Heat (36 page)

Fermi knew Teller well. They played Ping-Pong together. It may have been Fermi who suggested to Teller that a fission bomb could be used to trigger a fusion reaction, that an atomic bomb could make a hydrogen bomb possible. Fermi was also among the physicists who worried that nuclear explosions could ignite the atmosphere.

But the Italian physicist I talk to now is no Fermi. He does not believe that the world’s climate is warming. As evidence against it, he cites the record cold temperature from the Dolomite Range. It is not the argument of an educated man. He ignores John Tyndall’s nineteenth-century measurements showing that carbon dioxide traps heat. He ignores five decades of data showing increasing temperatures. He ignores climate itself, focusing instead on the vagaries of local weather.

I break away. I wander alone on the sidewalks of Rome in the rain. I walk past the Coliseum, completed the year after Vesuvius exploded, the year after Pliny the Elder died. I wander through the ruins of the Forum, imagining the stout Pliny, attended by servants and admirers. My feet touch ground on which Pliny once trod. Even then, two thousand years ago, he would have seen ruins here, temples built seven hundred years before he was born, buildings that had been sacked and rebuilt.

I walk fifty minutes through the rain to Saint Peter’s Square. I walk past the obelisk in the courtyard, navigating around pigeons and tourists, stepping on ancient cobbles and soggy cigarette butts. I find a docent who speaks English. I ask if she can direct me to the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. She does not know where their offices are but she asks another docent, who asks another, who asks another. Within seconds four docents stand in a circle. A complicated and heated discussion ensues, but after five or six minutes the woman returns her attention to me. She smiles. She says they are not sure, but they think it is the building just there, “down and to the right, past the Swiss Guards.” She gestures, a fingernail darkly painted pointing the way to a nondescript building, five or six stories tall, with shuttered windows, the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei.

I talk to the Swiss Guards themselves, young men, alert, wearing sharp black berets but otherwise dressed like clowns, their official uniforms striped in red and blue and orange, topped with wide white collars. They want to be helpful, but the building is off-limits unless I have official business there. I do not, so I sit for a few minutes on the concrete base of a column, staring at the building.

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was tried by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, known then as the Supreme Sacred Congregation for the Roman and Universal Inquisition. His alleged crime: “holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world.” More precisely, Galileo was tried for ignoring an earlier injunction by the church, an injunction ordering him to abandon heliocentrism, to give up blasphemous thoughts that would inconvenience the church.

The building in front of me is not old enough to have been the site of Galileo’s trial. But somewhere near here, under threat of torture, on June 22, 1633, Galileo spoke: “I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you…swear that I abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves.”

He was sentenced to imprisonment, but the sentence was relaxed to one of house arrest. He died nine years later, still under house arrest.

A century passed. In 1758 the church dropped its ban on writings claiming that the earth circled the sun. Two more centuries passed. In 1992 the pope called Galileo’s conviction “a tragic mistake.”

For a time the Vatican considered erecting a statue of Galileo. From Nicola Cabibbo, a nuclear physicist and head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in 2008: “The Church wants to close the Galileo affair and reach a definitive understanding not only of his great legacy but also of the relationship between science and faith.” But the statue would not come to pass. The church diverted the statue’s funding to Nigeria, to help Nigerians better understand the relationship between religion and science.

I try to imagine the great man himself, a septuagenarian, his weathered face strong behind a gray beard, worried about his immediate future, his fate to be dictated by the politics of Catholicism, by the Inquisition. Even then, it is easy to imagine him obsessively thinking about the planets and stars.

A nun walks past carrying a shopping bag, and the Swiss Guards step aside. Two more nuns drive up, and the guards wave them through. In front of the building itself, the building that houses the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, a policeman dressed in dark blue and wearing a thick Kevlar vest carries a machine gun. A middle-aged woman panhandles. Church bells ring.

Back home, I place another telephone call, this one to a physicist known for her work at the Brookhaven supercollider, officially called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. She is a distinguished professor, known for smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together at close to the speed of light just outside New York City.

The goal, she says, is to learn more about quarks, to see quarks in isolation. Quarks are strange things, otherworldly, behaving in ways that make no sense at all in the everyday world. They are the stuff of protons and neutrons, building blocks that do not, under anything resembling normal conditions, exist in isolation. In day-to-day life, they exist only in groups. The groups are called hadrons, and protons and neutrons are two kinds of hadrons.

“In the normal course of events,” the physicist tells me, “heat transforms matter from solids to liquids to gases.” Heat moves the molecules farther and farther apart, forcing them to dance. Add more heat, and electrons move away, leaving a plasma, a soup of positively charged ions and electrons. In plasmas, matter remains intact. The nuclei of atoms remain unchanged. The protons and neutrons retain their integrity. Plasmas are not especially exotic. Lightning is a plasma. The imprudent homeowner can create a plasma in a household microwave oven with nothing more than a match, a bit of electricity, and acceptance of the possibility of a fire. Plasmas are normal, just another phase of matter.

But add enough heat, and another phase change occurs. Protons and neutrons fall apart, breaking into their constituent parts. Quarks are freed.

