//------------------------------// // Chapter 3: Dinner Conversation // Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Chapter 3: Dinner Conversation Gus wanted to call his wife and tell her that he’d be spending an indefinite period of time performing an insane research project, he really did. It was just that he kept missing the phone every time he grabbed for it. So he decided to go down to the bar at the far end of the hotel’s restaurant and get drunk instead. Only he didn’t make it out of the restaurant. “Gus? Gus Guiseman? Is that you?” Gus turned to see two men sitting at opposite ends of a booth. He was sure he knew both of them, but he could only recall the name of one of them. “Freeman? What are you doing out here?” “Attending the annual meeting of the Federation of American Scientists, like I do every year.” Freeman Dyson was a tall man, seemingly aged in advance of his years. In particular, it appeared as if the rest of his face had shrunk, leaving an oversized set of ears and a nose. His thinning once-golden hair was brushed carelessly atop his head. The eyebrows encircling his sunken blue eyes were practically gone, making the bony ridges below the skin that much more visible. He spoke with an English accent. “You remember Pending Theory?” Gus grabbed Pending’s hand and shook it vigorously. “Pending! It’s been ages! How’s the world of physics been treating you?” Pending Theory was a small man with golden skin and dark brown hair. A small pin on his lapel showed his mark to be an old fashioned quill pen being used to write something in cursive. “I, uh…never ended up getting into physics, remember? I got my degree in mathematics instead.” “Oh.” “I’m actually President of the University of Oregon now.” “Oh. Oh! Congratulations! I’m sure it’s much more interesting than a boring career in physics.” “Of course,” said Pending. He didn’t sound very convinced of the truth of his words. “Do you mind if I join you?” Gus asked. “You haven’t eaten already, have you?” “Not at all,” said Freeman, getting up to let Gus sit between them. Just then Delver was led by a waiter right past them. “He looks familiar,” Pending confided to Gus. “That’s Truth Delver, the TV historian,” Gus told Pending. “I just met him today.” “Well invite him over,” said Freeman. “Otherwise we’ll be stuck talking shop all night.” “Delver, over here! Come join the party—I was just telling them about you.” “Oh, hello, Gus. Who are your friends?” “Take a seat. These are Freeman Dyson, Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Learning in Princeton, and Pending Theory, President of the University of Oregon. Oh, and you don’t mind me calling you ‘Delver’ instead of ‘Truth’, do you?” “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. And I do prefer ‘Delver’ in casual conversation—‘Truth’ I’ve found is rather too intimidating.” “Where are your students?” “Gnosi and Meridiem have decided to see the Falls at night.” The men ordered their meals at that point. “I believe I saw your episode dedicated to Windsor Castle,” said Freeman. “I learned some things I never knew about the place, and I practically grew up in its shadow.” “Did you now?” asked Delver. “Have you lived in America long?” “Since ’47. Gus here was practically the first American I met.” “Really!” “I received a Commonwealth Fellowship to study at Cornell under Cino Cycle, and everything was brand new to me, as I was not only changing countries, but also disciplines: from mathematics to physics. I was giving myself a tour of the campus, when who should I bump into but Mr. Guiseman here, who immediately applied the full charm offensive against me. “What can I say? Gus Guiseman was and is the most utterly American person I have ever met. There was nothing of the systematic to him, nothing of the contemplative. At least not in the public self that he presented. Everything was spark and sizzle with him then.” “You make it sound like I’m a fraud, or that I was one,” Gus groused. “I’ll have you know that I have always been 100% authentic to myself.” “Oh, I’m sure you believe that,” Freeman said calmly. “And please, don’t be insulted—the world needs people like you, or else where would the crazy but true new ideas ever come from? Back then, though, you took it too far, to the point where it got in the way. No sooner would you come up with one brilliant theory and start developing it, before you would put it aside to work on another brilliant idea that barged into your mind. As a result, you never finished anything.” “If you say so,” said Gus doubtfully. “So, what else do you think about me?” “I think there’s a good chance that you never would have gotten that Nobel