Quanta.

(I wrote this back when I lived in Korea)

My life as a flatworm

When I was an undergraduate physics student in Hawaii, one of my classmates was named Claudia. I first noticed her in quantum mechanics, a class where the average test score was 30% and the faint popping sound of brain cells imploding could be heard.  I sat next to Claudia one day and I heard her humming to herself, seemingly taking no interest in the class itself.  Glancing over, I noticed her workbook was covered with the symbols of music: staff, notes and scales.  She hummed her way through that class, and at the end presented her ‘notes’ to the professor, telling him she had translated his lecture to music. She scored 100% on every test that semester and never stopped listening to her quantum mechanical opera. I later found out she had taken all the physics classes in undergraduate and graduate school.  She was 16 years old.

Speaking with Claudia about physics or math made us feel like flatworms trying to comprehend the nature of the stars in the sky.  She had an intuitive grasp of physical theory and the related mathematical tools. She could read math journals as we would read the Sunday paper. She was not a skilled instructor because she was unable to explain to us what was obvious to her. Like trying to describe the color “orange” to a person who has only seen ‘green’.  While we puzzled over the road signs, she was over in the next county, figuring a new way to draw the maps.

She always seemed amused, as if at the scene of some vast, cosmic joke. She wrote and published poems about the beauty of Hawaii. She was a campus activist (this was the early 70’s remember) and could often be found at the podium of some antiwar rally, microphone in hand. Sixteen years old and older than all of us put together.

Now that you have this picture of Claudia in your mind, this towering genius, I must tell you one more thing.  She was born into a life of grinding poverty on Philadelphia’s mean streets, growing  up in a place where all life’s markers are set to bring you down.  But she broke out through the opportunities offered by blind, random genetics, her own will, and I expect a modicum of good fortune.

This flatworm often wonders: how many other Claudia’s are trapped in the shadow-world; stars whose light (and music) are forever lost in the terrible gravity of circumstance?