The Paula Scale

Tufts University, 2017. Tallahassee, Florida, 1983. Two men who never met, from different continents and different disciplines, who answered the same question negatively. There is nothing at the centre. Dennett spent his career removing the inner observer from consciousness. Dirac spent his career trusting an equation that produced particles nobody had seen. One explained everything. The other sai...

Season 4 opens on a question that no institution can answer. Who decides? When the constitution permits a tyrant, when the physics permits a weapon, when the logic permits the destruction of a colleague -- who decides what is right? Not what is legal, not what is logical, not what is strategically optimal. What is right. Paula frames the season by naming the scale she operates on. Q-Level is a mea...

Between seasons, there is a crack. This is where the crack lives. Paula calls it a Gödel bonus. The running order opens up here, and she uses the opening to visit two people the season structure does not accommodate. Prague, the winter of 1917. Franz Kafka is thirty-four. He has had a diagnosis in August that he is still absorbing. He goes to the office in the morning -- the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versic...

Milan, January 2016. Umberto Eco is eighty-four. His apartment in Piazza Castello holds seventeen thousand books; the corridor between the shelves is wide enough for one person to walk. There is coffee and there are cigarettes and there is a manuscript on the desk called Pape Satan Aleppe, and Eco is going to spend the day talking to the one visitor he does not have to explain himself to. He recog...

Two rooms, two years, both in England. Cambridge, nineteen twenty-nine. Ludwig Wittgenstein has just returned to Trinity after six years away. He came in nineteen eleven at twenty-two, the son of one of the wealthiest industrialists in Austria-Hungary, meaning to study engineering; within a week he was in Russell's rooms arguing about the foundations of logic. He gave away the entire family fortun...

Paris, nineteen sixty-nine. Samuel Beckett is sixty-three. He has just been given the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suzanne, his wife, called it a catastrophe. He agreed. He will not go to Stockholm. He will not give a lecture. He has given the money to Trinity College Dublin. He is at his desk in his fourth-floor flat off the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, where he has written most of what he considers fi...

Two rooms, two decades. Pasadena, nineteen fifty-one. Jack Parsons is thirty-seven. His security clearance has been permanently revoked. The man who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and invented the castable composite solid rocket propellant that will power the Space Shuttle, Polaris, and Minuteman is now making explosions for Hollywood. He has a garage instead of a laboratory. Santa Cruz,...

Cinecittà, spring nineteen ninety-three. Federico Fellini is seventy-three. He has just received an honorary Oscar -- Sophia Loren handed it to him in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and he said one name: Giulietta. She was in the audience, crying. He asked her to please stop. He is at Studio 5, where he has essentially lived for forty years. He is drawing. He draws before he thinks. The thinking com...

Toronto, late nineteen eighty-one. Glenn Gould is forty-eight. He has just come back from the last recording sessions ever held at Columbia's Thirtieth Street Studio in New York. The studio is being closed. Gould brought his own chair -- the one his father Bert sawed the legs down on in nineteen fifty-three, fourteen inches high, so his knees are above his hips and he can pull the notes rather tha...

Cambridge, England, nineteen sixty. Lise Meitner is eighty-one. She has recently retired here to be near her nephew Otto Frisch. She is sorting sixty years of correspondence -- letters from Hahn, from Planck, from Bohr, and one letter she wrote in nineteen forty-five and never sent. Otto has made tea. He is hopeless at most domestic tasks but very good at tea. Paula sits opposite her at the table....

Vienna, spring 1905. Ludwig Boltzmann is sixty-one. He holds two chairs at the University of Vienna -- theoretical physics, and the philosophy of science chair that Ernst Mach vacated after a stroke. His lectures fill the largest halls in the philosophy building; students stand in the stairways because the seats have run out. Emperor Franz Josef has invited him to a reception. He has courteously d...

London, autumn eighteen fifty-two. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, is thirty-six -- the same age at which her father, whom she never knew, was found in a rented house in Missolonghi. Her physicians are evasive, which she takes as a form of certainty. She is on laudanum for the pain. Her mind is clear. Paula sits down opposite her; Ada does not rise -- the laudanum, she explains, makes standing theatric...

