Random Thoughts from a Nonlinear Mind, Volume 2: The Athena Chapters, Chapter Zero:
The Zeroth Chapter of this Book
“Excuse me, isn’t that supposed to be a negative one (-1) in line 16?”
Phillip “The Yeti” Frank
*****
An anxious and fresh-faced Buford Lister sat at the center of the head table. The rows of seats before him formed an asymmetrical pattern, skewing sharply to his left. He looked at the nameplate in front of his chair to double-check he was sitting in the right place. Sure enough, it said, “Buford Lister” in faded black marker.
Buford Lister rolled his head around and back. The big clock on the sidewall read 12:12. OK, talk starts in 18 minutes. He was an East Coast boy on his first trip out west, the unfamiliar surroundings putting him slightly on edge. He couldn’t sleep on the overnight flight, so he read a biography of Einstein that The Plumber had given him. Now son, it is always good to learn more about the giants upon whose shoulders you are standing. Never a morning person, the time change, coupled with the lack of sleep, wasn’t doing him any favors.
The hall was already about half full, quickly filling with the sounds of footsteps and idle chatter. The glances consistently came Buford Lister’s way, they were the looks that young people like him get at places like this; stares of intense jealousy, some of constrained hatred, and a few of admiration. This, after all, was not just a talk. It was a coronation.
The heavyweights, the established scientists, came sauntering in at their own pace; that is what silverbacks do. Buford Lister watched the procession, it was a who’s who of all-star academics, mostly balding white males. Even though it was loosely organized, he recognized it as The March of The Gatekeepers.
He was only slightly nervous even though he had never given a presentation like this before. It’s not that he was unprepared; he had been over the paper a thousand times, his academic advisers tearing it apart and then building it back up. Subtle, nuanced questions asked and answered in the same spirit they were given. No worries, the problem was solved.
The buzz in the hall was growing. Buford Lister ran his routine down in his head one last time. Always start off with a joke. Always. He had memorized the entire presentation, all except for the funny. He glanced down at the yellow legal pad in front of him as he let out a giant yawn. This is exactly what he had written in his notes (by that I mean what follows is a verbatim account of what appeared in his own handwriting):
Once upon a time, there was this horse. Now, let me tell you this was no ordinary horse. No siree, what we have here is a mathematical horse. This horse actually knew arithmetic. He could add and subtract with ease. Impressive? You bet. Algebra, you ask? No problem what…so…ever. Heck, this animal could even prove The Pythagorean Theorem in unusual and unexpected ways. This was one heck of a horse! But let me tell you… if you tried…and people did…if you tried to teach this horse analytic geometry, he would get up on his hind legs and scream bloody murder. Oh, the tales that have been told about this animal. He would kick and violently thrust his head from side to side at the first mention of anything, and I mean anything, to do with analytic geometry.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the moral of the story is simply this. [Pregnant Pause] You can’t put Descartes before the horse.
[…wait for uncontrollable applause and laughter to die down…then get to work]
*****
Why am I starting this volume with a Chapter Zero? That is an excellent question. I will try to give you an answer, at least a preliminary one, in this chapter. You will have to wait until you get to the end of the last essay for the full explanation. At least I hope that by the time any reader works their way through the entire book, they will look back at this essay and have a good idea of why I decided to add a Chapter Zero after I had finished writing several chapters. I certainly didn’t plan it this way, that is just the way things worked out.
*****
It was 12:32 when Sandy “The Plumber” Wilkins stood up to introduce his protege, his latest pride and joy. The Plumber had been awarded a Fields Medal (a very big deal for mathematicians) twenty years ago to the day of this conference. He hadn’t disappointed. He had done major, innovative work since then; perhaps most importantly, he was currently mentoring a young genius named Buford Lister. This was to be a crowning achievement for both of them. The Plumber was a special guy, he wasn’t a person who was jealous of his students who were smarter than him (lots of people in his position are), he simply nudged them and then got out of their way. He was a man who understood that his place in history wouldn’t be evaluated based only on his accomplishments, it would be measured by the contributions to humanity made by his students. He rarely talked about him, but he greatly admired a British physicist named Fowler. That guy had mentored many future Noble Laureates as well as dozens of prominent scientists. That, The Plumber always thought, was a meaningful legacy.
