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"The Impossible Has a Way of Passing Unnoticed": Reading Science in Fiction

Rebecca Goldstein’s novel Properties of Light, inspired by (but not really “based on”) the life of physicist David Bohm, tells the poignant story of Samuel Mallach, a scientist “of even more than singular promise” (15), who has developed (as Bohm did) a “deterministic model for quantum mechanics” (“Afterword” n.p.). Mallach’s theories, “deemed to be impossible by nearly all who were given to thinking about these matters” (16), threaten the status quo. As a result, he has been marginalized (as Bohm was) by the scientific community in which he works. Many years later, a young physicist named Justin Childs finds himself in the same institution as Mallach, now reduced to teaching “Physics for Poets” while his rival, Dietrich Spencer, gets all the glory (including a Nobel Prize). Justin, antagonistic to the “quantum occult” (45) championed by Bohr and his followers, tries to revive and refine Mallach’s insights, so long ignored that Mallach himself has forgotten them—and, in the process, he meets and falls in love with Mallach’s daughter Dana. The triangle of Mallach, Justin, and Dana, with its complex intellectual and erotic components, swirls the characters into dark and terrible, but simultaneously beautiful, places. It’s an emotionally gripping and intellectually stimulating novel; but even more than that, Properties of Light stands out because it has a special flavor (using the word “flavor” in its ice-cream, not its physics, sense)—a flavor as strange and paradoxical as the sensations of “icy flames” and “frozen fire” that appear in the novel (77, 79). In fact, it is unlike that of any other novel I know. It’s not easy to describe. But readers and critics have addressed it in a roundabout way, noting the novel’s “stimulated