Mister 136: A Lesson in Humility

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” [1]

– Isaac Newton

Like so many incomparable geniuses, he won his Nobel prize before he was 40. He was the principal or co-discoverer of 10 elements in the periodic table – the transuranium elements, including plutonium. Those two lines of elements at the bottom of the periodic table that you likely never learned or even looked at? They’re called the lanthanide and actinide series, or the light earth metals and heavy earth metals, etc… His idea.

He was a section head on the Manhattan Project. He was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission for ten years, accepting the job in 1960 after a personal phone call from President John F. Kennedy. He has his own entry in Encyclopedia Brittanica.

He has a fucking element in the periodic table named after him!

All of this swirled in my 17 year-old brain while I sat outside his temporary office in the Mayflower Hotel in February of 1987. My knee was bouncing, so I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax. Glenn T. Seaborg was the final interview – la grande finale – of the judging in the annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the nation’s “oldest and most prestigious” science competition.

He was also about to expose me as the giant intellectual fraud that I knew I was.

I looked down at my attire and I felt like I might break and run  – I didn’t even own a legitimate suit. I was wearing an assortment of items cobbled together to make me presentable, which my mom had bought me during my junior year of high school. She insisted that I was getting to a point in my life where “a young man” needed to have such things, so I had acquiesced and we went to the mall. I let the accommodating gay, black man in the store impart as much of his (significant) sartorial wisdom on me as he could, but I was a lost cause. I was starting to fill out in the shoulders and chest, but my father’s height genes couldn’t overcome my mother’s, and so my 28″ inseam and large quads made me an impossible candidate for fine menswear. I looked like someone had decided to hang a cream colored blazer on a fire hydrant… and then as an afterthought added a pair of brown shoes in front of it.

I heard the door open and a woman came out to let me know that the execution had not been stayed.

“Doctor Seaborg will see you now,” she said with the faux-smile that all experienced administrative assistants have. I almost heard the word “through” before “you” and paused for a moment before I walked past her. The whole charade was about to come unraveled.

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My path to the Westinghouse STS had started almost a year prior, in the summer of 1986, between my junior and senior years of high school. I attended an 8-week program at the University of Georgia for high school students, along with some of my friends from our Queens, NY, high school and some other kids from around the country. Back then, serious high school students with a knack for the hard sciences could apply to these programs. In essence, your parents would pay for room and board and you got to live in the dorms and work as a kind of wannabe-graduate assistant for a professor who needed some help on a variety of research projects. Our teachers in NYC were all gung ho about that summer work getting turned into a paper that could be submitted to a variety of science competitions, including The Big Enchilada – Westinghouse. Coming in the top 300 – ahem, being selected as a semi-finalist – was thought to be a near-guarantee of getting into almost any college you applied to, even the Ivy’s. It had worked for my almost-high school sweetheart; she was a year ahead of me and had gotten into every single one of the Ivy League schools… Being selected as a finalist, one of the top 40 projects out of the 17,000 plus that were submitted? That was a whole ‘nother level of ticket-punching.

…But the truth is that my road in a yellow wood that led to Westinghouse began long before the summer of ’86. If I’m being complete, it probably pre-dated my birth by a generation or two, but I didn’t live that, so it isn’t my story. It was my back-story, however. The expectations of those generations and relatives on both sides of my family who had never even considered higher education lay on me and my older sister both.

We both had the good fortune to be the byproduct of parents who were smart, but in very different ways. My dad was an unusually good card player, particularly with a partner, because he had a great memory: he could recall exactly what card had been played by each player in a four-player game for all 13 rounds. And cards were a competitive endeavor at my grandparents house; my father liked to win. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say he hated to lose. Tom Brady and Michael Jordan wouldn’t have lasted one Friday evening playing cards with my old man… or maybe the opposite: maybe they would have been peas in a pod! His lack of patience made him a rough partner because he couldn’t understand that other people simply didn’t have the kind of memory he did.

“Why’d you play the 4 of clubs there?!?” My father would yell, exasperated that his partner – frequently my poor mother – couldn’t see why it was a bad play in light of what cards had been thrown earlier in the round.

My mother didn’t have that kind of capacity… but she could destroy my father in word games. He loathed it.

“That’s not a word!!” he would yell, exasperated for a very different reason. My mother wouldn’t even smile as she crushed him in Boggle, three-letter word after three-letter word after three-letter word. Out would come the dictionary… and he would eventually leave the table. Mom loved languages and crossword puzzles; and she was no slouch in the sciences, either, particularly life sciences, like biology.

