A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  Professor Gomulka went on and on about synergy and diversity and mutual respect and embracing differences and welcoming change. I was wishing Amit and I had put together some buzzword bingo cards. We’d heard it all before in class. Finally, Professor Gomulka began running out of steam.

  “Change may be frightening to some, as the disruptions of the past few weeks have amply demonstrated,” he concluded, “but Professor Ames is the ideal person to guide us through this beneficial change. How appropriate it is that such a talented woman will lead the effort to ensure that women’s voices and those of other underrepresented groups are finally heard in the engineering curriculum!”

  On cue, Amit and I stood with the rest of the SJWs and gave him a standing ovation.

  Professor Muldoon rose as the clamor began to subside, shaking his head. “I’ll believe you’re sincere about wanting women’s voices in our curriculum when you start discussing Ayn Rand in literature, philosophy, and political science.”

  He waved an arm over the audience. “Look around you at this facility. Civil engineers designed the water and sewer systems that keep us safe from disease. Mechanical engineers keep the structure from falling on our heads. Electrical engineers design the power, lighting, and sound system to work without electrocuting anyone. I’ve just barely scratched the surface.

  “A doctor who makes a mistake can kill a patient. An engineer can wipe out a hundred people in the wink of an eye. Engineering is pervasive. It’s all around us, everywhere, every day. It’s here. It’s real. It works. Almost all the time. Whether you realize it or not, you bet your lives on the judgment of engineers many times every day. If you wonder why we engineers may tend to be a bit more conservative than usual, it’s because our profession teaches us not to mess with what works. Failure has consequence.

  “Professor Gomulka and his social justice clique aren’t satisfied with that success. They want to change all that. They want ideas included in the curriculum for reasons other than engineering relevance, voices heard for reasons other than merit, and standards applied other than engineering truth.

  “Are there obstacles in the way of our students’ success? Certainly. Do some students have greater obstacles to overcome than others? Of course. Should we remove those obstacles? Hell, no! Sweat expending in training avoids blood spilled in battle.

  “How will a timid student, afraid to raise a hand and speak in class when all that’s on the line is a grade, ever summon the courage to look their boss in the eye, the person controlling their paycheck, their livelihood, their future, and say, ‘These O-rings won’t take the cold, and were going to have to tell NASA to scrub the launch even though it may cost us millions in penalties,’ or ‘We can’t put the gas tank there; it may explode in a rear-end collision; we’re going to have to delay the product launch and redesign the car,’ or ‘Those levees have to be fixed or else the city will flood during the next hurricane, and I’m going to tell the public even if you fire me.’ The best engineers, in my experience, are the ones who’ve overcome obstacles, who have the gumption to stand up for themselves, who have the discipline to dig in and solve problems themselves, instead of waiting for some authority figure to tell them what to do.

  “Heaven help us if some coddled social-justice snowflake is all that stands between us and the next disaster. God as my witness, we should be making our classes less welcoming and cuddly! We should be making them more intimidating and more demanding, placing more obstacles in our student’s paths, making sure our graduates are worthy of the responsibilities they will face in their careers! If Professor Ames is allowed to run amok, she will corrupt our curriculum, debase the value of our degrees, and produce graduates with dangerous delusions of adequacy.

  “We engineers take time-tested principles and impart them to our students in time-tested ways to yield the time-tested results you see around you. When we make a change or an incremental improvement, we test it. We check it out. We make sure it works as advertised before inflicting it upon the public. We already are diverse. We already are inclusive. We will include anything, any idea, or anyone that works. Period. De-center Western civilization? We are the guardians of Western civilization! Our civilization rests on how well we engineers do our job. How well tomorrow’s engineers do their job depends on the choices we make in the coming weeks.

