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Playing with Physics in Poetry (and Prose) by Tania Hershman Stand inside the nucleus of the atom. What do you see? You see protons, neutrons, dashing clouds of electrons. And a woman with a notebook, writing. It all began with physics. It wasn’t that I was good at physics at school. Chemistry was easy. Maths was a thrilling challenge. I didn’t quite click with physics. The school suggested I study chemistry at university. I decided to choose the more difficult option. The much more difficult option, it turned out: joint honours in maths and physics. What was I thinking? Although this is not a document aimed at physicists, or scientists, or even those curious about physics, she, the writer, who is interested primarily in story and in narrative, begins here because it is where it began for her, so many years ago, the spark that led to this PhD project. And it’s where humans may have begun to get particulate, to split and fragment everything, where “everything” includes story and narrative. She hopes, although the word “physics” is a turn-off for many people, that you don’t find it so here. She hopes you are entertained and intrigued. The above is a quote from the “contextualising research” that formed part of my creative writing PhD, which I received in 2017. Am I the only person to undertake a practice-based creative writing PhD inspired by particle physics? I suspect I might be. Did I have any inkling this would be in my future as I sat in a University of Manchester physics lecture hall almost 30 years earlier, one of very few female particles in that male sea? I suspect I already knew I wouldn’t become a physicist (or a mathematician, my brain wasn’t suited to that), but I never dreamt, despite writing stories since I was small, that I might become a writer. A Writer. I felt that somehow this wasn't “allowed” for someone who not only didn't study English Lit at University but didn't even really like English at school. “The universe erupted in a hot Big Bang, spewing matter and radiation outwards from a hot fireball,” writes Frank Close in The New Cosmic Onion: Quarks and the Nature of the Universe.1 “Some 14 billion years ago, all the material that we see today in the galaxies of stars would have been compacted together in a volume smaller than an atom. It is the explosion outwards that we refer to as the Big Bang.” After the Big Bang, things began to chill and clump: “[O]ut of that fireball,” writes Close, “the quarks, electrons and neutrinos were the survivors while the universe was still very young and hot. As it cooled, the quarks were gripped to one another, forming protons and neutrons. The mutual gravitational attraction among these gathered them into large clouds that were primaeval stars.”2 We could also call this: • The End of Wholeness • When We Got Particled • The Universe Grows Up 67
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• The Grand Fragmentation • The Big Clumping • Look! Stars! • Falling To Bits • Why Have One Thing When You Can Have Trillions? • Is It Cold In Here? • Matter Pulls Together and so on… Perhaps ironically, I realised recently as I was writing a hybrid creative non-fiction book about Time (that tiny topic) that it was in those undergraduate physics lectures that my imagination was unleashed. Relativity and quantum physics were the catalysts. Relativity is, objectively, completely mad. There we were, taking notes as if it was just another normal lecture, when the lecturer, whose style was fairly dry, started talking about how, if you drive a car close to the speed of light, it shrinks to fit into a garage that it had been too long for. A car. Shrinking. Or, said the lecturer, if a twin went into space, when she came back she would be biologically younger than the sibling who stayed on earth. Yup. Time. Space. Nothing like I thought they were. The lecture hall had stopped taking notes at this point and was sitting there open-mouthed. This was not speculation. Einstein’s theories of relativity had been proved by experiment, making this as close as science ever comes to “fact” (which science rarely lays claim to; theories that best explain stuff “for the moment” are the mainstay.) Einstein demolished some of the previous almost-facts of science. That’s how science works. Rather than being irritated when this happens, scientists seem to love it. Slightly less bizarre were particle physics lectures where, contrary to what school science classes led me to believe, what we were discussing were entities no-one had seen, not even with the finest instruments. Protons, quarks, electrons, neutrons etc weren’t actually billiard balls banging into another and spinning away. They were tiny theorised particles that places like the Large Hadron Collider were on the lookout for. We can’t see them; what we can see is the effect they have on each other. From a wonderful documentary, Particle Fever, about the search for a particular particle, the Higgs Boson, which the theories said should exist, I learned that particle colliders – which smash particles together at high speeds and then pick through the wreckage – are trying to reconstruct the past (or several possible pasts) from a snapshot of the present. Like sifting through lots of minuscule shards of clay and trying to figure out which two, three or more mugs might have crashed into each other (if mugs could travel incredibly fast). 68 We Are Not All Related The family is unstable In time spontaneously the family decay (Nature called family a puzzle) Family particles are unlike Matter has no meaning and neutrinos play One member of the family says No The others stare at him terrified of subsidence grateful later for the opportunity to reunify family Not only can we not see these particles, they don’t even stay the same, they “decay” and become other particles, inspiration for the above poem from the hybrid book I wrote for my PhD, and what if we were all allowed to disappear, which uses found text from Particle Physics: A Beginners Guide by Brian R Martin. Let’s just say that it’s complicated. To me, this felt like both magic (relativity) and extremely creative fiction (particle physics). I began to lose faith in science as hard objective facts, which, looking back, is good because sciences are not, in fact the hard objective fact-based fields they’d presented to us at school. You might, if you were me, feel lied to. (Teachers told us about the three states of matter – solid, liquid and gas – and “forgot” to mention that there’s a fourth. Plasma. Did you know that? Lied seems like a strong word, but that’s how it felt to me. Did you feel lied to too?) A certain type of lying felt to me, someone who grew up reading stories of every kind, similar to what a fiction writer does. If physicists could make up particles, if they could invent theories about long cars fitting into short garages, wasn’t this just another form of storytelling? She left physics behind after her undergraduate degree – all her experiments were disasters, she always felt a failure, couldn't swallow the information being presented, wanted the Big Picture, but none was (then) forthcoming. And besides, she just wanted to write. I didn’t hang around after the three years during which I didn’t understand a great deal of either maths or physics. I had learned of the existence not only of many possible particles as an undergrad but also the career option of “science journalist” (this was the early 90s, preInternet; if another human being didn’t tell you something, it was hard to find it out.) So science journalism was my next adventure.

