Of course, there is a genuine product inside all that marketing fluff.
Beneath all the stories about the International Space Station (ISS) and space
shuttles you’ll find probes that touch the very edge of the Solar System, rovers
that scour the surface of Mars, telescopes that bring us pictures of the very
earliest moments of creation. There is no question that NASA is home to some
genuinely inspiring science.

But science isn’t a big sell for NASA. Instead, the agency drenches the
public with a steady stream of images and stories from its Human Space Flight
(HSF) programmes. Every shuttle launch is a media event. Headlines proclaim the
construction of the ISS. News agencies interview the humble American hero, John
Glenn, who returned to space 36 years after his first historic flight.

The value of these HSF missions has been challenged by 20 different research
organisations and countless scientists. But that doesn’t change the fact that to
sell a product you have to tell a story. If scientists want to kill the HSF
programmes, robots and telescopes alone must become sellable stories. Since
robots aren’t heroes, the ISS and the space shuttles provide the human
characters NASA can use to sell the business of space science to the US.

A few years ago, members of Congress were frustrated by the delays and
escalating costs of the ISS. A bill calling for its cancellation had growing
support, suggesting a close vote. To make the case for the ISS, storyteller
James Michener testified to the House Science Committee on behalf of NASA. He
was no fountain of scientific wisdom. But the committee didn’t need science,
they needed a reason to believe.

Michener evoked the spirit of Columbus. He reminded us all of the struggles
of the American pioneers in their wagons. He wove a grand tale of adventure and
destiny. After a soaring 15 minutes, he crescendoed with a call to contribute to
the building of the ISS and remain committed to human space flight. “It’s not
real until someone’s been there,” he thundered. The ISS survived.

With stunts like that, NASA steered itself through difficult times in the
1990s. But the next century may be different. The next generation has grown up
with the Internet, video games and remote electronic access. They won’t need
human characters to feel the thrill of adventure that is so critical to
promoting space science. That means that the unmanned missions might be able to
sell themselves. There’s already a hint of that. The Mars Pathfinder website
(http://mars.sgi.com/default.html) had 720 million hits in one year.
Perhaps, to the next generation, robots can be heroes.

Nevertheless, NASA continues to market products the way it has throughout the
1990s. It broadcasts stories of human space flight. It meticulously constructs
life-size models of the ISS at community events. Sure, the kids are wide-eyed
when they leave the model, arms filled with NASA storybook, poster and badge.
But maybe a few of them will consider the content and look past the image.

Perhaps one of those children will create her own story that night. She’ll
dream of sitting behind a glowing control panel, calmly steering a spacecraft
through the last tricky metres to the ground as the fuel tank drains dangerously
close to empty. Only, she won’t be on board the spacecraft—no one will. No
one need be. And some day, when she’s grown up, sitting on the edge of her seat
in a hushed control room on Earth, she’ll make the final adjustments that point
us all toward the stars. Now that’s a sellable story.

ZERO as a number needs a complete overhaul. The problems are obvious. First
of all, zero doesn’t have the broad public appeal of a classic such as &pgr; or the
pizzazz of “zillion”. Also, it is completely neglected by the press, which tends
to focus on huge negative numbers such as government debt, or huge positive ones
like Italian footballers’ salaries. Even deadbeats have abandoned it.
Generations X’ers aren’t content with being a bunch of zeros—they want to
be losers. Clearly, zero is losing its market share, and it’s time we set out to
revamp it.

Of course, scientists are partly to blame for the mess zero finds itself in.
Take the topic of “absolute zero”. Whenever it comes up, physicists are quick to
point out that we cannot actually reach it. And when NASA’s publicity agents
claim that the International Space Station is a “zero-gravity” environment, its
scientists give the game away and acknowledge that they can’t do better than
microgravity. The only zero that actually crops up comes at the end of a meal,
when they are calculating their share of the bill.

So, I have a few proposals for overhauling zero. I shall start with the
definition. According to Noah Webster’s famous American Dictionary of the
English Language, zero is: “An element of a set that when added to any
other element in the set produces a sum identical with the element to which it
was added.” Any publicist worth his Porsche will tell you that the Webster
definition is wordy and lacks punch. To turn things around for zero, we have to
think in soundbites. It is worth remembering the publicist’s mantra: simple is
better.

