Out of Many Scattered Things: Science Charm

Happy Quantum Field Tuesday; you have been science charm’d!

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Science Charm

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

At times I feel as though you have a firmer grasp on the conceptual underpinnings of quantum physics than many of my colleagues, though one would hope this isn’t truly the case. Perhaps a better way to put this is: you are a reductionist who presents himself inductively. By this, I mean that while I can, occasionally, trace the evolution of your train of thought via your annotated questions, your observations strike me as having an intuitive quality by virtue of your failure to annotate logical leaps that must appear obvious to you(?). It is quite striking. There is something of an arithmetical aesthetic when it comes to ascertaining which steps to skip and which to denote. While I would not go so far as to use the word “hubris,” there is certainly an element of glamor to your logical leaps.

Such leaps bring to mind the maddening study of mathematical history—the sketchy outline of group theory contained in a letter, Fermat’s margin notes, et cetera. Do you take an interest in such things? I find accounts from the history of science to be a source of intellectual companionship—like Machiavelli in exile, who would sit down each evening in his best formalwear and, alone, interrogate texts of the past, I occasionally spend my evenings examining the thoughts of other mathematicians. I would not describe this as a common pastime amongst my colleagues, but it is not altogether rare, either. There is something about mathematics particularly that invites it, I think, especially when applicability is lacking.

I would imagine applicability is something with which you never need to struggle, working in the life sciences. Does it bring you any particular satisfaction to read works by Darwin, for example? Do you read works by Darwin? Most likely, you do nothing of the kind. I can’t imagine when you’d find the time. I am and have always been an avid reader, in spite of the—how to put this—disapproval that extra-scientific pursuits elicit from driven colleagues. I have less time for reading now than I once did, but I find it psychologically helpful in uncertain times. The end of this summer has been nothing if not an incredibly uncertain span of months. I have just begun History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. It strikes me as topical, and I have a fondness for exiled authors. I’m concerned my projected reading time may be shorter than what average German life expectancies indicate. 

Apologies for the wandering dark of the previous paragraph. I confess it is, again, quite late here, and I have spent the last six hours responding to your notes on my manuscript while drinking Oettinger (lest you form a mistaken impression: this is a matter of economy and not reflective of the sophistication of my palate). Reading your notes, I cannot help but wonder how long it took you to work through what I sent. It doesn’t appear that you completed it all in one sitting. Tell me it was longer than six hours; if it wasn’t, I am resolved to throw away my academic prospects, give up on them entirely, and pursue an alternate career. (A practical one. One with enough financial compensation that I’ll no longer feel compelled to drink Oettinger for god’s sake.)

Frustrated hyperbole aside, I have very much enjoyed this our exchange. Please feel free to send back another round of comments if any of my explanations are unclear, or fall outside your realms of mathematical familiarity. I tried to pitch them based on your revised (though still not wholly forthcoming) disclosure of your mathematical background. There is no reason to minimize your qualifications; or, perhaps I should clarify—there is no reason to minimize your qualifications within the confines of this particular set of correspondences. I cannot speak to the intellectual climate you might encounter on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Socially, I am familiar with the concept of academic minimization—if I have to attend one more family gathering at which I am asked whether I am “still in school” I refuse to be held responsible for my actions. I hear that in the United States anti-intellectual sentiment is more extreme than it is here. I’m not certain how true this might be—we are always hearing such things about the state of American science; perhaps it is just a story we tell ourselves to maintain a sense of psychological superiority. At the very least, funding for the basic sciences is more available in Germany; that I do know for certain. I have heard, however, that the NSF has received a large allocation from the U.S. Congress to fund xenobiological research and to establish a new governmental branch dedicated to specimen collection, disposal, and cleanup. Have you heard anything more about this?

Along these same lines, I am incredibly interested to hear your take on what is known of the physiologic effects of kaiju blood. There has been nothing but yellow journalism here regarding the topic—primarily, I suspect, because all the scientists who attempted to collect samples perished in the attempt. I am certain you’ve thought extensively on the subject. Do you know if even basic epidemiological data are available? I can’t imagine the stories related by the popular press are true. For instance, the claim that aerosolized blood can permeate a filtered respirator. Is this actually the case?

I shall leave off my rambling here and resign myself to making yet another fruitless appeal for funding tomorrow. Think stochastically favorable thoughts in my direction at 03:00 EST if you are awake. 