without me there to grab you by the shoulders and steer you in the proper direction.” Gus opened his mouth to object, but then closed it and thought carefully. “You’re probably right,” he finally concluded. “Not that getting the Nobel Prize was entirely a good thing in my life.” “Now of course you’ve mellowed considerably since moving out to California, but in your heart I believe that you are like most geniuses I have ever met: overgrown children, the lot of them.” “I’m much better now,” Gus said, his arms crossed. “You just ask Gabe.” He thought for a moment. “Or better yet, don’t. He’s biased.” Delver laughed. “I suppose I’m opening a can of worms, but what exactly did he get the Nobel Prize for?” “For working out the interaction between radiation and matter,” Gus answered glibly. Freeman and Pending gave him a look. “What? It certainly sounds clever, and it’s less rude than my previous answer when asked to explain it in a single sentence, which was: If I was able to explain it to laymen in a single sentence, then it wouldn’t be worthy of a Nobel Prize.” “Well maybe you can try explaining it in more than one sentence.” “It was like this,” Freeman began. “In 1947, there was a problem that everyone in our tiny branch of theoretical physics was obsessing over, the fact that the equations describing the universe as we knew it blew up into infinities every time we tried to use them to match up with the latest experimental results. Another physicist had come up with an answer to this problem—it was very vigorous, very formal, and very, very slow. I suppose with the supercomputers we have today nobody would have quibbled with Schwinger’s method and he would have shared his Nobel with a lot fewer people. But back in the late 40’s his method was simply unusable. “Guiseman on the other hand had an alternate method. Of course he had an alternate method—he bragged about deriving a completely new alternative to the quadratic equation back when he was in middle school that he insisted on using whenever possible, and his calculus looked like it came from Mars. He even had his own symbols for sine, cosine and tangent, because he didn’t like having these little words being the only English in his equations. It just so happened that this time his alternate versions of Schwinger’s equations were easier to use than the originals. I tried to promote them, but they were full of counter-intuitive ideas like reverse time travel that turned everyone off. To try and sell Guiseman’s ideas better, I tried to come up with some way of illustrating them. Gus saw what I was trying to do and once again came up with a much better alternative—the Guiseman Diagrams that they use to teach particle physics to high school students to this very day. And the diagrams got Guiseman his share of the 1965 Nobel.” “‘His share’? Didn’t you get any part of that prize?” “No. The Institute has this rule about not giving a Nobel Prize out to more than three people for the same thing. And Tomonaga did far more to deserve his share than I ever did. Besides, they don’t call Newton’s Laws ‘Newton-and-Halley’s Laws’, despite the fact that without Edmund Halley, the Principia would never have been published. In any case, I’ve managed to pick up my own collection of prizes through the years.” By this time dinner had arrived—steak for Freeman, chicken for Gus, pasta for Pending and a vegetarian dish for Delver. After they had finished, Delver turned to Pending. “And how do you know Gus?” he asked. “I hired him to consult with me, and I want to see what I’ve gotten myself into.” Pending Theory smiled. “I met Dr. Guiseman at Los Alamos. I was a graduate student in physics, while he was recently graduated.” “Did you have the opportunity to work with him often?” “Oh yes,” said Gus before Pending had a chance to answer. “He was in Cino Cycle’s theoretical division, the same as me. My job was to tackle all of the tough calculations with my team of calculators—” “Your team of pretty, teenage girl calculators,” added Pending. “So of course we’d find every excuse imaginable to walk our calculations over and chat with them.” “And I was always the one guarding the door to their room like a guard dog,” said Gus. “I had an awful lot of anxious mothers to answer to.” The others laughed at the joke. “Yes, I consulted with Gus plenty of times to run calculations for the Project. But in addition, I was working on my graduate thesis when I had the time, and I thought to use him as a sounding board.” The smile left Pending’s face. “That turned out to be a big mistake.” Gus winced. The others didn’t appear to notice. “It did?” asked Delver. “Yes. Now don’t hold this against