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: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Science Charm

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

At times I feel as though you may have a firmer grasp on the conceptual underpinnings of quantum physics than many of my colleagues, though I am certain this cannot truly be the case. Perhaps a better way to put this is that 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 explicitly annotated questions, your observations strike me as having an intuitive quality just 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. I am not certain I would describe this predilection for a minimalist style as hubris exactly, but there is certainly an element of glamor to the logical leap. I suspect this stems from the occasionally 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 tend to 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 most formal clothing 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 that 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 vague—how to put this—disapproval that extra-scientific pursuits seem to elicit from driven colleagues. I have less time for reading now than I once did, but I find it psychologically helpful in uncertain times, and 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 because it strikes me as topical, because I have a fondness for exiled authors, and because I have always wanted to read it. I am somewhat concerned that my projected reading time may be shorter than what average German life expectancies might 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 entirely 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 will no longer feel compelled to drink Oettinger for god’s sake.)  Frustrated hyperbole aside, I have very much enjoyed this entire 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 entirely forthcoming) disclosure of your mathematical background. There is no reason to minimize your qualifications to any extent; or, perhaps I should clarify—there is no reason to minimize your qualifications to any extent 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 States the anti-intellectual sentiment is more extreme than it is here. I’m not certain how true this might be—it seems that 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 just 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?

And 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 of the scientists who attempted to collect samples perished in the attempt. I am certain you’ve thought extensively on the subject, and it is at least peripherally related to your area of expertise. 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 aeorosolized blood can permeate a filter-based respirator. Is this actually the case?

I shall leave off my rambling here and resign myself to another fruitless appeal for material 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 am terribly flattered by your analysis of my analysis, or, rather, your analysis of my analytical style. Allow me to say: right back at ya, but inverted. Somewhat. I’m not going to 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 a very polite phraseology you’ve chosen—‘sloppy’ might be more accurate], but I will 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 out a little bit with 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 cannot even tell you. Are you seriously a graduate student? You do not 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 obviously 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 straight 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?]   And while I’m on the topic of impropriety, I will also admit to drinking whilst typing. Alas, I cannot 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 called Camera Obscura. I say ‘faux’ dive bar 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 decently cutting edge 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. A little bit. ‘Nerd rock’ is a really disingenuous name. Let me guess. You are 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. [Explanatory aside:  the Thucydides may have something to do with me receiving that vibe, I think.]

I am drinking tequila. Oh GOD this email is going to be long. Part of the reason for that is: full disclosure, I’m currently out on the town, at a bar, with Kat, as, like, a confused wingman, of sorts? I didn’t realize that was going to 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 notably fashionable shoes). Consequently, I am now responding at length to a very important “work email” while Kat and Liz stare deeply 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 hexagonial honeycombing? Honestly though, it’s not the kind of thing that really yanks my extracurricular chain, if that’s not incomprehensibly idiomized. There are two reasons for this. If I’m reading for science, I like my science to be crisp and contemporary. If I’m not reading for science then I prefer to be not reading for science. I tend to 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 am embarrassingly well versed in manga. I have taken a strange interest (that I cannot explain to you) 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’ve found 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’m not going to lie. 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 it was actually 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 biolevel four lab. I’ll send you the Nature paper where they describe this. Anyway, Blue was found within 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 aeorsolization. You need a mask with a ridiculously small filter size prevent breathing the stuff in. But they’re producing the things. You can already buy them from two companies. For research. And for cleanup. It’s going to be hard to do arduous work in them because if there’s any particulate matter in the air those small pore-sizes are going to clog and make it impossible to breathe. 

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 was interviewing for a post-doc at Berkeley during the Trespasser attack. He was exposed to Kaiju Blue and didn’t make it. Awfulness. Just, total awfulness. He emailed me a first-hand account, called me a few times. I think mainly out of a desire to make his death contribute to an understanding of the interaction between an exobiological toxin and human tissues and I seemed like the go-to guy at the time? We weren’t extremely close, more like science buddies with similar musical tastes, who rocked out once per week, but god it was distressing. It would have been distressing if I hadn’t known him at all. Anyway, very long (and overly personal) story short…I ended up passing the entire thing on to a colleague who’s an MD for him to write up as a case report. So ultimately, my friend absolutely did contribute to science, but god, I mean really I mean god.]

