An unknown sociologist reflects on the celebrated physicist’s influence
When I was 16, I was on the cusp of taking the one course I had been looking forward to all summer: physics.
I went to high school in Rimouski, Que., where I had to take advanced math, chemistry, and physics in my final year. I was not a good student. I consistently got 97 per cents in art class, but I was famously awful at math, despite entire weekends spent trying to crack the code. Despite this failing, I was obsessed with the idea of one day being an astrophysicist. I understand now that this was perhaps a foolish dream, but the fact remains that I devoured anything I could find related to the subject.I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I think it might have been because there was a copy of Max Born’s Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in my dad’s study. I eagerly read it over the summer. The thing that really stuck with me was this: E=mc² explained something about how the stars I could see from my backyard, the planets, and everything else in the universe, worked. I was enchanted, and I proceeded to read A Brief History of Time, which I loved even more.
Dr. Hawking wrote in a way that was both funny and serious. He wrote in words that I could, with a little effort, understand. Space-time, not space and time, as I’d always thought. Mass curves space-time. There are things called black holes. How was it possible that I lived in a universe of such staggering and epic grandiosity?
By the time the first day of school rolled around, I was dying of excitement. I approached my first physics class with my mind full of stars and general relativity and sat down in the front row. I think we started with Newton, though the details are hazy. I do remember, however, what happened when I went up to the teacher after class and, quivering, asked if we would be covering E=mc². I was eager to learn, I explained. I’d read about it in advance and would love nothing more than to understand what Einstein meant.
He laughed at me.
He said that the most we’d ever be covering was E=mc (whatever that even means — maybe a physicist reader can explain it to me, but to this day, I don’t know of anything that would allow one to remove the square from the theory of relativity). He shooed me out scornfully, and broke my heart. The rest of the year was more of the same.
I remember how it felt when I failed that class with a 32 per cent. I scraped a 60 per cent in math, and therefore was allowed to graduate, but it felt like the stars themselves had shut me out as unworthy. I still joined the local astronomy club, where I was known as the girl who was obsessed with black holes.I was the only young woman in a group of much older men who were almost all serious amateur astronomers, and I think they found my presence refreshing. They asked me to give a small presentation on black holes, which made me very happy, and them, I’m sure, kindly amused.
My main reference, of course, was A Brief History of Time. Almost nothing could take away the sting of being deemed rather stupid by the educational system. Except, perhaps, being able to read Dr. Hawking’s work on my own and imagine what it meant to have all the mass in the universe packed into a tiny singularity, or space-time be a web that bends to the mass of planets and stars.
These days, I’m finishing my Master’s in Sociology. Although I have a great love for this field, there’s still a speck of sadness buried somewhere in the part of my heart that is still sixteen. The few real physicists and mathematicians that I’ve met can attest to the fact that I’ve rather embarrassingly fawned over them, monopolized their time, and asked them all kinds of questions about their work that they probably didn’t feel like explaining.
The truth is, I’ve never been able to recover from the wonder I experienced when Dr. Hawking turned my incurably artistic and unmathematical mind towards the mind of God. And so, I offer this unlikely tale of appreciation for Dr. Hawking from an unknown sociologist.When Dr. Hawking died, I looked back on myself over a decade ago. I remembered the way his work was a balm for a young girl who often felt out of place and out of her depth. If I could read A Brief History of Time, I must not be as stupid as I sometimes thought I was. I must not be as stupid as my physics teacher thought I was. Stephen Hawking, by writing that book the way he did, showed that the world’s greatest physicist since Einstein believed in me and people like me. And that is a gift to the world that is equal to all his stunning work, and that to me, is everything.
Illustration by Barbara Salsberg Mathews
Instagram @maddysmom_4u