Kalila by Rosemary Nixon Read Free Book Online Page A

beside our child, drive back in silence; Brodie goes to bed.
    Desire tingles into nerve endings that reach out my hands to walk the inner seam of his pants just above the knee.
    Touch me.
    I feel so guilty.
    His mouth. The brush of finger against that lower lip. I want to slip my hand into his pocket, remove his wallet, play my fingers in that hidden place between materials, search out the cotton twill of his pants.
    I awaken on the couch, back stiff, move to the window, a pool of street light, a lone dog trotting down a sidewalk. Skipper emerges, groggy, from his spot under the table, stretch-yawns, regards me gloomily. We stare out at the darkness of Nose Hill.
    I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence
cometh my help .
    There’s no help coming.
    Maggie, you’re on your own.

The ancient Greeks saw stars and moons and constellations as their gods and heroes. They prayed to them and sought answers to their prayers. They gazed into the night sky and pondered their own place in the cosmos. They tried to understand what we call science.
    You can’t just study to be a scientist. In order to hypothesize, a scientist must believe. Believe there is an unknown — not what it is, but that it is. How else can he predict? Science equals curiosity. A scientist can’t wait for answers. He has to leave the world he knows and go in search of them. A scientist revels in the contradictions.
    You stand before your restless grade elevens, pointer on a timeline you have trailed across the blackboard. Frankie’s bed head is rising toward the lights in a kind of frenzied glee.
    It was in 1900 that Max Planck, the German physicist, formulated an equation that dealt with the emission of light from a hot surface. He couldn’t explain why his equation worked.
    So what was the use? Sukjeevan, twirling a paper clip. Andy gets up to retrieve a sailing pencil, sits down on a tack deposited neatly by Raj. You ignore his small shriek.
    I’m starved, Erika mutters.
    Well, Planck felt sure that the tiny emitters of light could only have certain values of energy. So, you tip the pointer against the blackboard, he took a leap. He proposed that radiation was made up of small packets, much as matter is made up of atoms. He called each unit of radiation, ‘the quantum, or quanta,’ which in Latin means?
    How much, Ashton says.
    Hungry or not, you can rarely stump these kids. Quantum mechanics is what? A theory that governs the very small, those minuscule pieces from which the universe is made. And for those tiny pieces, the rules of our world do not hold. The uncertainty principle reigns in quantum mechanics.
    But what about Planck?
    What about him? The man proposed something he couldn’t see. He took a chance. Chance based on probability. He proposed that radiation is made up of these small packets. Were the physicists of his day impressed? No, they were not. Because he couldn’t prove it, they believed Planck a kook. But in 1918 that kook won the Nobel Prize. Thanks to Planck’s imaginative thinking, quantum physics entered modern thought.
    A wad of paper whaps into the garbage can.
    A whispered, Right on!
    Freddie, just for you, we know you love your sport, fifteen minutes after school today. A coaching session — no, I’m uninterested in excuses, fifteen minutes in which to perfect your hoop shot. I understand your obsession. I’ll be here for you. Three-forty. Sharp.
    You move your pointer along the timeline trail. It squeaks and sings.
    Caleb, are you listening? Five years later, 1905, a young German physicist, Albert Einstein, verified Planck’s findings. But Einstein, too, veered off the safe path and in the process made a discovery that changed our view of the world.
    Einstein’s Theory of Relativity suggested a brand new view of the universe, based on Planck’s quantum theory. He proposed that light moved through space in quantum form. He proposed that light had at the