” . . . an intelligent conservative might post this question: ‘Even if I accept the idea that income is a good measure of quality of life, what matters is how much income I spend (after taxes), not how much I earn. Bigger government usually leads to more taxes and less disposable income. Are your income numbers gross or disposable?’”

This is an excellent point – disposable (post-tax) income is a MUCH better measure of quality of life than gross income. The median family income quoted was gross (at least, the Census Bureau does not indicate otherwise). I decided to hunt around for median pre- and post-tax income to see what I could learn.

I was only able to find this data for 1980-2003 [1]. Since there are already interesting trends in those two decades (large growth of govt. size and continued growth of deficit in the 1980s, followed by rapid shrinking govt. size and deficit in the 90s, followed by slight growth in size and large growth in deficit in the 2000s), this period could already be informative. In addition, it has the benefit of political party flipping – three terms of Republican presidents in the 80s, two terms of a Democrat in the 90s, and most of one term of a Republican president in the 2000s (up through 2003, when the data ends).

One important note: the data available is median HOUSEHOLD, not family, income. These are not the same. I will therefore show median pre-tax family income as well as median pre-tax household income. The family income is a control; if household income tracks family income, we should see this and then consider the post-tax household income as a reliable measure of post-tax family income.

Observations

First, let us compare the control (pre-tax family income) to the new data (pre-tax household income). They track beautifully. The slope of the ratio of these two data sets is 0.002 (2007 Dollars)/year, which is essentially zero. Therefore, pre-tax household income measures the same trends as pre-tax family income.

The pre- and post-tax household incomes are clearly different, and that difference varies with time.  The difference, divided by the gross, is a measure of the median tax burden. From 1980-1992, this (as a percentage of gross income) was 17.7%; from 1993-2000, this was 17.1%; from 2001-2003, this was 15.9%. So on average it’s been dropping by about 1% per decade.

The trends in disposable income largely track those in gross income, except after 2000, when disposable income flattens out while gross income drops. The opinion of the author is that here we are seeing the effect of the Bush tax cuts, since government spending was very much on the rise (along with deficit spending) while disposable income seems to hold against those pressures.

The tables illustrate the slopes in the size of government, government spending/deficits, and household and family income. We see that the trends in household and family incomes largely track, as expected. The caveat is that in the first and last periods studied (where household data is available), there is LESS household data, so one cannot expect the slope measured with fewer points to perfectly track the slope in the family income data. In between, where there is just as much data in both samples, we can make more reliable observations.

Considering the relationship between the size of government and disposable income, the conclusion is that the pace of increase in disposable income is largely unaffected by the large changes in the size of government from 1980-2000. Disposable income grows, but by less, after 2000 (until 2003, when the data ends) There are definitely internal variations that seem largely to coincide with recessions, but overall the trend is up and doesn’t seem all that connected to swings in the size of government.

The relationship between federal deficits and disposable income seems to be inverted, as it was with gross income. When deficits grow at a large rate, the rate of increase in disposable income is slowed. This is most apparent in the 2000s, but also clearly visible in the 1980s.

Conclusions

Disposable income is a more realistic measure of the quality of life in an American household. Trends in disposable income largely track those of gross income, except in the early 2000s. The author attributes this to the effect of the Bush tax cuts, but that is an opinion. In general, when federal deficit spending increases, the pace of disposable income growth decreases.

[1] SOURCE:  U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/rdi1.html

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In some small way, I’ve been living that alternative scenario for quite some time. Jodi is Analysis Coordinator for the CDMS experiment [1]. She and her colleagues have been in long meetings . . . looooooong meetings . . . for weeks. The fruits of their labor appeared  in a pair of talks on Thursday at SLAC and Fermilab [2], followed by seminars at a number of institutions on Friday.

I’ve seen the inside of exciting physics results before, but being slightly on the outside is a different experience entirely. I say “slightly” because being her husband exposed me to a most of the personal stress, devotion, and struggle. That’s certainly in contrast with collaborators, who only see little outside the daily meetings.

The past month has been built on a  foundation of normal responsibilities: teaching and committee duties. Those take a minimum of time out of each week to do well. Added on top of that were the collaborative responsibilities: data-taking at the Soudan mine, data analysis, and committee meetings. On top of all of it was amplification, however. The stress was higher, the meetings were longer, the committees multiplying.