I’m not advocating rewriting the dictionary. That would require the sort of
astronomical advertising budget that only tobacco companies and gun lobbyists
can afford. Instead, all we have to do is ask the compilers of Webster to
reorder the definitions. Definition number 7 reads: “Nothing”. That is exactly
the kind of plain speaking we need. We simply ask the lexicographers to
interchange definitions number 7 for number 1. And if Webster doesn’t accept our
polite request, then we play hardball. We boycott the dictionary. The beauty of
this plan is that the boycott will hardly affect scientists, since few of us
seem to own dictionaries anyway.

The next thing we have to tackle is the image problem. The circle and its
variant, the oval, are passé. So are the square and the triangle, for
that matter. Actually, all these shapes have been recognised as dull and
unimaginative ever since the American artist Ellsworth Kelly, a leading exponent
of the “hard-edge” style, started painting them. Consequently, I propose a new
shape for zero, one with some marketing appeal:

The final problem with zero is that it starts with the letter “z”. In a
previous Forum article
(22 June 1996, p 48) I proposed doing away with the
letter “z”, and I’d better be consistent. I suggest we simply call it “ero”.
This sounds a bit brusque, so I ran it past a publicist friend. He asked people
which word they liked more: “ero” or “zero”. “Unfortunately,” he explained, “ero
didn’t poll well.” However, it polled very well when he told people that the
Latin word erotranslates as “the smell of daffodils on a cool summer
evening”. He calls this “packaging”. In other words, when the truth stinks,
bring in the potpourri.

Now that we’ve simplified the message and patched up the image problem, we
have to get the word out. How? Well, scientists could pass out “ero” test tubes
at community socials or wear “ero” sandwich boards when strolling to work. But,
if we want to saturate the general public, we must be bolder, more creative. I
say we take our message to the one place that everyone is sure to visit once a
day. Let’s have an “ero” stamp on every ply of every toilet paper roll. And
let’s hope the manufacturers agree, because a boycott could cause problems.

Finally, no PR campaign can be successful without a slogan. I tested a few
out on my colleagues: “ero: A Number You Can Believe In!” and “ero: The Cream of
Manchester!” Surprisingly, these polled badly. (I suspect that my fellow
professors have no grasp of marketing.) Eventually, I settled on a slogan that
fully captures what this campaign is all about: “Make Something Out of Nothing!”
This should work. After all, if you’ve got nothing to say, it’s a lot easier to
get people to agree.

Dear Professor Flaypeed, It takes time to set up the equipment. I’ll
be ready in an hour. I’ll notify you when the experiment is complete. Jim
Townsworthy

Jim, Perhaps someone should have got up earlier to turn on the
equipment? That is what a graduate student is for, after all. Ha ha. I sit by
the computer, awaiting results. Miles

Miles, You should check facts before firing off an e-mail. We don’t
share the same time zone—it’s 0500 hours, my time. And I don’t have grad
students. I work in industry. I’ll notify you when the measurements are done.
Experiments take time. Jim

Jim, You must pardon my ignorance of experimental science; I am a
theorist. I had no idea there was so much manual labour in your line of work.
Indeed, with all the time spent with the wrench, it must leave little time to
think. I wait, patiently. Miles

Flaypeed, I have carried out your absurd experiment. Your setting
ruined my equipment. It is out of commission for three hours. You seem to have
have no aptitude for this type of work. Our business is done. I notified NFS.
Jim

Jim, I erred. I had expected that with your industrial experience
you would be capable of following directions. Alas, my directions placed too
great a burden on your schedule. You have probably returned to your daily
routine of building a better widget. I don’t blame you for the demise of our
test. I blame the bureaucrat that selected you. I have suggested to NFS that it
find an experimentalist less engrossed in turning a profit. Miles

Flaypeed, The directions from your first message are: “. . . adjust
the equipment so that the laser illuminates the superconductor for precisely 50
m-seconds”. No experimentalist can carry out this measurement because it’s
absurd. I tried to be even-tempered, but at every stage you spew academic
gibberish. I am forwarding your last message to NFS so it can see you for the
annoying little ass that you are. Jim

Jim, There is a simple explanation for the difficulty you had with
the experiment. Apparently, when I e-mailed my instructions, the Greek symbol I
used for “micro” was converted by the e-mail system and sent to you as an “m”.
So you see, you measured for 50 milliseconds not 50 microseconds—that’s
1000 times longer than I intended. My! I note that your equipment will be
working again by 0200 hours. I anticipate your renewed cooperation and have so
informed NFS. Miles

