Joe Ferguson was one of the temps at the Cyclotron Institute, a computer programmer stop-gap whose unimportance was evidently marked by his placement in the building. All summer he had been relegated to the background corridors of research purgatory; his cubicle was the only one given to an adult worker among the cubicles of the summer research students, who, unlike him, were lucky enough to have this as a temporary engagement with an ending date. These college students, indeed, seemed happy enough to be there. Though the Cyclotron Institute’s heyday was long past—in the 1970s, it had been one of the leading high-energy research centers in the world, but gains in technology had since rendered the center mostly obsolete, making its available energy levels ideal for specialized cancer treatments but little else—it was still a good place for a burgeoning physicist to gain a foothold in the world of accelerator physics. At the end of the collegiate school year, Joe’s room had cleared of the doctoral students whose theses had been finally completed, and within two weeks the room had been filled by these college students whose main pastime was loud philosophizing about the true nature of the quantum wavefunction.
Having been at the Institute for about two years now, Joe could see in these students the beginnings of the professionalization process that he had discussed with one of the newly hatched doctoral candidates not three weeks previously. “The bitch of it is,” Ronald, his neighbor in the cubicle to the north had complained, “as a professional, I don’t even feel interested in science anymore. It takes all of my effort just to read the accelerator design journals, and I have no idea what’s going on in any other areas of science. Last week, Jan told me that over at the other end of campus they’re doing these really amazing biophysics experiments on limb regeneration in chickens, spatial orientation of flies, cognition in rats—all this really wonderful jazz—and what did I say in response? I made some lame excuse and told her that I wanted to go for a jog. I mean, you can only stand so much science in one day.” A short, lumpy man who had met his longtime girlfriend Jan when they were both undergraduate mathematics majors, Ronald was just one example of the depressing brand of scientific professionals who had been jaded by a few years of graduate study and who would now look for a spot of quiet tenure to settle in for a lifetime of undergraduate education.
All this seemed boringly predictable to Joe Ferguson. He felt that he could write a computer simulation entitled ScienceProfessional.cpp that would be more boringly accurate than the chaotic-motion simulations incorporated in so many doctoral theses to explain the random fluctuations in their data sets. The functional trajectories would be like a closed form two-body problem in which the initial conditions completely determine the endpoints of the situation, which have been analytically solved from the beginning. The sad thing was that the summer research kids didn’t seem to know what was coming at them. These nice, preppy kids were already caught in the trap, and they seemed blissfully content to argue over the history of ideas like they would never need to specialize, like they could forever argue over whatever topic seemed momentarily interesting. Give them three years, thought Joe, four max: 5% of them will be happy and successful in their chosen field, and the other 95% will be bored and burnt out, just like any other corporate professional. The worst thing of it is, they’ll have to turn around and pretend that they have an undying passion for finding the possible magnetic moment of the neutron, or they’ll never get grant money, whereupon they’ll be even worse off than the ordinary mediocre scientist.
Joe decided that he would not communicate with the research students that summer. For a lunch break, he stayed in his desk, ate the sandwich he had packed, watched two videos off sexyandfunny.com labeled ‘Safe for Work,’ and wondered how long it would be before this particular brand of work purgatory would evolve into work hell. After a few minutes of habitual angst, he got back to running configuration checks on a virtual Linux machine and worked steadily until 4:45, when he closed down his workstation, shuffled papers for fifteen minutes, and left, glad to be done with another boring day of unwanted steadiness.
While examining the case of Joe Ferguson, there are several considerations worth noting. The first of these is that he did not think of himself as being on the same path as the scientists with whom he daily collided. But to an outside observer, it might seem that his life path had been just as blandly predictable as those of the despised professionalized. Following a successful but not remarkable college career during which he lived at home and commuted, he moved in with his college girlfriend and got his first job as a corporate programmer. After a year of on-again, off-again happiness, he and Megan mutually decided that they were each too good for the other. As a result of this split, Megan made it clear that Joe, and not she, was expected to move out. Joe lived in his parents’ basement for another five months, and, having realized early on that this was a situation he could not stand for very long, by Christmas he had landed a new job in Illinois with the Cyclotron Institute.
As mentioned, the outward normalcy of these daily transactions did not strike Joe as being predictors that his life would lay easily within one or two standard deviations of the normative American Gaussian. He was still young enough to carry that touchingly hopeful vanity of a man convinced that he will someday do great things. Indeed, a disinterested onlooker might be inclined to agree with him, to a point. After all, he had his youth and, for a programmer, good looks and suavity. Despite his recent dislike for his cubicle neighbors, he was generally affable and got on well with his coworkers. Still, there were other aspects of his manner to make one wary as to his chances at success. Though he was intelligent, he was politically unambitious, and this lack of worldly motivation was often interpreted by his superiors as an attitude of general insolence. Once, while leaving her office after a quarterly review, Joe heard his Institute boss comment, “He’s such a bright guy to be working as a temp, but you can sure tell that he knows it.” Instead of realizing this as a statement of not-so-veiled contempt, Joe took it as a compliment, as an indicator that he was to be the one to choose how temporary his position might be.
