{"id":668,"date":"2008-09-07T19:27:17","date_gmt":"2008-09-07T19:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/09\/07\/in_which_a_physics_experiment_goes_horribly_wrong\/"},"modified":"2008-09-07T19:27:17","modified_gmt":"2008-09-07T19:27:17","slug":"in_which_a_physics_experiment_goes_horribly_wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/09\/07\/in_which_a_physics_experiment_goes_horribly_wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"In which a physics experiment goes horribly wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think there is no pain more acute than that of unrequited love, especially unrequited love that devolves from a formerly happy relationship. And the more perfect the love rival, the more painful the love object’s indifference. But what do you do if your rival is the result of a physics experiment gone awry, a stabilized absence<\/em> in space? What do you do, in short, if your love is seduced from you by a sentient black hole?<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nMisplaced passion<\/strong> A clever story of scientific obsession <\/p>\n

\nFor those of you interested in that queasy period of time when love slips through your fingers in slow motion, I can heartily recommend the novel As She Climbed Across the Table<\/em> by Jonathan Lethem (Faber and Faber, 1997), the book choice for our next Fiction Lab<\/a> at the Royal Institution this coming Wednesday evening. This short, tidy, beautifully written campus novel is a lab lit<\/a> classic about an English professor whose girlfriend, Dr Alice Coombs, falls destructively in love with a space-time anomaly she has dubbed ‘Lack’. But this modern-day Alice is dealing with an entirely different sort of rabbit-hole.<\/p>\n

\nAs always, an excerpt to tantalize you:<\/p>\n

\nAlice cleared the room of observers, locked the outer doors, and began the experiments that would etch her name forever in the history of physics.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n_The first was a paper clip, I think. Just a curled steel wire. She slid it across the table, pulling her hand away just short of the calibration that indicated Lack’s edge. The paper clip slid across the table, through Lack, and dropped to the floor on the other side. _<\/p>\n

\nAlice retrieved the paper clip and tried again. Again it fell to the floor behind the table. She fished in her pocket, brought out a dime. The dime slid through and fell. So did a penny, and so did a ballpoint pen. Alice emptied her pockets into a pile on the other side of the table, and each item clattered to the lab floor, refused.<\/em><\/p>\n

\nAlice went and gathered her belongings. One was missing. She searched the floor, frisked herself, reloaded her pockets, conducted an inventory. It was nowhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

\nLack had gobbled the key to our apartment.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think there is no pain more acute than that of unrequited love, especially unrequited love that devolves from a formerly happy relationship. And the more perfect the love rival, the more painful the love object’s indifference. But what do … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}