. How are you tonight? Doing fine, Mrs. W. Is everything okay? It was rare for her to call me. Plus wed just talked the day before. Yes, thanks. Didnt mean to worry you. Have you looked at those admission forms from grad school? Yes, maam. Filled most of them out, planning to send them back in the next few days. No deadlines looming. Do they ask you to pick a concentration or anything? she asked. I could hear her taking a drag from her cigarette. Concentration? I asked. You know. Astrophysics. Quantum mechanics. Orbital mechanics. No. I dont seem to have to pick courses until Fall. Did you request a faculty advisor? she asked. Theres a blank for that but I left it blank. I could give a sh I started. I could care less, I finished. No, no. You need to care about this, she said. Um, look. Thus far my academic advisors have been handsome well-meaning do-nothings or pains in the whatchamacallit, I said. Why should I care? Grad school is different, she said. Youre choosing teams. Kind of like choosing your religion.

It was what we now call a land line, attached to AT&Ts network of wires by a wire. In the 1970s most of us were unaware of any other kind of phone. It was manufactured by a subsidiary of AT&T called Western Electric. It was expensive, because they kept track of long distance calls and charged by the minute. But it worked well and what we now call reception was great. You heard every word of every call but you couldnt wander around.

People dont choose religion, so far as I can tell, I said. They seem to be born into one. Not true, she said. Didnt you notice all that born again, Jesus saves, second birth stuff going on around you in high school? You mean like Ed Bork? I asked. There was a pause. I could hear her take a short puff. I thought Ed was a witch, she said, contemplatively. Im sorry. Yes maam, youre right. Stoney and I ran into him a few years after I graduated and Ed said that after several years of witchcraft hed found the Lord and devoted his life to Jesus. There was a pause while she thought this through. Howd that work out for him? she asked. I guess not optimally. When I met up with him he was hitch-hiking north after leaving a Christian group that sounded kind of like a cult to me. Like a cult how? she asked. Work to exhaustion with no pay, no contact with outsiders including family, rigid adherence to dogma, distant but ever-present authoritarian leader, public shaming of nonconformists. And theyre Christian? she asked. Yes, maam. Why did he say he left? she asked. She took what sounded like the last sharp drag off her Benson & Hedges. As best I can recall he said that the Baptist minister at one of the big downtown churches seemed to understand him and be a lot more informed than anybody in his cult. Baptist, you say? Yes, maam. Was it First Baptist? she asked. Sorry, cant recall. What do you remember? she asked. Scotch last name, I said. Scots, she corrected me. I knew that. McEwen, maybe? she asked.

Yes maam. That sounds right, I said. Reverend McEwen. Thats Jack, she said. Jack McEwen. Knows his stuff. Good guy. And Ed liked Jack? I dont know, I said. I just remember that he was in a cult-like thing and he talked to this Baptist preacher after listening to a sermon and the cult wasnt happy with him for liking the Baptist. Yeah, well, if it was Jack, Im not surprised. Never anybody who wasnt charmed by Jack. Charmed? Oh, yeah. Completely charming in every way. Intellectually, personally. Brilliant. Informed. Knowledgeable. Learned. If all Baptist preachers were like Jack wed all be Baptists. Well, apparently the Vine Street Christian Community didnt approve of Rev. McEwen. Oh, Vine Street. Weird group, she said. Yes, maam. Anyway, I think our point was, there are lots of born-agains around, and I was using Ed as an example, but I interrupted you in the course of making a point about something to do with grad school, I said. Yeah, okay, she said. I heard her Zippo crank and could tell shed lit another Benson & Hedges. But lets stick with religion for just a second longer. Didnt you just say something like you thought religion was something a person picked up in childhood, as in from your parents? Yes, maam. Thats the way it appears to me. Didnt you tell me last week that someone named Beatrice was taking you to Catholic mass? she asked. Beatriz. Yes maam. Beatriz is supporting Cisco on what she refers to as a penitential journey, I said. That sounds funny, she said. Dont get it. Theres a Les Brown song called Sentimental Journey. Anyway, werent you raised Protestant? Yes, maam.

And are you liking the Catholic services? she asked. I had to think. I would have thought Id call them a nuisance. Maybe not as bad as I expected, I said. I hadnt been to a church since high school until we started this. Why not as bad? she asked. I had to think. Well. Hard too say. When they talk about the scriptures I know the Greek. The New Testament part anyway. I thought a minute more. I guess I expected it to be totally useless but it turns out to be oddly comforting. Exactly! she said. And your choice of academic advisor is going to have a big influence on whether you find grad school to be oddly comforting or totally useless. I think I need you to show your work on this one, Mrs. W. Okay. Grad school is broken up into these groups or tribes. Almost like denominations. All grad schools, or just the one Im going to? I asked. All programs in all grad schools to some extent, but none more so than Physics, and thats especially true at the good ones. Okay, I said. Where you go and how important you are is partly the result of who your mentor is. Let me call Dick Feynemann and see who you should request. Why did it get like this? I asked. Like what? she asked, taking a drag. All this tribalism, I said, All these denominations. Where I am now its clear that the math department and the physics department look down on each other. Ive picked up on the fact that even within physicists there are rival groups.2 What youre telling me seems to confirm this. Well, it wasnt like this in the beginning, she said. We used to be all in the same boat. So what happened? I asked. I could hear her take a drag from her cigarette. I guess what happened was quantum. Albert started with, I mean his earliest papers were about, what happened with atomsremember, he was the first to explain Brownian motionbut then he moved on to speed of light and gravity. Relativity was
2

Only a clueless idiot like Henry could fail to notice this right off.

