Zig Zag (10 page)

"Some
building," he said. "Is being rich a requirement for making
it as a physicist?"

"For
my mother, it's a requirement for anything."

"We
haven't even talked about your family ... What does your mother do?
Mathematician? Chemist? Genetic engineer? Inventor of the Rubik's
Cube?"

"She
owns a beauty salon two blocks from here," laughed Elisa. "My
father
was
a physicist, but he died in a car crash five years ago."

Maldonado
looked genuinely distraught.

"I'm
so sorry."

"Don't
worry, I hardly knew him," Elisa replied easily. She climbed out
and closed the car door. "He was never home." She bent down
to look in at Maldonado. "Thanks for the ride."

"Thanks
for your help. Hey, if I have ... more ... questions ... could we, uh
... go out sometime?"

"Sure."

"I
have your phone number. I'll call you. Good luck tomorrow on the
first day of class with Blanes."

Maldonado
waited courteously for her to reach the door to her building. Elisa
turned to wave.

And
froze.

Across
the street, a man was staring at her.

At
first, she didn't recognize him. Then she saw his graying hair and
big gray mustache. She felt a chill, as if her body were full of
holes and a gust of cold wind had just blown through her.

Maldonado
drove off. Another car drove by. Then another one. Then the street
was empty, and the man was still standing there. I
must
be confused. This man isn't wearing the same clothes.

Suddenly,
he turned and walked around the corner.

Elisa
stood staring at the spot where he'd been just a few seconds ago.
That
must have been another guy; they just looked the same.

Nevertheless,
she was sure that this man, too, had been watching her.

05

"THIS
is
not going to be a fun class," David Blanes said. "We're not
going to talk about amazing, extraordinary things. We're not going to
answer any questions. If you're looking for answers, go to church or
back to school." Nervous laughter. "What we're going to see
here is reality, and reality has no answers, and it's not
particularly amazing."

He
stopped abruptly when he got to the back of the room.
Must
have realized he can't walk through walls,
Elisa
thought. She stopped looking at him when he turned back around, but
she was hanging on his every word.

"Before
we get started, I want to clear something up."

Taking
just two steps, Blanes strode over to the slide projector and turned
it on. Three letters and a number appeared on the screen.

"There
you have it: E = mc
²
.
Probably the most famous equation physics has ever produced. The
relativistic energy of a particle at rest."

He
clicked to the next slide. A black-and-white photograph of a young
Asian boy, his left side destroyed. You could see his teeth through
his cheek. People whispered. Someone said, "Jesus." Elisa
couldn't move. She shuddered in horror at the image. She was also
riveted.

"This,
too, is E = mc
²
,
as they know in every Japanese university."

He
switched off the projector and turned to face the class.

"I
could have shown you one of Maxwell's equations and the electric
light of an operating room where someone is being saved, or the
Schrodinger wave equation and a cell phone, which enables a doctor to
save the life of a suffering child. But instead I chose Hiroshima,
which is slightly less optimistic."

When
the murmuring died down, Blanes went on.

"I
know what a lot of physicists think about our profession, not just
contemporary physicists, and not just bad ones, either: Schrodinger,
Jeans, Eddington, Bohr—they all agreed. They thought all we
worried about were symbols. 'Shadows,' Schrodinger used to call them.
They think that differential equations are not reality. Hearing some
colleagues speak, it's as though theoretical physics was just playing
house with plastic building blocks. This absurd idea has gained
currency, and now people seem to feel that theoretical physicists are
little more than dreamers locked away in ivory towers. They think our
games, our little houses, bear no relation to their everyday worries,
their interests, their problems, or their welfare. But I'm going to
tell you something, and I want you to take it as a ground rule for
this course. From now on, I will be filling this board with
equations. I'll start in one corner and end in another, and I promise
you I'll make good use of the space because I have small
handwriting." People laughed, but Blanes wasn't joking. "And
when I'm done, I want you to do the following: look at those numbers,
all those little numbers and Greek letters on the board, and repeat
to yourselves,
'This
is
reality,' repeat it over and over..." Elisa swallowed. Blanes
added, "Physics equations are the key to our happiness, our
fears, our lives, and our deaths. Don't forget it. Ever."

He
jumped up onto the dais and raised the screen, grabbed a piece of
chalk, and began scribbling on the left-hand side of the board, just
as he'd promised. And for the rest of the class, he made no mention
of anything besides complex noncommutative algebraic abstractions and
advanced topology.

DAVID
Blanes
was forty-three years old, tall, and appeared to be in good shape.
His gray hair was receding and thinning on top, but it just made him
look interesting. Elisa had also noticed some things that weren't as
obvious in the many photos she'd seen of him: the way he half closed
his eyes when he was concentrating; his pockmarked cheeks, no doubt
the result of teenage acne; his nose, which was so bulbous in profile
it was almost comical. In his own way, Blanes was sort of attractive,
but only "in his own way," like so many men who are not
famous for their looks. He was dressed in an absurd explorer getup,
with camouflage vest, baggy pants, and boots. His voice was hoarse
and quiet, and didn't seem to fit his constitution, but he gave off a
certain air of authority, a certain desire to rattle people. Maybe,
she thought, it was a defense mechanism.

