Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

Robert emptied his glass before lighting a fresh cigarette. He loved to have the last word. And those that came before.

“Let’s stop there. Kitty is unhinging her jaw with yawning. Your rotating universe is going to finish her off.”

“We had a rough night. Toni had nightmares. You know how much fun that is, Lili.”

“They have morbid anxieties at that age. When she was five, Hanna would wake me up to see if I was alive.”

I had no appetite for listening to a conversation where I had even less to contribute.

“I’ll bring some coffee.”

“Good and strong, Adele! Oppie likes it black as pitch.”

When I returned with my tray, the guests were still arguing over time.

“If I could travel into the past, I’d go back and kill Hitler.”

Kitty, whose eyelids always grew a little heavier when science was discussed, helped herself to a large cup of coffee.

“What a good idea, Lili! Let’s play What If!”

“My very beloved friend, if you had killed that monster before he dragged us all into the recent nightmare, we would not be here together in Princeton and ipso facto you would not be thinking of performing such charming acts.”

Lili frowned. If she’d been looking for a father figure in Albert, she had certainly found one.

“It’s a time paradox. 29An insurmountable obstacle to my dear friend’s theory of time travel.”

“A paradox is not an impasse, Herr Einstein. Just a challenge. I consider paradoxes as doors to be opened onto bigger universes.”

Oppenheimer drained his cup in a single gulp, then poured himself a second. Kurt could never have swallowed even a drop of that coal tar without whimpering about his ulcer.

“You’re a mathematician. Facts concern you very little.”

“Mathematics is the skeleton, where physics is the flesh, Robert. The first has no embodiment without the second. But the second would collapse without the first.”

I registered the physicist’s skeptical smile. Oppie knew about my husband’s ambition to support the theory of relativity with a systematic mathematical approach, just as Newton had been able to quantify the theory of gravitation. Although it was the IAS’s mission to encourage such ambitious work, the project seemed to him if not presumptuous, at least fairly risky. As Herr Einstein had just said, no one other than its originator and a few astronomers were still interested in relativity. All the physicists at Princeton worked on quantum mechanics. Kurt had always had a taste for impossible quests. Or outmoded ones. It wouldn’t be the “rotating universes,” which had everyone at the Institute laughing up their sleeves, that would pay off our mortgage.

“The possibility of time travel is not just a pleasant anecdote to be served up during society dinners,” said Kurt. “The philosophical implications strike me as much more captivating.”

“The two of you are squabbling over a toy that no one understands.”

“We’re not arguing, Adele. We’re discussing.”

Albert, entangled between his convictions and his desire to show kindness to his friend, took shelter in flattery.

“Study in general, and the pursuit of truth and beauty, are fields that allow us to remain children all our lives. Your husband has the wonderful quality of looking at every new object with fresh eyes, without a priori knowledge.”

“And of refusing to go outside and play with the big boys!”

Oskar choked on his coffee.

“Don’t use these superb metaphors for venting your domestic quarrels, Adele. Your husband is motivated by an admirable ambition, even if to your way of thinking it is not particularly salable. He wants to prove the nature of time by using mathematics. I see nothing puerile in that.”

Kitty, with her long acquaintance of drawing room disputes, decided it was time to draw the fire on herself.

“Dear Oskar, you remind me of my philosophy professor back at the Sorbonne. The students all called him ‘Kant-adoodledoo’! He looked like an old bedraggled rooster.”

Lili pursed her lips, and even Dorothy made an effort to keep from smiling so as not to wound her man. It was rare to see Morgenstern so thoroughly mortified.

“I didn’t mean to imply a physical resemblance, Oskar. Our host is trying to resolve the ancient quarrel between idealists and realists, isn’t he? 30Does time have objective existence?”

I thanked Kitty with a quick wink. How I’d have liked to be one of those women —almost able to enter the discussion on an equal footing. I watched them closely, envious of each for some aspect of her character. There was Kitty, a small, sparkling brunette with a hard glance but a dazzling smile, enviable for her husbands, her studies, her children, and her sumptuous house. There was Dorothy, who was young, beautiful, and hopelessly in love with her big patrician beanpole of a husband. And I envied Lili her strength. Mine exploded in acid eruptions, while with hers, she rocked the world in her arms.

“I have proof that time really and truly does exist. And gravity. My eyelids are drooping!”

Oppenheimer took his wife’s face between his hands to kiss her wrinkles one by one. I was touched by this spontaneous gesture of affection. Kurt was embarrassed by such shows, which he himself never performed in public. And not often in private. He called us back to order: “Yet some philosophers suggest that time, or rather its passage, is an illusion that derives from our perception.”

“Time is kinder to you men. That’s my theory of relativity.”

“That’s entirely beside the point, Adele! Special relativity demonstrates that the simultaneity of two events is relative.”

“Darling, what I find relative is your sense of humor.”

Albert, absorbed in relighting his pipe, choked with laughter.

“You’re wrong, Adele! Your husband has a very subversive sense of humor. Under your gentleman’s guise, dear friend, you are an anarchist. You slip out and place your little bombs, unnoticed.”

“Kurt would never hurt a fly!”

“Follow my thinking. If you go back to some moment in the past, the intervening moments have never occurred. Time hasn’t passed. Consequently, intuitive time doesn’t exist. You can’t relativize a concept like time without destroying its very existence. Gödel has assassinated the great clock! It wasn’t enough for him to blow up the positivists’ dream!”

“Mother of God! Can I not leave you alone even for a moment, darling?”

“If I were traveling in the past and came face-to-face with Hitler, I would have no memory of the intervening experiences I had lived? I wouldn’t try to alter them?”

“To tell you the truth, darling Lili, I really don’t know for sure! Maybe we could relive all the good moments ad vitam aeternam and avoid the bad.”

“What about you, Professor? What would you change?”

“If I were young again?”

Albert drew on his pipe, staring at Oppenheimer, and muttered, “If I had to choose how to make my living, I wouldn’t try to become a research scientist. I’d become a plumber! It’s less threatening to mankind.”

Everyone around the table protested. But Albert wasn’t veering off into self-criticism, he was taking particular aim at Robert’s political friends. The military’s influence over science worried him to an extreme degree. He believed that Truman lacked Roosevelt’s stature. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to the paranoiacs and opportunists who infested Washington. The newspapers were already vomiting the allegations of a certain Senator McCarthy, the elderly physicist’s new bête noire. Kurt and Robert believed that Congress would not back McCarthy in his reckless and defamatory course. Albert was afraid that the warmongers in the Pentagon would turn the skirmishes in far-off Korea into an atomic testing ground. Robert, who had left the Manhattan Project but was a consultant for the federal Atomic Energy Commission, was ambivalent on the subject of nuclear armament. Albert was pressuring him to use his influence to stem the headlong flight into madness. Oppie wasn’t oblivious of the dark clouds ahead, but he thought himself able to navigate these troubled waters, even through heavy squalls. Time, even if it didn’t exist, was to give him a severe lesson in humility.