Insights from Chapter 8
#1
I was saved by institutionalization, medevaced out of the family home and delivered from my solitary fugue into a crush of new people. I had a choice between
Stanford and Reed, the two leading eastern schools, and chose Reed for its bohemian reputation and its proximity to Mount Hood, where I imagined I would
spend all my weekends skiing.
#2
I was initially planning on studying everything in Portland, from philosophy to science. But after reading the frivolity of Plato’s Symposium, I transferred into
glassblowing instead.
#3
I graduated college during the great surge of scientific reductionism, which believed that big, visible things were the result of tiny, invisible things. The hier-
archy of the intellectual edifice was that the social sciences were ultimately reducible to biology, which was in turn reducible to chemistry.
#4
I had always thought that science was a remote and improbable adventure, but as I began to study it, I realized that it involved working in laboratories. I was no
klutz, but I had never disassembled a machine or traced the flow of kinetics through an automobile engine.
#5
I was not a fan of lab work, and I lacked the patience required for it. I was also not a fan of organic chemistry, and I would often cheat on the tests by going
through the chemical supply room and sniffing everything until I found an olfactory match for my mystery substance.
#6
I was in love with Steve, and I did not care what he thought about it. I loved him, and I did not care what he thought about it. I was a self-proclaimed logical
positivist who disdained all nonquantitative observations.
#7
When Steve asked me to marry him and transfer to the University of Oregon, I said yes, although it was months before we dared reveal this plan to our families.
I introduced Steve to my parents during the Christmas break of my second year in college, to startling effect.
#8
I had no idea that Jews never married out of their race. I knew that Steve was Jewish, and had even heard his mother refer to me as the shiksa, as if unaware that
I had access to a translator. I was ashamed of my father for the first time in my life.
#9
I married Steve, but for reasons that had nothing to do with our ancestral religions. We had a very undefined vision of married life. We would have to find a way
to make money, and where would we live.
#10
The impact of phages on twentieth-century biology can be compared to the impact of animal domestication on Neolithic humans. Phages are viruses that prey
on bacteria, and their impact on twentieth-century biology was far more elegant and minimal than that of animal domestication.
#11
I was awarded a degree in chemical physics, and was set to work on my senior thesis project with the classical mechanics professor Jean Delord. I couldn’t get
just one value to record, and the electrode potential of p-type silicon never attained a steady value.
#12
In a laboratory, the objects of interest are supposed to be dead, as they are in a morgue or at least very near death at the time of their arrival. If you want to
study cells, you have to kill them first.
#13
I was in charge of only one thing: the switch that supplied the power that set the whole ungovernable chain of events into action. When I decided to bike home
at the end of the evening, through the rain and fog of a Portland night, the party was over.
#14
I had been up against a living antagonist, a low-level demiurge, that was trying to protect the surface of semiconductors from the etchings and other torments
inflicted by humans. I had encountered something higher up in the chain of command than a normal demiurge.
#15
I had found waves in my thesis, but the physics faculty said that it was impossible to report something completely anomalous that had never been observed
before. The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools.
#16
I had found a way to bypass the tedium of math and science, and I used it to find a way to finish college early. I had accumulated a number of articles on the
odd behavior of silicon electrodes, and I had read in most cases at least the abstract, discussion, and conclusion.
#17
The old science, which was based on the idea that tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the
macroscopic world as we know it, has been abandoned.