The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Read online

  It may also be what failure to achieve compromise looks like, because reviews by environmentalists were rapid and negative.

  To the eyes of SUWA’s Groene, the deal would give the farm to counties, off-road users, energy companies, and the state of Utah in exchange for little sacrifice on their part. “Those are swell-sounding numbers,” he says of the wilderness acreage, “but this whole thing falls like a house of cards when you look at what those numbers mean on the ground.” Several of the new wilderness areas, for instance, would lie within existing national parks, where the lands already enjoy significant protections. Taken together, Groene says, the proposal “actually means less protection than currently exists, advancing the state of Utah’s quest to seize our public lands and igniting a carbon bomb.”

  So what now? Everyone will demand changes. The congressmen will take those demands and reemerge with a final proposal. “My name is on it,” Bishop told me last fall. “I’m not playing games with it. I’m not putting in stuff that I’d be willing to barter later.” The timeline for all this? Bishop seemed eager to keep things moving. He was clearly exasperated with the grinding process.

  But environmentalists are no longer in the mood to play ball. “The bill is unacceptable and unsalvageable,” Groene says. “If they’d be willing to have a do-over, we would be willing to have discussions.” In San Juan County, Groene’s group won’t negotiate at all—they want the Bears Ears National Monument.

  Another significant defection happened three weeks before Bishop’s draft appeared, when the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition announced that it was formally withdrawing from the Public Lands Initiative and throwing all its efforts into lobbying Obama for a national monument, citing months of missed deadlines, delays, and “no substantive engagement” with its concerns. “We don’t feel we can wait any longer,” the group said.

  Weeks earlier, before all this, I asked Bishop if he was still optimistic about his grand bargain. “If it’s an even-numbered day, I feel positive,” he quipped. The Obama administration had been encouraging, he said. “They have never given me a deadline for anything per se.”

  It was hopeful for Bishop to think that after so much work, the proverbial win-win was still within reach. Now that seemed more unlikely than ever. The Native Americans had been alienated. And despite Bishop’s assurances, time was running short to push anything through Congress during an election year, even with the support of powerful Utah senator Orrin Hatch.

  The only certainty was that even the players on this stage didn’t know what was coming next—whether it was the end of Utah’s wilderness wars or just the close of yet another dyspeptic chapter.

  “Make sure you’ve got popcorn,” said Casey Snider, Bishop’s legislative director. “It’s going to be quite a show.”

  Part III

  The “Real Life” of Scientists

  SALLY DAVIES

  The Physics Pioneer Who Walked Away from It All

  FROM Nautilus

  Inside the South London offices of Doppel, a wearable technology startup, sandwiched into a single room on a floor between a Swedish coffee shop and a wig-making studio, CEO and quantum physicist Fotini Markopoulou is debating the best way to describe an off-switch.

  Markopoulou and her three cofounders have gathered in convivial discomfort around a cluttered Formica table and lean-to blackboard. They’re redesigning the features of their eponymous first device, which is due to be released in October. It’s a kind of elegant watch that sits on the inside of your wrist and delivers a regular, vibrating pulse. By mimicking a heartbeat, the Doppel helps regulate a person’s emotions and mental focus.

  Swiveling in a chair, Markopoulou says she likes a “smothering” gesture—placing a palm over the face of the Doppel to turn it off—because it is intuitive and simple, and the term suggests the device is “alive.” “You could always murder it,” deadpans commercial director Jack Hooper. Head of technology Andreas Bilicki chimes in: “Why not choke or asphyxiate?” The team throws around alternatives: “throttle”; “go to sleep, to sleep”; “turn your Doppel off, just like putting a blanket over a parrot’s cage.”

  Markopoulou, 45, observes the banter with a half-smile. She is fine-featured and striking. Her heavy-lidded eyes anchor a gaze that seems wary of its own powers, as if her promiscuous intelligence must hold itself back from latching on to your every word. She wears her hair in a tousled pixie cut and, on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fishlike scales. There are no airs about her, nor any indication that she’s 20 years older than the rest of the team. Markopoulou lives in Oxford but sleeps on design director Nell Bennett’s couch whenever she comes down to London.

  After the meeting Markopoulou and I walk downstairs to get a coffee. With the zeal of the reborn, she tells me how much she relishes the pleasures of making a product that people will use and pay for. “There is a very practical satisfaction to getting stuff done, whether it’s making something or selling something,” she says. “I do enjoy solving practical problems, like how to convince people Doppel’s a good idea, or how to get the right deal from an accountant.”

  It’s hard to see how these tasks could fully absorb Markopoulou. She is one of the most radical and fiercely creative theoretical physicists alive today, and a founding faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, where she was at the vanguard of quantum gravity. This is the branch of physics striving to unify the two most fundamental theories of the universe: general relativity, proposed by Einstein, and quantum mechanics.