  “Educating tomorrow’s engineers in the practice of engineering – that is our business. Researching and testing improvements to improve the engineering state of the art – that is also our business. Overthrowing the civilization that made this institution and most of what we teach possible, indoctrinating students in the currently fashionable political claptrap, those are not our business.” Professor Muldoon’s conclusion triggered a remarkable thunderclap of applause. His backers rose and gave their champion a standing ovation as well. I was surprised to see almost as many in support of Muldoon as had risen for Gomulka. When the crowd had quieted, the moderator announced that the opening statements were concluded, and we would have an open discussion, beginning with Professor Gomulka.

  The professor rose slowly, defiantly, as if taking possession of the platform. “Humanity is our business!” He countered triumphantly, as if he’d just refuted Muldoon’s argument. Professor Muldoon looked… puzzled? No that wasn’t it. Smug? He always had a touch of arrogance to him. I didn’t have time to decipher his expression before Gomulka continued. “Dickens,” he added haughtily. “Marley to Scrooge… A Christmas Carol. Behind all your posing and protestation that you’re some kind of champion of ‘Western Civilization,’ you have not the least idea of the simplest basics of our culture – where it’s come from, its history of systemized oppression, and where it’s going. Your ‘engineering truth’ is a racist narrative employed by hegemonic institutions to perpetuate systems of white hetero-patriarchal dominance and to project their bigotry and misogyny! We ‘social justice warriors’ are the next chapter in what you call Western civilization. We progressives will overturn your reign of oppression, correct historic injustices, introduce culturally inclusive pedagogies, and allow the voices you and yours have marginalized to be heard at last!”

  Muldoon smiled condescendingly at Gomulka’s diatribe ran down. “Mankind,” he said with a smug smile, as if he had just rebutted Gomulka’s case in turn. There was a long pause.

  “What archaic, patriarchal point do you think…,” Gomulka began.

  “You heard me,” Muldoon countered. “I said ‘mankind.’ ‘Mankind is our business,’ said Marley to Scrooge,” Muldoon corrected Gomulka. “Not ‘humanity.’ You and your real-life Ministry of Truth twist and pervert language and facts and truth, rewrite literature, history, and culture, trample and spit upon the genius and the hard work that made this institution and all we teach possible, all to acquire power. You proglodytes have as little respect for culture, as little respect for engineering, as you have just shown to the inestimable Mister Dickens. You’re only interested in power and how to acquire it.”

  “You have held the reins of power long enough!” Gomulka insisted.

  “And how did we in what you like to call the patriarchy acquire that power in the first place?” Muldoon asked. “By delivering success. By engineering the society in which we live. By providing the infrastructure for individuals and families to thrive and prosper and a safe place for mothers to raise their children.”

  “Thanks to us, women are no longer confined by your narrow patriarchal standards of old,” Gomulka proclaimed. “Thanks to the suffragettes, and the civil rights workers, and the activists, and the feminists, and today’s social justice warriors, women don’t have to squander their talents in domestic roles – they now have the freedom to pursue the same careers in engineering as men!”

  “You say that as though it’s a bad thing your mother chose to squander her talent in your upbringing, although on second thought, I shall concede the point.” That prompted a laugh, although some of the chuckles seemed awfully guilty.

  They bantered bac
k and forth. I thought Gomulka was getting the worst of it, but he kept drawing cheers from the crowd with his every attack on the oppressive white hetero-patriarchal hegemony. Finally, the moderator reined them both in and called for closing statements.

  “The bottom line is this,” Muldoon summarized. “Do you want free and open discussion in your classroom? Or must we and our students alike forever walk on eggshells, timid and afraid lest something we say can be twisted or construed so as to offend the sensibilities of some proglodyte? Do you want the true diversity of opinion and thought dueling on a level playing ground? Or do you prefer the pseudo-diversity of race and sex quotas? No to the thought police. No to the would-be commissars of culture. No to Professor Ames.” He sat down to hearty applause, taking Gomulka by surprise with the brevity of his comments.

  That was a trick Amit and I loved to pull in debate. Take less time than the other team expected, so they wouldn’t have the prep time they anticipated to collect their thoughts and be ready when it was their turn. Gomulka made a weak closing statement meandering around and around his buzzwords and catch phrases. The SJW contingent gave him the obligatory standing ovation, and then it was over.

