Quantum Physics and a Ham Sandwich

Oops

I come to you this afternoon limping. Now that people seem to be reading this newsletter, I’ve encumbered myself with “standards” and become all bumbly-footed about production. But rather than getting stirred up with this bout of writer’s block, we’re going to glide on through. Forgive me for missing sections—this week is all about moving fast & loose. (Like that cheeky ampersand.)

Here’s something I wrote last week:

These past two weeks have been a burst of East of Eden, and it was only moments ago that I found the last words (that word!), closed the back cover, and settled into a soft and dusty quiet. From now, each character who was to live has lived on forever, and each character who died must be mourned.

I spat at fiction last week, and then there was this. Has anyone read this book recently? Won’t you send me a note and meet me for ginger beer in some bar? I want to talk about all of it. My whole body itches in an itching out from an inside where so much has been laid still yet to be tilled and cultivated.

I feel, at one time, sad and hopeful. Perhaps mostly because in this book there were such believable glimpses of goodness and such believable pictures of badness. And neither wins, but instead creates some other. Yes. This seems to be the case: that in combining these opposite forces, neither remains. Instead, they explode. For Steinbeck, this explosion is freedom. As for me, I have some more thinking to do.

Lessons From Papa Frank

I was nine years old when my grandfather first taught me how to make a hydrogen bomb. We were in my grandparents’ Florida house, where white sofas looked out to screened-in pools and lush, harsh grasses. As he spoke professorially of atoms and reactors, his pad of paper covered with circles and arrows in the facile manner that only an expert could execute. I listened obediently with the promise that this would make me a Smart Kid.

Papa Frank was a physicist who worked on the H-bomb—an MIT graduate who, when he heard I was accepted to Harvard, simply noted that “Maybe now they’ll take you at MIT.” His stories were mysterious and metallic, sparkling with futuristic pictures of ultra-strong magnets, nuclear submarines, and believable solutions to global water, energy, and transportation crises. Despite some conclusions that were very wrong, his correct conclusions were very correct: in the early 2000s, we used to humor Papa Frank when he insisted upon the advent of a new form of transportation, thinking it extraneous and silly. The vehicle? Electric bikes.

Someday, I’ll write more about Papa Frank, but for now, here’s what I know about hydrogen bombs:

The hydrogen bomb is unique because it relies on nuclear fusion—the process of merging two hydrogen isotopes into one larger atom (helium) while expelling neutrons and a ton of energy. The new atom has slightly less mass than the initial ingredients; the lost mass does that classic E=mc² thing of changing from mass into energy and is released as a huge and devastating explosion (or starlight). I also know that this merge is initiated by a process of nuclear fission (splitting) that one would see in your classic nuke (uranium splits, things explode). There’s also other stuff that happens in terms of chambers and heat that I would be able to explain if I had kept my notes from Papa Frank.

Nuclear fusion is like this: say you want to merge two friend groups. Both friend groups are stable and happy, but you’re bored, so you cook up a very hot and exciting dinner party and you invite everybody. The result is chaos. In one corner of the room, a smattering of the two groups has hit it off. But a few individuals certainly Have Not. They hate this new dynamic, and can’t find their place in it. Where there before was very little emotion, there is now a boiling-over of resentment. Some neutrons wander off in dull isolation, but the damage has been done—these newfound emotions have burst out from the apartment in a rage and seeped into the street. Suddenly, silently, the entire city of New York is shaking with the social insecurity of shifted alliances. This is a hydrogen bomb.

In a world where atoms are in constant rearrangement (grouping and ungrouping to make all sorts of fun combinations like water or carbon dioxide or everything else ever), nuclear fusion is comparatively rare: atomic nuclei (those dense bundles of protons and neutrons that serve as the core around which electrons zip) only combine in extreme circumstances—when humans create nuclear reactions or when stars do star things. This feels beautiful. It also feels beautiful that fusion releases more energy than fission.

Obviously, this all comes back to poetry. Good poetry is nuclear fusion—something that places disparate elements under so much heat and pressure that they combine forever into something new. I suppose I don’t even mean poems themselves. I mean moments of poetry—experiences that press so deeply into us that we are inextricably changed; our soul is a new element; we shift our spot on the Periodic Table. And poems exist to account for those poetic moments. This is where the universe is rearranged. This is where mass becomes energy. This is why we like stars.

This

Thoughts

The atomic equation of a hydrogen bomb is as follows, where “D” and “T” are hydrogen isotopes, “He” is helium, and “n” is neutron.

2D + 3T → 4He + n + energy

The atomic equation of this poem is as follows:

Thought of sister + idea of brother → Sister (heavier, changed) + grief

or

folded sheets + rinsed glasses → banal routine + personhood

or

“This is what you’ve been waiting for” + “cheese and mustard sandwich” → “sort of looking around” + energy

or

cheese + mustard → sandwich*

*This one is just a stable compound. Basic chemistry, people.

What I mean is that the power of this poem is in the energy it releases. It mimics the “I have wasted my life” of James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” It is the case of fusion that does not result in more mass, but less. Clarity, if anything, has been destroyed. But in the place of clarity, a release of expansive, unlabelable force.

It feels important to me that we remember this: That mass can be converted to energy. That there is substance in something that doesn’t land in answers, but in movement.

Read this poem again. Try to be okay with the fact that it doesn’t land in sense, but in the “sort of looking around” of this.

Easter Morning

Something important to me is this poem. I heard it first in a class recited by a friend on the Monday after an Easter. On that Easter, our family’s colt had died and been buried beneath three trees. This poem touched that grief and transformed it, and I was the hawk that circled, then continued on.

I’d like to write more about it at some point, but today, I’d just like to share it with you.

Easter Morning, A.R. Ammons 

Links to Things

• From Diane Seuss: “The present tense: to take a loveless path is to court / a purple-blue emptiness, like a disco or a grotto.”

• I’m pretty sure the Central Park Zoo owl is just Rainer Maria Rilke.

• Thank you to the ten people who forwarded me this mouth-watering article about croissants. Most importantly… there’s a Pastry World Cup???

• A completely fascinating On Being episode about AI and nature with James Bridle. “…maybe that’s what AI and network theory actually are. They’re just new stories about the world that make that kind of world accessible to us properly again.”

• AI can’t generate hands: “It’s a classic exercise in high-school art class: a student sits at her desk, charcoal pencil held in one hand, poised over a sheet of paper, while the other hand lies outstretched in front of her, palm up, fingers relaxed so that they curve inward. Then she uses one hand to draw the other.” Is this what is uniquely human? The ability to use one hand to draw the other, while AI does not have the outstretched, relaxed, ‘other’ to observe? That it can’t both recline and produce?

I’ll be back soon and more frequently I hope. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’re reading, thinking about, or avoiding.

This is what you’ve been waiting for…

Robiny

Also, Papa Frank on an electric bike: