Electrons Are Not Snowflakes

 When I was an undergraduate studying physics, one of the most shocking passages I read was about electrons, in a textbook. David Griffiths (best physics textbook author ever), like the great physicist Richard Feynman, had little tolerance for "philosophy," and yet, also like Feynman, perpetually dished out philosophical gems. It seemed automatic for both of them, like breathing. They saw themselves not as "doing philosophy," but as framing physical, mathematical, and imagistic interpretations of problems. In other words, they were doing philosophy, just not silly philosophy where anything goes. Their philosophy of physics was the most rigorous kind.    

Griffiths wrote, "You can't paint an electron red, or pin a label on it [...] all electrons are utterly identical in a way that no two classical objects can ever be. It is not merely that we do not happen to know which is which, because there is no such thing as 'this' electron or 'that' electron; all we can legitimately talk about is 'an' electron."

When I was in the third grade, I became fixated on the concept of identical objects. I must have bored my neighbor to tears, talking about how her parents' newspaper was the same, but not the same, as my parents' newspaper. A tiny little tear or bend or ink smudge made them different. 

On the first day of Metaphysics in college, our professor held up our textbook and asked, "does anyone have this book?" In my eagerness to be a good student, I fell into the trap and nodded affirmatively. He became animated: "No! You can't have this book! This book is in my hand!" It was his introduction to the concept of token and type, my newspaper thing. 

But Griffiths was telling us something radical about electrons. Something I have never forgotten. There is an electron "type," but there are no electron "tokens."  

In the spirit of Calvino's Cosmicomics, where an impossible narrator describes the early universe in inescapably human terms, I wrote a poem from the perspective of the electrons (a poem that necessarily loses the linguistic legitimacy Griffiths was striving to teach us). The poem is in my forthcoming chapbook. Here it is:

Red

(originally published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal)

Each day, the electrons grow tired of resembling each other so completely and edge—as a group—toward properties. “Red,” one says, but since they are identical, no one knows who said this and they adopt it as their collective stance. “We should like to be red,” they say in unison.
 
And they paint themselves red, but as redness is only a phenomenon of light interacting with atoms, of which electrons are only a part, the electrons realize, one by one or as a group (no one can tell), that they can’t be sure whether they have become red at all.
 
“I was hoping for a change,” one says. But since all electrons are identical, it is unclear which of the electrons is most disappointed about their failed attempt to distinguish themselves.

Something keeps escaping them.

They agree that they are relatively light particles and that they often occupy orbitals in atoms. But this is not enough.

“We have charge,” one says.
 
“And spin,” another adds.
 
“I hear the stars can be told from each other,” one electron says. “That some are old and some are young, some are larger than others, some are destined for collapse or explosion. That each star has a composition, like a fingerprint.”
 
“This is what we lack,” says another electron, whose thoughts are so attuned to the first it is as if they share one mind. “We are not composed of anything but ourselves.”

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If you like this piece, pre-order my new chapbook, World, Composed. The book is a collection of meditations on contemporary physics, and ships March 23, 2018. Pre-orders help determine the size of the pressrun, so please reserve your copy today.