John Updike’s prose was so rich and intimate that I never felt compelled to pry into his life beyond the printed page.  But his final book,

This specter of mortality is present even in the seemingly mundane: copyright © 2009 by the Estate of John Updike.  It was a sad reminder that one of my muses was gone.

Clive James wrote  “Updike was always a clinical observer of his own body.  Right to the wire he took inventory; he had the mind of a regimental quartermaster.”  This is the lure of this poignant and serious volume of poems.

On his birthday in 2002, he wrote this poem that begins Endpoint.

“Mild winter, then a birthday burst of snow.

A faint neuralgia, flitting tooth-root to

knee and shoulder joint, a vacant head,

too many friendly wishes to parry,

too many cakes. Oh, let the years alone!

They pile up if we manage not to die,

glass dollars in the bank, dry pages on

the shelf. The boy I was no longer smiles.”

And a stanza later:

“Wife absent for a day or two, I wake

alone and older, the storm that aged me

distilled to a skin of reminiscent snow

so thin a blanket blades of grass show through.

Snow makes white shadows, there behind the yews,

dissolving in the sun’s slant kiss, and pools

itself across the lawn as if to say,

Give me another hour, then I’ll go.”

 And the final stanza:

 “Nature is never bored, and we whose lives

are linearly pinned to those aloof,

self-fascinated cycles can’t complain,

though aches and pains and even dreams-a-crawl

with wood lice of decay give pause to praise.

Birthday, death day – what day is not both?”

In a poem called Oblong Ghosts written just two months before he died, Updike writes:

“A wake-up call? It seems that death has found

the portals it will enter by: my lungs,

pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than

the other on the doctor’s viewing screen.”

And a few weeks later on 11/23 from Mass General Hospital in Boston, he wrote:

The Hospital

“Benign big blond machine beyond all price,

it swallows us up and slowly spits us out

half-deafened and our blood still dyed: all this

to mask the simple dismal fact that we

decay and find our term of life is fixed.

This giant governance, a mammoth toy,

distracts us for the daytime, but the night

brings back the quiet and solemn dark.”

And the final stanza:

“My wife of thirty years is on the phone.

I get a busy signal, and I know

she’s in her grief and needs to organize

consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;

her body is the only locus where

my desolation bumps against the wall.”

The other poems in this last book include sonnets and light verse covering everything from Doris Day and Payne Stewart to the painter Lucian Freud and baseball.

Getting the words right was important to Updike.  Like another favorite author of mine, Thomas Wolfe the elder, I revel in the parade of adjectives and the minute descriptions of things from plumbing fixtures to the way a woman’s hair is carefully braided.

The criticism of Updike's prose was usually about his verbal virtuosity – that his similes and metaphors short-circuited the reading experience...that the reader admired the sentences instead of losing oneself in the story.

I don’t disagree, but I have lost myself in so many stories and in so many authors, I read Updike or Tobias Wolff for other reasons beyond the story. It resonates with me like a Wyeth painting. An echo of the Updike’s essay-autobiography "Self Consciousness,"the prose is unabashedly self conscious. 

But in Endpoint, Updike’s poems are even more directly personal and intimate. He is aware of his own self-consciousness but embraces death with the understanding of man as part of something larger – from his extended family to the world of letters.

So, I place Endpoint next to his collected short stories and Rabbit Run. When I am short on insight and influence, I come back to bask in the words and a life well considered.

To read my entry on Updike's Death in January of '09, just click here:

http://tinyurl.com/ybtjggo

Robert Bolt found his ideal More in Paul Scofield, an actor of extraordinary intelligence noteworthy for his stage presence, distinctive voice and for the unmannered intensity of his delivery.  He was also a man of tremendous humility, declining the honor of knighthood three times. 

How do you find a budding Paul Scofield in community theater? You don’t.  You just cast a net for an actor who you pray will deliver the essence of the character and who will grow into a commanding presence on the stage.