Flaypeed, I’ve redone the experiment at 50 microseconds. I enclose
your data in an attachment. Despite your errors, we should consider the test a
success. I am informing NFS. Our test is complete. Jim

Jim, I appreciate the wonderful data! I agree that e-mail
experimentation is a success. But I want to clarify a small point. An observer
might say that the errors in our test were your fault. I disagree. Certainly, an
extremely attentive scientist would have checked back with me before carrying
out an experiment for 50 milliseconds—clearly an absurd length of time.
But, it is unreasonable to expect an ordinary scientist to show such care. I
will defend you to the hilt and have so posted a note to NFS. Your supportive
colleague, Miles

Flaypeed, You go too far! My research has been at the frontier of
discovery for two decades. I tried to be gracious, now I’ll be frank. Your
overrated career won’t amount to more than a footnote in history. Jim

Jim, Evidently I have more confidence than you do in historians. And
when they review this historic test and paint you the fool, shrug it off. You
are a Nobelist, after all. And while some say that your shared Nobel prize was
undeserved, I, for one, recognise it for what it is—a testimony to your
extraordinary ability to eschew independence and work exclusively in large
groups. I e-mailed a final message to NFS summing up the matter. Cheerio.
Miles.

Dear Professor Miles Flaypeed and Dr Jim Townsworthy, I thank you
both for participating in a test of e-mail experimentation. Your frequent
updates gave us a clear indication of the practicality of the programme for
scientists such as yourselves. Darryl Clark, National Federation for
Science.

Until recently, John Hagelin was a proper scientist. His Harvard PhD earned
him a postdoc job in Europe at CERN. Supported by the National Science
Foundation, he published in prestigious physics journals. But then, 10 years
ago, he was swept up in the teachings of Maharishi Yogi and never returned to
the planet. Looking around, I can tell that the audience is in orbit with him.
When the convention is over, they will go home and play their Astral
Awakenings CD and relive this moment. I’ll go home and mix a stiff
drink.

Hagelin has been fishing for followers for years. Caught up in his net are
medical doctors, computer scientists and fellow physicists. This year, he
released his acolytes on an unsuspecting American people. More than 700
candidates for the Natural Law Party are running in state and federal elections
around the country. Many of those candidates are here for the
convention—I’m here for the hell of it. During a pause in Hagelin’s
speech, one of them leans over to me and observes: “Isn’t this neat?” I look
into his eyes, searching for signs of life. “You may want to cut back on your
medication,” I suggest.

This flock of docile intellectuals makes poor convention material—they
don’t cheer. Fortunately, some of them have offspring strategically placed
around the hall. At key times during Hagelin’s speech, the kids erupt. A child
in front of me stomps his feet, throwing all his weight into the pounding. Now
he’s yelping and swinging a campaign poster over his head. He’s gleeful. I feel
like I’m in a movie—Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Lord of the
Flies.

During the hour-long acceptance speech Hagelin never mentions the centrepiece
of his beliefs: “coherence creation”. In past speeches he claimed that he
lowered the nation’s rate of inflation by having 7000 experts meditate in unison
to create a “coherent field”. He asserts that he’s made the stock market go up
and the crime rate go down. He believes the whole concept can be proved with
particle physics. In fact, if the Superconducting Supercollider had been built,
he says, he could have worked out the details. Too bad.

But he doesn’t mention any of this in his acceptance speech. The speech is
being broadcast nationwide and Hagelin has learnt to sanitise his message for
mass consumprion. He’s also learnt that politicians don’t have to go into
detail.

This is the second time Hagelin has run for President. Four years ago, when
he created his Natural Law Party, he said that “it would take a miracle for me
to win in 92, but it would take a miracle for me to lose in 96.” But things
didn’t play out the way he predicted. Then again, maybe they did. Hagelin gets
everything he wants out of American politics.

He has a campaign coffer deep enough to finance a 16-page advertisement in
USA Today. On top of that million-dollar expense, he plans to televise
a half-hour commercial on a major network. What does he get for it all? He
claims that he is “the third party candidate to beat”. So, it appears, he’s not
spending money to win the election, he’s spending money to be seen.

Occasionally, Hagelin is seen by some dispirited intellectuals who find his
script alluring, and the flock and funds grow. These are people who know enough
science to recognise that we are flecks of matter trapped on a tiny planet,
alive for a few dozen orbits around an unexceptional star. They have just enough
sense to recognise that the world can be a fairly predictable place, horse
racing aside. But instead of seizing the day, they lose their grip, preferring
to believe in a world where anything is possible.

