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This was our final project, a contraption designed to catch a raw egg dropped from six feet, made entirely of plastic straws and masking tape. I’ve only killed a couple of eggs so far. Here’s the video evidence. I cleaned up the crime scene with a bit of toast and jam.

I might be playing a show at the Carrboro ArtsCenter on November 16th. We haven’t sold many tickets, and I’ve asked the presenter if they’d like to cancel. It’s not profitable to put on a show for 20 people in a room that holds 200. If you bought a ticket, thank you for being a fan. I’d love to play, but it has to make sense for everyone. Share the link and invite your friends — it will help.

November 16th, 7:30PMCarrboro ArtsCenterCarrboro, NChttps://app.amilia.com/store/en/theartscenter/shop/products/19502515

Now, enjoy the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done. Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

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Okay, you dirty rascal. I knew we’d get along.

The name Burke & Hare seems respectable enough, inasmuch as it sounds like a law firm or some financial enterprise, similar to the American euphemism “gentleman’s club.” We can rest assured there are no gentlemen in the club, and Burke & Hare are not public defenders. They are, in fact, one-third of Edinburgh’s ‘pubic triangle,’ three notable points on the city’s Euclidean garden of earthly delights.

But neither of the namesakes is alive today, and one dramatically not so. Even in death, they need not worry about their reputations being sullied by having their names attached to a strip bar. Their deeds are so despicable that they make the Pubic Triangle seem like the choir loft.

William Burke and William Hare were both laborers of Irish descent who moved to Edinburgh in the 1820s. When a lodger at Hare’s house died unexpectedly, leaving the rent unpaid, Burke suggested they take advantage of the fact that Edinburgh was home to one of the world’s leading schools of anatomy, and the fact that there were never enough cadavers to dissect. Indeed, there was a local cottage industry of “resurrection men” who supplied more-or-less fresh cadavers to the school with few questions asked.

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Burke & Hare filled the man’s coffin with bark from a local tanner, carried the corpse to the school, and sold it for more than enough to cover the rent and their labor. A couple of months later, when one of Hare’s lodgers became ill, he and Burke decided that a dead man was better for business than a sick one. They sedated the renter with whisky, suffocated him, and sold his body for an even higher price.

After that, the men (and likely their wives) needed no further excuses. They would invite mostly single women to drink, suffocate them, and sell their bodies to the medical school. In total, they murdered sixteen people before they were caught.

Because of the lack of forensic evidence, Hare was offered immunity in exchange for his testimony. The trial was highly publicized, and a new rhyme was circulated. The most famous teacher of anatomy and most likely purchaser of the cadavers was Robert Knox, who was known to perform two public dissections per day for up to 400 medical students.

Up the close and doon the stair,But and ben wi' Burke and Hare.Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,Knox the boy that buys the beef.

(A close is an alleyway, and ‘but and ben’ can mean ‘back and forth’ or refer to a two-room dwelling. As a bonus, ‘ben’ can be Scots for ‘bone.’ So, at minimum, ‘but and ben’ has a triple meaning.)

Hare’s testimony exonerated Knox and convicted Burke of a single murder. That was enough for him to be hung in front of a crowd of 25,000, then publicly dissected, during which the professor was said to have written notes with the man’s blood. William Burke’s skeleton is still at the Edinburgh Medical School, and a wallet made of his tanned skin is on display in the Surgeon’s Hall Museum.

It still doesn’t make a lot of sense to name your strip bar after a couple of murderers, does it? Well, stick with me. Cockney rhyming slang is not Scottish, but Irish immigrants like Burke and Hare may have invented it in densely populated London to keep their conversations private.

The way Cockney rhyming slang evolves, the slang may not rhyme at all by the time a phrase becomes popular. A common slang epithet is “Berk,” short for “Berkshire hunt,” which finally rhymes with a part of a woman’s anatomy evoked by Edinburgh’s Pubic Triangle.

Now that you know that, the sound of ‘Burke & Hare’ brings to mind something altogether different from a law firm. Within it is Edinburgh’s history, legend, a rhyme that is still popularly known, and a bit of rhyming slang evocative of the goods they purvey.

I told you this was not for the faint of heart. Neither is Scottish history, nor Scottish humor. If you want more of that, come with me in July 2026 on a photographic tour of Scotland. We’ll have history, music, beautiful places, and the famous Scottish sense of humor.

It’s not too early to sign up. There aren’t many hotels in Scotland; they typically sell out a year ahead. Traceless Tours is a regenerative tour company, which means we leave the land and the economy better than we found it. We only have 16 seats; some sold before we even announced the tour.

We’ll go to the Isle of Skye, Lewis, and Orkney and spend eleven days in one of the most captivating countries in the world. I’ll leave a link below.

https://www.tracelesstours.com/tours/focus-on-scotland%3A-photography-tour-with-jonathan-byrd

Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

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Take a look at this photograph.

One of the most famous photographs in the world, “Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare (Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare),” was taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1932. A print sold in 2011 for $590,455.

As far as image quality, Cartier-Bresson could have shot this with a flip phone. So, what is special about this photograph? There are three notable things about this photograph, and you can easily achieve any of them.

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* The most remarkable thing about this photograph is the photographer. Henri Cartier-Bresson cared about imagery. He painted and studied art. He took a lot of pictures. Anyone can practice.

* The light is interesting. It looks as if there is smoke or fog, or possibly the backlight is washing out part of the photo. Regardless, the light was right for reflections on the water, and Cartier-Bresson put it to work. The sun is behind your dog, highlighting a rim of fur across her head and ears. An old man walks into a beam of sunlight on an otherwise shaded street. A neon sign paints a pensive woman’s cheek red in the window of a bar. The light is the photo. Anyone can learn to see the light.

* This was a moment. Cartier-Bresson found his spot and observed people in it. He waited. The man is about to break the water’s surface but never does. Ripples radiate from the ladder. Time is visibly suspended. He probably took multiple photos and tried different angles. Try things. Be patient. Anyone can wait.

What I’m saying is, shoot with whatever you’ve got. If you could go back in time and give Henri Cartier-Bresson an iPhone and a way to print the images, he would probably leave his Leica at home.

Maybe you are bringing a DSLR on vacation and wondering which lenses to pack. Henri Cartier-Bresson used a single 50mm lens for nearly all of his life’s work. I have six or seven lenses; I can’t remember exactly now. Last year, I went to Guatemala as a documentary photographer. I took one lens, a 24-105mm zoom, so I had many more options than Cartier-Bresson ever used. Here are a few photos from that trip, all taken with the same lens.

When I went to Scotland last year, I brought the same lens. Here are a couple of shots from that trip.

I think you’ll agree that this one lens was pretty versatile. If I had several lenses to choose from, I might have missed a lot while deciding. As it was, I had a lens on a camera. If I saw something, I lifted my camera and shot it.

I say all this because if you’re digging around online, watching photography tutorials on YouTube, or reading blogs of landscape photographers, you can get the idea that you need lots of specialized gear. Honestly, I might not even bring a tripod. I haven’t decided yet.

Think about it this way: the more limitations you have, the more creative you will have to be. The more creative you are, the more interesting your experience will be. Which one will most enrich the rest of your life, the experience or the photographs?

Bring whatever you want, but I encourage you to dream big and pack small. We’ll travel in a smaller bus to rural places so that less luggage will be appreciated. Here’s my camera bag, all packed and ready to go. I’ll probably just put most of my clothes in here.

One more note. UK laws around public photography are pretty relaxed, meaning you can take pictures in public spaces and not worry too much about who’s in them. However, churches, shopping centers, museums, and other attractions can be privately owned, and you should ask if it’s okay to take pictures. In particular, trespassing on railways or Ministry of Defence land is a big no-no.

I’m excited to travel with you and talk about light, composition, and waiting for the right moment. I’m sure you will teach me things, too. Thank you for trusting me with your experience. It’s going to be great. Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

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Wednesday, June 19, 7pmYonder: Southern Cocktails and Brew114 W King StreetHillsborough NC 27278

However, since I’ve got you here, I might as well tell you another story about humility — someone else’s this time — and why music makes you feel things.

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A few months ago, to my surprise, I explained something about physics to physicist and bestselling author Sean Carroll. Sean really didn’t know and was grateful for the explanation.

He periodically asks his patrons for questions and then answers them in an “ask me anything” podcast. The questions range from existential to cosmological. Sometimes, the podcasts are 4 hours long; I always think there’s no way I’ll listen to the whole thing. Then I do.

Someone asked Sean if there was a physical explanation for how music makes us feel. Why, for example, do different combinations of notes — physical phenomena with mathematical relationships, after all — sound sad, bright, or mysterious?

Dr. Carroll was humble enough to read the question and admit he had no answer. I don’t have a complete answer, but I know in which direction the answer lies, so I sent him a message. His response was equally modest and a reminder that science is humbling, or should be, even to the most accomplished. The biggest tell of a crackpot is unassailable confidence in their ideas.

Of course, our cultural background and personal history strongly affect how we feel about what we hear. However, there are some physical realities in music that, at the very least, compel us to feel something. One of my favorites is the phenomenon Western music theory calls the minor chord.

Think of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers. There’s darkness and tension. How you interpret it is largely a result of your cultural training, but the tension is there. To understand why, all you need is grade school math.

Thousands of years ago, people knew that if you make a note at exactly half the length of a lyre string, it is an octave — a note that is obviously higher but also sounds like the same note. If an A vibrates 440 times per second, there are also As that vibrate at 220 and 880. You can theoretically halve and double that frequency all you want, and you’ll have a note that sounds the same but is different.

Here’s where more exciting things start to happen. What if we add the original 440 to 880? At 1320, we get what’s called a fifth. Do re mi fa so. One, two, three, four, five. The first two notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss — the intro music to 2001: A Space Odyssey — are the “do” and the “so,” the first and fifth notes of a Western scale.

There is not much emotional information between these two notes. In Strauss’s piece, you may notice that it feels like we’re waiting for something to happen until the first three notes give way to two dramatic chords. The first and fifth notes of the scale are so closely related mathematically that their relationship is only slightly interesting, like a couple who wear the same t-shirt.

We need to keep going up this series of overtones — literally tones over the tone — to understand the tension in a minor chord. After the octave and the fifth is another, higher octave — we add another 440 to 1320 and get 1760, which is also 440 times 4, two octaves higher than our original A note. 440 x 2 = 880, 880 x 2 = 1760.

What happens if we add another 440 vibrations per second? At 2200, suddenly, we seem to get emotional information. This is the major third. Do re mi. Do and mi are the first and third notes.

If you think about different kinds of waves in a wave pool, some long and slow, and some short and fast, you can imagine how the peaks might add together in places or how a peak and a trough might cancel each other out in other places. The third is the first note of the harmonic series that seems to introduce a compelling amount of chaos into the wave pool. Peaks start to break and fold. Our brains go, hmmm.

All of these intervals are present in every note of any non-synthetic instrument. Any natural vibration will create a distinct harmonic series. We can say things like, “The fifth of the third is the seventh of the root.” Doesn’t that sound complicated? It is, and we love the sound of all those vibrations dancing in our extraordinary ears. If I play an open A string on a guitar, the octave, the fifth, and more are a part of the unique character of that note. This fingerprint of overtones is part of what makes a flute sound different from a trumpet. Throat singers take advantage of the situation and emphasize the overtones, clearly producing two or more notes. Barbershop quartets will combine their notes to create virtual high notes that no one in the group is actually singing.

However, there’s another third in Western music. Some cultures have several. The one we’re concerned with is a little lower than a major third, and it is why a minor chord contains so much emotional tension.

When I play an A at 440, the major third at 2200 (C#) is already present in the harmonic series of that note. It’s just a mathematical resonance. When I play the minor third, a C, around 525, 1050, or 2100 vibrations per second, all hell breaks loose in the wave pool. None of the frequencies or their harmonics play well together.

But who doesn’t love a handsome villain or a good cry? The minor chord defies our tendency to categorize emotional information however hard we try. Like most choices of the heart, it’s a moving target.

So, is the emotional quality of music cultural or physical? Yes. Yes, it is.

Speaking of feelings, it sure did feel good to teach something to someone who has taught me so much. Sean Carroll’s podcast is called Mindscape. You don’t have to be a physicist to listen. There is no math, and not all the questions have answers.

That reminds me of what a polite and exasperated rabbi said to my friend’s son. “Your questions are so good. Are you sure you want to trade them for answers?”

I am sure I’m playing on Wednesday, June 19th. There will be minor chords.

