What Light, One Light

The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World by Suzie Sheehy - June NF Book Club Read

The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World by Suzie Sheehy. Knopf, 2023. 313p (with notes and appendices)

Our nonfiction book club selection for June by accelerator physicist Dr. Suzie Sheehy is an ambitious book that explains what we know about the forces and matter of our universe. It does this by covering, blow by blow, how scientists involved with twelve remarkable experiments in the last century came by our knowledge. Piece by complicated piece Sheehy leads the lay reader along the brainy paths of the work of Nobel Prize winning physicists (beyond Einstein) while pausing to acknowledge their often unmentioned and mostly uncredited female colleagues. In an incredibly short span of time (since the early 20th century) a staggering amount of work has been done. Physicists have not only theorized what could be possible but designed massive experiments to measure the fundamental building blocks of our world and the forces that keep it all in concert.

Tracing advancements back to their earliest phases of simple wonder at the nature of our universe and curiosity as to how it all works, Sheehy highlights the research done for the pure sake of curiosity—for no corporate profit or special interest. Experimental researchers building on theoretical physicists and vice versa. She explains:

“This is how knowledge progresses. There is no sudden moment of inspiration, but we inch our way along in the dark anyway, often spending long stretches feeling out details, trying to establish a hold on some corner of this Universe we live in. Eventually, it clicks, and a new image of nature starts to take shape in our minds.”

I took a great deal of solace in this notion—that such breakthroughs were possible and such research efforts were undertaken by creative, curious, and ingenious people. It also felt like a very distant notion to me in our current historical moment. The book’s title serves as a neat summation of my question of the current state of affairs in the US. It’d need a slight tweak though: “What’s The Matter with Everything?”

I believe the answer may have something to do with vain arrogance, crass showmanship and corporate greed. There is so much to be depressed about in this hateful wrecking time. Dr. Ashish K. Jha wrote a recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe asserting that Trump’s slashing NIH, research, and education funding, coupled with aggressive intimidation towards international students will effectively end America’s participation in new breakthroughs. Research, in so far as it survives, will almost definitely have to move outside of America. It has taken the better part of a century for America be where it is in terms of scientific research, and it might only take a few years of heedless egotistical myopic hateful leadership to undo it. China, Europe, and Canada, are welcoming scientists with open arms. Creating a real and lasting brain drain from America. All of this is so unnecessary. Some might ask: why do we need new research when we have MRI & CT scans already? Why do we need farms if we have supermarkets? Really sad.

But back to the hope—because, ultimately, that’s what this book is about. Sheehy deftly underscores how interconnected everything (and everyone) is, even the various modern scientific disciplines beyond physics. How technological advancements in medicine and radar and remote controls and photo sensors were all made possible by this research as is so much of the magic of our modern world.

Sheehy did an admirable job of explaining complex theories and discoveries well enough for me to understand as I read, though my information retrieval ability immediately fell away. My head spun as I went along. I could have used a few illustrations I think but I was able to find some online. It’s amazing how well she was able to describe with the English language the forms and implications of discoveries in discipline such as quantum mechanics that is primarily composed of mathematics.

I tripped out on the fact that light is a wave and composed of real matter. And don’t get me started on cosmic rays. Jumbled is my brain with the various particles: muons, nuons, quarks (up, down, strange and whatever); and the built machines: cloud chambers, bubble chambers, linear accelerators, the synchrotron, the bevatron, cosmotron, cyclotron, Tevatron, Large Hadron Collider, Fermilabs, and CERN! I re-learned there are four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. I have a shot at retaining this information.

It’s truly amazing to realize that we can scan images of the entire insides of volcanos, Egyptian pyramids, and the human body thanks to the particle radiation research. That hospitals use nuclear technology that creates particles to make such scans.

The book is peppered with mind blowing factoids like:

• “If the atom was the size of a cathedral with the electrons as its walls, the nucleus [would be] the size of a fly. In between was nothing at all.”

• “…the volume of actual matter in each atom is so small that if you took all the matter from every human on Earth and lumped it together, you could fit it into a space no larger than a sugar cube.”