Gus—he meant well, he just didn’t know the devastating effect his genius could have on someone who wasn’t quite as smart as he thought I was.” “What happened?” “Well, I had what I thought was a completely new theory about treating positrons as if they were electrons that moved backward in time, and how this would resolve certain differences between how such particles moved in a particle detector compared to existing theory. It turned out I didn’t have to explain my theory to Gus in any detail, because he had already come up with it. And furthermore, he had thought it out in such detail that he had already proven that it couldn’t possibly be true. He explained his reasoning to me, and I couldn’t find a hole in it, so I now had nothing to graduate with when the war ended and I went back to Princeton. That’s the reason I switched from physics to mathematics. “It turned out that Gus’s objection was wrong. It was based on an experiment whose results were later proved to be way off. It turned out that happened a lot with experiments in the 30’s—the experimental physicists had equipment that was an order of magnitude less accurate than they thought they were. And Gus took his positron theory, refined it, and shared that Nobel Prize for it. I looked at that paper that earned his prize and I wish I could have taken my stab in the dark as far as he did—I really do. But I just can’t say it. Compared to me, that man was a giant. And he still is.” “Look, Pending, I’m sorry,” said Gus. “The last thing I’d want to do is to intimidate someone who asked for my help.” “Yeah, but you do,” Pending said, somewhat severely. “There’s a reason that none of your students have gone on to do anything truly significant in physics. Most of them change fields, like I did. I’ve made it a bit of a hobby of mine to collect accounts of all the times that you’ve proven some other physicist wrong. It’s a pretty long file. For example, there was this seminar that Caltech put on back in the 60’s on the subject of quasars, which had just been discovered. Willy Fowler presents his findings about this absolutely new thing, an object the size of a star giving out as much light as an entire galaxy, and he admits that he has no idea how this thing is working. The next day, the very next day, you corner Fowler on the halls of Caltech, and tell him that if he studies these quasars a bit more, he’ll discover that they’re gravitationally unstable. And of course it turns out that you’re right. Fowler confronts you, demanding to know how you could possibly have figured out that fact from the very little data that Fowler had presented in the seminar. And you admit that a few years ago, you had imagined an object with the properties of a quasar, just for fun, and worked out that imaginary object’s properties in a hundred-page paper. Fowler demanded that you publish that paper, now that the objection that the object didn’t exist no longer stood in the way. And you said something noncommittal, and walked away. You never published that paper. Half a world away, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar did write that paper on the properties of quasars, knowing nothing about your work, and he won a Nobel Prize for it. And I’m left wondering how much was missing from Chandrasekhar’s much shorter paper that was in your dashed-off masterpiece, moldering in a desk somewhere. What do you want? What’s holding you back? Are you afraid of swallowing nuclear physics whole, leaving nothing for us common mortals?” “I…well…” Gus stammered. “That paper, it wasn’t complete. You couldn’t really get anything big out of it.” “But you could,” Freeman pointed out coldly. “Chandrasekhar’s paper on quasars laid the groundwork for a whole new field of astrophysics. A field you could have led. And I know for a fact this isn’t the first time you’ve backed down from the brink of revolutionizing the field. I have a theory, that you just can’t stand confrontation.” “Well that’s ridiculous,” countered Gus. “I stand up for my beliefs all the time.” “Sure,” said Freeman. “You stand up against blowhards and ignoramuses. Easy targets who have nothing to defend themselves with but their power, which is nothing against the force of your combined assault of common sense and simple logic. But when you are truly up against your peers, against people you respect? People who may or may not be wrong, but because of hard-to-interpret facts, not ego? The idea of losing against that is too much for you. I’m telling you this as a friend, Gus. That book you just published? Surely You’re Joking Mr. Guiseman? That got you the respect of the general public, but if you truly want to win over