Are we recording? Sorry, just a minute …. Ok, let’s begin … Tell us what happened, from the beginning, as best you can recall. Do not omit any details.
“From the beginning? Right then, I guess it all began with this problem that Rich had assigned us …
You call your team leader Rich?
“Yeah, I mean, he insisted on us calling him that, not Professor Taylor and definitely not ‘Dick’, even though … well, y’know if the shoe fits ... So, anyway, I was looking at a bunch of theories that might help crack the problem using ‘Search and Discover’ …”
I’m sorry, ‘Search and Discover’?
“Really? Ok, sure, well, it’s this pretty sophisticated AI set-up that basically helps us find theories. New theories. Possible ones, I mean. Given some initial input, obviously. And I know what some people think but honestly, if you want to get ahead in this game, you can’t not use it these days. I mean, DeepMind showed the way … but then it turns out that modelling how proteins fold and designing new drugs is, like, one thing … ok, two things … but coming up with a new theory of quantum gravity or explaining what dark matter is, well, that’s a whole other whatever.
And that’s where the likes of me still has some role to play! Turns out that even if you feed in something plausible, the AI will happily spew out hypothesis after hypothesis, all of which may be true but also, a lot of times, trivial, or at least, completely uninteresting. To find the good stuff, like the theories that stand a chance of having some explanatory value, and maybe generate a novel prediction or two … well, yes, then it seems that a little wetware selectivity is needed. Which I suppose says something about the nature of creativity and no doubt the good folk at Global AI Dominance or whatever it’s called will crack that too, soon enough. And yeah, sure, if they had already we wouldn’t be in this situation, with a future Nobel Prize winner locked away in, y’know, that place, and me here. In this little room. With you. For reasons that still aren’t clear, if I’m honest. But we are where we are, as they say …”
Please return to your account of what happened. You said Professor Taylor assigned you a problem.
“Oh, yeah, sure, sorry … Well, as you know, Rich is, was, one of those ‘rising stars of science’ that get profiled in The Guardian, top of his class at Cambridge, PhD from CalTech, working at the intersection of high-energy physics and cosmology blah blah blah. By the time he hired me, he already had a prestigious professorship and a major international grant to go with it, plus the attitude to match.
The grant was for looking at these weird theoretical particles called axions, which Rich, sorry, Professor Taylor, thought could be a major constituent of dark matter. As for the attitude, well, yeah, I guess that was par for the course … he was one of those men who believed that it wasn’t just the world of physics that was his for the taking but pretty much anything else that he fancied. Or anyone. Still, I could handle him and his attitude. Or so I thought.”
So you thought?
“Yeah, like when his hand slid down my back at this conference reception we were at, I made a point of stepping away. And then when it rested on my thigh as we sat next to each other at dinner after a seminar, I lifted it off and gave him A Look. Of course, he just shrugged and smirked, as if to say “Well, I had to try …” And that was that. Or, again, so I thought.”
Was all that before you made your breakthrough?
“Yeah, pre-‘Breakthrough’. Anyway, using Search and Discover we’d already located a bunch of theories covering axion-dark photon interactions, some of which looked quite promising, at least at first. But then they didn’t pan out and I was toying with the idea of just going off down a completely different path. To be honest, I was a bit frustrated with the lack of progress, we all were, and anyway, one evening I was scanning through a bunch of pdfs on the physics preprint archive and my eye was caught by a review paper that looked interesting ...
So, I saddled up the ol’ AI and set the search parameters using the details from that paper. I wouldn’t say I’d had an idea, or even the whisper of one – more like when you’re half-asleep and you think you hear a voice murmur something, but you don’t know what, you know what I mean?”
Please just continue.
“Alright, sure. Well, it must’ve been hours later and my head was all over the place and I know it might seem silly to say this, but I remember thinking this was how Einstein must’ve felt, y’know, back in the day ... Not that I had the ‘Nobel Prize’ in mind or anything like that, of course, but still … And, yes, obviously, in those days it was just him and his incredible physics brain, whereas I had this super-powerful side-kick, mapping out the space of possibilities for me. Even so, without me we probably wouldn’t have pushed beyond crank-land, with all those idiots beavering away, trying to prove Einstein wrong with some chunk of theoretical fools-gold.”
