NOAH #3
He threw his head over his shoulder to face me and shared the most blissful smile you ever did see.
“Hit me. Feynman something.” He plopped his ass back into my desk chair and I decided to take the spare, wooden chair from the corner, then sit next to him.
Normally, it was the other way around, but I had a sense that everything would be a battle with Sawyer, so I preserved my energy.
“Richard Feynman was a physicist in the quantum and particle field. He won a Nobel prize for the diagram he had made that depicted particle processes.”
“Careful, there. You’re losing me.” Sawyer said that with such casual disregard for everything I held dear that it warranted an eye-roll.
“Anyway, he is also famous for the particular way he learned pretty much anything he wanted. Take the material you want to learn. Say, this chapter in your textbook.” I lifted the textbook for Physics 101 and opened one of the early chapters.
“Where’d you get that?” Sawyer asked.
“The library. After you ran away.” I put my finger at the top of the chapter and traced all the way through the first page, then flipped it to the second and third. It was explaining the most basic laws of nature. “Read through it. Twice if you have to.”
“Oh, buddy, I read it ten times already,” Sawyer said. “All of it.”
“Good. Then, you should be able to take a piece of paper and explain it as if you’re teaching a sixth grader,” I said.
“And as you try to do that, identify the things you don’t know or understand.
Then, go back to the material and read those specific parts.
Take a book on them and find explanations.
Look for references in the back which might point you to the right book.
And when you fill one knowledge gap, identify another.
Do this over and over until you understand the whole chapter and are able to teach a child. Rinse and repeat.”
He watched me and hesitated. “Is…that it?”
I shrugged. “That’s how you’ll do it with me.” I was soft spoken on that part and looked at him until something clicked in his eyes.
“Alrighty. Where do we start?” he asked.
“Right here. The basic forces that govern our world. Gravity, which governs the attraction between masses and keeps planets in orbit as well as you in that chair. It keeps the universe together. Electromagnetism, which is basically the interaction between electrically charged particles. And weak and strong nuclear forces. The weak one is part of radioactive decay and it won’t be on the test. The strong one, basically, keeps all of the matter stable because it binds protons and neutrons together.
” I frowned at him because his eyes were glazed while I was talking about the entire universe in the simplest terms I could find.
“Not to brag, but I’ve heard of gravity,” Sawyer said.
“That would be sarcasm,” I decided.
“Correct.” He sighed. “You’re losing me with all the electrically charged particle nonsense.”
I scratched my head and tried harder. “Imagine balls.”
“Now we’re talking.” His evil smirk was horrible.
“I’ve changed my mind. You’re not a child.
You’re a teenage boy. Particles aren’t really balls, but we draw them that way because it helps us imagine them.
It’s ironic in a way. We are made of this.
We are particles that got together and decided to figure out what particles are. ” I waited for a chuckle.
I received an ogle and a quiver of his eyebrows. “Your sense of irony is precious.”
“Right. Balls. Imagine them. They are charged with electricity. Okay? Okay. And electricity makes them attract or repel one another, depending on how these balls are charged. Positive or negative. If they are the same, they repel each other. If they are opposites, they attract each other.”
“That sounds about right. Put that lesson down into your book, too,” Sawyer said with a coy smile.
I was well aware that I was attracted to my opposites.
I had always been the best of friends with other clever cogs.
But I had always had a thing for mean athletes who thought running the fastest was going to change the world somehow.
“That’s basically what electric force does.
And the magnetic force is the product of the motion of these charged particles.
A fridge magnet and your fridge are charged differently and they slam together. ”
Sawyer leaned back in my chair and watched me, his butt practically hanging off the edge and his legs spread in a way that gave me unholy ideas. He tilted his head. “Got it.”
“Good. Now, let’s try to understand all of the universe and a single atom at once,” I said, rubbing my hands.
Sawyer pretended to faint and slid off the chair until gravity won once again and his ass slammed against the carpet.
It dragged a near smile from me, but I managed to wipe it away before he opened his eyes.
I observed him coldly and waited for him to get serious and back in my chair before we proceeded.
For an hour, I was lost in my world and I talked without a break while Sawyer asked questions and told me to slow down and, most often, found a way to make physics all about smashing butts together.
I wasn’t going to show that I appreciated the creative way of looking at things.
But by the end of the first session, I wasn’t as reluctant to schedule the second one.