An astrophysicist's superpowers
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My mother, the family scientist, had earned degrees in chemistry and biology in an era when few women ventured into such fields. To impart her love of these disciplines to my brothers and me, she wove science into our everyday lives. In our kitchen, for example, rather than write 'sugar,' 'salt,' or 'baking soda' on containers, she wrote the corresponding chemical formulas. The resulting mishaps were inevitable. For my 8th-grade graduation, I baked a chocolate cake, mistaking a dusting of baking soda for powdered sugar. Only the music teacher stoically consumed her portion without remark. The remainder of the cake found its way into the waste bin.
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My aspirations for my future evolved with mercurial swiftness. At 15, I envisioned becoming an oceanographer. Subsequently, a journalist. After watching Woody Allen's 'Manhattan,' I briefly contemplated filmmaking. Upon learning that Marsili — Europe and the Mediterranean's largest submarine volcano — lay concealed within the Tyrrhenian Sea, volcanology beckoned.
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So when the moment arrived to decide what to study at university, I felt unprepared. What kind of life did I envision for myself? A single physics lecture with a remarkable professor decided for me. To this day, my former classmates and I reminisce about how deeply this eccentric figure's lectures influenced us. His chalk appeared to move on its own across the emerald chalkboard, producing symbols that conveyed narratives and possibilities. In that moment, I recognized what I had been seeking: the practice of posing questions that transcend initial responses; experiencing the intellectual exhilaration that accompanies the pursuit of understanding; and occasionally — gloriously — achieving it.
If I had worried that pursuing literature or philosophy would keep my focus too inward, I saw that physics offered me the opportunity to externalize my focus and establish a certain distance from myself. I was a diminutive and ephemeral point in an indifferent and silent cosmos — yet a cosmos I could endeavor to comprehend. This feeling gave me a profound sense of liberation. To immerse myself in the infinitely small, where quantum mechanics prevails, or in cosmic spaces governed by general relativity is to leave the reality we know behind, to learn the pleasure of speaking mathematics, and to become aware of the very thin line that separates the possible from the impossible.
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Consider time. We perceive it as absolute, beating with a universal rhythm, identical everywhere, for all. Einstein comes and crashes this idea. Time becomes relative, flowing at different rates depending on motion and gravity. A famous example: If one twin travels close to the speed of light into space while the other stays on Earth, the traveling twin will return younger than the earthbound one, because for her time literally passed more slowly.
And it is not just that. The closer you are to a gravitational field, the more slowly time will flow. Time therefore passes more slowly at sea level than on mountains or on an airplane or on the International Space Station. Time also dramatically slows down near massive objects like black holes. Hypothetically speaking, just one year spent orbiting 330 feet away from the horizon of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, translates to 11,000 years on Earth. Hard to believe, yet it's so. (This physicist's advice for anti-aging: better to run on the beach than sit enjoying the healthy air on the mountain.)
The speed of light, finite and constant, also gives us the superpower to peer into the past.
Magical
. The red disk of the setting sun that you see on the horizon actually disappeared eight minutes ago; that's how long it takes light to travel the roughly 93 million miles that separate us from the sun. The twinkling lights that dot our starry skies are flashes of remote time that shine. They are many layers of time overlapping in a single darkness. And with the James Webb Space Telescope we can observe galaxies formed when the universe was just a toddler.
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Believe it or not, sometimes we can also see into the future. For example, because space missions have measured the position and velocity of some two billion stars in our galaxy, we can predict how starry nights will look for the next 1.6 million years.
My decision to study physics was, above all, this: it offers the opportunity for a journey into a wonderland of things that don't seem possible; privileged access to otherwise inaccessible worlds; and the profound sense of belonging to a reality that transcends yet encompasses us. In other words, a great adventure.
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