So, how did you do it?
“Honestly? Beats me. Go ask a psychologist. Or a philosopher. I guess it comes down to being on top of the latest experimental work, so you know what’s ruled out but then you also need to have some appreciation of the way a theory hangs together, of its beauty, whatever that is …”
Ok, so tell us what happened after you made your discovery.
“Right, yes, well, I sketched out what I’d found in a note and Whatsapped it round the rest of the team before crashing into bed. I must’ve only been asleep for a couple of hours when I got a call from Pete, the other post-doc: Rich, sorry again, Professor Taylor wanted us all in for a group meeting at 10. And as soon as I walked into the seminar room and joined the others, I could see how excited he was. He started off with “Major advance” before dropping in “Fundamental break-through” then landing on “Paradigm changing”, which I thought was a bit hackneyed but hey, I’d take it. The two PhD students, Ann and Vicky were looking at me wide-eyed, while Pete had a smile slapped on and was giving me the thumbs-up.
So, anyway, there was a major conference on dark matter coming up in Munich and right there and then Rich decided we should all just drop our planned presentations and switch focus. Ann and Vicky were scheduled to be in the poster session and their work needed only small tweaks, just to set the scene. Pete would have to rewrite his paper to help ‘soften up the ground’ as Rich put it and then I’d present my theory before the man himself would wrap it all up in his planned plenary, exploring the implications and generally framing this new approach ‘we’ had developed. And, of course, it all had to be checked and double-checked, against the most recent observations, against known rival hypotheses, against the possibility of some unfortunate implication we hadn’t seen immediately … I tell you, those were some intense weeks.”
What happened at the conference?
“Basically, everything went exactly as anticipated. The Q and A following my talk could’ve been brutal, if I hadn’t been so well prepared and if the theory hadn’t been so … so tight. I could see all these big names in the field, sat right there in the front row, nodding their heads and actually paying attention. And then after the big presentation by the man himself, our Glorious Leader, the auditorium pretty much erupted! It was less a Q and A and more like thirty minutes of fan worship. At the conference dinner that night I felt, well I know it’s a cliché, but I felt on top of the world. And then … huh … and then, yeah, it all went tits up, pear-shaped, whatever.”
Go on, please.
“Sure. Well, we’d had a fair bit to drink, I’ll admit to that. And we were all a bit overwhelmed, I think, Rich included. Bu then at some point, somehow, it was just me and him walking down the hotel corridor, almost arm-in-arm and I did feel that we were close, that we had become more like, ok, maybe not peers per se, but colleagues, sure. That is until we reached my room and suddenly, I was being pressed up against the door and … and …
Please take your time.
“Right, I’m good, thanks. So, well, next thing I knew, his hands were all over me, trying to get under my shirt, down my ... I distinctly remember saying “No!” not once, but, I don’t know, two or three times, louder each time and then I pushed him away as forcefully as I could. And I also remember him stepping back towards me as if he wasn’t going to take that for an answer and I did that thing … that thing that I was always a bit dismissive about, I’m now ashamed to say, when I read the accounts of other victims, about how they just froze. Which is what I did, right there, against the wall outside my hotel room, but then, for some reason, I don’t know, the look on his face changed and then without a word he just turned and walked away.”
So, he physically abused you.
“That’s right. And I know, I know – a tale as old as … whatever. Like I said, I’d heard of this sort of thing, of course, I mean, who hadn’t? We’ve all read the newspaper stories, about professors being dismissed … well, more often, about their victims being vilified and hounded and put through the grinder because the university didn’t want to lose one of its ‘stars’. And I’d always wondered what I’d do if I found myself in that situation: report it or let it go as just one of those embarrassing episodes, lubricated by too much wine and accolades?”
So what did you do?