“Sad songs say so much.” — Bernie Taupin

Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

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“You walk bigger than that.”

I’ve always been a skinny guy. In my late teens and early twenties, if we were having hamburgers, I’d order three. I’d eat an entire box of cereal for breakfast. Still, I was 6’1” and weighed 155 lbs. For my scientific readers, that’s about 70kg or 3.7x10⁻²⁴ Jupiters. I know matter is neither created nor destroyed, but I think I may have been pushing the limits of conservation laws.

The most I ever weighed was 180 lbs, which is roughly the same amount of Jupiters but a significant difference for a human. I was in the Navy, working 12-16 hours a day and eating more than an average midwestern family. When I left the Navy, I went right back to my fighting weight.

Last year, I moved myself, my mother, and my son out of the country and into a townhouse where we could use the local gym, among other urban amenities. Most people in developed countries go to the gym to lose weight. I’m so skinny I literally can’t buy pants in a store; I have to find what I like and see if they manufacture my size online, and many don’t. I wanted to know if I could gain enough weight to wear something off the rack.

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Today, I weigh 175 lbs, which is still about the same number of Jupiters. I say that I eat five meals a day, but honestly, there’s always something within reach. I’m eating right now and mostly typing with one hand. I’m much stronger than I was a few months ago, which feels great, but the big win is that I can wear a small shirt off the rack or a medium “slim fit.”

On a clear night, even Jupiter looks like it might wear a men’s large at most. It’s just a bright star. You wouldn’t know by sight that it’s the sideshow freak of the solar system. Today, for fun, I added up the masses of everything in the solar system except for the sun and Jupiter. Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Makemake, Quoaor — the whole Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, and asteroid belt. Then, I divided the mass of all that stuff by Jupiter’s mass, which is how you get a percentage. Do you wanna take a guess?

42%. No, Jupiter isn’t 42%. Everything in the solar system besides Jupiter is 42% the mass of Jupiter. Like me, Jupiter cannot buy pants at the mall.

So, for more fun, I added the 42% to Jupiter to make one uber-planet out of everything in the solar system and then divided that by the sun’s mass. Wanna take a guess?

.13 %. Yes, that is a leading decimal. Everything in the solar system is 13% of 1% of the sun’s mass. I know, I know. Jupiter walks bigger than that.

175 lbs is still pretty slim for an American guy over six feet tall. When I look in the mirror, I seem really buff compared to my lifelong mirror image. Then, a normal dude walks into the locker room, and I realize I’m still just an asteroid.

But in terms of Jupiters, we’re essentially the same.

This is one of my favorite short films. Take 7 minutes to watch these guys build a scale model of the solar system in the Black Rock Desert.

Come see my slightly more muscular version in Hillsborough, North Carolina, this Wednesday in the round with Rebecca Newton and Kirk Ridge.

June 16th, 7pmYonder: Southern Cocktails and Brew 114 West King StreetHillsborough, NC 27278https://yonderbarnc.com/events/songwriters-over-yonder-june/no cover, pass the hat

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They are both things we might have dreamed of when we were children. We imagined ourselves being world-famous and influential, but most of us who made those dreams come true played a lot of weddings or wrote grant applications every quarter. Having had a rewarding career as a not-so-famous musician, I think I’ll also enjoy teaching and working on a paper for an arcane academic journal in a dusty campus office.

We can get enamored with the idea of doing something without caring what it takes to do it. I mean, I can. I hope you can, too. That’s the beauty of dreams, and dreaming is the first creative process. But I’ve never liked the phrase, “Dreams come true.” First, you gotta pick a good dream. Then, you have to work your ass off, have a lot of money, or both.

It took me ten years to face up to the reality of what it would take to be a professional musician before I got to work on it, and now I wouldn’t wish a music career on anyone. It is often frustrating and heartbreaking. Every day, I do the math to see if it’s worth it to do the gig, to find out what it takes to make the next record, or to pay my friends what they are worth in an industry that usually doesn’t.

People also say, “I love physics, but I hate math.” I’m in my second year and have yet to take a physics course. You know what I’m doing?

Math.

Honestly, it’s not disappointing or grueling. I’m not biding my time until I can finally do real physics. The math is the physics; the only difference is in the name of the course.

As nice as it is to know that a pendulum swings at a constant rate, it’s breathtaking when I see that fact pop out of an equation. The secret papyrus of the universe unfolds, and everything is doing math all the time. Chandeliers are doing math. Stars are doing math. Electrons are doing math.

A few days ago, I learned something that illustrates what I mean. It’s mathematical but straightforward enough that I think anyone who graduated high school can understand it. If I’m wrong, let me know in the comments.

So.

If you’ve read Popular Science, followed SciShow on YouTube, or even read this far in this essay, you may have a basic idea of how gravity works. In particular, there’s something called the inverse square law, which means as you back away from a massive object, gravity falls off by the inverse square of the distance.

Astronomers use a unit called an ‘astronomical unit.’ We are simple people. 1 AU is the average distance from the earth’s center to the sun’s center. An AU is used like any unit, like a foot or a kilometer, but you’d need a very large ruler to measure an AU. Earth is 1 AU from the sun. Jupiter is about 5 AU from the sun, or five times as far from the sun as Earth.

So, the difference between the strength of the sun’s gravity at Jupiter’s orbit vs. Earth’s orbit is the inverse square of that increase in distance. The inverse of 5 is 1/5, and the inverse square is 1/5². Multiply 5 times itself, and you find that the sun’s gravity at Jupiter’s orbit is 1/25 as strong as it is at Earth’s.

This isn’t the thing I just learned. It’s a little mathematical fact that I’ve known for a long time. I have always wondered why it works that way. Why would the universe obey such a strangely simple rule? Shouldn’t there be some infinitely repeating decimal like pi or a crazy equation with Greek letters?

A few days ago, I was listening to Sean Carroll give a talk about his new book. Sean is a great science communicator, but he was mostly trying to sell books and doing a great job of it. However, he said something almost as an aside that gave the inverse square law such a simple, intuitive foundation that I’m not sure why I didn’t already know it.

Imagine gravity traveling out from the sun, like a bubble inflating into the solar system. Where the bubble’s surface meets with objects, they encounter the force of the sun’s gravity.

When a bubble grows, its walls get thinner and thinner. The force of gravity will not pop, but it does spread out more and more as it radiates outward from the sun.

People knew how to calculate the surface area of a sphere over two thousand years ago. It’s 4πr². “r” is the radius, which is the basis for that astronomical unit. The radius of Earth’s orbit is 1 AU. So, the surface area of our gravity bubble when it touches the earth is 4πAU² (or about 12.566AU²).

I want you to notice that there’s only one variable in that surface area equation. 4 is just a number. π (pi) is just a number. But r keeps growing as the bubble grows. At Earth, r is 1. At Jupiter, r is about 5. And in our formula for surface area, r is squared.

When your real estate agent tells you the size of the kitchen, she doesn’t just say how long it is. The length of a room is multiplied by the width. Square feet, or “ft²,” tell you something about the kitchen’s surface area. Likewise, r² gives us the surface area of that bubble of gravitational force.

As the bubble grows, the force of gravity thins out along that surface area. It’s an inverse relationship.

The surface area changes as the square of the radius.

The strength of gravity changes by the inverse square of the radius.

It’s not strange at all. It makes perfect sense.

I love this feeling, wondering for years and then finding the equation sitting cross-legged at the top of the mountain, saying, how could it be otherwise? Moments like this will always drive me.

Maybe I’m a little glassy-eyed about studying physics, too. It was a good dream. Now, it’s hard work. That doesn’t dull the dream, not even a little bit. I’m watching undergrads I’ve met in math classes get paid for summer research jobs. I’m attending a donor appreciation dinner to meet the people who gave me a scholarship last semester. Those things weren’t even in the dream! It’s as if, when we put in the work, we get paid by the surprising richness of reality (perhaps to compensate for the crushing dullness of committee meetings).

There’s one more thing I want to say about this, which could be an entire essay of its own. Maybe someday it will be. I am aware of general relativity. Newtonian mechanics are such a close approximation that a moon mission using general relativity instead will make a landing more accurate by about a centimeter. If an astronaut ate an extra piece of cake before takeoff, it would make far more difference.

General relativity didn’t disprove Newtonian mechanics. Newton was right, and he’ll always be right to an astonishingly close approximation. General relativity also seems to be a very close approximation. Heck, quantum mechanics makes it clear that any classical theory has its limits (pun intended).

So when you read something that says, “Big Bang Disproven!” just take it with about 64 milligrams of salt. We will always be surprised by the universe. We can also be surprised by how predictable it is.

Today, I’m going to integrate an elliptical orbit to find the average length of the square of the radius. Then I’m going to write a paper about steel. Keep dreaming, kids. Keep dreaming.

Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

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One of the most convenient units of measurement in the world is called a mole. When you say “a mole",” it’s like saying “a year” or “a dozen.” We all know a year is 365 days if we stop to think about it — 366 days in a leap year — but usually, we don’t need to. I say I’m 53 years old, and no one ever asks — or needs to know — how many days that is. Likewise, you probably wouldn’t say, “Can you run to the store? I need 36 eggs.” You’d say “three dozen.”

A mole is 602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000, most often written as 6.022x10²³. If you’re unfamiliar with scientific notation, it means, “Science is hard enough. I’m not going to write this whole number. It’s essentially a six with twenty-three zeros behind it.”

Why would anyone want to use a number like that? Well, atomic masses are tiny, and no one uses the world’s smallest tweezers to put atoms together piece by piece. Overwhelmingly, we deal with grams and kilograms of things, so a few million atoms here or there hardly make a difference at that scale. At some point, scientists decided that one proton or one neutron weighs 1 atomic mass unit or 1 amu. Compared to those heavier particles, electrons hardly weigh anything. That makes it easy to say, okay, oxygen typically has eight protons and eight neutrons, so it has a mass of 16 amu. Hydrogen usually just has a single proton, so it weighs 1.

This is where the mole comes in and makes everyone’s lives easier. If you add up the atomic mass units of the substance you’re working with and multiply it by 602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000, you get the mass in grams. That’s a mole of stuff.

For example, water is H₂O. We just learned that hydrogen atoms have an atomic mass of about 1, and oxygen atoms have an atomic mass of about 16.

    1 x 2 + 16 = 18

If you have 602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules, you have about 18 grams of water. That’s an amount we can get our hands on.

The other thing you know is that just like a double cheeseburger has two patties, a mole of water has two moles of hydrogen. If you’re trying to make ammonia, which is NH₃, instead of starting with how many grams or what volume of each element you need, you know that each molecule will have a nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. So, you’ll need a mole of nitrogen for every three moles of hydrogen. Having done only an introductory chemistry course, I can tell you, without even looking, that’s about 14 grams of nitrogen and 3 grams of hydrogen, or 22.4 liters of nitrogen and 67.2 liters of hydrogen at standard temperature and pressure.

Having a mole makes chemistry so much easier! Imagine having to tell people how old you are in seconds. You can figure it out if you need to, but you won’t put that on your Tinder profile. A year is a much more helpful way to talk about your age, and a mole is a much more helpful way to talk about enormous amounts of tiny things. And it works the other way! You can weigh some known element or compound, divide the mass by 6.022x10²³, and that’s how many atoms or molecules there are in it. Let’s take a breath and appreciate how amazing that is.

Okay. I promised I would show you how small an atom is, and we’re going to do that by imagining the size of that number. Our brains are not designed for huge numbers, but we’re creative, you and me, and I think we can do it. If you stay with me till the end, I think you’ll feel part of something extraordinary. Because we are.

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A teaspoon is about 5 milliliters, and I put four teaspoons of water in this shot glass. Let’s call it 18 milliliters for the sake of argument. One of the great things about the metric system is that a milliliter of water at any reasonable temperature and pressure is about a gram. So here’s a mole of water.

Now imagine the Milky Way galaxy. There are about two hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and it seems that the Milky Way is an average galaxy in our universe. Keep that picture of the Milky Way in your mind with all those hundreds of billions of stars.

There are five times as many galaxies in the observable universe as stars in our galaxy. That means as far as we could ever see, out to the ends of the observable universe, there are about one trillion galaxies and, on average, two hundred billion stars in each one. That’s two hundred billion trillion stars in the observable universe — or 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.

If you multiply that number by three or imagine three universes, you’ll have a mole of stars. That’s about the number of molecules in this shot glass of water. If a bartender poured you a shot like this, you’d complain, yet it contains three universes.