  It was difficult to tell exactly what happened and why. Professor Ames “was appalled at the bigotry and narrow-mindedness on display at Georgia Tech” and withdrew her application to head the College of Engineering. We got the real story by reading Professor Gomulka’s emails. A critical mass of influential donors and alums had pressured the administration to rescind Professor Ames’s offer and her withdrawal was a mutually agreed upon face-saving measure. For all the vitriol and contempt unleashed at Georgia Tech, I think they’d have been better off making it clear the school rejected her rather than giving her the chance to pretend she was rejecting us.

  It was amusing seeing Gomulka rationalize his failure to “Bernard,” his superior at the Civic Circle. “More challenging than anticipated,” he explained. The Georgia Tech community was “full of racists and misogynists,” and we Southerners were “hardly a generation away from Jim Crow, after all.” Ominously, though, Bernard castigated him for agreeing to the debate. “There can be no free speech for hate speech. You never should have let it get to a discussion. In the future, you must de-platform reactionaries instead of giving them a forum from which to spread their hatred and misogyny.”

  There were many glum faces in social-justice class the Friday morning before spring break. Most of us had taken several midterms, and all the time out for social activism couldn’t have been helping with studying or grades. All week long there’d been an atmosphere of gloom and failure which Amit and I had reinforced as best we could. “Bigotry and misogyny are deeply embedded in our culture,” we explained in private conversations with our classmates. “We’ll be fighting this same fight all our lives, over and over, again and again, making incremental progress at best against the pervasive forces of reactionism.” For some reason, our classmates seemed turned off by the prospect of a perpetual struggle for incremental progress.

  Professor Gomulka gave us a pep talk. “Ours is a deeply flawed institution,” he began, “and change doesn’t happen overnight. We exposed Professor Muldoon in particular and Georgia Tech in general as a haven for intolerance, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and hostility against women and minorities.” He tried to encourage us by claiming that our defeat had a silver lining. Then, he asked us to self-critique our social justice campaign. I’d already read the Civic Circle’s critique, so I came out strong.

  “With respect, sir,” I replied, “I think it was a mistake to debate Professor Muldoon. You gave him a platform. You treated him as an equal. You legitimized his hatred and misogyny by treating it as just another opinion instead of something to be shunned, suppressed, and silenced.”

  I saw looks of surprise. No one challenged, questioned, or disputed Professor Gomulka on questions of social justice, not that directly. The few who’d tried in the fall semester quickly learned they’d be assigned an essay to deconstruct their deviationism.

  The neutral look on Professor Gomulka face burst into a smile. “Exactly,” he beamed at my insight. “Peter has it exactly right. There can be no free speech for hate speech. Reason and persuasion are only for well-converged targets. Those tactics only made sense when we were thinking in terms of the campus administration as the target. Muldoon on the other hand… he’s as anti-converged as they come. We should have applied power and coercive tactics against him.” He spent the rest of the class discussing the need to de-platform reactionaries, and the tactics to disrupt their presentations, shout them down, intimidate them, and silence their voices.

  “Enough with the ‘could have dones’ and the ‘might have beens,’” he concluded. Have a great spring break and come back refreshed for the second half of the semester.”

  * * *

  Having carefully consulted his pick-up artist blogs for the destination with the “hottest and easiest” girls, Amit was off to some Gulf Coast destination for spring break. “I could use a wingman,” he offered. “I’m paying for the hotel room and driving down anyway. You’re welcome to join me.” I appreciated the offer and thanked him. For all his flaws, he was thoughtful about the fact I had nowhere near the money he was making from his software business. I also didn’t have anything against picking up girls, but the way Amit went about it just seemed… distasteful. I didn’t really want the kind of girl who’d sleep with me on the basis of a few glib lines and some psychological power projection.