So I became the time-traveler’s husband. Jodi disappeared for long hours in paper-writing meetings with her fellow analysts. The internet exploded with rumors about the CDMS result while I was at CERN. Jodi was livid. Not only were the rumors wrong, in hindsight, but they had layered on top of them potentially dangerous  accusations about the collaboration’s behavior and the behavior of scientific journals. The collaboration appeared to remain stalwart and tight-lipped.

Rumors in physics are particularly dangerous to the scientific enterprise.  A collaboration deserves to own its result until release. They deserve to verify the claims in their data and to patiently and carefully explore both the meaning and consequences of their work. Rumors, on the other hand, try to force the hand of the collaboration, to trick them into leaking information or making public statements that threaten to cheapen the announcement, the paper, and their claim to the quality of the work. Rumors work against the scientific process, just as they work against the legal process. Of course, we’re all humans and rumors are inevitable. It was clear, however, that they took a personal toll on the members of the CDMS collaboration, grinding on them emotionally at a time when their full intellectual faculties were required to conclude and present their work.

The week of the scheduled release was a tangle of meetings and travel. Jodi would announce to me that she would need to work late at SMU, possibly until 10pm. We’d grab a fast dinner near campus (or I would grab her dinner and drop it off in her meeting), and then she would disappear into a polycom unit for hours. 10 pm would come and go. The night before her early morning flight to California we didn’t leave SMU until 11:30 pm.

The release of the CDMS result seems to have gone very well. Younger members of the collaboration followed the big talks with their own institutional seminars. Back-channel word from the funding agencies suggested that they were pleased the release occurred in the U.S. first – that’s EXTREMELY important for the long-term health of the funding-research partnership in this country. The press had their fun, too [3].

Science is a mix of process, press, and politics. Anybody who thinks otherwise hasn’t tasted an important result. I once thought that way, a long time ago when I was a graduate student. Now, as the time traveler’s husband, I have instead tasted the long absences, the scourge of nerves set on a hair-trigger, the anguish of listening to others speak wrongly about your own work when you yourself must say nothing in order to protect the enterprise.

It also makes me wonder if, one day, Jodi will be a time-traveler’s wife.

[1] http://cdms.berkeley.edu

[2] http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~madejski/kipac.all_cropped.mov and http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/WC/091217Hsu/index.htm

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/science/space/18dark.html?_r=1&hpw

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This meeting drew participants from across the globe, spanning all of the continents except Africa and Antarctica (at least, as far as I know based on the participants list). We’ll meet again next year, after the writing has started. It’s a long process, but we’ll all have to be vigilant as new results appear and new relationships are (potentially) revealed by the work of the LHC. The difficult part will be to distill the book into something that can be approached by a starting graduate student, while still being informative to the highest levels of interest. Of course, in achieving that balance we also must be attentive to the length of this thing; the target is 1000 pages, but it’s really unclear just how realistic that goal is right now.

After the meeting, I did some work in preparation for the coming week’s Collaboration meeting. Before dinner, I headed out for a jog. I always mean to jog when I come here but somehow never manage to do it. I’ll either forget my running shoes at the hotel, forget a towel, forget a change of clothes – you name it. Today, I managed to forget none of those things and so I set out for a nice run. I started around the loop road, then entered the accelerator area and ran the PEP road. In total, this took me just over 2 miles. Considering I am not running regularly any more, this was a pretty nice achievement for me. It gives me confidence that if I keep at it, I can work up to a good pace for a 5k run sometime in the near future.

Meanwhile, you can see my route below, thanks to gmaps-pedometer [1]!

[1] http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

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This lull is just ahead of a work week that, for me, leads to travel to California. I am attending a workshop on the BaBar+Belle Legacy Book, a project we’re hoping to kickoff this coming week. The idea is to compile the results of these two frontier flavor experiments into a book that serves both archival and educational purposes. I am a co-editor of one of the chapters (each one is edited by at least two people, one from each experiment). After the workshop is the BaBar collaboration meeting, where I’ll present the case for SMU membership in the collaboration. For me, this is extremely exciting. This is my first chance to become a principal investigator in an experimental collaboration. My group won’t be big, but I have some clear goals for the next 3 years on BaBar and I’m excited to become a member so we can get moving.

