[Goldsmiths Press; 2024]
Pippa Goldschmidt’s new short story collection, Schrödinger’s Wife (And Other Possibilities), uses the imaginative tools of speculative fiction to challenge how we talk about science and its history. Not quite “science fiction” as we usually think of it, her stories are instead fictionalized accounts of scientific facts and true stories, illuminated with the texture of quotidian experience. Set in a dizzying variety of times and places, Goldschmidt turns abstruse theories into metaphors of interpersonal relation, uncovering the hidden labor of scientific research and recovering the technical language of physics for humanistic consideration.
For example, you’ve probably heard of Schrödinger’s cat but have may never have heard about his wife Anny before. To review the principle behind Schrödinger’s cat: This feline thought experiment was the Austrian physicist’s attempt to visualize one of the more counterintuitive results of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics suggests that physical events are never independent of observation: It was the act of looking inside the box that decided the cat’s fate. This meant that the very act of measuring something in the laboratory changed it fundamentally. For many scientists, this was a troubling vision of reality: Rather than a world of certainty, they were suddenly faced with a world of probabilities and paradoxes. In his famous thought experiment, Schrödinger put a hypothetical cat in a rather dangerous situation, trapped inside a box with a flask of poison that would be released by a subatomic event that may—or may not—occur. It all depends on quantum probabilities. Until we open the box to observe it, Schrödinger concluded, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive; the two states are superimposed upon each other. Although Schrödinger proposed this thought experiment to demonstrate the apparent absurdity of the quantum account of reality, in time scientists have increasingly come to see it as an accurate account of reality.
But while Schrödinger was holed up in his alpine sanatorium deriving the equations that would upend the discipline of physics, what was his neglected wife Anny doing? Was she cooped up at home waiting for him, dutifully maintaining the domestic space that supported the work of the great man? Or had she finally decided to leave her unfaithful and inattentive husband? Perhaps she had packed her bags, boarded a train, booked a hotel, and started to dream of a new life. Like Schrödinger’s famous cat, the precise whereabouts (and emotional state) of his wife are unknowable, at least until he came home to observe her. In the title story of Schrödinger’s Wife (and Other Possibilities), Goldschmidt inverts the typical narrative structure of science, transforming Anny from a historical footnote into an independent observer:
Nobody (and certainly not her husband) has ever observed Anny with the same degree of scrutiny with which she has repeatedly eyed herself in the mirror and thought, “unruly hair, thin lips, big nose, sparse eyelashes.”
Schrödinger’s consistent pattern of sexual impropriety has certainly been observed by historians; it was an open secret even in his own time. Time and time again, he formed troubling relationships with young girls, sometimes as young as twelve. The canonical biography of Schrödinger tends to gloss over these details euphemistically, but Goldschmidt imagines that Anny did not.
Yes, there is a problem with terminology, decides Anny. We persist in calling an entity x, when in fact it might be something quite different, but we’re just not equipped to understand it, not yet. What is labeled a “friendship” between an older man and a young girl is nothing of the sort, might be better termed “unhealthy obsession” or “abuse.”
Goldschmidt does not flinch from Schrödinger’s pattern of abuse. Compare this with the fictionalized account of Schrödinger in Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. Labatut presents Schrödinger’s relationship with an underage girl as part of his beautiful scientific madness, as almost necessary for his heroic creation of a new branch of physics. Labatut never pauses to wonder what Schrödinger’s mathematical or sexual obsessions might have looked like to Anny. Eschewing the lyricism of Labatut’s novel, Goldschmidt’s prose mimics the objectivity of scientific language to make visible a hidden history of violence. With the same subject matter, Goldschmidt presents her readers with a radically different account of science and its context, highlighting the web of relations that make possible moments of scientific discovery.
Although she trained as an astronomer, Pippa Goldschmidt now works as a writer and science communicator, having built up a fascinating body of fiction and nonfiction writing over the past decade. In addition to Schrödinger’s Wife, she is also publishing a book in German that details her return to her German-Jewish grandfather’s former homeland. Befitting her astronomy training, many of her previous fiction and nonfiction works focus on humanity’s relation to outer space. Her first novel, The Falling Sky, follows a young astronomer into the intricacies of cosmological theory, while Night Vision focuses on human space exploration. Several stories from her new collection continue this theme, highlighting the tension between capitalist funding and scientific curiosity that characterizes modern space exploration. In “Safety Maneuvers,” Eva, a technician working on a privately funded Mars Rover named Ariel, is harried constantly by board members eager to plunder Mars for its resources:
Eva wishes the analysts would learn from Ariel. The rover is capable of assessing its own situation, and will run through a pre-programmed series of movements designed to free itself from the most common sorts of hindrances. If this doesn’t work it will quietly wait to be told what to do. It will not phone her up and demand that she detonate one of the mini explosives in its wheels, an act of last resort that would severely impact its future ability to move. It will not email her boss and complain about her. It will not draw her attention to the endless requirements to produce good news stories about it to appease its investors.
