Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            “Cece, I can’t read anything that’s one millimeter from my nose.”

            “Here.” She drops the phone in my palm and goes back to the tartiflette. I let my eyes focus on the words and—

            The floor wobbles. Jerks. Then it drops from underneath my feet.

            On the home page of the journal that published Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, there is an open letter written by Jonathan Smith-Turner.

            An open letter addressed to the scientific community.

            I take a few steps back, stopping when my thighs hit the table. The words on the screen feel like something Jack is murmuring in my ears.

                             The last time I published in Annals of Theoretical Physics, I was seventeen years old, and motivated by something that had nothing to do with science: revenge.

                My mother, Grethe Turner, has long since passed away, but she was a brilliant theoretical physicist. When I was in my mid-teens I started developing an affinity for physics myself, and as a consequence I read her diaries and reached out to her former colleagues, hoping to get a better idea of what a career in physics might entail. That is how I discovered her awful experiences with her former mentor, who had forced her to leave academia.

                That man was Christophe Laurendeau, and at the time he was the editor in chief of Annals. When I tried to report him for what he’d done to my mother, I was told that there were no grounds to open an investigation. So I took matters into my own hands.

                I knew what kind of article Dr. Laurendeau would look upon favorably, and I knew from the grapevine that he was infamous for being lax when it came to the peer review of works that he believed would further his own scientific agenda. So I wrote something that would fit those criteria. Again: my aim was to sabotage Laurendeau’s career, and as unethical as that may sound, it’s something I stand by. He did suffer setbacks, and for several years he was unable to receive funding or mentor students—an outcome I cannot regret.

                But that’s not all that happened. After I exploited one specific weakness within one specific journal to target one specific individual, the scientific community began to use my article as an example of the decline of theoretical physics. And what I regret is that as it happened, I stayed silent.

                For over fifteen years I did nothing to dispel the idea that I believed theoretical physics to be inferior. I became a symbol of the enmity between theoretical and experimental physics, and of that, I am ashamed. I am ashamed of how it must have made my theorist colleagues feel, and I am ashamed that I did not quell these assumptions for over a decade. Above all, I am ashamed that I put a person I deeply respect in the position of having to explain to me the consequences of my own actions because I was too proud, too angry, and too self-centered to realize them.

                So let me send a message to anyone who still cites my article as a weapon in some petty war within our discipline: don’t. I never believed that theoretical physics was less rigorous, or less important a field than experimental physics. And if you do believe that, you are mistaken, and you should read some of the most meaningful theory work of the past few decades. I am citing several below . . .



            “Oh my God.” My hands are trembling. My legs, too. And the floor, I’m pretty sure. “Oh my God.”

            “Yup.” I look up. I’d forgotten Cece existed. I’d forgotten to breathe. I’d forgotten the rest of the world was a thing. “That’s, like, the science equivalent of proposing with a flash mob.”

            “No.” I shake my head forcefully enough to scroll out everything that’s inside it. Mashed potatoes, probably. “He’s not proposing. He’s just . . .” I crumple in a chair.

            “Finally reckoning with his decades-long evil legacy because he wants you to be his girlfriend who sends him cute little heart emojis and sixty-nines with him every other day?”

            I shake my head again. The truth is, it feels like it. Like the letter is addressed to me. “No—he—he doesn’t—”

            “He does. He has that look. I can just tell he’s into all sorts of filthy stuff.” She grins. “Anyway, just from reading this, Madame Person He Deeply Respects, it doesn’t feel like you two are going nowhere.”

            My mind is tottering in circles. No. Yes. “It’s complicated.”