Einstein was a clever guy, who asked many clever questions regarding life, the universe and everything. What would it be like to ride alongside a light wave? What is the difference between the force of gravity and the force of acceleration? But for me, the first question I think of when someone mentions Einstein is: “Haben sie ihre hände gewaschen?”

Have you washed your hands? That question, along with a black-and-white portrait of Albert himself, looking stern and paternal, greets me each day when I leave the men’s bathroom in the Edna McConnell Clark Physical Sciences Library, on the second floor of Clark Hall of Science.

We have a physical sciences library? What’s Clark Hall? I hear you asking these questions, as you make your way from Music History in Lincoln Hall to Libe Café for a soy mochachino before dance class in the Schwartz Center. Clark Hall is home to the Departments of Physics and the School of Applied & Engineering Physics, and the Physical Sciences Library is home to physics, chemistry, astronomy and applied physics students, frantically finishing their problem sets before 5 p.m. deadlines. Or at least it was our home, before Cornell decided it was too expensive and underutilized to keep operational. Before it became the latest victim of the University’s budgetary liposuction — a love handle, so to speak, of real estate, salaries and academic resources, to be surgically transported to augment Cornell’s budgetary boobs.

What budgetary boobs you ask? Perhaps the hotel school’s darling addition, a sleek new tower, complete with an “observation deck,” designed to look shinier and newer than its next door neighbor, Duffield Hall. Or maybe Rem Koolhaas’ too-cool-for-Ithaca-building-codes wonder box — Milstein Hall, the chunk of modern starchitecture which will loom over University Avenue like shittier-looking areas of New York’s Port Authority Bus Depot. Or better still, Duffield-wannabe shiny-glass-atrium-atop-a-parking-garage addition to Martha Van Rensselaer Hall which adds excessive, useless common space, er, collaborative workspace to the former College of Home Economics. I’m sorry that was a low blow. But I’m kind of bitter right now, if you haven’t noticed.

Oh, physical sciences library! Where did you ever go wrong? In the ’80s you were the only 24 hour library on campus! While all the humanities kids slumbered in their dormitories, the premeds, chemists and physicists toiled away on problem sets, under the glow of your long, continuous strips of fluorescent lighting lining the ceiling. Now Uris, with her elegant clock tower and fancy A.D. White Library has stolen your crown and even the music library closes later! Mozart: 1. Feynman: 0.

I don’t know what it was about the Phys-Sci, but it will always hold a special place in my heart. The linoleum floor and geometric array of bookshelves and sterile-white columns just reminded me of the era of skinny ties and gender-bias in the sciences, an age where physicists like Hans Bethe could save or doom the world with a few equations and an Atomic Clock. Clark’s walls are lined with portraits of Cornell’s Nobel Laureates and big discoveries in the physical sciences. Nerds can stop and admire a picture of a spiral galaxy or the phase-diagram of Helium-III without worrying about running into all those Darwin-worshipping pansies and Freud-loving freaks. Now we must retreat to Mallott Hall to be lectured by mathematicians about how “it’s just criminal that you could blindly use so much mathematics without ever rigorously proving that 1 is indeed greater than 0.” I better start practicing my exaggerated eye-rolling.

Clark Hall was once a shiny beacon of triumph at Cornell University: a towering seven-story monument to science — sleek and modern. Over the years, we slowly realized a sprawling office tower coated in lumpy brown panels was probably not going to age as gracefully as neighboring Baker Labs. Its windows were boarded up, and its front doors sealed, and the next iteration of modern shininess has all but completely blocked the 50-year monster. If you look at the plans for the new physical sciences building (that’s what the giant yellow crane “behind the Arts Quad” is for), the architect made sure the new building reached just tall enough at its rear to completely block Clark Hall.

The entrance to the physical sciences library was once a wide, lengthy corridor lined with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the Arts Quad and lower campus. Sitting in the second-floor hallway on a wooden park bench, you could take in a sunset over West Hill, beyond downtown Ithaca. Now those windows are boarded shut, as construction continues on a new research facility. Uninformed premeds like to call the new physical sciences building “that new addition to Baker Hall.” I call it the “view destroyer.” But at least we still had the physical sciences library. It was the one thing Clark Hall still had going for it. And now … we’ve lost that too.

If you feel no empathy for me, know that soon you will feel pain. You will soon hear the ear-splitting pain of students arguing over which spherical harmonic we need to use when constructing our hydrogen orbitals. Know these tired, cranky students bringing unwanted noise to Uris and Olin are the displaced refugees of the former physical sciences library: tragic reminders of a lost land of magic and wonder.

And, yes, Dr. Einstein, I did wash my hands.