Goldschmidt satirizes the uncomfortable alliance between science and capital, drawing readers into witty explorations of the human labor propping up glittering Mars missions. The investors are dependent upon Eva’s embodied understanding of the rover; scientists are dependent on the investors for important scientific data; Eva depends on their goodwill to pay her bills. Borrowing the short, declarative sentences of a technical manual in these passages, Goldschmidt destabilizes what counts as an engineering problem and what counts as a personal or political problem. Other stories borrow more directly from scientific prose styles, including a short story told entirely through the footnotes of a scientific article. In one of the most captivating stories—based on real-life events—she narrates the fall of the Berlin Wall from the icy obscurity of Antarctica. Through a fictional “log book,” we follow the first all-women research team from West Germany arrived in Antarctica in 1989, looking forward to their year of isolation:
Now was our time, the moment when we realized we were a community of nine women several hundred kilometers from all the other national bases. We were the most remote group of women in the world and as we stood on the packed ice runway listening to the blessed silence, we realized we wouldn’t have to meet any men for over a year, that we wouldn’t have to go through the tiresome processes of dissembling, of persuading, of pretending.
But even in Antarctica, both politics and patriarchy managed to creep into their daily lives. The shocking collapse of East Germany disrupted their previous communication patterns, and they slowly made contact with the East German male researcher, tutoring them on what life would be like in the capitalist West:
“No, but we can tell them about the process, the sort of language you have to be fluent in to convince people you’ve got ‘potential’ and ‘leadership qualities,’ that sort of management-speak nonsense. They won’t have heard anything like that.” . . . “Tell them that when you fail in the West, you’re taught to blame yourself. That you internalize the system, until you’re not sure where the system ends and you start.”
The emotional heart of the collection, though, is the plight of female intellectuals during the Second World War. The book’s opening story, “Alternative Geometries,” weaves together the stories of groundbreaking Austrian-Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, Einstein’s neglected wife Mileva Marić, the Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, and Goldschmidt’s Austrian-Jewish grandmother into an acute portrait of disempowerment and displacement. “A Distant Relative of the Samsa Family,” based on another true story, recalls how Jews in Poland were protected from the Nazi regime by taking part in a scientific study. Shot through with Kafkaesque metaphors of metamorphosis, in this story a young girl protects herself from forced marriage and German aggression by transforming herself into a scientific research subject:
When Galia Schmule awakes one morning after a night of uneasy dreams, she finds herself altered. Her bed in the corner of her childhood bedroom looks the same, the bedspread with its cheerful printed fabric of apples and cherries is tucked around her, she can reach out and touch the nearby stove, still warm from its overnight fuel, the tiles smooth beneath her hands, the sunlight is in the right place on the rug, but everything has—overnight—utterly changed. . . . Soon she will be wearing a metal ring on one of them, like a ring through the nose of a farmyard animal.
To escape her fate, Galia transforms herself instead into “some sort of unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice”—by being infected with lice for vaccine development.
These stories offer counternarratives to “great man” histories of science like the recent blockbuster film Oppenheimer, which presented the development of atomic weapons through the achievement of a few great men. Not mentioned in Oppenheimer, of course, is the work of Lise Meitner, the woman who first characterized uranium fission. While her research partner Otto Hahn was awarded a Nobel Prize, Meitner was passed over. Goldschmidt’s account of Meiter’s forced migration across Europe is crafted with tender detail, holding the spotlight on a woman so often overshadowed by figures like Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Schrödinger. Although Goldschmidt is clearly fascinated by the unappreciated women of science, she also offers glimpses of the (often female) domestic work that makes scientific research possible. Office cleaners, waitresses, telegraph operators, and wives take up just as much space in Goldschmidt’s stories as trained scientists. Many of the stories mimic the conventions of scientific writing, but she never loses sight of the humanity of her characters. Instead, her precise and technical prose works reflexively to interrogate the violence and erasures of mainstream science. Taken collectively, this engrossing collection creates a mosaic of situated perspectives on science that is surely more than the sum of its parts.
Libby O’Neil is a writer and historian currently living in New Haven. She is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Yale University, where she writes about the history of systems theory and scientific emigration.
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