In Hagelin’s world, remarkable things can happen. He ends his acceptance
speech by claiming that he will vanquish crime and replace it with world peace.
He will end drug abuse and cleanse our inner cities. He’ll even make the
nation’s $5 trillion debt vanish. The bottom line is that he views
misfortune as opportunity. I suspect that when Hagelin has a flat tyre, rather
than just bolting on the spare, he prays over the flat and takes up a
collection.

The convention is nearly over now. All that’s left is a gala dinner in honour
of Hagelin that costs $50 per plate. I don’t have a ticket so I phone his
press agent. “Our budget is tight,” he explains, “but we’d love to have you.” He
says he’ll sell me a ticket for $35. He pauses, seeking commitment,
trying to lure me in. “I’ll skip it,” I say. There’s another pause as he reviews
his tactics. He drops it—I’m not worth the effort. There will be an easier
dollar to be made further down the campaign trail.

I began by trying to finger someone as the cause of my problem. After all,
the first step to self-improvement is assigning blame. Maybe my environment
mucked up my verbal skills. I considered blaming my graduate school mentor, but
I’ve hung enough of my deficiencies on him already. So perhaps some pesky gene
was the culprit. Alas, my father publishes poetry. Eventually I settled on
blaming Sir Isaac Newton. Surely, Principia has been polluting my
diction since childhood.

The next step required some distasteful self-examination. What was it about
my speech that made the eyes of the masses glaze over? I examined my scientific
publications and uncovered my shameful weakness. I, Francis Slakey, am addicted
to adjectives. There in my papers, mocking me, were the giveaway phrases:
“optically induced metastable phase”, “magnetic-exchange Cooper-pair
interaction strength”. The devilish adjective was my master, I was its pathetic
tongue-lolling junkie. There was only one way to kick the habit—I went
turkey.

When I had finally re-established control over the adjective, I began
examining other aspects of my scientific speech. I discovered that while my
verbs were not a source of confusion, they were all quite boring. I did plenty
of “measuring” and “calculating” but I rarely “reckoned” and I never “conjured
up”. I needed to enrich my vocabulary.

As I began stocking my head with fresh verbs, I discovered that the adverb is
completely oversold. The adverb is a footstool for linguistic dwarfs who cannot
reach the right verb. For example, instead of saying a scientist “spoke
confidently”, you should say “babbled”. Instead of saying the wise doctor
“keenly lectured”, you should say “droned on”. What you find is that for every
quality verb you learn, you can discard at least one adverb. So, expanding your
verb inventory does not require any new mental shelf space. In fact, it is quite
the opposite. If you choose your verbs carefully, you will discover that when
you finish upgrading your inventory, you will have an impressive number of empty
mental shelves.

In the course of examining my speech, I found that I completely misunderstood
the semicolon. A typical sentence in my scientific paper would make a point, but
then additional little thoughts and fragments would trail along behind. The
semicolon was the glue for this verbal streamer. What I learnt, however, was
that a semicolon is the pennant of a dimwit, a waffler. So, uncertain whether to
use a full-stop or comma, the dimwit uses both—stacking them one on top of
the other.

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t mastered the paragraph. Apparently, the
purpose of the paragraph is to introduce more white space into the text,
breaking up what the eye would otherwise interpret as an endless blotch of ink.
Fortunately, a skilled editor rescues me in this matter. Though I must admit I
am uncertain whether this very sentence should be boxed between two others
or should conclude the paragraph.

Most of the linguistic rules I’ve just described I worked out on my own, but
I have it from a respected source that they are, nevertheless, accurate.
Although this source is dead his writing confirms my theories. For example,
consider the following plausible scientific sentence: “In order to achieve some
measure of progress, it was necessary for him to agitate the liquid repeatedly
with an exhausting twisting of his wrists.” Now consider Ernest Hemingway’s
version: “He rowed and he rowed and he rowed.” Magnifique! No adjectival
blockage, no semicolon irregularities, just smooth flow.

You may also have noticed that I don’t use the letter z. I recommend that you
drop this letter from your public alphabet. You will find it difficult at first,
because you have to avoid phrases like “Zener diode” and “zirconium crucible”.
Of course, that is precisely the point—these phrases should not be used in
normal company. In fact, I believe we should drop the letter z from the
dictionary altogether. That would do away with the zodiac, making us all a lot
better off.

