My most challenging midterm turned out to be Introduction to Computer Programing – the class I thought was the easiest. I turned the exam sheet over. Question one – what is a computer? My programming class had essay questions?!? I answered that one as best I could. Question two – what are the four basic functions of a computer? I really wasn’t sure about that one. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? That made four. I wrote that down and moved on. I finished the essay questions and worked on the algorithms. At least I knew all the algorithm questions. I thought I wrote some decent pseudocode describing how to implement each one.
I compared notes with Amit after the test. The four basic functions of a computer? “You were thinking of conventional arithmetic,” Amit corrected me. “Computers are digital. They use Boolean algebra. The four basic functions are AND, OR, XOR, and NOT.” There went something like twenty points right there. Ouch. I was not looking forward to the grade.
* * *
The next morning a fire alarm woke us up at 5 am. Police were everywhere. “Another bottle bomb?” I speculated to Amit. Just a week before, some idiot had abandoned a few two-liter bottles filled with dry ice. The pressure builds as the dry ice turns to gas and then finally, a resounding boom! One had gone off next to a janitor, temporarily deafening him. Those things were dangerous, if not properly attended.
“Maybe,” Amit acknowledged. “Might be Marcus and Ryan executing their plan, instead.” I followed him as he made a point of circulating through the crowd looking unsuccessfully for them. Then, just to be thorough, Amit suggested we circulate through the groups of girls standing around in their pajamas. Amit happily spread gossip, shared rumors, and expressed his judgement on their choice of sleepwear. It was a couple of hours before we were allowed back into the dorms to get dressed and head off to class. In fact, we missed introduction to programming entirely. Ryan was not in linear circuits. He and I always sat near the front of the class, and I noticed his unusual absence. He didn’t make it to social justice studies, either, and neither did Marcus. Amit looked knowingly at me. I nodded. They must have done it.
It took a few days to get the full story of what went down. The evening before, Ryan sent a text message to Marcus. “Got my Remington. Will shoot students in the commons this am. Want to help?” The commotion was the police arriving on an “anonymous tip.” They searched Ryan’s room and found his Remington. His Remington camera. Apparently they manufacture game cameras, and not just guns. Hunters stick them up on game trails to shoot, not bullets, but pictures of deer, so they have an idea of what they might be able to hunt later.
Marcus and Ryan had an uncomfortable day in custody. Fortunately, they’d followed George P.’s instructions. Ryan had suggested to the residence hall director that it would be really cool to have a time-lapse film of students coming in and out of the lobby to put up on the web page. They’d maneuvered the director into sending an email requesting that they do it. Then, they clammed up and refused to answer any questions when they were arrested and interrogated. Mr. Burke had figured the investigators would drop the case if all they had to go on was the text message, rather than admit that they were monitoring all text messages. They didn’t, though. They charged Ryan with making a terroristic threat, and Marcus was facing conspiracy charges.
The lawyer Mr. Burke found for them had to arrange bail, and decided to call the prosecutors’ bluff. The next day the news was full of the story how an intercepted text message and an unfortunate misunderstanding had led to the arrest of a couple of innocent college students. “The US government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers, has engaged in massive, illegal dragnet surveillance of the domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans,” read the press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few days later. “Bring government surveillance programs back within the law and the constitution.” Charges were dropped, and Ryan and Marcus had to agree not to sue for false arrest, but the genie was out of the bottle.
“We’ve been looking for a trigger point like this,” Mr. Burke confided in an encrypted email, later. He and his lawyer friends had been ready, and Ryan’s arrest over a text message made a perfect smoking gun. Mr. Burke’s allies at the Electronic Freedom Foundation and in the press made it a top story for several days. Even Uncle Rob complimented us on the outcome. It was our first real victory. We didn’t know how deep the Civic Circle’s influence went into the government. They could pose as FBI agents with impunity, and they clearly had access to all the data collected by the government’s surveillance programs. Exposing that capability to public scrutiny delivered a solid black eye.
We got an email from Marcus the next day. “OK, George. I believe you now. What next?”
We explained to him and to Ryan how the social-justice class worked. “Play along,” we suggested. “Use your experience with the police to spin your own tale of heroic oppression.” In addition, we told Marcus and Ryan to be on the lookout for additional allies, and to educate them on how to use encrypted email. George P. Burdell could use all the friends he could get!
Marcus told the story at the next social-justice class and railed about the police assuming because he was black he had to be guilty. Ryan described how he and Marcus had struck a blow for civil liberties by standing on their right to remain silent until their lawyer could be present. Professor Gomulka just nodded and smiled. It seemed as if Ryan and Marcus had finally joined the rest of the class as courageous victims of oppression.
* * *
One evening, while I was wrestling with a particularly difficult initial value problem, Amit burst in carrying a box “It came!”
“What’s that?” Amit ignored me and continued furiously unwrapping something. It looked like a digital alarm clock. “You already have an alarm clock.”
“Look closer,” he insisted.
