Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (14 page)

 

Thirty-Three

 

After settling into the room, we unfolded our camping chairs out in the courtyard and uncorked a bottle of red wine, eager to watch what the news had promised would be a minor but vivid meteor shower. As we watched the night sky, my father continued the cosmology lecture he'd started earlier in the day, one he'd touch on not only during our trip but for the next two decades, a conversation he resumes every chance he gets, even to this day.

“Billions of stars,” he said with his face turned up to the sky, his neck resting along the back of his chair. “We live in the Milky Way galaxy.” He pronounced it mill-kk-ee way, with such emphasis on the “l” and hard “k” that it sounded like a totally different word than “milky.”

“Yes, I know.”

“There are so many things you don't know. Can I tell you?”

As he spoke, I noticed the young woman from behind the check-in counter was now standing under the patio cover across from us in the courtyard, washing laundry by hand in a big tub. Out near the road, several men had gathered to socialize, some leaning back in their white plastic chairs, others propped against the open back of a flatbed truck. Although I could not make out the words, their conversation lilted in a jovial tone. Friday night, time to unwind.
Uno mas cerveza.

“All the stars you see are part of the Milky Way galaxy. Its name derives from the hazy band of white light in the sky, the milky clouds arching over us. The Milky Way is shaped like a disc,” he said, and motioned with his hands, “bulging at its bar-shaped core, with arms spiraling outward. It's one hundred thousand light-years in diameter, one thousand light-years thick, and contains four hundred billion stars.”

I filled our thermos camping mugs with wine.

“Our planet sits close to the inner rim of one of those arms,” he said, “which means we're near the outer edge of the galaxy itself. And even though we can't feel it, our galaxy rotates at four hundred miles per second.”

I imagined what it might be like to be the galaxy itself, if the galaxy were a conscious being—spinning around and around, a whirling dervish with arms extended, fanned outward into the abyss.

“Which means you're hurling through space at the same rate,” he said.

I sat up in my chair and spread a blanket on the ground. What better way to take in the narration than to gaze straight up into the heavens, like a narrated slide show? “I'm gonna lay down,” I said.

“No,” he said, referring to my grammar. “Lay and lie. Lay requires a direct object. So you lie down on the ground. One says, ‘I lie down, but I lay the book down.'”

“Whatever.”

“Say it: ‘I will lie down.'”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Yes, it matters,” he insisted.

We'd had this conversation twice today already. “It only matters in written speech. Nobody cares when you're talking out loud.”

“I care. You should care. My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Loretta Swift, she cared. And she had perfect grammar.”

“She died a spinster.” Which was true. We'd talked about Ms. Swift that day, too. “Now she's cold, dead, and alone.” I sat back up and gulped my mug of wine.

The woman doing laundry hunched over the tub, her shoulders rising and falling, her arms extended, submerged in water. The men out front whooped at what must have been the punch line to a story, their laughter punctuated with the pop-fizz, pop-fizz of
Tecate
.

“Say, ‘I lie down,'” he said.

I pointed to the sky. “There. A shooting star. Did you see it?”

“Yes. That's a meteor, though, not really a star. It's a fragment the size of a grain of sand burning up in the atmosphere. The stars are constant.”

“I know. More wine?”

He repeated almost word for word what he'd said in the car. “Before the Big Bang, there were no stars. The universe was created by a cosmic Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Before that, there was an infinity of nothingness. That's one of great mysteries: how we got from nothingness to somethingness. Starting with the chaos of radiation at over one hundred billion degrees Kelvin, in a universe initially smaller than a single atom, the universe started to expand. It blasted outward, and then cooled as it expanded. There was no actual bang because there were no ears to hear a bang.”

“How do you know there was no sound if you weren't there to hear it?” I wiseacred. But it fell on deaf ears.

