putting us both in the same age group would tend to mollify him a little, “physics was all snug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that's all there was to it. But there's been some changes made. There's the co-ordinate systems of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from framework to framework. There's the application of multivalued logic to physics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers talk about the expanding universe-it's a piker compared to man's expanding concepts about that universe."
He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating around the bush.
"That all has a bearing on what happened,” I assured him. “You have to understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the facts themselves. First, we weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all. Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical approach to cybernetics. He made up some goop which he thought would store memory impulses, the way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over to me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on with my personnel management business at hand."
Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff of smoke.
"The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little girl, daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwing things, setting things on fire. The teachers didn't know how she did it', she just did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a tantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop was trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened,” I said.
He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself. After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. The general manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary arithmetic.
"Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background,” I went on. “Her mother was from the old country, a Slav. There's the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid never got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing anybody; get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who knows what kind of a coordinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother would come home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to the daughter, half to herself. ‘I really burned that foreman up, today,’ she'd say. Or, ‘Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!’ Or, ‘She got herself thrown out of the place,’ things like that."
"So what does that mean, Ralph?” he asked. His switch to my first name was encouraging.
"To a child who never knew anything else,” I answered, “one who had never learned to distinguish reality from unreality as we would define it from our agreed frameworks special coordinate system might be built up where ‘Everybody was up in the air at work, today,’ might be taken literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen, of course-it says in the textbooks-but since it has been happening all through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get some of the answers we thought we had.
"We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're still trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how to code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder
He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating around the bush.
"That all has a bearing on what happened,” I assured him. “You have to understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the facts themselves. First, we weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all. Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical approach to cybernetics. He made up some goop which he thought would store memory impulses, the way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over to me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on with my personnel management business at hand."
Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff of smoke.
"The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little girl, daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwing things, setting things on fire. The teachers didn't know how she did it', she just did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a tantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop was trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened,” I said.
He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself. After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. The general manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary arithmetic.
"Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background,” I went on. “Her mother was from the old country, a Slav. There's the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid never got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing anybody; get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who knows what kind of a coordinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother would come home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to the daughter, half to herself. ‘I really burned that foreman up, today,’ she'd say. Or, ‘Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!’ Or, ‘She got herself thrown out of the place,’ things like that."
"So what does that mean, Ralph?” he asked. His switch to my first name was encouraging.
"To a child who never knew anything else,” I answered, “one who had never learned to distinguish reality from unreality as we would define it from our agreed frameworks special coordinate system might be built up where ‘Everybody was up in the air at work, today,’ might be taken literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen, of course-it says in the textbooks-but since it has been happening all through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get some of the answers we thought we had.
"We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're still trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how to code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder
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