Everything
Elisa told Maldonado the day before was 100 percent true, and now
that was becoming obvious. Blanes's disposition was "special,"
more so than the other big names in the field. But it was also true
that he'd had to take a lot more flak and faced a lot more prejudice
than the others. First, he was Spanish, which meant that for an
ambitious physicist (as she and her classmates were all perfectly
aware) he was already a fish out of water and at a serious
disadvantage. Not because of any discrimination, but because of the
pathetic state of physics in Spain. The few achievements made by
Spanish physicists had all taken place abroad.

Then,
Blanes had made it. And that was even more unforgivable than his
nationality.

His
success was the result of a few hurried equations that fit on one
side of a piece of paper. That's what science comes down to: a
collection of short, timeless strokes of genius. He'd written them in
1987, while he was working in Zurich with his mentor, Albert
Grossmann, and his colleague Sergio Marini. They were published in
1988 in the prestigious
Annalen
der Physik
(the
same journal that, more than eighty years earlier, had published
Einstein's article on relativity) and shot him to an almost
ridiculous level of fame. The kind of bizarre celebrity that only
very rarely do scientists achieve. And that in spite of the fact that
the article, which proved the existence of time strings, was so
complex that few specialists, even, understood all of it. Despite its
mathematical perfection, it would take decades to obtain any
significant experimental proof.

Be
that as it may, European and North American physicists reacted to his
findings with awe, and that awe filtered through to the press. The
Spanish papers didn't get too excited at first
(Spanish
Physicist Discovers Why Time Only Moves Forward and Time Like a
Sequoia, Says Spanish Physicist
were
the most common headlines), but Blanes's popularity in Spain derived
more from the spin put on the news by less-respected publications,
which had no qualms about making declarations like "Spain takes
lead in twentieth-century physics with Blanes's theory,"

"Professor
Blanes affirms that time travel is scientifically possible,"

"Spain
could be the first country to build a time machine," and so on.
None of it was true, but it worked. The public ate it up. Magazines
began to put his name on the cover next to naked women, associating
him with the mysteries of time. One esoteric publication sold
hundreds of thousands of copies of their Christmas edition with the
headline
Was
Jesus a Time Traveler
?
and then, in smaller type below, "
David
Blanes's Theory Disconcerts the Vatican."

Blanes
was no longer in Europe to gloat (or take offense). He'd practically
been beamed over to the United States. He gave lectures and worked at
Caltech, and, as if he were following in Einstein's footsteps, at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where great minds strolled
through silent gardens with plenty of time to think and plenty of
paper to write on. But in 1993, when Congress voted to terminate the
Superconducting Super Collider project in Waxahachie, Texas, aborting
construction on what would have been the biggest and most powerful
particle accelerator in the world, Blanes suddenly cut short his
honeymoon with the United States. His comments became somewhat
notorious in the American press shortly before his return to Europe.
"This country's government would rather invest in arms than in
scientific development. The United States reminds me of Spain, in
that it's a country full of talented people ruled by disgusting
politicians." Since he'd insulted both countries and their
governments equally in his comparison, his assessment managed to
offend everyone and please almost no one.

After
concluding his U.S. tour, Blanes returned to Zurich, where he lived a
life of quiet solitude (his only friends were Grossmann and Marini;
the only women in his life, his mother and sister—Elisa admired
this monastic existence) and his theory took a real beating, since
people had stewed for ages and the results of their long-festering
ire appeared regularly in print. Curiously, some of the most vehement
rejections of his theory came from the Spanish scientific community.
Endless university experts came out of the woodwork to blast the
"sequoia theory," as it was being called at the time (in
reference to the time strings coiled within particles like the tree
rings within a sequoia's ancient trunk used to date them), claiming
that it was a beautiful theory but totally inaccurate. Perhaps
because he was from Madrid, critics there took a little longer to get
going, but perhaps for the same reason, once they did, they really
let loose. One famous professor from the Complutense even called his
theory "a fantastic pile of poppycock with no basis in reality."
Things weren't much better abroad, although at least specialists in
string theory like Edward Witten at Princeton and Cumrun Vafa at
Harvard claimed that it could still turn out to be an intellectual
revolution comparable to the one set off by string theory itself.
Stephen Hawking, from his Cambridge wheelchair, was one of the few
who came out in Blanes's defense (albeit not wholeheartedly) and
helped circulate his ideas. When they asked him about it, the famous
physicist would answer with one of his typical ironic quips, emitted
in the cold, inflexible tone of his voice synthesizer. "Though
many people want to chop it down, Professor Blanes's sequoia still
provides plenty of shade."