Sincerely,

Hermann Gottlieb, PhD

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

I talk a good game it’s true, but I think (I think) a better one! You, on the other hand, seem to mean what you say and say what you think and so I’m terribly flattered by your analysis of my analysis, or, rather, your analysis of my analytical style. In short: right back at ya, but inverted.

I won’t call your thought processes inherently “inductive” because that would be terribly impolite science etiquette [personal aside: I forgive you, by the way, for dressing up my annotative laziness as inductive reasoning, that’s very polite. “Sloppy” might be more accurate], but I’ll whip out and dust off the overused label of “intuitive” to describe your jury-rigged levering of quantum mechanics into a geophysics-shaped box. I very much enjoyed trying to follow your conceptual leaps, which are more interesting and wider than you make them out to be. To answer your question—you do not need to give up your academic pursuits. Going through your document took me days. My graduate students thought I’d died. [Accuracy aside: not actually true, but I did cancel a day of (mostly) superfluous meetings to go over the thing, plus the addition of, er, about four nights or so. I also needed to help myself by going back to my old friend Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach, so all things included, full disclosure, it took me about forty hours all told. We’ll round up to forty-two and that gives us a quantum mechanics annotation disparity of seven to one. I’d say you should stay in business.]  

There may be a certain amount of impropriety in what I’m about to admit, but I’m a little bit of an imprompritizer [editorial aside: yes, Dr. Gottlieb, that is, for sure, an American word, no need to look it up]. You are ridiculously satisfying as a correspondent, I can’t even tell you. Are you seriously a graduate student? You don’t seem like a graduate student to me—and I’ve mentored about [accuracy aside: where ‘about’=exactly] twelve of them by this point, so I speak with a reasonable amount of experience here. It’s not a raw intelligence thing (because that’s no surrogate endpoint when it comes to successfully running a lab); it’s your attitude. You seem like a guy who should be allocating vast quantities of resources, not giving job talks. Is there a back-story here? Did you go through the German education system in the typical way? [Congratulatory aside: I can’t believe you implied that I’m full of academic hubris; do you have any idea how blazingly correct you are in that assessment?]

While I’m on the topic of impropriety, I will also cop to drinking whilst typing. Alas, I can’t claim to be doing anything as civilized as reading Thucydides [inquisitive aside: are you serious? You’re serious.]  I’m at a faux dive bar in Cambridge (Boston) called Camera Obscura. I say “faux” because while it disingenuously looks like a dive bar, it’s actually just full of people pursuing or sporting post-grad degrees and looking for a decent music scene. I’m listening to sincerely:sam sing about the heat death of the universe. Don’t be jealous. I—listen to nerd rock a little bit. Not all the time. Let me guess. You’re less into Nerd Rock as a genre than you are into people who were writing music in the 1700s. That’s the vibe I get.

I’m drinking tequila. I’m out on the town, at a bar, with Kat, as, like, a confused wingman? I didn’t realize this would be part of the deal? I’m here under false pretenses. I’ve definitely been turned into an accessory to Kat’s attempt at trying to get it on with the hottest little number in the Department of Biochemistry (here read: a newly tenured faculty member with attractive hair and fashion-forward shoes). Consequently, I’m now responding at length to a very important “work email” while Kat and Liz stare into one another’s eyes and talk about the broader cultural influence of Radiohead. It’s going well. Kat says to say hi, by the way. She says YOU have notable hair. What’s “notable hair?” Don’t ignore this question. I really want to know. 

Do I read Darwin? Well, short answer: yes. Long answer: no. Here’s the thing. I read The Origin of Species out of a sense of professional obligation, and I liked it. I remember especially liking the chapter involving bees and hexagonal honeycombing? Honestly though, it’s not the kind of thing that really yanks my extracurricular chain, if that’s not incomprehensibly idiomized. If I’m reading for science, I like my science to be crisp and contemporary. If I’m not reading for science I prefer to be not reading for science. I gravitate toward tales of existential torment, so for highbrow I go with Nietzsche, for middlebrow I go with Lovecraft, Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, and for lowbrow, I go with…well, no need to go there at this point. I’m embarrassingly well versed in manga; we’ll leave it at that. I’ve taken a strange interest in scientists screwed over by their contemporaries and historical figures who have been scooped/screwed by bigger-name scientists. Rosalind Franklin, Alfred Russell Wallace, Lise Meitner, Gottfried Leibniz. The list goes on. I wish I could give you a psychological explanation for this, but, alas, I can’t. I’m neither particularly worried about being scientifically cast aside nor about misappropriating the quantitative/empirical spotlight. I just—feel badly for them is the bottom line. Like you and your exiled authors? Maybe. I don’t mean to presume.