“The early universe,” the physicist says, “was all about quarks.”

The early universe—the first microsecond, the first flash—was unimaginably hot. The heat just after the Big Bang did not allow the existence of normal matter.

But the early universe is gone. It is fifteen billion years in the past. “It is not something you can see,” she tells me. “It is not something that astronomers can study.”

And so people like her use supercolliders to smash together heavy ions, re-creating the temperatures of the early universe. She casually mentions that the experiments at Brookhaven recently reached a temperature of four trillion degrees Kelvin, or more than seven trillion degrees Fahrenheit. This is the highest temperature ever created in a laboratory. It is hotter than the core of the sun. It is hotter than the core of a supernova, which itself is thousands of times hotter than the core of the sun.

I make plans to visit Brookhaven, the last stop on a journey to the top of the thermometer. But first there is the matter of firewalking.

With my companion, I fly to California. With two days between us and our firewalking appointment, we decide to walk in the mountains. We pick an area near Nevada City, a Gold Rush town once populated by forty-niners. Some of the Death Valley survivors may have found their way here. They may have bought a bottle of Kier’s Petroleum. Some of them may have seen Mark Twain here when he spoke in 1866, describing his travels in Hawaii, describing his visit to Kilauea.

We drive on gravel roads wet with steady rain. The mountains have had their faces ripped off, torn away by hydraulic mining to leave behind steep barren bluffs. The forty-niners created landscapes as barren as those of Death Valley, or more so, but wetter. We park our rental car and walk the Humbug Trail, named by forty-niners who failed to find gold. The rain turns to snow—fat flakes that settle lazily to the ground. When we return to our rented car, the flakes lie stacked four inches thick on the road. The car refuses to climb hills through the snow. A man and his wife offer us a ride. We abandon the rented car and return to Nevada City to wait for our fire walk while nature mocks us with ever-thickening snow, throwing down barriers between us and hot coals.

But we are not to be stopped. We find alternative transport to the Goddess Temple, an hour from Nevada City and below the snow. The temple stands on private land at the end of a long driveway. To enter the temple, one walks beneath the open legs of a two-story metal woman, a sculpted New Age goddess. The goddess stands soaking wet, pelted by rain, blasted by wind. Behind her, in an open space a hundred feet from the temple itself, blue tarps cover a full cord of wood. Rain has pooled on top of the tarps. Wind whips the tarps, slapping them against the wood.

Inside the temple, the rain finds its way through a leak in the ceiling to a pan on the floor. A woodstove in the corner, in the shape of an elephant and as big as an elephant calf, heats the room. Firewalking novitiates mill about, waiting, hovering near the stove for warmth. A stereo tuned to a top-forty station competes with the sound of wind at the windows.

I find my instructor, and we talk quietly. She reminds me that she burns a full cord of wood for firewalks.  “I want firewalkers to have the full experience,” she says.

And this: “My goal is to inspire personal empowerment without getting burned.”

Getting burned remains a distinct possibility. The firewalkers, me included, sign waivers. The waivers, the instructor tells me, hold up in court. “The courts know that anyone walking through a fire is taking on some risk. It’s like skydiving.”

Some firewalking events, she says, cater to a thousand participants. These are the corporate team builders, big events set up for big businesses. Tonight she has thirty-four walkers signed up. This is not a team builder. This is about personal growth. This is about healing.

“No one has to walk through the fire,” she tells me. “There is no pressure. Some people will just watch, but even in watching they will feel empowered. The fire’s presence in itself is inspiring.”

But she is there to help people break through their personal barriers. She once told a teenage girl, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” The girl did not want to walk through the fire alone, but she wanted to walk through the fire. The instructor held her hand. They walked through together.

We talk for a time about the science of firewalking, about physical explanations of firewalking. Hot coals conduct heat poorly. The feet are in contact with the heat for fractions of a second. Walkers are unscathed because of physics, not because of a mystic force. But in the end, it is about a barefoot walker and a bed of glowing red coals. It is about the very real possibility of being burned. It is about intense heat and the human reaction to the presence of that heat.

“The science doesn’t really matter,” she says. “In some ways the fire itself doesn’t matter. It’s not about the fire. It’s about conquering fears. It’s about healing. It’s about overcoming personal barriers.”

When she is not guiding people through fires, she is a clinical behavioral therapist. She has helped people with depression, with anxiety, with panic attacks, with sleep disorders, with addictions. She has counseled cancer patients. She has counseled victims of rape and child molestation. What she does here, with firewalking, she sees as an extension of what she does there, with behavioral therapy. She helps people help themselves.

Thirty-four of us sit on cushions on the floor of the Goddess Temple. The instructor, up front, talks about firewalking. She talks about fears and limitations. She talks about Saint Francis of Paola, also known as Saint Francis the Firehandler, who held burning coals. She tells us that the Romans, in the time of Pliny the Elder, did not tax those who could walk through fire unscathed. Now firewalking has come back. People are tired of being told that happiness comes with the purchase of a particular car, with the wearing of a particular pair of jeans, with the eating of a particular cereal.