A Process Genius

Everyone you meet teaches you something.  At times it reminds you how different we all are and that alone is a precious gift.  I don't know about the rest of you but a world filled only with types like me would be truly awful!  So here's a tale of gratitude that you are unique and maybe one day I'll get to learn from you too.

A Process Genius

Working in the small office in the physics department had its drawbacks. There were three of us in the office and our desks practically touched. That could have been considered cosy if it had not been for Ronnie’s BO. He was a longhaired, beer-bellied, cheerful chap whose excitement about jazz and films kept him in a permanent sweat.

Ronnie was in the process of completing his PhD in metal-semiconductor interfaces and was one of the most unlikely looking research students in the department. With his fat pink face and round spectacles mounted on a curved double chin, atop a rotund torso, supported by a pregnant belly and tiny legs he had the chubby cheerful comical look of a truly stupid person.

When he went to the states for a six-month research project we found ourselves missing his cheerful presence. “In the States”, Ronnie gave us his impressions after returning, “everything is wrapped in cellophane and packaged to sell, even the people. These guys kept coming up to me and telling me I smelt! I told them I knew that, but they kept coming to say the same thing.” The thought of our Ronnie being singled out made me feel curiously defensive for him.

He got excited over jazz and films and would watch these weird pieces involving nothing more than a shot of a door, zooming in close and then panning out again. They never had a plot and left you feeling disorientated like a migraine headache. Ronnie would wax lyrical about the hidden meaning, the symbolism, the captivating photography, the subtlety of expression, the minimalist approach etc. It didn’t take much to amuse Ronnie. He would form a square frame with his fingers and examine various perspectives of the corner of the office for an hour. On one memorable occasion he was captivated by the empty dejectedness of a garage forecourt at night and while searching for the best angle for a camera shot managed to fall down a flight of steps and badly bruise one side of his face. Watching him in the student film theatre quivering with excitement at the jazz sound track of another useless film, I could only envy his passionate love of such things. The rest of us could only sit appalled by the pathetic acting and plot but Ronnie was in a state of ecstasy over the sound track alone. It was all that was needed to transport him to another plane.

I treated my tutorials as SAS assignments. Prepared for those unexpected stinker questions, underlying hidden principles, past exam questions were consulted in detail. Even so the tutorials were tricky as the students we were teaching had distinct advantages. Not only were they reading textbooks and papers and having lectures on the subjects covered but for us it had been usually four years since we’d encountered many of the topics. Time has a way of blurring the memory and erasing the finer detail and eroding one’s understanding.

Ronnie seemed to sail through his tutorials unprepared and unscathed. His technique was unusual and effective, based more on chemistry rather than physics. When the situation, during his tutorial, became fraught with difficult concepts and questions, etc, Ronnie would let off a couple of pluffs, his ‘slow and deadly ones’ as he called them. In the small cramped tutorial rooms this form of chemical warfare was incredible successful. “That soon shuts them up”, he explained enthusiastically.

Ronnie also had a different approach to experiments. All his were done on a department made ultra-high vacuum machine that the rest of us called “The Pig”. It was temperamental and had a definite will of it’s own. This machine would only work in Ronnie’s hands. He would stroke its metal curved body with infinite love and patience coaxing her to do her stuff. Mind you perhaps a lot of his success was due to his unusual data handling. For me the data that arose from experiments was akin to the Holy Grail, something to be respectfully analysed and examined. Ronnie had an altogether alternative approach. The grotesque care he took with getting his machine to perform was juxtaposed by his totally cavalier attitude to the data actually produced. Points that did not conform to the appropriate straight line on the log graph paper were simply moved. Either nudged slightly until they lay in the right place or if totally unacceptable just erased. Ronnie had no scruples about a search for eternal truth. He was a process person. The end result was not really important.

Everything seemed strangely inverted. All that was vital and critical to me, scientific truth, laws, discovery, etc, were playthings to Ronnie that deserved nothing more than his casual attention. Jazz and film, these were the bread of his life and were analysed with scientific precision and passion. Undertones felt, quality of colour, scenery, directors - these were the serious issues. The rest were pastimes, a mere game for the philistines.

Getting a PhD is a painful affair and for Ronnie no less than the rest of us, it caused its fair share of pain. He likened getting doctored to being castrated and swore our professor kept the organs of every successful student in huge glass sealed jars on a shelf beside the hardbound copy of each of their theses in his office. As his theses was nearing completion he would often groan and mutter. “It’s the bloody slowness of being de-balled I can’t stand. I mean for cattle it’s one quick snip and they’re gone. I feel I’ve been having mine ripped off for over a year now!”

Towards the end of his work Ronnie developed a strange form of paranoia. Having written seven chapters of his thesis he became anxious in case this material so long sweated over should accidentally be lost. He kept one copy in the boot of his car, another in his case which he carried everywhere and a third in the office. This caused it’s own problems as when he did corrections he never remembered which version he’d been working on. As a result he ended up doing three sets of corrections, each slightly different.

One of his closest friends in the department was James. James tackled everything in life with earnest sincerity. He was the only theoretical physicist among us experimentalists. He investigated the theory behind some of the instruments that we used to study our semiconductor surfaces. As a result, James was always in a state of doubt. We just took data and plotted and interpreted. James fretted over the edge effects, spurious anomalies. And as a result, data was not points on a piece of paper to him but the end point of a complicated projectile path subjected to magnetic, electric and gravitational fields, absorption, reflection and God knows what else. He regarded data as an evil confusion seeking to lure the unwary into hasty interpretations. Ronnie summed it up one coffee break “ The problem with James is that he’s so far ahead of us all he’s coming up behind!’

Ronnie got his PhD and typically then left to do a course on movie making. He wanted to do what he loved. He had a kind of genius. I doubt he’ll ever make a brilliant film or become famous because he’s a real genius who is only interested in the perfection of the process, not the finished article. There’s a kind of admirable fidelity about that kind of genius. I hope wherever he is now, there’s jazz music playing and a screen nearby because his happiness could then be guaranteed. That’s one of the many advantages of being a process genius: your happiness is not in the finished product (whatever illusive goal that might be) but in the here and now. That quite simply is enough.