The Night of the Shooting Stars

It was early in the morning when my radio clicked on. listened for awhile in the dark. I was about to get up and head for the bathroom when the announcer said they had awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physics to three guys. I paused and lay back down to listen. I’m no physicist, and I’ve never even taken a single course in physics, so it may surprise you to know that I’ve actually met some Nobel Prize winners in physics—met them before they ever became Nobel laureates.

I wondered if it could happen again. The radio said that the winners were Masatoshi Koshiba, Riccardo Giacconi, and a Dr. Raymond Davis, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr.

Davis won for his research on neutrinos— little subatomic particles produced in the nuclear fusion reactions occurring in the core of the sun that shoot out across the universe passing directly through everything they encounter (neutrinos rarely interact with matter). In the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Davis marked the passage of these solar neutrinos using chlorine detectors located deep underground in a South Dakota gold mine. Yessir, Dr.

Raymond Davis. We knew him as Ray. Back in the 1960s, my father, a physics professor, worked for a time at the Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, New York— the same place Ray Davis worked. Our families got to know each other and we used to go sailing with Ray Davis on his 25 foot sailboat.

I remember one day in particular when we were out on his boat, tacking across Long Island Sound. A sunny day and a stiff nor’easter. Ray and I were back in the cockpit just shooting the breeze and I recall saying to him, “Ray, it might be interesting to take a look at this neutrino business.” He just nodded, sipped his beer and stared out at the water. But I guess he was listening.

That’s how I remember it, anyway. Yeah, it’s true that I was just a kid back in the 60s. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t on the ball. I paid attention when my father talked about particle physics, detectors, scanners, cloud chambers, bubble chambers and accelerators.

And yeah, maybe I really thought that neutrinos was a breakfast cereal. It was a long time ago. And also, I would have liked to have known Norma Jean—but I was just a kid, as I told you. But as kids grow up, they listen, they take mental notes and then they start asking the tough questions.

Particularly when their father is a high energy physicist who took his family with him when he did experiments on the big atom smashers, like CERN in Switzerland, Fermilab in Illinois, and SLAC which straddles the San Andreas Fault in Palo Alto, California. So I had, at least some understanding that atoms were not the fundamental building blocks of nature—that the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up an atom are actually made up of even smaller little things, and that physicists learn about these even smaller little things by smashing atoms together and watching what the resulting little pieces do after the impact.

I found this mildly interesting. And I remember my professor pop talking about Gell-Mann and Feynman, and a host of other theoretical physicists. Some would stop by our house to visit pop, and some would stay the night. A few would later win their Nobel.

So after hearing about quarks for most of my life, and occasionally asking my father for explanations, as a teenager, I asked my dad, “So, Pop, ‘zup with them quarks?” Theoretical physicists are often well-rounded types, my father opined, and when, in the 1950s, Caltech’s Murray Gell-Mann first proposed the existence of the tiny little particles that really were the fundamental building blocks of matter, he chose to call them “quarks.” Why? Well, the word came from James Joyce’s phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark,” in Ulysses, says my pop. Gell-mann said there were three kinds of quarks (up, down and strange) and Joyce postulated three quarks, so there you go, said my dad.

Now that was sort of intriguing to a well-rounded political science major, as I was in the mid 1970s. I resolved to check into it at some point. But I was in no rush to figure out this subatomic particle zoo that was the business of high energy physics. I’d let it play out for awhile on its own.

So in the 1980s and 1990s I paid scant attention to developments in particle physics. Sure, I thought about black holes and read Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, Riordan’s The Hunting of the Quark, and finally Driving Mr. Albert (about a cross-country trip with Einstein’s brain). But then finally, in the mid 90s, I was ready.

Ready to match, or at least follow, the intellectual path of the man who first perceived the ghostlike existence of the quark, Dr. Gell-Mann. bought a copy of Ulysses and started reading.

It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t always pretty, but I finally plowed through all of Joyce’s Ulysses. And it wasn’t there. No quarks at all for Muster Mark. And no Muster Mark either.

Much to my disappointment and then to my outrage, I never found that phrase about Muster Mark and his quarks. So I confronted my father yet again about inconsistencies in his physics. “There ain’t no quarks in there,” I screamed, waving the book in his face. Roused from pondering string theory in the far reaches of the universe, my father, with an effort, raised his head to focus on me and my issue. “No, no, son,” he soothed, “the three quarks for Muster Mark was in Finnegan’s Wake, not Ulysses.” Well, dad, thanks for clearing that up. Ulysses …

Finnegan’s Wake … it doesn’t really matter, eh, son? That’s just Gell-Mann! Grrr. Stupid non-literary physicists—conflating Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.

Guess some time in the next thirty years I’ll get around to plowing through Finnegan’s Wake as well. Those quarks better be there, though. Or maybe, as I do on my father’s claim that he understands Einstein’s theory of relativity, I’ll just have to trust him on this one. So for a time I refused to think about particle physics, quarks, neutrinos, wormholes and the like.