Paris, spring 1934. Marie Sklodowska-Curie is sixty-six. She has just come in from the courtyard where a fresh delivery of pitchblende residue is waiting, and she is already at her bench at the Radium Institute -- a laboratory on a street named after her husband, who was killed by a horse cart in nineteen-oh-six. She has four cataracts. Her fingers are scarred. She carries test tubes of radioactiv...

Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California. May 1960. Theodore Maiman is thirty-two. Two weeks ago, on the sixteenth of May, he wrapped a ruby crystal the size of a fingertip in a spiral of xenon flashlamp, cooled it with a fan, and produced the first coherent light in the history of the planet. Every photon in his beam is in phase with every other photon. Same frequency. Same direction. The...

Cambridge, February 2016. Stephen Hawking is seventy-four and has just heard the news that direct evidence for gravitational waves has been recorded by the LIGO collaboration -- two black holes merging one point three billion years ago, ripples in spacetime so small the four-kilometre arms of the detector stretched by a thousandth of the diameter of a proton. Einstein predicted them in 1916 and sp...

Ithaca, New York, February 1990 and a hotel room in Stockholm, April 1972. Two men at two different tables, two decades apart. Carl Sagan is fifty-five and has just persuaded NASA to turn the Voyager 1 camera around. The photograph came in six days ago. Earth appears as a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam, six billion kilometres away, a fraction of a pixel. Nobody outside the mission has seen i...

Riverside Drive, New York. Late summer 1973. Hannah Arendt is sixty-six years old, has just returned from Aberdeen where she became the first woman to deliver the Gifford Lectures, and is in her apartment with the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun, chain-smoking Chesterfields. She is writing The Life of the Mind -- a three-volume meditation on what it means to think, will, and judge -- and...

Paris, 1967. Jacques Tati is sixty years old, his masterwork is finished, and he has just lost everything. Playtime is in the can. He shot it in seventy millimetre. He built an entire city for it -- Tativille, fifteen thousand square metres of glass and steel on the wasteland outside Paris, with movable façades and a working metro stop. It took three years. It bankrupted him. He has lost his house...

Chicago, September 1954. Enrico Fermi is fifty-three and has just returned from teaching the summer school at Varenna on the Italian lakes. He still walks to the office at the University of Chicago every morning. He derived the statistics of half-integer-spin particles in 1926, calculated the theory of beta decay in 1933, built the world's first nuclear reactor under the squash court at Stagg Fiel...

Berkeley, late 1989. Paul Feyerabend is sixty-five, retired from the philosophy department where he taught for thirty-six years, and has sat down to write Conquest of Abundance -- the book he believes is his real work, even though Against Method sold a hundred thousand copies and earned him the title of the worst enemy of science. He walks with a cane. He has walked with a cane since 1945, when a...

Stockholm, December 1954. Max Born is seventy-two and has just received the Nobel Prize. The committee has cited him for the Born rule: |psi|² is probability – the wave function does not tell you what will happen, it tells you what might happen, and how much each possibility weighs. He published this in July 1926 in a footnote in the proof of a paper. He had first written that the wave function it...

Dublin, 1954. Erwin Schroedinger is sixty-seven and has lived in Ireland for fourteen years. He is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, the one Eamon de Valera built around him. Two years from now he will return to Vienna, but he does not know that yet – these are the years he will later call the happiest of his life. The house holds his wife Anny, his companion Hilde March, and Hilde’s daughter...

Princeton, New Jersey. 1972. Kurt Gödel is sixty-six. He lives in a quiet house on Linden Lane with his wife Adele, who is the reason he is still alive. The food is not always safe. He is careful -- careful in a way that has tipped into something he calls prudence and others call paranoia, and the fact that the difference between the two is not always visible from the outside is itself a fact he h...

Königsberg, September 1930. David Hilbert is sixty-eight years old, the most influential mathematician of his generation, and in excellent spirits. The day before, he stepped in front of a microphone at the end of his retirement lecture and closed with eight words that will be carved on his tombstone: "Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen." We must know. We will know. After forty years he has hand...

Prague, 1888. Ernst Mach is fifty years old and has just finished developing eighty photographic plates. With his collaborator Peter Salcher firing rifle bullets through the field of an electric-spark schlieren rig, he has done something that has never been done: he has photographed a shock wave. You can see the bow wave preceding the projectile. You can see the angle change as the velocity increa...