It has hitherto been necessary to postulate some special arbitrary “instability” of the nucleus; but in the following note it is pointed out that disintegration is a natural consequence of the laws of quantum mechanics without any special hypothesis…. Much has been written of the explosive violence with which the α-particle is hurled from its place in the nucleus. But from the process pictured above, one would rather say that the α-particle almost slips away unnoticed.
GURNEY AND CONDON
I arrive at the Montreal office half an hour before office hours begin. He arrives at the same time, from the opposite direction. I say hello and my name. He unlocks the door. “I’m here early…” I start. He enters, puts down the briefcase, removes an Indian-style fur hat. Fox, I think. He hangs the hat and his brown sheepskin coat on the coat rack. I mimic him, taking off my own coat, but putting it on the chair beside me. He sits down behind his desk. Only then does he speak: “Let’s start.” But I cannot start like that. It is too late to offer a handshake or a hug or other formalities or niceties. Still, I muster up a half-hearted Namaste, putting my hands together, the only thing left for me to do. Which is strange, because I never Namaste. Maybe he sees that. I reiterate my project goals and ask him to start by remembering 1967, the year he met my father. He does so naturally, his memory in this matter intact, an alpha particle decay but in reverse.
Dr. Sharma confirms that he told my father, who wanted to join the department as a graduate student when he first arrived as an immigrant to Canada, to go to a better university. But he then tells me a few things that do not match my father’s story. That he was never the supervisor of my father’s Ph.D. research. That he was never my father’s mentor. That my father only went to two or three classes in his courses and never returned. That he hardly had any interactions with him. It was instead a Jewish professor my father worked for, who was his supervisor. The things that do not match what my father remembers do not seem to matter in and of themselves. And yet, I have stumbled onto a problem I cannot apply the scientific method to. What do you do when you know something is untrue but you cannot prove it? How can you tell the difference between a failing memory and a delusion? Which facts belong to whom? The electromagnetic forces become stronger than the nuclear forces. The alpha particle escapes through a tunnel and joins another nucleus. The truth slips away, unnoticed.
Dr. Sharma’s father was a Sanskrit professor in India. He wanted his son to learn and speak Sanskrit, even though it was a dead language and over thirty-five hundred years old. When visitors came, Dr. Sharma’s father showed off his son’s talent. When he made a mistake, which he always did, and even if was just a slight pronunciation error, he would get hit, in front of the guests. That is why Dr. Sharma became a scientist, he says. To get away from Sanskrit. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1959 with Dr. Steenberg, who agreed to take him on but said, “Find your own problem and then solve your own problem.” So, he did. His topic was Alpha Decay and Fission of Aligned Nuclei. In Sanskrit, there are no independent vowels. They are all linked to consonants. Determining how the alpha particles could escape their nuclei would be satisfying on so many levels, from the subatomic to the universal.
During his time in Toronto, Dr. Sharma was supported financially by his father, but he still wanted to make his own money. He and another student from Pakistan, Latif, became door-to-door salesmen for the Fuller Brush Company. They had to pay a deposit of $125, a huge sum, to get the products and the briefcase that held the receipt books. Dr. Sharma would go door to door in Toronto’s Annex, an affluent neighbourhood near the University of Toronto, offering samples, describing the products with gusto even though he himself was often unkempt. Most of the products were mysterious to him, but he invented scripts to explain their utility nevertheless. One of his favourite items was a white plastic letter opener whose non-functional end was the silhouette of a young man wearing a hat and carrying a briefcase. The young man reminded Dr. Sharma of himself. People bought the item from sheer sympathy. Occasionally someone would buy a hairbrush, a skin balm, or a tonic because they truly needed those items. Occasionally they would call him a Paki (to which he would politely reply: “No, I’m from India. My friend Latif, who is at your neighbour’s door, is the Paki”). But most of the time, the door would be slammed in his face. When he decided to call it quits, he returned the remaining merchandise, but there was no refund of the deposit as promised. Dr. Sharma argued that he should at least be allowed to keep the empty briefcase, which made him feel professional not only in the realm of sales, but in the department of physics. He had been using it to carry his papers to and from the office, and liked the way the rare girl he passed on campus on his way to the physics building looked at it admiringly. The way Dr. Sharma uses the phrase “Tom, Dick, and Harry” sounds like he is referring to colleagues who were actually in the department with him over the years: In fifty-five years, every Tom, Dick, and Harry has become a Full Professor. I am still an Associate Professor. There is a story behind that, too, but I am not allowed to write it. But there is some reference in there to not wanting to polish the shoes of others. His briefcase from the Fuller Brush days.
Like the inevitable outcome of an alpha decay process, Dr. Sharma decides to tell me his whole life story (love and death and betrayals). He talks for hours. When things stall, we sit with the silence. I allow my voice-memo recorder to record the silence, but when it gets too long for me to bear, I ask him about physics. I want to see some of his published papers.
DR. SHARMA: What will you do with them?
M: I will look at them. I will read them. I will…
DR. SHARMA: Are you in physics?
M: No.
DR. SHARMA: So, what’s the use?
M: Well, I’m also not a psychologist and I’m listening to your stories [laughing]. I’m interested because I’m writing about my family, my father. And, I’m writing about physics too. So you can call me a writer. I am a scientist too, I can understand some things…I can understand mathematics. But, I’m just curious. I’m just following my curiosity.
I explain clearly that my father is the nucleus, and I am interested in anything that touches it and radiates out. He does not argue. He does not even utter a word. He gets out of his chair and starts to look half-heartedly for his papers, first with a turn of his head towards his bookshelf, and then slowly walking to his filing cabinets. He opens and shuts them without touching anything inside. “No. It’s all too disorganized,” he says. “I will never find them.” I should look myself, I think, but I do not offer to do that. I remain the objective observer. And yes, there is the problem of Schrödinger’s cat. This is an experiment and one of us will have to serve as the control.