But we’re not done—one more thing.

If you multiplied THAT number by three — because H₂O — or imagine nine universes, you’d have the number of atoms in this parsimonious drink of water. It’s barely more than a sip.

That’s how small an atom is. Bottoms up.

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DaVinci died in 1519. Over 400 years passed before anyone else understood atherosclerosis. Evidently, Leonardo never told anyone. His notes were lost for centuries.

The popular understanding of entropy is the inevitability of chaos or, if you want to sound slightly more academic, disorder. But the concept of entropy is more interesting than simple messiness.

Entropy is a measure of how much we don’t know.

When my son was very young, before he started school, I was helping him put all of his toys back where they belonged. He said, “Hey, Dad. Infinity is just another kind of zero.” Remember how much fun science was before we had to be good at it?

Why were we putting his toys away? I didn’t want to step on a Lego, sure, but the real lesson was about information, and nothing is more valuable than information.

Can I walk across my living room without stepping on a Lego? Moreover, if his toys are scattered all over the house, he has no idea where to find his firetruck.

What if we wrote down where all his toys were? The stegosaurus is in the dryer. The squishy ball is behind the bookshelf in the living room. So on. To find one toy, he would have to go through such a long list of where his toys are that it would be faster to look for them. In essence, he would have the same amount of information he did before he made the list.

This is where infinity meets zero.

You’re reading or listening to this on the internet, built to share information between scientists worldwide. It’s tempting to think: If only DaVinci had had the internet. Heart surgery would be older than telescopes. But something doesn’t sound right, does it? Something smells off about the whole “Information Age,” and sometimes you even think certain people are to blame, but that doesn’t feel right either. You know what it is?

You can have so much data that you don’t have any information.

It’s a messy world. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do. Not long ago, most people believed that a higher authority determined their life’s purpose, and the goal of a successful life was to fulfill that higher will. Many people still think that way, but much of humanity now believes that we define our own purpose. We believe in choice and, in our better moments, responsibility.

We tend to think of the invention of the printing press as a revolution for humanity, but literacy wasn’t average worldwide until about the year I was born. That’s over a thousand years between the first printing presses in China and the average human’s ability to read a printed page.

With that in mind, people seem quite confident they know how to use the internet, which — to complete the loop here — was invented about the same time most of the world learned to read. We are convinced we have all the information we need to demand freedom and accept responsibility for our choices. But really? Really?

At the extremes of physical science — black holes, neuronal connections, the number of gas atoms in a room — it’s impossible to access or keep track of all the data. In light of our limitations, we freely admit we may never know exactly what’s happening. Yet, we walk out of the lab and believe we have a handle on the world. We grew up and created a perfectly searchable Excel spreadsheet of our toys and their locations, all saved to the cloud, of course.

Then the cat bats something across the bedroom. Someone takes the couch apart, looking for the remote. The wifi goes out. Information dissolves like marrow into the warm broth of entropy.

You walk out onto the porch with your postmodern ennui, and the sunset burns to coals like The Great Library of Alexandria. Isn’t it beautiful? Maybe not being in control of everything is okay. Imagine how God feels. Once, the universe was all together, and now it’s all over the damn house.

Take heart. One day, stars like the Sun will run out of fuel, and they won’t have enough mass and energy to explode like supernovae. They will be mostly leftover carbon under the incredible pressure that makes a diamond, which means they will be diamonds, galaxies of colossal diamonds drifting through a very, very cold universe, all their information — all the information that may ever exist — lost forever.

We live somewhere in between one very simple universe and another. The entropy generated by the Sun keeps our planet alive even as it destroys unimaginable amounts of information. In other words, we are here because the library is burning. It’s terrifying and beautiful, and there’s so much we don’t know. In fact, there’s more we don’t know every day.

But now, right now, we are rich with information. You have so much information in every cell of your body that it can make another completely unique human, a human so brilliant that centuries might pass before anyone knows what they knew.

You still have to put your toys away. When you’re done, go watch the sunset and remember the one thing you and God have in common.

No one knows what you know.

Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

I’m leading two tours of Scotland this July. Sign up soon!

July 3-13 Focus on Scotland, a photographic tour of one of the most beautiful countries I know. We’ll go to locations that I don’t even know yet because we are protecting the landscape from human traffic. Traceless Tours is a conservation tour company that brings money to the local economy and helps heal the wild spaces. We’ll leave it better than we found it. Reserve your spot here:

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July 15-25 Music tour! Ten days of breathtaking scenery, castles, museums and ancient historical sites during the day and live music at night, including some special private concerts.

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Hey, Mom. I love you, but you probably don’t want to read this.

I grew up in a very proscriptive love culture. Everyone was supposed to be heterosexual, wait until they got married to have any physical intimacy, and then stay married until one of them died. Many old couples wore their misery like a badge of honor. Some of them, mostly men, had extramarital sex to cope with the loneliness.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine took me to the Miss North Carolina Drag competition at The Power Company. I had no idea what any of it was, but I knew it had to be more fun than hanging out at my mom’s house in the country. By the way, I was 17 and did not have a fake ID. In the ‘80s, teenagers could just go to a venue and watch a show- even a drag show.

It was as fabulous as it sounds. All the greats were there — Madonna, Cher, Marilyn, Donna Summer. It blew my country boy mind, and I remember thinking, “There really is a place for everyone.” It gave me hope that I would find my place, too.

Mom, if you’re still reading, I warned you.

That night, I saw a friend of mine from school. I walked over and said hello. He said, “I didn’t know you were gay.”

I said, “I’m not.”

He never spoke to me again.

So, the second thing I learned that night was that I could belong almost anywhere, but not everyone can. He wanted to love and be loved, and people hated him for wanting what they, too, wanted. I think about it often. That night still gives me hope and makes me mad at the same time. Imagine everyone free to love.

That’s the gift I wish I could give you this Valentine’s Day — the freedom of love that doesn’t have to last forever, and doesn’t have to make your mother happy. I hope it makes you happy. I hope you find the place where you belong. I hope you follow Mary Oliver’s advice and “… let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Happy Valentine’s Day. Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd

I’m leading two tours of Scotland this July. Sign up soon!

July 3-13 Focus on Scotland, a photographic tour of one of the most beautiful countries I know. We’ll go to locations that I don’t even know yet because we are protecting the landscape from human traffic. Traceless Tours is a conservation tour company, bringing money to the local economy and helping heal the wild spaces. We’ll leave it better than we found it. Reserve your spot here:

https://www.tracelesstours.com/photography-tour-with-jonathan

July 15-25 Music tour! Ten days of breathtaking scenery, castles, museums and ancient historical sites during the day and live music at night, including some special private concerts.

https://www.tracelesstours.com/music-tour-jonathan

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I was not inside the lab because I had to attend a chemistry lecture online. So, I sat in the lobby with my iPad and some headphones to dull the thwack of the foam torus and the cries of injured children.

The course I am taking is called “Introduction to Chemistry,” and chapter two is quite basic. My professor was discussing the history of doing dangerous things for science, particularly the dangerous things people did to figure out what an atom was like.

Early on, a British physicist named J.J. Thomson developed an idea known as the “plum pudding model.” Thomson’s hypothesis was that electrons were like raisins spread around in a big atomic cake of positive charge that resembled a British pastry called a plum pudding, which, in keeping with scientific naming conventions, is not a pudding and does not have plums in it unless you’re British, at which point you can assume that everyone in the world understands your inconsistent version of an inconsistent language that has, for better or worse, become the international language of physics.

I digress. In fact, this entire piece is about how I digress.

In discussing the history of all the fun and dangerous things scientists have done to discover what atoms are like, one must next talk about the Rutherford gold foil experiment. In short, a Japanese physicist named Hantaro Nagaoka rejected the plum pudding model for scientific reasons relating to charge, but also perhaps because it was actually a cake made with raisins and should be called “raisin cake.” Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander who probably called the dessert something like “jacky woptogs,” decided he would f*** around and find out.

Rutherford, who loved lead boxes and uranium, put some uranium in a lead box. One side of the box had a hole so particles could escape as the radioactive uranium decayed. Everyone wore safety glasses. They pointed the hole at a thin sheet of gold foil, which was surrounded by a circular screen coated with zinc sulfide. The zinc sulfide emitted a little flash of light every time it was hit by an alpha particle, which, in keeping with scientific naming conventions, is not a particle; it’s actually two protons and two neutrons bound together by the strongest force in the universe, which, in a rare lucid moment, physicists named “the strong force.” If you recognize this little bundle of particles, that’s because it’s also the nucleus of a helium atom, and all the helium on earth is produced this way by radioactive minerals. Yes, the thing in a party balloon that makes your voice sound funny was once part of the thing that makes an atom bomb, and not so long ago.

So, Rutherford had a box of the atom bomb stuff that was slowly but quite dramatically making the party balloon stuff. He and his assistant Hans Geiger — yes, that Geiger — turned the lights off and sat with this little chunk of uranium until their eyes became accustomed to the dark and they could see the tiny flashes of light that the radioactive particles made on the zinc sulfide screen. They saw that most of the particles flew straight through the foil, some were deflected by a tiny amount, a rare few bounced off the foil and landed on the side where they were emitted, and presumably, some ripped through Rutherford and Geiger’s DNA, encouraging interesting mutations.

My professor told us about this as I tried to ignore the muted screams in the next room where my precious child was doing science. And then, as I was reading the PowerPoint slide, everything went quiet in my brain. In cold Arial font, it said, “Alpha particle velocity ~1.4 x 10^7 m/s (5% of the speed of light).”

If you are American, I’m sure you’re aware that the speed of light is 3,273,600 football fields per second. If we convert that to standard units, which, in keeping with scientific naming conventions, almost no one uses, 5% is about 33.5 million miles per hour. “5% of the speed of light” is not a detail you think of being hidden away in parentheses.

I missed everything the professor said for the next five minutes. I knew this wasn’t the class to ask the questions I had. Like:

* Does an alpha particle go from zero to 33.5 x 10^6 mph instantly? Does the classical concept of acceleration make sense at this level? Two protons and two neutrons together could be large enough to have a fuzzy center of mass, right? This isn’t just one question, is it?

* Does this hurt the gold atom?

* What’s our health insurance deductible?

An alpha particle has an atomic mass of 4. A gold atom has an atomic mass of just under 200. Imagine a 4-kilogram weight traveling at 33,550,000 miles per hour and hitting something that weighs 200 kilograms. An alpha particle traveling this unimaginable speed hits a gold nucleus and bounces off.

Rutherford said, “It was like firing a 16" shell at a tissue paper and having it bounce back at you.”

In the chaos of my online class, accompanied by the firing, thumping, and squealing of teenage scientists in the next room, I had my own sort of eureka moment. Until that second, I hadn’t been as interested in quantum mechanics as I was in relativity physics. Maybe it’s because you can see moons, apples, and foam toruses, and you can either throw them at things or throw things at them. A raisin cake, even at 5% the speed of light, is a raisin cake.

The subatomic world is built differently.

I snapped out of my quantum reverie. In “Introduction to Chemistry,” my professor had moved on to Sir James Chadwick, who was firing alpha particles at beryllium to discover neutrons. My son emerged from the lab, grinning, holding a broken piece of plexiglass, and wearing his safety glasses.

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(Editor: actually not real.)

Professor Ima Pyro, PhD: We have a straightforward system of naming things in chemistry. For instance, these are named di- because “di” means “two,” except for this one which we call “thio” because it’s sulfur and Ancient Greek roots are sapio-erotic, but sometimes we do just call it sulfur, and you will memorize those instances when we do that. Otherwise, we name these combinations by the metal and then the non-metal, except for the enormous number that have no metals like ammonium, not to be confused with ammonia, and just remember those. Monatomic ions end with “ide,” and then if you add some oxygens — never mind how many — the polyatomic ion ends with “ite,” and if you add one more oxygen than that original amount — which is a secret amount known only to the priests — then it ends with “ate,” but don’t be fooled by hydroxide and cyanide which are polyatomic but also mischievous, so just memorize those two cheeky little ions.

Now, if we have more oxygens than one more than the original amount that only the priests know, then we’ve run out of suffixes and there’s nothing we can do. We must turn to prefixes like “per” and sometimes “super” because everyone loves super things, but if everything can be super, then nothing is, so we only do it rarely. If you have less than the church-mandated amount of oxygens, we may begin with “hypo” because sometimes you just needle little. That’s a pun, which is allowed in lecture but not in lab.