“After a tenth of a second—are you listening?—just one tenth of one second—subatomic particles condensed from pure energy: electrons, positrons, neutrinos and antineutrinos, photons—by which time the temperature had cooled to thirty billion degrees Kelvin. By the time the universe was two seconds old, neutrons formed, and a neutron can decay into a proton and an electron, although not all of them did. By the time the universe cooled to four billion degrees, the first hydrogen atoms appeared, followed by heavy hydrogen and tritium; then, fusion of these particles produced helium atoms.”

I tried to imagine how lonely it must have been before the bang—how absolute nothingness, how complete solitude, how utter darkness and total seclusion would feel. And then all of a sudden: pop! The joy of activity—little nano-things buzzing about. But if I were the universe, and if I had been used to solitude—if all I had known was solitude—would I like the nano-things buzzing about, or would I find their chatter mundane and annoying?

“The first stars were huge, much larger than our sun, and they were composed almost entirely of hydrogen. No new hydrogen is formed in the stars. They fuse hydrogen in their cores to produce helium. When the hydrogen runs out, the tremendous temperature allows helium atoms to fuse up to iron. Atoms heavier than iron are not produced until the star explodes, at which time the heavy atoms are blown out into space, where they are incorporated into new stars. Our Sun is calculated to be a third-generation star because it has all the heavy atoms, up to uranium. Atoms heavier than uranium are so radioactive that they decay into lighter elements. The atomic number of uranium is 92. Atomic physicists have produced man-made transuranium atoms up to number 118. I have memorized the names of all 118 elements in the order of their atomic numbers. Reciting them each day is a kind of meditative exercise that gives me access to the throne of the Creator.”

“Huh.” It was all I could think to respond.

The woman rinsed her laundry using a hose and a second wash basin, then began passing it through rubber rollers to squeeze out the water with a contraption that reminded me of the old wringer washer my great-grandmother had used.

“You came from this nothingness, Carole. You originated in the Big Bang. Your very existence was improbable, in that each cosmic bifurcation that could have led to a no-Carole universe providentially favored you. There were millions of events that could have otherwise led to a no-Carole universe. For example, if gravity had been just 0.02 percent stronger, the stars would have burned themselves out before human life could evolve. Likewise, if gravity had been just 0.02 percent weaker, there would be no galaxies or stellar systems, no oceans and no people. It turns out that the entire cosmos is tailor-made to accommodate human evolution. This is a stunning insight called the anthropic principle. The observations of the physical universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it.”

“Um, okay.”

“I want you to understand this,” he said, referring to cosmic principles. He paused for a moment as he looked at the sky. “I'm sorry I couldn't send you to Stanford,” he finally said.

My father got his master's and doctorate at Stanford, yet never contributed a single penny toward my education. I worked full time (and my mother ran her credit cards sky high) to get through the local community college and state university. The possibility of a private school like Stanford never even entered my universe.

“A particular school is irrelevant. Anyway, I wouldn't have wanted to go, not at that time in my life. So, the chances of events?”

He continued with his previous train of thought. “If the Earth had no continents, there would be no you. If there had been no moon, there would be no you. If the Earth had not been struck by an asteroid sixty-five million years ago, there would be no humans or other primates. My point is that if any of the laws of nature or timing of cosmic historical events had been different, there would be no humans and no Carole.”

A pair of stray dogs meandered into the men's circle. One of the guys bent to pet them, and someone turned up the music, which seemed to come from a radio inside the hotel lobby, or perhaps a boom box just outside the arched corridor. The woman hung her laundry on a line inside the courtyard. She called something to one the men out front, and one of the men called something back.

“I'm so glad I can talk to you about these things, Carole, because my wife is not interested at all.” He often referred to Marina as “my wife,” even to me, though I'd known her some fourteen or fifteen years.

“Yes, that's what you always say.” I'd heard it a million times. “What's Marina interested in?”

“She likes to cook and clean. She's a wonderful cook, you know. Makes everything from scratch. And she keeps the house spotless, for which I am grateful. She treats me like a king. But she doesn't have an intellectual bone in her body.”

