What once seemed full now seems empty. What once seemed so durable now seems evanescent; what once seemed permanent now seems an accidental gathering of particles—gulls on the beach bound for dispersion. For at this level of analysis, this table, matter itself, has too many points of entry, too many microscopic toeholds, too many interstices, too much motion. It can be teased apart, the way manganese is teased by water from basalt; disassembled the way rock is disassembled by wind, layer by layer, atom by atom; the way iron oxides are dissolved and dispersed in the depths of a summer-stratified lake. This table can be turned to smoke, recycled back to carbon dioxide, sent on its way through the wild troposphere, if only enough heat is applied—a small flame will do. Against time and chance this genial gathering of molecules is nothing.
So I lean against the garden table, in the shade of the monkey puzzle tree. As furniture this bit of nothing is entirely adequate. Though now, in the wake of these reflections, it is less familiar.
As it turned out, the physics of Rutherford was only the beginning. Bohr had then to see the possible arrangements of the electron in hydrogen, its planetary paths around the nucleus, its circus leaps and arabesques through the void, the lines of visible light that it cast as a spectrum from eerie tubes in darkened rooms—red, green, blue-green, violet (these and no others). Matter and light linked; the hues of the Swiss schoolteacher Johann Balmer, caught in the net of numbers. Heisenberg, Born, Schroedinger, Dirac, Jordan—the quantum theorists of the “golden age”—had yet to capture the electron as wave, as barn swallow—here, there, everywhere, mere mist of charge. They had yet to give deepened logic to the elements, to the play and recurrence of their themes: the nobility of platinum and gold, the vigor of metallic potassium and cesium, the utter vivacity of fluorine and chlorine.
After two short years, from 1925 to 1927, you could at last understand why hydrogen behaved as it did, its vehement attachments, its liaisons with nearly everything. And the same with oxygen: Now you could rationalize its valence, its self-involvement as a diatomic gas, its undisguised propensity for metals. The red and orange rusts of iron followed exactly from this. And Mendeleyev’s elements, stacked in neat empirical columns, strung in long, sonorous rows, finally sounded, as Mendeleyev had known all along, like a lovely sonata.
So there is a trembling at the heart of matter, at its very core a disquiet. Things oscillate and turn, twist to breaking, collide and sunder, re-form anew. Generation comes from this. And decay. The way a lake rolls and stratifies and rolls again. All that we see is change. The shadow moving on the mountain is the Earth’s moving, the sun’s moving, the explosion of hydrogen against hydrogen far away becoming helium, casting light, spitting photons through vacuums of folded space. Light lands on the mountain, warms the stone, sets it to moving faster deep within itself. You can measure these things, you can feel them against your skin, recon their beginnings as events, as births and deaths by the billion. Warming yourself on a simple rock, you know catastrophe upon catastrophe and you are gladdened by it all, knowing this is the way it has to be, it can be no other. We were given only one world and this is it: reckless, dangerous, sweet, forever in flux. The sun’s death raises the brook in the hills, warms the stone, warms the skin, warms the very soul along its way.
This trembling cannot be stilled, not down at the farthest zero, not on the still life of canvas. Cézanne’s apples spilling on the table, spilling on the cloth. What is still? Not the apples Cézanne faced, brush in hand, waxed skin glowing red, yellow, green, like a spectrum. Not the painting, not now, not ever, not in reproduction. In the wine there is change, in the straw, in the cloth, in the simple fruit. You cannot hold on to it, it is always passing, always gone. Cézanne knew this.
This change has been written into things like a law: electrons on the wing, atoms shaking at their very core. Things build and fall apart. Only the pattern remains, only the name. The mountain is rising, is being worn down, never the same mountain. Look twice, you will not see what you saw before. The flanks, the peaks, the ridges. Even the pattern changes: this is the vision, and physics sings of it. And chemistry. And geology. And biology. Thus, from Rutherford’s physics and what came in its wake the great cycles of the world emerge as necessities. The vision of Ecclesiastes finds its theoretical underpinnings. Beauty and death are everywhere, and everywhere are entwined.
I think it was Varner who reminded me that this journey into the heart of matter, which scientists always associate with the early decades of the century, coincides neatly with the quest for the Pole. Scott’s Discovery Expedition, which came through these very gardens (1901-4), extended the human presence south to 82 degrees latitude during the very years that Planck was probing the discontinuity of physical process and Thomson was sketching the contents of the atom. These were the years of Soddy’s work on radioactivity, of Lenard’s on the photoelectric effect, and of Roentgen’s on X rays. By the time of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition, Einstein had explained the photoelectric effect, had shown that Brownian motion was the outcome of atomic and molecular events, and had published his epochal papers on special relativity. Bohr was only a year away from his quantum trilogy on the constitution of atoms and molecules.
There was a probing of limits in that age, an effacement of distance, a turning outward and in at the same time that shadowed forth a deeper need. This intellectual passion, this desire to take the measure of the world, to map the territory in which we dwell, shone so brightly that it all but masked the more common motives that were surely there as well. The pure ebullience that seemed to flow out of Thomson’s laboratory, the playfulness of Bohr, with his ping-pong and his animated walks through the Tivoli, the swagger of Rutherford in Manchester claiming of the electron, “why I can see the little beggars there in front of me as plainly as I can see that spoon,” all suggest a grand adventure under way, motivated by a simple need to know.
The warehouse stood in the Antarctic facility near the Christchurch airport. It was a cheerless, functional place. Cement floors, dark walls, cold even in spring, unless the wide doors were thrown open. Before this morning there had been a sense that the journey to the Ice was not yet real; that I would roll over soon, wake up, stare out the window of my own house into the gray Ohio sky, into the leafless redbuds, into my own backyard. But here, now, it became real.
There was a seascape on the wall, a black and white photograph, eight feet by ten, taken by William Curtsinger. In the photograph, a freezing southern ocean heaved, under gray skies, the bitter cold sea blending into low cloud, sky and water dissolving in gray. No ice floes, no pack ice, no research vessels. Only the sea itself. I knew the photograph must have been taken twenty years ago, when Curtsinger worked these latitudes. But it held an instant in time that would play itself over and over again; that at this very moment, as we dressed, was being relived. In this photograph, the southern ocean seemed to brook no intrusion. “Go home to your cities,” said the grim sea. “Go home.” And I once heard of a scientist who, having gazed into this scene for several minutes, thought better of the journey south, handed his clothing back, left the warehouse, and returned to Los Angeles.
Eventually we approached our plane. I climbed through the door into the hold, felt my way along the webbing and canvas seats toward the back. Pipes and wires ran the length of the fuselage, and huge crates, like some dark cordillera, tapered into the tail. I groped my way into a slot between two Navy men and sank into my seat. The plane shook. I took the yellow ear plugs, rolled them into points, and began to insert them into my ears. Mike was yelling at the top of his voice, but I could hardly hear him. “We’re finally going,” he shouted. “Finally. I want to get to the lakes.” I nodded and pushed the plugs in. Moments later we were