We were essentially party people, always looking for something to celebrate. Tom Akins, the physics department chairman and my mentor, played his accordion, accompanied by Freeman and my brother Bill on guitars. They filled the house with music and everybody danced. We passed out drinks, ate through three and a half cakes, played some games and talked about how good life was.
Tom was a cosmologist who was devoting his life to trying to solve the riddle of cosmic inflation, the incredible, and incomprehensible, rate of expansion that occurred at the very beginning of the Big Bang. He’d won some awards, and had been a good guide for me when I was coming up through the program. Toward the end of the evening, he took me aside to pass on some news. “Maryam,” he said, “I’ve told you about Dan Martin? He’s been doing some groundbreaking work on space-time curvature. He’ll be receiving the Carnegie Award this year.”
Martin had gotten his doctorate only three years earlier. “Beautiful,” I said, trying not to sound jealous. “When did you find out?”
“He called me this morning.” He laughed. “He says some of his friends are making references to Martin’s Theorem.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”
He must have picked up something in my tone. “Don’t worry, Maryam. Your time will come.”
It was a happy night. But I guess some part of Dan Martin lingered. When it was over, and everyone was saying goodbye and retrieving their cars from around the neighborhood, my husband hesitated as we left the house and started down the walkway. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Why do you say that?”
“Something’s bothering you. It’s been there for most of the evening.”
I took a deep breath and faced it. “I’m thirty.”
His eyebrows rose the way they usually did when politicians were talking. “Maryam, you still look great. I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about for a long time.”
“That’s not what I mean, love. You know what they say about physicists and thirty?”
“No. What do they say?”
“That if you’re going to leave a mark, you have to get moving early. After you hit thirty your brain begins to freeze.” I tried to turn it into a joke, but he didn’t smile.
“Come on. You don’t believe that.”
I’m not sure whether I did. But it ended there. We got into the car and went home.
Despite the alcohol, I didn’t sleep well that night. There’s not a physicist on the planet who doesn’t want to leave his or her name in the history of the field. To do something that grants immortality. Predict the Higgs Boson. Devise the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
Schwarzschild pinned his name to a radius. Heisenberg to uncertainty. Doppler has a shift, and Hawking has radiation. Schrodinger scored with a cat. And what, in the end, would Maryam Gibson have?
I’d been working on dark energy since the beginning of my career. My thesis had been an attempt to account for it. Get to the heart of dark energy and you can explain why the universe continues to expand at an increasing rate. If I could succeed, make some sort of progress, it was easy to imagine, that at some future date, people would be talking about the Gibson Hypothesis. Or maybe Gibson Energy. I especially liked that one.
At one time it hadn’t seemed too much to ask. Dark energy constituted 68% of the total mass-energy of the universe. Seventeen times the amount of ordinary matter. I’d been convinced that I could figure it out. It was just waiting there for someone to explain it.
But that night, with the partying done, I lay in the fading moonlight that came through the curtains, and I knew it wouldn’t be me.
I needed a different track, but my career demanded I stay with the hunt for dark energy. There was no way I could leave that. But maybe, I thought, I could use my spare time to accomplish something that didn’t require an Einstein. Mark Twain had commented once that he’d come in on Halley’s Comet, and that he expected to go out with it as well. Which he did.
Find one of the things and you got to name it. Gibson’s Comet wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for. But I could live with it. And it might be obtainable.
Warren and I spent a couple of hours most evenings watching TV. I enjoyed being with him, and had always arranged things to ensure we got some time together. But I was going to have to give that up for a while. “I’m going comet-hunting,” I said.
“Whatever you like, babe,” he said. “But you’re not going to give up on the dark energy thing, are you?”
“No. This would just be something I’d be looking at in my spare time.”
“Okay.” He sounded disappointed. “Will we still get to watch Big Bang Theory?”
“Sure. And one more thing—”
“All right.”
“Don’t mention this to anyone, okay?”
“Why not?”
“I’d just as soon nobody knows until I actually find one.”
We both had offices at home. A couple of nights after the party, when I had some free time, I went into mine, sat down, and started digging through the online sky surveys. Even though I’d devoted my entire career to cosmology, I was probably uniquely qualified to look for comets because I had exactly the right tools. I’d developed software that could analyze for mass, gravitation, dark matter distribution, distance, velocities, and so on. Normally, my research consisted of recording a set of results from the digital archives, moving forward a given number of years, analyzing how the situation had changed, and comparing the results with what I’d anticipated.
The same approach should work in the hunt for comets. Comets originate in the outer solar system, either in the Kuiper Belt—which consists of small bodies of ice, rock, and metal orbiting beyond Neptune and extending for an additional two billion miles—or in the Oort Cloud, which lies at a range of about a light-year. The Kuiper Belt offered a much better chance of success. So I locked in on it.
Warren never quite understood why I was so hung up on gaining visibility in the field. He was a realtor, but he knew there was more to life than making money. He enjoyed being able to see his clients settle happily into homes, or to assist them when they were moving elsewhere. He thought those were the only two things that really counted in one’s profession: making a contribution, and collecting a decent income. “Nobody other than my clients and family, and a few friends,” he’d told me once, “will ever know my name. But what does that matter?”
Why did I want to put myself out front with a theorem that would never matter to anyone? Or probably even be understood by anybody except a few specialists? He’d tried reading Quantum Theory for Dummies, and realized that even physicists didn’t really grasp the reality of some of the more arcane mathematics.
I sat quietly through the night, looking at patches of sky, discarding stars, picking up glimmers that were too faint to amount to anything. Eventually my eyes got heavy and I resigned myself to the fact that I would not amount to anything… at least not tonight.
Two nights later I repeated the process with the same result. But I stayed with it, whenever I had time. Warren thought it was a waste of effort but he didn’t say so directly. He did mention that real estate was booming, and that he could use another agent. He guaranteed I’d earn a lot more than I was making as a college professor. He mentioned an article about how people who keep irregular hours damage their brains. And he left a magazine open on the table with a story about how marriages work better when the partners spend time together.