On “Quantum physics” By Hannah Reade
I am ten years old. Weesa is twenty. She is our American lodger. We are sewing colourful patches of cloth together into a gusset so that I can turn my jeans into flares. It is the 90’s. I wish it was the 60’s. This is where it starts. She sings and plays guitar. Her guitar case has a Joan Baez sticker on it. I am awestruck. Weesa teaches me the ballad of Mary Hamilton. She writes it out for me in her beautiful curly writing. I am impressed that she can remember it all. She says it’s just a story in which each part is like a coloured patch which you stitch onto the next.
Ten years later she publishes a book on the history of quantum physics (1). I carry around this and another enormous hardback with me for three months, only to reach chapter four of her book. I confess this to her on the phone, to which she responds ‘Maybe it just isn’t the right time, there’s no point forcing
it’. I have been struggling to understand the physics in the book, but I love the stories she has woven into it. The other hardback argues that the development of literacy has disempowered women. In it there is a line ‘woman is space. Man is time’(2). I understand this, I agree and disagree with it. I think of Weesa and her book, and the 10 years which have passed since I made my patchwork flares, and her understanding of space and time. Slowly this story forms with a childlike logic, perhaps painting an all-too-perfect-picture. To listen to the song go to: http://wanderingswallows.wordpress.com 1. Gilder, Louisa 2008 The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn Knopf USA 2. Shlain, Leonard 1998, p.23 The Alphabet Versus The Goddess. The Penguin Press, London, UK