The Plumber was not a blue blood, he wasn’t the offspring of academic royalty. Any advantages he got while growing up were those that he had earned himself. When he was young, The Plumber worked in the family business during the summers, hence the nickname. Some privileged students at Harvard had started calling him The Plumber when he was an undergrad. He embraced the name, he was proud of the fact he wasn’t where he was because he was born to a rich daddy. He always had trouble understanding why the other guys thought they were better than him simply because of who their parents were. He found that curious, more than a little weird. If he was at Harvard, it had to be based on ability alone, his family didn’t know anyone able to pull any strings on his behalf. Why would anyone look down on a person like that?
Whenever his house or the houses of his friends needed plumbing work, he would gladly do it, but he spent most of his time being one of the most famous mathematicians in the world. After this short talk, he knew that Buford Lister was going to happily share his newfound fame with him.
The Plumber waited for the applause to subside, and then he got to it. He told the audience that no one, not even him, was able to solve the problem they all were going to hear about today. He gave a short history of the famous people who had tried and failed to unmask this cosmic mystery. The rise in intensity during the build-up was palpable. He reminded the audience that many brilliant people in that very room had worked on this problem and had failed. Some made a little progress, but ultimately they all came up against it; that stout, impenetrable, mathematical wall. The Plumber was fond of saying that people ran out of talent right at the moment they needed it most. All, that is, except one.
The introduction was brief; the applause that followed was loud, too loud to be just polite. Buford Lister began his short talk (no one had any idea how short) about the problem and how he came to his solution. He started off by telling the audience that Sandy often spoke of things that were “well known.” Something “well known” was an assumption about the nature of the universe that was, apparently, generally accepted as legitimate and valid.
Buford Lister began to move around the podium. He didn’t need the mic, he became so energized that the boom in his voice meant that the people standing in the back would have no trouble hearing him. Besides, the mathematics sloppily written on the blackboard spoke louder than he ever could. He got so excited as the energy in the room started to rise that he forgot to tell the joke.
*****
Sometimes people view daily occurrences as trivial, routine events that actually turn out to have a deep, essential meaning. I think that happens more than we all realize. There are probably things in your own day to day life that you view as unimportant, which really are profound if you took the time (as if you have the time) to think about it. This certainly is true in my case. Much of this book can be understood in terms of things once viewed as trivial that turned out to be of critical importance. Here is a fine example…
Over a decade ago, a lifelong friend of mine named Mobe (you will hear much more about him later) innocently handed me a CD he had purchased a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t bought any new music in a long time, but he was compelled to get this particular disc. He had heard one of the songs on the radio and liked it a lot. As it turned out, uh, I kind of liked it, too.
I am not the type of person who dabbles in things. When I get interested in something, I tend to do my due diligence. I learn as much as I can about the topic, be it dark matter, string theory, British Literature, or a punk band who made a CD that I thought was really good. As you might imagine, I bought everything this group had done. I still have that pile of CDs in my house. I ripped the music for my portable devices, and I (sigh, sigh, sigh) started going to their concerts. I had no idea that by handing me that CD, Mobe was putting me on a life-changing path. How was I to know that around ten years down the road, I would walk into the dingiest concert venue imaginable as one person and walk out as another? How could I even imagine that hearing that music would start a chain of events that ultimately would change me in a most fundamental way? The easy answer is that I couldn’t.
This Chapter Zero nonsense is, at least on the surface, about heat and the way it is measured. Slightly underneath the surface, within the subtext, is an in-depth discussion about how seemingly trivial things can change lives. I am the first to admit that Athena generated quite a bit of heat the night I met her, but, inexplicably, this essay is not explicitly about the night we met. The thing is, this essay is a little different than those to follow. The subsequent essays detail what happened to me when she introduced herself; this one is a bit more mysterious in structure and content.
*****
The young and suddenly energetic Buford Lister was feeling it, Mathematical Mojo emanating out of every pore. As he started his presentation, he actually began strutting (Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to introduce to you The Mathematical Mick Jagger).
