Connie Willis - Bellwether

“Was there?”

He looked thoughtful. “Chaos theorists think the Heisenberg uncertainty principle means that chaotic systems are inherently unpredictable. Verhoest believes that prediction is possible, but he’s proposed there’s another force driving chaos, an X factor that’s influencing its behavior.”

“Moths,” I said.

“What?”

“Or locusts. Something other than butterflies.”

“Oh. Right. But he’s wrong. My theory is that iteration can account for everything that goes on in a chaotic system, once all the factors are known and properly measured. I never got the chance to find out. We were only able to do two runs before I got my funding cut. They didn’t show an increase in predictability, which means either I was wrong or I didn’t have all the variables.” He stopped, his hand on a door handle, and I realized we were standing outside his door. I had apparently walked him all the way down to Bio.

“Well,” I said, wishing I had more time to analyze his tie, “I guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got to brace myself for Flip’s new assistant. And fill out my funding allocation form.” I looked at it ruefully. “At least it’s short.”

He peered blankly at me through his thick glasses.

“Only twenty-two pages,” I said, holding it up.

“The funding forms aren’t printed up yet,” he said. “We’re supposed to get them tomorrow.” He pointed at the form I was holding. “That’s the new simplified supply procurement form. For ordering paper clips.”

Miniature golf [1927–31]

Recreation fad of small golf courses with eighteen very short holes complicated by windmills, waterfalls, and tiny sand traps. Its popularity was easily explainable. It was a cheap place to take a Depression date, had a low skill threshold with multiple achievement levels, and let you pretend for a couple of hours that you were part of the refined country-club set. Over forty thousand courses sprang up across the country, and at its height it was so popular it was even a threat to the movies, and the studios forbade their actors to be seen playing miniature golf. Died from overexposure.

The source of the Colorado River doesn’t look like one either. It’s in a glacier field up in the Green River Mountains, and what it looks like is tundra and snow and rock.

But even in deepest winter there’s some melting, a drop here, a trickle there, a little film of water forming at the grubby edges of the glacier and spilling over onto the frozen ground. Falling and freezing, collecting, converging, so slowly you can’t see it.

Scientific research is like that, too. “Eureka!”s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals’ density are few and far between, and mostly it’s just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Take Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Their goal was to measure the absolute intensity of radio signals from space, but first they had to get rid of the background noise in their detector.

They moved their detector to the country to get rid of city noise, radar stations, and atmospheric noise, which helped, but there was still background noise.

They tried to think what might be causing it. Birds? They went up on the roof and looked at the horn-shaped antenna. Sure enough, pigeons were nesting inside it, leaving droppings that might be causing the problem.

They evicted the pigeons, cleaned the antenna, and sealed every possible joint and crack (probably with duct tape). There was still background noise.

All right. So what else could it be? Streams of electrons from nuclear testing? If it was, the noise should be diminishing, since atomic tests had been banned in 1963. They ran dozens of tests on the intensity to see if it was. It wasn’t.

And it seemed to be the same no matter which part of the heavens were overhead, which made no sense at all.

They tested and retested, taped and retaped, scraped off pigeon droppings, and despaired of ever getting to the point where they could perform their experiment on radio signal intensity for nearly five years before they realized what they had wasn’t background noise at all. It was microwaves, the resounding echo of the Big Bang.

Friday Flip brought the new funding application. It was sixty-eight pages long and poorly stapled. Three pages fell out of it as Flip slouched in the door and two more as she handed it to me. “Thank you, Flip,” I said, and smiled at her.

The night before I had read the last two thirds of Pippa Passes, during which Pippa had talked two murderously adulterous lovers into killing themselves, convinced a deceived young student to choose love over revenge, and reformed assorted ne’er-do-wells. And all just by chirping, “The year’s at the spring,/And day’s at the morn.” Think what she could have accomplished if she’d had a library card.

“You can change the world,” Browning was clearly saying. “By being perky and signaling before turning left, one person can have a positive effect on society,” and it was obvious from “The Pied Piper” that he understood how trends worked.

I hadn’t noticed any of these effects, but then neither had Pippa, who had presumably gone back to work at the silk factory the next day without any notion of all the good she’d done. I could see her at the staff meeting Management had called to introduce their new management system, PESTO. Right after the sensitivity exercise her coworker would lean over and whisper, “So, Pippa, what did you do on your day off?” and Pippa would shrug and say, “Nothing much. You know, hung out.”

So I might be having more of an effect on literacy and left-turn signaling than I’d realized, and, by being pleasant and polite, could stop the downward trend to rudeness.

Of course, Browning had never met Flip. But it was worth a try, and I had the comfort of knowing I couldn’t possibly make things worse.

So, even though Flip had made no effort to pick up the spilled pages and was, in fact, standing on one of them, I smiled at her and said, “How are you this morning?”

“Oh, just great,” she said sarcastically. “Perfectly fine.” She flopped down onto the hair-bobbing clippings on my lab table. “You will not believe what they expect me to do now!”

A little work? I thought uncharitably, and then remembered I was supposed to be following in Pippa’s footsteps. “Who’s they?” I said, bending to pick up the spilled pages.

“Management,” she said, rolling her eyes. She was wearing a pair of neon-yellow tights, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a very peculiar down vest. It was short and bunched oddly around the neck and armpits. “You know how I’m supposed to get a new job title and an assistant?”

“Yes,” I said, continuing to smile. “Did you? Get a new job title?”

“Ye-es,” she said. “I’m the interdepartmental communications liaison. But for my assistant, they expect me to be on a search committee. After work.”

Along the bottom of the vest there was a row of snaps, a style I had never seen before. She’s wearing it upside down, I thought.

“The whole point was I was overworked. That’s why I have to have an assistant, isn’t it? Hello?”