Heat (37 page)

She talks of a certain tribe in which men not only walk through fire but roll in it, rubbing the hot coals against their own bodies and those of their fellow tribesmen. “We won’t do that,” she says. “All we are going to do is walk through the fire.”

As a group, we move outside. For the moment, the rain has slowed. We watch as the blue tarp is moved away from the wood. The instructor’s assistants spray lighter fluid across the top of the pile and along its edges. A flare is ignited and in turn is used to touch off the lighter fluid and the wood. Within minutes, a raging bonfire dances in the wind.

While the fire burns, we return to the temple. The instructor offers further inspirational comments. She talks of walking on recently hardened lava. She talks of building the energy within yourself that will make this fire walk possible. While she talks, one woman, sitting on a cushion, knits. A man, sitting on another cushion, meditates. Two women, on separate cushions, hold hands.

The instructor quotes Henry Ford: “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

And she tells us that there will be no layer of ash between those hot coals and our bare feet. “Despite this,” she says, “you are not going to feel the heat on the soles of your feet. You might feel the heat rising up from the bed of coals on your legs, and maybe on your faces, but to your feet it will feel like you are walking on popcorn. There will be no pain. It will just feel a little crunchy.”

She demonstrates the technique. “Don’t run,” she says. “Don’t stamp. Don’t dance. Just walk across.” Near the front of the temple, she has each of us walk across an imaginary fire, one at a time.

And then we are back outside, standing in a half circle around the fire. The rain has slowed to a drizzle. From a distance of five feet, the heat of the fire offers comfort, but the gusting wind renders the flames unpredictable, sending out unexpected flares. My feet, bare, grow cold in the mud.

The instructor’s assistants rake hot coals on the ground. They build a thick layer of glowing embers and burning wood. They make an incandescent promenade. Along this promenade, a flame pops up and goes out, and then another, and another. This is the real deal.

It is time. I am the second in line waiting to walk across hot coals. I am the second in line waiting to become a firewalker.

In an ice-covered tent, in spruce forest or on frozen tundra or on the sea ice, heat becomes a central focus, like hunger for a starving man or water for Pablo Valencia. It is impossible to think of anything but heat. The same is true now, but for very different reasons. Here at the edge of the fire pit, my mind is supremely focused. For a moment, my mental space, my conscious self, is consumed by fire and heat. I understand the science. I understand that hundreds of thousands of people have walked across hot coals unscathed. But I also understand that I am about to step barefoot onto a bed of glowing coals and flaming wood with a temperature of one thousand degrees. I understand that what I am about to do feels just the slightest bit insane.

And so I step onto the bed of coals and cross fifteen feet of thousand-degree ground, barefoot. The heat rushes up my pants legs. I feel it on my hands. I feel it on my face. The burning ground feels rough, like rounded gravel, like popcorn, but it does not hurt my feet. A moment later I do it again, and again, this time hand in hand with my companion. On the third walk, I step on something hot—a sharp ember or a burning stick—but I keep walking. I smile broadly. I am a firewalker.

Later I talk to the instructor about my feelings as I walked across the fire for the first time. I was surprised by my hesitancy, but I was also surprised by my sense of exhilaration.

“Your mind has to be in a certain place,” she says.

And I jot down this simple note: “In firewalking as in life, your mind has to be in a certain place.”

The physicist, in another telephone conversation, mentions that there have been problems with litigation. The road to the top of the thermometer is not without legal hurdles.

The plaintiffs presented a straightforward premise. Collider experiments explore unknown ground in physics. It is possible, the plaintiffs argued, for the experiments to create runaway reactions capable of massive destruction. For example, tiny black holes could form, and over time they could consume the earth. Alternatively, strangelets could materialize. Strangelets are a hypothetical form of matter that could convert all other matter into something similar to itself, again consuming the earth.

The plaintiffs invoked the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, signed into law by Richard Nixon in the wake of the Santa Barbara Channel oil spill.

“There is no question,” the plaintiffs explained to the court, “that should defendants inadvertently create a dangerous form of matter such as a micro black hole or a strangelet, or otherwise create unsafe conditions of physics, then the environmental impact would be both local and national in scope, and deadly to everyone.”

The plaintiffs demanded an environmental impact assessment. If someone was going to play around with the fundamental building blocks of the universe, if someone was going to cook quark soup, the plaintiffs wanted to understand the potential environmental impacts.

Some critics said that at least one affidavit provided to the court appeared to be based on a Wikipedia article.

Many members of the experimental physics community considered the plaintiffs to be crackpots. The kinds of collisions created in colliders happen with some regularity in nature, when cosmic rays smash into particles in the upper atmosphere, with neither local nor national environmental impact. The earth has not been devoured.