Now that I find myself pointed back in a vaguely science-ward direction—Kaiju Blue. Capitalize that Proper Noun. That’s the way to go. The stuff terrifies me. I’ll lay out what’s available in the current literature, which is almost nothing, so don’t get excited:

One. Yes. Aerosolized Blue can pass through standard-issue respirators. There was some speculation early on that it wasn’t passing through, that instead it was an organic solvent that could permeate human skin, but ah, you remember the PI from UCSF who took his lab out to collect samples? Well, after they died, a lab in the same department retrieved their personal protective equipment, hermetically sealed it, and sent it to the CDC, where it was re-opened in a BSL-4 lab. I’ll send you the Nature paper, but long story short, Blue was found throughout and on the inside of the filter. No one’s been able to perform chromatography or mass spec on this stuff yet, but it’s got an interesting chemistry to its aerosolization. You need a mask with a ridiculously small filter size to prevent breathing it in. They’ve started production and testing on a new filter model for research and cleanup. It’ll be hard to do arduous work in them because if there’s any particulate matter in the air (which there will be), those tiny pores will clog. I have some ideas about filter modification I’ve been working on in my free time; we’ll see if it goes anywhere.

Two. The epidemiology data are just—really depressing.

Three. The epidemiology data are unequivocal. Uniform lethality with time to fatality directly proportional to extent of exposure. [An anecdote: the bass player in my band (Rob) was interviewing for a postdoc at Berkeley during the Trespasser attack. He was exposed to Kaiju Blue and didn’t make it. He emailed me a first-hand account, as clinical as he could make it. Hate thinking about it. Still trying not to. He had some interesting speculations on xenoproteases that I passed on to an MD colleague of mine; hoping the case report in JAMA includes those. So ultimately Rob absolutely did contribute to science, but god, I mean really I mean god.]

Four. I’ll keep you posted on Blue. As unsettled as I am, Blue stands at the Venn diagram overlap region of multiple areas of expertise that I’ve accumulated. I intend to switch fields. Xenobiology, here I come. I think.

I guess.

I have three graduate students. One’s close to finishing. She’ll be fine. But the other two…they signed up for stopping neoplastic transformation in regenerating tissue. Not research on a thing that kills most of the people who try to study it.

Gotta make a better filter before I make the switch.

It’s raining outside, and it’s three in the morning here. All my vibes are stochastically favorable and Berlin-directed, sir. Good luck with your funding pitch. I’ll send you another round on your notes re: my notes re: your notes. I am slightly too intoxicated to be mathing in the immediate present, but certainly not intoxicated enough to be late for a nine AM thesis defense. Good vibes to graduate students, every one. 

Oh. And for the love of secular humanism will you please address me as,

Newton

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

Much though I appreciate your Berlinward vectored well-wishes, I regret to inform you that they were insufficient to persuade my department that I should be granted a year of discretionary funding in order to pursue a project on the spatiotemporal mechanics of the anomaly at the bottom of the Pacific. The objections to my proposal centered around two themes.

The first objection was the dearth of evidence that there is real spacetime distortion at the site in question. I suppose this is a germane point. I attempted to combat it not with data (all of which I had already presented), but with a cost/benefit analysis of pursuing the project. This did not avail me very well, I regretfully admit.

The second objection was that the intellectual course I’m attempting to set for myself is unrelated to my field of inquiry and therefore a possible dead-end when it comes to my career (and a sizable allotment of departmental “crush” funding—that is the best translation I can come up with; it’s somewhat peculiar to our particular department and meant as a bridge to support transitioning investigators). I countered that, as no extant scientific fields can explain the events of this past summer, such an argument would preclude all research into whatever emerged from the Pacific.

The meeting lasted three hours, prolonged due to my stubborn refusal to let them out of the room, and their strange reluctance to go until they had convinced me of the error of my ways. Suffice it to say, we were all disappointed in one another. Should I wish to continue pursuing my present avenue of inquiry, my academic options at TU Berlin appear to be limited. 