There is one final bit of self-editing that I do, the rhetorical equivalent
of the lowest common denominator. Before publishing anything, I check the
average word length. In graduate school, I could boast an average regularly in
double figures. Recently, a psychiatrist told me that an obsession with long
words is a sign of sexual insecurity. Now I try to keep my average under six
letters.

So, has any of this actually helped to improve my speech? Well, last week I
went to a local dive to try to communicate with some folk there. I found a
very promising fellow wearing a coat that had a strange odour about it. When he
asked me what I did, I said physics. “Like it?” he rasped. “It beats
proctology,” I observed. He called the bartender over and bought me a drink.

I went to the courthouse the next Monday expecting to be turned away for
the passionless cube that I am. I was assigned the number 39 and directed to
the next opening in a chain of bucket seats. The television was playing.
Coffee was stewing on the burner. If the chairs weren’t so comfortable, it
would feel just like a faculty lounge.

I was roused from my stupor by my number being called. After a few
questions, I was cleared. Perhaps this was a precedent; a scientist had been
selected as a juror. I would make my people proud …

A juror is exhorted not to use real names when describing a case, so I can
only tell you that Laurel and Hardy were arguing over a pay cheque one day. A
fight broke out and Laurel grabbed his bike lock and swung it into Hardy’s
face, chipping a tooth. Laurel ran home and Hardy went off to find a dentist.
In order to sue for the price of a cap, Hardy first had to find Laurel guilty
of something. With the help of a discount lawyer, he accused Laurel of assault
with a deadly weapon.

As a scientist, I immediately seized on the facts. An asymmetry was
glaringly apparent. Hardy packs 250 pounds onto a frame that is a good foot
taller than feeble Laurel. Hardy could dismantle Laurel as easily as a toy.
While asymmetries have great appeal for scientists, they are too mundane for
lawyers. These lawyers were sniffing for something that would add some drama
to an open-and-shut case. They settled for trying to ridicule each other’s
client.

At one point, Hardy’s lawyer worked into a crescendo, then abruptly stopped
and held up a picture of a flower box. “What does this look like, Laurel?”
“The flower box on the corner of 14th and K Street. Hardy pushed me over it. I
fell near my bike.” “Is this what the flower box looked like the day you got
into the fight with Hardy?” “Yes.” “Are you absolutely sure?” “Yes.” “But your
fight was in mid-January and I checked the weather service and there was snow
on the ground at that time. But there isn’t any snow in this picture is
there?” “No.” “You were wrong. The box didn’t look like this. It couldn’t
have. You were wrong, correct?” “Yes.”

The discount lawyer had caught out dimwitted Laurel in a contradiction,
casting doubt over his credibility. Laurel’s lawyer counterattacked by
bamboozling Hardy. Within minutes, Hardy was trapped in an equally irrelevant
contradiction. Clearly, the lawyers wanted to keep common sense from intruding
on our jury deliberations.

The next morning the lawyers made their closing arguments, with Hardy’s
discount lawyer again holding the photo of the flower box high up over his
head. The judge then explained the legal definition of “self-defence” and he
sent us off to deliberate.

The foreman decided to take a vote immediately. “Who thinks Laurel is
innocent?” she asked. I looked around the table at raised hands. Eleven? “Who
thinks Laurel is guilty?” We all looked dumbfounded at the juror at the end of
the table with his hand up. The foreman asked the question on all our minds,
“Why?” He mumbled “nnnrn snrrnn’. Uh oh. Verdicts must be unanimous here in
the US.

There are two sides to human nature. There is the side that brakes and
swerves to avoid a squirrel in the road. And, there is the side that
accelerates to get in a clean hit. My fellow jurors accelerated. But the
mumbler would not budge despite the barrage of abuse he was suffering. With
every insult hurled at him, he became more resolute. Somehow he was drawing
strength from the beating, gaining energy. I considered telling him that
gaining energy was in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, but I let it
pass. Instead, I tried to bring some order to the discussion. But science had
not trained me for this. There was no blackboard, no podium. There wasn’t even
an overhead projector. All I could do was clear my throat to try and get
everyone’s attention. No one heard me over the din.

