Timescape

CHAPTER TWENTY

ALBERT COOPER’S CANDIDACY EXAMINATION BEgan well enough. Gates, a high-energy physicist, started off with a standard problem. “Mr. Cooper, consider two electrons in a one-dimensional box. Can you write down for us the wave function for this state?” Gates smiled in a friendly way, trying to defuse the tension that oral examinations always had. The student nearly always balked somewhere along the line, unable to summon up some simple piece of physics purely because of his own skittering nervousness.

Cooper worked his way through an opening piece of the problem, sketching the lowest energy state. Then he stalled. Gordon could not tell if this was simple funk or a calculated delaying tactic. Lately, students had hit upon the frowning, silent stall as a method for extracting hints from their committee. Often it worked. After a moment Gates said, “Well then… should the spatial part of the wave function be symmetric?” Cooper responded eventually, “Ah… no… I don’t think so. The spins should be…” and then, halting now and then, he successfully got through the rest.

Gordon felt uneasy as Gates led Cooper through a series of routine questions, all designed to find out if the candidate knew the general background of the thesis problem he proposed to attack. The air conditioning hummed with vacant energy; Cooper’s chalk scratched and squeaked on the board. Gordon eyed Bernard Carroway, the astrophysicist. No trouble there. Carroway looked bored, impatient to be done with this ritual and get back to his calculations. The fourth and last member of the committee was the only problem: Isaac Lakin. As senior professor in the field of Cooper’s thesis, his presence was unavoidable.

Gates finished his simple questions and Carroway, blinking sleepily, passed to Lakin. Here it comes, Gordon thought.

But Lakin was not so direct. He took Cooper through a discussion of Cooper’s own experiment—usually safe ground for the student, since that was what he knew best. Lakin stressed the theoretical underpinning for the nuclear resonance effects. Cooper wrote down the scaling equations, working quickly. When Lakin probed deeper, Cooper slowed, then stopped. He tried the stalling tactic. Lakin saw through this and refused to give Cooper any meaningful hints. Carroway began to take an interest, sitting up straight for the first time during the examination. Gordon wondered why a student in difficulty always provoked more attention from a committee; was it the hunting instinct? Or a proper professorial concern that the student, presumed to be accomplished until he proved otherwise, had suddenly betrayed a fatal ignorance? Either answer was too simple, Gordon concluded.

By now Lakin had Cooper on the run. Lakin made him frame a clear picture of the theoretical model and describe the underlying assumptions. Then Lakin cut Cooper’s explanation to ribbons. His statements were vague, his reasoning sloppy. He had neglected two important effects. Gordon sat absolutely still, not wanting to interrupt because he still clung to the hope that Cooper would right himself after being blown over in this quick storm, and begin to answer correctly. That hope faded. Gordon remembered Lakin relating a comment he had written on a thesis some years ago: “Young man, there is much in this work which is original and much which is correct. Unfortunately, what is correct is not original, and what is original is not correct.”

Carroway joined in with a few incisive questions. Cooper seemed to make headway, then reverted back to his withdrawal mode, stalling for time. But in a two-hour examination there is more than enough time to uncover weaknesses. Carroway listened to Cooper’s floundering replies, eyes still half-closed, but now obviously alert, a sour expression spreading across his face. Gates peered at Cooper as if to understand how a student who had appeared bright only moments before could now be in such trouble. When Cooper turned to answer a sally from Lakin, Gates shook his head.

Gordon decided to step in. It was not a good idea to defend your student very much in the candidacy examination precisely because it was so obvious, and it implied that you, too, conceded the student’s defects. Gordon spoke up, interrupting the flow of Carroway’s probes. He pointed out that in the time remaining the committee had to consider the form and details of Cooper’s experiment, and they hadn’t touched on that yet. This worked. Gates nodded. Cooper, who had been standing with his back pressed to the blackboard, smiled with evident relief. The committee room filled with the small sounds of hands riffling through papers, bodies shifting position in uncomfortable chairs: the earlier mood was broken. Cooper could repair some of the damage.

Five minutes passed smoothly. Cooper explained his experimental setup, elaborated details of the rig. He passed around samples of his early results.

Lakin gave these papers scarcely a glance. Instead, he slipped some pages of his own into the set of data and passed them to Cooper. “My concern here, Mr. Cooper, is not only with the easy-to-understand results. I am sure the committee will find them unsurprising. What I wish to know is whether they are correct.”

“Sir?” Cooper said in a thin voice.

“We all know there are… odd… features in your work.”

“Uh, I…”

“Could you explain these things to us?”

Lakin pointed at his pages, face up on the table. They were traces showing the sudden interruption of smooth resonance curves. Gordon peered at them with a sinking feeling.

