"De Camp, L Sprague - The Care and Feeding of Mad Scientists" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)
BY L. SPRAGUE DECAMP
Astounding Science Fiction, Vol. XLVII, No. 5, July 1951
You could hardly have science fiction without scientists, mad or otherwise. A check of the current issues of eight science fiction magazines shows that about a quarter of the stories deal with scientists, either puttering in their laboratories or plunging into trackless wastes on expeditions. As a result, we readers have acquired a certain mental picture of how laboratories and expeditions are run.
Well, are they run that way?
Yes and no. The pictures in the stories are sometimes accurate especially when a scientist writes the story and sometimes not. If they have any consistent fault it is one of omission. That is, there are certain practical problems and difficulties in managing scientists and their activities that are seldom touched upon in the stories, though any scientist or scientific administrator will weep on your neck for hours about them.
To begin with, who or what are scientists? People who practice science. To save type in a chase for definitions we might as well include engineers as "applied" scientists, though some of the "pure" scientists may object. The two classes are not very different as human types, except that you might say that pure scientists are like engineers only more so; or that engineers are more "average" than pure scientists.
Now, scientists vary just as other people do. There are wise and foolish ones, sober and dissipated, solitary and gregarious, courteous and boorish, puritanical and lecherous, industrious and lazy, and so on. They do as a class show certain tendencies. For one thing they are all people of high intelligence, because even to be anchor man in the graduating class at one of our tougher Institutes of Technology one has to be up in the top four or five percentile of the whole population; and to get through a Ph. D. examination in science puts one up in an even more rarefied stratum. The scientist may be a fool about some things, but he must have that basic mental power to become a scientist at all; he cannot be a moron in any strict metrological sense.
Being more intelligent than the average, scientists perhaps tend to be more reasonable, rational, and judicious than most people. When conflicts of interests or ideas occur among them, there is a better chance but a chance only of settling the conflict by reason and discussion. All of which does not prevent some scientists from getting into love life troubles, falling for obvious hoaxes and swindles, or embracing pseudo scientific doctrines like Spiritualism and Marxism.
Dr. Sheldon, the varieties of human physique and temperament man, thinks that scientists tend towards his ectomorphic physical type and cerebrotonic temperament. From what I have seen of scientists I am inclined, on a basis of subjective impressions, to agree. The ectomorph is the thin man, and the cerebrotonic is the thoughtful, introverted, nervous, self controlled, subdued individualist. He likes to work by himself, prefers ideas to people, and ages well, becoming wrinkled and leathery instead of paunchy and jowly. The psychologists class him as a schizoid.
Every time I attend a meeting of the alumni of my college California Tech I look around the circle of lean, slowly wrinkling men with sober faces behind steel rimmed glasses gleaming over the highballs; note the careful gestures and precise speech, and chalk one up for Sheldon. How different from a conclave of salesmen or politicians.
Of course we have here a chicken-and egg problem: Are they scientists because they lacked the physical strength to compete with other boys in sport and combat and thus directed their energies in other directions ? Or are they thin and under muscled because they never had enough interest in food to eat enough to fill them out? I don't know and doubt if anybody else does.
Some scientists are interested in arts, games, and sports in addition to their work. Einstein's violin is famous and I know several who paint. Others take an attitude of wilful Boeotian ignorance towards interests outside their particular field. Many read science fiction because, as one explained: "In the stories the experiments always work."
Most of them are sociable in the specialized way that writers and other practitioners of numerically small professions are sociable: They like to congregate with the few others of their kind, but find the general mass a bore. Most of them make good matrimonial risks if the girl doesn't mind such quirks as refusing to come to meals until they have finished some recondite train of abstract thought. According to the statistics the sedentary ones like chemical engineers make better than average husbands, but some of those whose work requires extensive travel and exploration, such as anthropologists, are poor matrimonial risks.
The usual accusations against scientists of absent mindedness, lack of interest in great wealth, and a tendency to treat a date with a girl as a problem in advanced sociodynamics, have a grain of truth. However, a couple of late science fiction novels, Stewart's "Earth Abides" and Norris' "Nutro 29," each presented a hero evidently intended as a typical scientist. The egregious characteristic of these men was, let's say, lack of character. Isherwood Williams and Thomas Hightower are weak, pliant, easygoing, irresolute men, content to drift with the tide.
Now as far as my acquaintance with the breed goes, that is not at all typical. For of all men, scientists are on the average the world's most stubborn and refractory individualists, usually inoffensive, but capable of pursuing any objective on which they have set their sights with the fanatical intensity of mania. When people call scientists "mad" they refer to this quality. If that were not the case, they would never undergo the long and intense educational process that it takes to make a scientist.
Which brings us to the main question: How do you govern the ungovernable? Should you even try?
But before we get into that subject there are two other varieties of fictional scientist, common in stories but extremely rare in fact, who require comment. One is the rich scientist. Rich scientists are rare because a boy born rich is unlikely to develop the necessary drive, while poor scientists seldom have either the commercial acumen or the time and opportunity for financial manipulations to get rich.