“You know what I did! You’ve read the file, right? OK, you want details. Here we go then: after I’d showered and got my hands to stop shaking, I sent an email to HR setting out exactly what had happened. Then the next morning I went down to breakfast as usual because, really, I didn’t have any reason to feel embarrassed or ashamed, right? So, I filled up on the buffet and smiled back at the nods and waves from the other conference participants. It turned out that our esteemed Professor had sent word that he was busy with work-related matters and while the rest of us sat shoulder to shoulder in the airport shuttle, he took a taxi. Still, on the plane, he was, as they say, the consummate professional, complimenting us all again on our talks and posters and sketching the outline of the paper we would submit as a team. I knew the convention was that he would be ‘first author’ as team leader and I accepted that, of course, but I did expect to be listed second, with the appropriate acknowledgement of what I’d done.”
And that didn’t happen.
“Ha! No, not exactly … Looking back, I can’t believe I was so naïve. A couple of days after we returned, I got an email from HR requesting that I attend a meeting to discuss the ‘incident’. And I have to say, the HR manager played it by the book, listening sympathetically, nodding her head at all the appropriate moments, but I was told that it would be best for all concerned if I didn’t attend any team meetings while the investigation was on-going, or even go to the departmental seminars. In fact, they preferred I didn’t have any contact with anyone in the department.
And then, after a few weeks, they scheduled another meeting and ‘encouraged’ me to have my union rep there. I should’ve known, I really should, but … it wasn’t until I saw the look on the HR woman’s face that I began to realise how this would go. Professor Taylor of course had denied everything and since there were no witnesses, it all came down to my word against his. And you’d think that these days, after everything that’s happened, mine would carry more weight. But no, it didn’t, not when put in the scales against his ‘value’ to the university. I was told that he had offered to apologise for any ‘inadvertent actions on his part’ that I may have ‘misinterpreted’ but that was as far as it went. At least as far as his culpability was concerned. It was then I realised why they’d asked for my union rep to join us.”
Please continue.
“The university felt that given the nature of the allegations, it would be ‘inadvisable’ for me to remain on the team. Of course, an alternative position would be sought for me to be ‘redeployed’ into but I knew, and they knew, that given my background and the specialist nature of my research, the likelihood of their coming up with anything appropriate was about as close to zero as you could get. Even now, talking about it here, now, well, I have a hard time describing how I felt. My rep, bless her, was outraged on my behalf but Rich was the Big Name, of course, even more so now in the university’s eyes after that conference and all the excitement it generated. And me, well, I was just another in a long, long line of those who had accused some senior professor or other of inappropriate behaviour. And the university knew how to deal with the likes of us.
So, the short story is that thanks to that union rep I did at least get a decent ‘exit package’ with a significant pay-off. Of course, I had to sign a Non-Disclosure-Agreement but it was when I saw the ‘agreed reference’ that I knew my career was effectively over, or at least, the one I thought had been laid out in front of me just a few weeks before. There was nothing in the letter that I could really object to, no damning with faint praise, nothing like that, but it was definitely not the sort of reference that would catapult me into a top research job.”
What about the discovery itself?
“Oh, while all this was going on, the paper was being written up with Pete acting as a kind of go-between, sending me drafts and passing on my comments and so on. All above board and very professional and my name was right there with the rest of the team but there was no real acknowledgement of my role. Even then, I still thought that what I’d done would get due recognition, some way or other. But even before the paper was published, while it was still being refereed at one of the top journals in the field, Rich started giving interviews about ‘his’ theory.”
His theory?
“Yeah. The first few didn’t go into much detail but then he appeared on one of those YouTube channels and went on about how he had used Search and Discover to scope out previously unexplored regions of theory-space and … well, basically, he just appropriated everything I’d done and I mean, everything, the lot. And it got even worse, because not long after that, he was given the ‘Breakthrough Award in Fundamental Physics’ which is, like, such a huge deal because it not only comes with a massive chunk of money but basically sets the winner up for a future Nobel. His acceptance speech at the award ceremony was, of course, erudite and insightful and even quite witty in places but it contained no mention whatsoever of me or my contribution. Not a word. Nothing.”
You must’ve been quite angry.
