Sending Arecibo’s Message of Breathing Caesar’s Last Breath -
a New Mexican’s Musings and Family History Lesson
Fermi’s Theory devised on July 16, 1945 Trinity Site, NM
Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American physicist, simplified the problem of the order of magnitude estimation in physics at the 1945 Trinity test site, less than a hundred miles from my family’s farms in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. Before and following the Gadget’s test, Fermi correctly predicted and calculated the power of the first atom bomb using shredded paper.
While observers at the test site beheld the searing golden, violet, gray and blue explosion of light - ten times brighter than the midday sun - Fermi scrutinized strips of paper he had placed at the periphery of the blast and then measured the distance they traveled when the air pressure from the explosion reached them. His estimation corresponded exactly to the measurements produced by precise instrumentation - greatly surprising his fellow scientists.
During Fermi’s scrap paper chase, the scientist missed the beauty and clarity that exposed each crevasse and ridge of the surrounding San Andres mountains and the Capitan and Sierra Blanca peaks; he ignored the 1,200 ft. diameter fireball, the same temperature of the sun, that rose over 10,000 feet into the high desert sky.
At exactly the same time, less than a hundred miles to the southeast, my grandfather was starting a pre-daylight breakfast of biscuits and gravy peppered so intensely it looked like a black constellation on a white sky. He said the morning became so bright that it couldn’t be described with words - the dark sky splitting open into light so bright it felt electrical - and then the glare suddenly fell back onto itself into darkness.
The Las Alamos assemblage at the Trinity Site were spellbound by the test’s success. After the emergence of light and the disappearance of sound, there were cheers and the participants congratulated each other and shook hands. The nearby farmers, ranchers, Mexican villagers, and Apaches were told an ammunition dump exploded at the nearby White Sands Proving Ground - just the beginning of many lies, thievery and collateral damages inflicted on them in their fateful proximity to the military base.
In a later casual conversation with fellow scientists back at Los Alamos Labs, Fermi analogized about the distribution of his scattered paper scraps, the equal distribution of atoms in our atmosphere, and then simply clarified his proposition by postulating on how we all breathe Caesar’s last breath.
The physicist explained that every atom on the planet has been here forever and when we take a single breath, we intake a single molecule from Caesar’s last exhalation. He wrote his equation on the blackboard, and then he left to meet his wife, Laura, for dinner.
Enrico and Laura Fermi both had salmon and sour cream sauce for dinner. They washed it down with a crisp, lemony, Vermentino bottle of wine.
2049 years earlier - Ides of March, 44 B.C. - Caesar’s Last Breath
On a perfect 63 degree day in the Roman Forum, Julius Caesar was circled by Senators hiding their knives in the folds of their togas; Caesar blocked Cassius’ first stab toward his shoulder and prepared to battle the twenty-three assassins around him. "Why this violence?" Caesar stammered. Upon seeing his dear friend, Brutus, colluding with the murderers, Caesar covered his face with his toga and cried with unbearable grief at his friend’s betrayal.
Two dozen knives blindly slashed around Caesar, some slicing and puncturing fellow conspirators’ faces, arms, chests, thighs; rivulets of blood streamed into Senators’ bodily crevices, clumped on their old scars and hair, and dripped stickily into their sandals. Caesar gasped in fresh air and spat out a gory, stale final gasp - expelling atoms which began to evenly displace into Earth’s atmosphere. His death rattle shook atoms from Caesar’s breath into Brutus’s heaving lungs. "Peace, freedom, and liberty!" Brutus roared as his friend fell and the rattling of knives ceased.
As successive battles augured badly for Rome, a civil war brewed in Marcus Junius Brutus’ chest. He plotted a delusory attempt to save the Roman Republic but haunting consequences accompanied murdering his beloved companion; he did not comprehend that every atom on the planet had been here forever, that with each single breath until his own self-demise, he would intake a single molecule diffused from Caesar's last exhalation.
In due course, weighted with the recognition of his naivete, burdened with the brutal tonnage of his shame, and seized by the impossibility of saving Rome from itself, Brutus surrendered onto the sharp point of his own sword and gasped in molecules of his beloved companion’s breath, which mingled with his own, which commingled back out into the atmosphere.
Side Bar
Jesus and Judas would inhale atoms of Caesar’s breath in their day, as would Africans and Vikings, royalty and slaves, infidels and true believers, dogs and cats. Every atom that has ever been here does not practice discrimination; they evenly displace without ration, allocation, commission or dividend. Incessantly, atoms respire into water and sugar and release to grow a talon on a raptor or fuel the fabrication of tusks on an elephant. Every atom that our ancestors breathed in and out, every atom that we are built of, is still held tight here by Earth's gravitational pull - so, please take your due.
Ovid wrote, “The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into beasts, but never perishes.” From the atoms we bequeath - salmon leap, hawks uplift, bears sleep, fawns slip onto earth, ink dots paper, dust stirs, musical notes form, floods cross plains.