“I always wondered what that meant…for something to be well known. At first, I suspected that someone, maybe decades ago, had run the proof and confirmed the mathematics of whatever argument it was that Sandy was talking about on a given day. Then I reached that critical point in the life of any scientist; I had an intense realization that just because something was in a textbook didn’t mean that is was right, true, or even meaningful on anything other than a superficial level. I realized that nearly everything I believed, at least the important things, I believed simply because someone told me the ideas represented an accurate reflection of reality. This, of course, is standard fare for all non-scientists in the world. I don’t know anyone out there in the real world who knows anything worth knowing that they weren’t told is true by someone passing themselves off as an authority figure. Self-perpetuating nonsense, generation after generation; no one questioning the validity of the ideas, everyone just wanting to fit in. I decided that day to break free of socially constructed knowledge; at that very moment, I made the decision to reduce all my knowledge to mathematics. We are here today so that I can talk about what I found.”
Buford Lister went on to tell the audience that the conjecture had been confirmed. The proof was to be found in the lines of mathematics. Buford Lister declined to go through the proof, that would have taken way too long. “The proof has been vetted. It is correct.”
*****
In 1931 something very interesting and more than a little strange happened. OK, I am sure lots of noteworthy things happened in 1931, but I am speaking of one thing in particular. During that year, a British physicist named Sir Ralph Howard Fowler (Sir Ralph to you and me) came up with an intriguing insight. His discovery created a problem concerning the standardized numbering systems that scientists like to use. Sir Ralph discovered an essential relationship between thermal systems that appeared so trivial to those who came before him that they thought it not worth mentioning.
I am not going to talk about the exact nature of the discovery. It is irrelevant. And besides, if I did nearly everyone reading this would stop and move on to the next thing on their list of things to read. If you want to know more then you can Google the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, trust me, you can learn all you ever wanted to know. I am interested in just a couple things when it comes to this Zeroth Law. The first thing is what it is.
The Zeroth Law says something like this: If A = B and B = C, then A = C. Well, duh! That is what everyone thought before Fowler came along. Could anything be more obvious? All the scientists working on thermal systems passed this little nugget over when it came to naming and numbering the universal laws of thermodynamics. Originally there were three of them called, believe it or not: The First Law of Thermodynamics, The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and The Third Law of Thermodynamics. After the three laws had been documented, Fowler came along and said something like, “Uh, excuse me but there is a problem.” And there was.
It seems that trivial little relationship between A, B, and C is critically important when it comes to deriving the mathematics of the previously mentioned three laws. Also, it is fundamentally important if you want a mathematical definition of temperature that can relate the concept of heat to what a person sees when they read a thermometer. This created a bit of a problem. There were already three laws in place, and the one that everyone passed over, the trivial one that everyone ignored, turned out to be fundamental to the whole enterprise. With Fowler’s insight, that little relationship instantly became the most fundamental law of thermodynamics.
The problem then became one of what to do. Science has some very specific rules when it comes to naming things. Scientists spend a lot of time and energy putting things into different categories, it is a big part of what many of them do. Physicists have a particular problem when it comes to naming and categorizing things like laws. The most important one always comes first, that is just the way it is. The problem here is that the three laws already in existence were very well established. Everyone knew them by those names and numbers. Fowler came up with just about the only solution possible, he named his insight Law Zero. With one publication, the world was introduced to The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics. I remember scratching my head when I first was introduced to the Zeroth Law decades ago. I knew there had to be a story behind it, and sure enough, there is. I think it is a fascinating one.
*****
Out of nowhere, it happened, the beginning of Buford Lister’s waking nightmare. A huge man in a Grateful Dead tee shirt stood up. He wasn’t from a major university, it wasn’t even clear that he had an academic appointment anywhere. No one on the podium seemed to recognize him, and this was a guy you wouldn’t forget. The man, nearly seven feet tall with shocking white hair down to his waist and a beard to match, rose and said the infamous words that ruined more than a couple reputations and destroyed the promising career of Buford Lister. “Excuse me, isn’t that supposed to be a negative one in line 16?” It was quite the spectacle to witness him wildly gesticulate as he made the sign of a -1 in the air with his right index finger.
Buford Lister laughed, as did the entire audience. The hall held 1500, every seat was taken, and the people standing along the back wall added another couple hundred to the total. Over the laughter, another voice from way off to the left said, “Yes, I see it. That should be a -1, not a 1.”