There are exceptions: I once knew a young scientist who inherited a pot of money, built his own lab with it, became one of the country's leading biophysicists, and is now an authentic bigshot, serving on committees to advise the President what to do with the Atom and so forth.
But for practical purposes the rich scientist is like that other familiar fictional character: the super-colossal hero seven feet tall, with tawny hair and smoldering ice blue eyes and never mind the mixed metaphors broad of shoulder and mighty of thew, who pulverize platoons of dastards and "liberates" droves of wenches as easily as we common clods put on our rubbers.
Now, it is not true to say that no such person ever lived. There was one once: King Harold III of Norway (1015 1066 ) whose fantastic career out Conaned Conan. Harold the Roughneck was seven feet tall; he did lead his army bellowing battle songs and cutting down foes like ripe wheat with a two handed sword; he did hew his way at the head of the Byzantine Emperor's Varangian Guard through the Muslim hordes to Jerusalem and back half a century before the Crusades officially began, and so forth. But the type has never been.
The other fictional type is the beautiful lady scientist. As a matter of cold fact most lady scientists range from plain to downright ugly, even though Dr. Beebe did have a very photogenic assistant, a blond girl ichthyologist, some years back. The reason is simple. Ugly girls tend to go in for science just as skinny boys do, because they can compete in this field with their fellow beings better than on more conventional grounds.
Now comes the problem of putting our scientists to work and keeping them at it in an efficient manner. Well, where and how do scientists work?
Among private organizations, colleges and universities tend to specialize more in pure science abstract problems about the nature of man and the universe while the other kinds favor applied science - engineering research on practical problems leading to improvements in ways of making and using things. However, just as there is no sharp distinction between these two kinds of research, so there is no sharp distinction between the organizations performing them. Many colleges and many industrial laboratories solve problems in both fields. Some of the laboratories of manufacturing companies do much basic research while others concentrate on specific problems.
Moreover these organizations do a lot of work for each other. A manufacturing company, for example, may rely upon its own engineers for ordinary design and improvement of its product, but resort to a university or government laboratory for advice on drastic new departures and difficult problems. The university laboratory likewise may at the same time perform engineering research for a manufacturer, research in sociology or economics for the government, and investigation of a problem in pure science for itself in order to advance the knowledge of mankind.
The "laboratory" using the word in its broadest sense will comprise a group of buildings or a single building or a part thereof, with equipment and personnel. This will be divided into parts, called "divisions" or "sections" or "laboratories" or whatever, each specializing in some field or branch of science. Then each of these subdivisions has two more or less distinct areas: the office space where the scientists have their desks separate cubicles for the higher ups; a general deskery for the rest and stenographers, and a "laboratory" proper where the physical work is done.
A "laboratory" in the last sense is seldom so neat and shiny as it appears in movies about noble scientists. Instead it is cluttered with odds and ends of electric cable, tubing, wire, glassware, stands, pencil stubs, mechanics' lunches, old technical magazines, ash trays made of discarded scientific paraphernalia, and so forth. Let some officious person "clean it up" and the scientists scream that they can no longer find anything: "I've been saving that roll of copper nickel iron wire for a year to use in Project 8663 B, and now just when I have a use for it-"
There is no very serious problem in hiring a young scientist to work in a laboratory. That is one reason there are degrees: so that the young scientists come neatly ticketed. Hence if you have work to be done in biochemistry you hire a biochemist.
But then the trouble begins. If he turns out to be no good you fire him but how do you know when he is no good? Maybe the problem you gave him was inherently insoluble, so it is no discredit to him that he failed to solve it. On the other hand if he fails to solve several problems and then some other man succeeds, the first man doesn't look very good. I have known a third rate scientist who would repeatedly turn in nice neat reports, carefully calculated and composed and reasoned and every time the report would be rendered useless by some glaring basic error in scientific assumptions.
Then, in most lines of work there is a rough correlation between a man's general work habits neatness, agreeableness, punctuality, et cetera and the merit of his work. But with scientists this does not apply. Some very good scientists are disorderly people who keep irregular hours and snarl at everybody. It takes a good administrator to weigh the worth of the men under him and to see through such superficialities as sloppiness of appearance or disagreeable personality.
Well, how do you get a good administrator?
Ah, there's one of the hardest nuts of all to crack. In most organizations, when you wish to choose a man to head the outfit or a section thereof, you pick the one in that group who has shown the most ability in his assigned work in the past. Now, if your outstanding scientist is also a good administrator you're in luck and there is no problem. But this doesn't happen any too often, because the qualities that make the best scientist are not at all those that make the best administrator. The scientist often cares little for people and doesn't get on well with them; the administrator must be an expert on people and must get along with them. The scientist is usually bored to tears by bookkeeping, finance, time checks, organization charts, and maintenance problems; the administrator must seize all these with a sure and confident grasp.
