Around the time of my seventh birthday I spent a while in hospital and as a consequence a friend persuaded her mother to buy me a book, Cherry Ames at Hilton Hospital. It was the first book I ever read that wasn't a picture book. I was engrossed. Not only did I learn all about amnesia and how to treat it (late 50's style), but I became an instant avid reader. I would visit the library regularly with my younger sister. It was only down the road and across the park. On the way home I would get my sister to walk in front of me so I didn't need to move my eyes from the page. (Only the other day I saw a young boy leaving the local branch library here doing exactly the same thing with his mother, who walked ahead laden with books.) I wanted to read all the children's fiction. The only trouble was that, although we were allowed to have out six books at a time, only two could be regular fiction and the remaining four had to be non-fiction. I soon discovered the loopholes. The library had one bookcase devoted to the classics and a non-fiction card sufficed for these. I generally found them quite heavy going. The Lady of the Camellias, for example, went way over my head, and I didn't even follow The Three Musketeers completely. However the non-fiction section that included books on myths and legends from around the world was full of magic. I couldn't get enough.
All the while, I should say, I was regularly attending Sunday school where we had the story of just about a miracle a week. This magic didn't satify me – God could do anything. I wanted magic that was in the domain of ordinary people, magic that I could experience myself.
When I was nine we moved town to a new library, a new collection of books. I learned how to use the libray catalogue so that I could find what I wanted. This was not always successful. The Talisman Ring turned out to be a boring, or so I thought at the time, romance novel. (A few short years later I was to change my opinion about that.) I did discover the Salem witch trials. As horrifying as this was, I clung to the fact that responsible adults, or at least adults who ought to have been responsible, firmly believed in witchcraft, so it must be real. And it wasn't just confined to Salem. Also, like millions of others, I was led into an exploration of Tibetan Buddhism through the works of Lobsang Rampa the author of The Third Eye. I became a believer in reincarnation.
My grandfather had drowned at the age of twenty-six in 1932. In her own quest for a way of contacting him, my grandmother turned to spiritualism and Theosophy. According to Theosophers: “Devotion to truth, love for all living beings, and commitment to a life of altruism are the marks of the true Theosophist.” My grandmother taught me that all religions are just different facets of the truth. She was a hairdresser and as a young child I sometimes accompanied her when she made home visits for housebound women. I also went with her delivering meals for Meals-On-Wheels. I think she enjoyed the company and the old people liked to see young children. I did not think much of the food though – I particularly remember the disgusting prunes in rice custard! My grandmother showed me a book containing photographs of fairies taken by a couple of young cousins. These are known as the Cottingley fairies. They were finally exposed as a hoax when one of the, by then, old, ladies admitted the fairies were paper cutouts propped up with hat pins or suspended on fine threads. Modern image processing a few years before the admission had indeed revealed some threads. At the time I first saw them there was no solid evidence that these photographs were not authentic. I found them intriguing but I kept an open mind.
Meanwhile as I progressed at school I was discovering more and more about the magic of mathematics. The world of numbers was opening up to me. And it wasn't just numbers. With a very few basic axioms and some definitions, the application of logic suddenly created the whole of geometry. It was mind-boggling and extremely powerful.
I still continued to search through the libraries. In my school library I found The Man Who Was Magic by Paul Gallico. This is a book that I would like to read again. It was about a man who really was magic in a town of magicians who performed standard magic tricks. Of course, I had no illusion that this novel would reveal real magic to me. The book did suggest that nature is magic and magic is all around us. This is something I was coming to discover for myself. I started reading a lot of science fiction and historical novels. I did not expect to find magic there either but they did allow me to explore a lot of what-if scenarios. What would happen to society if .. if, for example, someone created a machine that could duplicate any object at no cost. Maybe that one should have been called “economic fiction”.
I was the only person in my family still going to church when I stopped attending at around the age of fourteen. It was not for any big principle but simply because we moved again. However I didn't stop thinking and philosophizing about God and religions.
My search for magic was now leading me into the realm of the supernatural and the paranormal. My boyfriend at the time, my husband now, and I even tried a series of experiments in telepathy. I thought that if ever two minds were in tune it ought to have been ours. Needless to say we had no success.
I was also beginning to discover how magical the real world was. When I went to university I knew I wanted to study science and mathematics. It was only as I learnt more that I was particularly drawn to physics. Physics is real. It is not speculative but must demonstrate that it describes the real world. Physics is the study of the most simple and basic properties of this amazing universe that we are part of. It covers everything from smallest subatomic particles and the forces which glue them together to the vast reaches of space where we are able to literally look back in time to almost when the universe came into existence. This is precisely what the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do. Just as we think we are getting to the bottom of things it always seems that the universe throws up surprises to show how little we know. In the twentieth century it was quantum mechanics and relativity, which have still not been entirely knitted together, and now it is the great mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is the term used to describe the large proportion (27%) of matter or energy that we cannot see but which we can “weigh” by looking at the motions of the matter we can see. Dark energy (68%) is something even more mysterious – it doesn't behave like anything else we know. It has a constant density even as the universe expands. It seems to come into existance and cause space to expand, or maybe the causality is the other way around. I am now working mainly in x-ray astronomy which is able to capture some of the most high energy events that take place as the universe evolves. At lower energies, which means lower temperatures, we get atoms which are able to bond together to form compounds and suddenly we are in the field of chemistry. As we get more complex molecules we find that life emerges and we are now looking at biology: ourselves and our fellow lifeforms. People are amazingly complex, as you all know first hand, and, to ourselves, exceedingly interesting. I have always been interested in language and have now spent some time studying spoken language, one aspect of human complexity.
We went to England for my husband to do his PhD in astronomy. While we were there we became friends with a fellow student, Bernard Carr, who was in fact one of Stephen Hawking's students. Because of his own interest in the subject Bernard later became involved some serious scientific investigations into phenomena such as reports of ghosts. Despite his very best efforts all he was able to do was disprove every case he could investigate fully, much to his own great disappointment.
I have become comfortable with the idea that when I die I will be no more. I promise not to haunt you! I admit that I find it less comfortable thinking about the the end of the human race. Perhaps it is for that reason that one of my favorite stories is a short story by Isaac Asimov in which he describes the evolution of computers as the universe slowly dies until the last star blinks out. By then the whole universe has been integrated into one massive omnipotent computer. And then the computer says “Let there be light!”
Having children unexpectedly gave me a totally fresh view of the world around me, a perspective I have not lost. I found new wonders every day as I introduced these new people to this place they had never been in before. I can remember one day seeing a new-born foal as we were driving somewhere and trying to draw my children's attention to it. They barely looked up from the books they were reading in the back seat. Did I used to be like that?
Now I find magic everywhere I look. For example, one thing that always amazes me is that bees and humans, who could not be more different animals, are both able to appreciate the exquisite beauty of flowers. I can see no evolutionary reason for this. Flies, for example, don't think the same way.
Above the entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory, which is the physics department of Cambridge University and which is where I worked for nine years, is an inscription which reads “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.” I always remembered it as “Great are the works of the Lord, sought out by all those who have wonder therein”. In either case it is expressing the view that this universe is an awesome place. Looking up at the sky on a dark night on my mother's farm, or in any dry and dark place, truly fills you with awe as the stars blaze overhead and reach down to the ground in every direction. You feel as if you are right among them.
I want my children and their children, and all your children's children's children to be able to continue to experience this wonderful world that we all know today and knew when we were children.
That is all I have to say for now. Thank you for listening.
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