Does Light Matter by Richard Seltzer

(excerpt from my fantasy The Lizard of Oz, in which an elementary school class on a field trip goes to the Underworld. You need to stand under the world to understand it. There are many levels of understanding.)

Everybody in the class put on sunglasses and stretched out on the beach, with the waves tickling their toes. They felt even better than they had when they fell into the river from the mushroom. Maybe they were relieved to be safe after all the danger they had passed through. Miss Osborne, in particular felt good that the quest was ending. Finally they were in Ome, and soon they'd be Home.

"Gosh," said Donny, "that bush over there looks like it's on fire."

Everybody went running to the bush.

Timmy got close enough to touch it.

"Watch out!" shouted Miss Shelby. "You'll get burnt."

"But it isn't burning, Miss Shelby," Timmy answered.

"Of course it's burning," said Miss Shelby. "You can see it's on fire."

But when she got closer, she too saw it wasn't burning.

"I wish Mr. Shermin were here," she said. "He was so good at explaining things. I learned so much from him."

"Why that's the fire that doesn't burn," said Miss Osborne, and she rushed forward with the stick that Plato had given her.

"What are you doing?" asked Joey.

"I want to see if this stick will catch fire, so we can bring the fire back home."

The stick glowed when she put it in the bush; but when she took it out, the glow faded.

"Do you think it's God?" asked Miss Shelby.

"Beware," a voice boomed, like it was coming from a loudspeaker.

Miss Shelby screamed, "The bush is talking!"

But Donny said, "Gosh, no, Miss Shelby. It's that astronaut over there.",

On top of the hill two men in space suits were walking toward them, waving as frantically in their cumbersome suits let them.

"Stand back from that bush," they said. "Return to the water. This area is contaminated. Radioactive material."

Everybody ran back to the water and got up to their waists in it. The spacemen plodded close to them.

"What's wrong?" asked Miss Osborne. "Did somebody drop a bomb or something?"

"No, miss, it's a natural phenomenon," answered one of the men. "Alpha and omega particles. It's long been a mystery, but we're very close to a break-through. Research has been going on here for years. Scientists named this land "Ohm" because they thought the phenomenon was electrical. An ohm is a measure of electrical resistance. But just last week we successfully separated and identified the two major forms of radiation: the alpha particle and a new particle we've christened the ohm-ega particle. That's an event of cosmic significance."

Miss Shelby explained to the class, "That means it's very important."

"Well, not really," the scientist corrected her. "Alpha and omega particles are cosmic rays and our discovery is very important in the study of cosmic rays. But nobody's sure how significant cosmic rays are in elementary particle physics."

Miss Shelby explained to the class, "Elementary means basic. The most important things, the building blocks you need for further study are elementary. Our school is an elementary school."

"It's different in physics," the scientist explained. "Elementary particles are very advanced. Not that we've advanced that far in our knowledge of them, but that only advanced students ever study them. Actually, very few people study them, and we know very little about them and how they relate to the world of ordinary experience."

"You mean they don't matter?"

"Brilliant, my dear, brilliant!" he exclaimed. "Particles matter. The very word we've been looking for. It's difficult to explain what happens at the subatomic level. Sometimes we talk of matter, and other times we talk of energy. Neither concept alone is sufficient, and yet the concepts of energy and matter seem mutually exclusive. When we try to put them together, we wind up with strange-sounding expressions like 'matter waves.' It all makes sense in terms of equations; but when we try to tell people what we're doing, language keeps leading us into trouble. The words we use often mean more than we mean them to mean.

"We have to be very careful with our words, for they can imply whole systems of thought, and no single system of thought or set of concepts is adequate for describing the world around us. We are faced with the difficult task of using contradictory sets of concepts, now using one and now another, according to the needs of the moment. It's a complicated process that can only to be learned by experience. There are no signposts to tell us when to use which."

"Gosh," said Donny, " Winthrop's like that. There aren't any street signs, and it's awful easy to get lost unless you've got a magic coin."

Miss Shelby started to reprimand Donny for interrupting, but the scientist just kept talking.

"Particles matter," he said. "That's beautiful. A simple pun might make it easier to talk about elementary particles. Yes, 'matter' is a verb as well as a noun, and on the subatomic level it makes more sense to use the word as a verb. Light isn't matter as a noun, but it is matter as a verb. Language, for all its pitfalls, is capable of unexpected beauties. Its very imprecision can be a source of clarity. Light matters. Electrons matter. Elementary particles matter. Perhaps even matter matters."

"I certainly hope so," said Miss Shelby. "I'd hate to think people spend their lives studying things that don't matter."

The scientist laughed, "That's another good one. The words keep meaning more than we mean them to mean. If we aren't careful, we might find ourselves talking about values and morals and other things that have nothing to do with physics."

The full text of The Lizard of Oz is available for free at http://www.seltzerbooks.com/lizardill...