Fortunately, there is a force in nature that can bring any discussion to a
halt: the lunch bell. By the time I got to the lunch hall, 10 of the jurors
sat clustered around two tables. Occasionally, they would halt their
conversation to scowl at the mumbler ostracised in the corner.

If I was ever going to return to my cave, I would have to do something to
change his mind. A well-crafted argument built on a solid foundation of logic
was not the way. So, reluctantly, I abandoned my training. I jettisoned the
scientific method and tried an old approach to persuasion. I kissed his butt,
as we Americans say. “You really have a lot of integrity.” In my entire life,
I have never spoken such blather. He beamed with pride. That was promising, so
I asked the mumbler where he was from. “Ehhnga.” I found that when I got an
ear right up to his mouth, his syllables became familiar. It turned out that
he had emigrated from the town that my mother grew up in – Cuenca, Ecuador.
Bingo! A few more humiliating minutes of male bonding and this case would be
over.

Before the jurors had a chance for their next salvo, I suggested we take
another vote. “OK, who thinks Laurel is innocent?” All the hands went up: 12
to 0! We filed into the courtroom and dispensed justice.

Like original sin, generations of physicists are born with reputations stained by the actions of their thermonuclear-minded forefathers. To make matters worse, most of us physicists cannot see the stain. Opera singers, however, see it very clearly. I was prepared for her criticism. Some notable historians have been accusing scientists of doing more harm to society than good. I asked one of them recently how he could so confidently make the accusation without ever having taken a science course. “Precisely the point,” he said. “Only someone detached from a subject can offer an objective critique.” Someday I’ll ask my hairdresser what he thinks of historians.

As it turned out, the opera singer wanted us to realise the dream of every world leader, every human rights advocate, every beauty queen. She wanted world peace. This could be a real opportunity. Perhaps, together, we could cleanse the scientific community of its elusive stains.

I strongly endorse peace. I also endorse freedom of speech and the quaffing of beer – though not simultaneously. Probably sensing my fervour for inalienable rights, she described her vision. We would put a stop to nuclear weapons testing, she said. Excellent, I thought. I’ll call my bomb-testing colleagues and say “the Cold War is over chaps, time to forge some ploughshares”.

Alas, things were not so simple. This would require political activism, which I knew nothing about. She knew nothing about political activism either, but because of the nature of her job she was going about the activism with complete confidence. After all, being monolingual never stopped her from singing Carmen.

We had to move fast. The White House was planning to announce its decision on the issue in two weeks, and a key weapons lab was lobbying for nuclear testing. We needed to send the White House a message making it clear that the majority of scientists opposed further testing. Unfortunately, President Clinton doesn’t know Bethe from Bertha. We needed name recognition.

We settled on a dual approach: we would draft two statements calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing. One would be signed by presidents of physics societies in countries that were part of the nuclear club. The second would be signed by celebrities. When we delivered them to Clinton, the celebrity statement would be on the top.

After a week of international faxing, the presidents of five physics societies signed the scientific statement. I had some misgivings about the second statement. The signatories included Desmond Tutu, Billy Joel, Judy Collins and Francis Slakey. Hopefully, Clinton would overlook Joel’s embarrassing 1970s schlock ballads and concentrate on the body of the letter.

Unfortunately the weapons lab had the ear of the White House. We did not. Our statements would be just so much waste paper if they could not pass through the morass of staffers and into the hands of President Clinton. That is when I learned how entertainers prosper. Beside every celebrated entertainer sits a mighty lawyer. Paul Newman’s lawyer, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, would personally deliver the statements.

The day after the delivery, I got a call from the opera star. Newman’s lawyer just told her that Clinton bad read the statements and was “impressed”. Later that day I got a call from the White House. A member of staff reported that the letters “were greatly appreciated”. I interpreted these hollow responses as meaning that Clinton had not overlooked Billy Joel’s recording history. To my surprise, two days later Clinton announced that the US would seek a comprehensive ban on all nuclear weapons testing. Salvation. I had cleansed the reputation of physicists for generations to come. Perhaps, in a hundred years or so, a pilgrim would see my face appear in a tortilla and I would be on the path to sainthood.

This spiritual reverie was short-lived. Just a few days later, the paper reported that plutonium had been found on sale on the black market in Germany. Our reputations were still stained, historians would continue to blame the physicists. There would be no salvation, at least not today. I would have to team up with another group of romantics and try again. I’m waiting for a call from a coalition of politically-active commodities brokers.

