Equations of the Sun
It was a homework assignment. My professor was the curly-haired Herbert Bernstein. He liked to stride across the front of the classroom with chalk in his hand, and sometimes with both hands behind his back. As he thought about the assignment, his face broke out in a wide smile.
He turned and finished his set of equations on the chalkboard. Although we were only a couple weeks into his quantum mechanics course, I was finding his enthusiasm to be infectious. This was my favorite class.
"These are what we see, roughly, coming out of our nearest star, the sun," he told us. His eyes swept the room. He swiveled and tapped the slate next to what he'd written. "According to our best measurements, here it is. These are the results of whatever is going on in there."
"Nothing more?" someone asked, the young, blonde man who had dropped out of Princeton and returned to college here.
"Nothing of significance," Herb put his hands behind his back. He shrugged. "This is pretty much it. So your homework is to explore. Tell me, with equations, what you think is going on inside the sun to produce these results on the surface."
Dutifully, I copied the results. As I did, I started thinking backwards. What was the previous reaction step? Or really, what were the set of previous reactions that would produce this? Some of them could be simple. Maybe most of the results came from hydrogen and helium. The odds and ends in the equations could come from the traces of other light elements reacting in the plasma.
Next to me, one of my classmates, a young woman who spoke up with keen questions, pulled back her kinky blonde hair and jotted the assignment down on her page more quickly than I did. When she finished, she slapped her pencil down. She noticed me staring at her and flashed me a smile. I put my head down for a few seconds, embarrassed, and checked my equations.
It was my first semester at Hampshire College.
I'd made a few acquaintances but no close friends yet. And since I had a routine of working late into the night and getting up early to exercise, I could make lots of time for homework, especially writing. I was working on a novel, bit by bit. I was composing notes for my Division I linguistics paper. Naturally, I spent an hour on the equations for the interior chemical reactions of the sun. In fact, I spent another block of time on the problem on Saturday morning.
On Sunday, the young woman from my quantum mechanics class found me as we were passing through the halls. It was an odd chance, very welcome, but I had thought she didn't live near me. In our conversation, I found I was mostly right. She revealed her room was two floors up and two sections north of me, although conveniently we were both in the Dakin building.
“Did you make any progress on the homework?” she asked. The light in the hall was dim. It made her golden hair seem browner, but her blue eyes shone.
“Yeah.” I thought about where I had given up. I had not been able to make my forward-looking solution and backward-looking solution join together. “But it doesn’t quite balance.”
“Let’s meet up and go over it.” She gave me a determined look, based on the slight crease in her brow, but with a hopeful, uncertain grin beneath. It seemed like a challenge.
I had been thinking of her as the bright girl. She was smart and fairly quick-witted. She spoke in a feminine but slightly rough voice. For the first time, in the hall with her, I really looked at her upturned nose and her freckles and thought about how cute she was. She would later tell me she hated the bump in her nose although, if she had one, it was essentially invisible. As far as her freckles, she would tell me she hated them. She never told me she hated being smart. That, I think she felt good about.
In the afternoon, we sat down together and got out our notebooks. On hers, she had written a few lines. She appeared to have lost interest early. Maybe she figured out quicker than I did that we didn't have much of a sense of direction, in our group, about the chemical reactions in plasma even though we had spent most of a class on them.
So far, I had filled three pages with equations and maybe a sixth of another. I had given up, too, when I had gotten enough sense of the bigger problem. I had started to develop opinions about how the output from the sun should theoretically appear. I was able to contrast it with how the results actually appeared and see a significant gap. I suspected something was wrong with our starting point. Everyone was sure about the starting point, apparently, because we knew the proportions of elements in our sun, but I was starting to guess our picture had to be wrong somehow - or at least incomplete.
"Explain this," said the young woman. She put a finger down on the second step in my equations.
Line by line, we stepped through my work in the first two pages. She listened to my thinking. Twice, she jotted down notes in her own notebook. She checked my math. When she reached the middle, she tapped her chin. She sat, lost in her thoughts for a moment.
With awkward smiles and confusing body language, we said goodbye before dinner. On Monday, we met again in our quantum mechanics class. There, I discovered how little I had written compared to another student, a blonde young man who had dropped out from Princeton. He had returned to academics here at Hampshire College. He had filled page after page, nearly twenty pages, before he gave up getting the reactions to balance between the starting elements and the finished products. He seemed consumed by the project. However, he was kind enough to read my work a little and see I had tried a different direction, which seemed to frustrate him, please him, and make him want to resume. He really wanted Professor Bernstein to reveal the answer.
"There is no answer yet," Herb Bernstein told us. "No one has solved this."
That made everyone a little happier with how far we had gotten. This wasn't a trivial problem.
"The important part," Herb continued, "Is the thinking about it. The question of particle reactions in our sun is an interesting one. I think we can all see the math doesn't work out. Either it's tremendously complicated, more than humans can do, or there's something we don't know. And I think there's something we don't know."
Our classmate from Princeton seemed frustrated but he obviously felt happier, too, and more relaxed. I think he was discovering that he hated required courses and the pressure of exams but he actually liked learning. He loved the process.
I think I was coming to the same sort of understanding. When all the external forces and distractions were removed, as they mostly had been at Hampshire, I loved to learn. I wanted to figure out solutions to problems. And I wanted to make things.
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