I got a healthy dose of both.

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Like most wild animals, I had more curiosity than sense.

When I was three or four, my mother was (as usual) busy at the sewing-machine mending and patching the burn holes in dad’s work coveralls. The scorch-marks were a necessary part of welding inside the tight spaces of the hulls that would eventually become one of the Navy’s ballistic-missile or fast-attack nuclear submarines. Dad was a welder for Electric Boat at the old SeaBee base out on Quonset Point, just north of Wickford, Rhode Island, proper on Post Road – Route 1. At the end of the day, he would come home and sit on the living room floor with my sister and me, his back against the couch, while my mom sat behind him on the couch to pick the iron slivers out of the back of his neck. It didn’t matter how he tightly he zipped up those coveralls, the arcing and splashing of the molten metal and the odd positions would land steel slivers into the back of his neck. There we would sit to watch the afternoon and evening slate of shows: Best of the West, Star Trek, and maybe Hogan’s Heroes or something similar after dinner. There were only 3 or 4  channels, until my dad finally got a rotary antenna to supplement his prized possession, our console TV with a built-in stereo and record player. I was in awe of it. How could those images get in there? How could those sounds come out of it? I was barely tall enough to see over the top into the wooden cabinet…

I convinced mom to let me play with the jewelry screwdriver set while she mended and cleaned. I knew that would give me enough time to see what made that damn thing tick… The tiny tools were the perfect size for my little hands. When my mom walked into the living room, it was one of the few times in my life I’ve heard her audibly gasp. By then, I was sitting among a small pile of screws. I could have sworn I’d be able to remember which one went where.

We both looked at the guts of the record player strewn on the floor and reached the same conclusion: I was fucked. My father would kill me. Hell, he might kill us both. (He didn’t). I think mom might have figured out how to reassemble it; I have no idea if she ever told him.

Then there was the “fork in the light-socket” incident. I can still hear the pop and sizzle, the arc, that unique smell that goes with electrical fires, and my mother’s scream. That was followed by the knife-in-the-toaster incident; my parents decided that I needed to have some “testing.” I don’t blame them for starting me in school early; I didn’t want to be home either.

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Sports stadiums change names as often as musicians change chords and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search became the Intel STS became the Regeneron STS for the same reasons: sponsors (or efficiency experts) decide that the money for the naming rights is better spent elsewhere. Regardless of sponsor names, the Society for Science – which founded the whole idea of a national science search for seniors in high school – has amassed a pretty impressive record of pulling a gem or two from “among the rubbish.” [2]

Society Alumni include:

  • 13 Nobel Prize winners
  • 2 Fields Medal recipients
  • 13 National Medal of Science recipients
  • 2 Enrico Fermi Award winners
  • 26 MacArthur Foundation Fellows
  • 3 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winners
  • 6 Breakthrough Prize winners
  • 33 National Academy of Engineering inductees
  • 120 National Academy of Sciences inductees
  • 56 Sloan Research Fellows

Raymond Kurzweil, the famous inventor, author, and futurist, is an STS winner.

I can assure you that you will not find my name among any of those luminary alumni. We all knew I was different from the moment I showed up at the Mayflower in the heart of Washington, D.C., that cold February my senior year of high school. Both Fate and I made sure of it.

My flight had been delayed out of Providence because of the snow and generally crappy weather that pervades in New England in February. And in the pre-cellphone era, it means I missed the ride that was there for when the majority of my fellow finalists had been arranged to be picked up, and I had to get a cab and make my own way to the hotel. And I was rushed checking in and there’s a meeting for you that’s about to start but you’ve got time to go drop your bags off, young sir! I looked down at the schedule they had handed me and it said “business casual” for the next meeting, but I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew what the word “casual” meant (to me), so I threw on some jeans and my (former) girlfriend’s Harvard white tee-shirt, with the Crimson lettering that arced “CLASS OF 90” across the top, and “A NEW DECADENCE” straight below. (Wasn’t I so edgy?).

I came bustling into the packed dining room and noticed instantly that everyone – and I do mean everyone – was wearing suits and ties, dresses and skirts: in that moment I almost tried to pull off some kind of Chevy Chase move from Fletch. I nearly grabbed the busboy’s towel and tray and started clearing dishes and drinks, but I knew everyone had already seen me.

Oh. Fuck.

