Swatches in Gradients: A Rumination on Energy
By: Faith Parlemo
In Dublin, I went to church with a retired nuclear physicist. After learning that I would be traveling to Ireland to study the impact of radiation on previously colonized areas, Dr. Eric Finch recommended that we meet at Christ Church Cathedral as God was the only force that brought him back into the city nowadays. Of course, he wrote, if you’d rather meet after, that’s fine too, but the building is quite striking. Standing beside Dr. Finch and his wife Jean, I couldn’t help but agree. Originally built by Vikings in the 12th century, the building evolved with time. Flying buttresses encircle 19th century stained glass windows. The preserved heart of Saint Laurence O’Toole, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin who laid the cathedral’s first stone in 1172, is cradled beneath the funeral slab of Anglican James Hewitt, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland who rose to power centuries after the English Reformation turned the building Protestant. Different periods of time bleed into one another, clotting around major events. This timeline is vertical, major changes collaged over one another defining its legacy.
After the sermon, Dr. Finch took me on a proper tour of the building. We wandered through the nave and the chapels, the choir and the crypt. The nuclear research could wait a few hours, radiation operating on a geologic time scale different from our own. If a lump of pure uranium-235 had been placed behind the pulpit as it was initially constructed, only 0.0001% would have decayed over the 850 years that had passed. In that time, billions of prayer candles had been burned down to their wicks. Slotted nearly into choir stalls, generations of congregants exhaled a tempest of hymn, lips and lungs shifting to accommodate sound. Through our metric, human interaction drives this exchange. In lighting candles, in breathing out devotions, parishioners made the cathedral’s potential energy kinetic. Energy holds agency, holds power, but can only be considered as a function of time, of space. Our timekeeping is active. Legacy is rooted in perseverance, in time measured through survival. Geologic time hinges on a scale of decay, of half-lives and decompositions. Human time adds, natural time subtracts.
In the present, I found myself drawn to the different artifacts of time. Embedded into the back wall of the nave was a series of stained glass pieces, five narrow lancet windows hanging beside one another in arpeggio. Portraits of biblical figures, each isolated within their own black halo, were connected by vines of blue light. Each somber face was one of Christ’s ancestors, the Tree of Jesse motif memorializing the holy line of succession. According to the Old Testament, the Messiah would be the final link in the chain of those blessed by God. The window ends before it can complete the cycle.
In the soft sunlight, the ties connecting each descendant glowed a baby blue. While occasionally found in Protestant churches, the color blue is more frequently tied to Catholicism. The Virgin Mary, as pure as the untouched sky at Jesus’ birth, peeks out from under a blue veil, encircles herself in a blue robe. The Catholic Church, in their veneration of the saint, named the tone of ultramarine marian blue, weaving it through holy spaces to connect congregants to their God. Eventually, facets of this styling were picked up by Protestant churches, but the symbolism of blue as divine light never quite permeated Protestant culture as it did Catholic.
When the Tree of Jesse was installed in Christ Church in 1878, well after the Reformation, the Church welcomed the celestial in the Nave, a pale blue light filling the space where parishioners would gather for the next liturgy. The stone arches supporting the nave, smooth and fair toned, reflected it, the haze radiating out as an aura.
**
At a café nestled into a museum down the street, we settled into a talk about a different kind of longevity. Roughly 130 miles northeast, the Sellafield Nuclear Site peeks out from a small community in Northern England. In 1957, under the name Windscale, it caught fire, causing the worst nuclear accident on British soil, a 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Despite the distance, Ireland still experienced low levels of pollution, the wind knowing no political border. While the physical impact was minimal, the cultural impact was more pronounced; following the Windscale Fire, the majority of the Irish public opposed nuclear efforts, viewing it as yet another way that England’s mismanagement could threaten their safety. My research had drawn me to this societal tension, but to truly understand the scope, I needed to understand the science informing it.
