2
and experiment.
So I had thought. Now I rode a great circle above the SSC, haunted by questions about infinity, singularity--improbable manifestations even among the wonderland of quantum physics, where nothing was--quite--real. And more than that, I was needled and unsettled by questions about the way we--not my group but all of us, the high-energy physics community--did our business. I'd always taken for granted that we were after the truth, whatever its form, whatever our feelings about it. Now even that simple assumption had collapsed, and I was left with unresolvable doubts about it all--the nature of the real, the objectivity of physics--riddles posed by an unexpected visitor.
Two nights earlier I had returned from a ride to find a woman standing in front of my house. "Hello," I said, as I walked the Invisible Bicycle up the driveway toward her. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Carol Hendrix," she said, and from the sound of her voice, she was just a little bit amused. "Are you Sax?"
"Yes," I said. And I asked, "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" Really I was just stalling, trying to take in the fact that this woman was the one I'd been writing to for the past six months.
We had begun corresponding in our roles as group leaders at our respective labs, me at SSC-Texlab, her at Los Alamos, but had continued out of shared personal concerns: a mutual obsession with high-energy physics and an equally strong frustration with the way big-time science was conducted--the whole extrascientific carnival of politics and publicity that has surrounded particle accelerators from their inception.
Her letters were sometimes helter-skelter but were always interesting--reports from a powerful, disciplined intelligence working at its limits. She had the kind of mind I'd always appreciated, one comfortable with both experiment and theory. You wouldn't believe how rare that is in high-energy physics.
Women in the sciences can be hard and distant and self-protective, because they're wo