Shirley Hurd’s challenge in the first week for auditions was finding her More.  Three actors emerged as contenders in the first two auditions.  Bob Nelson, a well-known actor who had been Artistic director of Generic Theater, Actor’s Theater and Virginia Valley Theater Company. Joel King, a classically good-looking actor with a strong physical presence.  And Mike Hoover, a corporate lawyer,who had never appeared on stage before.

Casting the leads in a small community theater is a leap of faith and in Hurd’s case, relying on her experience as director and her instincts. “I look for actors with certain “qualities.”  The nearest I can come to giving a description of what I mean is an innate aspect of the actor’s personality; something a director recognizes when he or she sees it, but cannot put into words and often it’s a quality that actors don’t even realize they possess.”

Mike Hoover, with silver-white hair and a serious demeanor, seemed to be a long-shot for the lead.  The least experienced of the actors, Mike didn’t appear to capture the humor and charisma that the role of More demanded.

But Shirley saw something in Mike that resonated with her.  Ultimately is was Hoover’s natural grace and intellectual curiosity that won the role and the day.  Bob Nelson was so good, he was a natural for the play’s other commanding role, The Common Man.  

Note:  Since this production blog is being published near the end of the play’s run, I can tell you that Mike Hoover made the transition from novice actor to taking the role to tremendous heights.  In the first few weeks of production, Mike seemed at times brilliant and other times so serious that the full character of More didn’t bloom.  But on opening night,  he offered up a star turn that was truly impressive.  He conveyed a remarkable range of emotions –from humor to pathos that was unimaginable from the simple auditions.

Mike’s determination and Shirley’s direction were the blue print for such a great performance.  When I talked with Mike after the opening he gave credit to Shirley and the other actors.  In some of the more intense scenes, he told me Ann Heywood’s (Lady Alice More) compelling performance allowed him to feel the true emotions of the part.

It was a crisp Monday in mid-September and dozens of actors crowded the small lobby of The Little Theater of Virginia Beach (LTVB). It is a storied community theater nesting in a sea of suburban homes a few blocks from the beach.  LTVB first opened its doors in 1948 and is the city's oldest continually operating non-profit community theatre. 

The auditions were for A Man for All Seasons, a play written by Robert Bolt, and first performed in London at the Globe Theatre 1960. It later found its way to Broadway, enjoying a critically and commercially successful run for over a year.  Inside the theater, a petite British woman with strawberry blonde hair stands at table wedged behind a row of seats.  She is the director, Shirley Hurd.

Shirley, a 15 year veteran of many LTVB productions, opens up a white binder and unfolds a series of pages. It’s her blueprint for the play; every scene and actor in a timeline.  She directed her first full-length play, Blithe Spirit at LTVB while working for a BA in Theatre.  A Man for All Seasons is her 12th play at LTVB.  Shirley is also an actress and has played many of the classic leading ladies from Blanch Dubois to Lady Macbeth.

Hurd considers MFAS her most difficult challenge.  A challenge that began on that September night with nearly 50 actors vying for only 14 parts. “It is hard turning away so many hopeful and talented actors.  But part of the mission of a community theater is to consider new actors.” So, as she glances through her list of audition resumes, Shirley hopes to find roles for some people who have never graced a stage before.

Donna Lawheed, part time stage manager and full time school nurse in Hampton Roads takes a list of names from Shirley and disappears into the packed lobby. She returns with a small group of actors including the woman with the marmalade hair who is trying out for the part of Sir Thomas More’s daughter. The scenes selected for the auditions are group scenes so that the director can mix and match roles quickly.  Hurd has only two nights of auditions and one evening of call backs to find the right cast.

The ironic backdrop of these auditions is that the set of LTVB is from their current production of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23^rd Floor.  So the backdrop for this 16^th Century period play was the writing room of a TV comedy show based on the 50’s TV comedy  Your Show of Shows.

The first scene includes Sir Thomas More, his wife Alice and his daughter Margaret.  One actress, Elisabeth Martingayle, stands out. Her accent is pitch perfect and she has the kind of voice that resonates throughout the theater. There is almost a palpable sense that the first of  key roles has been filled.  But finding the perfect Sir Thomas More would prove to be more daunting challenge.  (To be continued)

If you've ever heard of Hans Bethe, raise your virtual hand.  Because he is the great unknown in the general public, but a source of admiration in the world of nuclear physics.  To put it on my level, he explained the twinkle in the stars.

