Extra: Phonon II

A voice note about wanting to understand

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PHONON II*

Someone asked me recently, at the tail end of a loud birthday party in a loud Williamsburg bar, the kind that used to smell bad, but now features foodie-forward pop-ups, what physics was. 

Having spent most of my life in school and academia or at least in spaces that are academia-adjacent and both cater to academics and benefit from their work, it’s easy for me to forget that that is a question that gets uttered by folks other than the likes of a past me, when I was at the front of a 9th grade classroom. And, of course, when I had asked that question of my students, I did know the answer. 

And it’s easy for me to forget that any explanation I may offer in one of the academic worlds that I am sometimes an uncomfortable citizen of, but a citizen nevertheless, likely just won’t fly here in the real world where spicy palomas are on tap and the line for the bathroom is always unreasonable. 

“Do you know how electricity works inside of wires? Or how the bits inside of your phone make it show you images? Those are questions you can answer with physics,” I tried to yell over mid-2000s pop music and the intergenerational man-on-man banter on the other side of our table.

“What attracted you to that kind of work then?” the other person yelled back, a considerate question but one that’s also generic enough, the kind you may ask on a first date, to have left me unsure of whether I may have made any sense at all just a moment ago.

I’m honestly not sure what I said. I probably just rambled about my first physics class, the one I took in the 7th grade, and balls rolling down inclines, or whatever the hardest problem we did that year actually was. About wanting to know how things fundamentally work. About being seduced by the idea that we can invent, or discover, mathematical equations that then mean something in the real world. 

This is not good bar talk. We dropped it very quickly as a joke spilled over from the other side of the table and we got drawn into the surf of banter, laughter and, eventually, mild heckling.

I have wanted to do many things in my life, so the question of why I ended up giving my 20s to physics in particular is not one without merit. These days I am quite consumed with the idea of being a writer and that’s one that has been with me on-and-off since middle school. I had always written, I was always writing, I was always about to write something, but I never made it a calling or a focus of the kind of formal study that puts your life on pause for six years, like physics graduate school did for me, and then some after that. 

The more I think about it, though, the more I am convinced that the answer is actually very simple: I want to know why things are the way they are.

The frame of physics, and theoretical physics in particular, is just the neatest one that was presented to me, the one that was sold to me as the most fundamental and most objective before I knew that both of those claims can never be culture-free or absolute. I wanted to know how things become what they are and physics seemed to give me a classification system and a prescription for how one moves through that system and puts the pieces of it together. It felt efficient and it felt extensive. 

I admit to this often - I love listening to podcasts about movies I’ve never seen, about music I’ve never listened to, to interviews with writers whose work I’ve never read. This does sometimes land me into odd conversations, but I am never doing this for proverbial watercooler purposes, I am doing it because I want to understand why culture is the way it is on the same terms that I thought I could understand the physical world. The mapping is not at all one-to-one, but discussion of process (with writers and artists) or critique of a finished product in the context of past and concurrent work (with films and music) feel a bit like constructing a Drude model or a mean field theory in the back of my mind, a crude but useful framework for approximating each individual phenomenon that I may come across.

I mentioned being quite enthralled with the podcast Bad Gays in my last letter and have continued to pretty much binge it since, all the while thinking about how a podcast that complicates the historical conception of gay (and queer) identity, a project detailing how something became what it is, is something that I was always bound to be hungry for. It’s funny because I have always been at least a bit of a believer in the kind of representation that offers you someone how is enough like a version of you to keep you going, but I have nothing in common with King James or Lawrence of Arabia or the gangsters and skinheads and politicians profiled on the show - it’s is not a representation project.

Yet, what draws me in is the throughline of seeing how the gay identity was constructed through and alongside the actions of these people. That too answers the question of why things are the way they are. And construction of identity seems like a vital idea in the age of ever-rising culture wars where conservative states are using legislation to forbid young people from even thinking about how they may construct their own identity. 

This is radically different from physics which aims, quite explicitly, to be timeless and irrespective of the place where it is practiced. The figure of a physicist, however, is an identity in itself and one that I have thought about having been constructed through a specific sequence of historical events and circumstances rather often.

How the people who do things do those things does depend on who they think they are and why they think that. I’ve realized that any urge to understand how the world works must eventually evolve into the much hairer question of how the people that shape that world work.

I live with a psychologist so I know that this is a question that can be at least partly answered through science as much as I know how hard it is to devise the correct way to ask it. Certainly, there is more that one can do than listen to podcasts about best fantasy movies or 80s comedies or what a New York Times critic thinks of Beyonce or how much information about Bruce Springsteen fits into one enthusiastically read essay or even historically despicable gays. They all mostly scratch the surface, but the scratching is, for me, like the opposite of nails on a blackboard, a rather pleasant shockwave spreading through my brain until it dissipates into a small ripple of very mild understanding.

On Bad Gays, the host who is a historian by training often gives a disclaimer that calling a historical figure gay more often than not just doesn’t make sense 0 the conception of “gay” had to be invented and was invented at a specific time. However, he will continue, it can be interesting to use our modern conception of the word and the attached identity to examine how people in the past experienced and commented on same-sex attraction. You can sense the exasperation in his voice every time, the kind that is familiar if you’ve ever been yelled at on the Internet for something that you’ve said or written, but grappling with that annoying nuance makes for some of the best parts of the show.

While I was teaching, I would often ask my students to imagine traveling back in time and trying to understand why ancient civilizations may have been wrong about the way the Earth moves or how our eyes interact with rays of  light. They would struggle to come up with a way to argue with the likes of Aristotle or Ptolemy without invoking modern technology or modern ideas about the world, ideas that would have been completely foreign and inaccessible back then.

There was a physics lesson in there, because science is empirical after all and you always benefit from imagining an experiment or an argument, but also a lesson about what goes into our process of constructing an understanding of a world. Maybe even constructing a world that we think we understand that is, hopefully, not that far from whatever physical reality is. 

So, knowing why things are the way they are is incredibly complicated. An organized science like physics can offer valuable assistance and this is attractive, but it is an ever-evolving and a all-enveloping task - and probably one that can keep you going through more than one career.

Best,

Karmela

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P. S. The first Ultracold letter titled Phonon appeared here, on my birthday last year, and it also involve sound.

*In condensed matter physics, a phonon is a particle-like excitation in solids and some liquids. If a photon is a “chunk” of light, then a phonon can be best described as a “chunk” of sound, a sort of a narrow packet of vibration. Phonons are ubiquitous in studies of quantum fluids, where their behavior exemplifies how different these fluids are from classical liquids like water, and in many quantum devices, where they usually mean trouble in the sense of energy being inappropriately wasted on shaking and vibrating instead of whatever the device is designed to do.