But then I heard about the meteor shower. Hope Valley Road was pretty well deserted—as might be expected at 4:20 a.m. early this Sunday morning. My wife and I had our travel coffee mugs, and my son had his hot chocolate, so we were relatively content as we drove south from Durham headed for the darkness of Jordan Lake. A few days before, I had told them I was going to get up at 4:00 a.m.

Sunday to go see the Leonid Meteor Shower. I smiled and asked if they wanted to come. Much to my surprise they both said yes. So the alarm was set, the sleep-deprived were awakened, we got our chosen beverages and we started up the car and drove away through the sleeping city.

The fall had been remarkably mild and clear. Bad for our water supply but the consecutive weeks of high pressure kept the clouds away and ensured that Sunday morning would be calm and cloudless—ideal for star gazing and meteor watching. The newspapers and television had told us the Leonid Shower should be a big one— multiple shooting stars every minute. And if it was clear and dark, the night sky should be spectacular.

That is why we were headed out to Jordan Lake—to get away from the city lights and to look out over the dark waters. The official viewing spot was to be Ebenezer Church Recreation Area. We figured we’d have the place mostly to ourselves. Crossing over Highway 54 we saw some red taillights up ahead.

Maybe some other folk were up for some meteor viewing after all. As we sped down Highway 751, headlights appeared behind us. Soon we formed a little caravan, backed up behind a slow moving van. We didn’t expect traffic problems on this drive but it was encouraging to know that a few others were making the effort to see the shower.

At the first bridge over Jordan Lake both shoulders of the road were filled with parked cars. Meteor watchers? It had to be. And yes, we could see people standing next to the guard rails.

We looked up through the windshield and saw our first shooting star of the morning. Every time we drove clear of the trees we would see the dark sky and another meteor. There were more cars parked on the sides of the road at every bridge. As we approached Highway 64, the traffic backed up.

We stopped, then gradually crept forward. What was going on? As we got up to 64, we looked to our left, toward Raleigh, and saw a constant stream of headlights headed west, toward Jordan Lake. We turned onto 64 and joined the line of cars.

A few miles down the road, the left turn to Ebenezer Church Recreation Area was backed up for over a quarter of a mile. We’d never get in, I thought. Thousands of people had left their warm beds to come out and see the meteors and to clog the roads around Jordan Lake. I was impressed and amazed.

I had no idea so many others would be drawn to the shower. But I was also concerned that the crowds had filled the viewing spots. We kept driving west on 64. All the recreation areas we passed were closed with their gates locked.

We came up to the causeway that crosses the middle of Jordan Lake. Cars were parked on both shoulders and in the median. At the first empty stretch of grass on the right, I slid the car in and parked. We got out and leaned against the car with our backs toward the traffic on 64.

The van parked in front of us and the SUV parked behind us

blocking out the passing headlights. We looked out across the lake and the stars began falling. They came in ones, twos and threes, through all parts of the sky. And they came constantly.

Particularly bright ones would leave a smoky white trail that would linger across the sky before evaporating. Our small party, and the groups gathered on either side of us, would gasp and remark when a big meteor or a double or triple shot across the heavens—just like at a Fourth of July fireworks display. But in between, we were quiet, awed by what we were seeing. Distant meteor trails flashed regularly over the far horizon but the brightest ones were those we saw looking straight up into the night.

They all seemed to be shooting toward the west. Gradually, we stopped exclaiming at particularly dramatic meteors, and we simply watched in total silence. Far up in the sky, I could identify a few constellations and their twinkling stars, motionless behind the falling stars. It was impossible not to think of these stars as simply enduring in place, and waiting for their turn to blaze across the sky and disappear into the void.

The meteors fell, time passed and a soft wind blew across the lake. When the SUV parked behind us turned on its headlights and drove away, we snapped out of our reverie and realized that we were a bit chilled and we had cricks in our necks. With the big SUV no longer blocking the headlights from the traffic on 64, we were distracted from the sky and someone mentioned breakfast. There was still no glow in the East and the stars were still falling.

But the expected warmth of the car was compelling, we got in, turned up the heater, and decided to join the exodus away from Jordan Lake. We drove back the way we had come earlier that morning, past many cars still parked on the shoulders and a few late arriving meteor watchers. We were warming up and the sky was light when we pulled into the parking lot of Biscuitville. But Biscuitville was not yet open, so we drove back to our still sleeping neighborhood to complete our reentry into our earthbound existence.

So I pull into our driveway and shut off the car. We gather up our coffee mugs, lock the car and walk to our porch. At the door to our house, just as I slip the key in the lock, three neutrinos slam into the bed of azaleas in our front yard. They burrow on through the earth’s crust, mantle and core, and shoot out the other side, headed for deep space.

In a great hurry, as always. Then, from somewhere in my memory, an image flashes in my mind of my father and Ray Davis, much younger, in bathing suits and canvas shoes, sitting together in the old sailboat, Ray with his hand upon the tiller. They are smiling, laughing about something, and the boat heels over in the wind. Then they turn to look my way.

And my father winks at me. Against all probability (as I have never been the winking type), I actually wink back. “Three quarks for both of you musters,” I think to myself. My wife, watching me, smiles and ushers me inside.