Dr. Surly meets Ophelia

 

‘Round about the mid nineteen-sixties, I spent time in a 100-seat lecture theatre along with about seventy-five fellow undergrads who’d chosen Physics 101 as an Arts degree elective. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but I’ll call him Doctor Surly; his greeting to us was, “Good morning. I’m thinking you probably don’t want to be here, and I know I don’t. So let’s just get it over with.” (Note how he used a preposition to end his sentence with.)

He was mostly right, of course. Taking a science elective was mandatory.

I have never been a nerd, except that my relative success in the humanities in high school probably branded me that in the mouths of what we now call the STEM people (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Experience had taught me that an orange rolling off the table will end up on the floor, not on the ceiling, but under the cold, dry pronouncement of Dr. Surly, I suddenly became enamoured with the possibility that certain speeds of falling (including terminal velocity) could be calculated mathematically as could the strength of gravitational attraction in relation to material size. (My heights-and-falling-phobia may have been implicated here.)

My days of wondering why, “if an orange in Canada falls down, why doesn’t an orange in China fall … well, up?” were over. Perhaps the attraction came from thinking that Hamlet learning of his mother’s unfaithfulness would inevitably lead to his estrangement from Ophelia. Gravity (in both its definitions) would become integral to plot developments studied in Can. Lit. 101 as well as in Dr. Surly’s half-hearted curriculum.

Physics, the study of the behaviour of things physical. Although behaviour seems the wrong word, as if some choice is allowed an oxygen atom when it bumps into the hydrogen twins on the street and ponders whether or not to pursue forming a water molecule with them. (Sorry, Chemistry, but you’re just a thin branch of Physics in the end.) “Natural laws are immutable, indestructible, 100% predictable, all the time,” Dr. Surly would intone. “There never have been, are not now, and never will be miracles—if miracle means that the laws of nature can be thwarted.” With one wave of his chalk-wand, he turned seventy-five Sunday-schoolers into agnostics; all the water-walkers sank as one.

But, my slowly-awakening, undergraduate mind protested: “Human behaviour is not immutable, predictable. Estrangement doesn’t progress at a specific velocity, is not bound by a terminal speed either. Hamlet doesn’t have to drive Ophelia to suicide. Neither are the odds of a certain choice mathematically calculatable.”

Inadvertently, accidentally, Dr. Surly provided much to the education of the Humanities-bound students in that lecture theatre. For those who would enter careers in what was called, “English teaching,” the dichotomy posed by the material and the emotional would be foundational to everything from literary criticism; to logic; to story construction; to first learning, then transmitting the deepest essentials of human experience to malleable, youthful minds.

Oranges continue to fall earthward, both in Canada and China. And  Ophelia will continue to drown herself in front of high school students annually … and predictably, and her friend Laertes will make that silly comment: “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,/And therefore I forbid my tears … (Hamlet: IV, vii)

And in classrooms everywhere, a young man will fall asleep on his palms, elbows on his desk, but will produce a startling, lecture-stopping bang when his head-prop slips and gravity smashes his acned face into Hamlet: IV, vii.

Isn’t Physics wonderful? Thank you, Dr. Surly.