A Review of a Field

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”
-David Foster Wallace

We passed through endless blankets of tall grasses. You could hear the cicadas over the grumbling combustion under the bus’s hood, and the low roar of tires ripping across the hot tarmac. I had no notion of those controlled explosions, the pistons they propelled, or how to drive a bus for that matter, but we arrived at our destination regardless, carried somewhere just outside of Batavia, Illinois by those who did. We clambered out of the bus and onto a dusty patch near the road. A forest ranger type started giving us a safety lecture, as our teacher counted off heads. The sky was blue and entirely empty. In front of us there was a small forest of pines, and in every other direction the field stretched past the horizon. There was a laboratory all around us, though I didn’t know that at the time, but that was because most of it was buried in the very ground we stood upon. Somewhere below, electromagnetic fields might have been generated as a means to fling subatomic particles at one another through a giant vacuum tube track with a circumference spanning nearly four miles. They travel this course at near light speeds, making about fifty thousand revolutions a second and altering the way they interact with time and consequently space, until they collide rearranging matter and energy in ways that are only possible in these most extreme of conditions. The moment of impact is often so energetically dense that some physicists liken these precise explosions to the conditions of the big bang, allowing comparatively huge pockets of energy to pour themselves into matter, transcending our narrow notions of possibility within the human frame of reference, even if for only a fraction of a second.In this facility, simulating the conditions of the beginning of everything is commonplace. In recent years, Fermilab researchers have been responsible for the discovery of the higgs boson, the particle that gives us mass and so much more, and just within the past month or two, possible evidence for a new fundamental force, adding a fifth interaction to describe the way particles, and consequently everything, can influence everything else. Gravity is the most well known of the fundamental forces, without which the formation of solar systems, planets, and stars would not be possible. Another one is electromagnetism, the force that allows you to use a computer, which in turn allows you to do things like convert electricity to photons, which you decode into visual information using electrochemical circuits in the brain.  Now physicists are saying there is strong evidence that there is another force in our universe as potentially unique and profound as these ones we know. The week of this discovery was the week of my Grandpa’s 90th. While physicists around the world celebrated, I was at a restaurant listening to him tell a story about getting drunk for the first time when a junior high janitor bought liquor for him and his friends. When his story ended, he thanked us all for coming and sat down by my Mom and her brother. Between sips of beer and mouthfuls of pasta, I asked my cousins how much longer they thought our species might stick around. A few moments later, after the quiet grew louder than anything else in the room, I would notice my grandfather's head slumped, and my uncle shaking his limp shoulder as my Mom spoke with a 911 operator. They laid him down, and I stood up. Unsure of how to tell my uncle I knew cpr, that we needed to take his vitals and start doing compressions as soon as possible, I paced close enough to help without getting in the way. I tried to calculate the length his brain had gone without oxygen, how much longer it could go, and the ways responsibility is diffused among large groups of people. I shouted out asking if anyone knew cpr, and the wall of silence screamed back “only you”. As I tried to work up the will to do anything that might matter, I was sure I was watching a man die, a man that I am inextricably connected to by the same forces that connect who I am now to the terrified child I was, the old man lying on his deathbed that I will one day be, and the endless string of selves connecting them only by the lack of distance between the space they hold as they are continuously squeezed through a temporal axis. Finally he started puking, they rolled him onto his side into the rescue position, and I went back to my table. A few minutes later the EMT's had him on a stretcher loaded into the back of the ambulance. One of them happened to be the same guy that saved my sister’s life when her heart stopped a few years prior. She sobbed into my shoulder on the restaurant's patio, as the ambulance screamed past us, its sirens shifting blue, then red, then gone, just like every other part of the universe that we can never hope to touch, which is by far most of it, and I knew he may have slipped over that horizon too. While I stared at the pavement on main street, drivers zipping down the road just as I have done a thousand times, physicists around the world were celebrating what very well could be the single most influential scientific discovery of my lifetime. I didn’t get the news that day. I only happened upon it by chance a few weeks later, but if I hadn’t it still wouldn’t have changed the fact that this essay is not about fundamental forces, special relativity, or the spacetime continuum. Sometime on a late spring morning, my classmates and I were loaded onto a bus and shipped across Illinois to a field, the field that we stood in, a field that by the property of its sheer vastness alone, I would have been trapped within had it not been for the invention of faster than mammalian technology. This is an essay about that field. 
In that field, where the only bit of shade was a patch of pines, I tested ph or nutrient content, scooping dirt into a vial as their smell, full of mint and rain, seeped into me. Later, we made our way to a nearby pond. Our guide pointed out into the water at what he said was a turtle. I followed his arm, squinting at the water, trying to peer through the reflection of the sky, but all I could make out was a single point, maybe a nose, poking out of the water. Just as soon as I noticed, it collapsed back under, and the waves rippled outward in its place. We finished our tour, ate lunch by some nearby picnic tables, then loaded back onto the bus for the drive home. One day in the future, after my Grandpa was released from the hospital, we will have a dinner table conversation that will lead to a discussion on the fossil fuel industry. He will tell my family that humans are too small to affect the whole planet in any meaningful way, that mother nature is simply too vast and powerful. I will watch everyone treat him like an old fool, and the air will fill with a quiet disagreement, clinking ice and  forks.  Perhaps it was because I have always been terrified I would be treated this way some day, that I had seen myself on the floor of that restaurant, but I was the only one who told him the truth: scientists are in uniform consensus that the effects of climate change are man made, and that we are currently living through the largest mass extinction event our planet has ever seen.When he questioned how they could even know, I tried to explain how we pull ice cores out of the ground in the arctic to measure the gas bubbles trapped in different layers, and how we can match those layers to different periods of time. When he was still unimpressed, I tried to explain how far science has come in the past ten years alone, that this was just one example of dozens of ways scientists have learned to measure the natural world even through the fog of time. I tried to explain the discovery of gravitational waves, the fact that we had to build the largest, most uniform mirror ever created so that we could shoot the strongest laser ever built at it from a mile away, and then we had to build a second facility just like that one thousands of miles away. It could have been because I did a poor job explaining, or the concept was just too foreign, but I could see I had lost him at some point along the way. Maybe a more apt way to illustrate the point would have been to tell him that there was a time when our little midwestern patch of plains once had so many pigeons, their flocks blotted out the sun, only to be shot down by the first settlers who built the roads we travel every day. Though, I’m still not convinced even that would have worked. How was I supposed to bridge seven decades of human discovery during the most robust period of technological development that the human race has ever seen? Perhaps one answer is that he was right. Maybe the species he was talking about couldn’t ever manage to alter the composition of their atmosphere, power their homes with the energy trapped inside of the smallest units of material, or capture a photo of the beginning of everything. Perhaps I am one of the first members of a new species or proto cyborg humanoids, the first beings to live with access to all of humanity resting in our palms, the first that might die with our heads in the cloud, and the first species that knows that it will never touch most of the stars in the sky, that in fact that sky is an illusion, that light will someday fade, and that they are already out of reach. We are the first to know we are trapped in our own pockets of space and time, and we are the first to know that this is ok. If the rules were written any other way, none of what we are would be possible. This is just the way things have to be. Maybe we humans, as much as we like to view ourselves as separate from nature, are in fact only part of a naturally occurring process that has a disturbing proclivity toward self-destructive technologies, regardless of whether that destruction comes in the form of death or transcendence, and maybe that is ok too. But what isn’t ok is that I went on a field trip to one of the coolest laboratories in the entire world, and all I got to do was play with some dirt in a fucking field.