Buford Lister felt a rush of anxiety as he put his head down to look over his copy of the paper, the same paper he had read thousands of times. It can’t be…no…it can’t be. He, along with everyone else there, knew that a mistake on page one would negate the entire proof. Time seemed to stop as he considered what was going to happen if that tiny number 1 was really supposed to be a -1. He looked the first page over hard, looked over at The Plumber, looked back at the stranger, and then said: “I have no idea how this happened, it appears you are correct.”
The Plumber, one of the experts who had vetted the paper, dropped his head into his hands as people began to walk out. The other people at the head table started mumbling to themselves as they got up to leave. All left their seats except for one, Buford Lister sat paralyzed in his chair, his eyes glued to lines one through sixteen. This can’t be happening. How can this be? How did this happen?
Author’s Note (you will occasionally get these throughout this volume): Rarely does an entire career, an entire life, get derailed in a singular moment like this. Most times, things like this are the result of slow, smoldering implosions. Buford Lister knew there would be no second chances, he had embarrassed the people who believed in him most. He instantly realized that things would never be the same. He was right, at that very moment (blah, blah, blah negative one, negative one) life as he had known it was over.
*****
I love the tale of The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics. It is not the science that won my affection, it is the story behind the law’s discovery and how it got its name. Fowler’s brilliant insight created some pretty cool problems, don’t you think? My little flash, while much more elusive and undoubtedly not brilliant, has also created its own set of issues. I will leave it to each and every individual reading this book to reach their own conclusions on the matter. All I know is I was standing against a wall in a dive bar drinking a beer (and, I might add – minding my own damn business) when I saw a chick; that constitutes the simple beginning of my story. The moment she introduced herself things, and by that, I mean each and every one of them, were permanently and fundamentally altered.
How about a Breaking Bad style flash-forward? If you are anything like the people who read this book before it was published, there is a very good chance that, at some point as you are reading along, you are going to view this collection of essays as some kind of bizarre and tragic love story. Do me a favor, if you ever feel like you are reading a book that is simply about a hopeless guy’s attempt to get a pathetic lunch date from a beautiful punk rocker chick I want you to refer back to this chapter. The Zeroth Chapter of this book, like every other chapter, is included for a specific purpose. The major reason I am including this essay is because I think there is much more to my story than an empty stomach and an intense attraction.
My situation, even though it also lead to the inclusion of a number zero, is unlike Sir Ralph’s in many ways. He had rock-solid mathematics and logic to back up his claims. He actually convinced all the other scientists that there needed to be a Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics. Can you imagine? That is a huge deal. I, on the other hand, have no such proof to offer as evidence of my dramatic and mind-numbing discovery. All I can do is try to string sentences together in a somewhat meaningful way. By doing this, I hope to convince Athena that something magical happened on the night we met. The invitations to join me on my quest have already been sent. No RSVP required.
*****
Scientists are a tough bunch. Forgiveness is not something in their vocabulary. One mistake, especially one like this, and you are done. No one will ever recommend you for a job, that is if they even give you your degree and send you on your way. After episodes like this, lots of places hand the poor slob a master’s degree and tell him not to let the door hit his butt on the way out. At least that is what they usually did back in the day that Buford Lister made his grand mistake.
Like everyone else, he was given only one chance to lose his reputation. Once it was gone, there was no getting it back. There was no appeals process, no redemption; the only viable option was oblivion. Go now and live out your life in total obscurity, that was The Plumber’s implied message as he sent Buford Lister on his way. The two of them never spoke again.
As best as anyone could figure, this is what happened: copies had been sent out across the country by a student on work-study, mimeographed copies. The paper was 84 pages of dense formulas, that meant that just a few copies were sent out in the mail. The people who got their copies made mimeographs of their own. And on and on and on. By the time the bulk of the people got their copies, they were reading a faded version of the original. The Yeti had picked up a near-pristine copy from a table outside the lecture hall. Apparently, so did the other guy who quickly caught the simple mistake. Not many smudges on their prints, marks that people might assume are a minus sign and such.
As for The Plumber and Buford Lister, well…they both wanted the paper to be correct; so much so that they simply missed it. In their defense, the first page was basic background information; it consisted of high school algebra. A departmental secretary had typed out those pages, and maybe she made a mistake. A smudge here got interpreted as a minus sign there. That is just a guess. The fact is, no one really knows.
