Scientist Building 101

Before I get into this issue's topic on how to build a scientist, I just wanted to make a note that this column has now been appearing in the Bulletin for five years, and I wanted to thank the readers for all their wonderful comments and feedback during this time. To kick off what will hopefully be many more years of columns you will find both entertaining and informative I am going to change the format a bit on for this special anniversary column. Instead of the normal News You Can Use and Bits and Pieces sections, I'm going to devote the entire column to a single topic - namely, that of how to build a scientist. I'm certain that at some point in all of your careers you've at least glanced through some SF/Fantasy How to Books and seen the chapters on how to fabricate worlds, characters and aliens. Pretty standard stuff. But what you don't often see is how to build a scientist. For those writing SF, and even those writing Fantasy (where many aspects of the scientist can be used for wizards and magicians - at times the boundary between SF and Fantasy blurring to nothing in this regard), the vitality and realism of your scientist can make or break the story.

The two-dimensional scientist that we hope we never find in our own writing or are subjected to in other's writing is either that of the sociopathic variety bent on controlling/destroying the world, or the saintly scientist who hugs trees and has devoted his/her life to the betterment of mankind and the world.

Forget it.

The problem is that scientists are people, and as such are incredibly complex, colored in infinite shades of gray. However, having said that, I will back step just a bit and tell you that real scientists typically fall into one of three categories. These three types can best be described by a joke that I first heard while a freshman at UCLA at which time I was a physics major (during my junior year I switched to engineering, but will discuss that later). Here goes.

Three men check into a hotel and each are given a room on a different floor. They are the only guests in the hotel. One is a physicist, one an engineer, and the third a mathematician. After they've all gone to sleep, a small fire breaks out in the hallway just outside each of their doors (talk about a coincidence).

The physicist is the first to wake, smelling smoke, and opens the door to his room, seeing a small fire burning in the hallway. He notes that some 10 meters away is a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall. He calmly walks over to the extinguisher, reads the operating instructions, as well as the ingredients, and makes special note of the pressure within the cylinder. He then puts the fire extinguisher down, turns around, and pulling a pen from the pocket protector in his pajama top pocket, he begins to write on the wall, starting with a few fundamental thermodynamics equations, and then applying the proper boundary conditions, including the size of the fire, the material being burned (carpet, a dried out fern, and faux-wooden molding made from some hyper-toxic long chain organic compounds). Thirty seconds later, with equations scrawled down nearly to the floorboard, he has his answer, puts his pen back into his pocket protector, picks up the fire extinguisher, and walks over to the fire. He stands 2.2 meters away from it, holds the fire extinguisher at an angle of 53 degrees with respect to the plane of the floor and pulls the trigger for 12.3 seconds rastering the extinguisher's nozzle back and forth exactly 7 times. The moment he releases his finger from the extinguisher the fire goes out. He then returns the extinguisher to its wall bracket, reenters his room and getting back into bed is asleep in a few seconds.

Next, the engineer wakes to the smell of smoke. Running into the hallway, he sees the fire, and looks up and down the hallway, seeing not only the fire extinguisher some 10 meters from him, but also two more fire extinguishers further down the hallway. Not sure exactly how much each extinguisher holds he decides to get all three. They're heavy and he can only carry two at a time, so that to get the third one, he has to make a second trip to the far end of the hallway. By the time he has the extinguishers back at the fire, a considerable part of the wall, and even a portion of the ceiling is now on fire. He blasts away with the extinguishers, spraying foam everywhere. Two extinguishers later, the fire is finally out. But being an experienced engineer he knows that it's good to always ensure a bit of over design in any project, just to make sure. He takes the third extinguisher and starts spraying it on the carpet, walls and ceiling, spraying as he backs into his room, continuing to spray everything in his room, as well as his bed, and even underneath the sheets. Better safe than sorry. When the extinguisher finally sputters, totally empty, he drops it to the floor, and crawls into his foam drenched bed. But he is unable to fall asleep, worrying that he should go in search of a fourth extinguisher, just in case another unrelated fire should begin.

