Saving St. Germ (25 page)

Faraday started at the Royal Institution, Davy’s lab, in 1813 as a lab assistant, working for a menial wage. In three years he was writing research papers, and eventually he became director and the greatest experimental physicist of the time. He learned everything about the laboratory, from cleaning flasks to wiring magnetic coils. He carefully observed and took notes on every experiment. It became clear to his colleagues that his mind worked differently than others’. Here’s Faraday himself:

Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the “Arabian Nights” as easily as in the “Encyclopedia.” But facts were important to me, and saved me.

How odd. Faraday, for all his talk of the facts, paid no attention to them at all. He just let his mind walk, never allowed predisposed ideas to get in his way. Because he knew no math, the academy ignored him. Faraday’s religion forbade representation in signs or symbols, plus he said he had trouble remembering formulae. So he talked and wrote about what he saw—and he saw things other people didn’t see.

He wanted to share these things; he particularly wanted ordinary people, his people, poor people, to understand science. Every Christmas he gave a special, public Children’s Science Lecture: Little kids and amateurs came. People contrasted his funny, startling, unforgettable language in explaining scientific phenomena with Davy’s more pretentious, dead diction. I suppose he was like a rock star or a stand-up comic on the lecture stage
—
bouncing around, his whole body animated by his thought. He’d work audiences into a terrific excitement. It isn’t clear if his speech impediment disappeared when he lectured. I like to think it didn’t
—I
like to think that he bopped around, sounding like a hopped-up genius Elmer Fudd.

The public is always hungry for Science Stories, but Faraday did not take his examples from contemporary culture; he invented analogies, he got his audience to stretch
their
imaginations. Faraday’s style of thought was “scattered,” they all said
—
but, even more interesting, his thoughts moved free of “reasoning,” free of prior frameworks of thought. “Intuitive,” they said. Faraday knew how his own mind worked. He moved, in his thinking, toward what he called lateral action, without giving any single idea hierarchical priority. Things clarified themselves through unpredictable “thought selections.” He allowed
chaos
into his head. Principles, observations, and facts all whirled there, in and out of the chaos Faraday by dispensing with the need to immediately “understand,” evolved a coherent model. Facts, he said, saved him
—
but it was not the word
“facts,”
perhaps, that he meant to emphasize. It was the verb “to
save.
” His mind
saved
things (not in the sense of
keeping,
but in the sense of
salvation,),
spinning them out of unarticulated space, darkness. Without math, his comprehension was mathematical
—
he traveled with the light waves, then brought them back into language, the linear, back through the mirror, saved.

I imagine him in the lab; he sprinkles iron filings over a piece of paper resting on top of a bar magnet, then records the patterns of the magnetic field lines traced around the magnetic poles. Beautiful starbursts, sprays, spirals, fingerprint whorls. Then he lifts up his head, imagining the waves and whorls moving outward, transversing all matter, running through the universe.

He thought like a child. He took a hike one August and stood looking at a waterfall: watching a rainbow at the bottom of the falls, superimposed over the chaos. He saw things spatially. The chaos didn’t bother him: The image sprang from it
—
and he saw things simultaneously. Or four-dimensionally, just as he saw ghostly waves, the pattern of field lines, everywhere, even inside magnets. What he worked out showed the deep abiding connection between electricity and magnetism
—
only fully revealed when the two are set in relative motion. Thus he stepped into contemporary physics. This beautiful symbiosis would be shown off by the field concept. In 1865, when James Clerk Maxwell thought up a system of equations that articulated this electromagnetic relationship, it was easy to predict the future. Our whole technological world (electricity, lights, TV, computers, satellites) depends on what these equations tell us about the interactive behavior, the marriage, of electricity and magnetism:
the electromagnetic field.
You could only tell what they were capable of when you got them moving around each other, arguing, making up, finally connecting. The waves of the electromagnetic field (Maxwell said) were a form of light. And you might be able to guess where the waves went from there. Into the mind of a patent officer, junior grade, in Switzerland. Then into the mind of Niels Bohr, into a theory he called complementarity.

Oh, I like to think about Michael Faraday. I like to imagine him thinking his patchwork thoughts, putting seemingly unlike concepts together
—
shocking the world with his strange running commentary.

