—
There may have been other issues.
Unbelievably, after many weeks of this we began to see results. We took a run on a month’s worth of data and saw what appeared to be evidence that we were picking up a pulsar emitting gravitational waves from the galactic center. There was even a clean, predictable Doppler effect that accounted for the earth’s rotation and its orbit around the sun, both of which carried the detector toward and away from the source, increasing or decreasing the apparent frequency of the signal. You couldn’t wish for neater data.
When DeWitt was finally sure of what we were seeing, he was in the mood to celebrate. He took us out to a ramen joint in Kingston for dinner, where he ordered a steaming bowl of miso charsiu and said to the server with enthusiasm, “Load it up with pork!” He spiked the Diet Coke the server brought him with a half shot of vodka from a hip flask.
He told us we didn’t realize how lucky we were. He said that because we’d shown up at the right time in the right place we were going to get credit on a paper that was going to blow the field wide open, and he talked trash about “those chumps in Louisiana who’re spending nine-figure sums on this ridiculous project that’s good for nothing more than repeating the Michelson-Morley experiment.” Even in his exuberance he was still cautious, or at least wanted to give the appearance of caution: one month was nice, but he figured four months’ worth of results would be enough to merit publication. But at this point the work was practically doing itself. We just had to wait and be patient.
He liked Claudia, that evening. “You look really pretty,” he said between slurps of his ramen. “You have a kind of glow. Good for you.”
Now things get difficult to talk about. This is when I began to see and not see, when my mind held two competing truths.
I think it was about two weeks later when Claudia and I were both in the lab but DeWitt was out. We liked to beat DeWitt to the lab because if we were there when he came in, he’d have no idea how long we’d been there. Maybe we got there at four thirty, for all he knew. We knew he was getting a root canal that particular morning and wouldn’t be in until eleven at the earliest. I remember that Claudia and I both arrived at the lab around nine, and it felt like a vacation day.
I looked up from my desk to see Claudia standing near me, not alarmingly close like she usually did, but a few feet away. She looked like she was in a hurry. “Can I talk to you?” she said. “About the data?”
No need to ask what data she was talking about. I went over to her desk.
She pointed at her monitor. “This is from a day’s worth of data from the detector. I filtered out the Doppler effect due to movement of the earth around the sun. So there’s just the effect due to the earth’s rotation over the course of a day. So look. From zero to twelve hours the rotation of the earth carries the detector away from the galactic center. Apparent frequency decreases slightly as the detector moves away from the source. Now, at twelve hours, the earth is between the detector and the galactic center. The decreased frequency of the waves here is due to the fact that they have to push through the earth to get picked up by the detector—that’s not the Doppler effect. Then, between twelve and twenty-four hours, the earth’s rotation carries the detector closer to the galactic center. So the apparent frequency increases. Twenty-four hours later, the detector is back where it was at time zero, and the frequency of the wave is back where it should be.”
I said, “Sure.”
She said, “You see the problem here, don’t you?”
I saw, and felt dread pooling in my stomach, but at the same time I didn’t see.
She said, “At the twelve-hour mark.”
I said nothing. I looked at the graph and squinted, performing the act of thinking. I may have stroked my chin.
She said, trying to lead me to it by the nose, “Gravitational waves are like neutrinos.”
I said, “And?”
She said, “They shouldn’t be altered by travel through matter. The earth should be transparent to them. So the frequency of the wave at the twelve-hour mark, when the detector is moving laterally with respect to the galactic center, should be the same as the frequency at time zero. That shift shouldn’t be there.”
I said nothing. I told myself I didn’t see the problem.
She said, “This is a huge mistake. If you look at the literature, you’ll see this is the kind of thing that’d get you laughed out of a conference as early as the 1970s.”
I said, “You coded these algorithms!”
She said, “I know, I know. I’m just trying to admit what’s been in front of me this whole time.”
I couldn’t find anything to say.
She said, “You saw how he’s been on my ass this whole time, right?”
The look in her eyes said, Okay, I’ve laid it on the line, and now I need you to agree with me.
—
I wish I had not reacted as I did to what she said: looking back on it, I’m not sure why I did. But I know this now: an effect of being socialized into the profession when you are a young graduate student is that certain rare advisers, the ones who tend to be charismatic and single-minded in their focus, can unintentionally alter their students’ values, and their perception of reality. It’s easy to see the reason for this. Your adviser controls when you graduate, and he can choose to write letters of recommendation that overflow with praise, or that exhibit the studied neutrality that can be a worse black mark than an outright pan. So it soon becomes uncomfortably apparent that in order to escape into your later career, when you can presumably have a greater latitude for independent thought, no matter what else you do you have to please one particular man, who because of his position is by definition everything you want to become. If your adviser tells you that two and two are five, you may find yourself forced to consider whether this is in fact true, for certain values of two and five.