your fellow physicists, you really need to put your opinions out there in the form of papers. Even if you’re wrong.” “Especially if you’re wrong,” offered Pending. “The idea out there is that you’re a sore loser, and a bit of a coward.” Gus said nothing. “When the Senate witch-hunt had Oppenheimer in their cross-hairs, where were you?” asked Freeman. “Now that’s not fair,” said Gus. “I was on sabbatical in Brazil, teaching the latest advances to college physics professors.” “And none of those professors bothered to tell you what was going on back in America? I’m sure at least one of them would have been keeping track, and it was very well covered in the press.” Gus said nothing. “And what about the Federation of American Scientists?” asked Pending. “Why haven’t you ever joined? Why have you never shown up to any of our anti-nuclear protests? Do you think the military use of atomic power is a good thing?” “Well no,” said Gus. “I just don’t think that protesting does any good. In fact, public protests in the wake of Three Mile Island are the reason why the peaceful use of atomic energy has ground to a halt in this country. But no protest has ever made a dent in the number of our nuclear missiles. And it never will.” “You could show up anyway,” said Freeman. “Even an empty gesture has meaning. And you, with your new-found popularity, could mean an awful lot, maybe not to the government, but certainly to the populace.” “Sure,” Gus said with a scowl as he rose to his feet, “and then I have to go back the next day to Caltech, where half of the physicists are hawks. It’s not worth it. And neither is this conversation.” After dropping a couple of twenty-dollar bills on the table, he pushed his way out and walked back towards the elevators. “Well, at least he isn’t getting drunk,” remarked Pending. “Congratulations,” Freeman said, turning to Delver. “You’ve just witnessed the rarely-seen grumpy side to Professor Guiseman. Keep telling him how brilliant he is and you’ll probably be fine. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Delver: I have the utmost respect for Gus Guiseman. It’s just that I’m disappointed that he doesn’t fully live up to his incredible potential.” He looked down at the recently delivered bill, and used a pen to write out everyone’s shares after an infinitesimal pause to perform the calculations in his head. “Is there anything else you’d like to ask us?” Delver stared in the direction that Gus had departed for several seconds, a disappointed frown on his face. With a sigh, he looked back at the others. “Are there a lot of Markists in physics?” he asked. “Yes,” answered Freeman. “Although I resist the stereotype that most of the remainder are atheists. I for one am a practicing Christian.” “Really?” Delver said, glancing at Gus’ vacated seat. “Yes, and we get along wonderfully, tonight’s evidence to the contrary.” “But…he’s pretty emphatic about his atheism.” Dyson raised an invisible eyebrow. He collected himself for a few moments (watching as Delver took Gus’ place as the one squirming in his chair) before finally replying. “I believe that God created this universe, and that He created us. He endowed us with a sense of wonder and curiosity. The former is how we know that God exists. The latter is how we explore this universe, understand it, and use that knowledge to leave our mark on the universe, a mark that I am convinced will be mostly for good, for in doing this we will be emulating our Creator. But we will never understand Him, because He is incomprehensible. “I have a problem with any Christian who claims that they know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what God’s intentions are. I believe that putting ‘certainty’ and ‘religion’ in the same sentence is an act of lunacy. I am a scientist, not because I want to know how everything works, or because I want to remove all mystery out of the universe, but because I believe that mystery is infinite, and the more we study it, the better we as humans become because of what we learn. “Gus Guiseman’s beliefs are not that different from mine when you come down to it. There is no God at the summit in Gus’ mind, but other than that, there is the same reverence for mystery. Gus was in an interview with the BBC in 1981, and he was asked how he felt as an atheist not knowing what would happen to his soul after he died. And he said—” “‘I don’t have to know an answer,’” Pending Theory quoted from memory. “‘I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, about being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.’” He laughed brokenly. “I really need to let him go.” “I wish there were more atheists like him.”