The first lab is the child’s mind: before conditioning, even before consciousness. Children, even right-handed nondyslexic children, write words backwards. Maybe they can see “through” things, maybe they only see the “curve” of the words (OUT—TUO) around in space, around corners. The
lab
is where sense is made first, not in school. The
lab
can be a sandbox, a stream bottom, dust motes in light-filled air.

When you grow up to be a scientist, you study the parts of the cell; light; elements; you count chromosomes. You discern the structure of DNA, and you tally reflips and markers, alleles and enzymes that work like molecular scissors. You draw pictures and take notes; you look again, through a powerful microscope, at the structure of DNA, the double helical structure. Then one day, you set your gaze a notch up over your cold cup of coffee, you crane your stiff neck, lean back, and gaze up a little into the galaxy and notice the mirror symmetry in the world of whirling planets. You notice the symmetry because of the
asymmetry
also discernible there.

Then it must be true: What Nature does in a left-handed way she can also do in a right-handed way! Our sun circles through the galaxy on such an axis that its planets trace spiraling helical paths of other-handedness! Astronomical asymmetry: How did this happen in our galaxy? Are other planets, orbiting other suns, describing spirals of reverse handedness? The human heart beats on the left, but there are examples of hearts working away on the right side. Mother Nature allows it, you see, in differing quantities, the existence of both types of handedness: the ambidextrous universe.

This is how you begin to imagine things that few people believe are actually there. You peek into the wild, subatomic world
—
where particles move right through walls and disappear. Quantum electrodynamics makes Mother Nature look crazy, a real nut case, from the perspective of common sense. Yet the theories agree completely with experiment.

When I watch how you think, sweetheart, I compare your cerebral skitter and leap to Faraday’s “lateral action.” And I ask myself, What teacher is going to pay attention to this phenomenon, assuming she would even notice? You fit into no category. You can read and write, so you’re not dyslexic. (It was not
words
he couldn’t grasp, it was the superimposed
organization:
grammar, syntax, punctuation
—how the story was told.
So he had to tell it
his
way
—
to invent his own way through words.)

“Learning-disabled,” that’s what you are
—
because you don’t talk like others, or think like them. And you’re “gifted”: an equal curse. Of course there’s the right and left brain, but I believe in the ambidextrous, asymmetric prelateralized brain. Like Faraday’s.

When I was growing up, I wanted words to be less confusing. Language defines itself spatially like this: left-right reversal understood by us in terms of our bilateral symmetry. Stuck there, you see. In the mirror, opposite the enantiomer. How I loved, in high school, the precise spatial language of three-space coordinate geometry! What a relief from the endless
flatland
of words. I dream in a language that is spatial, that is cubist, hyper-dimensions of thought and speech. But the language isn’t math, or geometry. It’s Ollie’s
speech,
Ollie’s waterfall of words.

So I like to think of Michael Faraday, little street urchin, running after a scholarly gentleman in the street, speaking gibberish. I don’t like to think about how he left the world, mad and sequestered, the waves having finally overwhelmed him. As we close the door on the world for a while, Ollie, perhaps he’ll be our guardian angel. Perhaps we’ll feel the waves begin to hum and gently oscillate
—
above, below, around us? Verbs: to think, to Faraday. Perchance to dream.

T
HEN THIS SWEET
interlude of false peace: Ollie and I alone together for three, four, five days? I lost track. With food, music, drawing paper, toys. Cozy fires in the fireplace, fudge. We lay on the floor together in pajamas, talking, coloring. We trimmed the plants and watered them, baked cookies. We slept together in the big bed. Nose to nose, she stared cross-eyed at me, thinking hard. “Mom,” she said, and patted my face solemnly. Then smiled her lopsided smile. “Ollie and Mamma.”

I refused to answer the phone. Disembodied voices talked away behind the door of my study, following the high-pitched beep. With a certain amount of morbid satisfaction, I noted the increasing urgency in these floating voices as the days rolled by. Occasionally, I’d stand outside my study door, eavesdropping on whoever was calling. Students, friends, Faber’s secretary—even, once, Jay. But I would not pick up the receiver.