I learned polarized sunglasses work by blocking out all but the vertical wave forms of light—those waves bouncing off reflective surfaces such as car hoods and lakes diffuse out in all sorts of horizontal and diagonal angles. Can’t help but think we need more of those non-polarized waves going on in America. That we ought to maybe lean into the glare and turn towards the light as it truly is—bright, wild, and powerful. Maybe we’ve been blinded by the sideways selfish glare our multifarious individualisms? We’ve lost sight of our commonalities and forgotten or abandoned our connections. I don’t know exactly how as a group we can restore those connections. There are small examples of folks selflessly giving to the betterment of humanity. For example, Tim Berners'-Lee. Perhaps hard science needs to open itself up to softer sciences? For example the disciplines of social science dedicated to understanding social change would be worth examining and incorporating.

As an employee of CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, invented what we know of as the world wide web by coming up with HTML, HTTP, and URLs, in order for scientist to be better able to communicate and analyze the enormous amount of data the Large Hadron Collider was generating (in search of something called a Higgs Boson (I have no idea what that is)). Then Berners-Lee and CERN gave it all away for free. The uses we’ve put the internet to haven’t always been advancements for humanity, but the internet as a whole has changed the fundamental order of our society—I believe (on the whole) for the better.

Sheehy hits on this notion as well in her closing chapter called “Future Experiments.” A staggering amount of technology of our modern world came about from research that wasn’t designed for that purpose. Unfortunately, today we have politicians, think tanks and funders who limit funding to research oriented towards tangible results or their own special interest. Sheehy warns against this misguided myopia. True breakthroughs and discoveries don’t work that way or on that timescale. I usually refrain from quoting the end of a book in a review, but I can’t help but share a little bit of the hope and optimism that the book brims over with—and I don’t think Dr. Sheehy would mind. She lays out what she sees as the “three ingredients we need in order to face the challenges of the future: the ability to ask good questions, a culture of curiosity, and the freedom to persist.” And there’s still work to be done. We only know about 4% of what’s in the universe—there’s so much antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, etc. that we know nothing about.

One concrete example of using science and technology for the betterment of humanity is as Sheehy notes the idea of using a system like LHC’s Grid to replace the commercial (proprietary) cloud storage solutions currently available. Having this as a global well-maintained public infrastructure (like the web) would allow for that much more sharing of information especially because we would be able to bring information between systems without being locked into proprietary system software (.doc or .pdf or event versions of the same software!)

I used the draft title “What Light” for this post as a tribute to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet “What light through yonder window breaks?….” thinking of the mind-blowing nature of light—remember, light it is matter! And studying the matter of light helped science understand how sub-atomic particles work. I later remembered the Wilco song “What Light,” (off Sky Blue Sky) and the title seemed all the more appropriate.

Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky Cover Art

Jeff Tweedy sings about bringing forth “the light” from within yourself to make whatever art (or music, or essay, etc.) you feel called to make and release ownership once it’s out in the world.

And if the whole world’s singing your songs
And all of your paintings have been hung
Just remember what was yours
Is everyone’s from now on

And that’s not wrong or right
But you can struggle with it all you like
You’ll only get uptight

And there’s a light (what light)
There’s a light (one light)

Reminds me of Lewis Hyde’s notion in his book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World that the purpose of art is to be a gift to the rest of humanity. It makes it tricky for an artist to feed herself—Hyde goes deep into the intersection between art and commerce. Certainly a profound subject for another post.

The scientists in Sheehy’s book, much like artists, worked in pursuit of achieving a better understanding of the universe. Individual egos aside, they held no ulterior motive for the application of what they were discovering—that was never the point. Many magical, mysterious, grand and terrible things have been enabled because of their research—from MRIs to the atomic bomb. Sheehy notes:

We are facing unprecedented challenges: climate change, endangered biodiversity, water scarcity, energy demands, ageing populations and, of course, pandemics and infectious diseases. With such constant news worthy threats to our existence, no media outlet is going to remind us daily of the long-term trend that in fact humans are living longer and better lives, because we take this fact for granted. Which is odd, because there is no guarantee that we will live longer and better than our ancestors.

If we hope to continue forward and make discoveries and then use them to better quality of life for all of humanity, we will need the kind of leadership and determination Sheehy outlines in her wonderful book: inquisitive in nature, ambitious in scope, humble in the grand scheme of things, heartening in all matters.