  Furthermore, I hadn’t clocked near enough hours at the mirror lab, what with my involvement in protests and studying for my midterms. Sarah was off with her friends on a camping and climbing trip out west, so the lab would be deserted. Spring break gave me an opportunity to earn some extra money and spend some quality time on my translations of MacGuffin’s mystical prose into modern physics. Besides, Professor Chen and Professor Graf’s paper on their gamma ray breakthroughs had been accepted, and the physics department scheduled a big press conference for the Monday after spring break. I’d been there at the beginning and I’d contributed to the discovery. I wanted to help the team get ready and see it through.

  I got an early start Monday morning by slipping a glass disk in the kiln and firing it up. I didn’t already have a slumped disk to coat in the vacuum chamber, so instead I went back to the data I’d been looking at over winter break. “Interesting technique,” Professor Graf acknowledged. “Maybe we can get your results into the conference paper we’re presenting for GammaCon. The deadline’s coming soon. We already know when Chernobyl and Kyshtym happened, and all this Cold War testing took place, though, so I’m not sure it adds much to the conversation.” She and Professor Chen were more interested in understanding the environmental and biological impacts of radioisotopes – seeing which ones went where, how they were taken up by plants and animals and diffused through the biosphere.

  I revisited my calculations from winter break, and updated them with the latest satellite data. There were a few anomalies that really bothered me. For instance, there were more than a dozen significant plumes with gamma ray detections from antimony-126 significantly above back-ground levels all over the world. In each case there were very low levels of tin-121 – so low that my dating technique was yielding ridiculously old dates for them. Finally, I asked Professor Chen to take a look. He pointed out the hits in China and England and in the Andes Mountains of South America. “That’s a tin producing region,” he pointed out an area in southeast China. “A small amount of tin-126 occurs naturally. Take a closer look at your hits, and I bet they will correlate to tin deposits.” He looked thoughtfully. “Your results suggest we might be able to look through the data for deposits of valuable minerals. Keep working on your tin analysis. I want to take a closer look to see if there are any other valuable ores or minerals that might show up in this gamma ray data.” Sure enough, some online research showed that I’d really just generated a map of the world’s tin deposits, more or less. I spent
the rest of the day correlating my detections with known tin regions.

  The next morning I loaded a fresh plate into the kiln, fired it up, and placed Monday’s slumped disk into the vacuum chamber to be coated. I was feeling burned out by the gamma ray data, so I worked a bit more on translating MacGuffin’s mystic prose into the physics notation I’d been learning in my classes. One section of it talked about “qi” which translated as “energy,” but MacGuffin talked in terms of “bounding the fields” of yin and yang to get their energy. I had to run to the library at lunch time to hunt down an ancient Chinese math text, The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, or the “Jiuzhang Suanshu” to make sense of it. I found a hundred-year-old translation by Florian Cajori. “Bounding fields” meant measuring the area of literal fields – pastures, farmland and plots. MacGuffin’s bounding the field of yin meant the “area” of the yin? What did that mean? I was stumped for a while on that one, until I remembered that the energy density of the electric and magnetic fields depended on the square of the respective intensities. Yes, this bounding language referred to area, but more generally, the text must be describing taking the square of the field intensities.

  That led me to a lengthy example in MacGuffin’s text – the case of an exponentially decaying dipole. It threw me for a while, until I realized it was the same thing as the discharging capacitors I’d studied in my class work. The problem was simple, yet fascinating. The induction component of the magnetic field goes as inverse distance squared and dominated near the discharge. The radiation component of the magnetic field goes in the opposite direction and went as inverse distance. On a spherical bubble whose radius was the speed of light times the decay constant time, they exactly cancel out, meaning there is no magnetic field on that bubble. No magnetic field means no energy flow. The energy inside the bubble is absorbed by the discharge. The energy associated with the radiation came from outside the bubble. That really blew my mind. I’d thought that radiation came from accelerating charges. Accelerate a charge and out pops a photon moving away, carrying the radiation energy. That was – more or less – what Professor Graf had taught me – at least as best I understood it. MacGuffin’s manuscript had a different story.