Fourth Wall
I’m going to break the fourth wall here to tell you that this rambling was initially written as a first draft of an eulogy and sat unfinished and undelivered due to the plague. It resurfaced after watching Oppenheimer with my mother. We ate popcorn during the movie and she had water and I succumbed to a rare, crispy diet Coke (which Mother repeatedly says will destroy my bones). There is no profound moral in this undelivered encomium which was merely an attempt to say, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust; a fancy pants contrivance in hopes of significance.
Post Script
4.4 billion years ago, carbon arrived on Earth - probably due to a car-crash-like event between earth and a small, embryonic planet. Stony-iron meteorites fell hard onto and into Earth and it was the beginning of something big - relatively - as Einstein (as played by Tom Conti in Oppenheimer) would say.
4.4 billion years later - mas o menos - in 1954, Ann Hodges was taking a nap on a sunny afternoon in Alabama when a meteorite traveling 30,000 mph crashed through her roof and bounced off her hip, creating a bruise which was uncannily the size and shape of a pineapple.
During that same year, 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was being probed about his loyalty to the U.S. due to his flirtation with commies fifteen years prior.
During the same year, 1954, my parents, living a mere 75 miles from Trinity Site, where Oppenheimer’s Gadget was first tested, were expecting the first of their Baby Booming brood - me - a fact that my father said was made possible because at the time of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his Naval ship, the New Jersey, was headed to Japan and he swore that the bombs saved his life by ending the war.
In 1945, under the unforgiving rule of the Emperor and Imperial Japanese Army, around 250,000 Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Indonesians were dying each month. Nearly a million Japanese men and thousands of kamikazes (plane, torpedo, boat, frogmen) were positioned in anticipation of the U.S. invasion of Kyushu scheduled for November 1. It was estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be killed or wounded at the upcoming confrontation. According to accepted military doctrine, an amphibious force must enjoy a three-to-one manpower advantage over dug-in defenders onshore. In fact, the Navy would have faced a one-to-one disadvantage if they had landed on the shores of Kyushu.
In August 1945, most Japanese were living off meager diets. By Christmas, blockaded Japanese would have been starving to death by the millions. The army, with their stockpiled food, would starve last.
One bomb was not enough to disintegrate the Japanese military’s fanatical resolve nor the emperor’s commitment to his own self-regarding, self-preservation. The second bomb and the threat of more bombs offered a face-saving excuse to surrender—a glimpse into a sky splitting open a light so bright and electrifying the heavens so unimaginably, would make the Japanese surrender and allow my father to survive and return to New Mexico to participate in the next behemoth boom - the Baby Boom.
Side Bar
New Mexico provided more military volunteers and suffered more casualties than any other state per capita. Patriotism ran high even in marginalized Hispanic and Native communities. The Navajo code talkers secreted military communications to commanders. 1,800 New Mexican troops fought the Japanese invasion of the Philippines just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor; New Mexicans died in droves during the subsequent Bataan Death March - 900 died, 900 returned to the Land of Enchantment. And my father, at 17, ran away from his Sacramento Mountain home, less than a hundred miles away from where the bombs had been tested, and hired a woman to pose as his mother to sign the papers that allowed him to join the Navy immediately instead of waiting a year until he turned 18.
Lastly, the Arecibo Message
The Arecibo Message is an interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth that was sent to the globular cluster Messier 13 (M13) about 25,000 light years from Earth. The message was sent in 1974 from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. It was meant as a demonstration of human technological achievement rather than an attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials. When correctly translated into graphics, characters, and spaces, the 1,679 bits of data contained within the message describes our DNA, our understandings of science, and includes Fermi’s order of magnitude estimation - aka Caesar’s last breath.
In conclusion, there are atoms that conspire, ones that inspire.
Ann Hodges might have been inspired to use her time more productively than taking a nap if she’d known that space debris has a difficult time hitting a moving object; one never knows when a star-dust laden meteorite is going to car-crash through your roof. It might be 4.4 billion more years before another woman lying on a couch receives a pineapple shaped bruise from a space rock.
My father was inspired to believe the atom bombs saved his life from a self-regarding emperor who conspired with an imperial army’s fanatical resolve to maintain an authoritarian military empire. My future dad was grateful to not have to face the odds on the beaches of Kyushu. I’m inspired to believe we need to be constantly on the look-out for the Probability of a Series of Independent Imperialists, Fascists, and Fanatical Racist Supremacist Events. Watch Out!
Robert Oppenheimer might have been inspired to tell Senators who conspired against him about Brutus’ misplaced, delusory attempts to save the Roman Empire. As U.S. Senators brandied their career slashing knives against him, their name-calling schemes slicing and puncturing scientists’ reputations, their democracy destroying, self-serving machinations spewing rivulets of spittle into their aged crevices, clumping on old scars and thinning hair, and dripping stickily from their jutted chins, they were in fact unknowingly spewing out gory atoms of Caesar’s and Brutus’s final breaths.
“Peace, freedom, and liberty,” Oppenheimer might have howled at them during his character assassination. But relatively speaking, scientists and Senators are not always aiming at the same target…conspiring to inspire…splitting atoms…must be something in the stardust.
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