If the ion contains phosphorous, we begin the name with some form of that word, for example, “phosphate.” However, once in the Golden Time, a great prophet saw that one of these phosphorous ions was very flame-y, so we begin that one with “pyro,” which is also what we might call many people who get into chemistry because there are so many flame-y things. However, there is only one that we call “pyro.” Thus spake the prophet.

Okay, lab equipment: These are all screws except for this one that is 1.5 inches long. That’s called the Nail because Lavoisier called it a nail, so we cannot change it. We will learn to identify the difference between physical and chemical changes, but name changes require creativity, and creativity requires coffee, which is not allowed in the lab. Don’t forget to wear your safety glasses.

For your homework, study the straightforward system of naming ions you copied in your notes. Then, burn your notes and determine whether this is a physical change, a chemical change, or an existential crisis. Finally, memorize all the exceptions, which will be most of them.

Please fill out your post-lab questions with a No. 2 pencil, which is made of graphite, which is not a compound and does not have one more than the ordained number of oxygens because, in fact, it has no oxygens and is a mineral composed entirely of carbon. Have a great week.

Saturday, February 3rd, I will be playing a show at Cafe Veritas in Rochester, NY. Doors open at 7pm. Buy your tickets at https://www.showclix.com/event/jonathan-byrd

I’m leading two tours of Scotland that are selling out quickly. One is a photography tour, July 3-13, when we will be traveling to some of the incredible wild landscapes of Scotland to study light, composition, and processing to capture what we’ve seen and the emotions it inspired in us. Photographers of all levels are welcome and encouraged.

The second is a musical tour of Scotland, July 15-25, wherein we will listen to some of the greatest musicians Scotland has to offer. Last trip, we were surprised by an unexpected meeting with Fiona Ritchie! There is a schedule, but surprises abound.

Traceless Tours is a conservation tour company, which means we leave the landscape and the economy better than we found it. Some of your payment will go directly into wildlife conservation efforts. Some locations remain secret even to me until we are there, to keep human impact on the landscape minimal. I’m proud to work with Traceless Tours. You can put down your deposit and reserve your seat here:

Photography Tour, July 3-13, 2024https://www.tracelesstours.com/photography-tour-with-jonathan

Music tour, July 15-25, 2024https://www.tracelesstours.com/music-tour-jonathan

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“All models are wrong, some are useful.” — George Box

To be fair, I was wearing a pink bathrobe and eating a piece of gluten-free cherry pie in someone else’s house. It was New Year’s Eve. I told a stranger I was studying physics.

His face lit up. He said, “I’m a big fan of Deepak Chopra.”

This kind of response used to annoy me.

It still does. But not as much, and wondering why it annoyed me taught me something about people, some of whom I love.

“Words matter.” — Barack Obama

Deepak Chopra is not the only person who has endowed the word “quantum” with spiritual glitter. Still, he’s been the most effective. My new friend could not remember the name of the actual physicist from the podcast they were telling me about, but they remembered that Deepak was there. Most people are not physicists, so they hear the word “physics” and connect it to the closest thing they’re familiar with — popular science articles and new-age-spirituality-self-help-motivational things — which for decades have been about or inspired by quantum physics, quantum uncertainty, and the certainty of book sales with the word “quantum” in them.

I am a writer, physics student, and ethical human interested in the rightness and usefulness of words. I want to understand you, and I want you to understand me. Let me define what physicists mean when they say “quantum,” as in “quantum physics.”

“The game I play is an interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics.” — Richard Feynman

A quantum is a discrete unit of energy. There seem never to be .75 photons of light. There is one, or there isn’t, or, famously, there can be one and not be one simultaneously until we observe it.

That’s it. Energy comes in discrete units called quanta. Sometimes, they’re called particles. Everybody’s next question, even the physicists who created quantum theory, is, does “until we observe it” mean that our consciousness affects the photon?

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No. A camera sensor can observe the photon. The solar cell on a calculator can observe it. We could check our data and observe what the photon’s position was a moment ago, back when we were unaware of it.

Of course, quantum mechanics is much more complicated than that, and if you have ten years to study it, you should. If you don’t, I get it. No one can care about everything. We have to do the laundry.

“I’m a magnet for all the crackpots in the world, but they are of interest to me, too. A favorite pastime of mine is to reconstruct their thinking processes.” — Albert Einstein

Let’s get back to Deepak Chopra. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, or he isn’t, until I observe him.

EDITOR: Well, I guess we found out which it was.

“There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.” — Deepak Chopra

There is right and wrong. Let’s not generalize; every person with a career in “wellness” is a terrible person in their own unique way. When you buy their books and products, you can bet that you are supporting some kind of evil. In this case, we got to find out which particular brand of evil. Back to his manifestly idiotic entirely non-scientific pablum…

His latest book, Quantum Body, states:

“Very little about your real body is talked about in medical textbooks… Your real body is a quantum creation, it arises from the quantum field that created the universe…”

Is he saying doctors don’t understand that your body obeys the laws of quantum mechanics? That seems unlikely. Doctors use X-rays, MRI machines, PET scans, and many other technologies designed to take advantage of the quantum mechanical properties of your body.

Also, which quantum field created the universe? Was it the electron field? The Higgs field? There is a different quantum field for every particle. So, “the” quantum field doesn’t make any literal sense.

Speaking of fields, to be generous, Deepak Chopra is not in the field of physics. One of his co-authors, Jack Tuszyński, is a trained physicist but works as an oncologist. The other is Brian Fertig, an endocrinologist. I’m pretty sure that Jack and Brian aren’t the only doctors who understand that bodies obey the laws of quantum mechanics. If you’re a doctor, leave a comment and let me know if this is news to you.

The authors go on to discuss the difference between the body we think we have and the book's namesake, the quantum body. They assert that the quantum body “doesn’t get sick or grow old.” I just had the flu. Are they saying that wasn’t real? Or are they saying electrons don’t get sick?

Are they using the word “quantum” as a metaphor or a metonym? “Russia denied any wrongdoing” is an example of metonymy; “Russia” is a stand-in for something else — in this case, an official spokesperson.

A friend of mine, a neuroscientist and researcher, said, “Physics is the soul of the sciences.” “Soul” is not a scientific word. One could even argue that it’s misleading. However, it expresses something that would be lost if the sentence was paraphrased as “the work done on the principles and theories of physics underlies the foundations of all the sciences.”

The word “soul” was clear to me as a metaphor, meaning something like “a thing that, whether visible or not, underlies these other things.” Metaphor is an ancient technology that did what it was designed to do; it compressed the information. Moreover, it was well chosen because it gave me an idea of how my friend feels about physics. “Soul” implies something eternal and immutable and conveys the awe of profound mysteries.

So, I’m trying to understand what “quantum” means to Deepak Chopra. If we replace it with “spiritual,” we get, “Your real body is a spiritual creation; it arises from the spiritual field that created the universe…”

That makes a lot more sense to me. It jibes with the vibe of his writing. The book would be called “Spiritual Body.” Let’s try it with more Deepak Chopra quotes.

“Spiritual healing moves away from external, high-technology methods…” That works.

“Viewing your body from the perspective of spiritual physics opens up new modes of understanding… human beings can reverse their aging.” I know that time never literally goes backward. So, when I put the word “spiritual” in here, I don’t expect anything to make literal sense, and I’m not disappointed.

It seems like Chopra is using “quantum” as a mystical metonym to bridge spirituality and science. To be clear, he says a lot of helpful things about eating well, exercising, and managing stress. But this attempted bridge between the spiritual and scientific worlds is the thing that annoys me.

EDITOR: To be sure, now I am much more upset that he’s a rapist and a pedophile, and that my friends fell for his sociopathic hucksterism.

“Then the medium went skirmishing through the papers for the corresponding name. And that old sport knew his card by the back! When the medium came to it, after picking up fifty others, he rapped! A committeeman unfolded the paper and it was the right one. I sent for it and got it. It was all right. However, I suppose all those Democrats are on sociable terms with the devil.” — Mark Twain, The Spiritual Seance

God isn’t a good theory to describe electromagnetism or gravity; science won’t mend your broken heart. It’s like trying to design a hammer that’s also a paper towel. But this kind of thing has happened since the birth of science.

The term “scientist” was coined in the 1830s to describe a newly lucrative field that, for millennia before then, had been predominantly a prestigious hobby. Science exploded in the West during the age of Darwin and Maxwell. The fields of optics, biology, thermodynamics, and more grew at an unprecedented rate, awakening interest not only in science but also in Spiritualism. As much as hucksters and snake oil come to mind, even Marie and Pierre Curie believed that science might finally prove the existence of a spiritual realm.

Unfortunately, misuse of the language of science was also used to cause irreparable harm and to gain widespread support for terrible ideas. Eugenics assured white people that they were, as they suspected, the best people. Charles Davenport, a professor of zoology at the University of Chicago, became the head of a government agency with this kind of scientific-sounding hogwash:

“One of the most striking characteristics of sea–lust is that it is wholly a male character … so the appeal of the sea develops under the secretion of the germ gland in the boy. It is theoretically possible that some mothers are heterozygous for love of the sea, so that when married to a thalassophilic man half of their children will show sea-lust and half will not.”

I wouldn’t say that Deepak Chopra is as dangerous as Davenport. (Editor: Actually, now I can.) Still, there are people — you know who they are — who use the current popular science language to convince people that vaccines are more dangerous than diseases and that they can cure themselves of cancer with supplements and buckwheat enemas. Throw the word “quantum” in there, and you’ve compressed all the wonder and achievement of modern science into a marketing slogan.

It’s not all bad news. The Victorians never found the spirit boson, but surely communicating with dead relatives was helpful for some, whether or not it was a factual enterprise.

The current milieu of quantum woo reflects that same fascination with the unknown that will never be satisfied, the blessing and curse of human curiosity responsible for the device that brings you these words. Spirituality and science can inspire each other and work their magic in turn. Science is about facts as much as possible, but facts and truth are both valuable — and only slightly overlapping — concepts.

The founder of what we now call the Big Bang theory was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître. When Pope Pius XII proclaimed that Lemaître’s theory was a scientific validation of the Catholic faith, Lemaître responded very clearly and carefully.

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God… It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”

Science doesn’t require you to profess your faith in the one true meaning of quantum physics. The great thing about science is that there isn’t one. Prove that all science is wrong; you’ll get a royal flush of Nobel Prizes. If we keep our minds open to new ideas, science and spirituality will inspire each other as they have for centuries.

"We are not an emergent property of a mechanical universe but the seasonal activity of a living cosmos." — Deepak Chopra

What an a*****e.

As far as we can tell, everything is quantum mechanical. There’s nothing supernatural or unnatural about quantum physics. On the contrary, it’s the most complete and accurate description of nature we’ve ever had. It’s not some other world unseen to us. It is the world. And that is what makes it magical to me.

Deepak is not a physicist and is not bound by the same conceptual straitjacket as Feynman or Lemaître. My generous assessment is that he is a spiritual poet and trickster. He’s trying to get you to think differently, and that’s fun. So have fun. (EDITOR: I’m glad he’s been exposed, and I don’t have to be generous anymore. Stop buying books and supplements from people who abuse scientific language. They may not all be child abusers, but none of them have respect for the truth.) Take part in “the seasonal activity of a living cosmos,” whatever that means to you. Paint a gourd in your soul, and take your medicine like your doctor told you.

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Bibliography

Box, George. Science and Statistics. American Statistical Association. https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writings/Boxonmaths.pdf This is a common paraphrase that appears nowhere in the text as such. A direct quote might have been, “Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad.” The phrase has been through a ‘folk process’ and is now ubiquitous in the sciences: “All models are wrong, some are useful.”

Cep, Casey. Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/why-did-so-many-victorians-try-to-speak-with-the-dead

Chopra, Deepak, et al. Quantum Body: The New Science of Living a Longer, Healthier, More Vital Life. Harmony.

Chopra, Deepak, et al. Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Bantam.