You asked about my personal history. I assure you it is a nearly conventional story. I say nearly because my attendance at a Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliches Gymnasium was, perhaps, briefer than one might expect due to a childhood illness combined with accelerated private tutoring. I matriculated early, then spent a year between university and my graduate studies pursuing an alternate career pathway that was ultimately not a viable choice for me due to physical requirements I wasn’t able to meet. Ultimately, I settled on the pursuit of mathematics. As you can see, my personal history is not particularly notable. My presentation of myself in text to an American scientist I’ve never met is more unencumbered by the trappings of institutional hierarchy than my exterior comportment in reality. If only you were making funding decisions at TU Berlin. Ah well. 

So you are not a reader of Thucydides. Perhaps you should be. I don’t know quite how to express myself without sounding overly familiar or overly melodramatic, neither of which appeals. Nevertheless, I’ll proceed.

I was struck by a palpable sense of unrest in your last message; I’ll elaborate no further, I will only say that I, too, have felt unsettled in a personal, societal, and philosophic sense by the appearance of Trespasser. I take no comfort in the specious, wandering suppositions posed by media pundits. Nor do vacuous conspiracy theories hold my attention. But I very much appreciate reading the thoughts of those who faced similar levels of apocalyptic uncertainty with an equanimity I’d like to emulate. As an illustration, I include this passage, which resonates with some of my darker thoughts of late:

“In other respects also Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness. Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune which came to the rich who suddenly died and to those who had been penniless but now inherited their wealth, people now began openly to venture on acts of self-indulgence which before they used to keep dark. Thus they resolved to spend their money quickly and to spend it on pleasure, since money and life alike seemed equally ephemeral. As for what is called honour, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws, so doubtful was it whether one would survive to enjoy the name for it. It was generally agreed that what was both honourable and valuable was the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. As for offenses against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial and punished: instead everyone felt that already a far heavier sentence had been passed on him and was hanging over him, and that before the time for its execution arrived it was only natural to get some pleasure out of life. This, then, was the calamity that fell upon Athens, and the times were hard indeed, with men dying inside the city and the land outside being laid waste.”

You can see why I sent you this, I’m sure. While this is an excerpt from Book 2, I’m finding the whole account to be acutely and painfully relevant. It’s a clear-eyed view of a flawed city that an exiled man so clearly loved. It’s a story of stochastic disasters, the misappropriation of resources, of deeply flawed but charismatic leaders. If you find yourself in the mood to engage with such a thing at present, I suspect it might strike a chord for you. What particular chord I can’t say, because I don’t genuinely know you (at present), no matter how much it feels like I do.

The end of your last letter sparked some curiosity about your experiences during and in the aftermath of Trespasser’s landfall. I assume you were in Massachusetts at the time? I spent most of the attack watching international coverage, like nearly everyone on the planet. I will never forget my fellow doctoral colleague’s tone of voice when she looked up from the screen in her hand and said, “Something’s come out of the ocean.”

Give all my best to Dr. Meyer, and also tell her I’ll thank her to stop maligning my perfectly respectable hair.

Sincerely,

Hermann  

Dear Hermann,

I’m dropping your title even though you didn’t drop mine…apologies. I suspect you might be waiting for me to drop your title before you drop my title because you view me as a step up on some invisible, international, cross-discipline Science Hierarchy, but, full disclosure, I’m not a hierarchical guy. That’s not my lifestyle. I can do the formal address (I suppose) if you feel strongly about it, but if you’re going to send me long passages penned by dead Athenian exiles you’ll need to justify a continuing preference for the use of honorifics (if such a preference exists) because those two things seem mutually exclusive to me. 

I am outrageously irritated on your behalf. Not surprised, alas. Here’s my question for you though—why are you applying for money from your department at all? Why aren’t you applying directly for an external grant? Ideally, a transitional award of some kind? You’ve defended, correct? Wrap up whatever remains of your doctoral work and go. Do a postdoc, don’t do a postdoc; someone will, for sure, fund you to do this stuff. If not within academia [discursive aside: somewhere within academia most certainly will, by the way] then outside it. Ugh. As I think about this—what you’ve said, what I’m saying—I’m getting the vibe that there’s something else going on here; some other subtext of which I’m unaware. So. Spill. [Obligatory aside: if you’d like to spill.]