groundbreaking, massive, wonderful. It explained so much about the nature of the universe. But it was complete, whole. It said what it had to say. There were no experiments to do. Nothing to confirm. There were no little nooks and crannies for grad students to explore. It was just this enormous, beautiful, elegant thing, like Newton. It explained so much. Then along came Bohr with his quantum. It didnt explain anything. It just works. And there were thousands of little unsolved problems for grad students to get busy with. It predicts with extreme accuracy whats going to happen but it doesnt even bother trying to take a stab at why. So youre saying more people go into quantum than relativity because quantum was more incomplete? I know it sounds funny put that way, but yes, she said. Both relativity and quantum are extremely useful tools for looking at the universe and figuring out what its up to. But Albert presented us relativity more or less complete, and quantum has been a messy process that will never be complete. No matter what you figure out, there will always be something else to study. Youve noticed that it doesnt pretend to describe an underlying physical reality? Sure. If you try to look for one theyll shoo you away. And what do you think about that? she asked. Yeah, that strikes me a weird, I said. I guess Im too rooted in physical reality. Thats why I got interested in all this. Despite what they say I think there must be an actual underlying physical reality, we just havent discovered it yet. I know this shows me to be a bad physics student. But I confess, and I hope you wont tell my professors, that I think that until we do, all these math puzzles that seem to describe the universe with increasing accuracy are just the best we can do. So you think theres a pattern, we just cant see it yet? she asked. Something like that. Somethings not right, and we cant seem to see it. So the science is an extension of your pool table problem? she asked. Maybe. Something doesnt add up, and the fact that the quantum guys cant look at it and tell us what it is just means that something has been missed. You know when people said that to Dr. Bohr his response was that if the equations didnt answer your questions you were asking the wrong questions. Its called physics. Thats because it has a physical reality, I said. She chuckled. Shall we lose faith in Delphis obscurities We who have heard the worlds core Discredited, and the sacred wood

Of Zeus at Elias praised no more? The deeds and strange prophesies Must make a pattern yet to be understood, she said. I didnt recognize it. Shakespeare? I asked. No, Greek. Sophocles, she answered. Oedipus Rex. Dont remember that, I said. The chorus said it. An ode. I admit I tended to skip the odes and stuff from the chorus. Read it again. Thats the best poetry. Anyway, it reminded me of you always looking for whats wrong when I read it. But were getting sidetracked. What I wanted to tell you is that I know how suspicious you are of quantum, and I understand your misgivings, but you need to go into it. It might lead you to a job as a particle experimentalist, and besides you really like puzzles. But I hate that deal about no underlying reality, I said. Very sensible of you, but you need to think about the future. I dont want to be more Bohr-like. I want to be more Einstein-like, I said. Okay, look, Henry. You like to be alone. I get it. But sometimes I think the biggest mistake of Alberts life was taking that job at Princeton, she said. Why? I asked, baffled. Princetons Institute for Advanced Studies seemed like the ideal job to me, at least for a theoretical physicist. Because he was up there by himself. He never liked having students, but when he was younger he really liked talking about things with colleagues. But he had to leave Germany because of the War and all, and he came over here, where his English skills werent so great, and he was just totally isolated. Bohr was Christian and in Denmark, so the Nazis didnt get in his way so much. Dr. Bohr didnt seem to think he had any colleagues. N o peers anyway. But he was tricky smart and really charismatic so he always had lots of smart boys around. You have a lot of students who love you, you make a big mark. Albert sat alone in Princeton for years and years and thought about that damned unified field theory. He didnt like the quantum and everybody knew it. God does not throw dice, I said. Something like that, she answered, but worse. Albert understood everything about all the quantum papers that got published. He was really good at math. But he never spoke up except to point out where it was stupid. He had missed the expansion of

the universe and it convinced him never to trust math that couldnt be deduced from observation. And that bothered them? Oh, no. They werent bothered. It just proved to them that he was an idiot, she said. What? Well, theyd all moved on. Everyone had accepted Relativity, which was Alberts big contribution, but then the science had moved on. It always does. Whenever theres a paradigm shift3, there are always some who dont buy in. They get left behind. Ernst Mach was at one point the preeminent physicist in all of Germany. But he died believing in the luminous ther. I dont even think he believed in atoms. Most of the guys of his era insisted that must be smooth, continuous. When did he die? I asked. I dont remember exactly, but it was not far one way or the other from Alberts paper on Brownian motion, she said. But he wasnt the last. Even when I was in grad school most of the professors had been taught that in college, and you could tell with some of them that they didnt really get it even as they taught it. Wow. Its not that weird, Henry. Things change quickly. Your grandmothers father probably remembered the Civil War. That would explain some things, I said. Like what? Never mind. Where were we? she asked. Einstein spent too much time by himself, I said. Yeah, well, he was too isolated, she said. If hed been part of the larger conversation he wouldnt have been so obsessed with the unified field theory. Or maybe he would have gotten more input and would have figured it out before he died. Or something. Trying to figure everything out by yourself sometimes doesnt work out so well. Thats what the bartender from the divinity school said.
3

Henry would correctly understand this as a reference to Kuhn.

What? she asked. Not important, I said. So youre going to call me in the next few days and tell me who I need to request as an academic advisor? I asked. Yep, she said, lighting a cigarette. Well, thanks, I said, thinking we were done. So youre almost done with college, she said. Yes, maam, I said. She paused and took a drag. Hows that checkerboard of yours looking? Gack, I said. I had to think. I guess worse. She waited for me to finish my answer. Its like the squares arent even solid. If you look in close theyre not even solid squares. The concept is losing its meaning. She chuckled. Have faith, Henry. College has been good for you and grad school will be good for you, too. Your checkerboard will come back. How has college been good for me? I asked. Ask me after you graduate, she said. Yes, maam. Talk to you later Henry. Good night, Mrs. W.