The mathematician then wakes, smelling smoke. He opens the door to his room and walks into the hallway, seeing the fire. He stares at it. His eyes slightly glaze. Nearly a full minute pass without him moving in the slightest, while the fire grows, crawling up the wall and licking at the ceiling. He then suddenly turns, goes back into his room, closes the door behind him, and walks into the bathroom. He turns on his sink faucet, and places a finger under the running water. He smiles. "A solution exists," he says. Pleased that the problem can be solved, he returns to bed. The hotel then burns to the ground, and the cindered corpses of the three scientists are sent to the morgue.

As you might guess, physics students told this joke. Later, when I transferred into engineering, the joke as told by the engineers was slightly modified. The engineer did get that fourth back up extinguisher and was able to keep his room from burning until rescued by the firemen.

These are certainly stereotypes, and the reality of a scientist's approach usually lies somewhere in between the extremes of the engineer and the mathematician, but believe me, it is amazing just how close to the extremes some real scientists approach these examples.

So as this joke illustrates, the first thing to do when building your scientist is to pick just what type of scientist you will need. If at some point in your tale your scientist will need to modify the warp drive by diving head first into matter-antimatter pods and jury-rig a hyper-dimensional flux coupler out of a coat hanger and a slice of chocolate cake, then this scientist had better not have spent his/her formative years pondering the mathematical quirks of black hole formation. In a similar fashion, the engineer who has had his hands biologically morphed into the 36th century version of Swiss Army knives would probably not be your best candidate to develop the theoretical underpinnings allowing the fabrication of a pocket universe capable of swallowing the invading armada of evil insectoid warriors from Cygni-12.

It is damn rare to find a real scientist who can do it all. So first pick your flavor of scientist.

Back-Story

Now unless your fictional scientists are being popped from cloning vats and their scientific expertise downloaded directly into their heads by way of the master computer controlling your fictional universe, your scientist had some type of life before being called upon to save/destroy the universe.

And that life will influence how he/she saves the universe.

A lot of that back-story will never make its way onto your printed page of course, but you will need to know that story in order to make this person real. And I can give you a case example of the twists and turns that make up a scientist, a single back-story out of the millions possible, but one that I know will have the ring of truth to it, one that will be capable of making a real, living, breathing scientist - because it's my story.

I'm what you might call an applied physicist - my training lying somewhere between the overeager extinguisher spraying engineer, and the physicist who knew just how long to keep the foam flying right down to the last millisecond.

Scientists are born and not made.

Give me a break.

In many people's minds a scientist enters into this world as a child genius, smashing atoms with a contraption built out of building blocks, and creating artificial creatures by manipulating a pet's DNA with common household cleaning products.

No. That is the two-dimensional exception.

Picture if you will, one 12th grade Bob Metzger, sitting in a guidance counselor's office, filling out an application to go to UCLA. The school itself was not picked because I had to work under some world famous scientist who resided there. It was picked because it was within driving distance to my parent's house, an all-important consideration for one who could not afford to live at school. Now while the school might have been forced upon me by financial circumstance, I was free to choose the field that I would major in, to begin the pursuit of my life's goals.

As I filled out the application for UCLA, and pondered that annoying little box that wanted me to fill in my intended major, I looked up at my friend Nelson Lee, who was also filling out some University related forms. Nelson's father was an engineering professor at one of California's State Universities. Nelson would be going to Cal Tech, following in his father's scientific footsteps. I asked him what he is going to major in. Physics. It was a family tradition. I don't think that he has any real choice.

I thought about it for a moment. I enjoyed my physics class, in fact liked all the science I had taken in high school. The problem was, that I liked just about everything I'd taken in high school (except foreign languages - I'd suffered through 3 years of both German and Spanish, and my mastery of those alien tongues barely exceeded the ability to count to ten and ask for the location of the bathroom). If Nelson thought physics was a good choice, then I thought I'd go along with that. I figured that I could always change my major later if I didn't like it.