Four. I’ll keep you posted, because as unsettled as I was by the whole thing, it’s kind of my area and I fully intend to switch fields to xenobiology. (Have I mentioned this to you yet?)  I’m already doing it. I’m not—well, I’m just not going to work on Blue (specifically) right now, primarily because I don’t think I could handle it if one of my graduate students died. Like they did not sign up for that level of shit. They signed up for preventing neoplastic transformation. 

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 and I will shortly 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 Berlin-ward vector of 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 mechanics of the rift at the bottom of the Pacific. The objections to my proposal seemed to center around two themes. The first was the lack of sufficient evidence that there is any distortion of space-time 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 am attempting to set for myself is potentially unrelated to my field of inquiry and therefore a possible dead-end when it comes to my career (and a sizable allotment of available department ‘crush’ funding—that is the best translation I can come up with; it is somewhat peculiar to our particular department—but it is meant as a bridge to support transitioning investigators). I countered that, as no extant scientific fields can currently explain the events of last month, such an argument would preclude all research into an extremely topical natural disaster. The meeting was 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, they were unsuccessful in this. Should I wish to continue pursing my present course, 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 childhood illness combined with accelerated private tutoring. I matriculated early at University and 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 was unable to meet. I ultimately 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 that I’ve never met may be significantly 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. Possibly you should be. I do not know quite how to express myself without sounding overly familiar or overly melodramatic, neither of which appeal to me. Nevertheless, I will proceed. It struck me that there was a palpable sense of unrest in your last message; I will elaborate no further, I will only say that I, too, have felt extremely unsettled in a personal, societal, and philosophic sense by the appearance of Tresspasser. I take no comfort in many of the specious, vacuous, wandering suppositions posed by media pundits. However, I very much appreciate sharing the narratives of those who faced similar levels of uncertainty with an equanimity I would 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 offences 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 am finding the entire account to be acutely, painfully, counterintuitively relevant. It is 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, 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 variant it might strike I can’t say, because I don’t genuinely know you (at present), no matter how much it feels like I do. In any case, should you be inclined to elaborate regarding your experiences during and in the aftermath of Trespasser’s landfall, please feel free. 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 labmate’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 that you might be waiting for me to drop your title before you drop my title because you view me as a step (or two) 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’re going to 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, just 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—as I’m thinking about the entire thing critically? I’m getting the definite 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 speculate I would say that you’re tethered in some way either to TU Berlin, to your department, or to your particular thesis advisor and that tie is personal in nature. Because if it weren’t, there’s no reason to persist in courting a department that isn’t taking you seriously. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that; in fact I should probably delete this entire trail of speculation but I won’t, only because I’m somewhat concerned that 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 essentially an apprenticeship-based system of education 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 (PI). Okay, I’m done now. But details. Details. Let’s have it.

This email took some time for me to put together, apologies for making you wait. I struggled with how to word a personal account of August tenth through August sixteenth, and I never did come up with a variant I was satisfied with. Ask me again down the road. I will tell you this much:  I was giving a spiel on the Geiszler Lab to my department’s new grad students and 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 is attacking San Francisco,” and I said, “something? Some thing is attacking San Francisco?” and then she said, “yes—like—a sea monster?” I then 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.” At that point though, everyone else had started checking their phones, and pretty soon we were all watching the thing 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. Apparently she’d been texted by a family member in Pasadena. Her twin brother, who was at Caltech. He died the second day. She’s rotating in my lab. This is why I’m not telling you the whole thing. It’s a little too soon, I suppose, and 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 feel like I 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 had better address me as,

