The Incubator

Day twenty-seven. I’ve stopped counting days, but the notebook counts for me — every entry is dated, and if you add them up (and I’m a physicist, so I added them up), you get twenty-seven. Four weeks minus one day. A month, if you round. (Physicists love rounding. It lets you say “approximately” instead of “I don’t know exactly.” All of cosmology is built on “approximately”: the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years, plus or minus twenty million. Twenty million years — a rounding error. For the report — acceptable.)