Where do you stop?

de Eric Kraft · Publicada por primera vez en 1992

Meet Peter Leroy, of Babbington, Long Island, "Clam Capital of America." He's a middle-aged dreamer who sits at a computer in a room in an old hotel, revising his childhood. In Where Do You Stop? Peter writes about his eleven-year-old self, just entering adolescence and just beginning to ponder life's big questions. When young Peter begins junior high school, he meets for the first time the black kids who come from a part of Babbington where there are no sidewalks, and he must evaluate his father's opinion that having no sidewalks is the way black people like it. Peter has to deal with his consuming passion for Ariane, the sultry older sister of his best friend, and he must figure out what to make of his beautiful new science teacher, Miss Rheingold, who is entranced by quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg and intoxicated by uncertainty. Miss Rheingold's style is discontinuity.^ After showing her charges an educational film featuring a zippy little character called Quanto the Minimum, she proposes that Peter and his group answer - in any way they see fit and with no deadline - the question "Where do you stop?" It's an interesting question: Where do things stop? At a subatomic level, where does your body stop and the air around it begin? At what point does society divide us into white and black? How late can you turn in a science project that has no due date? At what point does lemonade added to beer make the perfect shandy? And, perhaps most puzzling of all: When a car depreciates, where exactly does the lost value, formerly a part of the car, go? These are life's big questions. The answers - hilarious, profound, totally original - are in Eric Kraft's Where Do You Stop?, which is Peter's science report, finished at last after more than thirty years.^ Completing Miss Rheingold's assignment takes Peter into an investigation of the edges of things, of frames and borders, continuity and discontinuity, and the tribal isolation of people who think of themselves in terms of their membership in a group. Where Do You Stop? is a book about an endearing little boy, depreciation, ontology, epistemology, Zwischenraum, Miss Rheingold's legs, fantastic contraptions, and much, much more - and it's the first book that makes quantum physics wacky fun.