Fusion. Fission. Let's call the whole thing off. Very simply, fission is like a logger. It splits a massive element into fragments, releasing energy in the process. Otto Frisch named the effect "nuclear fission: because of its resemblance to biological fission -- cell division. Fission itself is a nuclear process which does not usually occur naturally in nature. (That we are aware of.)

Fusion is like a minister at a wedding. It joins two light elements, forming a more massive element, and releasing energy in the process.

In nuclear fusion the nuclei of light atoms combine at extremely high temperatures and release incredible amounts of energy that radiates from the surface of a star as heat and light.  Your basic star isn't as exotic as would it appear.  It is a sphere of gas that is by mass 73% hydrogen, 25% helium (Yes, like the balloons) and 2% "other" elements.
The temperature in the center of the star is so high it fuses four nuclei of hydrogen to form a single helium nucleus. The process which releases tremendous energy is known as the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) cycle. 

What Bethe theorized was that energy in stars is produced by hydrogen fusion reactions.  
 In 1939, in a paper entitled "Energy Production in Stars", Bethe analyzed the different possibilities for reactions by which hydrogen is fused into helium. He selected two processes that he believed to be the sources of energy in stars. The first one, the proton-proton or what I call the stutter, is the dominant energy source in stars with masses up to about the mass of the Sun. The second process, the CNO is most important in more massive stars.
Like tabloids, their job is to keep the stars hot. 

There is much to be said for brevity, but I do admire the literary diversity.   

Imagine an atom. Chances are you're seeing a Nagaoka.  In 1904,  a Japanese physicist named Hantaro Nagaoka created a the classic atom image  with planet like electrons orbiting around a nucleus.  A century later, physicists  envision the atom much differently.  Some see the electrons as a blades of spinning fan, managing to fit the space in their orbits simultaneously.  Others see as a cloud.

Derived from the Greelkatomos -- atom means "the smallest indivisible particle of matter."   An atom has two parts -- a nucleus made of protons and neutrons (except for Hydrogen which has no neutrons).  And a cloud of electrons that surrounds that nucleus.

Remember the high school science mantra: The protons have a positive charge.  The electrons have a negative charge.  And neutrons  which have no charge. 

An atom is incomprehensibly small.  They are 1 or 2 x 10^-8 cm in radius.  10^-8 is called an angstrom (A) in radius. The Nobel physicist Richard Feynman described it this way:  If an apple is magnified to the size of the Earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple. 

 Another analogy:  a human hair is about 1 million carbon atoms wide.  A speck of dust might contain 3 trillion atoms. A typical human cell is comprised of 100 trillion atoms.

Electrons are very light particles that are bound to the nucleus by electromagnetic attraction just as the moon is bound to the Earth by force of gravity,  But in the hot-early Universe (Big Bang Singularity) there was too much energy available for electrons to bind to their nuclei.  Photons (particles of light) prevented the electrons from binding. (Think of Photons as  galactic chaperones. Nobody got together.) The universe had to cool down and barrage of photons had t become less dense before electrons could bind to nuclei and form atoms.  (This took hundreds of thousands of years). 

All of the bound protons and neutrons in an atom make up a dense, massive atomic nucleus and are collectively called nucleons.  Atoms of the same element have the same number of protons (think positive) is called the atomic number.  (Just for cocktail conversation) The number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus can be modified.  Nuclear fusion occures when additional  protons and neutrons collide with the nucleus.  (Think Manhattan Project)

Physicists are now thinking smaller.  The current theory is that protons and neutrons are  composed of even more elementary particles called quarks.  There are six different types of quarks -- each has a fractional electric charge. These quarks are held together by a strong nuclear force mediated by particles called gluons. 