The difference between the collisions that occurred in the upper atmosphere and those that would occur in the collider was one of instrumentation. To understand what happens during high-speed collisions, physicists need to observe thousands of collisions in one place, and they need instruments that weigh four thousand tons. The upper atmosphere, with its collisions spread out in space and time, without a firm foundation for instrumentation, was no place for measurements.

The court closed the case on various legal grounds. The experiments moved forward.

Edward Teller, when he was not making bombs, occasionally thought about climate change. In his memoir he wrote of a conversation with Dixy Lee Ray. Ray was a marine biologist and an environmentalist, but also an advocate of nuclear power. Under Richard Nixon, she served as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission. Later, when she was governor of Washington, Mount St. Helens erupted.

From Teller’s memoir: “Dixy and I touched on several topics over lunch that day, one of them the question of whether the increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could cause significant global warming.”

From another passage in his memoir, in which he advocates nuclear energy: “Meeting global energy needs by an increased use of fossil fuels will not only increase atmospheric carbon dioxide (which may be involved in causing climate changes) but also may lead to the exhaustion of an economic coal supply.”

Teller and Ray, if they were still alive, would be sorely disappointed by the tsunami that damaged reactors in Japan. They would see the tsunami as a dreadful setback, as an unfortunate event giving nuclear power yet another undeserved black eye. Even mainstream environmentalists, they might think, were beginning to see the light, and now this wave has thrown us back onto the beaches of a carbon-dependent world.

I pack my bags one more time, off for a look inside the supercollider at Brookhaven. I want to see the place where humans have created and controlled temperatures of seven trillion degrees.

The journey involves an airplane ride to the East Coast, with more burning of kerosene and more carbon released, followed by a train ride to Long Island. I ask a conductor if he has ever heard of Colonel Edwin Drake, the driller of the Titusville oil well, the man credited with starting the petroleum economy. The conductor has not heard of Drake.

“He was a conductor, too,” I say, “before he went into the oil business.” The conductor looks at me for a second, says nothing, and moves on, punching tickets.

At the railway station I meet a courtesy van, and thirty minutes later I am in the Brookhaven complex. What is now the Brookhaven National Laboratory once belonged to the U.S. Army. It was Camp Upton, the onetime home of the World War I draftee Irving Berlin and the inspiration for his “Yip, Yip Yaphank” and “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.”

The base was deactivated after the war to end all wars and reactivated for the next war.

Soon after the Hiroshima bombing, scientists from Yale and Harvard and Cornell and six other universities pushed for a new laboratory, a place that could house big experiments, a home for jointly purchasing and maintaining equipment that no single university could afford on its own. They wanted a place for big science. They found Camp Upton in the backwoods of Long Island.

In March 1947 the War Department handed the camp over to the Department of Energy, and the Department of Energy turned the scientists loose. It would be six years before Eisenhower would deliver his Atoms for Peace speech to the United Nations, but from the beginning the Department of Energy saw Brookhaven as a place for peacetime science, for investigations of the atom that would contribute to the well-being of society. The Department of Energy beat the swords of Camp Upton into plowshares.

Now students and professors come and go, some for a day, some for a few months, some for years. Brookhaven has become an IQ magnet, where smart people congregate to work on things that excite geniuses. Work on the atom continues, but also climate research and medical research and energy research. They are building a solar farm to provide both power and knowledge. They work across disciplines. Biologists work with engineers who work with nuclear theorists who work with computer scientists who work with chemists.

In a Brookhaven building, I ask three men to tell me what they do. Are they computer scientists? Are they physicists? They hesitate. They are not sure. At Brookhaven, highly educated specialists are no longer certain of the boundaries of their knowledge.

And there is the supercollider.

From the outside, it looks like a river levee, a sloping mound of dirt covered with patchy grass and weeds and shrubs. But there is no river. The levee covers the tunnel that is the heart of the collider. The tunnel forms a circle on Brookhaven’s grounds. The circumference of that circle, around which protons and the nuclei of gold molecules fly, is about 12,600 feet, slightly shorter than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

On the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, drivers sometimes push their cars to speeds of 235 miles per hour. In Brookhaven’s tunnel, physicists sometimes push their gold nuclei to speeds of 670 million miles per hour.

At Indianapolis, as a general matter, the goal is to avoid collisions. At Brookhaven, as a general matter, the goal is to encourage collisions.

At Indianapolis the traffic flows in one direction. At Brookhaven traffic flows two ways, clockwise and counterclockwise, in two separate beams. The physicists, with magnets, occasionally make the beams cross. That dangerous intersection, with neither traffic signals nor stop signs, is where the action is.