—
“Why don’t you see what Peter says when he comes in,” I said. Not even, “This is interesting. Let’s show this to Peter when he gets in, and see what he says.” That would have required only a bare minimum of bravery, and I couldn’t even muster that. I went back to my own desk and sat down.
One thing I have to say about Claudia is that she kept her head clear, when I couldn’t. The woman kept her head on straight.
—
DeWitt came in around eleven thirty. He walked past both of us without a word, his hand to his chin, a bottle of painkillers clutched in his other fist. He entered his office and shut the door.
—
About an hour later I looked up from my work to see Claudia staring across the room at me, her face slightly fallen, her badly trimmed bangs obscuring one of her eyes. Her gaze posed a silent question, and when I turned away from it to the oh-so-important business before me, we were both aware that this was an equally silent acknowledgment of my cowardice.
—
About an hour after that, Claudia printed out a sheaf of pages, collected them, and approached DeWitt’s office door. She knocked, then opened the door just wide enough to stick her head in and said, “Can I talk to you about the data?”
Then she entered and shut the door behind her.
—
I think she was in there with him for about forty-five minutes. Near the end they both began to scream.
I had important things to do at my desk. I had tasks that were absolutely mission-critical if Science was to continue its forward march.
Claudia came out of DeWitt’s office and sat down at her desk. She didn’t look at me. She was breathing heavily, as if she’d just finished a ten-mile run. She propped her elbows on her desk and held her face in her hands.
—
DeWitt came out a few minutes later, also breathing heavily. He went over to Claudia’s desk and bent over her. His voice was full of honey. I kept my eyes on my work. I could feel him watching me as he spoke to her. I could tell I was meant to pay attention.
He said, “You know, there�
�s really no shame in admitting to yourself that you’re not cut out for this field. It’s a tough field, and even a smart person might not have the particular kind of fortitude to thrive in it. No one would judge you if you left. Many people who start out in physics make their way into finance, for example. A lot of the work in finance involves dealing with irrational systems, and that’s the kind of work that I think you’d have a natural affinity for. Just my two cents.”
He went back into his office.
A few days later DeWitt came over to my desk. Claudia hadn’t been in for a while.
He said, “Well, Phil, it’s just you and me now, on this thing.”
I think that was the first and last time he called me Phil.
He said, “As your mentor I should clarify something. What she did, coming into my office and just losing it like that, that’s not science. You can’t bring your feelings into this kind of work. The history of science is full of people who succeeded by ignoring dumb instinct. And frankly she may not have had the capability, the presence of mind, to do that.”
He said, “To be honest, and this is just between the two of us, I had misgivings about taking her on from the beginning. I always do when I take on a female grad student. This isn’t sexist. I’m just looking at the data, and the data say that women are far more likely to drop out of the field. The attrition rate for women in physics is very high. My job is to train future scientists who are likely to carry on the torch. And I’m more likely to get better results in the long run with someone who’s going to be willing to put in the long hours in the lab over his whole career, rather than someone who has a light turn on in her head when she turns twenty-nine and decides she has to get married and have a couple of kids before it’s too late. It’s a waste for me to invest that time in someone only to see her end up at home, cooking casseroles and dealing with dirty diapers.”
He said, “All we’ve got to do is focus and do some science. The science is practically doing itself at this point. We just need two and a half more months of data, and then we’re golden.”
My state of mind as it was then seems so strange to me now, full of contradictions and difficult to describe. The matter of the frequency shift was small, in the greater scheme of things, and yet it was also immense. I knew that the frequency shift was a sign that our research was flawed. And yet I did not know about the frequency shift, because I preferred to be in a world in which I did not know that our research was flawed, rather than one in which I did.
It would have been clear to a disinterested observer, and it is clear to me in retrospect, that we were engaging in pathological science. All the signs were there: a spectacular result that ran contrary to the literature, the consensus of the scientific community, and past experience; the fact that this contrary result was backed up by claims of great accuracy; the fact that this remarkable result was caused by a phenomenon of barely detectable intensity, such that the data we were generating needed to be measured and remeasured, interpreted and reinterpreted, in order to see it; the fact that we had achieved this amazing result in near solitude, without collaboration. But it is hard to see such a thing when you’re in the midst of it yourself.
The version of reality that existed in DeWitt’s lab, one in which gravitational waves were altered slightly by traveling through the body of the earth, was counterfactual to the version of reality that existed in the larger world, one in which gravitational waves were not altered by traveling through the earth’s body, but continued unimpeded as if the earth were not even there. And yet DeWitt’s lab was contained within the larger world. Physical laws had to be the same in both places.