After I finished slinking into my seat, which wouldn’t you know was near the front and I had to squeeze around everyone to be let in and make a big fucking show? Then it was time for all of the winners to stand up and introduce themselves – loudly.

This can’t be happening. Why, God? Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

After most of the finalists stood up and said their name, their school, and a little about their project, I stood up and said, “I’m ________… and I am terribly underdressed.” And sat down.

My fellow students burst into laughter and thunderous applause. It probably made me seem like the James Dean of STS to the nerds, but I could see that the woman charged with riding herd on us narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips. I could read I’ll be keeping an eye on this one all over her face; I’d seen that look too many times to count.

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They made me take an IQ test in second grade. I got a 136. There, I finally said it.

It’s not even good enough to break into Mensa, which requires a 140. I tease my wife about it on the odd occasion she asks if I want to go to her Mensa meeting. I look up from my iPad, grunt like an ape, and tell her: “Me no qualify… Not smart ’nuff. You go and bring back brains!” She rolls her eyes and goes back to doing something… smahht, I suppose.

Okay, okay. I know I’m not a moron, but I also know that I’m not a genius, either.

In 6th grade I was spending an inordinate amount of time fucking off and getting into trouble, but inner city public school being inner city public school, I was still getting As… because that was my parents’ minimum standard. For both my sister and me. The teachers spoke to my mom: I wasn’t being challenged, they said. They had no idea what they were talking about. I was being challenged – to fight – on a weekly basis. You think being an undersized nerd in a half-black, half-Italian middle school that fronted the Hartford Projects wasn’t “challenging?”

They made me take another IQ test and so I did the images with the blocks and repeated the numbers backwards and all of that bullshit with some guy who reminds me now of J.K. Simmons in Whiplash, except less swearing.

Same result. Now what?

They convinced my mother I should attend the “gifted program” at Nathaniel Greene Middle School, over past Chalkstone Ave and close to Rhode Island Hospital. Even for those of us who thought we were tough guys from Olneyville and its environs referred to Greene as “a tough place.” I got bussed in with some other white kids, mostly. My school, Oliver Hazard (“Don’t Give Up the Ship!”) Perry sat sandwiched between a blue-collar Italian neighborhood and the Projects, the same ones my mother had grown up in. Vinny Pazienza’s gym sat in what amounted to the DMZ, just a couple of blocks south of Perry on Lauren Hill Avenue and Laban Street/Whittier Ave. I can write all of that without looking at a map because when we played street hockey and my knucklehead friend John would take a slapshot from two feet away from the net – and miss by a country mile – with a good role and no cars barreling down Laurel Hill that orange Mylec ball would almost go into the drain in front of Paz’s gym. Sometimes Angelo would be outside roasting chestnuts and he’d kick it back into the street for us.

But Nathaniel Greene? That wasn’t our ‘hood. And that school was perhaps 10% white; and the rest… not. I begged my mother not to send me, but those fucking educators convinced her to voluntold me and away I went. Now I’d have to start fighting all over again.

It didn’t take me long to figure out I didn’t belong. It wasn’t that I wasn’t the smartest kid anymore or that I didn’t like being the little fish in the big pond, a phrase whose meaning I had already learned intimately whenever I moved “up” a league in ice hockey or baseball or football. I was always small, so right about the time I just got to be average, I had to move up. And my dad had explained the phrase to me in one of my moments of dissatisfaction after spending an hour on the ice getting my ass kicked by kids three years-older and about 50 lb. heavier.

Time to pay your dues, son.

But this wasn’t the same thing.

Imagine being the dumbest kid in Japanese class – and having zero desire to learn Japanese. Or “stage lighting.” Why the fuck we were learning how to to run the lights, anyway? Oh, because no one else can figure out how they work? Oh, Joy. Great.

It’s like being at the poker table and realizing you’re the sucker. These kids were smarter than I would ever be and it didn’t bother my ego. I just didn’t want to be around them because they were a magnet for more beatings… and they didn’t know how or even want to fight back.

My mom said I had to try it for two months. At day 60 I told her I had tried it and was done. Send me back to my old school please. I don’t think anyone was ever so happy to be going to front doors of O.H. Perry, right across from the Hartford Projects, like I was after being at Greene. It was like being transferred from Joliet back to medium security. Ahhhh… this is Club Med, boys!

