(Almost ) ALL MY HEROES ARE PHYSICISTS

I can’t believe I just casually did a Google search on John A. Wheeler a few days ago. I mean, I like physics, but it’s not like I keep running tabs on all the main players. We never had physicists on baseball cards in my childhood. If we had, we’d’ve attached them to the spokes of our bicycles with clothes pins so that our Radio Flyers would sound like Harleys on Valium while we pummeled Einstein to shreds. So the last time I saw Wheeler was on the cover of Discover magazine about five years ago in purposeful silhouette at the age of ninety-one, fading to black. This is the guy who coined the term ‘black hole’ and did much to revive relativity (and Einstein) and restore it to respectability from the sidelines where quantum mechanics and particle physics had relegated it. He’s also the one who explained general relativity simply as, “Space-time tells matter how to move. Matter tells space-time how to curve,” which I always thought was quite helpful. He also helped invent the atomic and hydrogen bombs and supported the Vietnam War, but that’s another story; after all Chomsky supported Pol Pot way beyond reasonable deadlines.

So I Googled Wheeler only to find he’d died but a few days before. All you theoretical physicists out there already knew that, of course, but I’m not a theoretical physicist, though if I had it to do over… Physicists are like athletes; they usually give their best at an early age and then spend the rest of their lives in eclipse. Schrodinger’s anno mirabilis at age 39 in 1926 was the great exception. Einstein had his at age 26. I know people still taking classes at age 39. Wheeler, student of Bohr and teacher of Feynman, lasted until age 96, beyond many of his students, like the linguist Franz Boas outlasting both his student Sapir and Sapir’s student Whorf. Wheeler was thus the last link to the golden age of physics, Einstein, and the quantum superheroes Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, etc. So now the torch passes to a new generation of physicists and the presiding elder now is the particle superhero Murray Gell-Mann, followed closely by the black hole and big bang biggies Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth, among others patiently waiting in line. Fortunately there’s also the ubiquitously photogenic and always smiling Michio Kaku, who explains it for us homies, because the rest of these guys seem pained to string words together into a sentence, apparently more comfortable with equations, though understandable with Hawking’s Lou Gehring disease. Kaku probably has a booking agent. You can find Gell-Mann’s and Guth’s phone numbers on-line. Can you believe that? I’m thinking of calling them. Murray Gell-Mann wears a tie hand-painted by Jerry Garcia. He apparently doesn’t care to be top-dog physicist either, since he also devotes his twilight years at the Santa Fe Institute trying to organizing linguists into finding the protolanguage that was mother to them all. That’s pretty cool. A lot of people would say it’s a waste of time. I wouldn’t. It’s just the flip side to ‘theories of everything,’ and that was you-know-who’s Big Waste. How many linguists are trying to explain the Big Bang?

If I had liked math more maybe I’d have gotten into physics before I became old and senile, but I doubt it. My high school didn’t even have a physics department, but that’s not the reason. The problem was the math, not that I wasn’t any good at it, but I just didn’t like it. I actually scored quite well on the math SAT, far higher than the verbal component, but that’s not what I wanted, was it? Or maybe it wasn’t what I needed. I needed explanations, and math didn’t do it. Still it’s strange for a Rankin County spelling bee prodigy who’s at least better than average at foreign tongues. There’s an idiot savant on TV who claims to be able to speak twenty foreign languages though he tends to not be able to find the bathroom and pisses himself regularly, but I doubt it. For one thing, on closer examination, he’s only actually fluent in three or four, so that’s no big deal, about like the average Belgian or Chinese Malay. For another thing, his Chinese tones are shit, which proves that idiot savants are still human, if nothing else. Mostly I imagine it’s just the long detour and fruitless path that foreign languages have been on since Chomsky decided that they were somehow magically ‘acquired,’ not learned, and which the Rosetta Stone language programs expect you to learn through reverse osmosis and parrot-chat. I’d like to see how much Hindi you learn by clicking merrily through the Rosetta programs with no knowledge of the Devanagari alphabet.

There’s more than one advantage to having a thousand channels on your TV screen. In addition to getting some good old-fashioned mind-candy as entertainment, a thousand movies giving you other people’s lives rather than your own, you might just learn something. I’m not talking Link TV, either. That’s good, an eye on the world, but mostly politics. I’m not sure why it comes on the religion frequencies. No, I’m more interested in Science TV, and even the NASA channel, in addition to old favorite Nat Geo and the History Channel, which seems to have moved beyond Hitler into the myths we live by, which is good, since Discovery has gone busting them as fast as they can. You can hardly read books on science anymore, since they’re out of date by the time they’re published. Internet’s good if you can trust your sources, but beware self-proclaimed intellectuals with more paper on the walls of their bathrooms than their offices. TV fills in the gap nicely. A good documentary beats YouTube or MeeVee any day, and it’s nice to see real scientists get their fifteen minutes of fame, however awkward or gawky or geeky they might just be. Some of them are a real hoot, and it’s not easy to remain unaffected by their infectious enthusiasm for their subjects, whether it be linguistics, DNA or physics, not coincidentally MY favorite three subjects. The personalities are not the important thing, of course, the information is, information that just might save our lives or our sanity or our planet or something.

Physicists just may be on to something big. They’ve diddled-off and dry-humped a long time since the last REALLY BIG THING, black holes, whose existence has only recently been confirmed (sort of) with the advent of the Hubble telescope. Sure there was a lot of hype when new particles were being discovered (sort of) every year, but that was not much different from the race to discover atomic elements a century before, and ended up asking as many new questions as it answered. Who can really keep up when they start introducing such bizarre concepts as ‘strangeness’ and ‘flavors’ in the actions of quarks, leptons, muons, gluons, etc. anyway, not to mention the elusive illusive allusive tachyon? So since then particles have been re-invented as strings with frequencies and dimensions to boot, and when strings get together of course first thing you know you’ve got membranes, whatever, anything’s better than ‘dark matter’ which starts looking more epicyclical every day, if you could only reconcile it with black holes, relativity, i.e. Quantum Gravity, the Holy Grail. In other words, why is gravity so weak in Nature and so… so… so EVERYTHING in a Black Hole? M-theory is now seriously considering parallel universe(s), which is where we come in, and everything ‘solid’, at the intersections of their planes, the dimensions of gravity, electromagnetism, and atoms, among others, mixing and matching, agreeing to disagree, and getting on with the business of reality. Next thing you know, they’ll even be suggesting that one of those dimensions is mathematically equivalent to what their metaphysical bastard cousins have always intuited as the spiritual world, the supernatural made natural, ready for a comeback as science. Let’s see a linguist do that. That’s why I like physicists; they could do that if they want. They’re smarter than me. Don’t you hate it when you read something and get the sneaking suspicion that the writer knows less than you?