astrophysicists are sad girls
A review-ish of Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
I’m always reading multiple books at once, but rarely does one inform the other as well as Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Etter cites Hawking’s research as a reference for her own novel in which the main character, Cassie, lives with a miniature black hole that follows her around like a loyal puppy, shrinking and swelling depending on her mental state.
“Doesn’t it overwhelm you sometimes? To be alive? Don’t you sometimes feel like at any moment you could be torn away from yourself? From your life?” -Ripe
Ripe slots in perfectly with the other sad girl novels of its generation, which is defined particularly by collective millennial ennui. We’re all sad girls, but we’ve mistaken that label as a deep, personal idiosyncrasy and spiral like the Milky Way Galaxy when it’s suggested that we’re not unique. Being sad becomes an entire personality. The protagonists of sad girl novels — bitter, immobilized but comforted by their mental illnesses, often privileged — embody this better than anyone.
Cassie is one of the more relatable sad girls out there, if I’m being honest about the sad-girl parts of myself I hate most. She is self-aware enough for a moral compass (whether she listens to it is a different story), to know she has made choices in her life that have led her to the brink of breakdown, but her sadness swallows any ability she has to take action. As readers, we are progressing further and further toward the inescapable event horizon of the black hole that is Cassie’s pain, yes, but also the post-capitalistic hellscape we live in.
Ripe portrays the toxic tech culture of Silicon Valley (and her company is conveniently named VOYAGER) against a backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying, often bleak San Francisco. Cassie’s awareness of the juxtaposition of power and helplessness brings her almost to the point of accountability and enlightenment, and that sets this novel apart in the sad girl lit genre — many of Cassie’s literary counterparts live in much more delusion.
But what I was most interested in wasn’t Cassie’s sadness specifically — we’ve seen it so many times that it’s frankly unoriginal at this point — but the way in which it manifested as a bespoke personal black hole, which Etter took great care to write with respect to astrophysics and what we know about black holes, other than, ya know, the fact that this particular one exists within the Earth’s atmosphere and is visible to only one person.
I too am obsessed with black holes and theoretical physics, and it’s conveniently been my latest science hyper-fixation (the one immediately prior to this one was dinosaurs). I just happened to attempt a re-read of A Brief History of Time as I was starting Ripe, 11 years after I bought the book because I thought I’d be cool and look cool if I read it, despite never taking a physics class in my life — a fact I am still ashamed of because I come from a family of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers. I barely made a dent in the book before I gave up.
One of the most enjoyable and unexpected parts of aging is how much knowledge opens up to you and how much more you understand things passively; I am not better at math now, I still haven’t ever taken a physics class, but A Brief History of Time made sense this time. Some of it is still too dense and too mathematical for normal people like me, but it’s written in a way that you don’t need to understand the math to understand the concepts.
Stephen Hawking is known for his work with black holes (among many other things), but when A Brief History of Time was published in the late 80s, black holes were much more conceptual than they are today. Such is the world of science; what is groundbreaking and awe-inspiring for one generation is taken for granted as common knowledge by the next. Hawking updated A Brief History of Time to reflect new research ten years later, in the late 90s, but even since then, we’ve discovered so much more about black holes; scientists have even photographed one, and of course, we’ve been blessed with the movie Interstellar, the most accurate depiction of a black hole yet.
An absolutely wild thing about physics is that what it’s revealed to us and that we now hold as universal truths could be disproven at any time. What’s certain is our uncertainty, even down to our understanding of the laws of the universe: Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which was published in 1915 and is still how we make sense of space, time, and gravity, doesn’t actually work with quantum mechanics, which is how we make sense of the universe on an atomic and subatomic level.
General relativity states that time is, obviously, relative; it is dynamic and it is not absolute. Quantum mechanics states the opposite, that time is absolute, because it’s viewed as a quantifiable external parameter instead of the parameter. But it isn’t that one of these theories is wrong.
Both general relativity and quantum mechanics appear to be true and are absolutely critical to modern science. They hold up in every experiment and haven’t been disproven yet — except by each other. They cannot work together, at least not in any way humans have been able to decipher yet, though Hawking dedicates a great deal of space in A Brief History of Time to remaining hopeful for a unified theory, which Einstein could never solve either.
Anything we’re ultimately unsure about is ripe (sorry) for generous creative liberties and artistic interpretation. There really is something poetic about physics and what it has revealed to us about the universe and our place in it as tiny specks. The law of conservation of mass tells us that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only rearranged. We have always been here and we will always be here. As Carl Sagan famously waxed poetic, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
I can’t really blame Etter for her pet black hole, then. After all, Christoper Nolan took advantage of what we don’t know to create Interstellar, and we all called him a genius for it. But where Ripe began to exhaust me wasn’t the loose interpretation of black holes (and ignoring the setting, it wasn’t inaccurate) but the related metaphors.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to lean on easy metaphors in a novel about women vs. the void because the language we use to describe both is similar: “I can feel the earth rotating beneath my body, and all the galaxies above me revolving, colliding, combing stars and dust, dark matter emerging.” Rotate, galaxy, revolve, collide, stars, dust, dark, emerge. The sad girls and the physicists share a dictionary.
Ripe is about the gravitational pull of a metaphorical black hole, though it’s made both literal and alluring here, which is something like a descent into hell, Persephone plunging into the dark unknown with Hades after eating a pomegranate. There’s rot in the underbelly of society that this novel wants to expose, ripe flesh hanging on the vine too long, begging to be picked.
A bloody, pulpy fruit splitting open is a fitting metaphor for an unraveling, though it’s also not particularly original and I sometimes struggled to find its natural intersection with the cosmos metaphors. Both are so conspicuous, which would almost feel empty and devoid of meaning if it weren’t so damn relatable, if sadness weren’t a black hole whose gravitational pull I’ve spent a lifetime rotating around, if my heart did not feel like a split-open pomegranate whenever I think too much about all of this.
“There is safety in metaphors. The truth is far more terrifying: Black holes are confrontations with the collapse of space and time. They are a reckoning with both the infinite and death, two forces that always hover above me, never letting me out of their sight.” -Ripe
I don’t know whether Stephen Hawking felt so deeply in his time, if he thought in metaphors too. A Brief History of Time isn’t a sad girl novel. But I don’t know how any physicist who studies the universe, asks questions of its vastness and our quiet but miraculous existence — “The world is distant and at the same time right on top of me, on top of us, its knife at our throats” — isn’t at least a little sad in that way that looking at the great expanse of life and all that we’ll never know will break your heart a little. Maybe they’d be able to find themselves in sad girl novels too.
To end on a fun fact: If a human were to enter a black hole, the gravitational pull at one end of their body would be so great that they’d be stretched extremely thin, and because science is so unserious sometimes, this process is called spaghettification. If a human entered a supermassive black hole, however, they’d likely survive — though they would be lost forever as quite literally nothing can escape beyond the event horizon.
A disclaimer: I am not a scientist, I have a very limited working knowledge of physics that is fed solely by curiosity and insomnia, and if I got any of the specifics wrong, I’m very sorry to the smart people whose lives have been dedicated to solving the mysteries of the universe only for dumb people like me to go and contaminate it like this..
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You rock girlie