With apologies to quantum physicists…

I just broke down and took my kids to see High School Musical 3 today. Not that they really had to twist my arm - I enjoyed High School Musical and HSM2 way more than I should have. The show lost some of its magic for me in its leap to the big screen, though. The songs weren’t as catchy, the characters didn’t grow or surprise me (except when the gay guy invited a girl to the prom- not really growth, but a bit of a surprise), and there was no conflict. Although my kids loved it, proclaiming it their favorite of the series, I think even they felt a little bored by Troy and Gabriella’s lack of edginess. As soon as he climbed into his car seat afterward, my six-year-old asked if we could listen to the Eels, which we have in the CD player. Specifically, he wanted to hear “Dog Faced Boy,” and, craving a little subversiveness myself (let’s face it – despite having a couple of harmless songs on Shrek movie soundtracks, Mark Everett is a deeply disturbed individual), I quickly obliged, and we all happily sang along during the drive home from the theater.

Coming home from the school today
Crying all along the way
Ain't no way for a boy to be
Begging ma to shave me please…

Ma won't shave me
Jesus can't save me
Dog faced boy

Life ain't pretty for a dog faced boy

Upon reflection, maybe I should remove the Eels from the car CD changer until the kids are both out of elementary school.

The Eels CD made me think about a documentary that my husband and I saw about Mark Everett’s father, Hugh Everett, who was a famous and influential physicist until he committed suicide when Mark was in college. I imagine that this family dynamic, combined with a gene pool fed by crazy genius genes – Mark Everett’s schizophrenic sister also committed suicide -- has something to do with the dour tone of most of the Eels’ music.

Dr. Everett was a pioneer in the field of quantum physics who hypothesized the idea of alternate universes. Somehow this relates to string theory. I can’t even pretend to understand the theory or its implications beyond the most basic level.(1) I think the idea is that rather than the traditionally accepted four dimensions of reality -- three space dimensions plus one time dimension – there are actually somewhere between seven and twelve dimensions. This is the only way to explain the funky, illogical ways that various subatomic particles and objects in space behave. Dr. Everett pushed this idea further to suggest that, in these alternate dimensions, alternate versions of ourselves may be living entirely different lives than the ones that we are aware of.

This idea is beyond creepy to me. Four dimensions is quite enough for me to handle, thank you very much. (Perhaps this is one reason I'm having a hard time with fiction writing.) Not only that, but string theorists seem to be a little too goofy to take seriously as scientists. Their research is peppered with terms like “graviton” and “fuzzball,” which makes it sound like these guys are just messing with us. Are they scientists or Austin Powers villains?

Evidently string theorists are engaged in an academic war with other physicists who think that string theory is a load of hooey. The other school of thought (don’t know what it’s called, but I'm sure it has a catchy name) posits that four dimensions are in fact enough to explain everything in the universe. There was a profile of one of the four-dimension science guys in The New Yorker about six months ago. Again, I can’t remember his name, but he was a renegade kind of guy, a “maverick”, if you will, who dropped out of the Ivy League and for several years lived in a trailer by the beach, surfed for half the day and thought about math for the rest of the day until he refined his theory and made it presentable to the scientific community. Compared to string theory, his theory was simple and earthbound, and it was like a hand grenade thrown into the field of quantum physics.

The debate still rages on, I’m sure, in terms that are way beyond my comprehension level. But one of the things that I think is cool about the debate, or the way that the New Yorker piece explained it, is that all these science guys seem to know that their work is, at least for the foreseeable future, purely theoretical and can be neither proven nor disproven. They are really engaged in a debate about faith, not science. They are trying to understand the world, and they value one theory over another based on how “beautiful” it is. By “beautiful”, they mean aesthetically pleasing. Really, this was how the scientists who were interviewed explained their motivations and values. Not being a mathematician, I’ve never experienced math as a beautiful thing, but I think I understand what they mean. They appreciate harmony, symmetry, balance, and a satisfying sense of resolution in their theories. They want to be surprised, but they need their theories to engage with their intuitive understanding of the world. In the absence of “proof,” they need their equations and hypotheses to connect with them on both an intellectual and an emotional level.

I think that when you experience this kind of connection with something in the world, whether it's a movie, a scenic vista, a math equation, or a song, it illuminates some truth of human experience and our connection to each other. This is true whether it expresses deep sadness or joy, hope or despair, or the promise of resolution to a baffling conundrum. I believe that these connections also illuminate a connection to a higher power that provides an intrinsic order and meaning towards which we all strive.(2) "Beautiful" in this sense is very different from "pretty", which may be nice to look at but illuminates nothing. I love it that my children seem intuitively to distinguish the soulful, despairing beauty of Eels songs from the prettiness of the kids in High School Musical. But I may need to be more careful about introducing too much of the darker side of beauty too soon so I don't blow their minds before they reach second grade.

(1) Even Wikipedia can’t boil string theory down into a concise framework; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory, which is indecipherable.

(2) It occurs to me that perhaps string theory allows for this higher power idea and that it exists on the additional dimensions that string theorists infer. Maybe science and spirituality are in fact approaching an explicit synthesis, not just an implicit one. OK, now I am blowing my own mind.