Chopra, Deepak. https://twitter.com/DeepakChopra

Farber, Steven A. U.S. Scientists' Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939): A Contemporary Biologist's Perspective. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757926/

Feynman, Richard. Feynman physics lectures. youtu.be/JK0TXcU47Ks?si=iYEnstti5AY41zME

Einstein, Albert. Conversations with Einstein, edited by R.S. Shankland. https://www.scribd.com/document/355885459/Conversations-With-Albert-Einstein-Shankland

Georges Lemaître, Father of the Big Bang. American Museum of Natural History. https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/georges-lemaitre-big-bang

Twain, Mark. The Spiritual Seance. Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. http://www.twainquotes.com/18660204t.html

I became a full-time professional musician on January 1st, 2000. I hadn’t reached any income benchmark. I had no manager, record deal, degree, or training. I was 30 years old and couldn’t keep a girlfriend or a job. Y2K seemed like the perfect window to throw my burning life through. For the next 23 years, I cold-called, emailed, mailed, shook hands, drove, flew, loaded, unloaded, wrote, recorded, and sold things. I never had a hit or made any mailbox money. I just worked really hard, driven by the flames of oblivion.

My Danish friends in The Sentimentals said they loved working with American artists because they had a lot of drive, and maybe the lack of art subsidies in the US encourages that. I landed a couple of small grants in my career, but honestly, I could’ve put the time I spent writing applications into playing gigs and made the same money. Not only did I support myself and my family, I took 2/3 of every dollar I made and put it in hotels, restaurants, gas stations, rental cars, airlines, conferences, printing, photography, videography, audio engineering, musical instruments and repairs, internet services, credit card fees, union dues, professional organization fees, florists, haberdasheries, publicists, agents — I was a one-man economic engine. As my friend Corin Raymond said, “If I wanted to stop working so hard, I’d get a job.”

It’s January 1st, 2024. This will be my first semester as a full-time student. I’m taking Chemistry, Calculus, Java, and Writing in the Disciplines.

Do you know what our government subsidizes — and generously? College. After 23 years of working my ass off as an independent artist, I’m finally gonna eat that sweet government cheese. My classes, my books, and my groceries are paid for. I still have to pay my living expenses, which apparently include a whole new wardrobe for my teenager once a month. Speaking of which, every Substack subscription in 2024 will feed a hungry child in North Carolina. I have one in mind.

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I received a few messages this week asking me where to play, how to get your songs “out there,” and how to make money in the music business. This week. Because the artist’s hustle never stops.

In short, if I knew how to do it, I’d still be doing it. I have four albums left to put out, almost all of them complete, but it’ll cost me money to release them, and I don’t ever expect to make that money back.

But I’m not sad. College is just as exciting as when I started playing music professionally. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and focus. I have to find clever ways to get by with no money. I have to form new relationships constantly and grow them. Someday, I might even stop working so hard and get a job.

A new day began in the middle of the night. That doesn’t make any sense but, like everything else, we make it make sense. We decide what’s important to us and we mark it. I didn’t have to quit my last job on December 31st, 1999. It didn’t make sense to anyone else, but to me it meant everything. New millennium, new me.

When Max Planck invented quantum theory, he wasn’t thinking about the secrets of the universe, consciousness, or artificial superintelligence. He was working on a light bulb. He didn’t even think that energy was actually quantized; he thought it was a mathematical trick that made the equations work.

Maybe that’s how the seeming arbitrariness of days, months, and years works. Maybe we really did cross a line last night, and a new tooth in the cog of the universe turned and clicked, and a bell rang, and a baby angel was born.

I do know two measurements of time that are real — never and forever. That thing you’ve been wanting to do? If you never do it, you’ll never have done it forever.

Happy New Year. Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd.

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“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”  — T.S. Eliot.

Thank God for the Christmas lights. You leave for work. It’s dark. You come home. It’s dark.

I’ve been leaning into the darkness a lot lately. I’ve been in college less than a year, but it feels like two. The feeling of not understanding something is my least favorite feeling in the world. Like I’m not good enough. Like hiding in the woods alone and facing my parents’ wrath at report card time is easier than not understanding.

But not understanding is what it takes to understand. There’s no way out but through. It’s really, really dark in that tunnel. As dark as a tomb. As dark as a womb.

In the southern hemisphere, the Milky Way can stretch from horizon to horizon. Ancient people in the south saw constellations in the stars, and they also saw dark constellations, creatures that inhabited the dark middle of the galaxy. If my parents had lived high in the Andes, I would have been born under the sign of the llama, an animal with great stamina and patience. No pressure.

It turns out the dark places are where all the action is. Half of the world’s great telescopes are high in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where the Inka built their own observatories. Now, vast radio arrays peer into those dark dust clouds in the center of the galaxy because we’ve discovered they are the alluvial soil of the universe. The dust collapses into stars and planets and maybe into creatures who will peer into the glass of a new stellar nursery where more of us might be born.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung.

This time of year in Ancient Rome, there was a festival called Saturnalia. They decorated with green branches and wreaths. They feasted and offered gifts to the gods and each other. They made and gave candles, symbols of light in a dark time. It was also a time for inversion, when masters served their slaves, and men and women crossdressed. I think it would been the perfect time to consider all the dark space between the stars. What if what is isn’t what is, but is what isn’t?

A year ago, I was a songwriter, teacher, and entertainer. During the pandemic, I went into the darkest place I’ve ever known, a mine shaft in my mind where I felt along the wall for a light switch or a door knob until I got tired and laid down. I asked for help, which is also not my favorite thing, and science helped me find the switch. It was up to me to come back out of the mine. When I did, I realized if I had a little help, someone to guide me, I could go back into the darkness and learn whatever it was trying to teach me.

So this is the time of year I turned my whole life inside-out and upside-down. I walked away from mastery and started over as an apprentice. I left the arts and stumbled into the sciences. But are they really that different? Isn’t a true master always learning? Recently, I met a neuroscientist who writes his research papers with a fountain pen “so that it is still an art.”

I’m learning how to learn. When I don’t understand, and I feel that terrible darkness rising up inside me, I remind myself that this is how it feels to learn, to grow, to die, and be born again like the sacrificial king. I remind myself that the darkness is fertile — that, in fact, I owe my planet to it.

What light will be born in the fertile loam of this dark night? Let’s go into it together. I know you can’t see me, but I’ll be right here. There are worlds to be discovered.

My family and I were given three tickets to the Broadway production of The Lion King. Tuesday, 7pm. Only the tickets weren’t there when we got there. The theater was sold out.

“We came all the way from North Carolina,” I said in a final desperate plea. The man shrugged his shoulders sympathetically behind the bulletproof glass.

Mary and I had attended a yoga class in the wealthy little country town of Bedford, an hour north, earlier that day. There was no one to look after Rowan so he came with us. He got a mat from the office and rolled it out directly in front of the teacher at the head of the class. To everyone’s amazement, the little five year old boy stayed on his mat for an hour and a half and did everything.

The teacher ended the class by saying, “Take an hour. Don’t go right to your phone. Let this feeling last. Don’t hurry off to the next thing you HAVE to do.”

Pshaw. We raced home to change clothes and then down the Sprain Parkway to New York City, navigating around the tolls on my phone, dodging rush hour traffic. We threw a hundred dollars at a spectacular dinner and ate half of it on the subway. We had free tickets to The Lion King.

Only we didn’t. I finally got the man who had given us our tickets on the phone at 7:15.

“WHAT!? This has never happened! I’ll make a call and call you back.”

“I don’t want to go into the show late,” Mary said. Rowan stood by holding her hand with, it seemed, no expectations. Standing there waiting for my friend to call me back, he brought me back to earth. I kneeled down.

“I’m proud of you,” I said. “You’re more together than I am.”

My friend called me back and I asked him if we could take a raincheck. He apologized and said he’d try to make it right. He didn’t really owe us anything. He’d just wanted to treat us to a show. A cheap seat for The Lion King is, by the way, nearly two hundred dollars.

We strolled through Times Square lit up like the day. We carried my mother-in-law’s umbrellas and it never rained once. The moon rose over Radio City Music Hall and I tried in vain to get a picture of it. We caught a subway downtown and ate ice cream. Twice. New Yorkers saw Rowan in his paperboy hat and bow tie and smiled, then seemed embarrassed that they had smiled, and then laughed at themselves. New York City is, above all, deeply human. Then we drove back to Bedford.

The next morning, we packed up the car to drive home to North Carolina. I got an email from my friend. Two o’clock matinee. Three tickets. He had walked to the box office and made sure.

We hugged grandma goodbye. We left her umbrellas because we weren’t coming back. We were driving at least halfway to North Carolina after the show. We found a garage on the West Side and paid fifty bucks to park the car so we could safely leave all our belongings in it.

It was garbage day. Piles of plastic bags and old mattresses gathered along the boulevards. The rain fell lightly as we walked toward Central Park and found the subway line to Times Square.

Our tickets were there. Orchestra, center. Not cheap seats. A man came and asked, “Are you Jonathan?” He apologized for the mixup the night before and gave us a bag of Lion King goodies. I gave Rowan the soft baby Simba.

“What’s a Simba,” he said.

“You’re about to find out.”

During the intermission, I stood in line for what seemed like hours for a bottle of water. In the crush, a young boy screamed to his mother from the merchandise counter. I looked over at him. He had Down syndrome, thick glasses strapped around his head making his eyes even larger and wilder.

“What do you want?” his mother yelled.

“A t-shirt!” he cried.

“Make sure you get the right size,” she said.

“I did!”

“What size?”

“A medium!”

“Maybe a small. Youth. Youth small,” she hollered. He glanced wildly at the t-shirts and back at her. She held out a hundred dollar bill. He raced over, weaving the crowd. “Make sure you get the change,” she said, nervous and hopeful.

He took the money back through the crowd, holding the bill over his head. He made the transaction, looking back at his mother every few seconds. She smiled and nodded. He came back with a plastic bag and a fistful of money. She counted it and smiled. He pulled out the t-shirt and showed it to her.

She held it up to him and said, “It fits you perfectly.”

“I did everything right!” he screamed and jumped in the air, pumping his fists.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said.

As they walked away, just before they were out of reach, I touched her shoulder and she turned around. “That was amazing,” I said. “Congratulations.” She smiled and they disappeared back into the crowd.

After the show we walked out into the street, dazed by the magic we’d witnessed. A Broadway show, one that lasts, is truly one of the greatest human artistic achievements. I may be a country boy, but I know a lifetime of dedication to craft when I see it.

The rain poured from the gridded sky and shocked us awake. Waiting for walk lights seemed like forever. Commuters folded their umbrellas one by one as they descended into the subway stairs, like a flock of black birds folding their wings into the roost. We rode the clackety underground again, this time down to Chinatown for dinner. I paid eight dollars for a bottle of water. The food was delicious and honestly unlike anything anywhere else on Earth.

We talked about all the things we loved about the show. The ragged sun shimmering over the savannah. The bicycle of bones. The natural world worn on every actor. Their voices, God, their voices. O, to sing like that, all their lives traded for such freedom in sound.

And it rained. And it rained. The rain made garbage tea along the boulevards and Rowan slipped in it and sat down on the asphalt. I walked behind a homeless man who smelled like an old locker room and spat on the sidewalk. The garbage tea and spit and piss seeped into the underground and dripped on our heads in the tunnels. More homeless slept in the tunnels in sleeping bags and hung their jackets from pipes to dry. The liquid seeped through my boots. Businessmen stepped in puddles up to their ankles in their dress shoes and seemed not to notice. And what can you do but wade into the Ganges? And what sense does it make to live this way or to raise a child against all odds? To pay hundreds of dollars for a brilliant flash of light and sound when grown men sleep deep under eight dollar bottles of water and the moon shines lonely above the heavy clouds that obscure the highest heights the architects have to offer, and it all spun around in my head like scripture and verse, contradicting and paradoxing until it shattered logic into bits like all holy things and God resided there in the broken and empty space, the being not being, the being above being, beyond all comprehension and lost in a child’s eye on the subway.

The door opened at Times Square station and a saxophone played, “O holy night, the stars are brightly shining…”

Mary said, “He’s good.”

The door closed. I said, “My favorite part of the show was the intermission.”

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You pick it up and spin that little dial on the top left. M, A, S, P. If it’s a Canon, it’s even weirder — M, Av, Tv, P, B. There might be some little icons of people skiing, a flower, or a generic face.

First, forget Auto, A+, and the icon modes. By the end of this article, you’ll enjoy photography much more without them.

Then, let’s talk about the exposure triangle. Many photographers have mysteriously disappeared and never come back from the exposure tri — no, sorry, the exposure triangle consists of three settings that control the creative outcome of your photo. I want you to think about it that way; this is not a technical exercise. These settings are creative tools.