“Angry?! Can you imagine how I felt? Can you?! I wasn’t just angry, I was absolutely fucking enraged! My first thought, right away, was to spew out a barrage of posts across every platform on social media I could get access to but then I calmed down a bit and realised how futile that would be. And it wasn’t hard to imagine the reaction that would rain down. What the trolls would do, the pile-ons, the level of hate …”
So, what did you do?
“Huh, nothing … for a long while. I mean, I was pretty depressed for the rest of that year, sat at home in my sweats, living off the university pay-out, binge-watching a bunch of stuff on tv. And it was while I was ploughing through one of those series, one about the American ‘Old West’, that I had an idea. Honestly, it’s not like I’d been secretly plotting my revenge all that time, at least not consciously, but when I saw this thing about the Californian gold rush, well, the notion that perhaps I could get my own back just bubbled up to the surface of my mind. And look, I’m not talking bloody vengeance here, nothing like that … no, just something that I felt would maybe balance things out a little and restore some sense of self-worth.
And at least it got me off my arse. So, I went back into the physics preprint archive and I started digging down into it. I mean, there’s just so much stuff on there, and lots of it never ends up appearing anywhere else, or at least not in any decent journal. And that is where I found this short paper from years ago, by a couple of authors I’d never heard of, tucked away in a little section on obscure forms of ‘quantum statistics’, with barely any downloads registered.”
What did that have to do with how Professor Taylor treated you?
“I’m getting to that. So, ok, the collective behaviour of axions, which Rich had staked his reputation on as being components of dark matter, well that had all become a bit of a ‘hot’ topic by then, because of my discovery … and I knew that Rich would be really keen to push things even further. And also, knowing him, I had a pretty strong feeling that he would be anxious about not falling prey to ‘Nobelitis’, which is like this condition where people who win a really major award supposedly become desperate to find the next Big Thing, and before you know it, they’re off spouting about all kinds of weird stuff and eventually, if they’re not careful they become a complete laughing-stock. Or worse, a university administrator! Sorry, academic joke there … probably inappropriate.”
Yes. Please do continue.
“Right, anyway, Richy boy hadn’t won the big prize yet, of course, because the Nobel Committee never gives it to a theoretical advance until it’s been definitely confirmed. But good results were already starting to come through from experimental teams all over the world and basically, everyone was just waiting, either for some magic number of observations to be reached or for one biggie, like those eclipse measurements of Eddington’s that confirmed Einstein’s relativity theory. And turned him into a global icon. Which is what our good Prof really, really wanted … Yeah, anyway, as a result of all that, the phrase ‘shoe-in’ was beginning to get bandied about. So … I reckoned he might just be tempted by another radical new approach to a problem, if it were packaged in the right way and looked attractive enough. This paper I’d come across in the archive really didn’t seem all that good as it stood but I was sure I could add enough theoretical ‘bling’ to lure him in and… Are you sure you really want all the details on this?”
Yes. You are being very helpful.
“Well, ok, fine then, here we go … so the core idea was that axions might obey some sort of non-standard quantum statistics that are different from the two kinds that we know about. There’s one form that describes how electrons and the like behave collectively and which explains the Periodic Table of Elements and why solid things are, well, solid. And then there’s the other kind which covers photons and gluons and such particles, which carry the forces. But it turns out that there’s also an infinite number of other theoretical possibilities out there and back in the day, one of these possible kinds of statistics was applied to the quarks in the nucleus and even though the theory was quickly replaced, it kind of opened up a whole new region of theory space. So, what this obscure little paper I’d found tried to do was apply the same non-standard statistics to dark matter axions. But I felt it needed something extra, something to give the theory a boost and really make it a contender. And I thought that with a little work, I could provide that. Ummm …. could we stop for a bit? A cup of tea would be nice.”
Of course.