Though I did not admit this to myself, I decided that the way out of what I refused to think of as my “dilemma” was to reconcile the two versions of reality, the one in the lab and the one in the world that contained the lab. The key had to be in the code that Claudia had left behind, and though I was not as good a coder as she was, I thought that I had to be better than DeWitt, though I would never say that to his face. I would find the mistake that everyone had missed, and quietly explain the frequency shift away. I would present DeWitt with the new interpretation of the data, he would be thrilled, and everything would work out without anyone having to acknowledge that any kind of error had been made.
For two months I came into the lab earlier than DeWitt. I tried to get there by five thirty if I could. And I would spend the time before DeWitt’s arrival up to my elbows in code. The first problem was that I just wasn’t very good at programming back then. I did not have Claudia’s ingeniousness, and I undervalued DeWitt’s experience. The second and larger problem was that I could not convince the data to speak with its own voice. I could see how the composition of the processing algorithms reflected the struggle of wills between Claudia and her mentor, and how she ultimately lost that struggle. I could see how to revise them such that they gave results that Claudia would think were best, or that would please DeWitt. But I could not see how to make those algorithms transparent to the data, in the way that the earth was transparent to the gravitational waves he hoped to observe. I could only see how to impose my own will on top of theirs, to make the data show what I wanted to be true, and not what all who looked at the results would agree was true. And I didn’t even know what I wanted to be true, by that point.
—
With each day that yielded perfect results from the data, DeWitt became more overjoyed. He was probably already beginning to draft our landmark paper’s inappropriately valedictory abstract. Eventually, too late, long after the time when Claudia could have used me standing beside her, I took the same trip into his office that she did, and said roughly the same things that I imagine she did, about how the frequency shift posed some serious and potentially embarrassing problems to our research.
I was probably not as blatantly confrontational as that makes me sound, or as I imagine Claudia might have been. I don’t recall indulging in the flat declarations of fact that are the privilege of those who do science. I may have used some weasel words and qualifiers. I may have said, “Maybe we should take a closer look at this?” and cringed inside when I heard my voice change the statement into a question at the last moment.
I saw a glint of flame in his eyes for a second, and steeled myself to receive the cleansing blast of his invective. But the fire faded as soon as it appeared. Perhaps an attitude of supplication might have been the best course, or perhaps I merely had better social skills than Claudia. Or perhaps DeWitt was more receptive to the news because it came from someone with broader shoulders and a deeper voice. Or perhaps he realized that any version of reality requires two people to believe in it if it is to have a chance of becoming real.
Instead he tried on the sweet-voiced paternalism that I should have been wise enough to beware, more so than if he’d lost his temper. “Philip. I’m going to tell you something that the founder of this field told me. He said, Only dead fish swim with the stream. You and I, Philip. I’m alive. You’re alive. You are alive, right?”
I nodded.
“And that means you have to swim against the stream. When you are sure that you hold the truth in your hands, and you do not act upon it, that is the worst possible kind of failure. Do you understand?”
I nodded again.
He said, “Now, about this frequency shift. I agree that it looks unusual. We’re going to need some new physics to account for this. But instead of giving up, why not look for that new physics? That is what someone who is alive would do.”
I nodded.
He said, “You need to grab your balls and do this thing. As a scientist you never know when truth may come to you and you alone, and when it will call on you to be alive, and brave. This may be one of those times.”
He said, “You need to be brave now, Philip. Do that, and the rest is easy.”
It was then, or perhaps a bit before, that I recall beginning to think that suicide was a viable option for me.
If I’d even thought about it
before, I think I’d always assumed that if I were to ever consider harming myself, the impulse would arise from a part of my personality that I would be able to observe as malfunctioning, as self-evidently irrational and therefore not myself. It would be at odds with what I would think of as my own will, and would feel like a command from a devilish colonizer of my mind that would be clearly identifiable as such, and therefore easily resisted.
But the demon of the suicidal impulse clothes itself in whatever guise its host will find most pleasing. In each mind it takes a different shape and makes a different pledge, and it coaxes you to confuse its own aims with your greatest desires. To the artist it promises that the ending of one’s life will be a moment of supreme, ineffable beauty, unachievable by any other means. To the athlete that same ending is the final, long-sought victory over one’s own body. And to the scientist it offers a demise that will be a demonstration to the world of one’s own intellectual brilliance, one that will give you the final satisfaction of solving a difficult puzzle, or of writing the last line of a proof that has gone unsolved for centuries.
I am sure at some subterranean level I was aware of the horns of my dilemma. If I proceeded with my research as if the frequency shift did not matter, or as if it could be accounted for by some nebulous “new physics,” then something would probably happen that had a good chance of ending my career before it fairly began. It was increasingly apparent to me that DeWitt’s name was not one a young and savvy student wanted his own attached to. And yet to insist that the world worked in a fashion other than the one he described, even in a small way, would raise the threat of the withdrawal of his love. Love is not too strong a word. It seems absurd to think about it, now, but in not much time at all he came to fill the world of the person I once was, mostly by making that world so small that he and I were its only two residents.
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