After this push on BaBar, I can re-focus on ATLAS again. That’s its own beast.

Let’s set all that aside, though. This is supposed to be my quiet Sunday. Blue skies. Cool air. Radio programs. Waffles. Sleep. Ah.

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When I was first invited to join the MIT BaBar group, I was a fresh Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While the person recruiting me for the position was a young faculty member at MIT, her group leader was Dick. Before I could get the job, I had to have a sit down with Dick so he could meet me and size me up.

I met him in the MIT office at SLAC. We spent the next 45 minutes just chatting. I didn’t know what to expect before I went in, and so naturally I was intimidated. Would I say something dumb? Would I come off as an idiot? The “imposter syndrome” was well at work in my head by the start of that meeting. By the end of the meeting, I was more relaxed and came away with the sense that Dick was a person deeply in tune with the technology that would enable science. Much of the conversation was spent discussing novel and non-existent particle detector technologies, a subject about which I am least comfortable but most interested.

My second memory of Dick was when he showed up at SLAC for his regular visits. He would collect us for lunch and inevitably we’d go for Japanese food. On one of the trips, he brought along a photo his then girlfriend had printed off the web. The site let you put anything you wanted in a picture of Einstein writing on a blackboard. His girlfriend had written “Detention Yamamoto” in the picture. Until recently, that picture still sat on the door name-plate outside the old BaBar MIT office where I used to work.

My final memory of Dick is the one that struck me most deeply. I had become interested in doing searches for new physics, specifically dark matter, using invisible decays of mesons. I gave a talk at a BaBar physics meeting that was meant to motivate this topic and suggest means by which BaBar could do this work. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure there was any support for these ideas, when there was “more important” physics to do. I felt like I was out on a limb, just me and a few other people really interested in the topic.

After my talk, Dick came up to me at the front of the room. He was excited. “That was great,” he said, “one of the best things I’ve seen in a while. We need more of this kind of stuff.”

Dick’s comment, whether he realized it or not at the time, was the antithesis of a comment made to me when I was an undergraduate. I was asking a professor if he would write a letter on my behalf for graduate school. He agreed, but said, “I don’t think you should be a particle physicist. I think you’ll be happier doing something else.”

We’ll see. Thankfully, while it took almost a decade, Dick took the sting off that old memory by creating a new and encouraging one. Thanks, Dick.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/obit-yamamoto.html

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While this gave ATLAS and CMS time to conclude parts of their construction, it prevented serious commissioning of the experiments with real collider data. Now, as the 1 year anniversary of the LHC opening ceremony  approaches, a number of press articles have appeared describing the current state of the LHC and decrying the failure to deliver physics. Today’s New York Times article is a realistic, if scathing, report on the state of the collider [1]. But in addition to this, programs like KCRW’s “To The Point” [2] have picked up the story and run with it.

What has bothered me about the reporting I have seen today is the quality of the reporting being done on the story. The facts are the facts: no doubt, the LHC has problems and no doubt this is an opportunity for Fermilab. I don’t dispute that U.S. involvement in the LHC also has challenges (please lets not forget that the U.S. has invested $500 million in the LHC program).

What bugs me is that the NY Times takes half of its quotes from theoretical physicists. Theorists,while they are interested parties (especially in the outcome of the measurements) are now, during startup and commissioning, more in a position to complain than to really solve the experiental problems and assist in the solutions. Of the quotes in the article, about half come from theoretical physicists whose focus is largely on the loss of physics if the LHC cannot run at design energy. Mainly, they are talking about losses framed in the expectations from their own published work, rather than from the realities of physics at high-energy scaled (which is currently completely unknown). The experimentalists seemed to be more pragmatic (at least, those quoted) focused on solving the problem and getting running, regardless of the energy of the collisions. I’m not sure that having half your quotes from theorists and half from experimentalists is what “showing both sides” is all about – in the end, we all have a vested interest in this program succeeding.