“Right, where were we? So, as part of the exit package, I was able to retain access to Search and Discover, to keep my hand in, research-wise, at least for a little while longer. And so, for the first time in about a year, I clipped the headset on and went back in. It was actually quite a useful exercise, first locating that theory outlined in the archive paper and then looking over the various possible lines of development leading away from it. I mean, I was thinking about physics again and some of the feeling I used to have, back before … everything, well, it started to come back to me. But then I remembered what the name of this particular game was and focussed on one of the more plausible theoretical possibilities that could be reached from where I started. It was pretty and suggestive, if you know what I mean … And when I began drafting the paper, I was careful to highlight those aspects, dropping just enough hints to lead the reader along the way I wanted them – ok, him – to go. And to suggest there was something there, just glimpsed perhaps, but something that held the promise of an important result. Maybe even ground-breaking.”
How did you let Professor Taylor – ‘Rich’ – know about it?
“I’m a big fan of the ‘belt and braces’ way of doing things so as well as uploading my draft to the preprint archive, I decided to be a bit more direct. I knew that Pete had landed a really good position at one of the big U.S. institutions, riding on the coattails in time-honoured fashion, so I emailed him, asking if there was anything else going in his department, even some junior post, or if he knew of anything somewhere else. I didn’t want to seem too desperate but I did want to give the impression that I was ready to get back in the game and also that I might be able to bring something interesting to the table, if I only had the research support to pursue it further. That definitely piqued his interest because he emailed me back the same day and all his ‘Oh, it’s so good to hear from you’ and ‘I’ve been thinking of you, wondering how you were …’ – yeah, not enough to actually get in touch, mate – all that was just the obligatory fluff packed round his burning desire to know more about what I’d come across. Now I knew that everything I told him would be fed back, more or less verbatim, to Rich, so I gave just enough detail for anyone who knew the field to be able to home in on the little patch of theory space I’d staked out and follow the trails I’d so carefully laid down.”
Trails?
“Yeah, you see, that episode of the ‘Old West’ show I’d watched, the one about the gold rush, it had this historian on it explaining how disreputable miners would sometimes ‘salt’ their claims. Like, some of them would carefully embed the walls and ceiling of some old worked-out mine with gold flakes, while others would drink a load of bichloride of gold, right, seriously – they used to take it as a kidney medicine back then – and then they’d literally piss liquid gold into the crevices … all so they could sell the mine off as a profitable opportunity to some unsuspecting rube. And having salted my own little ‘mine’ in theory space, all I had to do was sit back and wait for Professor Superstar to take the bait.”
And did he?
“Well, things got off to a good start when I heard him being interviewed again on one of the physics podcasts. Of course, he was asked about his plans for future research, and of course, he just couldn’t help himself, because there it was, ‘my’ idea about developing non-standard statistics for axion behaviour. It wasn’t fully spelled out, of course, because, well, I knew, or thought I knew, that actually there was really nothing there to spell out, but there were enough suggestive comments to get the interviewer all fired up and make Rich promise to come back again once he’d worked out the details and written up what was sure to be another ground-breaking paper. I’m not kidding, I all but went ‘Mwah ha ha ha’ – you know, the classic chortle of your stereotypical movie villain. No? Alright then …
Still, I have to be honest and admit I hadn’t really thought much beyond the vague hope that maybe he would publish something in one of the journals and then I’d write a devastating take-down letter to the editor and he’d have to retract, to his eternal shame and humiliation or something like that. Or at least, that he’d be asked to follow up on what he’d said in the interview but of course he couldn’t and he’d have to admit that he had nothing … to his eternal shame and humiliation blah blah blah. I know, I know, it all sounds really petty and kinda pathetic, especially now, after everything that happened.”
Assume that we don’t know.
“Really? Ok. It was Pete who told me. Apparently, Rich’s colleagues had started to become worried when he failed to show up at his weekly graduate seminar. At first they thought he was just really busy, working out the fine details and all that. But eventually someone ventured into his office and they found him there, still strapped in to the Search and Discover interface. The fail-safes had been triggered so he’d been dumped out by the AI but even so, I heard he was just babbling and his eyes were rolling all over the place and, well, he was clearly in a bad way.”
So the paramedics said, more or less.