And that was it - so much for what was probably one of the most important decisions of my life. I didn't even know what a physicist did. I didn't know that a 4-year Bachelors degree in physics was just about worthless, and to do any real physics would require a PhD.

In hindsight, my lack of understanding of how the scientific world functioned, what the players within it actually did, was incredibly lacking. Perhaps I was a particularly dim-witted case, but keep this in mind - many a scientist has started down the path by the most insignificant turn of events. And also remember that this important life decision was being made by a 17 year old. My recollection of that time, and as evidenced by my actions, clearly show that I had not yet reached the threshold of self-awareness (and yes, we could certainly debate if I have yet reached that state). I was a kid.

But the choice was made. I would not be a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief - I had chosen to become a scientist. And what does a scientist do? You might as well ask how many grains of sand fill a beach. There is no right or wrong answer to that question. But there is a general answer; in the same way that you could answer the beach question by saying that there is a helluva lot of grains. A scientist thinks.

Obvious?

Not to most folks. Many believe that the a scientist comes into being after having been shown the scientist secret handshake and given a membership card and lab coat - this honor received because they knew that the atomic number of Niobium is 41, the index of refraction of water is 1.33, and that the speed of sound is 1460 meter/second. Many fictional scientists you run across are painted in this way, shown to be little more than regurgitators of facts.

"If we only knew the value of p to 7000 significant digits we could befuddle the Rigellian ambassador and buy enough time to pound their planet into quarks!" shouted General Square Jaw.

"No problem," answered scientist first-class Pinhead. "I memorized the value of p to 10,000 significant digits while a freshman at Technical Tech," he said proudly.

A tear almost escapes the corner of the General's right eye. "Thank God. Your brilliant scientific prowess has once again saved Earth."

Scientist as regurgitator of facts does not cut it, despite what you may have read. But during my first two years at UCLA, I thought this was exactly what was expected of me. I took detailed notes of my professor's every utterance, and expected to be tested on my ability to regurgitate those notes. This had worked perfectly well in high school, and given me a near 4.0 grade point average.

But it was no longer working.

The test questions weren't quite like the ones given for homework or discussed in class. I could not just spit out a formula, pop in some numbers and crank out an answer. I worked every conscious moment, cramming ever more facts and formulas into my brain. But after two years of this grueling existence, my GPA stood at 3.0. I knew by now that to do anything in physics I would need a PhD, and that a GPA of 3.0 was not going to get me into grad school.

So during the summer between sophomore and junior year I gave up.

This was probably the first real scientific act in my life. I had come to the conscious conclusion that what I was doing was not working, and would not work no matter how long I continued to try it. It had taken two years, but I had finally figured something out. Regurgitating facts was not how science worked. I still did not know how science worked, but I sure knew one way that it didn't.

And for any scientist, knowing what doesn't work, can at times be even more important than knowing what does work.

Junior year began and I decided that if I was going to flame out that I should flare as big as possible. I sat in a junior mechanics class (no, this is not a class about working on small cars - but a math heavy class on the manipulation of physical objects ranging from planets to electrons), bringing with me not so much as a pencil or piece of paper.

I took absolutely no notes.

I simply listened to what the Professor was saying.

In the past, I'd perfected the art of note-taking to the point where my ears were connected directly to my writing hand - my brain never got in the way. But now I let my ears connect directly to my brain. Now this brain, like that of so many other scientists and engineers, had been warped by teenage years spent consuming vast quantities of SF and Fantasy. I'd been neurally primed to accept input in the form of plot and characters. And as the Professor scribbled across the chalkboard I experienced a little physics epiphany.

An equation is equivalent to the plot of a story.

The variables in the equation behave like the characters in a story.

I often ask writers when they know that their characters are working, when they've crossed the line between a two-dimensional sketch, to a three-dimensional flesh and bones individual. They almost all give the same answer - the characters begin to tell them what they will and won't do. This is just what the variables in the equations were doing - they each had their own unique little personalities that dictated what they would and wouldn't do, the whole thing constrained by the plot imposed by the equation.

That was it for me.

