As If: An Autobiography

3. From Entropy to Galilee: The Indeterminacy Principle

three From Entropy to Galilee the indeterminacy principle I’ve always had mixed feelings about Wernher von Braun, who developed the V-2 ballistic missile at a forced labor factory in Mittelwork, and put himself in the service of the Nazis before bringing his expertise on rocketry to the American army and NASA. Yet he might have been speaking for me when he said, “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing .” It takes a while, however, before you can learn to live with that, and in the theater you have to live it with others who, at some nervous crux of rehearsal, may be looking for direction, never mind the quantum jumps and discontinuities of the Indeterminacy Principle. It may very well be that the activity of perception changes the thing perceived—and that Heisenbergian notion is still beguiling to me—but as a beginning director, when something felt uncertain or the actors’ raised eyebrows made it feel worse, I might ‹nd myself doing instead what I didn’t want to do, or abandoning out of embarrassment, if still ill-formed, some promising intuition of a really good idea. As I eventually acquired, however, a searching perseverance (or call it a stubborn aesthetic), there were times when I’ve literally said to the actors after weeks of work—or once, with the KRAKEN group, more than six months into a project, all of us anxious about it—that I’m not at all sure what we’re doing, but let’s stay with it, because I think we’re on to something. As it was in the theater, so it’s been in theory, where I’ve almost come to believe that being baf›ed is a virtue. And there may be method to that: the 66 P overcoming of distress at not knowing where you are imparting a heuristic energy that wouldn’t be there without it, as if redeeming the aporia (the impassible, in theory), which is not only baf›ing, but leaves us at a loss. Maybe I’m merely deluded, but as I’ve been telling my students, it’s at the extremity of thought where thought escapes us that inquiry really begins, with no alternative but to pursue it, if it’s really worth the thought, which is what keeps it going, with the concomitant risk of its going into “the mad abstract dark”—that phrase encountered in Yeats, though it might have been particle physics. As it was, I may have been in the dark, and close to some mad abstraction when, shortly after classes started at NYU, in the School of Engineering, I pondered the empty spaces at the end of the Mendeleyev table, that colorful chart of the elements, up there behind the professor in the chemistry lecture hall. I’d learned in high school that an element’s atomic number is the number of protons in its nucleus, and that if I knew the number and its atomic weight I could diagram the probable structure of a ›uorine atom, which is what they asked us to do when I took the Regents exam. Yet I’d never really thought much about those white empty spaces before, or, if anybody had talked about them, it somehow passed me by. So, out of a sudden impulse, I asked why nothing was there, and what’s going to happen when and if there is. That the professor looked startled, no wonder. Speaking of quantum jumps, that was a disjunct inquisitive distance from what he had been talking about or—since I didn’t quite know what I was asking about or, from some uneasiness, why—it was maybe a garbled question. There were only 92 elements then, those presumably “natural,” but I had a premonition that when those empty spaces were ‹lled there was going to be some trouble . For the last one on the chart, number 92, was the ‹ssile material uranium , seemingly there in abeyance, awaiting the “unnatural,” as the arti‹cial elements were created by means of nuclear reactions—the word nuclear not yet, however, with any intimations of dread. What exactly the professor said I can’t really remember, only that he had a German accent, and whatever it was he said, it wasn’t quite radioactive. If subcritical masses of plutonium were not around to create the sort of excitement they did at Alamogordo—what caused J. Robert Oppenheimer to intone...