How we grew each other's hearts and schemes of home

[sovay]

I got up early this morning for a COVID-19 test so that I can make my doctor's appointment on Friday. I would prefer not to have to see a doctor at all, but once again it turns out that being kept from regular access to medical care is bad for me. I am still not exactly sleeping and it means I'm not doing much of anything else except working, although I did eat some very nice Taiwanese food this afternoon and discover to my surprise that a pair of jeans I bought off the internet actually more or less fit. I have moved on to watching the 2005 BBC Bleak House, which I remember my father highly recommending to me at a point in time when I just couldn't picture anyone but Denholm Elliott as John Jarndyce. I am in fact enjoying it. I may also be maxing out my capacity to watch TV. I'm treating it as an experiment. While visiting my mother for purposes of honeycake-baking earlier this week, I ran into the neighbor with whom I had discussed the radio telescope I built in high school and Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957); this time he wanted to know if I had read Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland (1884) and then he asked what sort of science I did nowadays. I had to explain that I am not professionally a scientist any more than I am professionally a classicist or professionally a musician or any of the other things I seem to look like to people until they get close enough, although I did at least remember to tell him that I am professionally a writer. I know part of it is the beginning of the academic year, which I am starting to feel I will have to be actually dead not to feel like a ghost-shiver from the wrong universe over. (I hope that one is less plague-ridden and/or on fire. Somebody should get to be.) I know the sleeplessness never helps and I have been rummaging around in parts of my head that were likely to produce this reaction. I think I'd feel a lot better if I could write a poem about it. But for that I would have to be healthier and sleep more, which is where we came in.

Comments

[sovay]

Wow, you know, looking over that entry, I see I even read it closely enough to have commented on it, but just now I read the part about how the hydrogen line can reveal the shape of the galaxy as if for the first time, and I'm thinking I must not have paid attention properly first time around, or else I would have said something, because it's amazing.

Thank you! I am very fond of the hydrogen line.

I'm curious about so many things: how (and I mean this in the most pedestrian and yet fine-grained sense) did you come to think of doing it?

I don't have an answer that doesn't sound tautological: I wanted to know if it could be done. If small student-built radio telescopes were common when I was in high school, I didn't know about them. I was interested in astronomy. I knew about the hydrogen line and I knew it was how we learned what kind of galaxy we live in. I can't remember any kind of eureka moment: I just became curious whether it was the sort of thing I could have discovered for myself. I was lucky in that I had the resources to find out.

And how did it come to be that you were able to carry a project over two years? What was the course, or was it an independent study?

It was my science project. We were supposed to do one every spring; they could be entered in the school science fair and then, if they were rated highly enough there, in progressively widening and more competitive rounds of science fair. The slime mold went to the regional level. No one was quite as interested in the radio telescope, as I recall, which still strikes me as weird: I thought it was technically much more complicated. All I did with the slime mold was raise it in a terrarium in my basement, feed it E. coli and photograph it, and draw conclusions about its life cycle. (I couldn't find any information at the time on the thing I wanted to know, namely whether Dictyostelium discoideum could be kept indefinitely at the roving amoeba stage if plentifully supplied with food—it was known that starvation induced the myxamoebae to secrete cyclic AMP and aggregate into the multicellular slug which wanders around and presently roots itself, sends up a stalk, and releases a fruiting cloud of spores that hatch into amoebae, starting the whole cycle all over again—or whether at some pre-programmed point they would aggregate and reproduce regardless of their resources. I discovered it was the latter. Even well-fed Dicty eventually grow up. I was asked last year if I ever published my findings; the answer was no, because it never occurred to me. Nearly twenty-five years having passed, I assume someone else has done so since.) I think squishy science went over with the judges better than the techy kind.

And was this an exceptional thing, or was Lexington High School just filled with highly motivated, persistent, imaginative students?

I think the answer to the second half of your question is yes, because my friend group was full of interesting people, and I have no idea about the first. It might have been slightly unusual. I was—and in many ways remain—very bad at evaluating that sort of thing. I never like the memes that ask you to list your weird habits or identify something you've done that no one else you know has. I have no idea what other people have done that I just don't know about. I never know that anything I'm doing is weird unless someone else tells me. It's normal for me or I wouldn't be doing it.

one tries to make a lemon battery (or is it a potato battery? Or can you do it with either?)

You can do it with either. You can also run a charge through a pickle and get a low-rent, flickery, kosher sodium lamp.

Even processes: the first time I tried boiling down maple sap to make maple syrup, I was amazed when, yes, as promised, it really did work. Even for me, even in my kitchen.

Yes! It's really exciting.

--Yes, I can understand that. Really what you need is to feel the truth of what we're insisting for yourself.

I work on it. Sometimes it feels true. Too much of the time it doesn't and I feel by now it really should. I shouldn't walk around with this kind of damage for the rest of my life.

--That must be extremely dispiriting, and I'm sorry.

I'm not even sure it's true. It's just something I'm afraid of.

("I will tell you a story . . . As a child I was apprenticed to the mightiest magician of all, the great Nikos, whom I have spoken of before. But even Nikos, who could turn cats into cattle, snowflakes into snowdrops, and unicorns into men, could not change me into so much as a carnival cardsharp. At last he said to me, 'My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known. Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the moment, and even I can find no way to set it right. It must be that you are meant to find your own way to reach your power in time; but frankly, you should live so long as that will take you. Therefore I grant it that you shall not age from this day forth, but will travel the world round and round, eternally inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are. Don't thank me. I tremble at your doom.'")