I did. He was all excited… about a clock. A clock with a USB serial port? “I don’t get it. Is it rechargeable or something?”
“It works!” he was as triumphant as I was confused. “At least the unobtrusive part. Now to check out the video quality on this baby.” He plugged the USB cable into his computer and installed a program. In a minute, live video of our room displayed on his screen. Ah. It was a stealth video camera that looked like a clock. “See, you can set it to motion-detect, or to just start recording video when you push the snooze button.”
“And why do you need a video camera?”
“So I can record and replay highlights of my exploits. With girls!”
I thought back. Unless he was way more discreet than I expected… “You haven’t actually had any exploits, yet, have you?”
“No, not yet,” he acknowledged, “but I’m getting really close! I want to be ready for it.” He carefully positioned the clock in the corner of our room, so the wide-angle lens would capture any events that transpired.
I simply wasn’t understanding my initial value problems. Time to set them aside and see if Sarah or one of my other physics friends could help me out tomorrow.
Chapter 4: An Unorthodox Shortcut
I was not the only victim of the deceptive simplicity of Introduction to Computer Programming. Amit was correct that the four basic functions of a computer were not addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Only they weren’t AND, OR, XOR, and NOT, either. The answer the instructor was looking for was input, output, processing, and storage. Amit got a C on his midterm and now had a B in this “easy” class. I’d have been more amused at his indignant outrage, but I now had a C in the class thanks to a bit more ineptitude on the algorithm and coding sections yielding a D on the midterm.
At least I had A’s going in chemistry and electromagnetics. I felt fortunate to have a B in diffy-q. I found that class particularly challenging. I also had a B in social justice. Amit and Madison were the only students I knew of actually acing the class. Professor Gomulka just loved Amit’s essays expounding on racism and oppression. A
mit and Madison were both publishing weekly columns in the Technique, Georgia Tech’s campus newspaper. I had trouble taking them seriously. One week, Madison had a diatribe on how demeaning it was for women to have to dress in a provocative fashion to attract male attention. The next week, she’d extolled how empowering it was for women to flaunt their sexuality. I read that last column and pointed out the contradiction to Amit.
“You need to stop trying to bring facts to a feel fight,” was his response.
Amit’s articles were even crazier. He had a long and genuinely touching piece on eating disorders, like bulimia and anorexia, and their tragic prevalence among college women. Then he argued that the physical differences in height and strength between males and females were due to malnutrition caused by systemic hetero-patriarchal oppression and pressure on girls to conform to archaic gender stereotypes. I pointed out to Amit that sexual dimorphism – asymmetries between male and female body sizes – was a common feature in many species and was not actually a function of nutrition.
“What did I tell you about bringing facts to a feel fight?” was his response.
The praise heaped upon Amit in social-justice class made it clear to me that humanity was not merely divided into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed. Amit had secured for himself a place in a third category – heroic champion of the victims. That left me feeling distinctly oppressed, not only at my own lack of obvious victimization, but also at my lack of enthusiasm for trumpeting patently ridiculous social justice ideology. I doubted, however, that was the kind of oppression Professor Gomulka would rate highly.
I was really looking forward to receiving my Linear Circuits midterm grade. I was absolutely confident I’d aced that test. That’s why what happened to me was such a shock.
Zero.
A big fat zero was written across the top of my Linear Circuits midterm when Professor Muldoon returned my paper. As he reviewed the exam, I compared my work to his solutions. I had every problem correct. What was going on?
“What’s this?” I asked Professor Muldoon after class.
“That? That is a zero,” he replied as if I were innumerate.
“Every answer on this exam is correct,” I insisted.
“I don’t suffer fools in my class.” Professor Muldoon began collecting his things. “I make fools suffer. It’s too perfect. That’s what gave you away. There is no way you could have completed that test in the allotted time. Therefore, you cheated. I have assigned you a zero. I don’t know how you did it, but clearly I need to work on my exam security. In any event, if you waste my time by contesting my decision, I will insist on your expulsion from Georgia Tech.”
“Professor Muldoon, I didn’t cheat on your exam,” I tried to explain. “You used…”
“A regrettable decision on your part,” Professor Muldoon said, cutting me off. He stood up, walked to the door, and turned to face me. “So be it. You will receive a notification from the Office of Student Integrity of the time of your hearing.” He shut the door decisively behind himself.
Great.
I tried being proactive, but no one would listen to me. “You’ll just have to wait for your hearing,” said the head of the School of Electrical Engineering. “We have a process we have to follow,” said the not very helpful lady in the dean’s office. “You’re wasting your time,” Professor Muldoon said smugly, as I continued to submit homework to him. He refused to grade it. I felt helpless. All I could do was treat myself to a frosted orange at the Varsity, carry on, and wait for “the process” to provide me an opportunity to tell my side of the story.
I read through the material on quantum mechanics that Professor Graf gave me. I did pretty well at understanding black-body radiation and the Bohr model, I thought. The photoelectric effect and Compton scattering weren’t too bad. As I started looking at the Schrödinger equation, though, I began to get overwhelmed. I was beginning to master the “divs, grads, and curls,” of vector calculus, but the Schrödinger equation was simply beyond me. My progress slowed and finally ground to a halt.
