Those of Nobel Character (2024)

I know what you probably know, which is lots of people trying lots of things. I know authors (of course), musicians (of course), filmmakers, professors, entrepreneurs, and so on. Each of them wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and has some version of this thought: What now? They are, on average, people who believe that they should be moving forward and upward, meaning that they are people. Now and again, one of them will take a Zen break. I’ll get an email or a call. “Hey,” the voice on the other end of the line will say, “I was thinking about something.” The way the voices says “something” gives the game away. I inquire anyway. “I was thinking,” the voice continues, “that I don’t fully know whether my drive to achieve, to be recognized for my achievements, is even real. Isn’t life fleeting? Isn’t it fleeting away from us? Isn’t the true significance of our existence something at once more fundamental and more elevated?” I resist the impulse to say that “fleeting” isn’t a verb and I just listen. There’s pain in the voice sometimes but also a freedom that resembles the pupa stage of peace.

This story is about one of those calls. It happened not so long ago. The person in question is younger than I am. She has done a ton in her fairly short life. She wonders if the Habitrail serves her well. In this story, I have changed nearly everything about her, except for the fact that she likes board games and has been in a pool.

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EYES ON THE PRIZE

Bill and Paul and I 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 various social 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, 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 ailing mother-in-law, 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. And while it is true that I cannot engage Bill or Paul on their research, the sophistication of that research is 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 healthily 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, and it is also a problem I have solved. The path to success 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 though I knew that the next logical phase involved simulating the atmosphere of a carbon star, It was difficult for me to move forward. Pain clung to every step. Instead, 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. [©2024 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]