Andrea Barrett - Archangel

I WAS ASTONISHED , she wrote to Owen a few days later.

Not to mention disappointed. How does a man like him — a man who has spent his entire life thinking and writing about physics — a man who idolizes Clerk Maxwell and Helmholtz and the rest — end up like this? One thing to bolt from your meeting; Einstein’s theories are so abstract that I sometimes wonder if anyone really understands them. But to refuse to accept them on the basis of insufficient proof, while at the same time contending that the survival of human personality has been proved: how does this make sense? The crowd was enormous, though, and seemed to glide right over the holes in his logic.

What, she thought as she took a new sheet of paper, would Owen have made of that talk? He’d been fresh out of university when he came to Washington, a slim boy with a high forehead, a clubfoot, and a calm faith in the triumph of true science. Not once had he acted surprised by her mathematical skills or questioned her ability to help him and Michael. He’d been Michael’s protégé, not hers, but she’d come to think of him as a friend and an equal and still considered him her one stalwart colleague, although they hadn’t seen each other since before Michael’s death, and she could no longer picture his face. Always — almost always — he responded to her letters. Always, courteously, he asked about her son, although she knew he envisioned not this Sam but the eager, open toddler of their days in Washington. Sam’s hair had been blond then, wisping pale curls she could never keep parted; no more like the springy auburn mat he now hid behind than her own sandy dullness was like the shiny chestnut waves Michael had loved. But then Owen himself might be halfway bald, no longer thin; perhaps with a stoop, still with a limp: wouldn’t he have told her if he’d had his foot repaired? Maybe not. Ideas connected them, mathematical symbols and diagrams, a disembodied thread of thought divorced from their daily lives. When she wrote him, she shaped her letters around pleasant anecdotes.

There’d been no point describing the details of those first harsh years after Michael’s death, when she’d tried and failed to regain her old job and then found that she and Sam couldn’t survive on the piecework calculations sent over by the Ephemeris staff. Skipping over the daily humiliations and petty miseries, she wrote lightly about the newspaper editor seated next to her at a dinner party — in her letter to Owen, a casual encounter; in fact, her rescuer — who, after learning about her training, had asked her to explain what caused the spring and neap tides. Pleased by her quick demonstration with an apple, an almond, and two bits of bread, he’d suggested she try writing about astronomy for the general public. From the column in his local paper (no examples of which she sent to Owen), she’d moved on to articles for the Electrical Experimenter and McClure’s, then to her Scientific American pieces (which she did send), and her first books.

She liked the work; she was good at it and pleased when Owen praised her: but it was too painful to explain to him that, even writing all the time and as fast as she could, she could barely pay the rent, and she was sometimes short with Sam. Nor had she wanted to mention that Sam repaid her with temper tantrums, shrieking with anger when she tried to work on weekends, until finally her parents, after several worried visits, had convinced her to move back to Philadelphia — which move she’d presented to Owen as a pleasant choice. No mention after that, of course, of the way Sam at first ignored his teachers and balked at his grandfather’s attempts to discipline him; nor about the molding he cracked around the dining room door or the scene he caused, a few months later, that ended with a broken vase and a cut on his scalp. And so, thus, no need to express her huge relief when, after a while, something happened — a teacher was kind, his body changed when he turned eight, who knew? — and he settled down. And no need to admit, except in the most positive and praising terms— Sam has grown very studious and stays late at school almost every day, working on special projects with his teachers; you’d recognize him instantly as Michael’s son —that now, instead of hanging around her, scowling and demanding her attention, he was completely courteous but as distant as Jupiter.

A SERIES OF short magazine articles on the night sky in winter kept her from tackling the chapter she should have been writing, and she felt herself falling farther and farther behind. Behind what? her mother asked, reasonably enough, when she found Phoebe fretting at the window. The same unambitious and pleasant publisher had handled each of her books, approving her rough outlines and then leaving her alone until she returned with a tidy pile of pages, which he exchanged for a check. It was hard to explain that the self-imposed schedule she’d laid out so carefully was as real to her as the demands of her mother’s garden.

Weary of her own excuses, she was also embarrassed by the way she’d left Lodge’s lecture, bolting from a disagreeable idea in the same way that Lodge himself, confronted with the evidence that his beloved ether might be in jeopardy, had fled the meeting in London. At the library, where she went to catch up with the astronomical journals, she instead took out a pile of his books. She read swiftly, voraciously, taking notes. What was she hoping to find? She could not have answered, she was glad no one asked. Nor could she have explained why she expanded those notes into pages describing material that she and Michael, years ago now, had once discussed. She wrote:

The whirling machine, the massive metal structure bolted into the bedrock beneath the lab: it’s difficult for a modern reader to imagine without inspecting the illustrations from Lodge’s 1893 paper, “A Discussion Concerning the Motion of the Ether near the Earth.” Here you may see the steel discs, a yard in diameter, perched on the central pillar like an oversize hat on a woman’s head. In a separate drawing is the optical frame, complete with mirrors, telescope, and collimator; a third illustration shows the whole assembly in action, a man standing beside the pillar, frighteningly close to the discs and caged by heavy timbers supporting the optical apparatus. It looks like a sketch for Mr. Wells’s Time Machine, an utterly improbable device on which Sir Oliver Lodge made the experiments he has called the most important of his life.

During the 1890s, he performed a series meant to supplement the Michelson-Morley experiments, which he felt could not be right. Electromagnetic waves, including light, moved through the luminiferous ether; a wave must have something to wave in, and the ether, whatever its mechanical structure, was the needed medium. That medium must be detectable, flowing past the rapidly orbiting earth as a kind of wind, but the two scientists in Cleveland had failed to find it. Their results suggested that a layer of the ether must be carried along by the earth, but that hypothesis offered another set of problems. To test it, Lodge designed his pair of huge steel discs, clamped together with an inch of space between them, rotating at high speed while light traveled round and round between them with and then against the discs’ motion, which might determine if rapidly moving matter could drag the ether with it. The machine was enormous, and very expensive. All the experiments failed. But he continued to define and extend the properties of the ether in his 1909 book, The Ether of Space , and still defends his concepts despite the absence of confirmatory evidence.