Forty years ago, a small boy in the remote hills of western Nepal waited with the men in his village to welcome the first motorized vehicle to ever enter their town. The approach was a slow one, the vehicle a tractor. When it arrived, the boy’s father and uncles took turns riding on the back of the spluttering machine.
The boy’s family wasn’t rich or even middle-class. His father was a subsistence farmer. The family grew rice and lentils and raised cattle and buffalo and goats. The boy’s parents had no formal education, but they recognized its value and sent all six of their children to the local school.
There was no electricity in the home, and so the children studied by the light of a kerosene lamp. When the kerosene ran out, they cut strips from a nearby Indian pine — known for its lambent and long-burning wood — and propped their books up near the light of the fire.
When the little boy was of a certain age, he and his brothers and sisters taught their mother to read and write. The boy was a teacher even then.
When he was in the fifth grade, a Peace Corps volunteer — a blonde-headed young woman from Kansas — arrived in the boy’s village to teach English. He was a good student and, because of that, he stood out. And she was a good teacher. Many decades later, when the two would reunite one afternoon in Kansas City, she would remember him. (Of course, at this point in the story the boy couldn’t have known that he himself would one day call Kansas home, even less that this early academic success would translate into his becoming one of this country’s premier nuclear physicists.)
And so the boy continued, throughout his schooldays, to show an appetite for knowledge, especially math and science, advancing from one institution of higher learning to another, until he found himself — no longer a little boy in the village but a scholar, Yadav Pandit — a lecturer at Kathmandu University.
Pandit spent a decade teaching science in the capital city before it became clear that his intellectual ambitions had outgrown his surroundings. He applied to doctoral programs in the United States and received a scholarship to attend Kent State University.
It was at Kent State that Pandit began to carve out a place for himself in the field of experimental nuclear physics, and to initiate breakthroughs whose implications are still being assessed.
“Sometimes I try to explain to my son how it was for me growing up,” recalled Pandit, speaking earlier this week from his small office on the campus of Allen Community College, where he is the school’s physical science instructor. “He can hardly believe. It seems crazy to him.” Pandit’s eldest son is currently a senior at Blue Valley North High School, in Overland Park, and will be heading to Stanford University on a full-ride scholarship this fall.
“For me, too, it sounds crazy,” laughed Pandit. “But I did it, and that is my life.”
AND YET TO GAIN the full measure of Yadav Pandit, it’s not enough to go back to his youth. You have to go back to the beginning. As in the beginning beginning. As in the Big Bang.
OK, here we go….
The observable universe is made up of atoms. Each atom contains a nucleus around which one or more electrons orbit. Inside each nucleus are protons and neutrons, and each proton and neutron, in turn, is made up of itty-bitty elementary particles called quarks and gluons. These are, so far, the smallest particles known to experimental science.
Less than one second after the Big Bang — which is going back now about 13.8 billion years — the universe was instantly flooded with these free-floating, unbonded, subatomic particles — quarks and gluons. This quark-gluon mix, subjected to the extreme heat that accompanied the primary expansion of the universe, formed a dense plasma. This liquid-like substance is referred to, colloquially, as “hot quark soup.”
