Antiphony Read Online Free PDF

minutes. Still enough time to make it, if he hurries. But perhaps he should not go, in this state of mind, without his notes. If he tries to wing it, he will make a fool of himself in front of them. He has been apprehensive about this presentation for weeks, and now it has somehow come to this. He could tell them he is ill; he could call Pradeep on his cell and inform him that there has been another episode of arrhythmia. Very plausible, the anxiousness that comes with giving a major speech like this could well bring on another attack. But imagine it: Pradeep, his chief rival for the position of Research Director, going to the podium to announce that Theodore cannot make it, and all of them rising as one to leave the room, the moment of glory Theodore has worked for years to achieve, squandered—gone.
    No, he must do it. They are waiting for him.
    At the elevators again, Theodore notices that music is being piped in from speakers overhead, lending the hushed vault of the corridor an air of floating, sprightly extremity. Was the music here before, when he came up? If so, he hadn’t noticed. Perhapssomeone in the hotel has only just now decided to activate the music over the speakers scattered throughout the hotel’s public spaces. Or maybe he is only now open to hearing such a sound, after having been filled with sound a few moments before. The music accompanies him as he steps into the elevator for the ride to the ground floor, a pulsating string section dancing on top of mincing triplets of flutes and oboes calling back and forth to one another. He suspects it may be Schubert, one of the symphonies. Theodore enjoys Schubert, but his music seems somehow derivative, a lesser form of Mozart that doesn’t quite seem to generate as much of a punch. He wonders whether Schubert would have garnered as much attention without the mystery of his Unfinished Symphony or his early death at the age of thirty-one from complications due to syphilis. Theodore turns this thought around on himself: Perhaps he is too old to accomplish anything great; the great ones, in music, in physics—in most fields—do their best work by the time they turn thirty, and then, if they are lucky, they die, transforming their lives into a dramatic opus commensurate with their art, and heightening the speculation about all the great work they might have done had they lived to a ripe old age. James Dean made three movies. Enough to make him a legend—or perhaps not, had he actually lived to survive them. Jackson Pollock found a tree with his speeding convertible and his mistress in the front seat to save him from growing old with his work. And in one single year, 1905, twenty-six year-old Albert Einstein discovered, in turn, the Special Theory of Relativity, in which he demonstrated that measurements of time and distance vary systematically as any object moves relative to anything else, thequantum theory of light—the idea that light exists as tiny particles called photons—proved that atoms really do exist, added the field theory to the quantum theory of light, and, of course, extended Special Relativity into the proof that matter and energy are one and the same, in the most famous equation ever conceived:
E = mc 2
. And he did all of this while working forty hours a week as a clerk in a patent office, shunned by the cloistered world of academia. What could be more daunting than that set of world-changing insights for any new physicist starting his career, hoping to be the one to discover the single theory that will tie everything together? Theodore is fifty-one years old and is having trouble describing his own little specialized corner of Perturbation Theory. Masturbation Theory, they call it. No wonder.
    The languishing string section follows Theodore off the elevator and down the long vault of the passageway that leads towards the conference center. His mind’s eye transfers the sound of the vibrating catgut strings of