You don’t know me. I’m from the humanities: english, history, latin. Those are my subjects. I read novels, quote poets, write grammatically correct prose and spell in my sleep. David Starkey beats Eastenders. My favourite book is a thesaurus. I love to feast on the words as I roll them over playfully in my mind before committing them to paper. I know where I am with words. They are my bread and butter.
You, on the other hand, are alien to me. Yet my son, the boy who once met polar bears in his imaginary games, you have lured to a degree in chemistry, now my daughter to A Levels in chemistry, physics and maths. My other half reads New Scientist, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and dreams of computer code in bed.
We have met, you and I, in the dim and distant past. I remember holding a test tube over a bunsen burner in a tired old school laboratory, watching light refract through a prism, staring into murky tanks at newts and frogs. But your ancient teachers in my all girls’ school made little effort to capture our imaginations. I dropped you, breathed a sigh of relief and moved into the comforting embrace of the arts.
So no - I don’t know you either. But I have decided that that is no longer good enough. My children laugh when I tentatively ask if there is gravity on Mars (Yes, but not quite as strong as on Earth). Are there elements in the solar system which have not yet been discovered? (Definitely not) Isn’t the Large Hadron Collider just a very big boys’ toy, an excuse to propel things very fast towards each other and then watch them collide? Eat your heart out Richard Hammond.
I call myself educated yet there is a vast gaping hole in my essential knowledge of the world. You’ve skirted past me, maintained an air of mystery, kept yourself aloof.
So I’ve been to the library and to Amazon. For weeks I’ve immersed myself in you. And I’ve found you’re not the enigma I once thought you were.
I’ve grown to love the periodic table in all its brilliant beauty – and not just for its names, though I must admit that antimony, lutetium and titanium sit elegantly on the page. I’ve learnt the second law of thermodynamics: that left to their own devices hot things get colder and not vice versa. Like my cup of tea. That entropy (your posh word for chaos) will always catch up with us in the end. My daughter’s bedroom is proof of that. I can now balance a chemical equation and explain electron sharing, say why carbon can form both a diamond and the shavable graphite in a pencil lead, know an angstrom from an isotope, my loops from my buckyballs. Neon is a cocky, noble gas. Cosmic rays are real not a fiction. It’s not so hard.
I’ve enjoyed our short time together. Maybe we could keep in touch – just now and then. Yes, I’d like that. I could even show you a rhyming couplet or two. Oh, and about that Large Collider of yours - bring it on!
You, on the other hand, are alien to me. Yet my son, the boy who once met polar bears in his imaginary games, you have lured to a degree in chemistry, now my daughter to A Levels in chemistry, physics and maths. My other half reads New Scientist, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and dreams of computer code in bed.
Not one language between them, no love of metaphors, gerundives, the early Anglo-Saxons and New Hart’s Rules. You’ve hooked them instead on positrons, covalent bonding, string theory, quarks. I have Shakespeare, you have Schrodinger – with and without his cat. You have Einstein, I have McEwan. C is a letter: to you it is the speed of light. Where did I go wrong?
We have met, you and I, in the dim and distant past. I remember holding a test tube over a bunsen burner in a tired old school laboratory, watching light refract through a prism, staring into murky tanks at newts and frogs. But your ancient teachers in my all girls’ school made little effort to capture our imaginations. I dropped you, breathed a sigh of relief and moved into the comforting embrace of the arts.
So no - I don’t know you either. But I have decided that that is no longer good enough. My children laugh when I tentatively ask if there is gravity on Mars (Yes, but not quite as strong as on Earth). Are there elements in the solar system which have not yet been discovered? (Definitely not) Isn’t the Large Hadron Collider just a very big boys’ toy, an excuse to propel things very fast towards each other and then watch them collide? Eat your heart out Richard Hammond.
I call myself educated yet there is a vast gaping hole in my essential knowledge of the world. You’ve skirted past me, maintained an air of mystery, kept yourself aloof.
So I’ve been to the library and to Amazon. For weeks I’ve immersed myself in you. And I’ve found you’re not the enigma I once thought you were.
I’ve grown to love the periodic table in all its brilliant beauty – and not just for its names, though I must admit that antimony, lutetium and titanium sit elegantly on the page. I’ve learnt the second law of thermodynamics: that left to their own devices hot things get colder and not vice versa. Like my cup of tea. That entropy (your posh word for chaos) will always catch up with us in the end. My daughter’s bedroom is proof of that. I can now balance a chemical equation and explain electron sharing, say why carbon can form both a diamond and the shavable graphite in a pencil lead, know an angstrom from an isotope, my loops from my buckyballs. Neon is a cocky, noble gas. Cosmic rays are real not a fiction. It’s not so hard.
Are you impressed? I still get stuck on the space-time horizon and the uncertainty principle, never mind the gluons. Hawking lost me at the six flavours of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom. Are you kidding? For now you can keep Planck’s quantum hypothesis, the singularity theorem and red shift.
But I’ll hold my own in the dinner party conversations about black holes and all that missing anti-matter. (Just put a mother on to it – believe me, we find things all the time!)
I’ve enjoyed our short time together. Maybe we could keep in touch – just now and then. Yes, I’d like that. I could even show you a rhyming couplet or two. Oh, and about that Large Collider of yours - bring it on!
No comments:
Post a Comment