Regarding “To The Point’s” coverage, this was a little more lo-fi. I happen to know the physicist interviewed for the program. I also happen to be VERY annoyed that in their link to the Fermilab website, they refer to FNAL as the “Fermi National Library”. I know they meant “Laboratory”, but WTF?! Where is fact-checking in this reporting, even for the basics? How does the public know you are getting the science right if you screw up the name of the competing laboratory? I know it seems little, but this is an easy fact to check; how do I know they are explaining the Higgs, extra dimensions, or even the basics of LHC operations correctly to the public?

Every news story is an opportunity to raise awareness about the science. Both the NY Times and “To The Point” pieces achieve mention of the science, even if they do so in their own strange ways. CERN’s own communications machine created this monster, in a way, by hyping the LHC at a time when they felt success was really in sight. Sadly, the reality of this complex machine got in the way of the positive storyline. What are the lessons? It’s OK to go for hype, if you’re willing to manage the consequences. We’ve arrived at the consequences, and what matters now is how we all deal with the reality that the original LHC vision is not quite within reach.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/space/04collide.html?_r=2&hpw

[2] http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp090804cash_for_clunkers_do

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This is just another one of those positive signs about how science is regarded by this administration. To put a pure scientist in this position, a man clearly able to speak to his audience and who seems to write his own material (or at least know it by heart), is an honor to the U.S. scientific effort. Having such an intelligent and creative man at the helm of DOE is better than a Nobel prize for the U.S. scientific community. Why? A Secretary in the business of developing and promoting pure but directed scientific inquiry is a Secretary who is setting the stage for a dozen Nobel Prizes.

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I could use more time, but I’m not going to get it. Tomorrow, I leave for Spain. While it will be BEAUTIFUL and a relaxed environment in which to have a BaBar collaboration meeting, I have two talks to write and give and recovering from jet lag to do. I’ll be back later in the week, in time to say goodbye to Jodi a few days later as she heads to Italy and then to CERN. It’s going to get busier before it gets better.

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I went to CERN a few weeks ago and spent a week at the most recent ATLAS Physics Week. This was a chance to absorb a concentrated dose of ATLAS information, this time focused on physics analysis plans. It was also an opportunity to see faces and meet new people. In his book, “The Black Swan”, Nicholas Taleb speaks allegorically of the library of Umberto Eco, and uses this to illustrate that it is not what you have read that matters, but all that you have collected and still waits to be read. Entering a new collaboration is a funny business, especially when that collaboration is not led by your home nation. First of all, there is the danger of feeling too comfortable, because in this case there are a lot of people I do know. CERN is like “Cheers” – everybody knows your name. But it’s not the people I know that worry me; it’s the people I do not, and I hunger to know more people.

The second danger is that I might act too American. The stereotype of the know-it-all cowboy dogs you as an American. It’s not my style, and it never has been. Sure, I like to think I know a few things, but as a physicist I accept there is far more I do not know. I don’t like to act like I can run the show, but I do like to know my goals. It’s those goals, in the face of overwhelming challenges, that keep you focused on the science.

The third danger is that I might forget that I am the new kid on the block. I’ve been in BaBar for a long time, and my previous forays meant to take me into new communities didn’t work as hoped. So I remain in the collider physics community, but in a new experiment. There are natural assumptions that coming from BaBar, I probably don’t know shit. That’s only partially true, but I don’t want to act like I am some experienced ATLAS person who can tell other peers what to do.

Head down, mouth shut. Sure, I want to get in there and do science. But there are 1000 physicists who’ve been at the table far longer than I, and while pursuing my physics dreams I mustn’t forget that without the respect of my peers I am lost in a people-driven enterprise.

Fresh from CERN, I had a few days to sit quietly before Jodi and I headed to Dallas to shop for a lease, with the intent to target communities where we can imagine one day buying a home. We focused on the Plano/Richardson/Allen area, although Allen was not quite in the original plan. In the end, after just one day and about six homes (and a very patient realtor), we settled on a house rental in Allen, TX, right near highway 75 (which takes us to SMU’s doorstep). We then had to buy appliances, got some good deals, and started thinking about other furniture we’ll need come fall. We stayed at the home of a family friend, who was also very gracious and extremely helpful in our quest to learn about the Dallas area. We’ve already staked out some grocery stores, big chain and high-end, found some coffee shops, located the parks and greenbelts near our home, and built the start of a comfort zone as we acclimate to our new state.