It rained—unusual for Los Angeles—which provided an even stronger sense of haven for us. The rain beat on the roof and trees and burbled in the downspouts all night. The air, when I opened the front shutters on the fifth or sixth day, was incredibly fresh, cleansed and shimmering. The sidewalks and bricks gave off a hosed-down, steamy smell; there were terraced puddles on the lawn. There was a nostalgic smell of washed linen, baked bread. Chlorophyll. Leaf patterns moved on the wooden porch and over its ceiling beams. I was beginning to feel restored. I yawned and stretched. I’d been working on my theory at night, after Ollie went to sleep; now I was so close to what I wanted that I knew I had to call L.R.

I turned back to the room, where Ollie sat in a rhomboid of sunlight in the lotus position, drinking from a yellow twin-handled Yogi Bear plastic cup. We’d been drawing together—whatever she suggested. We each tried a hand at her visions. We’d drawn the “X’s that fly,” lizards pulling “some deep egg ponds,” walking streetlight trees, the “gas station guy opening his mouth,” “scary” waves and stars “giving sharpness to the clouds,” and “very very green and loud spoons.”

I tore off another sheet from the big drawing tablet. I couldn’t resist giving her a little test. Everyone else is testing her, I thought.

I pencil-sketch some flat shapes that are symmetric and therefore not reversed by the mirror. I draw circles, squares, ellipses, equilateral triangles, and, for good gambling measure, diamonds, hearts, spades, clubs. She comments on the diamond—she loves that shape. When you draw a line of a certain length, there is a center point of symmetry—a single place that divides the figure into identical halves. But when you choose plane shapes, like the ones I did, you move into the two-dimensional world. Nevertheless, all these shapes can be bisected by a line of symmetry, which divides the shape into exact, mirror-image halves. I ask Ollie to show me where to sever a line and she does. We slice the diamond, her favorite. Then I ask her to look at the other shapes and she takes a pencil and divides them, square, circle, triangle, into their twin halves.

Then I show her asymmetric plane figures, I draw the mysterious ones: rhomboid, swastika, and spiral. If you try to bisect these guys into mirror image halves, no matter how hard you try—it won’t work. They’re asymmetric. I demonstrate this to Ollie: I try to divide the shapes equally and show how it doesn’t work. She takes the pencil from my hand and tries herself, then looks up at me and frowns. She understands, it just won’t do. She looks back at the symmetrical shapes, then tries again. No go. “No, Mom,” she says. She points to the different halves.

Then I try to draw three-dimensional solids. Lines have a
point
of symmetry, figures have a
line
of symmetry, 3-D solids have a
plane
of symmetry. I draw a circle. I draw a cylinder. This is harder. We’re into plane geometry now. If you think of a plane of symmetry as a reflecting surface, half the figure and its reflection restore the original shape. It has rotational depth. I get a hand mirror, cut an orange in half and show Ollie how it makes itself whole again, reflected. She watches carefully. I think she’s with me. Then I draw an asymmetric solid: one that can never be made to click with its reflection. The helix, the curve of the spiral staircase—I draw that, in the form of a candy cane and the red stripe that winds around it. You can’t divide that 3-D helix, that spiral, into mirror halves, no matter how hard you try. So she can see that the mirror image is exactly like the asymmetric solid, except that it goes the other way. Now we’re into
my
stuff. Enantiomers. Or enantiomorphs. I show her her own hands. Look, they’re just alike, but asymmetric. Her shoes are enantiomorphs. Her ears. She laughs as I wiggle my ears at her. Does she understand? I know she does. Ollie frowns and she draws more shapes; some are actually three-dimensional, and she bisects the symmetrical ones. I watch her. She hums a little.

“Ollie
line.
Ollie
line.
Ollie cut. Ollie’s pieces
fly.
”

Left and right, mirror reversals. All this doesn’t sound that hard, really. But amazing events in twentieth-century physics—the overthrow of parity and the magical corkscrew of DNA—are tied up with this looking-glass stuff. I show Ollie a piece of string. Maybe it
looks
symmetrical, but each strand twists into a helix that will dance the opposite way when reflected. I’m not sure she understands. Her face scrunches up in thought. While she’s looking at the unraveled string in the mirror, I get up, find my address book, and dial Lorraine Atwater. She answers on the third ring.