Everyday Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Author:Laurence Gonzales
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-04-22T23:00:00+00:00

Nine

“The Earth Is Rotting”

When I was a boy of eight or nine, my father gave me my first job. I worked in his lab at the medical school where he taught. I swept the floor, washed the glassware, and took out the trash. It was there, in his lab, that I first had a glimpse inside the very workings of the universe, though I had no idea what I was seeing at the time. One day I was washing glassware, standing on a step stool to reach the sink, wearing an oversized lab coat and blue rubber gloves to protect me from the dichromate solution18 we used to clean the glassware. I was rinsing a large bottle, holding it upside down, waiting for the water to slowly bubble out. My father came in, saw what I was doing, and took the bottle from me. He gave it a quick swirl, and a beautiful vortex formed inside the bottle. Within a second or two, it had organized itself so that there was a hole in its center, just like images I’d seen of hurricanes. The water drained out in seconds.

“You see?” he said. “So simple. It’s more organized. The universe likes a good trick.”

And he went back to his Zeiss microscope and the small FM radio he’d built for himself (out of a new device called a transistor), which sat on the counter playing classical music.

From then on, I always drained bottles by giving them a swirl to create that vortex. I had no idea what caused it or why it worked the way it did to drain water so fast. As I would later come to understand, it was an example of how a natural system will sidestep the most direct route to solving a problem and choose a better path. It was an instance of a natural system having memory and forming what almost seems like a mental model. Of course, without mind, there can be nothing mental about it. But it was a template for behavior in which what had happened in the past influenced what happened in the future. At the time, I didn’t understand any of it. Part of my education, as I came to see, required that I be baffled at first. Curiosity, confusion, learning, and at last understanding—that was what hope held out for me.

One of my favorite parts of our workday was lunch. At lunch, my father was all mine. There was a greasy spoon across from the Houston Medical Center, and we’d cross the asphalt parking lot, hot as a furnace at midday, and sit in the window of that diner eating cheeseburgers slathered in mustard and French fries drenched in ketchup, while the pile-driver sun streamed in. (This was before we came to count the cost of our eating habits.) It was at times like these that I could ask him all the questions I had stored up while he was working.

Shortly after he had shown me the proper lab technique for emptying a bottle, I asked him what made the vortex.

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