Today, we’re heading back to California. This week, I’ll be “taking a few days off” in Pasadena, as Jodi is working with her collaborators toward a big physics result in their dark matter search. This weekend, I’ll depart for an unplanned trip to Valencia, Spain, where I will participate in the next BaBar collaboration meeting and present a proposal for a new area of research and cooperation within the experiment. After that trip, I will have a week off (Julth 4th!) while Jodi is away in Italy and then at CERN. The week after than, I’ll depart for a short and also unplanned trip to Wisconsin, while Jodi returns from Europe. The week after that we are getting packed up and moved out, and then just a few days after that we’ll hit the road for Texas.

And so begins the transcontinental waltz.

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The door at the end of the waiting room clicked open and a nurse poked her head through the gap. “Erwin?” she called, glancing around.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Biggle said, almost leaping out of his chair and striding toward the door. He felt bad that he was going ahead of the cop – she’d taken a beating from some 300-pound, seven-foot brute who broke his restraints – but she’d arrived late and the ER seemed to be doing things in order. As for the heroin addict, Biggle was glad to be ahead of him and just as glad to be away from him.

The nurse took him to a bed in room 8, ordered him to strip and pulled the curtain. He clutched his abdomen as he undressed – the shooting pain by his ribcage didn’t like it when he moved, just a little more than it didn’t like it when he was perfectly still. When the nurse came back, he was laying on the gurney with his backside pressed against the cold sheets through the open flap in the gown. The nurse put a freshly warmed blanket over him, and suddenly he felt like a kid in heaven. Pleasant childhood thoughts rushed in – waking up in warm sheets, hot dogs at the park, train rides to see Nana in Baltimore. “OK, Mr. Biggle, we’re going to put in an IV and start a saline drip. We’re going to give you a little morphine for the pain and an anti-nausea medication for the morphine. It’s going to be about a half-hour before we can get an ultrasound tech to look at that gall bladder, but we’ll come back and check on you regularly. Do you have any questions?”

“Nope,” Biggle said, smiling and closing his eyes.

It was just a few minutes later when the IV was in his arm, the saline was flowing, and the morphine hit. For a moment, he could have sworn his brain stopped, and time stopped with it. A few minutes later, his head was swimmy but clearer, and he was resting comfortably. The stress headache from the anxious wait next to the addict and the nauseous cop fell away, leaving just the dull pain in his abdomen.

The nurse had pulled the curtain back before she left him to rest, exposing his bed to the view of the four other beds in room 8. A young woman lay in the gurney next to him, her eyes closed as she also rested. Biggle glanced over and saw her clothes folded neatly on the chair next to her. On top of the pile, a black tee-shirt mysteriously read “I look thin when you walk fast.” Biggle shook his murky head and turned away.

As Biggle started to drift off to a morphine slumber, the voice of his neighbor startled him awake. “I know you,” she said matter-of-factly.

“What?” he said, turning his head slowly toward her.

“Yeah, that did it,” she said as she got the full view of his face, “I know you. You’re Dr. Erwin Biggle. I saw you on Awakenings the other night.”

Erwin didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know this woman, but that was the price of being on TV; strange women, strange men, all suddenly recognize you. He tried to turn away and close his eyes, but she persisted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

That set Erwin’s brain afire, despite the morphine. “What DO you mean, young lady?”

“Millie. My name is Millie. I mean what I said – you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Young lady . . . Millie . . . I am a professor of the philosophy of science. I assure you, I know everything I am talking about.” Biggle knew that last part didn’t come out quite right, but the morphine was working on him again and he almost didn’t care.

“There is no such thing as the clock paradox,” she said, her tone steady and certain and very insistent.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Biggle said, “I am not well, I do not know who you are, and I want to rest.”

Millie paused for a moment, and in that moment Biggle was convinced he had won and began to settle into dope-enhanced satisfaction. “I am a graduate student in physics, I grew up in a small town in Nebraska, I am designing electronics for the EPIC project, and I shattered my finger in the high-bay today. There, now you know who I am.”