Does it fallow that the man who knows the most about accounting, organization, and the like is the best lab administrator?
No, because here you run up against another paradox. A laboratory cannot be closely compared with a production; sales, teaching, or policing organization, all of whom can show results that can be measured in simple units: dollars, arrests, and so on. A production department produces things that can be simply evaluated; a laboratory produces knowledge, and nobody knows what the knowledge will be worth until a year or a decade or a century has elapsed.
But the administrator, playing nursemaid to a gang of idiosyncratic geniuses, must justify his fat salary. Unless watched he is likely to impose upon the laboratory a degree of regimentation, organization, and paper work that actually cuts down the productiveness of the group.
In large organizations there is a natural tendency for paper work to increase with time. Each executive thinks of some daily or weekly or monthly report on hours, progress, equipment, et cetera which, if he could only make everybody turn it in faithfully, would give him a much clearer picture of what is going on in his organization. So he institutes this report, but seldom thinks to abolish any of the reports established by his predecessors. As a result the paper work increases until the scientists are actually spending a fifth or a quarter of their time writing reports.
These contradictions and difficulties are least evident in laboratories that do cut and dried engineering tests. Such outfits run in a routine manner, with one engineer bossing a gang of undegreed technicians, in much the same manner as a production department.
But as soon as any originality or thought is allowed you have "research," and the more research you have, the "purer" the science, the greater are the administrative difficulties. The troubles also increase with the size of the organization, reaching a maximum in government labs and those of great private companies like du Pont and Bell Telephone. [footnote: I said great companies like them, not necessarily those two companies themselves.] Though oceans of ink have been spilled on the respective merits and faults of capitalism and socialism, from the point of view of the ordinary working scientist or engineer, the difference between working for the government and for a large corporation could be put in your eye without discomfort.
Experience shows that for profound theoretical research in pure science, men work best when working alone or in a voluntary association of two or three brains, and when given the greatest possible freedom. On the other hand for solving practical engineering problems, or applying known principles, the best results are had by well-organized teams of specialists seeking well defined objectives. University laboratories, which go in more for pure science, therefore tend towards the former type of organization if you can call it that - while industrial laboratories, devoting themselves more to practical engineering, incline towards the latter.
The good administrator is the one who can tell what is the optimum degree of organization and control for his particular group doing his particular kind of work. He must be able to manage his geniuses, to spur them on, and to protect them from uninformed outside interference without pampering them to the point where they take advantage of his liberality as some scientists, like other people, will do if encouraged.
He must watch out, for instance, for the scientist who has been working for a long time on a problem and is hesitant to apply the crucial test for fear it will prove that he is on the wrong track, and who therefore goes on indefinitely refining his apparatus and devising subsidiary tests and generally fiddling around. The administrator must prowl around the laboratory enough to keep track of what goes on without driving his charges wild by constantly breathing dawn their necks. He must be able to ask for clearly defined results without imposing upon the scientist his ideas of how the results should be obtained and at the same time be ready to offer sound advice if asked, or to take corrective action if the scientist obviously has got off the track and is getting nowhere.
One authority recommends that a good laboratory administrator should be somebody like a patent attorney, who has had plenty of contact with science without himself being primarily a scientist. Another suggests: "All administrators should be women, of the aggressive but motherly type. I think they would possibly do a very good job, being willing to provide for their mad little creatures in return for a kind word now and then, and no ego build up."
As a practical matter the administrator, even if not primarily a scientist, should have a pretty good grounding in science, so that he shall be able to judge his juniors' results and make intelligent suggestions when asked. Also, many technical people get huffy when asked to take orders from nontechnical people, whom they regard as virtual illiterates.
Well, then, suppose you pick your administrator from the ranks of nonscientists who still know enough science for the task. What do you do to reward the scientist who has worked long and well for you and who in a more conventional organization might reasonably expect to be promoted to command of the group? For while most scientists are not extravagant hedonists with violent power complexes, they do - like other people like to live reasonably well, and their egos demand at least some satisfaction in the form of promotion and pay raises.
Sometimes, as I said, a good scientist is also a good administrator, in which case there is no problem. But sometimes you have to cook up a scheme for raising a scientist's pay and rank without actually putting him in charge of a department. You call him a "consultant" or a "senior engineer" or something, and reward him by giving him more freedom and less paper work instead of the reverse, which is the normal lot of the executive.
As an example of the absurdities inherent in this paradox, there was a world famous physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. To give him a rank commensurate with his standing in the field the United States Government had to hire him at one of their top rates, which meant that when the organization chart was drawn up this man was Number Three in command at Los Alamos. Ordinarily this meant nothing; Numbers One and Two ran the place and let Number Three sit in his chair and cerebrate. But the time came when Numbers One and Two were both away at once and our hero found himself acting director. A maintenance man came in to see the director and gave the physicist a long report on some perilous fire hazard that he had found, which should be attended to at once. When the maintenance man had finished, the physicist looked at him vaguely and said:
"But that has nothing to do with physics!"
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