There was some refinement down the road. When I read, and especially when I write, and slip into the zone, the story unfolds before me like a movie, and I am little more than a scribe recording the experience. This too began to happen with the equations - I could see how they behaved, convoluted contours like some three-dimensional topographical map spreading out before me.

This was my way of seeing physics.

For others it is often different. Some will tell you that the equations talk to them, actually sing. Others will tell you that they know they understand the deeper meaning of the equations when they finally see the beauty in them, the elegance, that rare combination of simplicity and power. The experience will be different for each and every scientist, including those of fictional construction. But they will have this experience, this revelation that all those equations are more than an assemblage of Greek symbols. At this point the would-be scientist has left the realm of the regurgitator and entered into the dark woods of the thinker.

From that point on, the time I spent in class, reading textbooks, and preparing for tests was radically reduced, while at the same time my GPA went to near 4.0. With the pressure off, and time on my hands, I finally pulled my head out of the sand, looked about to see what research was going on in the physics labs and came to a startling conclusion.

I didn't want to do physics.

I didn't want to unravel the secrets of the universe.

I wanted to use the rules to manipulate the universe - and that meant that I wanted to be an engineer. So I moved over to electrical engineering. Now the research I got involved with had to do with figuring out how atoms of gallium and antimony move across an atomically smooth silicon surface, and how those atoms get incorporated in a growing silicon lattice. This was pure physics. But the objectives were pure engineering. If I could figure out the equations dictating the movement and incorporation of those atoms (the plot), and then manipulate the variables (characters) of those equations, I could make the atoms do what I wanted, go where I wanted them to go (but you can only push them so far before they stand up and protest). And that would allow me to grow crystals with desired internal electrical fields that would cause the electrons within them to go screaming about in all sorts of bizarre ways. What we learned in the early '80s from this sort of research is now incorporated in the chips that sit in the receive/transmit module of your cell phone.

Pecking Order

Now this is very important when building your scientist. Science is a human endeavor, and as such, functions like any other human activity in which individuals with their own desires and agendas find themselves within an organization with its own desires and agendas. This is a recipe for chaos. The most basic approach to control this chaos is to establish a pecking order, or chain of command.

Think of an army.

In any large university laboratory, the Professor is the general - the person who dictates the objectives and brings in the resources to bear on the project. Directly beneath the general is his/her staff. These are either Research Staff (PhDs who are not actually Professors, but in many cases do the jobs of a Professor at a greatly reduced salary). Beneath them are the Post-Docs, those who have just received their PhDs, but need a few more years of guided research under their belts to pad resumes in an attempt to get a faculty position. Beneath them are the grad students, ranging from the nearly completed PhDs, to the beginning Master students. And lower than a Master Student are a few undergrad students who manage to worm his/her way into a lab. Trashcans always need to be emptied and there are more than enough willing undergrads to jump at the chance.

Most labs operate this way. Students are trained to take orders from the rank above. This mindset first established in school will see most scientists through their entire careers. Follow orders and work toward the goal of the organization. In your fictional works, these individuals are typically the spear-carriers, those needed to support your protagonist and antagonist. Rarely do these become the main characters of the story. On rare occasion one of these rise up through the ranks to eventually become a Professor (General) and start the process all over again.

Boring - both in the real world as well as the fictional world.

Whether good guys or bad guys, you want them deformed, bent, tormented by inner demons - in short you want them to be interesting, not to be good little robots that followed the rules and climbed the ladder rung by rung. Look at any real scientist who has changed the world, or any fictional scientist who can destroy the incoming alien armada, and I would bet my bottom dollar that damn few of them followed the rung by rung approach. Most either kicked the ladder down, or invented a jet pack allowing them to reach the top of the ladder without even touching the rungs.

My own graduate school experience, that critical period of formation that warps your mind and thinking processes to create the sort of scientist you will become was not one that could be characterized along the army model. My experience was a bit more unique, one best modeled along the lines of a terrorist organization.

