Review: "Properties Of Light"

Properties of Light is a dark and beautiful novel (set in a school suspiciously like Princeton) about three physicists whose lives unravel as they struggle to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity. Rebecca Goldstein really pulled off a hat trick, turning physics into first-rate fiction.

Properties Of Light author Rebecca Goldstein pages 244 publisher Houghton Mifflin rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-395-98659-1 summary Physicists seek truth and find tragedy.

So the formidable problem is this: reconciling quantum physics with relativity theory still awaits a solution.

You might be surprised that a writer could build a dark, cold, strikingly imaginative novel out of that dilemma. Or a bitter love story right out of the darkside of academe. But Rebecca Goldstein, an author of four novels (The Mind-Body Problem among them) and the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, manages to turn physics into first-rate fiction.

It isn't surprising that physicists have captured creative imaginations for years, from Jeanette Winterson to Michael Frayn's shockingly successful Broadway play "Copenhagen," about the famed World War II Bohr-Heisenberg encounter (the two devoted ex-colleagues could never agree on what did or didn't take take place), the purpose of which has had physicists and historians buzzing for decades.

After all, physicists are seeking nothing less than the meaning, nature and source of life.

The book doesn't waste the mystery and importance of its subject -- it's part thriller, part tragedy, both lyrical and surreal. The story, set in a college that is obviously inspired by Princeton, revolves around two physicists, Samuel Mallach and his young colleague Justin Childs. The two scientists, in the tradition of physicist friendships, have devoted their lives to trying to reconcile the contradictory claims of quantum mechanics and relativity, but in this almost-eerie tale, their well-meaning collaboration is doomed. This, also, is a deep strain in the history of physics: oddball, brilliant seekers ignored, celebrated, obsessed, consumed by their determination to unlock some of the biggest secrets in the universe. No field of scientific inquiry has higher stakes, or greater or more complex minds trying to grapple with them.

Appropriately, this story plays around with time, and narrative, as signalled by Goldstein: "whereby particles, having once been subjected to quantum entanglement, will forever after continue to assert, even when widely separated, instantaneous influences over one another ..." This book has a brooding, knowing, almost poetic tone, even as the lives of the characters begin to unravel, and the writing about physics is both remarkable and accessible.

"In the beginning," says one academic in the novel, "there was the big bang, a moment of infinite singularity, into which we cannot probe. Our knowledge begins at ten to the minus thirteen seconds after ground zero; only then can we lift the heavy veil and take a peek. All moments before that one are cloaked from our scientific view, and it remains to others to imagine what lies behind the cognitive curtain: whether it is there that God's hand may be invisibly moving."

There's another point where the Olympian chair of the physics department, whose daughter was playing Mozart on a miniature cello when she was four, tears into Justin:

"You can't really say what it's all about, now can you?", he had demanded of Justin, staring at Schrodinger's equation for the evolution of the wave function, symbolized by psi. Erwin Schrodinger, who had won his Nobel in 1933, had demonstrated that the wave function, a precisely defined mathematical object, completely specifies the state of any quantum mechanical system. So perhaps the most likely answer to Professor Kreb's querulously put question "What's it all about?" is that quantum mechanics is about the behavior of wave functions.

Ultimately, Properties of Light is about the gripping power of physics to capture the interest and imagination of everyone, even those who will never come close to understanding it's mystical, surreal properties. This is a sad story, many of the characters destroyed by mistrust, betrayal and hatred. Despite what happens to their relationships with one another-- the third major character is Mallach's daughter Dana, who Justin falls in love with -- the three are all mesmerized by the special beauty of seeking some big truth.

You can purchase this book at fatbrain.

Comments

Passion

[Mad Hughagi]

TV is so full of cops, lawyers, business people that they overlook the fact that scientific researchers can be very passionate about their lines of work, too

I think that saying researchers can be very passionate is an understatement as well!

I don't know too many people doing serious academic research in any field who don't devote their lives to it. When you spend that much time working on the same thing it pretty much influences your every thought. I think the reason why the general public (and the media in particular) don't view researchers as passionate is because they don't approach the work of the researcher from the same perspective - most people just see it as a bunch of math/experimenting with little relevance to their lives in particular, while to the people doing the work it is a source of extreme fascination and unbounded possibilities.

Then again I'm sure the same thing can be said about any profession if the person is serious enough about it, but it just seems that people have always viewed scientists/mathematicians as shallow, robot-like people - a view that couldn't be any farther from the truth!

Men in Black corollary:

[AFCArchvile]

If you see an 8-year-old girl holding a Quantum Physics book, AIM FOR THE HEAD!

bzzzt. hat trick is three things

[G Neric]

Rebecca Goldstein really pulled off a hat trick, turning physics into first-rate fiction.

the term "hat trick" comes from ice hockey where the fans will throw their hats on the ice if you score three goals in one game. Outside hockey, it is still generally reserved for accomplishing three things, not one. Rebecca Goldstein may have scored a goal with this, an amazing goal, but it's not a hat trick.

wonderful book (and another one)

[eostrom]

I concur with Katz's review, and want to stress something he didn't say enough about: It's a great story. It's fascinating that Goldstein managed to make fiction out of quantum physics, sure, but what's amazing is that it's such great fiction.

A few of the things that struck me: The gothic tone. The fragments of conversation that surface and resurface throughout the story, unrooted from time. The struggle between ways of understanding, between mathematics and poetry. Betrayals, great and small, and the fear of being betrayed again. The web of fathers and daughters and mothers and sons.

When I finished this book, I turned back to the first page and started rereading it immediately. I haven't done that since I was thirteen.

I also recommend Goldstein's Strange Attractors, a collection of interrelated short stories. Two of the stories feature a young mathematician named Phoebe who "studies the geometry of soap bubbles". Again, the stories combine a love of the world of ideas with a grounding in the world of people.

The New York Times has a pretty useful review of Strange Attractors but I can't get a working URL for it so if you're interested you'll have to do the search yourself.

On the meaning of life

[Blackheart2]

After all, physicists are seeking nothing less than the meaning, nature and source of life.

No, that is not physics; that is philosophy. You will recall that, although physics---and indeed science as a whole---was once termed `natural philosophy', a fellow named Newton came along and founded the notion of scientific method, thus putting science on a solid basis of empirical observation and experimentation, rather than metaphysical claptrap.