If I were to indecorously speculate, I’d say you’re tethered in some way—to TU Berlin, to your department, to your thesis advisor—and that tie is personal in nature. If it weren’t, there’d be no reason to persist in courting a department that isn’t taking you seriously. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you as much. In fact, I should probably delete this entire trail of speculation but I won’t because I’m concerned there’s something professionally untoward going on, and there are a lot of barriers to discussing that sort of thing within academia, not the least of which is it’s an apprenticeship-based system with unequal power dynamics that can be and are exacerbated in a multiplicity of ways by the occasional dick/idiot/creeper of a feudal science overlord.

Okay, I’m done now. But details. Details. Let’s have them.

This email took time for me to put together; apologies for making you wait. I struggled with how to word a personal account of August Tenth, and I never did come up with a variant I was satisfied with. Ask me again down the road. For now, you’ll have to content yourself with just a little shave off the beginning.

I was giving my spiel on the Geiszler Lab to my department’s new grad students. I was halfway through outlining the novel signaling pathway we’d just identified when one of them said something like, “Holy shit,” and I said something along the lines of, “I know, right?” but she was less talking about my science and more about what was happening online. She said, “Something’s attacking San Francisco,” and I said, “Something? Some thing is attacking San Francisco?” then she said, “Yes—like—like a sea monster?” So I said: “A+ for attitude and interest sets; D- for topical relevance; monsters are cool, it’s important to have hobbies, but a little more focus please, kids.” At that point though, everyone had started checking their phones, and pretty soon we were all watching live on my laptop. Me and a room full of terrified baby academics trying to take the whole thing like champs, practicing professionalism to varying degrees. It was awful. Two out of eight of them were from California, including the kid who’d interrupted my lecture. She’d been texted by a family member in Pasadena. Her twin brother was at Caltech. He died the second day. She’s rotating in my lab.

I feel uncomfortable with what happened, uncomfortable with the coexistence of my personal academic passion [politically incorrect aside: that thing was, biologically speaking, amazing] and the horrible social sequelae of the aftermath of K-day.

As for Thucydides, you’ve won me over. He’s winning me over as well. I liked him right from the beginning. I’m up to Pericles’ Funeral Oration:  “…the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.” I don’t even need to annotate that one. It stands on its own. 

Attached you will find the next round of my notes on your notes on my notes on your draft. Happy Quantum Field Tuesday; you have been science charm’d. 

You’d better address me as,

Newton

Dear Newton,

I feel the need to provide some explanation for the document I am attaching. You have now sent me two rounds of extensive comments and I feel I’m gaining an understanding of the seat of your approach. You are relying on a limited knowledge of certain properties of quantum field theory (derived from your experience in physical chemistry and also, no doubt, from your conversations with Dr. Meyer), but you’re trying to fill in certain gaps in your understanding by extrapolating from what you know of classical field theory. Entirely understandable!

There is no need to remedy this, as I can intuit what you’re attempting to convey. However, it occurred to me that you might want to extend your knowledge base. It also occurred to me that extending your knowledge base might open a few conceptual doors. I have, therefore, provided a short (by some standards) introduction to quantum field theory by adapting a set of four lectures I developed for the Masterstudiengänge at the Physikalische Institute. I’ve tailored it to your skill level and interests, but I think it should provide you with a grounding that is significantly broader than your conceptual array appears to be at present. Feel free to read it or not, according to your time and interest level. It is certainly not necessary; I will continue to read any future comments with enthusiasm either way. Also, please do not take this as a negative judgment on your proficiency level. You are not a quantum physicist, but you might have been one. It is extraordinary. 

As for your speculations regarding my current situation at TU Berlin—you’re correct. My difficulties stem from a family situation. My father is a prominent scientist with a position of some import within the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF). [I have been meaning to ask—you stated you could read German—are you a native speaker? Because if you are, I would prefer to be conversing in German.]

My father wields considerable influence at TU Berlin, and while he is interested in the biology and physical origins of Trespasser, he’s disinclined to see me hitch my personal career to an aberrant, sensationalistic event. He and I came to an agreement, of sorts, when I was seventeen. He agreed to financially support me while I pursued my choice of profession to the extent I was able to do so, sans interference; but in the event of my failure, we agreed I would attend TU Berlin. As I mentioned, I was ultimately rejected from the experimental aviation program I entered at age seventeen, and so, true to my word, I enrolled at TU Berlin, where I have, thus far, been very well mentored by my thesis advisor who also happens to be a close friend of my father’s.