My Advisor did not work his way up the academic ranks. You see, a Professor might be the General, but recall that there are all sorts of Generals, the levels dictated by the number of stars. Beginning Professors are brought in at the assistant level (one star), the next step being the associate Professor (two star), and finally the full Professor (three star). The head of any department, called the Chair, is not only a full Professor, but also lord and master over the other Professors (this makes him/her a four star general). The Professor I worked for (called your Advisor) was the Chair of the department. But he had not worked his way up the academic ladder. A world-class famous scientist, he had spent his entire career at Bell Laboratories, back in the day when that lab was the foremost research facility in the world. He had no academic experience, but was brought in to be the Department Chair due to his scientific reputation, and his strength of personality that was needed to reintegrate a department that was suffering from an out of control internal war. Think of this ploy as the academic equivalent of a crumbling government begging a military strongman to step in and take control before a country rips itself to pieces.

However, my Advisor had no desire to build a lab along the lines of an army. So confident, his reputation already firmly established, he had nothing to prove, did not need to add more stars to his uniform. He did not want a horde of students. He did not want to have to tell students what to do. He wanted students that could operate independently. He would provide a general vision, and leave the details of implementing that vision to those beneath him.

He needed a few well-chosen deviants.

In a typical Professor's career he/she might generate anywhere from 25-50 PhD students. My advisor barely broke the half dozen mark. I began my bondage as an undergrad, getting my foot in the door by agreeing to work for free. I did the grunt work in his lab - anything from filing papers, tightening bolts, and spending weeks on end in the machine shop where I quickly learned to operate mills, lathes and drill presses. When not working for him, I would be loaned out to other Professors in need of a grunt.

After six months in unpaid grunt status I told him that I was broke, and that unless he could pay me, I would have to go find a job if I wanted to stay in school. He started paying me. At that time he had only one other student, a new grad student from India. The two of us were to start on a new project. We were shown a room with nothing in it except for a big stainless steel vacuum chamber and a few racks of equipment. He told us that he had a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, and wanted us to build a machine capable of doing something called Molecular Beam Epitaxy (a technique by which semiconductor crystals can be grown atomic layer by atomic layer). He'd sketched out a design, gave us some technical papers to read, an account number to charge to, and headed back to his office.

Between myself and the other student it was a case of the blind leading the blind and the deaf (I am still not sure which one I was). It took us nearly a year to build the machine and the electronics to support it. I spent months in the machine shop. We would see our Professor once every few weeks and report our progress. At the end of the first year we had spent the money, and built a machine that did not work.

We were screwed.

Our Advisor went on a three-month summer vacation.

What to do? Any rational student would have walked down the hallway and signed up with one of those army-labs, received their daily orders, and started work on whatever widget that would eventually lead to a PhD.

The two of us were either too stubborn, too stupid, or too damn cocky to do that (probably a combination of all three). We would not go running with our tails between our legs. Our machine didn't work, but we'd learned a lot in building it. We knew what didn't work. We thought we knew what had to be modified, enhanced, and in some cases simply ripped out, tossed in the trashcan and rebuilt from scratch.

We wanted another crack at it.

But we were broke.

So we borrowed equipment. We found equipment. We'd developed a contact in one of the surrounding aerospace companies who liberated spare parts for us. And then of course there was the stuff that I just flat out stole - if no one complained after a few days I figured that they really didn't need it in the first place.

That summer we rebuilt our machine and it worked.

Our Advisor returned, and seeing what we had done, informed us that it was obvious that he should take more vacations.

A pattern began to emerge. Our Advisor did not like giving orders and we did not like taking orders - the perfect codependent relationship. This set the scientific styles for the rest of our careers. Of the six or so PhDs that our Advisor produced in his career, not a single one remains in academia. All went to work in industry. Four of them rose up to at least VP levels in large companies, or started their own companies - always attempting to get into a position in which someone was not telling them what to do. These are all typical alpha characters, all quite suitable as either protagonists or antagonists depending on ones perspective. One of the six vanished from the face of the earth - we suspect either commitment to a mental hospital, or that he has become a semi-professional golfer. The last one (me), tried to do his science like a good little scientist, but developed this psychosis that he must become a science fiction writer - I was obviously the most deviant of the bunch.

