by Mike Kimera
(04/02/03)

The podium should have dwarfed the slight young woman standing beside it, but she was too full of energy and excitement for that. Angela's personality grabbed the lecture hall and said "Hey! Listen up. This is gonna be fun." Perched in the highest row of the auditorium, professor Sheila Redmond whispered to her husband, "She really is a remarkable young woman, Anthony."

Anthony Redmond looked sideways at his wife, at the intensity of her gaze and the affection in her voice. Anthony knew a remarkable woman when he saw one.

"Welcome to Physics 101. Today we're going to examine Newton's laws of motion," Angela announced to the auditorium. "I know, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. But this time I want you to think about what it means, not just what it says."

Sheila saw frowns on some of the earnest young faces below her. Two rows down, one boy said, "What's to think about? Newton's been dead for hundreds of years. This stuff's like, old."

"There we have it folks, the Beavis-and-Butthead approach to science," Angela said affectionately, pointing at the boy but spreading her gaze across the room. "'Hey dude, what new ideas do you have?' We leave novelty to the engineers."

Angela waited for the laughter to die down. "Science is about discovering what has always been true but has not always been known. Each discovery gives a new context to old truths -- but the truths are no less true for all that."

Sheila watched the reaction of the crowd. Angela's words struck a chord, but most students were carried forward simply by the strength of her smile. Sheila found herself smiling too: she knew from personal experience that Angela could make old things feel new. In the weeks since she and Angela had become lovers she had felt rejuvenated, more like her true self.

"As you know, the First Law states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest, and that a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. This is also known as the law of inertia. Great. Looks cool on a T-shirt. 'Newton says we get stuck in a rut unless we meet something unbalanced.' But what does it mean for you and me?"

Sheila knew what it meant for her. She had been at rest in her marriage, floating in calm waters with good fishing until she'd met Angela. She took her husband's large, warm hand in her own while she watched Angela steer the class. The contact, the strength of his grasp, warmed her. Maybe she hadn't been completely at rest, just at a point where she had passed the rapids of courtship and child rearing and was flowing slowly towards the sea. According to Newton she should have continued this gentle drift, and probably she would have, if it hadn't been for an unbalanced force called Angela.

When Sheila was a student there were no female professors of physics. Physics was a man's universe. She had loved that universe but not the men in it. Even as an undergraduate, it had seemed to her that many of her peers were driven by a twisted passion; they went at the universe like it was a can of their favourite food and science was their can-opener. Sheila had always felt the universe as a dance; she could feel its beat in her blood. Science was a means of learning the steps. Her approach had been odd then, but was irritatingly fashionable now.

Sheila had grown used to being odd, assuming it to be an unalterable attribute like the colour of her eyes, until she met Anthony. She had decided on impulse to learn the tango, and not wanting to make a fool of herself, had opted for one-to-one lessons. Anthony was her tutor. He was tall and beautiful and knew how to lead. In his arms she felt safe and excited, as if many things were possible and all of them were good.

The first lesson should have lasted an hour. Three hours later they were still dancing. The transition from dancing to lovemaking was so gradual and so inevitable that later Sheila was unable to say exactly when it had happened. Anthony maintained that he had started to make love to her from the moment that their eyes met, that only the form of their lovemaking had changed.

For forty-eight hours they couldn't bear to be parted. They danced and ate and made love and in between used words to confirm things that their bodies already knew.

He told her of falling in love with the tango while backpacking in Argentina. She told him that particle physics was the whale-song of the universe. She confessed her alienation from her colleagues, saying she felt like a fish out of water. Anthony had laughed, "But you are not a fish -- and that is the problem! You are a dolphin swimming with sharks and feeling odd because you have the urge to leap into the sunlight and they do not." She knew then that he was the man she would spend the rest of her life with.

When her mother asked her why she had married a man who knew no physics and had barely any math, Sheila had said, as if stating the obvious, "Any man can be taught physics. Anthony knows how to dance."

Stealing a glance at Anthony sitting beside her in the lecture theatre, she smiled to think that physics had seduced him just as the tango had seduced her. He was listening to Angela's lecture not just with attention but with enjoyment. He was a remarkable man; in fact he was the most remarkable person she had ever met...until Angela. She squeezed Anthony's hand and returned her attention to the lecture.

