I knew a poem that yelled, "Refrigerator"! and my brain suddenly had room for a refrigerator[...]
My brain was so full of refrigerator - my mind full of that poem's world - my whole head suddenly hard on the outside and suddenly cool on the inside.
-B.J. Ward, "A Poem About a Refrigerator" from Gravedigger's Birthday
American astrophysicist and intellectual celebrity Neil deGrasse Tyson has repeated - in Congress and in countless conferences - that NASA inspires imagination. The more space we explore in the universe, the greater our capacity to dream. Tyson's cosmic perspective shrinks down to an earthly size in B.J. Ward's "A Poem About a Refrigerator." In his work, Ward revealed that objects affect our thinking patterns, individually or culturally. With 99.5% of Americans owning at least one, refrigerators fill a visible space in our daily lives and in our collective conscience, but the particulars of their impact remain unheralded. How refrigerators have shaped and can shape our ways of thinking is an untold story - investigated exclusively in the Other White Cube Project. The root of the refrigerator's cultural prominence begins, interestingly, with the father of modern physics, Albert Einstein.
In 1921, Einstein visited the United States and lectured at Princeton University on his newly developed General Theory of Relativity. Einstein's theory overturned the notion of impersonal time - that time is the same everywhere for every thing. Einstein argued that time depended on speed and was, therefore, relative - or different at different speeds. As a result of his work, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, launching him into fame and popularizing his theories.
During the same years, companies developed and marketed the first household refrigerators, and, just as fast as Einstein's theory reshaped physics, the refrigerator reconfigured the modern lifestyle. Although world's apart, Einstein's theory and the refrigerator share an interesting feature - the idea of slowing time. Einstein's theory claimed that as objects approached the speed of light, the flow of time slowed down. Likewise, refrigerators offered consumers longer periods of freshness by slowing the rate of decay.
Remarkably, others at the time must have seen similarities between the two developments. At the core of Einstein's theory was a concept that became known popularly as the "temporal refrigerator." Like slowing the decay of food, when one travels near the speed of the light, he or she ages slower. The comparison is both apt and educational. When faced with novel ideas, it is common to create a metaphor - relating a new concept and to a familiar one - in an attempt to understand. Einstein's explanation of slowed time became comprehensible through the refrigerator, attesting to appliance's "universal" significance.
Because of the refrigerator, my brain (and so many others') suddenly had room for Einstein's theory.