It is only now that I’m running into professional difficulty because of this association. I should have known better, but I admit that disappointment had clouded my judgment at the time I matriculated at TU Berlin. So when I say I am being opposed by my department, I do mean this, in as far as it goes, but I also mean that my department is in large part funded by a governmental branch that contains a member of my own family who has, ostensibly, my best wishes at heart and an unfortunate proclivity for interfering in my affairs.

I will spare you a quarter century of detail on this count. In fact, enough of this entirely. 

I have never had any particular interest in biology. I think this comes in part because of the lack of quantitative rigor within the life sciences (apologies; present company excluded of course), and because I have a personal dislike for the medical establishment, having interacted with them far too many times at an impressionable age. However, I’ve been inspired by your notes on my manuscript to look a bit further into your corpus of academic work if only because I am curious as to where you’ve been expending your intellectual resources, if not the field of quantum mechanics.

I have confined myself thus far to your work in tissue regeneration, specifically focusing on your paper from 2010, which I believe describes the novel biochemical pathway you mentioned in passing in your last email. The experimental complexity and sophistication of your paper makes me relieved at my choice of mathematics! It seems though, that you’re not unique in this—I picked up a copy of Cell yesterday and nearly every article has the idea density of a post-modern novel and requires the GDP of a small nation. It is not that the reading in my field lacks density—far from it; I had just underestimated the technical sophistication of cutting edge life science.

In addition, I have been specifically looking for commentary upon your work within the broader scientific community and it seems you have been exceedingly well received; well, this is certainly an understatement—I had no idea you were so prominent. Were you aware that there is an editorial in Science this week that outlines a set of personnel recommendations for the soon-to-be-assembled Joint Exobiology Task Force? Were you aware that you’re being recommended for consideration as Chief Scientific Advisor? I’m certain you must. You are not their top choice—do you know the woman who is? She appears to be a direct competitor of yours.

I suppose what I’m trying to convey with this stack of likely rhetorical questions is that I’d not say no to some elaboration on these topics…your work, your professional milieu, and your future plans.

Sincerely, 

Hermann

Dear Hermann,

Soooo, just to be clear:

One—you wrote me a personalized textbook by hand.

Two—your original career plan was to be a TEST PILOT for EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT?!?!

Three—your father, the German Cabinet Minister, is the one who’s been brain-blocking you??!?!?!

This is too much for me to take, you have to prepare me for these things, you can’t just drop them like rocks, I’m somewhat excitable,

Newton

Dear Newton,

One—you are grossly misrepresenting my notes.

Two—yes.

Three—yes.

Please explain your email in an expeditious manner,

Hermann

Dear Hermann,

Will you give me five seconds? I’m writing expeditiously, sir. Also? No, I will not chat in real time with you, so don’t you dare ever, ever ask me. Not ever. You’ll ruin my life.

Get out of my inbox and go to bed; it’s three AM in Berlin, 

Newton

Dear Newton,

Duly noted. 

-Hermann

Dear Hermann,

One. You’ll need to parse this whole thing with your father and your department a little bit further, because it’s extremely interesting and I’m tempted to say all sorts of things that I won’t actually say at this point, unenlightened as I am regarding the context in which all of this is taking place.

Here’s my best guess: you thought you had a better chance of tapping into your department’s discretionary funding than you did with a doomed external grant proposal no one will put their stamp on because of fear of political reprisal? From your father?

That’s a difficult position. A total mess, some might say. Also, it sounds like a thing that’s not your fault.

Are you sure this whole situation can’t be torqued to your advantage? It’s probably too soon for me to be metaphorically machinating in your general direction, but you’ve got a giant personal fulcrum; maybe you can reverse the direction of leverage, if that makes sense. I’ll stop strategizing about this until I know more.

