C P Snow’s lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959) argued that the perceived divide between scientists and literary scholars is narrower than commonly believed. They both fundamentally seek to understand and express the relationships that structure reality – whether human relationships in literature, or physical relationships in science.

In 1961, on the heels of that lecture, a children’s book came out – The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, a funny, punny allegorical fantasy that made the same argument but in a way that captivated readers well into the 1990s, when I first encountered this story: Milo, a boy already besieged by adult-like ennui and existential despair, takes on the quest to bring back the princesses Rhyme and Reason, reuniting them with their two quarrelsome brothers: King Azaz the Unabridged, Ruler of Dictionopolis, and the Mathemagician, Ruler of Digitopolis.

King Azaz claims that words are superior to numbers; the Mathemagician insists the reverse. In the end, the brothers reconcile and rebuild the City of Wisdom with the help of Rhyme and Reason, and Milo returns to his own world with renewed curiosity for words and numbers. By age 13, I’d already been convinced of the value of interdisciplinarity.

Eventually, I would learn that stories are not just a way of communicating science; they are intrinsic to science, actually part of doing science. My own story of merging these Two Cultures – for me, literary writing and particle physics – was complicated by a Third Culture, religion. I grew up in Utah, in an era when Mormon women could have physics careers, technically, but following this path was difficult, lonely, and considered a threat to the traditional family model. We were encouraged to pursue education, not to prepare for competitive careers but for traditional roles as wives and mothers. This worldview, where a woman’s education is merely a safeguard if her husband can’t work, exemplifies what George W Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. It is a mindset that stifles ambition and curiosity. In fact, in my world, ambition in a woman signified pride, selfishness, sin.

Yet I loved my advanced high-school mathematics and physics classes. With friends, I won team competitions in physics and computer programming. As a teenager, I even interned for three summers with the Cosmic Ray Research Group at the University of Utah – the High Resolution Fly’s Eye collaboration that detected the Oh-My-God particle in 1991. This rare ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray – probably a proton – was an atomic shard travelling close to the speed of light, bombarding our detector with an absurd amount of energy. This event defied physics models and opened new questions about the limits of energy in the Universe, presenting a cosmic mystery story I wanted to pursue.

Despite my interest in cosmic rays, the Third Culture reigned supreme. The pressure to conform was invisible but visceral: during my first semester at Utah’s Brigham Young University (BYU) in 2002, led not by reason or rhyme but by a fear of angering God and my Church, I walked out of the introductory physics class – the only woman in attendance – and changed my major from astrophysics to English. Burying myself in stories and syntax, I felt sad about the physics but decided to make the most of my education before I married. BYU’s editing and linguistics courses were truly superb, and I learned to find patterns in natural language, and improve those patterns to benefit readers and increase the quality of communication. Editing, I thought, was something I could do from home with a family. Maybe I’d even dare to be a science editor.

Fast-forward 10 years, and that’s exactly what I was doing, while my toddler slept. I loved reading upper-level STEM textbooks as a freelance editor for Taylor & Francis; it was as physics-adjacent as I could manage. I could search the pattern of writing for errors while absorbing the patterns of mathematics and physics, even if I didn’t understand it perfectly.

But I wanted to, though the desire still felt dangerous. I started writing fiction and essays, and my frustrations seethed onto the page. As soon as my son woke up, however, I would focus on him. Like me, he had a natural affinity for both letters and numbers, and we spent hours laughing and learning together. His intense curiosity reignited my own.

In October 2012, still wrestling with deeply ingrained but self-limiting patterns of thought, I interviewed the psychologist LaNae Valentine, who directed the BYU Women’s Services and Resources Center. She told me that the counsellors for college women were explicitly instructed to use the word ‘education’ instead of ‘career’ – an omission reflected in the name of the centre itself. It grated on her, she said, but she complied.

In the midst of disaster, I came full circle, back to the beginning of my story

The explicit omission was a revelation to me. Second-wave feminism had come and gone, but its reverberations were reaching me for the first time. My husband read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), liked reading it, and handed it to me, which started a tsunami of good, hard questions. What was I good at, drawn to, excited by? Was it too late to develop previously abandoned skills? Confronting the self-limiting story from my Third Culture led to a breakthrough: like Andrew, I could take myself and my career seriously, and still be a great spouse and parent.

Over the next 10 years, I began to level up in writing, then science writing, then physics. I contended with a Fourth Culture: life as the spouse of a US Foreign Service Officer. Moving from Washington, DC to the Marshall Islands, then Montreal, Virginia and Nicaragua, I had to actively resist the feelings of loss that come for those supporting a spouse’s job abroad. Fortunately for me, Andrew supported my personal and professional ambitions in return, so I could thrive alongside his career even as we moved country every two or three years. I started publishing science essays and teaching science writing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, both of which could be done remotely.

In April 2018, political violence erupted in Nicaragua, and embassy families were sent back to safety in the US. Max and I evacuated to Utah while Andrew remained in Managua as essential personnel. Making the sweetest lemonade with the bitterest of lemons, I returned to work for the Cosmic Ray Research Group, now known as the Telescope Array Project. In the midst of disaster, I came full circle, back to the beginning of my story.

From left: John Matthews of the Telescope Array, the author Jamie Zvirzdin and her former supervisor, Stan Thomas, at a café at the University of Utah

I have been making up for lost time ever since. I couldn’t influence a dictator in Nicaragua, but I could traipse out to the Utah desert, fix detectors, and operate telescopes to help solve the mystery of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Reunited with Andrew in October 2018 following his time in Nicaragua, I picked up my work for the Telescope Array Project remotely from Maryland, writing programs, analysing data and even operating telescopes during night shifts from my work computer. I am now more than halfway through a Master’s in applied physics from Johns Hopkins, a remote programme I can pursue from our current post in Germany.

My unconventional path to physics reveals an important insight for those who may feel excluded from the field or intimidated by its complexities: at its core, physics is fundamentally a word problem. A story problem. Personal stories, history stories, thought experiments, formal proofs, metaphors, cautionary tales: surround yourself with the various stories embedded in physics, and you’ll find firm........

© Aeon