理查德·沃克爾默/Richard Wolkomir
We paddled down Maine's Saco River that September afternoon, five couples in canoes, basking in the summer's last golden sunlight. Grazing deer, fluttering their white tails, watched our flotilla pass. That evening we pitched tents, broiled steaks and sprawled around the campfire, staring sleepily at the stars. One man, strumming his guitar, sang an old Shaker song:“Tis the gift to be simple. Tis the gift to be free.”
Our idyll ended, of course, and we drove back to the world of loan payments, jobs and clogged washing machines.“Tis the gift to be simple,”I found myself humming at odd moments,“Tis the gift to be free.”How I longed for that simplicity. But where could I find it?
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”That dictum of Henry David Thoreau's, echoing from the days of steamboats and ox-drawn plows, had long hunted me. Yet Thoreau himself was able to spend only two years in the cabin he built beside Walden Pond. And Henry-wifeless, childless, jobless-never had to tussle with such details as variable-rate mortgages.
My life attracted detail, as if my motto were:“Complicate, complicate.”And I've found I'm not alone. But one day my thinking about simplicity turned upside down.
I was visiting a physicist in his office tower jutting from his Illinois farmlands. We looked through his window at the laboratory's miles-around particle accelerator, an immense circle in the prairie far below.“It's a kind of time machine,”he said, explaining that the accelerator enables physicists to study conditions like those shortly after Creation's first moment. The universe was simpler then, he noted, a mere dot comprising perhaps only one kind of force and one kind of particle. Now it has many kinds of forces, scores of different particles, and contains everything from stars and galaxies to dandelions, elephants and the poems of Keats.