Timescape

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

GORDON SAW THAT HE WOULD HAVE TO SPEND A LOT of the summer working with Cooper. The candidacy exam had been a blow. Cooper took weeks to recover his self-confidence. Gordon finally had to sit him down and give him a Dutch uncle talk. They decided on a routine. Cooper would study fundamentals each morning, to prepare for a second try at the exam. Afternoons and evenings he would take data. By autumn he would have enough to analyze in detail. By that time, with coaching from Gordon, Cooper could take the exam again with some confidence. With luck, winter would find him with most of his thesis data complete.

Cooper listened, nodded, said little. At times he seemed moody. His new data came out smooth, unblemished: no signals.

Gordon felt a letdown whenever he looked over Cooper’s lab books and saw the bland, ordinary curves. Could the effect come and go like that? Why? How? Or was Cooper simply discarding all the resonances which didn’t fit his thesis? If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it.

But Cooper kept everything in his notebooks, as a good experimenter should. The books were messy but they were always complete. Gordon thumbed through them daily, looking for unexplained blank spots or scratched-out entries. Nothing seemed wrong.

Still, he remembered the physicists in the 1930s who had bombarded substances with neutrons. They had carefully rigged their Geiger counters so that, once the neutron barrage stopped, the counters shut off, too—to avoid some sources of experimental error. If they had left the counters on they would have discovered that some substances emitted high-energy particles for a long time afterward—artificially induced radioactivity. By being careful they missed the unexpected, and lost a Nobel prize.

The July issue of Physics Today carried a piece in the Search and Discovery section dealing with spontaneous resonance. There was a sample of the data, taken from the Physical Review Letters paper. Lakin was quoted extensively. The effect, he said, “promises to show us a new kind of interaction which can occur in Type III-V compounds such as indium antimonide—and perhaps in all compounds, if the experiments are sensitive enough to pick up this effect.” There was no mention of the apparent correlations between the times when the spontaneous resonances appeared.

Gordon decided to attack the “spontaneous resonance” phenomenon afresh. The message idea made sense to him—at least, something was there—but the rebuffs from his colleagues could not be ignored. Okay, maybe they were right. Maybe a series of bizarre coincidences led him to believe there were coded words in the scope traces. In that case, what was the explanation? Lakin was afraid the concentration on the message idea would obscure the true problem. Okay, say Lakin was right. Say they were all right. What other explanation was possible?

He worked for several weeks on alternatives. The theory governing Cooper’s original experiment was not particularly deep; Gordon labored through it, pondering the assumptions, redoing the integrals, checking each step. Some fresh ideas cropped up. He studied each one in turn, running it to ground with equations and order-of-magnitude estimates. The earlier theory dropped some mathematical terms; he investigated them, looking for ways they could suddenly stop being negligible and upset the theory. Nothing seemed to fit his needs. He reread the original papers, hoping for an offhand clue. Pake, Korringa, Overhauser, Feher, Clark… the papers were classics, unassailable. There were no visible escape hatches from the canonical theory.

He was pursuing a calculation at his desk, waiting for Cooper to show up for a conference, when his telephone rang. “Dr. Bernstein?” the voice of the department secretary asked.

“Um,” he said, distracted.

“Professor Tulare would like to see you.”

“Oh, okay.” Tulare was Chairman. “When, Joyce?”

“Now, if it’s convenient.”

When Joyce ushered him into the long, spare room, the chairman was reading what Gordon recognized as a personnel folder. Events soon confirmed that it was his.

“Briefly,” Tulare said, “I have to tell you that your Merit Increase has been, uh, subject to controversy.”

“I thought it was a standard thing. I mean—”

“Ordinarily, it is. The department meets only to consider promotions from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor—that is, getting tenure—or from Associate Professor to full Professor.”

“Uh huh.”

“A Merit Increase, as in your case, from Assistant Professor Step II to Assistant Professor, Step in, does not require the entire department vote. We usually ask the senior men in the candidate’s group—in your case, the spin resonance and solid state group—to give an opinion. I am afraid…”

“Lakin vetoed it, huh?”

Tulare looked up in alarm. “I did not say that.”

“But you meant it.”

“I will not discuss individual comments.” Tulare looked worried for a moment and then sat back, studying the tip of his pencil as though a solution lay there. “However, you realize the… events… of the last few months have not inspired a great deal of confidence in your fellow faculty members.”

“So I had guessed.”

Tulare began a series of reflections on scientific credibility, keeping the discussion safely vague. Gordon listened, hoping there would be something in it he could learn from. Tulare was not the standard administrator sort, in love with his own voice, and this little lecture was more a defense mechanism than an oration. Despite his earlier bravado, Gordon began to feel a sinking sensation steal into his legs. This was serious. A Merit Increase was routine; only really questionable cases had trouble. The big test was the leap from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, which spelled tenure. Gordon had started out as Assistant Professor I and been advanced to II within a year, which was speedy; most faculty spent two years at each step. Once he reached Assistant III he could be promoted to Associate I, although the typical route was to go to Assistant IV before making the jump to tenure. But now he wasn’t going to make the standard step from II to III on schedule. That didn’t bode well for his prospects when he came up for tenure review.

A coldness had reached up from his legs into his chest when Tulare said, “Of course, you have to be careful of what you do in any field, Gordon,” and discussed the necessary wariness a scientist had to have, the quality of being skeptical about his own findings. Then, incredibly, Tulare launched into a recital of the story of Einstein and the notebook for writing down thoughts, ending in the line, “So Einstein said, ‘I doubt it. I have only had two or three good ideas in my life,’” Tulare slapped the desk with genuine mirth, relieved at being able to turn a difficult interview into something lighter. “So you see, Gordon—not every idea is a good one.”

Gordon made a weak smile. He had told that story to Boyle and the Carroways and they had sat there and laughed. Undoubtedly they had heard it before. They were simply humoring a junior faculty member who must have appeared to be a buffoon.

He stood up. His legs were strangely weak. He found that he was breathing quickly, but there was no discernible cause. Gordon murmured something to Tulare and turned away. He knew he should be most concerned about the Merit Increase but for the moment all he could think of was the Carroways and their smiles and his own vast stupidity.