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Sound Travel: Classroom to Cathedral via the Moon by Lucy Sheerman The only physics lesson I recall in detail involved watching the teacher spread a metal Slinky across the huge wooden desk and explaining how sound moves in waves of compression and rarefaction. The idea of sound travelling, the speed of sound, the trajectories of light and distance were all briefly dazzlingly incomprehensible as sun swept through the high windows that looked down onto the valley, the canal basin, the flour mill. The mill whose owners funded this school which, when it opened at the start of the century, promised to teach science to girls. We took those sunlit lessons for granted of course, never imagining their radical premise or questioning the desire to escape inspired by abject boredom. We longed to leave at fourteen, just as our grandmothers had, for the grown-up world of work. There was no logic to the sense of sound travelling through a Slinky, that stretched out spiral of metal, just as there was no sense of the doors that had closed repeatedly upon the notion of girls, women even, arriving at this moment of understanding an intuitive fact as mechanical effect. Physics was on Monday morning and coincided with a year in which I felt increasingly reluctant to force myself to go to school. Sunday evening in Brighouse in 1984, it seemed to me, was the most desolate time and place on the planet. While my father polished political speeches and prepared for his weekly trip to London, my mother broadcast to the rest of the family an increasingly urgent sense of panic about the likely onset of a nuclear war. Dad, she was convinced, would be safe in a well-organised bunker, while she would be left alone to protect and survive. On Monday morning I lingered at home with ailments, real and imagined, creating an equation of time and space balancing so imperfectly that my understanding of physics was knocked entirely off its orbit. Not wanting to understand physics in a valley filled with factories powered by streams and the sage application of physical laws to the desire for profit was an act of wilful obstinacy. What did it mean for the inhabitants of 19
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this Victorian building with its high windows and views over the valleys that gave birth to Luddism, a dual carriageway twinned with Ludenscheid, a cooperative that still issued green stamps and a once profitable flour mill? At the time half my life was lived not in that so-called world, but in books. I didn’t know then, but that strange stubbornness meant that I would never be a scientist. There is a pragmatism that I learned from the school and from the town I grew up in that there are things you can’t understand no matter how endless your curiosity. Why, twenty years later, did I become haunted by this need to understand my place in the world, when I thought I had settled it in that sunny classroom? Bizarrely, it was watching a documentary about the wives of the Apollo astronauts, rather than the astronauts themselves, that inspired a deep longing to travel into space, specifically to go to the moon. There was a sense of loneliness experienced by both the astronauts and their wives that resonated for me as a new mother, struggling with isolation and a sense of disjointedness from the world. All the familiar rituals of sleep, sociability and the escape into books and writing had been suddenly wrenched away. It was more than longing, it was a compulsion that took hold so fiercely that I was taken aback by the flood of data and information that the urgent desire to be in space unlocks. The first thing you learn when you want to know about space is that everything is based on physics. The Apollo astronauts all had degrees in physics, astrophysics, aeronautics. They understood implicitly the science behind the parabolas of flight which they also enacted. Selected from the elite pilots of the army, navy and airforce, American astronauts were chosen both to understand the technical requirements of the proposed flight to the moon and to accept unquestioningly the orders they were given. Astronauts were not trained to describe the momentous onslaught of being launched into space, neither were they readied to help others relive the experience of walking on the moon. Ready for all the technical requirements of the mission, these star sailors were not prepared for the knowledge brought by looking towards the earth from thousands of miles away. When you look back at the contemporary 20 interviews, they were rarely asked about the physics of space travel, of the impossible odds of launching out of the gravitational pull of the earth and its orbit and leaving the atmosphere at its silvery thin limit. What thrust, what fuel, what trajectory or speed was involved in the mechanical wrenching of person from earth and into space. Or rather, what was involved in the dislodging of man from earth to take his small steps on the moon. The question the astronauts were asked repeatedly throughout every public appearance and interview and personal exchange with whoever they met for the rest of their lives was what it felt like to walk on the moon. Neither were the astronauts selected for their narrative abilities, the capacity to explain what things felt like. In much the same way that I could not conceive of how sound was expressed metaphorically by the metal coil spiralling across the wooden desk, it appeared that astronauts could not convey the lived reality of sitting in a spaceship no bigger than a VW beetle car for three days and the very real possibility of never coming back. In fairness, astronauts appear to have been selected precisely for their resistance to using metaphor or any kind of ambiguous techniques of communication. Hyperbole, fantasy, speculation, uncertainty, all had to be jettisoned like the rocket fuel tank as they lifted out of the atmosphere in order to reach outer space. Several of the astronauts recounted with loathing the psychological tests they were subjected to during the recruitment process and, in particular, being asked to describe what they could see when presented with a blank white page. It was nonsense, they said. Michael Collins, who was the command module pilot on Apollo 11, wrote, somewhat defensively, that ‘I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher… we might get a much better idea of what we saw.’ They might have described it better, he qualified, but they wouldn’t have ever reached the moon. I wanted to understand how it felt. I wanted to understand it so much that I began to try to understand physics after a lifetime of not caring that I didn’t comprehend how things worked or interrelated or reacted. How sound moved. It mattered very desperately that I didn’t have a grounding in physics, in the mechanics of how a person might find themselves

Sound Travel: Classroom to Cathedral via the Moon by Lucy Sheerman

The only physics lesson I recall in detail involved watching the teacher spread a metal Slinky across the huge wooden desk and explaining how sound moves in waves of compression and rarefaction. The idea of sound travelling, the speed of sound, the trajectories of light and distance were all briefly dazzlingly incomprehensible as sun swept through the high windows that looked down onto the valley, the canal basin, the flour mill. The mill whose owners funded this school which, when it opened at the start of the century, promised to teach science to girls. We took those sunlit lessons for granted of course, never imagining their radical premise or questioning the desire to escape inspired by abject boredom. We longed to leave at fourteen, just as our grandmothers had, for the grown-up world of work. There was no logic to the sense of sound travelling through a Slinky, that stretched out spiral of metal, just as there was no sense of the doors that had closed repeatedly upon the notion of girls, women even, arriving at this moment of understanding an intuitive fact as mechanical effect.

Physics was on Monday morning and coincided with a year in which I felt increasingly reluctant to force myself to go to school. Sunday evening in Brighouse in 1984, it seemed to me, was the most desolate time and place on the planet. While my father polished political speeches and prepared for his weekly trip to London, my mother broadcast to the rest of the family an increasingly urgent sense of panic about the likely onset of a nuclear war. Dad, she was convinced, would be safe in a well-organised bunker, while she would be left alone to protect and survive. On Monday morning I lingered at home with ailments, real and imagined, creating an equation of time and space balancing so imperfectly that my understanding of physics was knocked entirely off its orbit.

Not wanting to understand physics in a valley filled with factories powered by streams and the sage application of physical laws to the desire for profit was an act of wilful obstinacy. What did it mean for the inhabitants of

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