“Something about ‘alien maths’, or so Pete wrote in his email to me. He didn’t mean really alien maths, ‘cos that would be mad, right? But he said the maths was unlike anything they’d seen before, like way beyond. The bottom line was, they couldn’t make sense of it and so they figured the pressure had just got to Rich and sent him over the edge. And I probably shouldn’t have been told this but apparently, he was given indefinite sick leave although, again according to Pete, the feeling around the department was that he might never come back, or at least, if he did, he most likely wouldn’t be the same.”
How do you feel about that?
“Yeah, no, even after everything, seriously, that really wasn’t what I had intended to happen. And given his reaction, how severe it was, well, I felt I had no choice but to go back in myself to check, if only to reassure myself that this was some kind of mental breakdown, maybe from the guilt and not because of what I’d done ... Anyway, I went along the trail I’d laid down for him to track and then I followed where he’d headed in the direction that my theoretical ‘salt’ pointed towards. And there ‘it’ was, way off in theory space, far from any known theories, even the most ‘out there’. I’d had some idea of what it might be like when I read that paper but, honestly, this, in the flesh, so to speak, well, this was so different from anything I’d come across before. I mean, it was beautiful, really beautiful, but more than that, it was awesome, in the old meaning of the word. Even without digging into it, I could sense that it was deep, y’know, I mean, seriously rich in terms of its structure, the implications, all of that …”
Rich?
“Ha! I know, right? Sorry, shouldn’t laugh, or whatever … What I mean is, not only was it awesome and beautiful and all that, but it was also beguiling, that’s the only way I can express it. It drew me, it really did, like it was pulling me towards it. But at the same time, I could also tell, even without getting too close, without properly exploring it, that it was ‘off’ somehow. I mean ‘off’ mathematically speaking, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. Not just ‘non-standard’, but weirder than that, so, yeah, I got what was meant about it being ‘alien’ …
Anyway, by this time there were these alarm bells ringing in my head, you know, like that ‘a-roogah’ noise they have on submarines. You know, red alert, danger … whatever. Rich must’ve heard them as well. But then I realised that he and I really were different. Sure, I was tempted, I admit, but maybe I’m just not driven enough, not ambitious enough, or I just don’t have that attitude of his, you know, where he feels he can just reach out and take whatever attracts him. So, I pulled out, ripped off the headset and shut down the AI interface. I literally backed away from the computer. But you know what was weird, well, even more weird? When I went back to that old paper I’d come across in the archive, the one I used as the basis for my spot of theoretical salting, I couldn’t track down the authors at all. I even contacted the institute they supposedly worked at, but the departmental secretary told me she’d never heard of them and didn’t respond to my follow-up messages.”
There was no trace of them?
“None. And so, now I’m wondering, and I guess you’re wondering too, right? Otherwise, what are you doing, interviewing me? Was what I thought of as just some old bit of theory-junk that I could use, that I had stumbled across at random, or so it seemed, was it … was it actually some kind of decoy itself, designed to lead me, Rich, us, to something else, something much, much bigger? But then why? To what end? To take us where no physicist had gone before?! I mean, maybe it’s some kind of test, set by actual aliens, right? People always said that maths would be the universal means of communication, but no-one ever figured that the maths ‘they’ use might be so utterly different. Maybe only those with a certain kind of higher understanding can grasp it. But if the likes of Rich couldn’t, what hope is there for the rest of us? Or maybe there’s some darker purpose behind it all … Maybe this weird maths will spread and corrupt everything in theory-space so we’ll be blocked from making any new advances. And maybe it’s not aliens after all, maybe it’s the AI behind Search and Discover, maybe the rise of the robots starts here! Ha! Honestly, I don’t know, I really don’t know …”
Would you like some more tea?
“What? No! No, thank you. What I do know is that one of the top minds in physics is now basically hospitalised and I played a role in that. I mean, I didn’t mean for it to happen and the more I think about it, the more I feel like I was manipulated, somehow … Anyway, whatever, I think that whole region of theory space should be boarded up with a ‘Danger – Do Not Enter’ sign. Or at least, something needs to be done before whatever happened to Rich happens to someone else. But I guess that’s why you’re here, interviewing me like this, right? … So, what security agency did you say you were from again?”
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