  Quantum theory describes the rowdy interactions of fundamental particles that govern many of the forces in the known universe—except gravity. Gravity is rendered beautifully predictable by general relativity, which envisions it as an effect of how the four dimensions of space and time curve in response to matter, like a piece of tarpaulin bending under a bowling ball. Quantum theory’s ability to predict the behavior of an electron in a magnetic field has been described as the most precisely tested phenomenon in the history of science. But putting it together with gravity has so far produced absurd mathematical results. It’s as if a soccer player and a tennis player were managing to carry on a game despite being ignorant of the opponent’s rules.

  After years of single-minded study, Markopoulou cocreated a novel potential solution known as “quantum graphity.” This model of the universe operates at a scale that is tiny even by subatomic standards—as tiny in relation to a speck of dust as a speck of dust is to the entire universe. It suggests that space itself and its attendant laws and features could evolve out of interconnected dots to create the dimensions we experience as space, like a soufflé rising from a pan.

  “Fotini is extremely original, original to a fault,” says Lee Smolin, a fellow founder of Perimeter who used to be married to Markopoulou. “Most scientists pick up on ideas which are dominant, which come from living figures, and develop them incrementally. She doesn’t do that—she works solely on her own ideas.”

  Between sips of a latte, Markopoulou describes how theoretical physics consumed her. “It’s a lot like being in a monastery, like no normal human needs should make you waver from the cause of understanding where the universe came from,” she says. “In my previous eyes, just leaving is a moral failure, more than anything else. It’s a devotion thing—your devotion has just gone.” She pauses to shape her next thought. “It’s also not really a loss of faith; I changed.”

  Five years after walking away from physics, Markopoulou is still trying to explain that change to herself. She was forced to reexamine her position when Perimeter’s new director, Neil Turok, who joined in 2008, deemed her work too speculative and squeezed her out of the institute. But her unease had deeper roots.

  Working in a field where the air of reality was so thin, Markopoulou started to lose touch with her own life. “I have so many friends in their late 40s, and they still don’t have an actual home or a family or anything. As long
as they have a place where they can go and think, they’re happy.” She casts a wry smile. “I failed that test, obviously. For a lot of people that makes sense, and even for me that makes sense 80 percent. It’s that other 20 percent that causes problems.”

  Doppel embodies many of the qualities that Markopoulou came to miss in her work as a physicist. The company draws on the science of psychophysiology, a field which considers the mind to be deeply rooted in the body and its environment. But embracing the fact that the self is interwoven with the world, and at its mercy, is a frightening thought, Markopoulou says. Escaping that fear, and trying to pin down the interconnection between humans and the natural systems that make us what we are, is what drew her to physics in the first place.

  “I did appreciate, for a long time, the way science detaches you from that scariness, because you ignore it,” Markopoulou says. “Between the truth of the physical world and a physics theory, there’s humans. Of course, nothing happens there, because removing the person is the whole point of training as a scientist.” A pause. “But this may or may not be possible.”

  As a teenager growing up in Athens, Greece, Markopoulou looked like an ordinary kid: permed hair, heavy ribbed sweaters, a penchant for Clint Eastwood Westerns. But she was already attracted to the study of transcendent truths. On her way home from school, she would sometimes drop in at Greek Orthodox churches to lie on her back in the pews and contemplate the elaborate scenes of stars and angels painted into the interior domes. One summer, when she was 15, she happened across a book in the library of the British Council with the title Starseekers, a quasi-mystical account of the history of cosmology by English writer Colin Wilson. “I got totally obsessed with that book,” Markopoulou says. She convinced her mother, Maria, to buy her an Atari computer, and spent hours trying to translate Starseekers into Greek on a word processor.

  Markopoulou lived with her mother in a cramped two-story studio in Athens, where Maria worked as a figurative sculptor. She was a magnetic, troubled figure, unafraid to set her own moral compass but riven with internal conflicts. She’d fallen pregnant one summer to a Greek sculptor she had known in Florence, where she trained as an artist against the wishes of her parents, and decided to raise the baby as a single mother in Athens. She was 33. “Her lovely way of putting this was, ‘Jesus was also 33 when he was put on the cross,’ ” Markopoulou says. “But it was also very clear that I was the best thing that had ever happened to her.” (Markopoulou has never met and knows little about her father, who died in 1997.)

  Markopoulou loved accompanying Maria to exhibitions and openings but struggled to disentangle her sense of self from her mother’s strong and particular judgments. “My mother’s relation with reality, it would be wrong to say that it wasn’t solid, but it was just different,” Markopoulou says. Maria hated to sleep and refused to have a bed: “My mother clearly thought that sleeping was like dying, and that she might not wake up if she did, and something like a bed might as well have been a tombstone. I did realize as I was growing up that you couldn’t rely on her description of something.”

  The subjectivity of aesthetic merit troubled Markopoulou. “One of the things I hated about the art world is that decision-making is quite arbitrary,” she says. “People could say Picasso is shit just because they felt like saying it. I found that very frustrating, and very political; they’re gatekeepers, and then your life and self-perception is a function of those gatekeepers.”

