Episode 30: Distant Drums 1
When a spinning flask of blood has been totally freeze dried there is a giant bloody scab that lines the inside of the flask.
A link to the previous episode: The Red and the Black: 2
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young, In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Lepanto by G. K. Chesterton
Somewhere in my third year at UCT I am majoring in Physics and Applied Maths, and I start to pick up the increasing sound of distant drums. There are universities in England and America where serious people go to do advanced physics. There are people I know who have picked themselves up and gone abroad to get a PhD in some of those places, people serious and ambitious and willing to leave home even though they don’t have to. I imagine they want to do something wonderful in physics.
The physics department likes to tell you it’s not necessary to leave. But when we learn quantum mechanics, the physics department teaches it as though it’s something mysterious and hard to use. Most of the professors seem a bit bewildered by it, and teach it as though it’s not something they use, but something arcane they learned from a textbook. (In 1964 quantum mechanics was barely 40 years old, less distant in the past than the Standard Model is now. Tempus fugit.) You can get a PhD at UCT, but somehow I sense, rightly or wrongly, that Cape Town is not the right place for fundamental physics, which is what I increasingly care about.
At the end of my third year I’m about to graduate with a B.Sc. and I take a summer job in my field, working for Professor Frank Brooks, a skilled nuclear experimentalist in the UCT physics department. He doesn’t really need me. He is being kind, because firstly, he is kind, and secondly I got the class medal for physics that year.
He’s studying nuclear resonances, the excited states of a nucleus that occur when you bombard it with high energy charged particles that excite it and push its insides into a more energetic metastable state which then decays a short time later into other particles and nuclei. It’s called a resonance because the nucleus, when hit, resonates like a swing being pushed at the right frequency. He performs these experiments with graduate students at the Van de Graaff accelerator at nearby Faure.
I am very unknowledgeable about all of this — I have pretty much done only theoretical physics and don’t know nuclear physics. My work for him involves plotting the frequency of the decays of metastable states he’s measured as a function of the energy of the incoming particle. When you excite the nucleus into a short-lived metastable state by hitting it with just the right resonant energy, you observe a peak in the number of decays that’s described by the Breit-Wigner formula. The width of the peak measures the lifetime of the state, which can be compared with nuclear theory.
My job is to draw smooth lines, with a pencil, by hand, through the experimental data points and fit them to the Breit-Wigner curve, and then measure its width. I don’t do it very well and I think that when Prof Brooks needs it to be done accurately, for his research, someone else, one of his graduate students, does it.
I drive to university every day for six weeks in the summer. Each morning I settle into a bench in one of the physics labs to do my graph plotting. In the room next door is Vic, already working on a Master’s. He collects unused human blood in plastic bags, freeze dries it, and then measures something (some radioactivity?) in it. When a spinning flask of blood has been totally freeze dried there is a giant bloody scab that lines the inside of the flask. And there is a disgusting bloody vapor emitted during the whole procedure that forms a cloud in the room that envelopes everything and works it way unremittingly into my clothes. I have to wash and change them every day.
But then, suddenly that summer, UCT acquires an ICT 1301, a mainframe computer made in England and lodged in the new computer center. The language it understands is MAC — Manchester Auto Code. Prof. Brooks sends me to a week-long course on programming, and then wants me to write a program to automate the plotting of his experimental points on the resonance curves as X’s on a line printer, a primitive kind of graphics.
I write and develop my programs on paper, line by line, composed like an essay, with an eraser. There are no such things as terminals and editors. When you think the program is right, you punch it, instruction by instruction, as coded holes onto cards using a keyboard that controls a mechanical punch. To check for typos, you then put the cards into a very similar machine, a verifier, on whose keyboard you type the same instructions again, and the verifier checks the match against each card. Then you submit it to the computer center where the operators run it at night. Usually it comes back with a typo.
Some days I hang out with Dubbi, a nuclear physics student a couple of years ahead of me. Sometimes we go to The Pig and Whistle, a favorite pub of students, where a whole beer will leave me slightly woozy. I drive anyway.
One day I decide to use the computer to write multiple random poems. I code up hundreds of words as print statements, generate hoped-for random numbers by looking at the last digit of Sine(N) where N cycles through the integers, and use the numbers to determine which print statement to execute and when to generate a line break.
I prime the print statements with melancholy romantic words, hoping to generate attractively sad love poetry.
At heart I’m a theorist. And, at UCT, I’m beginning to find the rigor of the advanced mechanics and relativity taught in the Applied Maths department more to my taste.
To be continued …