One of my favorite writers, Bill Bryson sums it up this way, "So the atom turned out to be quike unlike the image most people had created.  The electron doesn't fly around the nucleus like a planet around the sun, but instead takes on the more amorphous aspect of a cloud.  The "Shell" of a ataom isn't some hard shiny casing, but simply the outermost of these fuzzy electronic clouds... it seemed as if there was no end of the strangeness.  For the first time, as James Trefil has put it, scientists have encountered "an areas of the universe that our brains aren't hard wired to understand."

So where's the artistry?  Well, one of the six quarks is called "Charm."  The true artistry is the dance.  An electromagnetic tango that pairs attraction and repulsion all on a gravitational dance floor. And the wacky electrons are doing the wave.

Gotta dance. 

On June 30, 2001,  a Delta II rocket launched the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe  or WMAP.  What sounds like a horrible medical procedure is actually an amazing satellite  designed to take baby pictures of the universe.  The mission of the WMAP is to measure the temperature of the radiant heat left over from the "Big Bang" singularity. 

What?

To appreciate why physicists love the WMAP, let's go back to the origins of the universe.  A hundred thousand years after the expansion of the universe from an infinitesimally small bit of matter, protons and electrons came together to form atoms.  A photon is simply an elementary particle responsible for electromagnetic phenomena.  It carries electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths. (gamma, x-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves and radio waves).

Today, there are 400 million of these original photons for every cubic meter of space.  13.7 billion years later, these photons form what cosmologists call the Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB.  

The specific goal of WMAP is to map the relative CMB temperature over the full sky with an angular resolution of at least 0.3°, a sensitivity of 20 µK per 0.3° square pixel, with systematic artifacts limited to 5 µK per pixel.  Or in other words, WMAP is like your turkey thermometer -- but so well calibrated it can measure temperature changes by millions of a degree.

What WMAP has discovered is that space is FLAT.  Not curved or rounded.  That means that scientists have been able to use the data to figure out the breakdown of matter in the universe. 

 Here comes the scary part.  Everything we see in space  -- stars, galaxies etc -- adds up only to 5% of the total mass of the universe.  Basically, 70% of the universe is composed of what cosmologists call Dark Energy.  It's the Lord Vader of the universe.  The other 25% +- of the universe is called Dark Matter or matter what influences the evolution of the universe gravitationally but is not seen directly by present observations.

• The universe is 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years old.
• The universe is composed of:
  • 4% ordinary matter.
  • 22% an unknown type of dark matter which does not emit or absorb light.
  • 74% a mysterious dark energy which acts to accelerate expansion.  
    
  • So our universe is old, flat and expanding.  Oddly enough, very much like Kate Moss.
    

Here's something that will give your brain a nice seismic jolt.  The size of our own galaxy.  Because light is so fast, speeding though space at 670 million miles per hour, a single light year is immense.  According to Astronomist and writer, Ken Croswell, "If you shrank the Milky Way so that the sun were just 1/100 inch across -- then to map our entire galaxy including the dark halo, you'd  need a sheet of a paper that stretched far beyond the moon." 

The Milky Way is nearly 100,000 light-years -- each an incredible 6 trillion miles -- in diameter with two large arms twisting around its central bulge, called the nucleus.  It contains over 200 BILLION START. Our sun,  the center of our Solar System, is located near the inside of one of the large arms.   Below is the Milky Way as seen from Death Valley.

Why do we day a fire is "red hot?"  Why does steel glow first, red, then yellow, then white when it is heated?  Good questions. A tungsten light bulb filament reaches over 3000 degrees Celsius, similar to the surface of a star.  The light looks white because more blue light has been added to the existing red and yellow.  This spread of colors is called a black body curve.

Let's show the electromagnetic spectrum again.

Let's do a quick review. 

In the early 1900's, nobody could explain what had been dubbed black body radiation or "The Ultra Violet Catastrophe."  Black body radiation is the radiation that comes from a non-reflecting, absorbing , non-glossy black body.  Since black is the absence of color, we have no color unless we heat that body.

We use the term "black body" because dark materials are best able to radiate or absorb heat.  (That's why the good guys were white hats). Black objects not only absorb but release heat more quickly than white ones.