Across the table, Dr. Finch helped to demystify science, explaining that a nuclear reactor is just a sum of its parts. In the core, an atom of uranium is exposed to an extra neutron. Upon absorbing the particle, the uranium becomes unstable, causing it to split in two. This rupture releases additional neutrons that are absorbed by additional uranium atoms, creating a fission chain reaction. Yet this process needs to be controlled. If the chain reaction occurs too quickly, the heat generated as a byproduct of the reaction will destabilize the reactor. To moderate the speed, control rods are embedded in the design, absorbing freewheeling neutrons to limit the number of reactions possible. All nuclear reactors are designed to safely perpetuate this fission cycle. At its core, the motivating scientific principles are the same.
While Dr. Finch had never been assigned to the reactor at Windscale, he had done significant work on underwater reactors. Outside of the confines of air, a charged particle can move faster than light. As it travels, it pushes past the atoms blocking its way, causing them to release photons, the particles that make up visual light. The resulting phenomena is a blue haze, cyan softened by the surrounding water. Buried in memory, Dr. Finch looked to the side. “It’s difficult to put into words, but it’s remarkable that something so destructive could be so beautiful.” Physicists call this Cherenkov blue, named after the scientist that discovered it. Pantone calls this cerulean, named after the Latin word for heaven.
**
Partway through our conversation, the Finches waved over a friend. Frequenting the café after church, they quickly befriended a young woman who worked at the museum. They hadn’t seen each other in some time, their friend having been out on sick leave. Jean Finch reassured her that they had been praying for her recovery. She smiled, offering her sincere thanks. She believed in the power of prayer but maintained that God only helps you if you make an effort. Salvation must be an active process.
She was happy to be back. Arms folded in front of her, she frowned. “You know,” she began, “there are ghosts here. I see them in bursts of light, all around the museum. They’re orbs, blue and white. Sometimes they make the sound of something crashing, just to let me know they’re here.” They moved at different speeds, at different intensities, she explained, but they rarely scared her. At first, it had taken her a moment to grow accustomed to them, the light crowding her vision, distracting her, but they had become just as intrinsic to the building as the art held in its collections. In her time gone, she mentioned, she had missed them.
The three of us – the Finches and I – nodded politely. The young woman, eyes focused on something in the background, waved a hand through the air, dismissing the thought. Her lunch break had ended, she said, but she’d see them next week. She made her way deeper into the museum.
**
After spending several hours with the Finches, they took their leave, returning home before the roads became clotted with traffic. At a flimsy picnic table, I watched tourists trace through garden paths cut in the shape of sea serpents, the white imprint stamped into green grass. It reminded me of a cyanotype, one of the oldest forms of photography. After painting a page with UV reactive chemicals, artists would place an object over the paper and leave it out in the sun. The light would turn the page a deep Prussian blue while the item would keep the space beneath it blank. With time, an impression would be left, white stark against a blue background.
In Dublin, we had all stood against our own white sheets. As time passed, light manipulated the space around us, our perspectives becoming the negative space left as imprint under a swath of blue. This too is nuclear energy, the Sun a ball of nuclear fusion. Under burning UV rays, cyanotypes develop, the image becoming the object left behind. In Dublin, we think about a different kind of legacy.
Sources
Baes, Fred. “Decay Calculator.” Health Physics Society. Accessed March 30, 2025.
Clark, Melanie. “Christian Symbolism: Blue.” St. Mary Magdalen School of Theology, January 1, 2025.
Finch, Eric in conversation with the author, May 2024.
Faith Palermo (she/her) is a writer from Eastern Massachusetts. He work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Offing, Puerto del Sol, Write or Die, Mulberry Literary, Sūdō Journal, and others. For more information, check out her website: faithpalermo.com
As a 2024 Cheuse fellow, Faith traveled to Ireland, England, and the Isle of Man to investigate the impact of the 1957 Windscale Fire, the worst nuclear accident in the UK’s history. This work appears in her thesis, a collection of essays interrogating the logic of nuclear disasters throughout history, highlighting the historical contexts that enabled them to occur.