Follow the light
«There is pleasure in recognizing old things from a new viewpoint». That was my first thought after finishing The Blood Cries from the Ground, a book about two brothers. As the title suggests, the first murder in the history of literature serves as a platform on which I attempt to understand what was not yet clear to me. Incidentally, this first thought of recognizing old things was not my own. It was something I had read elsewhere, in a lecture on quantum mechanics by the American physicist Richard P. Feynman.
I do not write because I understand the world around me. However, I have a strong tendency to remember the things I do not understand. There is no immediately comprehensible system to this memory production; I remember details and ticks, strange habits or funny out-of-place words, I remember how things felt, how the faces around me reacted. I remember these details from parties, from my childhood, from conversations with friends or strangers, even from my dreams. My greatest struggles as a writer, involves expressing these memories in the stringent system of words and sentences. If I succeed, although no ethereal social or psychological system transpires, the experiences reveal themselves as precise as I remember them. Since they often reemerge in new surroundings, I understand more than I did before. It has led me to believe that observation – not imagination – is my strongest motivation as a writer.
For a period of my life this disappointed me. Until I read Richard P. Feynman. In short, Feynman is one of the greatest minds of the last century, both playful and brilliant. He was also crucial in the making of the atomic bomb, thus co-responsible for ending all playfulness and all brilliance in close to a quarter of a million Japanese lives. Though interesting as a paradox, I will not break my back trying to balance his moral budget. I will rather expand on a specific quality in his thinking – one that came to him at an earlier age.
As Lawrence M. Krauss points out in Quantum Man, Feynman stressed the importance of creativity – which to him meant “working things out from the beginning”. As professor, he urged each student to create his own universe of ideas, their own original character – just as Feynman's own work carried a unique personal stamp. There are many ways to go about scientific exploration, as there are in the art of writing fiction. In our culture there seems to be a psychological connection between creativity and chaos; more often than not innovation – in both these fields – is equated with randomly throwing things together and seeing what happens. However, from Feynman's notebooks and letters I have learned that he never played “chaotically with scientific things”. Rather he always carried out his scientific play in a controlled manner; always attentive to what was going on.
And as any good writer, Feynman understood that he needed to fully explore the universe of ideas belonging to those who had gone before him. One of these was the brilliant and reclusive lawyer-turned-mathematician, Pierre de Fermat. If he is remembered at all today by the general public, it is not for his many key contributions to geometry, calculus and number theory, but rather for his scribbles in his copy of Artithmetiuca, the masterpiece of the Greek mathematician Diophantus. In his book Fermat wrote down an equation, indicating that he had discovered a simple proof of a remarkable fact, which 350 years later required almost all of the developments of twentieth-century mathematicians and several hundred pages to complete. The scribble is now known as Fermat’s last theorem, and proves to show, as for many writers, that the pen is indeed brighter than his lord.
Twenty-five years after making this dubious claim, Fermat did present a complete proof of something else, however: an almost ethereal principle that established an approach that would later change the way we think about physics. The issue to which Fermat turned his attention in 1662 involved a phenomenon which the Dutch scientist Willebrord Snell had described forty years earlier. Snell discovered a mathematical regularity in the way light is bent when it crossed between air and water. Today this is called Snell’s law, and it is often presented in high school physics classes as yet another additional fact to be memorized.
The exact form of the law is unimportant here; what is important is both its general character and its physical origin. In simple terms, the law states that when light goes from a less dense to a denser medium, the trajectory of the light ray is bent closer to the perpendicular of the surface between the media.
Now, why does the light bend? Why does Jeppe drink? Or why does my wife scratch her cheek when she talks about our children? Well, to answer the easy one first: If light is made up of a stream of particles, as Newton and others thought, one could understand this phenomenon if the particles speed up as they move from air to water. However, this explanation seemed fishy even at the time. After all, in a denser medium, any such particles would presumably encounter a greater resistance to their motion, just as cars on a road end up moving more slowly in heavy traffic, or Hamlet’s hand slows down as the blade cuts into Polonius’s flesh. There was another possibility, however, as the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens demonstrated in 1690. If light is a wave and not made of particles, then it would bend inward when it slows down, just like a sound wave. Science has later shown that light does indeed slow down in denser media, and Snell’s law provides important evidence that light behaves, in this instance at least, like a wave.
Almost thirty years before Huygens’s work, Fermat too reasoned that light should travel more slowly when it hit the water. Instead of thinking in terms of whether light was a wave or a particle, however, Fermat the mathematician showed that in this case one could explain the trajectory of light in terms of a general mathematical principle. We now call this Fermat’s principle of least time. As he demonstrated, light will follow precisely the same bending trajectory determined by Snell if “light travels between two given points along the path of the shortest time”.
This can be understood as follows. If light travels more quickly in the less dense medium, then to get from A to B in the shortest time, it would make sense to travel a longer distance in this medium, and a shorter distance in the second medium. Now, it cannot travel for too long in the first medium, otherwise the extra distance it travels would more than overcome the gain obtained by traveling at a faster speed. One path is just right, however, and this path turns out to involve a bending trajectory that exactly reproduces the trajectory Snell observed.
Now, Fermat’s principle of least time is a mathematically elegant way of determining the path light takes without recourse to any mechanistic description in terms of waves or particles. The only problem is that when one thinks about the physical basis of the result, it seems to suggest intentionality; so that, like a commuter in the Monday-morning rush-hour listening to the traffic report, light somehow considers all possible paths before embarking on its voyage, and ultimately choses the one that will get it to its destination fastest. It would be the same fallacy to suggest that Oedipus willfully and consciously sought out his father and mother to kill and fuck them, respectively.
But the fascinating thing is that we don’t need to ascribe any intentionality to light’s wanderings or Oedipus’s tragedy. Fermat’s principle and Sophocles storytelling are both wonderful examples of an even more remarkable property of physics and fiction: the amazing fact that nature is comprehensible via mathematics and art. If there is any one property that is guiding my own approach to writing, it is this one. Like it was for Richard Feynman. In fact this principle, which I still cannot decide whether to understand as the simplicity of our complex nature or the other way around, was so important that he referred to it twice in his Nobel Prize address.
First he wrote:
It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship … There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before … I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. I don’t know what it means, that nature chooses these curious forms, but maybe that is a way of defining simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing you are describing the same thing.
Later in his address he put into words what appears valid for all good writing, namely that originality does not come with exploring new niches or fetishes of the human condition, but rather in the continuous examination of these fundamental questions: How does light move? Why did Kain kill his brother? Alternatively, as Feynman put it:
Theories of the known, which are described by different physical ideas, may be equivalent in all their predictions and are hence scientifically indistinguishable. However, they are not psychologically identical when trying to move from that base into the unknown. For different views suggest different kinds of modification which might be made and hence are not equivalent in the hypotheses one generates from them in one’s attempt to understand what is not yet understood.
Now, how can we as writers follow this example? One way to do so is simply by understanding what Anton Chekov really meant when he, on May 30th 1888, wrote his friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin:
I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.
Methods may vary, but any literature of value lets readers see themselves not as they hope to be but simply as they are. It does so without hesitation, strategy or consent. Therefore, I have gathered, my job is to stare nature in the eye. Never to blink or judge, simply write down what I see.