A NUCLEAR PHYSICIST AND A WRITER WITH AN ART DEGREE MEET ON A FOUR-HOUR FLIGHT . . . WHAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN?
“Well two people are working on this flight,” he says. (He is in 22-B)
“Yeah,” she says. “Always.” She is in 22-C, grouchy because she really likes the window and after 10 years as a loyal customer could the travel agent not remember it’s window,not aisle?
As everyone else starts scrolling through movies or settling back with eye-shades on, 22-B and 22-C lower their tray tables and open their laptops.
“David,” he says, offering a hand. “Fran,” she says. “You’re editing something? Everybody needs a good editor. What’s it about?”
“Well . . . you see. . . I’m a physicist.” Much later in the flight he will explain: Ask a physicist a question, you’re going to get a very long answer. Even if the question is posed by a writer with an Art degree who is congenitally lacking in left-brain material.
Pretty soon they are joined by 22-A (the coveted window) who had started out behind the eyeshades. It turns out 22-A (I didn’t get his name over the engine noise) is a computer science student and recognizes a good thing when he finds himself seated next to it.
David is on the first leg of a trip from one top U.S. nuclear physics research and development lab to another. I’m just going to a family reunion; not sure about 22-A. What I do know for sure is that most casual airline conversations are about the weather, or legroom. Does this interest David the physicist? Hardly.
“Inertial confinement fusion. . .” he is saying. (Introduce yourself to a physicist, don’t expect to talk about legroom.) Something about shooting lasers at pellets’ exterior to turn stuff into plasma. Finally. A word I know: plasma. Part of the blood, right? Wrong. On row 22, A-C, we’re talking about a state of matter resulting from a gaseous state that’s been ionized. Or something like that.
Actually, at one point in our impromptu post-doctoral-level lecture there occurs a new concept I totally understand. David explains something about magnetized particles by performing a visual demo of grabbing one particle and stretching it to its limit. When you let go it may zap back past where it was and into space, and now you’ve got interesting stuff going on.
You can try this at home.
There’s one down-to-earth interruption when the mother-in-law sends a photo of the physicist’s lab (as in dog) whom she’s baby-sitting. But after a while, 22-C retreats into less esoteric endeavors on the aisle-side laptop, while B and A continue. There are ongoing snippets of “the algorithms just needed…” or “fun stuff…” or “nuclear fusion reactions…” or “you run the code…” and “once you get it…” But there is only so much brain elasticity available on the aisle at 34,000 feet.
Perhaps anticipating a time when all R&D labs get shut down and a podcast host is put in charge of science, David explains that “you need physicists for national security, for medicine, for the advancement of society. Even if we’re a little weird.”
Weird is good.