Biggle said nothing. He wasn’t about to get into a tete-a-tete with some smart-ass grad student. “I’m going to say it until you talk to me, Professor – you do not know what you are talking about.”

He couldn’t take it anymore. Biggle reached around, feeling for a call button. “They don’t have call buttons for people without life-threatening emergencies, Professor. And, yelling isn’t a good idea unless you want to be completely sedated. So, let’s talk,” Millie said, smirking.

“OK, fine. But I want you to know right away that I am a tenured professor and you are some snotty graduate student, so this isn’t going to go well for you.”

“Noted. You’re still wrong.”

“How am I wrong?”

“The clock paradox – there is no such thing.”

“You want me to recap, Millie? Fine – I recommend you pay closer attention the next time a professor talks. It’s quite simple – the EPIC program is entirely predicated on the theories of Albert Einstein. It will not work, because those ideas are fundamentally flawed. For instance, Einstein said that moving clocks run slower than stationary clocks. In a variation on Langevin’s formulation of the paradox, let’s say you have two clocks that are both standing still on Earth, and you synchronize them. You then put one of them on a spaceship and send it very far away at nearly the speed of light. From the earth’s perspective, the clock on the ship is moving and thus running slowly. From the ship’s perspective, the earth is moving and thus its clock must be running slowly. But when the ship returns to earth, it will find that the earth clock is further ahead, not behind it. That’s the paradox, articulated by the great man himself, and there you have it – it makes no sense, and so Einstein’s theories are flawed. Any reasonable person can see that it makes no sense.”

Millie was quiet. Biggle felt satisfied – he’d not been able to articulate it so clearly on TV, with that religious zealot host so eager to hear his learned thoughts on how modern physics is all wrong. An eager host, hungry for the next killer sound-bite, interrupts and cuts through the argument. Here, in this ER bed with a grad student in learning mode sitting in the next bed, he was free to talk the whole thing out in one clean shot.

Biggle turned his head away from Millie and prepared to drift off to sleep, sure that she he’d cut out her tongue in that one, swift stroke. He was wrong.

“When they take you to get your ultrasound, they will put you in an elevator and take you down to a different floor. Let’s say you’re in the elevator, and suddenly you feel completely weightless. The attendant standing next to you is also weightless – his feet, pushing against the floor so he can stand, have now pushed him off the ground and he is free floating. What has happened? How do you explain it? Has the elevator suddenly gone into a free fall on its nearly frictionless guides, or has the earth’s gravity suddenly been turned off?”

“What?” Biggle said. He hadn’t expected this, and he turned his head back to Millie.

“Which is it? Is the elevator in free fall, or is gravity gone?”

Biggle stammered. “Why, the elevator is obviously in free fall. That’s the only reasonable explanation, of course!”

“How do you tell the difference, short of waiting for the elevator to hit bottom?”

“What?”

“How do you tell the difference?” Millie said more slowly and deliberately.

Biggle’s brain froze again, not from a wave of morphine but from cold, intellectual shock. He was a reasonable man, a man who had published dozens of papers on the philosophy of science and the implications of paradoxes in the course of modern science. Yet, here he faced his own paradox, and his brain engulfed it to dismantle it, dissect it, leaving him unable to get out a word.

Now Millie smirked, not out of smugness but having seen that light in Biggle’s eyes as a new idea entered his head and wouldn’t leave.

“How do you tell the difference?” Millie asked again, trying to get him to react.

“I . . . well . . . let me think,” Biggle stammered.

A few minutes of silence ensued as Millie rested with her eyes closed and Biggle’s brain chewed on the question. He was sure it was just the morphine, slowing him down. He was sure this was a trick question, and that there was an experiment that would tell the difference. Perhaps he could throw a pen at the wall – no, that would look the same if the elevator was in free fall, free of the force of gravity, as if gravity was just turned off and the elevator was actually standing still. A pendulum wouldn’t help, either. He thought about pictures of astronauts spinning and tumbling in the “vomit comet” and momentarily felt his own anti-nausea medication give up.

“You can’t,” he suddenly said, “you can’t tell the difference. Without a window to tell you what’s happening outside, you can’t tell the difference between free fall and somebody just switching off gravity.”

