"Connie Willis - Bellweather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

Bellwether
Connie Willis
To John

From Abigail

"YoursтАФyoursтАФyoursтАФ"

acknowledgment

Special thanks to the girls at Margie's Java Joint, who make the best caff├и latte and conversation in the world, and
without whom I wouldn't have made it through the last months of this novel!

1.

beginning
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wivesтАФ

Followed the Piper for their lives.

From street to street he piped advancing,

And step by step they followed dancing.

robert browning

hula hoop [march 1958-june 1959]
The prototype for all merchandising fads and one whose phenomenal success has never been repeated. Originally
wooden exercise hoop used in Australian gym classes, the Hula Hoop was redesigned in gaudy plastic by Wham-O and
for $1.98 to adults and kids alike. Nuns, Red Skelton, geishas, Jane Russell, and the Queen of Jordan rotated them on t
hips, and lesser beings dislocated hips, sprained necks, and slipped disks. Russia and China banned them as "capitalist,"
team of Belgian explorers took twenty of them along to the South Pole (to give the penguins?), and over fifty million wer
sold worldwide. Died out as quickly as it had spread.

It's almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad. By the time it starts to look like one, its origins are far in t
past, and trying to trace them back is exponentially harder than, say, looking for the source of the Nile.

In the first place, there's probably more than one source, and in the second, you're dealing with human behavior. A
Speke and Burton had to deal with were crocodiles, rapids, and the tsetse fly. In the third, we know something about ho
rivers work, like, they flow downhill. Fads seem to spring full-blown out of nowhere and for no good reason. Witness
bungee-jumping. And Lava lamps.

Scientific discoveries are the same way. People like to think of science as rational and reasonable, following step b
step from hypothesis to experiment to conclusion. Dr. Chin, last year's winner of the Niebnitz Grant, wrote, "The proces
scientific discovery is the logical extension of observation by experimentation."

Nothing could be further from the truth. The process is exactly like any other human endeavorтАФmessy, haphazard
misdirected, and heavily influenced by chance. Look at Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin when a spore drift
the window of his lab and contaminated one of his cultures.
 Or Roentgen. He was working with a cathode-ray tube surrounded by sheets of black cardboard when he caugh