Dear Colleagues
by Tom Ligon
Illustration by Laura Freas
As you no doubt have heard by now, I quit.
Now, I’m sure most of you think old Erica Thompson is a prima-donna. (it’s true), especially since she got that little award. You probably think she’s just in a snit over a raise or something. Actually, this had been a long time coming, and it has almost nothing to do with money. In particular, I was offered a job a few weeks ago, one I would have snapped up in a minute when I was fresh out of school. I’ve sort of gotten used to my cozy lifestyle, though, and I was going to pass it up.
Until this morning.
I was up until two this morning working on a new proposal. Consequently, I overslept. That got me into a rush, and I came down the stairs a little too fast. Naturally, the motion detector at the bottom of the stairs interpreted that as a fall, and deployed the air-bag.
I knew instantly that I had to call the local rescue squad to let them know it was a false alarm. Since it would be against the law to call 911 for this purpose, I had to call the normal number. It was busy. By the time I got through, they had already dispatched an ambulance and rescue vehicle, which means I’m stuck with a five-hundred dollar fine.
I was mad at myself for being so careless, but I was inclined to chalk it up to experience and get on with the day. I headed into the kitchen for a container of fat-free, cholesterol-free, salt-free, high-fiber, toxin-screened, FDA-inspected. AMA-accepted, UL-listed, nutritionally labeled, high carbohydrate fuel for Homo sapiens. Blueberry flavored, my favorite. Then I stepped over to the utensil drawer for something to eat it with. I fumbled with the child-resistant catch, and opened it to find nothing in the drawer but spoons.
Of course, you say? What else would you have in a utensil drawer? Friends, I remember when we also used knives and forks to eat with. That’s right, we used to put four-pointed implements right into our mouths, back before the Insurance Institute for Culinary Safety managed to get them banned.
Anyway, I grabbed a spoon and my briefcase, resigned to eating breakfast in the car again, and headed out to the garage. I was grateful, for once, to just be able to tell the car my destination and have it handle the driving while I choked down the tub of mush and looked over the proposal in perfect, computer-controlled, NHTSA-mandated safety.
I reached the Institute with minutes to spare before presenting my proposal to the review committee. I caught myself running down the corridor, fortunately before any alarms took notice, and reached the conference room a few seconds before the appointed time.
Dr. Prunebottom—and yes, since I’m quitting I will call everyone by their accepted nicknames, and maybe someone will tell Prunie how he earned his—glanced at his watch. “By the hair on your chinny-chin-chin, for once, Dr. Thompson. What wild and mysterious rending of the laws of physics do you propose this time?
I passed out copies of my proposal. “I want to modify the Higgs field generator for a much smaller and more intense field. I think I can get the Supercollider’s collision cross-section up enough to have a significant chance of getting to within an order of magnitude or so of primordial density, at least on a sub-nucleonic scale.”
Dr. Pigwhistle was aghast. “After the havoc you caused last time?” She held up an invoice and shook it in my general direction. “We had to replace all the detectors in the collision chamber. And you want to go further?”
I nodded. “That’s right, I do. I think I’m on the verge of something really exciting.”
Dr. Ruth—see, Ruth, your nickname isn’t all that bad—glanced over the proposal. “Well, Erica, I see you’ve included a more… shall we say… robust? Yes, a more robust detector and field generation assembly. Substantially so. Ought to be capable of soaking up quite a blast, in fact. Now, Erica, I know you have a Nobel prize and I don’t, but the fact is that you either can’t or won’t explain why these reactions are so violent. From what I can tell, you expect a geometric increase in output from the last run.”
I shrugged. “Not immediately. The detector is over-built for the present proposal. I’m hoping, however, to demonstrate a radically new physics that will lead to advanced and extremely powerful propulsion systems.”
Prunebottom pursed his lips and puffed out his cheeks in that expression he thinks conveys disgust but which actually cracks us up. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that wild-assed idea of yours that there is a form of energy faster than light, would it?”
I grimaced. One tiny little paper as an undergraduate, and your peers label you as a crackpot for life. “Let’s just say I think I’m on to something hot, but something which no responsible scientist would believe without convincing proof. I think I’ve done it already, but the detectors couldn’t take it so I lost my data.”
“Sounds to me,” Prunebottom snorted, “like you’re messing with the fabric of the Universe.”
I put my face in my hands and my elbows on the table. “Here we go again. The Trinity wager. What are the odds the first atomic bomb test will trigger a fusion reaction of the atmosphere and blow up the world? What are the odds that Erica Thompson, in approaching the conditions of the Big Bang, will snag a thread of reality that makes all of Being unravel. Guys, I thought we built the Supercollider to investigate that corner of physics.”
Pigwhistle wheezed a couple of times—my dear, you do it with every anxiety attack, which is how you earned the nickname. With a quavering voice, she offered this gem. “Please don’t repeat it outside this room, but I always felt we really built the Supercollider to keep high energy physicists off the street. Frankly, we’re already so far ahead of the technological capacity to exploit what we learned with the last generation of accelerators, I wonder how we can justify what we’re spending on this one.”
I picked my head up out of my hands. “Approve this proposal, and, if I’m right, I’ll justify it a thousand times over.”
“Justify, shmustify,” Prunebottom retorted. “We deal in pure science. But our esteemed bean-counting colleague here is right that there may be no big payoff other than knowledge. That being the case, it behooves us not to charge ahead carelessly with experiments which could be unimaginably dangerous. After all, the goal is knowledge. The way I look at it, by cautiously progressing one step at a time, waiting for peer review and confirmation, testing alternative hypotheses which would explain the data, in other words by doing good science, we should be able to reach Dr. Thompson’s goals in, say, twenty to thirty years.”
The others nodded agreement.
“OK, then,” Ruth said, pulling out her calendar, “I think we should convene a preliminary safety review board to examine the methodology used in the last test, and to propose a retro-design to back off Dr. Thompson’s parameters…”
I got up slowly and trudged out of the room, unable to watch as they castrated my proposal. I headed back to my office and spent an hour in a total funk. Finally, my head cleared and I began to examine the problem rationally.
The problem, as I now understand it, is that the whole damned country has gone to hell. And, I am ashamed to say, so have I. As individuals and as a society, we have become afraid to take risks. Each of us has come to believe that our own life is somehow important, and we’ve become so obsessed with protecting our self-important asses that we virtually eliminate any chance of accomplishing anything meaningful.