Charmed Particles (11 page)

For Meena, it was—as this moment is for nearly all children who find themselves seeing a parent through the eyes of another—startling. Watching her father grow spirited and enthusiastic as he talked about his work, she felt as though she, too, had met someone new that night.

“And your father?” Sarala asked, turning the conversation to Lily. “What does he do, if I may ask?”

“Of course,” Lily nodded. “He's an explorer.”

Sarala looked at her for a moment, and decided there must be some meaning lost in the translation. She resolved to look it up in the
Webster's Unabridged
in Abhijat's study after dinner.

C
ODES AND
C
IPHERS

Although Lily's status in the social hierarchy of elementary school suffered for her awkwardness (which Meena often tried to mitigate with her more nuanced grasp of elementary-age social cues), her impatience with the intellects of her classmates (which Meena privately shared but was savvy enough not to display), and her often eccentric taste in personal attire (showing up, for example, one morning, in a kitenge topped with a Hello Kitty T-shirt her mother had insisted on adding to the ensemble for reasons of both warmth—for it was winter in Illinois—and modesty), when it came to show and tell, even the students who thought Lily was a weirdo had to admit that she aced it.

“My dad brought me this teddy bear back from a business trip. I forget where,” Abby Johnson mumbled, holding the stuffed animal aloft listlessly by the ear and sounding bored, even by herself. “He got my mom one, too.”

Lily, however, had requested that Mrs. Hamilton make available to her a slide projector and had informed her teacher that she expected to require thirty minutes for her presentation, not including Q&A. Had Mrs. Hamilton not been so exhausted at this point in the school year, having had her fill of wiping noses and breaking up scuffles on the playground, and having been kept up the night before by her husband's snoring, she might not have allowed it, but as it was, she chose to see it as a blessing, as thirty minutes of class time she did not have to fill.

Lily shared with them slides of her father's most recent expeditions. From New Guinea he had brought Lily a ceremonial drum made with lizard skin and human blood, which she had passed around the room and which the children held in their hands reverentially, equally horrified and curious, just as she'd known they would be.

A
NIMALS OF THE
G
RASSLANDS

It was field trip season—spring—by which it was understood that the teachers were exhausted and the children were restless, and thus any excuse to get everyone out of the classroom was leapt upon. Mrs. Hamilton, upon learning that Meena's father worked at the Lab, asked him to give the class a personal tour of the facility, and Abhijat had been more than pleased to oblige, consulting in advance with Meena and Lily about what their classmates would find most intriguing.

On the appointed day, the children, jostling and chattering, spilled in an unruly crowd from the bright yellow school bus, which idled noisily in front of the Lab's education center, a low building surrounded by prairie grasses and a reproduction Conestoga wagon. Here they were met by Abhijat and a docent, who had been dispatched by the education center to translate theoretical physicist to layperson, as needed.

The docent introduced Abhijat to Mrs. Hamilton. “Dr. Mital.” Mrs. Hamilton took his hand in hers to shake it, beckoning the children who had begun to stray back to the fold. “We are so grateful to you for taking time out of your busy schedule to show us around the Lab.”

“Not at all,” Abhijat said. “It is my great pleasure to have you all here as our distinguished guests.”

“Perhaps you know our chaperone, Mrs. Winchester? Lily's mother.”

Abhijat took Rose's hand in his. “Very honored to meet you, Madame Alderperson.”

“Please. Rose,” she corrected. During all of her interactions with the Mitals, dropping off and picking up Lily and Meena from their many activities together, Rose had only ever met Sarala. She'd been curious about Meena's father.

“I understand our daughters have taken quite a liking to each other,” Abhijat said.

“Yes, I've been so pleased to see that.” Rose smiled.

Together they looked at the girls, who stood a bit away from the rest of the children, notebooks and pencils already in their eager hands.

“Children, may I have your attention, please?” Mrs. Hamilton's voice rang out over the chatter, her hand held up in the air as she spoke. “I'd like to introduce Meena's father, Dr. Mital. Dr. Mital will be our expert guide today and will tell us all about his work here at the Lab.”

The children gathered in a squirmy half circle around Abhijat. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you all,” Abhijat began, nodding at the children. He was astonished by the way Mrs. Hamilton had so quickly brought order and quiet to the crowd of children, who now looked up at him in anticipation. “To begin, I wonder how many of you are familiar with what it is we do here at the Lab?”

Lily's hand shot up into the air.

“Yes, Miss Winchester, but perhaps one of your other colleagues?”

Abhijat waited for a long moment, but no other hands rose.

“Well, then, Miss Winchester, perhaps you will provide an explanation?”

“At the Lab,” Lily began, “you're studying elementary particles that are the building blocks of the universe,” sounding as though she were reading from a textbook, “as well as the forces that hold those particles together or push them apart. The particle accelerator and its detectors are like a giant microscope that helps you see these particles. Well, not really see them—they're much too small to be seen,” she corrected herself, already beginning, Abhijat saw, to grasp the difficulty of explaining this work simply.

“Thank you, Miss Winchester. Very informative,” Abhijat said, a smile lingering on his face, proud of how carefully she must have listened to his own description of his work. “Now, will you all please come this way?”

He led them in a long, wriggling line toward the Research Tower, the noise of the children, who had again resumed their chattering, rivaling that of the geese that eyed them suspiciously as they made their way past the reflecting pond, up the stairs, and into the atrium.

Rose looked up toward the ceiling of the atrium, its interior walls lined with glass, reaching up to the heavens. While on the surface the building couldn't have been more different, it reminded her, somehow, of the great cathedrals of France.