The sections in the paper that were really important, the stuff that constituted a breakthrough, were logically tight. The passages that were going to make history had been vetted and were correct. The problem was that the sections that were going to alter the foundation of the natural, the physical, and the social sciences all needed that number on line sixteen to be a negative one, not a positive one.
*****
The next essay you are going to read is one very special to me. I started writing it the night I met Athena. I was in a haze the entire time. It has been many years since then, and I am the first to admit that my vision is still cloudy.
Chapters One through Fourteen are much different than this one. You will see how I changed my mind over and over as I thought about what meeting Athena ultimately means to me. Each chapter is a snapshot of what I was thinking at the time. Each reveals my struggle to figure out why she has had such a tremendous impact on me. I came up with a bunch of ideas, you will read about them. I guess the best way to put it is to say that you are going to learn about my struggle to make sense of the most important night of my life.
*****
The lecture hall where The Lister Affair took place had been completely renovated decades ago. The blackboards were all gone, replaced by whiteboards and projection screens. A small, circular vent that lecturers had used to hide chalk was gone, in its place was mounted a panel to relay the remote control wishes of the wizard du jour.
The changes, though, weren’t quite enough. To those sensitive to these types of things, that space still reeked of doom and confusion. The demons brought to life so long ago were still in their prime, lurking in the ceiling corners and in the aisles where they patiently waited their opportunity to pounce.
Those ethereal creatures cared very little that the coast was unusually cold on the big day, the day of another coming-out party of a young superstar. A guest lecturer, a young assistant professor from a major Midwest university, was invited to give a talk about his latest research project. Scientists from all around the world were there.
The old man sat in the back of the lecture hall and fidgeted in his chair. These things make me so damn uncomfortable. He knew that the audience members were going to be watching him as much as they would be The Hotshot, the latest in a long line of prodigies to strut through the gates of the university. Nothing he could do about that.
The Hotshot started with the flash of insight that got him on the right path. He looked directly at the old man and said, “Sir, I was reading through one of your papers for what must have been the 100th time when I paused to take a sip of my warm beer. I nearly choked because I could feel something, an ambiguous flash. I didn’t quite know what it was, but I had a sense that it was important. I went for a walk. After I finished, I jumped in the shower, and it was right when the water hit me that I realized the answer to this dilemma. I understood why the path that you took was the wrong one. I knew I had to zig where you had zagged.”
The old man thought back to when he was as young and arrogant as The Hotshot. He remembered the sleepless nights, the little flashes of insight, and the occasional big ones. His mind wandered; he didn’t have to listen to this; he knew his own research better than The Hotshot did. Hell, he knew that little shit’s research better than the little shit himself did. He had been through it again and again, looking for that one small mistake, the one oversight that would lead him to throw the manuscript in the garbage. He never found it.
He watched as The Hotshot droned on and on about how uninspired all the attempts to work out the problem were until he, a divine gift from the cosmos, was sent to grace humanity with his special kind of genius. It is a simple fact of human nature that sometimes the only way a person can feel better about themselves is by making other people feel worse. The Hotshot was already feeling good, but he was taking more than a little joy (schadenfreude, right?) in the demise of the old man.
The math was becoming tighter the longer The Hotshot went on. The old man wondered how he could have missed it, how he did not see the solution. I was so close, I was right there time and time again. All of it, every last hour of work…meaningless. He tugged on his long gray beard and wondered what kind of prize he would get for living a wasted life. Deep down, he knew he would get what everyone else in his circumstance gets, nothing more than an empty plate of remorse.
Author’s Note: There are rare times when atheists pray. It is not what you think. It is usually not when they are in dire straights, and they believe they are about to die. No, the times that nonbelievers desperately appeal to a higher authority are times like these.
This is what he did: The old man closed his eyes and hoped and wished that someone from the back of the room would stand up and say, “Shouldn’t that be a negative one in line such and such?” His prayer, while totally sincere, went unanswered.
After the bows and the obligatory curtain calls, the old man limped his way up to The Hotshot; there were so many things he wanted to tell him, none of it relevant right at that moment. He cleared his throat and extended his hand. “You, young man, have solved a problem I have spent a lifetime trying to solve. Thank you.” A quick glance away, and Buford Lister was off. Thunderous applause (you wouldn’t believe how loud) followed him out. It never occurred to Buford Lister, the man whose face was often mistaken for a tattered road map, that the applause was for him.