Remember Newton the Apple guy and James Maxwell?  Well, they believe that any hot object should radiate energy mainly at short wavelengths, which is the ultraviolet end of the visual spectrum.   Well, when we heat a "black body" something different happens.  As a black body gets hotter; we get a variety of wavelengths from infrared to red, to orange to blue.

Basically this meant that classical physics had a burp.  Enter our cliff hanging hero.  On December 14, 1900, a soft-spoken 42-year old professor presented a odd concept to the German Physical Society.   His name was Max Planck or as I call him Mad Max.  Planck explained why heat energy doesn't always get converted to invisible ultraviolet light waves. 

In trying to understand Black Body radiation, Planck joined the physics of heat and light together.   His great insight was to treat electromagnetic radiation in the same way that thermodynamics experts treated heat.  Just as temperature is the sharing of heat energy among many particles,Planck described light by allocating energy among a set of electromagnetic "oscillators" or tiny subatomic units.

Time for a mental break? 

In this new theory, higher freqency oscillators took on high energy.  So, you couldn't have many of them without blowing the energy grid. (Like a black out).  By working out the most probable way of sharing electromaagnetic energy between many oscillators, Max's model put most of the energy in the middle.  Think of it as an sub atomioc Energy Budget. (Coined by Joanne Baker of Science Magazine.)

Okay, let's dig deeper into this  shattering discovery. Planck was astonished to find that matter absorbed heat energy and emitted light energy (ready for this?) discontinuously.  Discontinuously meant in "lumps" or "spurts."  Now what is truely astonishing is that until Planck's speech, physicists assumed that excited electrons radiated their energy smoothly and continuously like a wave.  Planck discovered that they emit and absorb energy in specific amounts or what he called quanta.  That was a radical change in thinking.

Remember, a black body is put over low heat, the first color it glows is red because the energy packets of red light are the smallest energy packets in the visible light spectrum.  As the heat increases, more energy is available to create bigger energy packets. The larger energy packets make the higher-frequency colors such as blue and violet.   

Now here's the mind boggler.  The glow of hot metal seems to increase steadily in brightness as the temperature increases. But that's only on a macro level.  The steps of brightness and darkness are so incredibly small that our eyes can not detect them.  Mad Max's constant is so small it's approximately 6.6 divided by ONE BILLION, then again divided by ONE BILLION, then again divided by ONE BILLION. 

It works like this. In any object, energy is distributed among the atoms.  Some have very little energy.  Some have a lot.  And most are somewhere in between.  Now when we we increase the temperature each atom can emit electromagnetic radiation in the form of quanta.  For big values of f (high frequencies/shorter wavelengths) the energy (E) needed to emit a single quantum is very large.  At low frequencies (longer wavelengths) it is easy to radiate quanta because less energy is required.  (The Energy Budget Principle).

Big Idea:  Light waves don't behave like mechanical waves.  Mad Max served up a physics thunderbolt.  He created a formula that is  understandably now called Planck's constant.   That formula (stay with me now)  said simply that energy (E) = the frequency of light emitted times a constant (h).  And with this simple formula, E=hf, the quantum age was born.

Let's revisit the previous paragraph.  Higher frequency means higher energy.  Consequently, unless the energy of heat was high enough ,the higher frequency light was not seen.  The energy in any given light wave could only be a whole multiple of the basic "chunk" or "quanta" of energy. A quantum means a whole amount. 

A summing up.  Planck posited that energy is not a continuous thing like flowing water, but comes in individualized packets, which he called quanta. Planck's idea related the energy given to a wave by oscillating material  -- to the frequency of that wave. As a practical matter, think of solar energy.  Light is transformed into energy. (IE: there's energy in light).

Despite all the acclaim, Planck's personal life was filled with many agonies. His beloved first wife died early, in 1908, and the younger of his two sons was killed in World War I. He also had twin daughters.  One died giving birth.  His other daughter fell in love with her sistgers husband and then she died in childbirth,  When Planck was 85, an Allied bomb fell on his house and he lost everything -- papers and diaries.  The following year, his surviving son was caught in a conspiracy to assassinate Hilter and was executed.

