The other day I was speaking to two friends, Bill and Paul. We were down at the clubhouse, playing Chinese checkers, smoking cigars, swimming laps in the pool. Then Bill said, “Stockholm,” and Paul got a look in his eyes, and that was it for checkers and cigars. I have known Bill and Paul for longer than I care to admit, and every year around this time, when the autumn air begins to sharpen, the conversation turns to Nobel Prizes. Bill and Paul are in competition to see which of them will be the first to win. Bill thinks that Bill will be. Paul thinks that Paul will be. "You can stay in my hotel room in Stockholm," Bill says. “No,” Paul says. “You can stay in mine." I don't usually participate in the conversation, but that is not because I feel I have nothing to contribute. To the contrary: I have everything to contribute, because I am fairly certain that I will be the first of our group to win. Do not be so quick to dismiss this as a preposterous fantasy. For starters, let me outline the achievements of the other men. Bill is an economist who has, for the last twenty-three years, studied the interdependence of economic sectors, both extending and eroding the work of Wassily Leontief. He has been nominated for the prize several times, and one year narrowly lost out to Edmund Phelps, whose achievement he dismissed as "overexplaining the golden rule savings rate." Paul is an ornithologist who has made great advances in understanding bird movement as a type of language and who has proven, pace von Frisch, that honeybees are not the only animals with hard-wired choreography. Though he has only been nominated once, he is slightly younger than Bill, and so more of his work is still ahead of him. Paul puts Bill's odds at ten to one, while Paul puts Bill's odds at twelve to one. Neither of them wants to suggest that the other is incapable of winning a Nobel Prize, as that would reflect negatively upon the naysayer, as both men are roughly equal in stature. Neither Bill nor Paul will tell me what they believe my chances are, and I detect in their reluctance a mix of condescension and dismissiveness. When they look at me, they see only the slightly younger, slightly stooped man who has worked at the clubhouse for ten years. They see only the husband who sometimes has to leave early to tend to his sick wife, or the father who brings his daughters to work and settles them into a side room with coloring books and crayons. If Bill wants to discuss the labor cost of exports, he may not be satisfied with my response; if Paul attempts to demonstrate sparrow syntax, he may find my concentration lacking. It is true that I cannot engage Bill or Paul on their research. My limits are not the only factor. I am busy with my own work. Over the last decade, I have devised a technology that allows an individual to remain surpassingly ambitious while at the same time not betraying or sacrificing those close to him. I know this seems as farfetched as Cherenkov radiation did in 1951, or as partition chromatography did in 1946. How can a man be both driven forward by his ambition and also remain located confidently amidst his family and friends? How can a man focus entirely on his research and still have energy left over for love, for life itself? It is a problem positively Heisenbergian. The path to solving it was neither easy nor direct—as a young chemist, I earned fame for examining carbon chains in interstellar space, and came very close to finding spectral evidence of longer similar molecules. Then my first marriage foundered on the rock of my research, and it was difficult for me to move forward. Pain clung to every step. I switched fields and, as I have said, eventually discovered how ambition and humanity can co-exist harmoniously. I cannot explain it with any accuracy in this essay—no time, must get home—but suffice it to say that I will give a full account in both my forthcoming paper and the lecture in Stockholm that will almost certainly follow. Bill and Paul are, of course, welcome to come along for the trip. I will even pay for their hotel rooms. It is hard to overestimate the value of friends.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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