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6.2
Quanta
Susanne Antonetta

-for Jin

There is an undiscovered particle called the graviton that holds our feet to the earth. There has to be, by the laws of quantum physics, which explain forces with an array of bits, photons for light, gluons for strong interaction, bosons for weak. But in the case of the gravity particle, we cannot find it, or equation our way down the chalkboard to it. Along with questions like dark matter and dark energy, it’s one of physics’ mysteries. What is it, how does it work? It has been a law in quantum physics that energy acts as both a wave and a particle, and this must hold true of gravity. It is also a law of quantum physics that the more you know about the position of a force in one state, the less you can know about it in the other: target a photon in its particle-state, and forget ever pinning down its wave-state.

What is the most primitive physical requirement of a quantum theory? writes Roger Penrose, who is a physicist, and whose notions of the primitive, I notice, diverge startlingly from my own. Since we are trying to do physics, we require that a really physical concept of graviton actually does exist.

That means that, as with light, gravitons must be things as well as waves, massless things but things nonetheless. The quantum truth of light’s dual life as wave and particle was a breakthrough in physics, largely credited to Paul Dirac, a silent man who loved Mickey Mouse and turned down a knighthood because it might mean people addressing him by his first name, as Sir Paul. Dirac drove in only two gears, reverse and fourth, and since he did little highway driving he was always either going backwards or frantically speeding.



I imagine that the physics of gravitons have a corresponding science in the physics of love, another binding force. There’s some particle that could be summoned up by an equation, an attachment-ton, a love-ton. Can it, like static electricity, grip, and then wear off? Particles might drift from the bodies of divorcing couples. I wonder, if you had the right lens, if you could see the bits lift away, the way fluff from the cottonwood trees in April fills the gutters and pales cars, as if invisible hands sheared an endless landscape of sheep above our heads.



You are my son, my fourteen-year-old. I would have said you and I were fast together, then you became a teenager, and I don’t know anymore.

I hate you, you say sometimes, you’re not a real mother. I don’t blame you; you face this thing, this primitive physical answer to a charged theoretical need. It’s a rule of physics that quantum particles obey a different set of laws than those governing the larger world, laws in which they can be many places at the same instant, can be both an object and a force. A real mother would be a quantum, be everywhere and everything you needed her to be at once. All of us, I believe, have an instinct for quantum law, through the bits that long ago began revolving around one another, on their way to becoming our bodies.

Where have you put my things? I can’t find anything. Goddammit. We have this conversation many times a day.

I don’t put your things anywhere, I tell you, with a mechanical, Don’t swear.

I can’t ever find my homework! I’m going to fail because of you.

I do not lose your things. I’m almost afraid to touch your things. But how keenly you feel the conundrum: you may fail because of me, in any number of ways. At one time in your life when you felt upset, or just sleepy or needy, you cried, “Hand! Hand!” or “Hair! Hair!” and I offered those parts of myself, contorting my body into angles to supply my long fingers or my longer hair, and you quieted. Some leap has occurred. Maybe we’ve become matter and anti-matter, and live in danger of annihilating together.



Surely each graviton carries its own measure of curvature, wrote Penrose, giving gravitons the quality of a face, a turned cheek. Your eyes, leaf-shaped, that flick down on meeting mine. Their curtains drop on so much going on inside, like quiet suburban houses with their inner worlds. Some houses close on violences, though the houses themselves, studded with windows meant to be clear and doors meant to swing open, seem to argue their innocence. But there are secrets we learn: the house down the street where an older boy killed a younger one, a neighbor. We went out that night and left you with a babysitter, a tall twenty-year-old named Joe, and when Joe took you to the park the police stopped you both and questioned you for a long time.

The officers must have been aggressive in their questions; they knew something was up, something involving an older boy and a younger one, and did not know Joe, who was gentle and nice. You were very small and remained scared for a long time, asking, Had you yourself been murdered? Had you committed murder? I sensed other questions underlying these constant and seemingly absurd ones: how could you become the center of so much wonder, such seeming risk the police circled you and asked you in multiple ways if you were safe, while we were absent?

Your mouth burned with a new vocabulary of danger, one that, like the theory of relativity, almost everyone’s aware of in some sense but almost no one really knows.

If we could find the graviton particle, we could perhaps bend space-time our way, bring gravity naturally to places like the moon. I imagine this could be true for love gravitons; if we could locate them, we could put them in, or put them back.

Which brings us to you. I want to talk to you like a scientist, say, infinities, renormalization, strangeness, weakness of censorship. I want to see if some detritus of the old you is drifting off. You would find me insane. This is in fact one of your weapons: to tell me—accurately—that you have a mad mother.

You don’t want to hurt me, or generally don’t, you apologize in a fever of penance. You are flickering all over at this age, first one thing, then another. I know you as a wave, a series of invisible urges. Your solid self drifts farther.

Dirac’s wife, in a rage, screamed at him, What would you do if I left you! Dirac, who’d once written to her that she made him a human being, paused and answered, Why I would say goodbye, Dear.

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s most recent book, Make Me a Mother, a memoir and study of adoption, was published by W.W. Norton. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, a Pushcart prize, and others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review and many anthologies, including Short Takes and Lyric Postmodernisms. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband and son. Her website is www.suzannepaola.com.