“What does she do when she's not cooking and cleaning?” Marina kept the house immaculate, all right, everything scrubbed and polished to a shine. She waited on my father hand and foot like a servant, hunched over the stove, her face moist with perspiration, stirring and serving from the heavy iron pots, stepping back and forth from the stove to the table and back to the stove again, while my father inhaled his food. She did it all, like a maid-cook-servant, never sitting to eat until my father had had his fill, until he'd licked his plate with his tongue and followed it up with one last shot of tequila.
More tortillas?
she'd ask him in Spanish. Even after three decades of living in the States with my father, she would never learn to speak English with ease, for she and my father spoke only Spanish at home.

“Well, she goes to the grocery store. Does laundry. That sort of thing.”

“What about for fun?”

“For her, that's fun.”

“That's not fun,” I said.

“She lives and breathes to serve my every need. That's what makes her happy, for which I am eternally grateful. I suppose I couldn't ask for a better wife.” He took in a deep breath. “Except that I wish she was interested in cosmology. And evolution and philosophy.”

We watched another shooting star.

“The Sun is a star at the center of the solar system,” he says. “It's more than a hundred times bigger than Earth, and it's made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.” He counted out each item on his fingers to make sure he got them all. “Hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of oxygen, carbon, iron, neon, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, and sulfur.”

 

Thirty-Four

 

When I reflect on that night now, I'm struck by my father's intellectual ability to reverse-engineer the cosmos, making me the focus of a Carole-centric universe—a rendition that, to be honest, I find both comforting and annoying. The Big Bang theory is, after all, the latest in a litany of creation myths, humankind's ongoing attempt to describe the ordering of the cosmos—we have, for example, creation-from-chaos stories like the Sumerians' Eridu Genesis, and the Greeks' Theogony of Hesiod; the Earth-driver type like the Cherokee story of the water beetle who formed the Earth from mud; emergence myths like the Mayan account of two gods, Kukulkan and Tepeu, who, after failing to create humans from mud, then wood, finally constructed man from maize; out-of-nothing explanations like the Judeo-Christian story of Genesis, or the collection of myths emanating from Ancient Egypt; world-parent tales like Rangi and Papa from the South Pacific, or the Hindu account of Mahapralaya and Svayambhu. Like my father, I could go on (and on and on), but my point is that we humans want to know where we came from. We want to know the origins of the universe. And for some of us, we want to know more about our family of origin. Where did I come from in the big and small scheme of things—I, the mysteriously generated organism that emanated from a long-ago crashing of atoms, but also I, the daughter of Bruce and Aranga Firstman.

My father's version of the origin of the universe intrigues me, not only because it includes me, by name even, and not only because it locates the temporarily clustered atoms that form the me I recognize in the mirror—the physical body I temporarily inhabit during this blip I call a lifetime—but also because this version accounts for the longevity of my atoms, the basic elements that spewed into existence billions of years before now, elements that will still exist long after my body's gone: a form of immortality, I suppose—not quite as comforting as the notion of heavenly eternal life, but at least the element-recycling plot of the Big Bang storyline is, well, it's something. Better than nothing.

I admire the fact that my father, through his professional pursuits—researching the anatomical features of modern scorpions in order to support Darwin's theory of evolution, thus contributing to the ongoing discourse of the creationist-evolutionist debate—adds to humankind's inquiry of nature, science, and God. That's big-potatoes stuff, the Strategy #2 approach in the Contents for Life conundrum.

I find comfort in the fact that my father and I share the same DNA.

If he can tackle big potatoes, then maybe I can, too.

I'm annoyed by the fact that my father and I share the same DNA.

If he can tackle big potatoes, then why didn't Raising a Family make his big-potatoes list?

Technically speaking, my father spent significantly more time with my half-sister, Liza, than he did with my brother and me. But the difference was in physical proximity rather than genuine day-to-day interest. Although my dad and Liza lived under the same roof for twenty years (until she died of cancer two days before her twentieth birthday), I don't think he was much more involved in her upbringing than he was in my brother's and mine. Children are seen and not heard. Children are the mother's responsibility. Don't bother me while I'm in my office at the far end of the house. Close the door on your way out.