Binary - Michael Crichton [10]
WRIGHT WAS ALSO INTERESTED IN SPORTS AND GAMBLING. IN 1944 HE WROTE AN AMUSING SHORT ARTICLE 'ON BEING DUE'. IN IT HE ARGUED CORRECTLY THAT THE ORDINARY NOTION THAT A MAN IS 'DUE FOR A HIT' IF HE HAS BEEN RECENTLY UNSUCCESSFUL AT BAT IS TOTALLY FALLACIOUS. EACH TIME AT BAT IS A SEPARATE EVENT.
HE WAS ALSO INTERESTED IN HISTORICAL CONTEXTS: THE FACT THAT JOHN ADAMS, JAMES MONROE, AND THOMAS JEFFERSON ALL DIED ON JULY 4th, AND SO ON. HE WROTE A PAPER ON ASSIGNING CAUSATION TO HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL EVENTS. IN THIS WORK HE WAS STRONGLY INFLUENCED BY THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS.
HE SHOWED THAT YOU CAN NEVER DETERMINE 'THE CHIEF REASON' FOR THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, NAPOLEON'S DEFEAT AT WATERLOO, THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, OR ANY OTHER HISTORICAL EVENT. THE CHIEF REASON CANNOT BE KNOWN IN ANY PRECISE SENSE. FOR ANY EVENT THERE ARE HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF CONTRIBUTING CAUSES, AND NO WAY TO ASSIGN PRIORITIES TO THESE CAUSES. HISTORIANS HAVE ATTACKED THE WRIGHT THESIS VIGOROUSLY SINCE IT TENDS TO PUT THEM OUT OF A JOB. HE WAS, HOWEVER, MATHEMATICALLY CORRECT BEYOND DOUBT.
FINALLY WRIGHT TURNED TO THE GENERAL THEORY OF INTERACTIONS. FOR SIMPLICITY HE STUDIED TWO-COMPONENT INTERACTIONS LEADING TO A SINGLE EVENT OR OUTCOME. HE BECAME QUITE KNOWLEDGEABLE IN THIS AREA.
SUMMARY: WRIGHT IS A TALENTED MATHEMATICIAN WHOSE PERSONAL INTERESTS FALL IN THE AREA OF PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS AS THEY APPLY TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES SUCH AS SPORTS, GAMBLING, AND THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. HIS DEVELOPMENT AS A MATHEMATICIAN DISPOSED HIM TO BE INTERESTED IN TWO-COMPONENT INTERACTIONS LEADING TO A SINGLE EVENT OR OUTCOME.
Graves stared at the screen. The notion of two-component interactions fascinated him. It seemed to have all sorts of connotations. He punched buttons and looked at the bibliography, which was not revealing. He looked at the abstracts of articles written by Wright. They were equally unrevealing. Then he saw that a final study was available: Apparently S. Vessen had applied a statistical analysis of his own to Wright's work.
S. VESSEN: ANALYSIS OF WORD FREQUENCIES IN PAPERS OF JOHN WRIGHT. THE FOLLOWING WORDS APPEAR MORE FREQUENTLY THAN EXPECTED ACCORDING TO RATIOS OF TOTAL WORDAGE FOR MATHEMATICAL TREATISES
PROBABILITY
COINCIDENCE
GAUSSIAN
INSTABILITY
INTERACTION
TWO-COMPONENT
IMPOTENCE
Graves frowned, staring at the last word. Then he pressed the 'Wipe' button a final time and hurried to catch his plane.
HOUR 10
EN ROUTE TO SAN DIEGO
7 AM PDT
The aircraft banked steeply over the oil fields of Long Beach and headed south towards San Diego. Graves stared out the window, thinking of Wright's file. Then he thought about his own. He wondered what it looked like, the information displayed on the unblinking cathode-ray screen in sharp white easy-to-read block letters. He wondered how accurate it was, how fair, how honest, how kind.
Graves was thirty-six years old. He had worked for the government fifteen years - nearly half his life. That fact implied a dedication which had never been there; from the start his career in government had been a kind of accident.
In college Graves had studied subjects that interested him, whether they were practical or not. On the surface they seemed highly impractical: Russian literature and mathematics. He was drafted immediately after college and did push-ups for five weeks before somebody in the Army discovered what he knew. Then he was sent to the language school in Monterey, where he remained forty-eight hours - just long enough to be tested - before being flown to Washington.