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The summer of ’86 at UGA two of us were assigned to the Director of the Physics and Astronomy Department, J. Scott Shaw. We were given a choice between writing a program in Fortran that would move the telescope based upon coordinate inputs from the terminal inside the dome OR doing grunt work on an inexplicable astronomical phenomenon known as the “O’Connell effect,” in which the peaks of the light curves of one specific subset of eclipsing binary stars have differing maxima. Which makes no sense because the light from two eclipsing binary stars orbiting around a common center of gravity – from our perspective should produce the same… Okay, you can probably guess which one I chose.

It largely consisted of running and re-running a computer program called Roche-O (and re-running, and running…), which modeled the light curves of these same star systems using a wide array of inputs. This was also in the early days of computing and the simulation we were running took hours to run. What I did in 1986 would today be done with a few keystrokes in about 15minutes, where you uploaded a set of criteria and had a program keep running combinations of the variables until it achieved a “best fit.” It took me almost 7 weeks, a good chunk of it in transit between our dorms and back to the freezing cold computer lab in the Physics building, which had to be kept near sub-arctic temperatures because of the heat being thrown off by the computers in there. It was grunt work, but I also managed to play in a quad softball league at Reed Hall and spend a fair amount of time ogling co-eds at UGA’s Athens campus, so I don’t want to overstate my plight.

But the real upshot of the whole thing is this: I wasn’t some super-smart savant who…

….had a perfect SAT score;

….or sponsorship from Duracell for my self-built speech-recognition computer;

…or designed and built a model submarine based upon reading “Hunt for Red October” that mimicked the imaginary Russian one and sound-tested it for comparison against U.S. submarines;

…or developed a better polymer coating for computer chips that made them process faster;

And those were the projects of the people who didn’t even come in the Top 10.

The truth of it was that my project hadn’t required superior intellect. It required a shit-ton of elbow grease, however, and just enough knowledge to understand the issue. More importantly, I didn’t get selected as an STS finalist because I was in the category of intellect who deserved to be there – I got selected because I could write a very good scientific paper explaining a someone else’s really complicated issue in layman’s terms.

And I knew that after a single day of speaking with the other finalists. They were amazing – truly brilliant and singular minds – and they were kind, too. But just for comparison’s sake, I think it’s relevant that same summer after Westinghouse, one of my friends from STS called to tell me that she got an internship at NASA’s microgravity lab. And what are you going to do this summer?

I laughed. I got a job as a bouncer at the nightclub down on the beach. I’ll be fighting middle-aged men with too much liquor in them.

That’s not an accident. If I’m being honest with myself, I didn’t want to do research in astronomy anymore. It had never been anything other than a way up and out of the neighborhoods where I grew up. I wanted to work as a bouncer and make money on the weekends and spend my days sleeping off my hangover and training in martial arts, sparring, boxing, trying to convince the girl whose phone number I had in my pocket that she should go out with me.

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After the judging was over, Dr. Seaborg was on our schedule for a lecture. It turned out to be his black and white slides from the Manhattan Project. And a discussion of being a scientist working on something like that… to an audience that included some not-too-friendly Japanese kids, likely first generation Americans for whom the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not merely theoretical. They asked some tough questions, but the memory that sticks with me is Dr. Seaborg’s explanations of how little that collection of singular minds really knew.

Oppenheimer. Leo Szilard. Bethe. Seaborg. And yes, even the brilliant traitor Klaus Fuchs.

There was a moment when Seaborg threw his hands up in reply to a question and said (and I’m paraphrasing, probably badly): “We didn’t know. Within our own ranks there was disagreement about whether the bomb would produce a runaway reaction that would never stop and consume us all… the whole planet… or simply hit the ground… A dud. There may have been a general, theoretical consensus… but who could really say they knew?”

I don’t remember much of the rest of what Dr. Seaborg said, but I just remember that for a guy who had an element in the periodic table named after him, he was a kindly man, with a love of science, and a genuine and healthy respect for the limits of human knowledge.

…

So maybe I hadn’t been such a fraud after all in the Great Man’s office, not even trying to bullshit him about how little I knew about the nuclear reactions in the core of a star, instead staring at him with my mouth agape for a moment.

Maybe “I have no idea” sometimes is the most knowledgable answer there is.

1987 Science Talent Search Finalists at the Capitol. Westinghouse STS.

[1] Attributed to him by Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay in “Anecdotes, Observations and Characters, of Books and Men” Vol 1 (p. 158), by the historian Joseph Spence (1820).

[2] Jefferson and other Founding Fathers can frequently be found in private, and even public, letters describing public education as nothing more than a filter for the mass of citizenry. Some baseline knowledge and then among that cohort discard those who are not academically inclined and by “this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.”