It must be because youre leaving. She wants to get your parting wisdom. She does that with some of the visiting people. Its a sign shes interested in your take on things.
But how would she know what that is?
I dont know. Not from me. I would only say good things, of course, but she hasnt asked me.
He rubbed a finger gently up and down the burn on his palm.
Tell me, he said, have you ever heard of someone getting a report and, you know, just filing it away? Taking no action on it?
Happens all the time.
Really?
Sure. With some things its the best way to deal with them.
Hmm.
They had made their way to the front of the line, and so paused for orders, and the rapid production of their coffees. Frank continued to look thoughtful. It reminded Anna of his manner when he had arrived at her party, soaking wet from rain, and she said, Say, did you ever find that woman you were stuck in the elevator with?
No. I was going to tell you about that. I did what you suggested and contacted the Metro offices, and asked service and repair to get her name from the report. I said I needed to contact her for my insurance report.
Oh really! And?
And the Metro person read it right off to me, no problem. Read me everything she wrote. But it turns out she wrote down the wrong stuff.
What do you mean?
They walked out of the Starbucks back into the building.
It was a wrong address she put down. Theres no residence there. And she wrote down her name as Jane Smith. I think she made everything up.
Thats strange! I guess they didnt check your IDs.
No.
Id have thought they would.
Maybe people just freed from stuck elevators are not in the mood to be handing over their IDs.
No, I suppose not. An up elevator opened and they got in. They had it to themselves. Like your friend, apparently.
Yeah.
I wonder why she would write down the wrong stuff though.
Me too.
What about what she told yousomething about being in a cycling club, was it?
Ive tried that. None of the cycling clubs in the area will give out membership lists. I cracked into one in Bethesda, but there wasnt any Jane Smith.
Wow. Youve really been looking into it.
Yes.
Maybe shes a spook. Hmm. Maybe you could go to all the cycling club meetings, just once. Or join one and ride with it, and look for her at meets, and show her picture around.
What picture?
Get a portrait program to generate one.
Good idea, although, sigh, it wouldnt look like her.
No, they never do.
Id have to get better at riding a bike.
At least she wasnt into skydiving.
He laughed. True. Well, Ill have to think about it. But thanks, Anna.
Later that afternoon they met again, on the way up to one of Dianes meetings with the NSF Science Board. They got out on the twelfth floor and walked around the hallways. The outer windows at the turns in the halls revealed that the day had darkened, low black clouds now tearing over themselves in their hurry to reach the Atlantic, sheeting down rain as they went.
In the big conference room Laveta and some others were repositioning a whiteboard and PowerPoint screen according to Dianes instructions. Frank and Anna were the first ones there.
Come on in, Diane said. She busied herself with the screen and kept her back to Frank.
The rest of the crowd trickled in. NSFs Board of Directors was composed of twenty-four people, although usually there were a couple of vacant positions in the process of being filled. The directors were all powers in their parts of the scientific world, appointed by the President from lists provided by NSF and the National Academy of Science, and serving four-year terms.
Now they were looking wet and windblown, straggling into the room in ones and twos. Some of Annas fellow division directors came in as well. Eventually fifteen or sixteen people were seated around the big table, including Sophie Harper, their congressional liaison. The light in the room flickered faintly as lightning made itself visible diffusely through the coursing rain on the rooms exterior window. The gray world outside pulsed as if it were an aquarium.
Diane welcomed them and moved quickly through the agendas introductory matter. After that she ran down a list of large projects that had been proposed or discussed in the previous year, getting the briefest of reports from Board members assigned to study the projects. They included climate mitigation proposals, many highly speculative, all extremely expensive. A carbon sink plan included reforestations that would also be useful for flood control; Anna made a note to tell the Khembalis about that one.
But nothing they discussed was going to work on the global situation, given the massive nature of the problem, and NSFs highly constricted budget and mission. Ten billion dollars; and even the $50 billion items on their list of projects only addressed small parts of the global problem.