I suppose I’m just surprised that this is the nature of the block you’re encountering. Your description of departmental stagnation sounded so much more pedestrian at a first level of approximation. Your father politically trying to influence your science career is less pedestrian. But that’s the thing about first level approximating, am I right? [Editorial aside: I’m right.]  The weirdest part about this, (in my opinion) is that your father seems to be trying to shove you in a theoretical pure math/pure physics direction, rather than toward a practical real world application. That seems…almost, nice? I suppose I wouldn’t want my biological offspring to go after sea monsters? [Accuracy aside: that’s a lie. Yes, I absolutely would be so proud if Little Sally became Captain Nemo. (Um, I do not have a child; if I had a child, I would not name it Sally.) I would deeply question my parenting skills if Sally became unreasoningly obsessed with living at the bottom of the sea and acquired some anti-Imperialist tendencies that were so extreme that…wait, now that I’ve put it this way, it seems like I was a great parent. Rock on Sally. I’m getting off topic. So, Sally can wait. She knows it’s too late as we’re walking on by. [Editorial note: I know what I’m singing tomorrow when Dr. Meyer and her new girlfriend drag me to karaoke.] In any case, I’m glad your PI isn’t behaving like an absolute dick and you haven’t been pressed into indentured science servitude.

Two. Experimental test pilot. Experimental test pilot? Do you realize—like, I seriously have the urge to yell in your face: “DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW DANGEROUS THAT IS?” But I’m assuming you’ve heard this multiple times, so I won’t do it. It’s hard for me. I’m always dispensing unnecessary life advice to graduate students. I’ll suppress the urge. This career option, aside from being ridiculously lethal also has a streak of badassery the width of a light-year? I’m having a hard time putting together a complete picture that encompasses you, Thucydides, your uber-suave quantum field theorizing, and the experimental test pilot thing; who are you even? I don’t understand how you can get more interesting all the time; you’ll have to tell me how to do that; I, like almost all humans, definitely become less interesting with time; literally everyone agrees. Your mystique trajectory is skyrocketing.

All this commentary could seem wildly insensitive given the outcome of your initial career plans. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you had some kind of physical limitation placed on your personal/professional goals; that is the worst, that is so unfair, that should not be allowed, I hate being trapped by my genes on the level of the individual, the group, the society, the species. It’s such a striking biological insult; that locking of the conscious mind to a decaying arrangement of carbon. Striking like a work of art, striking like a slap in the face. Like getting turned into sea foam as a consolation prize in the original version of The Little Mermaid. I can empathize. I can sympathize. I can feel your position at least a little bit. [Explanatory aside: my stupid brain has the habit of locking me into certain psychological states that may or may not be professionally and personally advantageous; no one wants details, but gestalts are always pretty with that smooth slide of a generalized edge.] In short, I resonate right on that frequency. I really do. 

Three. I’m probably not conversant enough to switch to German—or, put another way, I’m not as capable of expressing myself in German as you are in English. I lived in Berlin and spoke exclusively German until about age seven, at which point it became very apparent I wasn’t meshing well with German primary school education. I went stateside, where my mother pulled strings to sort out an educational situation for me that was a bit more well suited to my personality and skillsets. So, my spoken German is respectable; but my technical vocabulary is lacking. [Editorial aside: this is part of what’s taking me so long to get through your thesis. In a year or so, I may have the technical vocab amassed to swap away from English.]

On the subject of families; I don’t have the closest relationship with mine. My mother is actually a little bit of a celebrity depending on the circles you run in. Her name is Maria Schwartz. Google her. I’ve spoken to her about twenty times over the course of my life; she adores the idea of me (most of the time), and I like the idea of her (most of the time), but that’s about as far as it goes. I know my dad a bit better—but it was my uncle who raised me. When I was born, both my parents were married to other people (not each other). That was awkward for them. My uncle stepped up to the plate for reasons that I’ve never understood; I think he may just have an overactive sense of responsibility. That, or I was really adorable before I started speaking. Anyway, he’s the guy who gets a call from me on holidays, not my biological parents. 

Four. I’ve lost track of so many conversational threads. I have been meaning to mention JET Force to you, but I’m going to defer this discussion for now because it will be more meaningful to talk about it a few weeks when all the bureaucracy that’s in the air has had time to crash to the ground and the subsequent dust to settle. In the meantime I’ll say yes, I did see that article, it was, in fact, tacked to my office door by someone in my lab with DON’T YOU DARE written in red sharpie with all caps. I don’t think my lab fears me like they ought to. I’m always trying and failing to inspire fear, Machiavelli style. [Accuracy aside: that is an absolute lie; I’m just bitter right now because I took them paintballing a week ago and they all turned on me; my clothes were ruined, and my lab manager had to drive me home because not all my joints were working anymore; how dare they issue me ultimatums after that kind of thing, I ask you.]