The setting I always think about first is aperture. The aperture is how wide your lens opens. It’s also called “f-stop,” but that’s a confusing, technical way to think about it. The most important thing to remember about aperture is that it controls your depth of field. Yes, it lets more or less light in, but most professional photographers rarely think of it that way. A wide aperture has a shallow depth of field, like portrait mode on a phone. The subject will be in focus, and the background will be blurry. A narrow aperture will have a deep depth of field, like a landscape photo — the rock in the foreground is in focus, but so are the mountains miles away. It’s a creative decision.

Aperture is the one choice most professionals will not allow their camera to make for them because it dramatically influences the story an image tells. A portrait is about the person; a landscape is about the landscape. Look at the difference between these two photos.

The one on the left is shot at a wide aperture, f/2.8. The one on the right uses a narrow aperture, probably f/11 or f/16. (Other things affect depth of field, but please, no pedantry in the comments. I’m talking to beginners.) The subject is obvious in both images, but the aperture changes how the environment helps tell the story. The doll was in the woods; the dreamy, out-of-focus leaves evoke the childlike story-space of dolls and also complement the golden sunlight in her hair and shining through her sweater. The rose was in my mother’s garden in the suburbs; not only does the house gives us context, the water on the leaves also has a relationship with the moody sky.

The second part of the exposure triangle that I think about is shutter speed. It means literally, how long does your shutter open for? A good camera shutter can open and shut in less than a millisecond or stay open for minutes. With a little imagination, you can see how a slow shutter would create blur, like those night photos of taillights streaking through the city streets or the soft waterfalls that landscape photographers love. You can also see why a hummingbird photographer would push their shutter to be as fast as possible. Again, the shutter controls the amount of light we let in, but that’s not how most experienced photographers think about it. We think about the story we are telling.

What is the story being told in these photographs?

One image dramatically illustrates motion; the other freezes it in vivid detail. How might a different shutter speed have affected these images?

The last part of the exposure triangle is less of a creative decision nowadays as cameras and processing software improve. That is ISO. ISO adjusts how sensitive your camera sensor is. In the days of film, you would put in a different ISO film if you were going to shoot a concert at night vs a press conference on a sunny day. Digital cameras allow you to tell the sensor how sensitive to be. On a bright day outside, you will want a very low ISO, probably as low as the camera will go — 100 or sometimes 50. Astrophotographers often push their ISO as high as it will go to collect all the starlight they can get. The higher the ISO is, the more grain and noise the image will have, but lately, this is becoming less of a problem.

I don’t have examples of photos shot at different ISO settings because you probably wouldn’t be able to tell anyway. Some gearheads will obsess over noise in images. Gearheads obsess over a lot of inconsequential things. Don’t listen to them. You should use whatever ISO you need to capture your vision.

You’ve made it through the exposure triangle alive! Now, you’re ready to learn what those settings are about.

P is program mode, and I’ve never known a professional photographer who used it. Some people call it “semi-automatic,” and it allows the camera to control the aperture and shutter speed while you set a specific ISO or tell your camera that you want a brighter or darker exposure. Most experienced photographers don’t use it because it takes away perhaps the most important creative decision you can make — aperture. (If you use program mode, I’d love to hear why and how in the comments!)

That brings us to A, or Av on a Canon — aperture priority. You tell the camera what aperture you would like to use, and it’s up to the camera to control ISO and shutter speed to get the correct exposure. Aperture Priority is a fantastic tool for amateur and seasoned photographers alike. The only problem you might run into is if there’s not much light and your aperture is narrow, your camera will use a very slow shutter speed to let in enough light for the exposure. Things might get blurry. If you try out aperture priority, you will quickly learn when that might be a problem.

S, or Tv on a Canon, is shutter priority. You tell the camera how fast you want the shutter to move and let the camera make the rest of the technical decisions. I love this mode when things are happening quickly, like in this photo of a bagpiper on a windy day on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. My shutter was set to 1/3200 of a second to freeze the wind's motion in his hat and kilt, and we were surrounded by tourists and chaos. There was lots of light, so I knew it wouldn’t be a problem for the camera to correctly expose the shot. Shutter priority allowed me to focus on my composition without being distracted by all the different camera settings.

That brings us to M, or manual mode. You make all the decisions. No matter what photographers say on social media or in workshops, we rarely shoot in fully manual mode. If you are thinking about your camera, you are thinking about the wrong thing. What’s in front of the camera is what we all should be thinking about.

However, I often use Manual Mode in a sneaky not-fully-manual way. On most professional cameras, you can set your ISO to auto. The camera will choose the appropriate sensitivity while you control the aperture and shutter speed. It takes experience to work both settings at once, and you can still overexpose on a sunny day if you’re not careful, but this way of shooting gives me complete creative control. The exceptions who use manual mode quite a lot are studio photographers. They typically have a lot of time to set up and dial in settings, and complete control over lighting. Even patient landscape photographers will be dealing with light that can change drastically in seconds, and typically choose to give the camera some control to ensure each image is properly exposed.

That’s it! Start by exploring those two modes — A (Av on a Canon) and S (Tv on a Canon). Take that camera out of the closet, charge the battery, put an SD card in it, and set it to one of these modes. I think you’ll find that aperture is your most important creative decision, but there are times when you need to maintain a slow or fast shutter speed no matter what.

When you’ve had fun with that, try my auto-ISO trick in manual mode. Most cameras allow you to change aperture and shutter speed with two different dials that can easily be accessed with a finger and thumb. Once you learn where they are, it’ll be no more difficult than using a phone camera — but exponentially more creative.

Let me know how it goes! I’d love to answer your questions. Many people helped me when I was starting out. I can never repay them but I can pass it on.

Above all, tell your story. You’re the only one who can.

I’m taking 18 people with me to Scotland, July 2024, to learn about photography in some of the most beautiful places on Earth. People are already signing up; please register soon if you’d like to go — https://www.tracelesstours.com/photography-tour-with-jonathan

P.S. I don’t get any money from you clicking on this link, but these SD cards are great, the SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO. Not all SD cards work well when you’re clicking fast, or if you have a camera that does video too. These have never failed me, not once. https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-128GB-Extreme-UHS-I-SDSDXXY-128G-GN4IN/dp/B07H9DVLBB

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Happy Thanksgiving. I’ve been avoiding the internet lately, but I’d like to take a moment to tell you where I’ve been. What I’ve seen this past week has made me more thankful than ever.

Last Monday, I filled my backpack with my worst clothes — jeans with holes in the knees that I’d saved for painting, oversized flannel shirts and hoodies, generic white socks — and a pair of hiking boots. I had let my face grow long for a week. Somewhere between home and Charlotte, I bought a camouflage ballcap at a truck stop.

I reserved a room at the cheapest motel I could find, tucked along I-85 between two fast food joints and a row of brick apartments uniform as Army base housing. The exterior of the motel was painted fresh yellow and orange with white faux half-timbers. The marquee read “Under New Management.”

For less than most of us spent on groceries yesterday, I got four nights with two beds, two mismatched chairs, a floor lamp with no bulb, a desk with chipboard guts leaking through its Formica skin, and a single-serve coffeemaker on the bathroom sink. Let’s not talk about the carpet. I set up a laptop, an electric typewriter, and a ream of paper on the desk. On my way upstairs and down the hall, carrying the last load to my room, I passed a maid’s cart and nicked a few more bags of coffee. I did that at least once a day all week. I was there to work on a novel. I was there to look up at the glass bottom.

Every day, I put on thick frowzy layers of my oversized beater duds, drove downtown, and parked on North Tryon just inside the Brookshire Freeway, where skyscrapers frame the sky on the highest hill of the second largest banking center in the United States. I mapped out the downtown (called “uptown” in Charlotte). In the middle of the day, most of the people I saw on the northeast side were living on the street. You might miss them if you weren’t looking for them. They didn’t ask for money. They didn’t sprawl out or sleep on benches.

I wandered around to businesses. The staff almost removed me from a museum. I asked them where the coffeehouse was and they became too confused to evict me. The only people who didn’t think I was homeless were the homeless.

I went into the 7th Street Open Market on the first day and toyed with my new superpower. I walked up to the coffee counter, where the girl on staff quickly walked away from me and looked over at her male counterpart. I ordered a four-dollar cup of coffee, pulled a hundred dollars from my pocket, and fumbled for a fiver for my own entertainment. I’m not judging anybody. I knew exactly what these people were feeling and thinking. I have felt it and thunk it. I was examining my head as much as anything.

The libraries were amazing. Charlotte’s children’s library, ImaginOn, is brilliant in its architecture, vision, and staffing. It was also the first place I was treated like a person. I asked about programs for homeless children and was cheerfully sent upstairs to the offices.

Later, I found the main library. The street people were in there by the hundreds. They were reading the paper. Using the internet. Looking for jobs. Reading for love. Quiet as mice. Shaving and washing up in the bathroom and leaving it spotless. When I asked for help, the staff was so courteous, that I forgot I was in disguise until one lady politely tried to figure out what my situation was so that she could help me find whatever services I might need. I did notice a police presence. I was thankful that the city would spend the money on a few officers to keep this sanctuary for their most vulnerable population. The main library, from what I saw, is one of the best tools in the homeless’s fight against homelessness.

I talked to guys on the street. They didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t like it when I didn’t give them money and they didn’t like it when I did. They knew I was b******t. I kept bugging them. They loosened up.

One gave me his resume, two pages long. 16 years experience industrial technician. Marine Corps veteran. About a third of the people I met had associates or bachelors degrees. I met one with a PhD. They showed me their hands, scarred a few blocks away in a salvage yard, digging through rubble and beating the mortar off of old bricks to reuse them. The job paid forty dollars a pallet. They told me it took a day or two to fill a pallet. They smiled at me and said, in unison, “Slave labor.”

I asked them why they didn’t ask people on the street for money. They rolled their eyes. “You get in trouble. They got undercover cops down here.”

I asked them what they did the week before when it was twenty degrees out. “Same thing I do every night.” “I don’t like the shelter. I won’t go in there.” “I did some time. Some guys out here just got out of jail. They wouldn’t set foot in the Men’s Shelter if it was twenty below zero.”

They all talked about God. “Lord willing.” “The good Lord has helped me a lot.” “I’d be lost without God’s help.”

I ate lunch at the Urban Ministries Center. That’s where I found the women and children. Babies in strollers. Wigs and painted fingernails. Pantsuits and jewelry. As much dignity as they could afford.

“Sunday morning, twenty-eight degrees!” one man said. He whistled at the dire news. “I’m looking for a job. I can’t do no heavy work. I’m sixty years old. Be in the bed with a sore back and can’t get to work and then I’d lose that one.”

“I spent 400 dollars getting my CDL,” he said. “I’m fixing to retire. Wait a minute.” He dug in his wallet. He held the card up and smiled with his whole face. “Commercial Driver’s License,” it said in gold lettering across the top.

A lady inside the soup kitchen sang into a karaoke machine, “…and I think to myself- what a wonderful world…”

The soup was surprisingly good. I put my sandwiches and a bag of chips in my hoodie pocket and thanked the staff.

I left and walked downtown. Along the way, a large young man stood smoking. “You interested in making a hundred dollars today?” he asked. I wasn’t.

Back downtown, I saw a man I’d already met. An older woman sat on the bench in front of him, wrapped in a light blanket, her face contorted with sickness or grief or both. The man smiled up at me and said, “I’ll see you this afternoon.”

I got around the corner and remembered I had the sandwiches and the chips in my hoodie pocket. I went back to give it to him. As I walked back toward them, I saw him digging in his backpack. He took out a small orange sleeping bag, unzipped it, whipped it in the air to fluff it out, and spread it over the woman like a blanket. He sat down on the bench beside her and hugged her. I walked up and handed him the sandwich and chips. He smiled at me again but with reservation. Tired of taking things and living without walls.

Over the week, my motel room became a glittering palace. I practiced yoga on the carpet without reservation. I took a hot bath in the gritty tub and blew bubbles of thanks.

Yesterday, at home with my family, I paid two hundred dollars for three bags of the finest groceries in the kingdom. I sat in a warm house and watched the snow fall on the pond. I wondered where my new friends were sleeping.

One of them just texted me to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving. Thought I’d pass it along.

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My mother began losing her organizing skills between five and ten years ago. In a 4,000 square foot house, there are a lot of places for chaos to hide. To move it all to another, smaller home is to learn psychology, anthropology, and archeology all at the same time.

My son took it upon himself to pack the old pantry and organize the new one. I remember him commenting on how many duplicate spices there were, but I couldn’t get involved. I had my own battle of inches with her seasonal napkin collection. 

