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complexity and design
I see now that the cruise was a mistake, the first cause, if you’ll allow the joke, of my current difficulties. But Annie had wanted so badly to go, and I felt this was something kind I could do for her after everything that had happened. It also appeared to be a career opportunity for me.
The cruise would leave from Seattle, dock at Juneau, sail through Glacier Bay, and then return—its only guests the individuals registered for the 2000 Design in Nature Conference, sponsored by the Center for Complexity and Design, an organization with which I had, until this point, been unfamiliar. I had been approached personally by the center’s senior Fellow, who had received my name from a former colleague (I suspected it was Fred Zimmer, but the man on the phone would not confirm this). He showed particular interest in my most recent work, which had to do with solar acoustic pressure waves, and urged me to submit an abstract for the conference. But when I asked him to give me a sense of the conference’s focus, he was evasive. He would say only that the expected audience would be comprised of academics, politicians, policymakers, Fellows of the Center for Complexity and Design, and regular citizens with an interest in the topic of science. He hinted that the organizers had detected in their audience a burgeoning interest in global warming, but offered no further guidance. It is telling to me now that I cannot recall the man’s name.
It would not be inaccurate to say that, by this time, things had grown desperate for me. It had been three years since I’d been forced to resign from my position as the DuPont Professor of Physics at a small private college in the Midwest after the provost discovered I had plagiarized entire paragraphs in several of my research papers. In my area of study—helioseismology, or the study of solar wave oscillations—plagiarism was unheard of, and so when the University Research Integrity Committee began its investigation, there was great internal interest in the outcome. At its conclusion, I was given the option of resigning or being fired.
Annie was bewildered. I told her I’d been sloppy, that I’d been overextended, that I’d put too much on my graduate assistant’s plate, and that he had cut and pasted from several sources directly into my master documents, intending, of course, to flag those sections so that I might rewrite the material. It had happened to several academics in the last few years, and even some journalists. Contrite, they’d all slunk into the farthest corners of their professions, but had slowly been able to piece their careers back together. Framed in this manner, Annie found it plausible that there had been no intent to deceive on my part, and this made it harder for her to accept that I had been treated so roughly by the university.
I had lost the support of all but one colleague—Fred Zimmer, the chair of the physics department and the man who had hired me. He was a theorist who had spent forty-five years studying quantum chaos, specifically entropy dynamics. He was warm and gregarious in a department known for its austerity, and he wanted to believe there had been a misunderstanding.
But the truth was that it went far beyond a couple of plagiarized paragraphs. It was systematic, a compulsion I could not keep in check for reasons I could not fathom. I began seeing a therapist. I told Annie the therapy was for generalized anxiety resulting from my resignation and the subsequent ostracism, but in reality, I was unspooling a career’s worth of lies. My therapist accepted these lies; in fact she seemed to extract them, winding them back on a distaff from her chair across the room. And the question that hung over every session was why?
I had no answers to this, of course—the therapist had many, but she would pose her answers as yet more questions for me to consider. Could it be that, as a former “child prodigy,” I had a pathological fear of failure that created a tension so unbearable that I had to affect the failure myself in order to relieve it? Could it be I had an inferiority complex because I was a first-generation college student, surrounded by individuals who had “suckled at the breast of the ivory tower”? (When I pointed out the somewhat mixed nature of her metaphor, she indicated this objection was a way of diverting the conversation, but this did not stop me from spending the rest of that session imagining an ivory tower with leaking breasts, sustaining an entire generation of infant-academics.) Could it be that I felt everyone’s work was inherently better than mine, even when mine was yet unwritten, and so the compulsion to integrate the work of others into my own without risking a single change was a manifestation of both primary and secondary inferiority? Perhaps it goes without saying, but my therapist was a devotee of Adler. I found Adler’s approach wanting in many areas, and as a result, I wasn’t, in the words of my therapist, “doing the work.” We terminated our relationship.
Annie encouraged me to mount an attempt to return to the halls of academia. The gap in my résumé would be hard to explain—a plagiarism charge is notoriously difficult to work around. Instead, I continued my work on the solar neutrino problem I’d been working on prior to my resignation, but this time only as a private citizen. Annie went back to work at Pricewaterhouse shortly after I left the university, in order to replace the steady paycheck and health insurance I had lost.
*
I wasn’t aware that the man sitting next to me in the cruise terminal was addressing me until Annie nudged me with her elbow. Unlike the majority of the men milling about the waiting area, most of whom were dressed in khakis and polos, this man wore a business suit. He was clean-shaven and well groomed, and the symmetry of his face was pleasing. The gel in his hair gleamed under the harsh terminal lights, giving it a slightly plastic appearance.
“Scientists are prone to herd thinking,” the man said, with the air of someone who was conspicuously repeating himself. Annie nudged me again. I was unsure of how to address his statement. He seemed to sense this, and, to my relief, he offered his hand. “Eric Falleri,” he said.
“Frank Pavano,” I replied, as we shook hands.