  Markopoulou’s education in Greece was “a complete disaster,” she says, with teachers whose instruction consisted of reading the newspaper at the front of the classroom. In her final year of high school, Markopoulou went in search of private evening classes; by mistake she walked through the door of an institution that offered A levels, the exams for students entering the British university system. She hadn’t considered studying in the United Kingdom, but ended up enrolling. “The usual story about people in quantum gravity is, ‘I read about Einstein when I was eight,’ ” she says. That was not her. The pendulum for her imaginary career had swung between being an astronaut and an archaeologist. She only selected theoretical physics under the pressure of her university application, and chose the course on the casual advice of a tutor at the school, a former NASA scientist, who said it would be a good balance for her aptitude in physics and mathematics.

  Markopoulou says she failed her A levels—“the first time I walked into the lab was for the exam, and half the questions I answered in Greek”—but, as part of the clearing process between teachers and universities, her tutor secured her a place at Queen Mary’s University in London, her first choice. The department had several excellent particle physicists investigating the top quark, but the place retained the welcoming atmosphere of institutions unburdened by hallowed reputations.

  Money was tight, so Markopoulou didn’t have much of a social life. She planned birthday parties at McDonald’s for a bit of extra cash, while her mother, who was living with her in London to get the rent from her studio in Athens, repaired antiques. (They would continue to live together until the last year of Markopoulou’s PhD.) But Markopoulou loved it all the same. She and a clutch of the other undergraduates would relax in the chapel café between lectures and occasionally head out in the evenings to hear one of their professors play amateur hard rock. At the same time, in her classes she got wind of the fact that “there was some forbidden place”—that when it came to certain subjects, such as why time moves in one direction, it was better not to ask. She was not content with what the rules were; she wanted to know how they came to be.

  Toward the end of her undergraduate degree, a friend suggested Markopoulou attend a lecture on quantum gravity by Chris Isham, a rigorously mathematical physicist at Imperial College. He was also a Jungian analyst and devout Christian, with the air of a mystic and a fondness for peppering his lectures with passages from T. S. Eliot and Heidegger. “You can’t take out of the world the fact we see it,” Isham tells me. “What is the reality we hang on to? Well, it’s us, but who are we that sit inside this space which is relative to us?”

  Isham was the first person Markopoulou encountered who could relate the technical dimensions of science to humans’ wider search for meaning. “Sometimes doing physics can be a bit like doing plumbing—you have your equations and tools and you go around and fix stuff, and if you do it in a smart way, people respect you,” she says. “Because you are a professional physicist, you get used to the idea that there are difficult questions that you do not do for a living. But these are what drove most of us to join the ranks.”

  Markopoulou was developing her own clear vision of what she wanted to achieve as a physicist. “I am not going to devote my life to something because it’s beautiful—it’s this quest for the truth,” she says. “Science is not philosophy—there is not a lot of value in thinking about questions if you cannot come up with answers. But I’ve always been attracted to what is the furthest away you can get such that you can still come back with an answer. You’re trying to find the end of the coil to unfold it.”

  Under Isham’s influence, Markopoulou started to grapple with quantum gravity. Her assigned PhD project was based on a previous paper that examined the movement of dust particles to develop a new approach to splitting time away from the three dimensions of space. This sounds like a solution in search of a problem—surely time is a different thing from space?—until you remember Einstein’s counterintuitive insight that time is intimately interwoven with the fabric of space and can be similarly twisted and bent by matter and movement. Time is dynamic, and defined by its relationship to what’s happening around it. It follows that there is no absolute time that the whole universe obeys—and, more troublingly, when you push the equations far enough, time has a tendency to disappear entirely. “The relativity view of the world is that space and time is out there and it’s more or less a static thing—time is just another dimension,” the distinguished physicist Roger Penrose explains to me.

  However,
Einstein’s account of time doesn’t make sense in quantum theory. The quantum realm is host to all sorts of phenomena—particles existing in two places at once, or becoming entangled, as if they’re able to communicate their properties instantly and seemingly telepathically, whether separated by a lab bench or a light-year. It adopts a version of time that’s far more conventional, like a metronome ticking away in the background, distinct from the bizarre behavior of quantum theory’s zoo of quarks, bosons, and fermions.

  It began to dawn on Markopoulou that you might be able to reconcile these two accounts of time by looking more closely at how they viewed space. After her first paper on dust modeling, she turned to spin networks. These are geometric models which help physicists describe quantum interactions in space and fit more readily with the mathematics of general relativity. Markopoulou had the idea of combining spin networks with a “causal set,” which allows time to be captured as a history of discrete events rather than a continuous flow. Showing how histories could be represented spatially let her bring a more substantive version of time into general relativity—one that wasn’t rigid (as in some accounts of quantum theory) nor completely flexible (as in general relativistic spacetime).

  Her work caught the eye of Smolin, an American theoretical physicist who at the time was visiting Imperial from Penn State University. He’d made a name for himself as a joint inventor of loop quantum gravity theory—a competitor to string theory in the quantum gravity sweepstakes—which was building on spin networks to develop a more sophisticated picture of quantum spacetime. Smolin worked with Markopoulou on a paper on causal sets, and invited her back to Penn State for three months while she was finishing her dissertation. They went on to marry in 1999.