In my last entry here, I left myself lying exhausted on a snowbank, trying to walk home from school over sidewalks covered with heaped-up snow rather than disobey orders by walking in the plowed street. Well, here's the rest of this story.

The residents of the house where I was stranded were home, and saw with some alarm a young girl collapsed by their driveway. They came out to investigate and found me there. They asked me who I was and where I lived, and I told the story of how I must get home, and where my family lived. Home was, by the way, only a few hundred feet from where I had stopped, if I were to take my usual route walking through brushy backyards. But the snow was too deep to take that route that day.

The kind residents called my mother, who was by that time worried that I had not come home from school yet. She immediately came there by car, picked me up, and brought me home.

I hesitate to make any analogies concerning this episode. But my mother, who is still living in the very same house as 43 years ago, cannot rescue me from the long path through the snows of trigonometry. Mother doesn't know trigonometry. I grew up among artists and musicians; math has never been our thing.

The incident does say a few things about me, though, then and now. I cite this as a counter-example to the various "portraits of the scientist as a young man" which I read in popular science writing. The authors often recount their adventurous, risky, and even anti-social behavior in their younger years, such as blowing things up in their back yards.

I, on the other hand, recount my hyperobedient, timid ways, in which I was willing to exhaust myself trying to keep to the admonition and the rule rather than break its boundaries and take the risk of walking in the street. I will walk painstakingly and patiently through a mile of snowbanks, because I am dutiful, conscientious, proper, unchallenging, and averse to any risk. Perhaps it is not a good personality for a would-be scientist. And yet the call of the particle beam has reached me, and I have set forth against all odds.

Now I must follow dutifully my book's example on how I may find the sine, cosine, and tangent of 5Pi/12 radians…

Posted at 2:39 am | link