At moments like these Anna could not help thinking of Charlie playing with Joes dinosaurs, holding up a little pink mouselike thing, a first mammal, and exclaiming, Hey its NSF!
He had meant it as a compliment to their skill at surviving in a big world, or to the way they represented the coming thing, but unfortunately the comparison was also true in terms of size. Scurrying about trying to survive in a world of dying dinosaursworse yet, trying to save the dinosaurs toowhere was the mechanism? As Frank would say, How could that work?
She banished these thoughts and made her own quick report, about the infrastructure distribution programs that she had been studying. A lot of infrastructure had been dispersed in the last decade. Annas concluding suggestion that the programs were a success and should be expanded was received with nods all around, as an obvious thing to do. But also expensive.
There was a pause as people thought this over.
Finally Diane looked at Frank. Frank, are you ready?
Frank stood to answer. He did not exhibit his usual ease. He walked over to the whiteboard, took up a red marker, fiddled with it. His face was flushed.
All the programs described so far focus on gathering data, and the truth is we have enough data already. The worlds climate has already changed. The Arctic Ocean ice pack breakup has flooded the surface of the North Atlantic with fresh water, and the most recent data indicate that that has stopped the surface water from sinking, and stalled the circulation of the big Atlantic current. Thats been pretty conclusively identified as a major trigger event in Earths climatic history. So, abrupt climate change has almost certainly already begun.
Frank stared at the whiteboard, lips pursed. So. The question becomes, what do we do? Business as usual wont work. For you here, the effort should be toward finding ways that NSF can make a much broader impact than it has till now.
Excuse me, one of the Board members said, sounding a bit peeved. He was a man in his sixties, with a gray Lincoln beard; Anna did not recognize him. How is this any different from what we are always trying to do? I mean, weve talked about trying to do this at every Board meeting Ive ever been to. We always ask ourselves, how can NSF get more bang for its buck?
Maybe so, said Frank. But it hasnt worked.
Diane said, What are you saying, Frank? What should we be doing that we havent already tried?
Frank cleared his throat. He and Diane stared at each other for a long moment, locked in some kind of undefined conflict.
Frank shrugged, went to the whiteboard, uncapped his red marker. Let me make a list.
He wrote a 1 and circled it.
One. We have to knit it all together. He wrote, Synergies at NSF.
I mean by this that you should be stimulating synergistic efforts that range across the disciplines to work on this problem. Then, he wrote and circled a 2, you should be looking for immediately relevant applications coming out of the basic research funded by the foundation. These applications should be hunted for by people brought in specifically to do that. You should have a permanent in-house innovation and policy team.
Anna thought, That would be that mathematician he just lost.
She had never seen Frank so serious. His usual manner was gone, and with it the mask of cynicism and self-assurance that he habitually wore, the attitude that it was all a game he condescended to play even though everyone had already lost. Now he was serious, even angry it seemed. Angry at Diane somehow. He wouldnt look at her, or anywhere else but at his scrawled red words on the whiteboard.
Third, you should commission work that you think needs to be done, rather than waiting for proposals and funding choices given to you by others. You cant afford to be so passive anymore. Fourth, you should assign up to fifty percent of NSFs budget every year to the biggest outstanding problem you can identify, in this case catastrophic climate change, and direct the scientific community to attack and solve it. Both public and private science, the whole culture. The effort could be organized like Germanys Max Planck Institutes, which are funded by the government to go after particular problems. Theres about a dozen of those, and they exist while theyre needed and get disbanded when theyre not. Its a good model.
Fifth, you should make more efforts to increase the power of science in policy decisions everywhere. Organize all the scientific bodies on Earth into one larger body, a kind of UN of scientific organizations, which then would work together on the important issues, and would collectively insist they be funded, for the sake of all the future generations of humanity.