Four years ago, the job market for research physicists tightened up in the US. With the supply exceeding demand, employers became more selective. Suddenly, some of the most promising scientists of my generation were asked in job interviews if they had ever taken a class in public speaking. Spirits broken, they returned from interviews with the advice “work on your communications skills”. The advice became a grad student mantra.

Their failure shocked us. We had all assumed that our futures didn’t require skills in public speaking. If forced to teach, we would simply do as our mentors did. We would stride into the classroom with our eyes fixed on, say, a curious discolouration of the ceiling. Then, for the next fifty minutes we would talk to the chalkboard. Now we were being asked to make eye contact.

By mid-1991, every one knew that most universities weren’t hiring, though it took us longer to realise this than almost everyone. We had no choice but to do the unthinkable – we would consider working for industry. Unfortunately, most of us didn’t know the difference between macroeconomics and oatmeal. The interviews were short, we started exploring alternatives.

I remember the day I learnt the word “argyle” from a dejected colleague. Showing foresight, he interviewed with the computer trading division of a brokerage firm. At some point during the interview, one of the company gentry fanned him away, commenting: “You’ll never get a job wearing socks like that.” Socks? Most of us were just learning to tuck in our shirts.

As the situation became more hopeless, the physics neighbourhood soured. Years earlier, a stroll past the open doors along the physics department hallway always led to a breezy conversation about the day’s headlines. Now, few doors stood open. Conversation focused on the latest disappointment. A ghetto took root.

No one pushed Prozac, at first. Students began ingesting the bottled confidence behind closed doors. But by the time I graduated in March of 1992, a few colleagues began flacking Prozac to fellow students suffering from mounting depression. Recently, I went to a friend’s house for a reunion of my grad-school colleagues now living in the Washington DC area. He whispered to me that of the fourteen, nine were on Prozac.

Along with the drug came a gang. A contentious lot, they followed a time-worn script: Us versus Them. They claim that the sources of the problem were department chairmen unwilling to take action, or ageing faculty members unwilling to retire, or the reluctance of the National Science Foundation to admit to a problem. In short, they claim the trouble is “the system”.

They call themselves the Young ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Network, and they wear indignation like a tartan. They point fingers, index or middle, and raise their voices as one. The group therapy consoles them, but it doesn’t help them to work their way out of the grad ghetto. Physics jobs are scarce, and the gang rarely considers alternatives. Instead, they take academic postdoctoral appointments.

Postdocs are the migrant workers of Generation X. Currently, a postdoc appointment keeps money trickling in, but carries little opportunity for advancement to a permanent academic job. In most cases, it just perpetuates the dream that someday soon a tenured position will open up. Colleagues now seasonally drift from university to university with their possessions stuffed into the trunk of a rusting Chevy. They find a grad ghetto wherever they park.

How do we clean up the grad ghettos? Inner-city ghettos from east Los Angeles to southeast Washington DC address their troubles by encouraging birth control, reforming the educational system, promoting role models, and restructuring the welfare support net. In one form or another, these ideas are being tried in nearly every grad ghetto from Stanford to MIT.

Birth control is as touchy a subject in a physics department as it is in a confessional. Despite the friction, several universities are reducing the entering class in order to control the physics population. To make physics grads more marketable, some universities are requiring them to take nonphysics courses. The American Physical Society scours Wall Street and Hollywood Boulevard for physicists in “alternative careers”: the inspiring anecdotes are then circulated around the grad ghettos. And funding agencies are considering changes that allow students to broaden their research experience.

These are promising ideas, but it’s likely that things will get much worse before they get better. When the government completes its budget-balancing slaughter, at least 20 per cent fewer physicists will be employed in national labs. And the cut in federal research support will ripple through the system leaving a downsized academic enterprise. With even more physicists searching for even fewer jobs, more grad students will wind up as migrants.

To cope with the dilemma, many students rely on advice from recent ghetto survivors. Since I’m still in the academic world, I’m viewed less as a survivor and more as a ghetto landlord. Occasionally, however, a student will ask me for advice and I give a heartfelt reply. “Don’t dismiss an option you haven’t pursued. And, don’t forget to tuck in your shirt.”

By 2000, the project was running hopelessly over budget. “If NASA wants to go to Mars, it has to take more responsibility,” announced President Newt Gingrich as he imposed a $9 billion budget cut. lnevitably, this put a brake on construction and by the time the last rivets were inserted, 15 years after the first, the orbit of the station was already beginning to decay. NASA had just five more years before the station would fall from the sky and vanish in a sprinkling of luminous confetti over northern Canada.

