Finding comfort in physics

A friend posted to Facebook the text from an NPR commentary I'd never heard. Aaron Freeman wrote about having a physicist speak at your funeral, comforting your family with the knowledge we have about the conservation of energy. It echoes the beliefs I've found reassuring in the past, and makes room for the experiences I've had in the past ten months.

Today has been hard. Weather changes brought sinus pressure and low energy, but mostly I felt burdened by despair, fully aware that it was ten months ago tonight that I watched Sandy take her last breath.

I haven't read Facebook in a while, but on a whim, I checked it tonight, and there was this essay that I found incredibly soothing. The full thing is on the NPR website at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4675953.

Here are the parts I particularly liked, as I sobbed my way through the whole thing (emphasis mine):

I don't know that Sandy ever would have
called herself orderly, exactly. And her
hair is most unfortunate in this photo.
But she was proud of her tomato plant
on the deck. I'd already planted all the
ones I'd started from seed that year, and
she wanted to try another variety, to have
a tomato plant that was her responsibility.
As I recall, it was a great success— and
the fruit visible in this photo proves it.
This post didn't inspire me to include this
photo; it was seeing a picture of Laura's
newly planted tomatoes, and tending the
plants I've started this year that led to it.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.

           - Aaron Freeman