"Okay. You've been stuck in a rut, and you meet your unbalanced force. What happens according to the Second Law? Any volunteers?" Angela left the podium and paced the front of the auditorium, looking as if she was warming up the crowd at a rock concert. She stopped near a guy in the front row who was typing steadily on his laptop.

"You look like you're well enough connected to know Newton's Second Law," Angela said. "Wanna remind the rest of us?"

The guy blinked at her. "Newton's Second Law states that the speed and direction of movement is the outcome of the strength and vector of the force and the mass of the body being acted upon."

"I knew you were well read. A wireless connection to the Internet is a wonderful thing isn't it? So what does the Second Law mean?"

"It means that the less mass you have, or the more force there is, the faster you'll be moved in a particular direction."

"Good! Force versus mass plus direction." Angela emphasized her point by miming throwing a shot-put. Sheila wondered if she was the only one in the auditorium who was distracted by the movement of Angela's breasts during this demonstration.

She didn't think of herself as lesbian. She'd usually found women more attractive and often more interesting than men, but she'd never felt a sexual attraction. Her attraction now was not to women but to Angela. It was the force of Angela's love that had brought her to this point, in a direction set by Angela's desire and her own lack of mass.

Angela's desire had come as a surprise to Sheila.

They'd been working late on Angela's Ph.D. thesis. Sheila had been in the Zone, all of her attention focused on abstract thought. She'd stepped outside of space-time to become the conduit for math so beautiful it made her want to cry. There were few people who could keep pace with Sheila in the Zone. Angela not only kept pace, she became part of Sheila's creative process, a common consciousness.

When the breakthrough came, when they finally captured their thoughts in an equation that said everything, Angela had kissed her. It started as a celebration -- at least on Sheila's part -- but it soon became more; it became magic. Sheila wasn't lost in abstract thought any more; her attention was on heat and softness and the sensations that strummed through her body. Angela led and Sheila let her. The orgasm, when it came, left Sheila breathless, surprised, and grateful. It had felt like coming back to life.

Sitting in the lecture theatre, thinking back, Sheila wondered at why it had moved her so. She had an active sex life with Anthony. She wasn't starved of sex or love, and yet Angela had swept her away. What accounted for her lack of emotional mass? Perhaps, with her children gone and her life settled, she had fewer desires, fewer goals, fewer connections.

In the weeks that followed, Sheila had let Angela make love to her again and again. She never initiated, but never resisted. Now, Angela had announced that she wanted to spend the night with her and Sheila didn't know how to respond. Somehow, spending the night made things more concrete, more certain. It would collapse the probability wave she had lingered in and make her choose 1 or 0.

"Okay," Angela said. "Now my favourite law: Number Three. Repeat after me: 'For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.'"

Angela made the class repeat this three times. Some of them were laughing. Some looked bemused.

"So what was Isaac getting at with this one?" she asked.

A girl in the middle of the auditorium thrust up her hand as if she were still in school. Angela nodded at her and the girl said, "It means that everything balances. You can't touch without being touched."

"Yes!" Angela said, "that's exactly what it means. Every movement towards is also a movement away. All movement has a price."

Sheila shivered. Did moving forward with Angela mean moving away from Anthony? Was the universe going to make her pay a price for her lack of mass, her unresisting collision with this unbalanced force?

"She's good," Anthony said. "She reminds me of you."

Sometimes Sheila wondered if Anthony was telepathic. She was swept with a wave of affection for him that made her want to cry and smile.

She didn't want to leave Anthony -- and she wouldn't give up Angela. There was more to the universe than Newton could explain. The world is not always mechanical. Newton's laws break down at the extremes: when there is enough gravity to bend space-time or when things are small enough to be influenced by quantum events. Life is both a wave and a particle. Schrödinger's cat is neither alive nor dead until you open the box.

It was time, she decided, to step outside the vectors and balanced forces of Newtonian mechanics and ride the probability waves of the new physics. God may not play dice but that doesn't mean we have to follow his example.

The lecture was over, the class was emptying out. Angela was smiling up at her, waiting for her approval.

Sheila took her husband by the hand and smiled at him. "Come with me," she said.

It was time for her lovers to meet.

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