As I began cooking in the new kitchen, I saw that duplicates were not the only problem with the spices. Two of the three spice racks were on the left side of the pantry, tucked back in a narrow corner behind the hooks that held aprons and cloth bags. Another was on the right, easily reachable but incomplete. Even with three racks, there were so many spices that my son had organized part of another shelf in the pantry for all the bottles that wouldn’t fit into the spice racks. This set us up for the same duplication problem — my mom bought a new bottle when she couldn’t find what she wanted in her old pantry.

Sunday night, I was wondering what to write about and nothing felt relevant. This usually means I need to do something else for a while, preferably something difficult. I decided to finally tackle the spice problem. If you are a writer, I know this looks suspiciously like procrastination, and I encourage you to be honest with yourself about this kind of diversion. In my experience, when I’m stuck, I’m usually trying to make something out of nothing. The tank is empty. I fill it by engaging with the world on its most mundane level. I make an appointment. I go to the grocery store. I pull some weeds. While I’m solving boring little problems with my muscles and a crumpled list, some simple thing will suddenly expand into deep time and connect to the rest of the universe. It happens in a few paragraphs. You’ll know.

I took every jar and tin out of the pantry, culled and combined duplicates, and alphabetized them. I could have opened an Etsy store. It was a Manhattan skyline of McCormick bottles.

I smelled and tasted the duplicates to determine which one to save. Plastic jars lost their strength before glass ones. I relabeled glass jars with masking tape and a Sharpie. I poured spices from new plastic into old glass. Different brands had surprisingly varied textures, colors, and smells. For some, their “use by” dates indicated that this was their second house move — those went in the garbage. One old plastic bag of “wild Greek oregano” was shockingly vibrant and I’ve earmarked it for a recipe. 

I removed the spice racks on the left and moved them to the right, which required a trip to the hardware store. I reshelved the spices alphabetically except for spice blends. Those would go on their own shelf, a General Assembly Hall for the United Nations of Italian spice, Moroccan Spice, and Cajun Spice. These little weeds and seeds could transform a potato into an expression of cultural history. Hyperbole aside, all these spices might have fit into a paper grocery bag. They contained an essentially infinite palette for telling a human story. 

As I was shelving the spice blends, almost done with the entire task, I rested my eyes on the pumpkin pie spice and the Thing happened. Here was a unique and ubiquitous blend of one root, various seeds, and the bark of a tree, harvested and imported from several countries on at least two continents, for a single recipe made once — maybe twice — a year.

I’m writing this in October, when the sweater-clad pumpkin spice season begins. There will be mulled ciders at the PTA, Sunday-school pomanders, and persimmon puddings. Most notably, in 2003, Starbucks introduced the pumpkin spice latte and dropped “pie” from the name. It remains a cultural phenomenon, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone who can take it or leave it. A meme was born.

Everything that followed left “pie” off the name. Pumpkin spice trash bags. Pumpkin spice body wash. For about $12,000, you can propose with a pumpkin-spice-inspired engagement ring from Angelic Diamonds, shaped like a pumpkin and topped with a whipped-diamond froth.

Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Ginger. Allspice. Cloves.

We already had all those things, some in multiple forms — whole, ground, and fresh. Was it so difficult just to add them all to a pie once a year? Even the little metal tin is enough to do a dozen years’ worth of Thanksgivings and whatever you celebrate at the end of the year. 

The can in my hand was older than the pumpkin spice latte. I’m 52, and pumpkin pie spice was at the grocery store when I was still in the cart. When did pumpkin pie spice achieve thing-hood?

The first cookbook produced in the United States of America, American Cookery, was published in 1796. I must share the full title of this book with you. We think “pumpkin pie spice” is one word too many? Well, as I’ve said before, back then people could really name things.

“American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.”

The only thing we know about the author is her byline, “Amelia Simmons, An American Orphan.” It’s not much of an autobiography, but being an orphan likely would have meant that she was a domestic worker and not formally educated. Maybe it was a way to assert her authenticity in the culinary arts. Only twenty years after the American Revolution, she may have felt orphaned from her own nationality and sense of identity. Regardless, she gave us a collection of recipes that was so popular it was widely pirated, a book that included for the first time all-American ingredients like turkey, cranberries, maize, squash, and pumpkins.

In the political wilderness of a newborn country, American Cookery must have given testament to what was perhaps the real revolution. Out of necessity, the colonists had already woven an independent culture and identity from the materials at hand. For all its gory glory, a military victory is a mundane task, a grocery list, a pulling of weeds. Nations are not defined by borders, but by their languages and cuisines.

Garam Masala. Herbs de Provence. Gomasio.

Most of the recipes in American Cookery were British in origin but, like the language, they were different enough. Noah Webster gave us our grammar. Amelia Simmons gave us our food.

Among the tarts and puddings, American Cookery contains the first published recipe for pumpkin pie. It calls for ginger, nutmeg, allspice, and mace (the fleshy covering of the nutmeg seed).

Before modern medicine and sanitation, spices were more than flavors. Ginger is anti-inflammatory and aids in digestion, helpful for all the rich and heavy foods of the harvest season. Cloves sweeten the breath, and their oil inhibits mold. The spices stimulate your nerves and make you feel warm all over. Many are antimicrobial. They would have made an impact on quality of life that’s hard for us to imagine now.

It’s hard to know when pumpkin pie became popular before American Cookery, but it’s been on the menu since. In 1930, a company called Thompson & Taylor made a special blend they called “pumpkin pie spice.” McCormick released their version a few years later. No more grinding and measuring all those spices, just dip your teaspoon in a little jar and get those pies in the oven. The Great Depression doesn’t seem like a good time to develop a new product, but I suspect the middle class returned to cooking at home. Most counterintuitively, people began to live longer. Now that I’m sharing a home with my mother and my son, I can attest that living together and eating homecooked meals will make a lean life richer.

And the smell. To smell something important in your life is to immediately remember feeding your newborn, your dad slapping on Old Spice before church, your first wrecked car leaking oil and gas onto the scarred pavement. Smells go to places in your brain where no other sense can go.

In 1995, I was working in a little co-op when I was transported immediately back to my childhood in Germany. I was seven. It was cold. My father sent me upstairs with the rent check, and our gorgeous, fat landlady pinched my cheeks until they were red and sent me back downstairs with a chocolate bar as big as my head. I remembered all this like a dream, a moment containing a lifetime, all adrift in an aroma that disappeared before I could name it.

I spent weeks obsessed with finding the smell, wondering if it could induce that dreamworld again. One day, I was walking through another market, and it hit me. This time, there was a big display, and the smell was everywhere. It was marzipan.

But hear me out. There’s something even more special about pumpkin pie spice, no less so the Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, and — Lord help me —even the body wash.

In 2015, my partner and I were wandering the streets of Rome, looking for artichokes. We had missed them by two weeks. If you are American and you don’t travel much, I want you to imagine a place where certain foods are only available at the time of year that they are locally fresh. Imagine walking into a Whole Foods in January and there are no apples. No pears. No berries. You ask the produce manager, and he tells you to come back in five or six months.

You’ve just imagined reality in most of the world. Even in my lifetime, many things were like that in America, but it’s easy to forget. We walk into the grocery store with a list and expect everything to be there. Mostly, it is.

But you know what you can’t get most of the year? A Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. Could they make it year-round? Of course they could.

Isn’t it nice that they don’t? Shouldn’t we have one special thing to mark the season, to remind us that the earth goes round the sun on this perfect, imperfect tilt, that everything is fragile and temporal, that our mothers and sons and whole nations will come and go, that tremendous wars will be fought by forgotten heroes while one domestic servant lives on in history, an orphan in an idealistic country who fed someone else’s children like the parents she never had, a woman unknown but enthroned on a bookshelf in The Library of Congress, still warming our hearts from a little metal can on a spice rack in my mother’s pantry?

It's as American as pumpkin spice.

I’m sure Ms. Simmons would envy my mother’s spice rack, before or after the remodel. She would certainly be surprised at the grown-up nation she nursed in its infancy.

I’ve always been a bit of an iconoclast. I’ve poked fun at my lover’s pumpkin spice coffee creamer. I’m here to say, that wasn’t fair. The flavors and aromas that tell our story are deeply ours —and culturally relevant — whether they are trendy or not.

If  you need pumpkin pie spice, come by my house. Seriously. We have you covered.

If you’re not local, you’re still my people. We made it, y’all. No one could doubt America’s nation-ness now, and we go on defining it in our words and in our kitchens. Whether you’re standing at a dessert table in Connecticut on Thanksgiving afternoon about to do something unwise and delicious, in line at a coffeehouse just off the interstate wanting something that smells like home until you can get there, or making a new home in a world that never gave you one, I raise my mug to you, and to Amelia Simmons, an American orphan, home at last.

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In Scotland, there were no plastic cups in the hotel room. There were ceramic cups, stainless steel spoons, a down duvet, a real breakfast in the morning, and climate control that was felt and not heard.

When we gathered for the first night of the tour, our host said, “We should come as pilgrims, not travelers. A traveler might expect things to be a certain way, to have their days all planned out. A pilgrim comes with an open mind and gratitude for the unexpected things we encounter along the way.”

The trick for me is to be a pilgrim when I come home. I wouldn’t go so far as to say my country sucks. I encourage you to leave it whenever you can and get some perspective. Then I encourage you to come home and say things about it to people you love that you wouldn’t say on the internet.

When people say that gas prices are too high or taxes are out of control, I know they don’t own a passport. When people say, “the greatest country in the world™️,” I just think, “They need to get out more.”

There are no drip coffee makers in Scotland, as far as I can tell. I didn’t see a French press or a percolator. You pay for an impeccable espresso-style coffee or drink instant Nescafé. I’m the kind of person who has to know why. I don’t yet. I appreciate a good mystery, and I appreciate coming home and making a decent cup of coffee for myself that doesn’t cost $4. If I find out why Scotland’s coffee is all or nothing, I’ll report back.

On the way to parliament in Edinburgh, a building proclaims, “A nation is forged in the hearth of poetry.” The US feels more like it was forged in the hearth of a credit card. America can’t respect poetry, because we’d have to deal with a lot of cultural b******t that we don’t want to deal with. It’s wild to travel the world, hear hip-hop everywhere, and realize that the rest of the world knows America better than America does because they actually listen to our poets.

So it’s a mixed bag, right? It’s a pretty good country. Get a passport, though. Come back like a pilgrim. Check out the poets.

P.S. All the photos are mine. I’m working on putting together a photography workshop and tour of Scotland with Traceless Tours. Stay tuned!

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I registered a homeschool with the state, “The Parker-Morales Homeschool,” named after Peter Parker and Miles Morales, his favorite Spider-Men. As Corin Raymond says, “the Charlie Brown of superheroes.”

He came home and played video games for about 8 months. I didn’t teach him anything. I called a friend and we built a gaming PC from parts. He mowed my mom’s lawn for money to buy games. I paid him $10 apiece to do piano lessons with an app — don’t judge me. It’s cheaper than a teacher, and he can play Stand By Me.

In fact, this whole thing is about not judging me or my kid. Or anybody’s kids.

I had rules. In bed by midnight, get up whenever you want. Make your bed. Take your medicine. Therapy once a week.

Maybe I’m trying to repair my trauma, and maybe that’s okay. By the 4th grade, school was an endless nightmare for me. No one knew about gluten intolerance, and ADHD was called laziness. By high school, I was running around and hiding under the bus until everyone had gone inside, then running off into the woods, buying lunch at Hardees with $20 stolen from my dad’s wallet while he was passed out drunk, making my way slowly home so I was there when I was supposed to be.

I have a photographic memory. It doesn’t work like in the movies, but I don’t forget numbers. My first-grade spelling teacher gave me books to read while she taught the class. I learned a lot of math by stick-building houses with my dad for Jim Walter Homes. I read everything. I was smart and curious, but I barely graduated high school, disillusioned and angry at having been forced to do it. I joined the Navy and started on a tank landing ship as a deck seaman. I saw a job I wanted to do — maintaining and operating the CWIS system, a radar-controlled Gatling gun that fired 3000 rounds per minute and turned an incoming missile to confetti. I learned electrical theory and Boolean algebra while working 12-hour days and rotating night watches, took a test, made the rate, and skipped two years of school normally required for that job.

This is how I know my son is not lazy or stupid.