However, Joe’s sense of privilege stemmed less from his work skills than from his admittedly absurd belief that he somehow was uniquely destined to make the philosophical leap necessary for the next Copernican Revolution. It was for this reason that he had decided to leave the corporate world for the Cyclotron Institute and not for somewhere more stable or lucrative. Unfortunately, now that he was at the Institute, where he could talk to people with similar philosophical interests, he began to lose faith in science. By degrees, he understood that the progress of physics was more similar to the engineering of computers than, say, to theology. The popular science renditions had made it all sound so purposeful, like science gave a possible exit from the Sisyphusian comedy, like science might completely transform the old cycle of life and death into something completely new. After a few months of immersion, Joe wondered if science had any philosophical benefits at all. The professional drones spent their time building mathematical models of plasmas, not pursuing hope for mankind.
The worst effect of Joe’s searching was that he had finally started to question the nature of his own questioning. If this universe, via Everett’s Relative State formation of quantum mechanics, is truly deterministic, then would it even mean anything to discover the philosophical foundations of the universe? And what of the block universe theories, wherein the universe is set from the beginning and time is itself an illusion? In these cases, Joe would be a mere puppet on the strings of the ultimate equations—albeit a puppet cursed to feel guilt and shame at not being able to transcend his pre-programmed destiny. “I felt much more in control of things when I believed in my own free will,” Joe confided to Ronald a few weeks before Ronald’s spacetime trajectory diverged from his own.
“Tell me about it.” Ronald shook his head. “There’re just so many variables that are out of my control. Will my thesis get passed? Will Jan and I be able to get professorships in the same general location? I feel you, man.”
That wasn’t what Joe had meant; he had been referring to the possibility that all the variables had been stuck in place since the beginning of time, or of spacetime, or of whatever was the fundamental backdrop. But as Ronald, whose mathematical abilities far outstripped Joe’s, seemed oblivious to the greater implications, Joe stopped short. No need to ruin the professional’s life with too much profundity, he thought. The two men exchanged wry looks over their dividing cubicle wall and got back to work.
Joe Ferguson’s career at the Cyclotron Institute ended suddenly. He was alone in cubicle purgatory; the summer students had found the food kiosk in the front of the building, the only place in the building with large windows to let in natural light, and had made a daily ritual of taking a community lunchtime. After finishing his eggsalad, Joe opened up YouTube to watch a few videos, as was his custom.
The night before he had found the strange fetish media of smoker-porn, with hundreds of clips of women staring lustily through the screen while smoke poured from their mouths. Predetermined or not, there were bizarre things in this world. Joe felt no sense of guilt watching these videos, even at work.
Although there was an unwritten (and sometimes written) rule throughout the professional world that one should not watch pornography at work, these videos were not porn, Joe reasoned, because they didn’t turn him on. They were interesting simply for their peculiarity.
He clicked on a clip entitled “1min 12sec of Smoking in Bedroom,” which, as promised, simply showed a woman lying in her nightclothes smoking. The camera zoomed in on her mouth, revealing a small cold sore on her left bottom lip, but the smoke soon covered it, and she smiled, and continued. God, Joe thought: the guys who get off on this stuff must be hooked like Pavlovian dogs on their cigs. Weird. He kept clicking until he found something that excited him: a video of two girls making out while they periodically shared a cigar. The women together were interesting enough, but he still thought the cigar was strange, especially in the post-Lewinsky world. Although, Joe mused, maybe my interest in the look of an undressed woman would seem just as unnatural were I not stuck so completely in the human sphere. He considered his possible free will in the matter as the two women discarded the cigar to begin their standard kneading of one another. He then gauged how pretentious it was to continue the scientific meta-narrative even as he viewed near-porn, an action that by all rights should consistently shun rationality. One of the girls snapped her panty elastic, and Joe looked around to make sure the kids were still discussing philosophy.
The students were gone, but in his quick turn he saw his boss standing quietly behind him. How long? Joe wondered as he frantically closed the window. He knew that for a temp this question was of little use. The boss left without comment, her sharp manner indicating not only that she thought him to be repulsive, but also that he was not worth deigning to address. For a philosopher like Joe, this shunning was especially hard to take. She would not hear his reasons or excuses. In the thoughtless world of the professionalized zombie, it is simply assumed that each man is entirely in control of what happens in his kingdom, his cubicle. But Joe wasn’t sure that was true. Had his boss considered the boundary conditions at the beginning, then she would perhaps see that there was no other path he could have followed at that particular point in time. Then again, following the same line of logic, given her initial state, neither was there a possibility of her understanding.
Later in the day, he received the e-mail stating that his services would no longer be needed by the Cyclotron Institute. The message included a cordial thank you for his time but no mention of the slight offense. That afternoon, as Joe carried his things through the depths of purgatory into the outdoors, he felt momentarily glad to leave the student researchers in their dull patina of ambient fluorescence. He was glad that his quest would not follow so rigid of a life path as these boys who hoped so dearly to understand the universe. Or maybe his first impression was wrong. Maybe he didn’t even want to understand it anymore. Maybe he would like better simply to find steady, lucrative employment where he would no longer have to worry about the cosmic philosophical issues. As Joe stepped into the sunlight, he wanted only to understand the program controlling the rest of his life so he could relax and accept what he had no power to control.