"Snake eyes Mr. E"  Martin Baker

When I was a freshman at Rutgers University there was one student in our dorm who we all envied. He was one of the few that scored that most covetous of prizes -- a single. A room without a room mate. He also was majoring in physics with a concentration in quantum mechanics. He had a complete nervous breakdown. Some say it was the single room. I say it was quantum mechanics.

The word "mechanics" bestows upon it a kind of industrial revolution, wrench-in-hand kind of discipline. But add the word quantum and suddenly you are transported into an Alice In Wonderland World -- where you have to leave your assumptions, logic and some sanity behind. What follows is an attempt to simplify the process of understanding it.

Gary Zukav had done a masterful job of describing what is called the "new physics" in his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters. A "quantum" is a quantity of something -- a specific amount. Mechanics is the study of motion. Simple addition tells us that the result is that quantum mechanics is the study of the motion of quantities But these aren't your father's quantities. These are quantities on the sub atomic level.

Sub Atomic Level?

Words like Sub Atomic begin to feel like a bad sci-fi movie from the 1950's. It's also the point where most students eyes glaze over. The smallest object we can see, even under a high powered microscope contains millions of atoms. For example, to see the atoms in a baseball, you would have to make the baseball the size of the Earth. And if our baseball were the size of Earth, its atoms would be the size of table grapes.

Okay, now we are going to take an even closer look. The tiny particles that make up those atoms exist on the sub-atomic level. It would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of our grape. As Zukav says "to see the nucleus of an atom, the atom would have to be as high as a 14-story building. The nucleus of an atom as high as a 14-story building would be about the size of a grain of salt."

Eyes glazing yet? Let me try another analogy. A few years ago, I was able to climb Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican to the top. (Very small stairs). The top has a diameter of about 14 stories. Imagine a grain of salt in the middle of that great dome -- that gives us the scale of sub atomic particles.

Newton -- the Apple Guy

Issac Newton was (and is) the superstar of classical physics. Among his discoveries are the three laws of motion that describe the way all kinds of objects interact when they collide with each other in the everyday world. The key to understanding quantum mechanics (or at least developing an appreciation of it) is knowing why Newton's ideas do not apply to the sub atomic world. In other words, 'your money is no good here."

Maxwell -- the Electromagnetic Guy

In the early 1800's most physicists believed the Newton had hit the equivalent of a grand slam -- that he had described how the physical universe worked. But in 1864 (America was a bit distracted by the Civil War) , a Scottish Physicist named James Clerk Maxwell discovered something new. He revealed the laws controlling the behavior of light and other electromagnetic phenomena.  

 BakerMuse Bonus

Electromagnetic Spectrum seems like a word out of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory.  But it's actually an interesting concept.  Visible light makes up only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The rest is waves we can't see -- gamma, X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, microwave (yes, the popcorn kind) and radio waves."  Some waves are short gamma or ultraviolet and some are large like microwave and radio. Check it out.

If we add the ideas of Newton and Maxwell we have the dream team. But there was one little problem. 

Those wonderful laws of motion and electromagnetic and light behavior couldn't explain the nature of light radiated by "hot objects."  Okay, what's an hot object?  (ie: the Brad Pitt of physics?)

A hot object can best be described by what's called black body radiation.  Imagine for a moment, a large, hollow sphere with one tiny hole.  Any radiation that arrives at the whole goes through and is absorbed inside the activity.  Now imagine heating the sphere (ball) up until it glows first red hot, then white hot, then blue hot.  The radiation that comes back out of the whole is called pure black body or cavity radiation.  

Hopefully, I haven't lost you.  Only a few sentences left.  Because color of light is related to it's wavelength, it means that the intensity of the radiation emitted at each wavelength depends on the temperature of the object. ( For example, you can measure the temperature of the Sun (About 6,000 degrees Kelvin) simply from it's color (yellow/orange.)

But black body radiation didn't behave as expected.   And it took another physicist to solve the puzzle.   Next time,  I will talk about this man (it's not Einstein).  Is light a continuous wave or is it something more. Here's his photo.  Hint.  He won the Nobel prize.