-Newton

Dear Newton,

I feel the need to provide some sort of explanation for the document I am attaching. You have now sent me two rounds of extensive comments and I feel that I am beginning to gain 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 are trying to fill in certain gaps in your understanding by extrapolating from what you know of classical field theory. Entirely understandable!  There is also no need to remedy this, as I can see what you are 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 by adapting a set of four lectures I developed for the Masterstudiengänge at the Physikalische Institute. I have tailored it to your specific skill level and interests, but I think it should provide you with a grounding that is significantly more broad 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 interest. Also, 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 are correct, or you are, at least, an approximation of correct. My current 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—you stated you could read German—are you a native speaker? Because if you are, I would prefer to be conversing in German.]  He wields considerable influence at TU Berlin, and while he is extremely interested in the biology and physical origins of Trespasser he is 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 any interference; but should I fail we agreed that I would attend TU Berlin. As I mentioned, I was ultimately rejected from the experimental aviation program I began 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 am running into professional difficulty because of this association. I should have known better, but I must admit to not thinking entirely clearly at the time I matriculated at TU Berlin. So when I say that 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. 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, and also because I have a personal dislike for the medical establishment, having interacted with them far too many times at an impressionable age. However, I have 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 is the paper that contains the first description of 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 are not unique in this—I picked up a copy of Cell yesterday and nearly every article seems to have the idea density of a post-modern novel and require 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 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 that it has been quite 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, written by the staff of the journal that outlines a set of personnel recommendations for the soon-to-be-assembled Joint Exobiology Task Force? Were you aware that you are their second-choice pick for Chief Scientific Advisor? I’m certain you must know. Do you know the woman who is their top choice? She appears to be a direct competitor of yours. I suppose what I am trying to say with this series of rhetorical questions is that I would not say no to some elaboration on these topics. (By which I mean 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’re going to have to parse this whole thing with your father and your department a little bit further for me because it’s extremely interesting and I am tempted to say all sorts of things that I will not actually say at this point, unenlightened as I am regarding the context into which all of this is taking place. I will say that this makes so much sense to me, and I will guess that you thought you might be able to tap into your department’s discretionary funding and circumvent a doomed grant proposal that no one will put their name on with you because of fear of political reprisal? From your father, no less? That sounds terrifying. That sounds like a really difficult position. That sounds like a total mess. That 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; you’ve just got to reverse the direction of levering, if that makes sense. I will stop talking about this now. I suppose I’m just surprised that this is the nature of the weirdness you’re encountering, because 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. 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 of him? 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.)  Although 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. Her soul slides away; don’t look back in anger I heard you say. (I just quoted Oasis lyrics at you re: my hypothetical and monomaniacal daughter; I am so ashamed; but I also 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’re not in some kind of indentured science servitude. This is disorganized. Tell me more and I’ll tell you more.

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 will suppress the urge. This career option, aside from being ridiculously lethal also has a streak of badassery the width of a light year? I feel like 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 probably seems wildly insensitive given the outcome of your initial career plans. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that 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 transient 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; so, in that vein, sorry about the epic suckage of life, man; 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 that I was not jiving well with German primary school education. I went stateside, where my mother managed to pull some 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. I do not, for example, know how to say ‘Quantum Field Theory’ in German. [Editorial aside:  this is part of what is taking me so long to get through your thesis. In a year or so I may actually have the technical vocab amassed to swap away from English.]  On the subject of families; I do not have the closest relationship with mine. My mother is actually a little bit of a celebrity depending on the circles that 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 likes 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—he was less of an intermittent global enabler than a more frequent local enabler; but it was really my uncle who raised me. This is because at the time 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 entirely understood; I think he may just have an overactive sense of responsibility. That, or I was really adorable before the point that I started speaking. Anyway, he’s the guy who gets a call from me on holidays, not my biological parents. 

Four. I feel like I have 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 will say that 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 in some kind of preconceived plan; 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 is 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 got to 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 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 is it? I already tried to google you like a creeper and you must be social-media averse or have everything locked down because I cannot find anything, though I didn’t look very hard. 

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 from 2004 with your mother on the cover? I am looking at it right now. It was given to me by my sister Karla, who saw her perform a decade ago, in London. Several messages ago you speculated that I would prefer music written in the 1700s. Puccini, however, was not born until 1850, so you’ll need to modify 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 am terribly curious—did you inherit any of your mother’s innate musical talents? You very briefly mentioned that you have a band several messages back. What is it that you play? I have always greatly admired musical skill because I never possessed it myself. I was a mediocre violinist for years before I finally 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 that you are, and yet, I find myself terribly curious about the minutiae of your personal history, if only because I find your observations to be 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 that 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. Because, were I to describe the entire situation with the level of detail you seem to be requesting, you’d likely receive something of an abbreviated biography given that 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 edge 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 is beginning to feel like autumn here; the odd precocious Linden tree has begun to turn yellow and 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 is 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 are. Given that loss is a requisite part of change, 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 am not sure that I know what you mean by ‘gamer.’