I do know Dr. Anderson. Yes, she’s my principal competitor and she likes to go after me with casual ad hominems within our group of collective peers; which I haaaaate. There are different kinds of science-styles but the one she’s using has gotta be my least favorite. She does good work (I guess); sometimes our results don’t perfectly jive, but that’s the nature of the empirical beast, and the field will hammer it out as it paves down the current paradigm; I just happen to not appreciate the attitude she brings to bear towards me specifically. I think she’s a little bit afraid of me and so she’s trying to cast me as someone who’ll be a great scientist in ten years or so when it’s time for her to retire but that’s just her personal spin on the reality of the situation, which is that I am, at worst, her peer, and at best, peerless (ha). [Editorial aside: I’m a little bit arrogant; so sorry about that.] This would bother me less except for the part where she’s the number one JET Force pick, probably partially BECAUSE of that Geiszler-directed condescension. People internalize that garbage and it is just. Maddening. She’s trying to get the larger cell biology community to think of me as a rising star with a lot of potential, which is annoying because sure, that’s true as far as it goes, but I’m also kind of in my prime already.

I am excited to read your Quantum Field Bedtime Story.

Very Sincerely,

Newton

P.S. Seriously though, “notable hair?” What does it look like? I’ve already tried to google you like a creeper and you must be social-media averse or have everything locked down because I can’t find anything! 

P.P.S. If you were an aspiring pilot are you, by any chance, a gamer? 

P.P.P.S. The Athenians are about to launch the Sicilian Expedition and I have a bad feeling about this. I have a great feeling about Alcibiades though. Love that guy. I’m sure nothing will go wrong when he’s involved.

P.P.P.P.S. I’m feeling really nostalgic about Nonexistent Sally right about now.

Dear Newton,

Do you know that I own a recording of Puccini’s Tosca (recorded in 2004) with your mother on the cover? I’m looking at it right now. It was given to me by my sister Karla, who saw her perform a decade ago in London. Several exchanges back, you speculated I’d prefer music written in the 1700s. Puccini, however, was not born until 1850, so you’ll need to expand the bounds of your estimation. I do, admittedly, prefer classical to contemporary music. I am particularly fond of early twentieth century composers—Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel. I’m terribly curious—did you inherit any of your mother’s innate musical talents? I seem to recall you mentioning that you have a band. What is it that you play? I have always admired musical skill. They say it accompanies mathematical talent, but I never possessed it myself. I was a mediocre violinist for years before I gave it up. I don’t lack discipline, but practicing failed to hold my interest and willpower is a currency I considered best applied elsewhere (in my case). 

Are you genuinely interested in the details of my relationship with my father? I can’t imagine you are, and yet, I find myself terribly curious about the minutiae of your personal history, if only because your observations are so compelling; not only when it comes to quantum field theory, but universally. You have an unusual way of looking at the world. You must know this about yourself. (I hope you know this about yourself.) If you still want a second approximation of detail regarding my father and his habit of exerting unwanted influence on my career trajectory, I will give it to you. But, as you’ve been rather sparse on the particulars of your own personal life, I’d rather not overstep the bounds of familiarity. Were I to describe the situation with the level of detail you seem to be requesting, you’d receive something of an abbreviated biography given so many of my life experiences are tied up in my relationship with my family. 

The piloting of experimental aircraft is much easier to explain. Yes, of course it would have been dangerous, but no more dangerous than hands-on-exobiology (specifically JET Force) is likely to be. I enjoy the idea of pushing exploratory boundaries. This is, of course, the connection between cutting edge aircraft and cutting edge mathematics. There is nothing so mysterious about any of it. I am simply a lonely wanderer of the outer perimeters of humanity’s purview, keeping myself company with like-minded others who happen to have lived hundreds of years ago. Hence, the Thucydides. All of it is logically consistent when viewed through such a lens.

Speaking of Thucydides, tonight I finished the book. It’s beginning to feel like autumn here; the odd precocious Linden tree has begun to turn yellow. The nights are growing cold. For the first time in months I had to close a window. In the immediate aftermath of finishing Thucydides’ account I find myself possessed of a bit more mental equanimity. His city fell, but it’s remembered, all the same. Humanity as a whole has endured things of great scale and scope. We lose what we had in gaining what we become. Loss is a requisite part of change, but even so, some of us remember Pericles.

Sincerely,

Hermann

P.S. My hair is not notable, and I pay a fee to a professional company to remove references to me online.

P.P.S. I’m not sure I know what you mean by “gamer.”