“The accelerator,” Abhijat continued, turning to speak to the children as they paused in the atrium, “of which I will give you an aerial view in just a moment, is, some believe, the most important instrument for physics that exists in the world today.
Why?
, you may be wondering. Because of speed. Because in order to answer today's most pressing, most exciting questions in physics, one must have the fastest accelerator operating at the highest energy level. And here, at the Lab, we are fortunate to have just such an instrument.”

The elevators carried them to the top of the Research Tower. On the highest floor, large plate-glass windows looked out over the prairie; from here, visitors could observe the surrounding land as it had been before the beginning of its transformation into farmland, into suburbia. The children lined up before the windows, noses pressed against the glass. Rose looked out over the great expanse of the Lab's campus, thinking of how she had never before seen Nicolet from this height, so much of it visible all at once, arranged just beyond the borders of the Lab's grounds.

“There, in the shape of a ring,” Abhijat said, “you will see the outline of the accelerator, which exists many feet below ground, four miles in circumference.” He traced the shape of the circle on the glass with his finger. “Looking out even farther, you will see how vast the campus of the Lab is. We are nearly seven thousand acres.”

Rose looked out over the land she remembered as neighboring farms, prairie grasses now reclaiming the soil. The Nicolet Lily would grow up thinking of as home was so different from the Nicolet Rose had known—so different, she thought, as to be almost unrecognizable.

“And now, may I please turn your attention to this exhibit—” Abhijat gestured at a large segment of metal tubing stretching the length of the hallway, “—which shows a replica of the magnets used to power the accelerator. Here at the Lab,” he explained, “we are searching for tiny parts of the world we believe may exist. To do this, we use an accelerator, in which we send two particles around and around in a circle, going faster and faster until—smash!” He clapped his hands together and held them there for a moment. “We have crashed them!”

“Why?” Meena asked, her voice coming from beside him where she stood next to Lily, watching as Abhijat spoke. Hearing her father describing his work, her curiosity had overpowered her sense that these were things she ought already to know. But her father so rarely talked with her or her mother about his work. She knew the Lab as a facility with a lovely butterfly garden, a cross-country ski path, a dog park, lectures, arts events, and symphonies—not as her father knew it.

“Ah, yes. A useful question from our colleague, Miss Mital,” Abhijat said, looking surprised. “It is, to put it simply, to see what happens.”

“And what does happen?” Meena asked.

Abhijat looked at his daughter, intrigued by her curiosity. He felt for a moment as though he were speaking only to her. “You see,” he explained, “when they collide, they break apart into even smaller particles. Particles so small we can't even see them. All we can see are the paths they make as they go spinning and flying out into the world. And those paths help us to know what kind of a particle it is we are looking at.”

A chattering in the corner, which Mrs. Hamilton quickly shushed, broke the illusion and brought Abhijat back to the group of students.

“Now, you may be wondering, why should we want to do such a thing,” he continued. “Why build such a facility just to look at such tiny, tiny things? Who among us is wondering this?”

A few timid hands went up into the air.

He smiled. “Well, my distinguished guests, it is for a very good reason. These tiny, tiny particles help us to learn what the world was like at the very beginning of time.” He paused here for effect, his eyes wide.

“Like Adam and Eve?” one of the children, a pale, blonde-haired girl, asked.

“Oh, no, long before then,” Abhijat said, smiling.

“And what was it like?” Lily asked.

Abhijat looked out at them, eyebrows raised, his face animated. “Very curious indeed.” He clapped his hands together. “Now, if you will please follow me.”

Lily and Meena trotted along at the head of the group, close to Abhijat. As they passed the offices of the physicists, Rose noticed the chalkboard walls filled with equations, a beautiful script that reminded her for a moment of the hieroglyphs she and Randolph had seen in the temple of Karnak.

“You see,” Abhijat continued, “every particle gives an energy signal. As Miss Winchester suggested, you might think of the particle accelerator as a kind of microscope. When the protons collide, they create mass in the form of other particles, and here, sometimes, are new particles we have before only ever imagined. In order to see these, we must use a quite ingenious machine called a detector, which is watching all day, every day for the signals from these particles. It gives us, in a nutshell, a tsunami of data. Because, you see, the accelerator is creating over a million collisions per second. So someone must look at these collisions and see what they're telling us.”

“And what are they telling you?” Lily asked.

Abhijat smiled. “Well, you must be patient with us, Miss Winchester, as we work to discover that. Now, if you will please follow me, here we will look at part of the detector.” Abhijat led the children over to a bank of computers, where a number of young men sat glued to their screens. “Birali is the colleague who is making sure the machine is running correctly,” Abhijat said, indicating a younger man, who looked up from his computer screen and smiled at the children. “And he will today show us what the paths of some particles look like after a collision.”

On his screen, the young technician pulled up an image of a collision event, the paths of the particles outlined against a black background, arcing and spiraling off by way of announcing their existence.

Rose thought of how the paths of the particles, inked out against the dark background looked like chrysanthemums, like the explosions she and Randolph had watched blooming against a dark sky during the fireworks festivals of Japan.

“What we will do next,” Abhijat continued, “if you please, is to visit the experiment hall. Please, I think this you will find most exciting. So with your permission, we will head in this direction.” He led the snaking line of students back through the atrium to a nearby building, the docent trotting along at the back of the group to help herd the strays. “On the way,” Abhijat continued, “we will pass a very interesting part of our facility, the neutron therapy department. Here, with experimental medical treatments connected to our work, we are treating patients with very serious conditions.” He gestured at the building as they passed and crowded together at the door of their destination. “Now in the experiment hall, I must ask you please not to touch anything. We must all keep our curious fingers to ourselves.”

Inside, silver canisters of liquid nitrogen stood along the walls surrounded by strange machinery, and Rose thought it seemed more like being inside a factory than anything else. How, she wondered, did one connect the delicate image of the particle paths she had just seen, so like a flower, to this noisy, hissing, chuffing room?