The rest of the examination seemed to go by very quickly. Cooper lost a certain calm distance he had successfully kept through the earlier questioning. He explained the spontaneous resonance effect in halting sentences. He would rush forward through an explanation he knew and, reaching the end of it, back away from its implications. He tried to edge around the question of what caused the effect. Carroway, now visibly interested, drew him back to it. Gordon’s interjections did nothing to stem the flow. Gates began to second Carroway’s skepticism, so that Cooper spun from Lakin to Carroway to Gates, meeting fresh objections as he turned from right to left. “This issue is at the heart of the thesis,” Lakin said, and the others nodded. “It must be settled. Only Mr. Cooper knows the truth of the matter.” Everyone in the room knew they were talking about the messages and Gordon and Saul Shriffer, not merely about the correctness of Cooper’s electronics. But this examination was a way for the faculty to express their professional judgment of the issue, and on this ground the battle had to be fought.

Gordon let it go as long as he dared, eating into the two hours. Finally he said, “This is all very well, but are we keeping to the point? You have seen the data—”

“Of course,” Lakin shot back. “But are they right?”

“I submit that this question is not what we are considering. This is a candidacy examination. We pass on the suitability of a topic—not on the final outcome.”

Gates nodded. Then, to Gordon’s surprise, Carroway did, too. Lakin was silent. As though the question had been settled, Gates asked Cooper an innocuous question about his setup. The examination wound down. Carroway slumped in his chair, eyes half-closed to his own interior world, the spark gone out of him. Gordon thought wryly of what the taxpayers would think of their half-awake public servant, and then recalled that Carroway followed what were, for theoreticians, standard working hours. He would arrive at noon, ready to substitute lunch for breakfast. Seminars and discussions with students took him into evening. By then he was ready to begin calculations—that is, real work. This early afternoon exam was, for him, a waking-up exercise.

Gordon’s real work began as Cooper left the room. This was when the thesis professor listened carefully to the comments and criticisms of his colleagues, ostensibly for future use in directing the thesis research of the candidate. A subtle tug of war.

Lakin opened by doubting Cooper’s understanding of the problem. True, Gordon conceded, Cooper was weak on the overall theory. But experimental students were traditionally more concerned with their detailed lab work—“stroking their apparatus,” Gordon called it, to provoke some much-needed mirth—than with the fine points of theory. Gates bought this; Carroway frowned.

Lakin shrugged, conceding it as a tied point. He paused while Carroway, and then Gates in turn, expressed some misgivings over Cooper’s occasionally sloppy work on basic physics problems—the two electrons in a box, for example. Gordon agreed. He pointed out, though, that the Physics Department could only require students to take the relevant courses and then hope that the knowledge sank in. Cooper had already passed the department’s Qualifying Examination—three days of written problems, followed by a two-hour oral examination. The fact that Cooper’s grasp of some points was still slippery was, of course, regrettable. But what could this candidacy committee do? Gordon promised to press Cooper on these subjects, to—in effect—browbeat the student into making up the deficiency. The committee accepted this, rather standard reply with nods.

So far Gordon had skated on relatively firm ice. Now Lakin tapped his pen reflectively on the table, tick, and slowly, almost languidly, reviewed Cooper’s data. The true test of an experimenter, he said, was his data. The crux of Cooper’s thesis was the spontaneous resonance effect. And this was precisely what was in question. “The thesis is an argument, let us remember, not a stack of pages,” Lakin said with dreamy ease.

Gordon countered as best he could. The spontaneous resonance phenomenon was important, yes, but Cooper was not primarily concerned with it. His topic was much more conventional. The committee should look at the spontaneous resonances as a kind of overlay, occasionally obscuring the more conventional data Cooper was trying to get.

Lakin countered in earnest. He brought up the Physical Review Letters paper, which carried the names of Lakin, Bernstein, and Cooper. The final thesis would have to mention it. “And this, of course”—a sad, weary glance toward Gordon—“means that we must bring up the entire issue of the… interpretation… which has been placed upon these… interruptions… of the resonance curves.”

“I disagree,” Gordon snapped.

“The committee must consider all the facts,” Lakin said mildly.

“The fact is that Cooper is going for a standard problem here.”

“It has not been so advertised.”

“Look, Isaac, what I do has no connection with this thesis and this committee.”

“I really rather believe,” Gates broke in, “we should focus on the possibilities of the experiment itself.”

“Quite so,” Carroway muttered, rising from his half-sleep.

“Cooper will probably not deal with the, ah, message theory at all,” Gordon said.

“But he must,” Lakin said with quiet energy. “Why?” Gordon said.

“How can we be sure his electronics gear is functioning right?” Gates put in.

