For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us.
My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix the boiler in the basement, or tune a carburetor, and I could feel the time-space suck gathering itself beneath my feet, buckling my knees and shrinking my shoulders, tugging me toward the center of the Earth.
The cause of this peculiar effect, I now realize, wasn’t my father but the subject. I have had the privilege of receiving guided tours of some of the coolest technology on the planet—telescopes on Mauna Kea, tabletop gravity experiments at the University of Washington, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. I know they’re cool because my tour guides told me so. The passion of these guides—the scientists who know the instruments most intimately, who have nurtured them from spitballing sessions in the faculty lounge to $50 million, multi-ton, producing-results-in-peer-reviewed-journals reality—is very much parental. And if any scientists who have graciously given me tours happen to be reading this, thank you. Really. You’ve been great. You’ve given my tape recorder all the information I would eventually need in order to make sense of your babies. It’s not your fault that some of the time you were talking, I was thinking about the dinner of hot wings and beer I’d be having that evening at the dive bar down the street from my hotel.
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