He stopped, stared at the whiteboard. He shook his head. All this may sound, what. Large-scaled. Or interfering. Antidemocratic, or elitist or somethingsomething beyond what science is supposed to be.
The man who had objected before said, Were in no position to stage a coup.
Frank shook him off. Think of it in terms of Kuhnian paradigms. The paradigm model Kuhn outlined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The bearded man nodded, granting this.
Kuhn postulated that in the usual state of affairs there is general agreement to a set of core beliefs that structure peoples theoriesthats a paradigm, and the work done within it he called normal science. He was referring to a theoretical understanding of nature, but lets apply the model to sciences social behavior. We do normal science. But as Kuhn pointed out, anomalies crop up. Undeniable events occur that we cant cope with inside the old paradigm. At first scientists just fit the anomalies in as best they can. Then when there are enough of them, the paradigm begins to fall apart. In trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, it becomes as weird as Ptolemys astronomical system.
Thats where we are now. We have our universities, and the Foundation and all the rest, but the system is too complicated, and flying off in all directions. Not capable of coming to grips with the aberrant data.
Frank looked briefly at the man who had objected. Eventually, a new paradigm is proposed that accounts for the anomalies. It comes to grips with them better. After a period of confusion and debate, people start using it to structure a new normal science.
The old man nodded. Youre suggesting we need a paradigm shift in how science interacts with society.
Yes I am.
But what is it? Were still in the period of confusion, as far as I can see.
Yes. But if we dont have a clear sense of what the next paradigm should be, and I agree we dont, then its our job now as scientists to force the issue and make it happen, by employing all our resources in an organized way. To get to the other side faster. The money and the institutional power that NSF has assembled ever since it began has to be used like a tool to build this. No more treating our grantees like clients whom we have to satisfy if we want to keep their business. No more going to Congress with hat in hand, begging for change and letting them call the shots as to where the money is spent.
Whoa now, objected Sophie Harper. They have the right to allocate federal funds, and theyre very jealous of that right, believe you me.
Sure they are. Thats the source of their power. And theyre the elected government, Im not disputing any of that. But we can go to them and say, Look, the partys over. We need this list of projects funded or civilization will be hammered for decades to come. Tell them they cant give a trillion dollars a year to the military and leave the rescue and rebuilding of the world to chance and some kind of free market religion. It isnt working, and science is the only way out of the mess.
You mean the scientific deployment of human effort in these causes, Diane said.
Whatever, Frank snapped, then paused, blinking, as if recognizing what Diane had said. His face went even redder.
I dont know, another Board member said. Weve been trying more outreach, more lobbying of Congress, all that. Im not sure more of that will get the big change youre talking about.
Frank nodded. Im not sure they will either. They were the best I could think of, and more needs to be done there.
In the end, NSF is a small agency, someone else said.
Thats true too. But think of it as an information cascade. If the whole of NSF was focused for a time on this project, then our impact would hopefully be multiplied. It would cascade from there. The math of cascades is fairly probabilistic. You push enough elements at once, and if theyre the right elements, and the situation is at the angle of repose or past it, boom. Cascade. Paradigm shift. New focus on the big problems were facing.
The people around the table were thinking it over.
Diane never took her eye off Frank. Im wondering if we are at such an obvious edge-of-the-cliff moment that people will listen to us if we try to start such a cascade.
I dont know, Frank said. I do think were past the angle of repose. The Atlantic current has stalled. Were headed for a period of rapid climate change. That means problems that will make normal science impossible.
Diane smiled tautly. Youre suggesting we have to save the world so science can proceed?
Yes, if you want to put it that way. If youre lacking a better reason to do it.
Diane stared at him, offended. He met her gaze unapologetically.
Anna watched this standoff, on the edge of her seat. Something was going on between those two, and she had no idea what it was. To ease the suspense she wrote down on her handpad, saving the world so science can proceed. The Frank Principle, as Charlie later dubbed it.