After his Ph.D., Dr. Sharma started a post-doctoral fellowship, and soon after that, his father died. When he returned to India for the funeral, his mother had already arranged his marriage. The story of his first marriage is not one I am allowed to write about. It is salacious, and he says if I write about it, he will object. After a few years, he applied for the job at Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University), and a few years later married a Canadian woman of Latvian descent who worked in the physics labs collecting the lab assignments. Dr. Sharma is diabetic; it runs in his family. His younger brother died at fifty-five. His father died at fifty-four. His sister died at thirty-five. He is eighty-seven, has outlived them all. His doctor tells him he is part of the 1 per cent of his patients who are alive with his condition at his age. He attributes this to the fact that he is in physics. “Since I am in physics, and physics is a discipline…you have to be disciplined. Even now, before sleeping, at three in the morning, I measure my sugar, and if it is high, I go up and down the stairs. Last night I did six hundred stairs to bring my sugar down from seventeen to ten. If I allow myself to sleep with seventeen, kidneys will fail, eyes will go. I do not have balance walking, but I do when dancing. Indian Disco. For hours.”
He tells me he has forgotten to have lunch. He takes out a plastic jar of mixed nuts from his office drawer that looks like it might be from the 1960s. It is the same No Name brand my father buys from No Frills. He offers me some. We each select a few cashews—my father’s favourite, Anacardium occidentale. Anacardium: from the Greek for “backwards heart.”
Dr. Sharma is teaching a CEGEP course, an introductory course with over one hundred students. In the last fifteen minutes of office hours a couple of students come to ask questions. They produce their midterm exams and he looks over the papers, pointing his finger on the page.
DR. SHARMA: Boat is going this way, needs to go that way. The speed is still 12 km/hour. The wind is going to bring him this side. This square minus this square will be 10.9.
STUDENT NUMBER ONE: Perfect. I see what I did wrong.
STUDENT NUMBER TWO: Here, for this calculation here, sir, I just don’t know where I went wrong. Did I go through it correctly? Is it the right process?
DR. SHARMA:…Minus 4.2. Here, you made a mistake.
STUDENT NUMBER TWO: Okay, just multiplying them, I made a mistake.
DR. SHARMA: Well, if you do not know how to use the calculator, what can I do? Your answer is wrong.
STUDENT NUMBER TWO: That makes sense.
STUDENT NUMBER THREE: This one here, For Gravity. We were supposed to find the mass…
DR. SHARMA: G was not given to you. You took it from the last page. Only R was given to you.
STUDENT NUMBER THREE: It didn’t give us the mass of the earth?
DR. SHARMA: No. That is why I gave the problem to you.
At the end of office hours, I am invited home with Dr. Sharma for tea, to the house where my father spent one night in the basement in 1968 when he did not have a place to stay. I meet his wife. She pronounces Dr. Sharma’s first name, Ramesh, like ram—bighorn sheep—instead of how it should be pronounced. She tells me her life story too. She is retired and has taken up sculpture. The living room is filled with them. She shows me her work, one by one. About the process of sculpting, she tells me: “Some people say the stone speaks to me. They don’t. They say that the piece of art is waiting to be found inside. No, that is not true either. I know exactly what I want. You simply have to make a choice. Then another and another.” There is one piece she has entitled “Madonna and Child.” Another is entitled “Revery.” One is entitled “Eden.” It is a figure of a woman. Dr. Sharma’s wife shows me that this woman has red hair by luck, because the stone, alabaster, happens to have red patches at that end. Then she shows me a vein in the stone going right across her body like a sash. This red vein goes straight through her heart, she says. It is snowing heavily outside but they insist on taking me for dinner to Flavours of India on Jean-Talon. As we walk from the car to the restaurant, I hold Dr. Sharma to prevent him from falling. The sidewalk is icy. I have a flashback to 1968. To my father falling on the tarmac in Montreal. In my reverie, I am there, holding my father up. Finally, I realize that they have been married fifty years. The time it takes for a fundamental discovery in physics to find its application. I am not comparing, but here are some things Dr. Sharma has that my father does not: diabetes, a Ph.D., two daughters who never married, two good legs, a Western wife who takes care of him “like a mother and a sister,” an ex-wife in India, a continuous six hours spent talking with forty-eight-year-old me.
My father still wants a Ph.D. after all these years. He still reads textbooks on quantum physics. They lie on the family-room table, bookmarked with empty envelopes. He reads them when he is not watching cricket or Saregamapa, India’s version of America’s Got Talent. I ask Dr. Sharma if he has a copy of his own Ph.D. thesis. He says, “Yes, I keep it there on my shelf.” He walks over, takes out a thin, dark-blue book, conspicuously bound in the way every Ph.D. thesis is ever bound. It is the only one on the shelf amidst various physics textbooks. He looks at the cover, which has the title, the year, and his name on it in gold lettering, and puts it back in place. This is not it, he says. I do not know where I have put it. I swear I had put it there but now it is gone.
When he is busy with his students I look at the thesis on the shelf. I start to read the abstract:
Theoretical expressions for the angular distributions of Alpha particles and fission fragments from oriented nuclei are derived using the theory of angular moments and results are compared to the experimental measurements….
I show him the thesis and he fingers through pages he typed by hand fifty years ago. The thing that brought him to Canada, caused him to meet his wife, the thing at the heart of his fifty-year career.
“I look at this and it seems like nothing now,” he says, as he flips through the flimsy pages.