Finishing Touches

So you start to get the picture on how to build a real scientist. This of course covers only the most basics of early scientist formation - career advancement, technical/personality sabotage, ego-stroking, and vested shares will be left for another time. But I will clue you in to a few remaining little items in order to flesh out your fledging scientist, before you unleash him/her into the world, through a few examples of those little moments that make a person a person, or in this case a scientist a scientist. For the not so fictional Bob Metzger, several such moments come to mind before the University bestowed upon him his PhD. (along with secret handshake and decoder ring). Keep in mind that these are the sorts of events that an experimental scientist might experience in their formative years, and that the trials and tribulations of a mathematician or theoretical physicist would be much different. In no particular order:

1. While attempting to repair a high voltage supply used to power up an electron gun, Metzger accidentally touched a ten-inch long screwdriver to the hot side of a 10,000-volt transformer. There is a brief explosion, and Metzger finds himself still holding onto the screwdriver, only it is no longer poking in the back of the power supply, but embedded in a wall behind him. The screwdriver is tugged out, and is now only 5 inches long and terminated with solidified molten blob. Another student, who had been watching the electron gun's output during this little adventure, informs Metzger that the gun's output has improved and asks him to "try it again". Metzger declined.
2. Metzger hears about a scanning electron microscope in the geology department that had been used to investigate rocks returned from the moon. It is now 1980 and no one cares about moon rocks. Metzger wants that microscope. He has no money and his Advisor is on vacation and can't be reached. He fills out a bogus purchase order for $5,000, scribbles an authorization signature that some might assume was that of his Advisor's, and with the aid of a flatbed truck and five strong students has the microscope in his lab by the end of the day. No official charges were filed. The microscope was not returned.
3. While in the machine shop a bit seizes in chunk of metal, causing the 3 pound V-block it is wedged into to go flying from the drill press at a high rate of speed. The V-block intersects with Metzger's face just as he walks into the shop. No broken bones, but a lot of blood. Had the intersection point been a half an inch higher his right eye would have been turned to jelly.
4. Metzger's right forearm gets pressed up against a piece of stainless steel that is at approximately 400 °F. The forearm is temporarily welded to the steel, and many layers of flesh remain behind.
5. Metzger dropped a 30-pound lead brick on the inside of his right wrist. For several years after, whenever anyone sees the resulting scars, it is often assumed that they were the result of a botched suicide attempt - this is understandable mistake since he is an engineering grad student.
6. Metzger neglected to have a 15,000 V power supply turned off when his Advisor removed an electrical connector to the supply. No permanent damage was done to the Advisor, but Metzger nearly suffered a heart attack, realizing that had he killed his advisor he probably would not be given his PhD.
7. While in quest of stainless steel tubing Metzger went through one security door which was propped open with a chair, and followed a dazed labcoated individual through another security door. While searching through a pile of used tubing, Metzger was informed by a very alarmed individual that he was standing about two feet away from UCLA's experimental nuclear reactor and that he should quickly vacate and tell no one that he'd gotten into the reactor room. (Note - for unspecified security concerns this reactor was shortly thereafter shut down just prior to the 1980 Olympic games held in Los Angeles).
8. With fellow experimenter situated atop the roof of the 5 floor engineering building where he is slamming together two 50,000 V aluminum cables in order to produce sizzling blobs of aluminum, Metzger waits 5 stories below, video camera in hand, ready to record the interaction of these molten blobs with various debris strewn across the pavement. (Metzger's first consulting job for the private sector). An interesting sidebar to this experiment is the observation that molten aluminum blobs generated in this fashion will quickly burn through all types of clothing.
9. By the time Metzger receives his PhD, 7 wooden chairs, 3 telephones, and several dozen ceiling acoustic tiles have been destroyed in the lab by students whose equipment would not operate properly.
10. Flakes of titanium can spontaneously explode when exposed to air - especially when in close proximity to Metzger's face. Eyebrows do grow back in time.

I believe you are now ready to go out and build your own scientist.