Penniless and running out of time, the space administration found money where it could. It unloaded bagfuls of space rocks for $19.95 a piece on the Home Consumer Network. It sold off a warehouse full of satellites as reusable targets for clay-pigeon shoots. It even told its technicians to search for change between seat cushions in old Apollo space capsules. But after all these measures NASA still found itself $172 billion short, and to bridge the gap the administration found four countries willing to become partners in the project.

Each participant would provide one crew member for the mission, and the partners all agreed to keep scientists off the team. Humankind was going to Mars on the way to fulfilling its destiny of pushing to the stars; no one wanted scientists around meddling with destiny. Besides, scientific equipment for experiments would take up valuable trunk space.

The American choice for mission leader was a stroke of public relations genius. The mission needed a stout-hearted voyager who could withstand intense doses of solar radiation, the limb-dissolving effects of decalcification and hour upon hour of mind-numbing inactivity. And through all this, the space warrior would have to wear a radiant smile. There was only one place to look. They went to Malibu Beach, California, and found Biff.

When they asked Biff to give up the Malibu sand for a trip to Mars, he just rubbed his stubble and said: “No way, dude.” When they changed their approach and asked him to ride gravity waves to the shore of the most secluded beach in the Universe, his stupor lifted briefly. “Tubular”.

Biff was every inch the conquering warrior. Tall, bronzed, muscular, with a grin that smacked of Robert Redford and a stance that smacked of Kong. He could breathe in Martian dust like it was Los Angeles smog. In fact, they were afraid he might do just that. When Biff left the landing pod to survey the Martian landscape, mission control would have to make sure he kept his helmet on. They would keep the witless titan on a short leash.

The scientific community protested. Why not send probes or robots? A probe would have been a thousand times cheaper than the crewed mission and promised a thousand times the scientific results. Why send people if they are just going to be encased in a spacesuit? But their protests were derailed after a bungled press conference. A prominent scientist, inexperienced with pressurised clothing, donned a spacesuit, intending to stomp dramatically about the press room. On TV that evening, the world witnessed the tragic implosion of one of America’s greatest minds.

The incident took the pressure off NASA. Of course, it knew that the scientists were right about crewed space flight. In a spacesuit, the explorer had no sense of smell, no sense of touch or hearing. Biff would have only his eyes – and NASA wasn’t even planning to use them. Instead, it would use a sophisticated camera link. And no one had any intention of letting Biff handle the camera; it would be strapped atop his flat head and manipulated from the control room back in Texas. Ever confident, NASA pushed on.

By late 2015, the Pinta II stood complete. A band struck up as the five astronauts were loaded into the pod that would be their home for the next four years. Barbra Streisand sang, doves flew, NASA officials gassed on about destiny. Merry with drink, the public cheered as the capsule lifted off with a puff.

Little more than five centuries after Christopher Columbus sailed into history, the five weary adventurers were staring vacantly out of the porthole of Pinta Il at the desolate Martian landscape. Helmut made an unsuccessful attempt to fit his jellied legs into the intractable spacesuit. Suffering from radiation-induced nausea, Preeball retched dehydrated potato fluffs into his suit’s coolant reservoir. And the months of brain-numbing inactivity left Hector and Yoko with a touch of mania.

But the titan was unscathed, apart from having faded from bronze to ash white. Biff would go it alone. He donned a spacesuit and pushed the button to open humankind’s gateway to Mars. Nothing happened. Biff pushed again. Still nothing. Biff stared at the button, dumbfounded. It would take five minutes before a command would arrive from Texas.

He couldn’t open the door manually as NASA had eliminated all manual override systems. He couldn’t stand idly by with the most radical beach in the Universe just outside the door. So Biff did what NASA feared most – he made a decision. Biff laid into the button, thumb curling under the pressure. Only too late did he remember that the suit was fitted with hydraulics that increased sustained pressure ten-fold. The button shattered under Biff’s startled gaze.

Texas control saw it all two minutes later. But the mission would not be a failure; NASA was prepared for just this kind of calamity. It had learnt from earlier missions to expect the unexpected. The mission administrator flipped back a plastic cap on his console in Texas and pressed the large red button. Moments later a robot rolled out from the side of Pinta II and began surveying the Martian landscape. No one would ever notice the difference.