Selected Essays
Refuge and Prospect
Six Hens Journal, June 25 2018
A stranger drained a beer on my couch in Santa Monica while I led a Buddhist meditation group in northeast L.A. Apropos of the New Year, we discussed how intentions precede actions, and how the mind, in formulating them, seeks permanence and reliability in a world that lacks both. I always drive too fast when I leave – longing for home – but at some point in the drive west, I loosened my grip on the steering wheel, relinquished the passing lane, and glided in. As I crested the stairs, I noticed the paint peeling on the landing, the struggling bamboo, the fat Chinese Buddha. I did not see the bathroom window screen, torn and dangling, nor the scuff marks on the siding.
Op-Ed: Whatever Neil deGrasse Tyson did, it deterred women from STEM careers
Los Angeles Times, December 7 2018
Everybody has a breaking point. Reading about the sexual harassment and assault allegations against Neil deGrasse Tyson this week, I found mine.
Tyson had always seemed a force for good. Charismatic, entertaining and wicked smart, he’d done what few ever manage: Make science interesting to the public. He demonstrated by example the value of seeking truth, the worth of curiosity and the possibility of a world that operates based on reason and thoughtfulness.
These ethics are in short supply, and I was thrilled to watch his rise as spokesperson for the universe. That a black man achieved this visibility made me even more glad for his success. He was the role model I never had, and I was delighted to witness his influence on my students.
The Women Who Mapped Heaven
Barnes & Noble Review, February 1 2017
Although there was no statistical excess of high-profile deaths in 2016, the year felt like a relentless march to the other side. One loss that affected me personally was the Christmas passing of astrophysicist Vera Rubin, the mother of cosmology. In the 1960s she became the first woman to use then-state-of-the-art Palomar Observatory, and her studies of galaxy rotations “clinched the case for dark matter,” wrote Princeton physicist Jeremiah Ostriker. Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, argued that Rubin should have won the Nobel.
Rovelli’s Sublime Physics
Los Angeles Review of Books, September 17 2016
“IMAGINE A BOX OF LIGHT,” Albert Einstein told Niels Bohr in 1930, continuing their argument of 20-odd years. If we let a single photon — a particle of light — escape from that box and we clock when it left, then we’ll know the time it was emitted. If we weigh the box before and after, we’ll know the photon’s energy, because E=mc^2. Knowing both time and energy definitively, however, was allegedly impossible, according to the theory Einstein himself proposed but never adopted: quantum mechanics. Einstein was particularly annoyed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, with its view of the world as a set of probabilities instead of definite things: “God does not play dice with the universe,” he famously quipped. His box-of-light thought experiment was intended to disprove the theory once and for all.