One of the critical clues I’d uncovered in understanding how Heaviside’s work had been suppressed was the mysterious way in which so many of the key figures in electromagnetics died at an early age. Five scientists, “the Maxwellians,” were most responsible for the modern theory of electricity and magnetism. James Clerk Maxwell died in 1879 at age 48, not long after his theory began to be widely recognized. Heinrich Hertz died in 1894 at age 36, within a year of publishing his book that described how he discovered the existence of radio waves. George FitzGerald died in 1901 at age 49 as he was deriving how electromagnetics led to what would be dubbed special relativity by Einstein a few years later.
Only two of the five electromagnetic pioneers lived into old age. Heaviside himself was an eccentric and hermit. He managed to publish his last book in 1912, but it was largely work he had completed years earlier. His work on wave interference never appeared in print, or if it did, was thoroughly suppressed and vanished. Only the few hints and mentions I’d found gave evidence of it.
The other electromagnetic pioneer was Oliver Lodge. He was deceived by spiritualists and became convinced that he could talk to the dead, a conviction that became even stronger following the tragic loss of his son in the first World War. He died in 1940 at age 89, but his best electromagnetic work all dated back to the nineteenth century. Here’s a summary of the electromagnetic pioneers:
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) died at age 48
George FitzGerald (1851-1901) died at age 49
Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) died at age 36
Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) died at age 75
Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) died at age 89
As the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began, electromagnetics was dealt a staggering blow – its leading pioneers either dead or diverted from further progress. The clues were obvious once I opened my eyes to look at them.
Since it would be a while before I could master the math and physics of quantum mechanics, I chose to examine the history. I wondered if there might be a similar pattern among the founders of quantum mechanics. Here’s a summary of what I found:
J.J. Thompson (1856-1940) died at age 83
Max Planck (1858-1947) died at age 89
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) died at age 76
Niels Bohr (1885-1962) died at age 77
Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) died at age 73
Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) died at age 94
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) died at age 77
Paul Dirac (1902-1984) died at age 82
Even the two who came closest to being contemporaries of the Maxwellians had no problem living into their eighties. Quantum mechanics was a much healthier line of inquiry than electromagnetics! Unlike their electromagnetic counterparts, none of the quantum mechanical pioneers died prematurely. The contrast was striking. Average age at death for the “Maxwellians” was 59; for the “quantum mechanics,” it was 81!
Professor Graf had told me that discoveries in atomic physics led physicists to reject the classical or objective view of reality, to throw aside notions like causality and identity. The more I looked into the history of how quantum mechanics arose, the more convinced I became that she had it exactly backwards.
I traced a couple of intriguing mentions back to a 1971 article by Paul Foreman, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927.” The philosophic spawning ground of quantum mechanics was the culture of Weimar Germany. This period was characterized by amazingly flagrant attacks on reason and causality. One Weimar government official proclaimed, for example, “The basic evil is the overvaluing of the purely intellectual in our cultural activity, the exclusive predominance of the rationalistic mode of thought, which had to lead, and has led, to egoism and materialism of the crassest form.”
Even scientists commented on this cultural hostility. For instance, Nobel Laureate chemist, William Ostwald commented, “I
t is at present considered modern to speak all conceivable evil of the intellect.” Science was viewed as the root cause of societal ills. “[Natural science] is represented as bearing the guilt for the world crisis in which we stand at present, and the whole of the intellectual and material misery bound up with that crisis is charged to natural science’s account,” observed Nobel Laureate physicist, Max von Laue. A conspicuous embodiment of reason and intellectual achievement, science came under particular assault. As Ostwald further noted, “In Germany today we suffer again from a rampant mysticism, which… turns against science and reason as its most dangerous enemies.”
It was easy to see how quantum mechanics arose from a culture with a deep aversion to reason and intellect and an outright hostility to science – a culture that was already giving birth to National Socialism. I was stunned to see such tight coupling between culture, on the one hand, and science and politics on the other. I’d read an interview somewhere – some guy who worked with Matt Drudge – who claimed that “politics was downstream from culture.” That’s certainly true, but I came to realize it’s only a part of the truth. Culture – or more fundamentally, the ideas, the “zeitgeist,” the spirit of the times, the philosophy at a culture’s roots – is tied not only into politics, but also into science and art.
One key principle came under particular assault in the Weimar era – the principle of causality. As an example, consider the diatribe from the prominent historian, Oswald Spengler:
I mean the opposition of the destiny-idea and the causality-principle, an opposition which, in its deep world-shaping necessity, has never hitherto been recognized as such…. Destiny is the word for an indescribable inner certainty. One makes the essence of the causal clear by means of a physical or epistemological system, by means of numbers, by means of conceptual analyses…. The one requires us to dismember, the other to create, and therein lies the relation of destiny to life and causality to death.
A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth Page 8