“Exactly,” Lakin said.

“Look, there’s nothing that special about his equipment.”

“Who can say?” Lakin said. “It contains a few modifications above and beyond the usual resonance rig. These—if I understand them correctly—” a slight note of sarcasm here, Gordon saw “—were designed to increase sensitivity. But is that all they do? Is there not some unforeseen effect? Something which makes this experiment, this apparatus, pick up new effects in the solid in question—indium antimonide? How can we say?”

“Good point,” Gates murmured.

“What sort of effect are you thinking of, Isaac?” Carroway said, genuinely perplexed.

“I do not know,” Lakin conceded. “But this is the issue. Precisely the issue.”

“I disagree,” Gordon said.

“No, I think Isaac is dead right,” Carroway murmured.

“There’s some justice to it,” Gates said, reflecting. “How can we be sure this is a good thesis topic until we know the equipment will do what Cooper says it will? I mean, there’s Isaac here, who has doubts. You, Gordon—you think it’s okay. But I feel we ought to have more info before we go ahead.”

“That’s not the purpose of this exam,” Gordon said flatly.

“I believe it to be a legitimate issue.” Carroway said.

Gates added, “So do I.”

Lakin nodded. Gordon saw that they were all uncomfortable, not wanting to broach the issue buried under the detail of Cooper’s apparatus and the niceties of theory. Still, Gates and Carroway and Lakin thought the message hypothesis was bullshit, pure and simple. They weren’t going to let the issue slide by. Cooper couldn’t explain all his data, not the interesting parts, anyway. As long as that riddle hung in the air, this committee wasn’t going to pass on a thesis. Also, it was not simply a question of conflicting theories. Cooper was weak in some important areas. He needed more study, more time peering at textbooks. He had never been a particularly brilliant classroom student, and here it showed up in spades. That, plus the muddy issue of the messages, was enough.

“I move that we fail Mr. Cooper on this first try at the candidacy examination,” Lakin said mildly. “He needs more preparation. Also, this matter of the spontaneous resonances—” a glance at Gordon—“should be resolved.”

“Right,” Gates said.

“Um,” Carroway said drowsily, already picking up his scattered papers.

“But look—”

“Gordon,” Lakin murmured with a kind of tired friendliness, “that is a majority of the committee. Could we have the forms?”

Gordon stiffly handed over the University form for the examination, on which faculty could sign and write out either “yes” or “no” to the question of whether Cooper had passed. The form came back across the table with three nos. Gordon stared at it, still off balance, still not sure the whole thing was over. It was the first time he had shepherded a student through this examination and now the student had failed—a rather uncommon event. The candidacy was supposed to be a putz of an exam, for Chrissakes. Gordon thought suddenly of the conventional theory of scientific revolutions, where paradigms overtook each other, old replacing new. In a way the message theory and the spontaneous resonance theory were paradigms, erected to explain one bunch of mysterious data. Two paradigms, arguing over a scrap of experimental bread. It almost made him laugh.

The scraping of chairs and shuffle of papers roused him. He muttered something to each of the men as they left, still dazed with the outcome. Lakin even gave him a handshake and a lightly delivered, “We do have to straighten this out, you know,” before leaving. As Gordon watched Lakin’s retreating back he saw that to the other man this was a regrettable incident involving a junior faculty member who had gone off on a tangent. Lakin had abandoned the softer ways of persuasion. He could no longer come to Gordon and gently urge him to give up his notions. That kind of conversation would lead nowhere—had led nowhere. Their personalities didn’t match, and maybe that was in the end the most important thing in research. Crick and Watson hadn’t got on with Rosalind Franklin, and that prevented their collaboration on the DNA helix riddle. Together they might have cracked the problem earlier. Science abounded with fierce conflicts, many of which blocked progress. There were great missed opportunities—if Oppenheimer had broken through Einstein’s hardening isolation, perhaps the two of them could have gone beyond Oppenheimer’s 1939 work of neutron stars to consider the whole general relativistic problem of collapsed matter. But they hadn’t, in part because Einstein stopped listening to others, cut himself off with his own drowsy dreams in a complete unified field theory…

Gordon realized he was sitting alone in the bleak room. Downstairs, Cooper was waiting for the result. There were joys to teaching, but Gordon suddenly wondered whether they were worth the bad moments. You spent three-quarters of your time on the bottom quarter of the students; the really good ones gave you no trouble. Now he had to go down and tell Cooper.

He shuffled his papers together and left. Sunlight streamed in yellow blades through the corridor windows. The days were getting longer. Classes were over. For a moment Gordon forgot Cooper and Lakin and the messages and let a single thought wash over him: the blessed long summer was beginning.