Rossetti, fat and famous, wrote a ribbon at the top of her syndicated menus: FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN.
At least that was the story as Jove told it to me.
'Story of my life, Alice?' he said. 'The bright boy who loves and hates America. Loves it because it has given him everything. Hates it because it has given him everything. The ambivalence of the immigrant everywhere.'
Endlessly he talked of returning to Italy and never returned and lost in him were the warm slow days, the smell of ripening tomatoes, the dogs yapping out on the terrace, his father's country vineyard where the hills were steep with donkeys.
Sometimes the lost places overtook him and he started shouting about crazy progress and crazy life and why were the best brains in their field voluntarily working harder than in the bad days of bought slaves in the cotton field?
He said,'If I am master of my life why do I feel so out of control?'
Jove. He had been among the first of the younger physicists to criticise The Standard Model; the comprehensive theory of matter that seems to fit with so much of the experimental data. Jove called it 'The Flying Tarpaulin'; big, ugly, useful, covers what you want and ignores gravity. The attraction of the Model is that it recognises the symmetries of the three fundamental forces, 'weak force, strong force, electromagnetic force. Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily welded together.
His wife, his mistress, met.
In the 1970s Jove was working on his GUTs: Grand Unified Theories that sought to unite the strong, weak, and electromagnetic quanta in a sympathetic symmetry that would include gravity and overturn the bolt-it-together-somehow methods of The Standard Model.
GUTs had their heart in the right place; they wanted to recognise the true relationship between the three fundamental forces. Now, more than ever, crossing into the twenty-first century, our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. This is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
Symmetry. Beauty. Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.
'The tougher the problem the more beautiful the solution,' said Jove, smiling at me, frowning at my mathematics.
Later, in bed, inside me, 'The short and organised equations of physics are as beautiful and surprising as the natural forces they interpret.'
Jove had a way of being in the right place at the right time. As enthusiasm for GUTs weakened (negative experimental data), he hauled himself up through the body of science on a Superstring.
According to the theory, any particle, sufficiently magnified, will be seen not as a solid fixed point but as a tiny vibrating string. Matter will be composed of these vibrations. The universe itself would be symphonic.
If this seems strange, it is stranger that the image of the universe as a musical instrument, vibrating divine harmonies, was a commonplace of Renaissance thought. Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617—19) has a diagram of the tunings and harmonies of this instrument, according to the heavenly spheres. 'As above, so below' may prove to be more than a quaint alchemical axiom. Following the Superstring theory, the symmetry we observe in our universe is only a remnant of the symmetry to be observed in perfect ten-dimensional space.
'Jove only works on Superstrings because it reminds him of spaghetti,' said Signora Rossetti.
'Mama!'
At least that was the story as Jove told it to me.
'Story of my life, Alice?' he said. 'The bright boy who loves and hates America. Loves it because it has given him everything. Hates it because it has given him everything. The ambivalence of the immigrant everywhere.'
Endlessly he talked of returning to Italy and never returned and lost in him were the warm slow days, the smell of ripening tomatoes, the dogs yapping out on the terrace, his father's country vineyard where the hills were steep with donkeys.
Sometimes the lost places overtook him and he started shouting about crazy progress and crazy life and why were the best brains in their field voluntarily working harder than in the bad days of bought slaves in the cotton field?
He said,'If I am master of my life why do I feel so out of control?'
Jove. He had been among the first of the younger physicists to criticise The Standard Model; the comprehensive theory of matter that seems to fit with so much of the experimental data. Jove called it 'The Flying Tarpaulin'; big, ugly, useful, covers what you want and ignores gravity. The attraction of the Model is that it recognises the symmetries of the three fundamental forces, 'weak force, strong force, electromagnetic force. Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily welded together.
His wife, his mistress, met.
In the 1970s Jove was working on his GUTs: Grand Unified Theories that sought to unite the strong, weak, and electromagnetic quanta in a sympathetic symmetry that would include gravity and overturn the bolt-it-together-somehow methods of The Standard Model.
GUTs had their heart in the right place; they wanted to recognise the true relationship between the three fundamental forces. Now, more than ever, crossing into the twenty-first century, our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. This is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
Symmetry. Beauty. Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.
'The tougher the problem the more beautiful the solution,' said Jove, smiling at me, frowning at my mathematics.
Later, in bed, inside me, 'The short and organised equations of physics are as beautiful and surprising as the natural forces they interpret.'
Jove had a way of being in the right place at the right time. As enthusiasm for GUTs weakened (negative experimental data), he hauled himself up through the body of science on a Superstring.
According to the theory, any particle, sufficiently magnified, will be seen not as a solid fixed point but as a tiny vibrating string. Matter will be composed of these vibrations. The universe itself would be symphonic.
If this seems strange, it is stranger that the image of the universe as a musical instrument, vibrating divine harmonies, was a commonplace of Renaissance thought. Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617—19) has a diagram of the tunings and harmonies of this instrument, according to the heavenly spheres. 'As above, so below' may prove to be more than a quaint alchemical axiom. Following the Superstring theory, the symmetry we observe in our universe is only a remnant of the symmetry to be observed in perfect ten-dimensional space.
'Jove only works on Superstrings because it reminds him of spaghetti,' said Signora Rossetti.
'Mama!'
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