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Join date: 15 de nov. de 2022

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A flood of ideas came rushing in.I did not know what to express first.On my very first day,I had discovered a colleague interested in catastrophe theory,my own specialty within the mathematics of singularities.Schlimmer could become my gateway into the mainline of mathematical cosmology.He had worked at Princeton,home of some of the century’s greatest cosmologists.I stuttered as I explained that our research passions overlapped.He looked at me with surprise,as if just discovering I was there.He smiled his big,charming smile.You should join our seminar,he said,dropping his cigarette and snuffing it with his shoe.A handful of professors across disciplines and at different stages of their careers would present a synopsis of their research interests.The panel took place in the University of Puget Sound’s Memorial Fieldhouse where the basketball games were played.A thousand students waited in folding chairs set up on a brown plastic tarp to protect the shiny floor from scratches.As mentioned above,my particular research focused on the mathematical structure of the cosmic microwave background,the light that had been released in the explosion of the universe’s beginning.My plan for the panel was to sketch out some of the current approaches to the radiation and indicate my own particular hypothesis.Dolores Maro,from the Classics Department,started us off.Stooped forward slightly,she waited at the podium until her charisma quieted the last of the restless students.She began by clearing her throat,then filled the room with a voice powerful enough to reach a large crowd even without electronic amplification.Professor Maro described the challenge of translating the words of ancient Greek poets such as Hesiod into modern English.A translator needed to penetrate into Hesiod’s mind in order to understand what he meant when he wrote of primal light or other realities.A successful translation awoke the same feelings in a contemporary human that Hesiod awoke in his fellow Greeks three millennia ago.Hesiod depicted primal light as divine,but such designations were no longer viable in the modern world with its certainty that no Greek divinities inhabit the universe.To say to the modern mind that light is divine is to say nothing at all.Maro concluded that Hesiod’s beautiful poem lived in a realm beyond the capacities of the modern industrial mind with its materialist fixations.She summarized her point by saying,To ask a contemporary human to understand Hesiod would be like asking an ant to learn calculus.After this gloomy conclusion,with a handful of students clapping politely,Jeffrey Bland from the Department of Chemistry took over and enlivened the basketball gymnasium with his extravagant claims concerning the benefits of what he called orthomolecular medicine.But I was too mesmerized by Dolores Maro’s remarks to listen.Both by what she had said concerning Hesiod’s concern with primal light,and by what she had said concerning the shrunken modern mind.Though I had been ready to describe several mathematical approaches to the singularities associated with the cosmic microwave background,Professor Maro’s talk had conjured something new in me.A feeling,an excitement.I explained that scientists had been studying this light for fourteen years since its discovery in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson working at Bell Labs in Holmdel,New Jersey.Now that we knew how to look,we could examine this primordial light of the universe as it landed on Earth.We had learned to decipher its signals so we could piece the information together like archeologists reassembling stone shards into the statues that once graced the palaces of ancient civilizations.But there was a difference.With us,the shards were not bits of marble but waves of light from the beginning of time.I became more exuberant as I spoke.I imagined myself out there in their midst,hearing all this for the first time.It is astonishing,I said.This light has been traveling toward us for billions of years,and now,for the first time in human history,we can see it as it arrives freshly,here on Earth,after this long,long journey.It is right here in this gymnasium.We are bathed in it,moment by moment.If you cup your hands together as if getting water from a stream,approximately seven thousand photons of light from the dawn of time pass through the space between the palms of your hands each instant.Do you see what this means?We are in physical contact with the very origin of the universe.I’m not making this up.It’s empirically verified.We are the first humans in the history of the world to know how the universe started.Those photons of light left the origin and roared through galaxy after galaxy and trillions of stars and on and on before finally reaching Earth.The primal light is right here.That’s what we’re studying.This was my first public talk.I had taught mathematics classes as a grad student,but I had never stood in front of so many people in my life.With each sentence I had grown more excited,certain the students would be just as thrilled as I was.But the silence that greeted me when I finished showed they weren’t.It was so surprising.When I got halfway back,the applause began.As it rolled forward to the stage,I sat down next to Professor Maro.I tried to pick up the ice water.My right hand was shaking.I used both hands to carry the glass to my lips.Water spilled down my cheek.Dolores Maro turned to me.Was that an act of cunning or confusion?She touched her nose with her index finger.Pardon me?Your metanarrative,she said.My what?Science über alles.Was it my reference to Hesiod’s primal light that ignited your attack?I was stunned speechless.I had no idea what she was talking about.For the last six years I had been buried in mathematical equations surrounded by professors and graduate students who lived inside the mathematics.We had social gatherings,yes,but even then the same small groups formed and quickly sank into a festival of mathematical ideas.No one had ever conversed with me using the terms Professor Maro had spoken.There were no hard feelings on her part.She patted the back of my hand and smiled.We should have a conversation,she said.

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