Innocents Abroad

Life on a Möbius Strip

JANNA LEVIN

Einstein famously said, "Only two things are infinite: the universe and humanstupidity." Then he added, "And I'm not so sure about the universe."

And it's true, there's a realistic possibility that the entire universe isfinite; it's mathematically and physically possible. There was a period of timein my research when I was obsessed with this idea. I was fixated on theimplication that you could leave the Earth and travel in a straight line to aplanet in a distant galaxy on the edge of the observable universe and realizethe galaxy was the Milky Way that you had left behind you, and the planet youhad landed on was the Earth. There were also weirder possibilities that theEarth was reconnected like a Möbius strip—if you took a left-handed gloveon that same trip, it would come back right-handed.

The hazard for a scientist working on something so esoteric is the possibilitythat it just might not be true or it might not be answerable. I felt myself kindof navigating this precipice between discovery on the one side and obscurity onthe other side. At the time I was working at Berkeley, living in San Francisco.I would spend a lot of time in the coffee shop across the street from myapartment. I was trying to find some kind of tangible connection to a moreearthbound reality. And it was there that I met this guy named Warren.

Warren came charging past me the first day I saw him and pinned me with his blueeyes and said, "You're the astrophysicist." Which I knew. And then hehad so much momentum after having built up the nerve to say this to me that hekept walking; he didn't wait for my response. He went right out of the coffeeshop and down the street.

And so it begins.

Warren is just everything I would never want in a man. He can't drive, he'snever had his name on a lease, he's by his own confession completely uneducated,he's a self-professed obsessive-compulsive. He comes from a really tough part ofworking-class Manchester. He writes songs like

Daddy was a drunk, daddy was a singer,daddy was a drunken singer.Murdered in a flophouse, broke and drunk....

You get the idea. It's not good. So naturally I'm completely smitten. And he ismesmerizing. He has all this intensity, all this energy. He's full of opinions.He was going to start his own music station called Shut the Folk Up.

I said, "The gag is going to be that nobody's going to understand his accent.Nobody will understand a word he says! He'll just rant." It was a Manchesteraccent, but it did seem even more tangled than one would expect. It was quite abrogue. He would talk so fast that the words would just slam together—itwas really undecipherable. But when he sang, this big, beautiful, warm tone justlifted out of him; it was like this old-timey crooner, this rare crisp and clearsound. So I used to tell him, "If there's anything that's really urgent that youneed me to understand, just, like, sing it to me, OK?"

So, Warren and I started seeing each other, and he never asked me about my work,which was quite a relief from my own sort of mental world. And it's like we wereboth in exile. Warren was in exile from his actual country, and I was in a kindof mental exile. And he would obsess all day about music and melody, and I wouldobsess all day about mathematics and numbers. And it was like we were pulling sohard in such opposite directions that the tension kept both of us from floatingaway.

After a few weeks of seeing each other, Warren decides we should live together,and he's going to convince me that I should let him move in. So he gives me thisargument—some fairly inventive logic, which I'm a little suspicious of,and laden with all kinds of Manchester slang I don't really follow. But Warrencan convince me of anything, just anything, so I relent, and he says, "I'll beright back!" He's so excited; he comes back in less than an hour, and he's movedin. He's carrying his guitar and whatever he can carry on his back, because hehas this philosophy, "If you can't carry it, you can't own it." Right? So hemoves in with me.

And my parents are thrilled. Their recently Ph.D.-confirmed daughter—Ihave a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT—is living with an illegalimmigrant who can't spell words like "nonviable," "unfeasible." Even our friendsare full of doubt. Our good friend, the musician Sean Hayes, is writing lyricslike

We'll just play this one out until it explodesInto a thousand tiny piecesWhat's your story universeYou are melody, you are numbersYou are shapes, and you are rhythms

Warren and I hear this, and we're pretty sure it's about us. And I'm filled withdoubt too. I mean, this is a crazy situation; it's totally improbable. And myfellowship's coming to an end, and the only other offers I have are in England.And Warren hates England. He slumps when he describes the low-hanging skies andthe black mark of his accent there, and the inescapability of his class, but hesays, "Baby, you know, I'll follow you anywhere. Even to England," as though I'mbringing him to the acid marshes of hell.

But he makes himself feel better by convincing me we have to sell all our stuff,because you can't own what you can't carry. So we're sitting on the steps of ourapartment, and I watch stuff that I've been carting around my entire life justdisappear.

People come in and out of the coffee shop and stop to talk to us and say, "Soyou're the astrologer?"

And I say, "Well, no, I'm more of an astronomer." And they ask me about how isit possible that the universe is finite. And I explain how Warren and I could goon this trip from San Francisco to London, and if we kept going in as straight aline as possible we'd eventually come back to San Francisco again, where westarted. Because the Earth is compact and connected and finite, and maybe thewhole universe is like that. And Warren and I make this leap, his left hand inmy right hand, and we board a plane to the UK.

And it does suck. We have this very difficult wandering path, but finally I landa fantastic fellowship at Cambridge. It's beautiful. But not before we spend afew weeks in a coin-operated bed-sit in Brighton. If you ran out of pound coins,your electricity went off and the lights went out. We often ran out of poundcoins, and towards the end we were so despondent we would just sit in the dark.I could hear though not see Warren say things like "At least I don't have tolook at the wood-chipped wallpaper," which for some reason really depressed him,this very English quality of the wood-chipped wallpaper.

But eventually we get to Cambridge, and my work takes a beautiful turn. I startworking on black holes, these massive dead stars tens of kilometers acrossspinning hundreds of times a second ripping through space at the speed of light.This is very concrete compared to my previous research. So I'm excited about thedirection my work's turning in. I'm in Hawking's group in Cambridge, which isvery exciting, but he doesn't pay me any attention at all. But I'm invited byNobel laureates to Trinity College for dinner, and I get to watch this ceremonyof dinner at this old, beautiful college from the privileged perch of hightable.

Meanwhile Warren's down the road in another college washing the dishes becauseit was the only job he could get. And as things go on, we both start to retreatinto our mental worlds, me in my math and Warren in his...