He’ll spend 80 hours or more “platinum-ing” a game, meaning he has completed the main mission and all the side quests, and collected every little hidden thing in every dark corner of the game. Then he’ll go back and explore. He’ll go on YouTube and learn how to mod the game. He’ll learn the history and lore of the game, the company that released it, the team that created it, the voice actors, composers — should we call that “diamond-ing”?

Whatever it is, I recognized myself in it. I remembered hitting the rewind button on a cassette player thousands of times and learning every note of Joe Satriani’s “Surfing With The Alien” on guitar strings so old they should have given me tetanus. More recently, I was diagnosed and started taking medicine. I’ll never forget having a conversation with a friend that first day. An hour in, I started crying uncontrollably. This is what it felt like to be present.

The medicine didn’t fix me. It gave me a ladder with which to reach the shelf.

I practiced executive skills. I made lists and didn’t lose them. I forgave myself for everything.

My girlfriend, probably tired of hearing me talk about the latest physics news all the time, said, “Why don’t you take a class at the community college?” I was terrified, but I was curious. Did my new superpowers — or were they normalpowers? — extend to a classroom? I went and applied.

Long story short, I’ve been accepted into a baccalaureate physics program at NC State. My GPA in high school was 1.8. My GPA in college is 4.0. I’ve got a long way to go, but I’ve already learned the most amazing thing I’ll ever learn — I can do it.

My son is happy now. He’s a fantastic cook. He texts me kissy faces.

As the new school year approached this summer, I asked him what he wanted to learn. He took a standardized test, and we got an idea of where he was compared to his peers. His reading and word comprehension is college-level. His writing is appropriate for his age group. His math skills are behind, so we went back to decimals and fractions. I got a white board for our living room. We do a little every day.

My uncle Rodney called and said he’d a lady named Katie who works with the North Carolina School of Science and Math. It’s a boarding high school for gifted kids from across the state, and part of the UNC system. Teenage Einsteins and Curies walk the campus in black eye shadow and Zelda t-shirts.

He suggested I call Katie and talk about my son’s journey. I was leery of taking advice from anyone in the public school system, but we met for coffee. After telling her everything, Katie did the one thing I did not expect. She told me I was a great father.

Katie took the time to visit the local junior high with us, where my son would go to school this year, if he decided to go to school. The principal met us in the lobby and gave us a tour, talking up the teachers and programs. I asked the principal where his daughters went to school. They go to a private school. So, yeah, no.

Katie also mentioned there was a robot club at the North Carolina School of Science and Math, and you didn’t have to go to school there to join the club. They build robots and compete against other robot clubs in robot games. Rowan wasn’t quite old enough — it was supposed to be for high school students — but she’d ask if it was okay for us to come to the introductory meeting.

They said we could come. Katie met us there and introduced us to everyone. It was free to join, and money would never be an issue. If you needed a laptop or field trip money, they would find it. No one mentioned his age. Some kids wrote code. Some built parts. Some worked on outreach. Everyone was respected and included. The kids ran the entire presentation.

My son said he didn’t think it was for him. He said, “I thought we were homeschooling. Please don’t make me do this.” I knew I was going to make him do it.

I said, “Look. This is an incredible opportunity.”

“Why does everybody always say that about everything?”

“Right. You’re right. But here’s the thing. You don’t have to be good at this. It’s not school. It’s a club. Just show up and help them build a robot. If you’re not good enough, they’ll kick you out. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think you’re going to love this. Not like, someday when you’re older you’ll look back and say you’re glad I made you do it. No. Like, in a few months, you’ll be really grateful that you’re here. These are your people.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

I did.

This past Monday, we went to our first club meeting. They asked him what he wanted to do. He chose the mechanical team. We walked over to that lab and sat down with a group. The team leaders talked about various choices they had to make when building the robot. Would it have treads like a tank, or wheels like a car? They went around and asked everyone their opinion. At the end, we circled up. Everyone, mentors and students, said their name, their preferred pronouns, and one thing they learned that evening. He said he learned that “I should always have some blank sheets of paper.”

When we walked out, he said, “Dad. I want to go here every night. I want to go to this school so I can walk out of my dorm and go to that lab.”

I did not say, “I told you so.” Not exactly, anyway. Not right away. I did hug him. I might have cried a little bit.

A few nights later, he learned CAD software. He showed his mentor what he’d done, and the mentor said, “Oh. You’re way ahead of us. We haven’t gotten to 3-D yet.” He came home and showed me how to make a 3-dimensional stop sign in OnShape. Then he learned how to draw shapes on the sign while I watched, and in a few minutes, it said “St0p.”

It was a hexagon. We’re still working on math.

Thanks for the ladder, Katie.

Monday evening, we’re flying to Scotland for ten days. Technically, he’s required to be at robot club at least one night a week. They said, “We’ll work around it. Not a problem.”

Thanks for the ladder, robot club.

All my fans, readers, and students — you believed in me years before I honestly believed in myself. Thank you for the ladder.

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            I shook Peter’s hand at the door and asked, “What do you do?”

            He said, “I’m a physicist.”

            It’s rare to meet someone so excited about their work that the mention of it makes them grin with gratitude. If they have any social awareness, they have learned not to talk about it too much. I am one of those people. We are like vampires. You must invite us in. If you do, be prepared. You may become one of us.

            Maybe that is what happened to me. I asked Peter, “What are you working on?”

            Over coffee, he patiently tested how much I knew, and how much I wanted to know, always graciously offering to wrap up the conversation. I could have talked about it for a week. In the years between, we probably have.

            While I didn’t learn much about physics in Peter’s kitchen, I learned what it was like to be a physicist. Peter Saulson, a Harvard and Princeton alum and a professor and researcher at Syracuse University, had worked on a single experiment for much of his career — an experiment that had cost over a billion dollars — and it had never shown results. Despite that, he was still excited about it.

            The result of the experiment — conducted by a team of a thousand world-renowned physicists, post-docs, undergrads, and engineers — is now well-known. But years ago, in the Saulsons’ kitchen, it was anyone’s guess. I have since come to understand why Peter was not dissuaded, and was perhaps even encouraged, by the conspicuous lack of an outcome.

            Peter is now retired. This summer, I called him up and interviewed him for a class assignment. When I asked him why he chose such difficult research he said, “You can fail at anything. Are you working on something for which failure will produce an interesting result?”  

            A failure to find what they were looking for could have been one of the most intriguing results in the history of physics.

            In the 1800s, experimental physicists were able to show that light was a wave. That was exciting because even the most ancient nerds knew how waves worked. Sound waves travel through the air. Water waves travel across the surface of the ocean. Victorian-era physicists hypothesized that light waves must also have a medium, and they called it the luminiferous ether — because back then they could really name things.

            Around this time, a physicist named Albert Michelson became known for measuring the speed of light with unprecedented accuracy and designing clever optical instruments. Michelson realized he could detect the ether, this hypothesized medium that filled the universe, if he could precisely measure a difference in the speed of light from two perpendicular directions at once.

            If you’ve ever swum in a current, you know how much of a difference the direction you choose can make. Based on this simple physical observation, Michelson hypothesized that light should appear to be moving at a different speed depending on whether it was swimming with, against, or across the ether.

            The tool Michelson designed to make this measurement was so ingenious, it is still used in physics labs today. In fact, it is called a Michelson interferometer. True to its name, it measures interference — the way that waves interact with each other.

            A modern example of wave interference is noise-canceling headphones. They work not by turning down the noise, but by recording the noise and playing it back “flipped.” The new soundwave peaks when the original dips, and dips when the original peaks. The waves add together but, instead of being twice as loud, they cancel each other. The waves interfere. 

            The Michelson interferometer works on a similar principle. A single beam of light is split and sent down two perpendicular paths of equal length. Mirrors send the light back, and the two beams join each other again. If the paths are the same length, the beam at the end will look like the original. If the paths are different lengths, or if light takes a different amount of time to travel one of the paths, one beam will destructively interfere with the other.

            When Michelson first tested the interferometer, horses and pedestrians walking by his lab jostled the instrument enough to overwhelm the tiny result he was looking for. Rather than being frustrating, this was a good indication of the device’s sensitivity. Michelson enlisted the help of another renowned experimentalist, Edward Morley. They improved the interferometer, installing it on a sandstone slab that floated on a pool of mercury to isolate it from tiny vibrations.

            Finally, the instrument was accurate enough to measure the hypothesized movement of the ether. They could turn the interferometer on the pool of mercury, facing one beam in the direction of the earth’s travel and the other perpendicular. They could try it in different seasons, as the earth changed its angle of movement through space around its orbit. As Michelson and Morley turned it, the idea was that one beam of light “swam” against the ether’s current, and the other swam across.

            No matter what they tried, they could not detect the ether. The speed of light seemed to be the same in all directions. They considered the experiment — which would produce one of the most revolutionary results in modern science — a failure. The news quickly made its way through the physics community.  

            A wave that traveled through nothing was so counterintuitive that physicists of the time could not imagine a theory without the ether. They even suggested that the “ether wind” shortened one path of the interferometer just enough to cancel out the difference in speed. That sounds crazy — but, to be fair, the truth is equally bizarre. Henrik Lorentz worked out equations for this length contraction that would become important for reasons he couldn’t guess. Henri Poincaré refined this into a robust theory of relativity that included all the funky things that Einstein would say about time and distance — but all this correct work was done with an incorrect understanding.

            We all know who Albert Einstein is now, but what you may not know is that Einstein took all this work that others had done to defend the ether hypothesis and flipped it on its head. If the ether existed, it would be the one frame of reference by which all other distances and times could be measured. What if there was no special frame of reference in the universe? What if the speed of light was always the same no matter how the observer was moving? This was Einstein’s insight in the Special Theory of Relativity of 1905. By 1915, Einstein had produced The General Theory of Relativity, an astonishingly accurate theory of how space, time, matter, and energy work together to create and move the universe — no ether required. In 1919, Arthur Eddington observed as the sun’s gravity bent the light of a distant star — just as the theory predicted — and overnight, Einstein became the wild-haired icon of genius that we know today.

            Michelson and others never quite gave up on the idea of the ether. His inventions and research won him a Nobel Prize, but he considered his most famous experiment a failure.

            As I sat in the kitchen with Peter, he carefully and patiently explained his research. “Gravity can also make waves. They’re tiny, but we think that when very energetic things happen in the universe, like black holes colliding, we might be able to detect that.”

            “What is waving?” I asked.

            “Spacetime.”

            “Space itself is compressing and expanding?”

            “Yes. Maybe. We think.”

            “And you’re trying to take a picture of these waves?”

            “Well, it’s more like a sound than an image. The signal we’re looking for is in a range you can hear, if you convert it into acoustic vibrations.”

            The fact that I was getting ready to send acoustic vibrations across a concert hall to this man was not lost on me. I wondered how country music compared to the music of colliding black holes.

            In the intervening years, I’ve learned a little about gravitational waves, and the machine they built to find them. Relativity predicts them, but even Einstein was unsure of their existence.

            In the 1960s, a few physicists began to wonder if there might be some new technology that was sensitive enough to detect them. Devices were built and failed. In the mid-1970s, radio astronomers Russell Hulse and Joe Taylor observed a pair of stars in a binary system that spiraled closer as they orbited, meaning they were losing energy, and that energy had to go somewhere.

             Several researchers, among them future Nobel Prize winner Rainer Weiss, realized there might already be an instrument that could detect gravitational waves, an instrument that was in almost every physics lab in the world. Over the next few decades, they built prototypes and iterations ever more sensitive and, in 1981, Peter Saulson got involved in the most promising build to date. It was called LIGO.

            In September 2015, years after I sat at Peter’s kitchen table, the LIGO collaboration made the first ever verified detection of gravitational waves. When I heard the news, I called Peter to congratulate him. He seemed pleased, but no more excited about the project than when I met him, long before anyone knew if LIGO would show results. Maybe, like anyone who loves to solve problems, he was thinking about the next mystery. 

            Peter had either never described the engineering aspect of the experiment, or I didn’t know enough at the time to visualize it. I looked around and found a news reel online, and they showed the LIGO facility and explained briefly how it worked.

            There are two long perpendicular tunnels. They split a beam of light and send it down both tunnels. Mirrors bounce the light back and the two beams join again.

            LIGO is an acronym for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It is a Michelson interferometer.

            Séances were popular in those heady Victorian years. If I could reach Albert Michelson beyond the veil, I would tell him all the amazing work his ideas and innovations have produced. I would tell him what Peter told me.

            “You can fail at anything. Are you working on something for which failure will produce an interesting result?”