“How about if the elevator were in space, far from planets or stars and completely free of gravity? What if somebody fired a rocket on the bottom of the elevator, pressed you and the attendant against the floor, accelerating the elevator at 9.8 meters per second, each second? How would you tell the difference between that rocket being fired and somebody just suddenly switching on gravity?”

Biggle felt sucked into the riddle. “You . . . again, I don’t think you can tell the difference, short of hearing the rocket – but, I assume you want me to ignore that just like I should ignore the shudder of the elevator as it falls on rails?”

Millie nodded. “You know, Einstein articulated the clock paradox – he thought it just a curiosity – before he had that thought about elevators and gravity and acceleration,” she said.

“What does any of this have to do with the clock paradox?” Biggle asked, suddenly aware that he’d been distracted from his message with this pointless puzzle.

“Independent of this clocks curiosity, Einstein realized that his original ideas were too specialized, too narrowly focused on a small part of the laws of physics. He also realized how to complete his theories. I could waste your time with talk of time slowing down and space getting shorter, but let’s keep this close to home. The key is acceleration.”

Biggle couldn’t believe he was engaging in this, but he was so captivated by the riddle that he wanted to know where this was going. Einstein was a fool, he was sure, but Biggle himself was a reasonable man and this Millie had hit him with a little reason bomb. “What does acceleration have to do with anything?”

“Well, if you put a clock on a spaceship, even if you synchronize the clocks in orbit around earth and then put one on a ship already in space, you have to get that ship up to very high speeds to get it to get far away from earth. Einstein realized that his original specialized ideas, which dealt with clocks being compared between stationary places and places moving at high, constant speed, were incomplete. After all, how do you get up to speed? How do you get a spaceship to nearly the speed of light, relative to the earth, so that Einstein’s ideas even matter?”

“You . . . you accelerate.”

“Right. And as you’ve just realized, acceleration – an elevator in free fall in a gravitational field or a rocket strapped to an elevator in the middle of space – is impossible to tell from the action of gravity. It’s like a person on a train who suddenly sees the train next to them moving. Is their train in motion going forward, or is the train next to you moving backward and you’re standing still? That little doubt in your gut about who is moving is Einstein’s special relativity. Acceleration resolves the question, because if your train suddenly accelerates more, you feel your back pressed against the seat.. Now, you know you are moving.”

Biggle was silent. Getting up to speed means acceleration, and a rocket has to accelerate to get to nearly the speed of light. His eyes widened without him even realizing it, and Millie went in for the kill. “So you see, professor, the astronauts on the ship with their clock have to accelerate to get up to speed, so they feel that acceleration as they do it. Sure, the astronauts don’t need to feel the acceleration to find out their clock is running slower – they are moving fast, so space is contracted and the distance to their final destination is shortened. Sure, they travel a shorter distance than people on earth think it is, and thus when they do their round trip they do it in less time than people on earth think it takes. But you seem like a man who likes to feel and taste things, so let’s face it: there is no paradox, because the people on the ship know that they have been moving – they had to accelerate, and that gave it all away. The paradox is no more.”

Biggle was silent and pale. Once, when he was a child sitting on an Amtrak in Penn Station, he had looked out a window at the neighboring train. He hadn’t felt his own train begin its gentle acceleration, it was so subtle and so slight. He was convinced the train next to them was moving backward, until suddenly the end of that train disappeared behind them and he could see the switch yard landscape in motion. A wave of nausea had overtaken him, his vision blurred, his brain scrambled to reconfigure to the reality of the situation. The train suddenly jerked and pulled him against the seat, as if to convince him he had been moving the whole time. He hadn’t thought about that moment in a very long time, lost in the span of so many other moments.

Millie was silent now, her eyes closed again. Biggle remained silent. He felt that moment again, that moment of realizing it was he that was moving and not the next train – nauseous, brain a bit scrambled as if a film over reality peeled away. In that old reality, gone only moments, he had blathered like a fool on a zealous TV program and railed against modern science. Now he saw that once, when he was child, the universe had tried to speak to him on that train, and he had not listened.

As if privy to his thoughts, Millie said, “You know, professor, I recommend you pay closer attention the next time the universe talks to you.”

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