Transience

On Saturday, I had lunch with my uncle and two of his friends at Cafe Clem, a French place. It was a pleasant affair, with my uncle and his friends reminiscing about the memories they had of the time they were in Berkeley and the changes that had taken place since then. One of the two was PC, a Malaccan who had gone to MIT for his undergraduate studies and had met my uncle during their time as graduate students in Berkeley while the other was Ken, the graduate student who had mentored my uncle while he was writing his thesis and had stayed on to be a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). And yes, they did speak to me as well, but thats perhaps the less interesting part of that afternoon.

There was an air of transience about that day, with much talk of people who had passed away and of people who had moved on with life. And though the afternoon started off with PC teasing me, "What? You didn't get a 4.0 in your first semester? Die ar..now cannot ever get a CGPA of 4.0 dy", the main message the three of them had for me was condensed in my uncle's words - "Take life slow and easy. This is a race you dont want to win - because the finish line is death."

Later, Ken brought my uncle and I up to the LBL, both to show me around and to bring my uncle to his former workplace. The cyclotron that my uncle had used to irradiate brain patients' heads was gone but the entire complex was ginormous. I stepped through the old doors into the building dealing with the "Advanced Light Source" and came to this happy happy place with blinking lights and great numbers of machines. I didn't take photos - because yeah, its not good for a Malaysian to photograph the insides of an American national laboratory. But take my word for it, it was a happy happy place. And throughout the tour, past the areas with the radiation alerts, the great arrays of computing power and even the places where the roof leaked, my uncle kept repeating to me, "Look at all of this. This is good science."

I did. And it is good.

"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity." - Einstein