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• The Grand Fragmentation • The Big Clumping • Look! Stars! • Falling To Bits • Why Have One Thing When You Can Have Trillions? • Is It Cold In Here? • Matter Pulls Together and so on…

Perhaps ironically, I realised recently as I was writing a hybrid creative non-fiction book about Time (that tiny topic) that it was in those undergraduate physics lectures that my imagination was unleashed. Relativity and quantum physics were the catalysts. Relativity is, objectively, completely mad. There we were, taking notes as if it was just another normal lecture, when the lecturer, whose style was fairly dry, started talking about how, if you drive a car close to the speed of light, it shrinks to fit into a garage that it had been too long for.

A car. Shrinking. Or, said the lecturer, if a twin went into space, when she came back she would be biologically younger than the sibling who stayed on earth.

Yup. Time. Space. Nothing like I thought they were. The lecture hall had stopped taking notes at this point and was sitting there open-mouthed. This was not speculation. Einstein’s theories of relativity had been proved by experiment, making this as close as science ever comes to “fact” (which science rarely lays claim to; theories that best explain stuff “for the moment” are the mainstay.) Einstein demolished some of the previous almost-facts of science. That’s how science works. Rather than being irritated when this happens, scientists seem to love it.

Slightly less bizarre were particle physics lectures where, contrary to what school science classes led me to believe, what we were discussing were entities no-one had seen, not even with the finest instruments. Protons, quarks, electrons, neutrons etc weren’t actually billiard balls banging into another and spinning away. They were tiny theorised particles that places like the Large Hadron Collider were on the lookout for. We can’t see them; what we can see is the effect they have on each other.

From a wonderful documentary, Particle Fever, about the search for a particular particle, the Higgs Boson, which the theories said should exist, I learned that particle colliders – which smash particles together at high speeds and then pick through the wreckage – are trying to reconstruct the past (or several possible pasts) from a snapshot of the present. Like sifting through lots of minuscule shards of clay and trying to figure out which two, three or more mugs might have crashed into each other (if mugs could travel incredibly fast).

68

We Are Not All Related

The family is unstable In time spontaneously the family decay (Nature called family a puzzle)

Family particles are unlike Matter has no meaning and neutrinos play One member of the family says No The others stare at him terrified of subsidence grateful later for the opportunity to reunify family

Not only can we not see these particles, they don’t even stay the same, they “decay” and become other particles, inspiration for the above poem from the hybrid book I wrote for my PhD, and what if we were all allowed to disappear, which uses found text from Particle Physics: A Beginners Guide by Brian R Martin. Let’s just say that it’s complicated.

To me, this felt like both magic (relativity) and extremely creative fiction (particle physics). I began to lose faith in science as hard objective facts, which, looking back, is good because sciences are not, in fact the hard objective fact-based fields they’d presented to us at school. You might, if you were me, feel lied to. (Teachers told us about the three states of matter – solid, liquid and gas – and “forgot” to mention that there’s a fourth. Plasma. Did you know that? Lied seems like a strong word, but that’s how it felt to me. Did you feel lied to too?)

A certain type of lying felt to me, someone who grew up reading stories of every kind, similar to what a fiction writer does. If physicists could make up particles, if they could invent theories about long cars fitting into short garages, wasn’t this just another form of storytelling?

She left physics behind after her undergraduate degree – all her experiments were disasters, she always felt a failure, couldn't swallow the information being presented, wanted the Big Picture, but none was (then) forthcoming. And besides, she just wanted to write.

I didn’t hang around after the three years during which I didn’t understand a great deal of either maths or physics. I had learned of the existence not only of many possible particles as an undergrad but also the career option of “science journalist” (this was the early 90s, preInternet; if another human being didn’t tell you something, it was hard to find it out.) So science journalism was my next adventure.

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