A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a speaker dinner by a faculty member in the physics department. We were told to show up at 6:30 pm at Pi, a local gourmet pizza restaurant and cocktail bar that has gone from hip to hipster in the past couple of years. This is also where I meet with my students after our Monday seminar. But this time it was just me and a group of physicists.
When I showed up at 6:30 I didn't recognize anyone. I mentioned the name of the person who had invited me to the Maitre'De. She referred me to a corner of the restaurant occupied by a group of people who didn't look like physicists at all. As I introduced myself, I already regretted acccepting the invitation. When they introduced themselves and told me about their projects, I contemplated my escape. None of it made any sense to me. But I nodded with a smile on my lips and pretended that I understood.
Then the person who invited me showed up with the speaker. I felt even more intimidated. Here I was: a philosopher, in the midst of a group of physicists, who exceeded me on the coolness scale by a factor of at least 200. Sure, I just joined the Center for Neurodynamics and I do have a few empirical projects in the oven. But to be honest, I don't know all that much about black holes or elementary particles. I am sure the "cool math" these folks were referring to was ... well, very cool. But I didn't even know what kind of math was the cool kind of math.
We finally sat down at a table. I did my best to sound interesting when they were asking me about my empirical projects. They looked bored. I gathered that my projects were too macroscopic for their taste. They were laughing about some of the questions after the talk (not my questions, luckily). One person had asked the speaker to give a 60 sec NPR overview of the talk. Another had asked how her project related to consciousness and cognition. They were laughing because the speaker had been reporting on the physics of single neurons in in vitro experiments. "It's a bit like explaining a grand mal seizure on the basis of measurements of single-neuron firings", the speaker said and laughed. I laughed with her.
One of the brilliant physicists at the table had a five-week old baby at home, and a five-year old, so soon enough the topic of the conversation moved from cool math to the consistency of poop. I almost laughed at the thought that I felt more at home addressing the color of baby poop than speaking to the properties of elementary particles. How ironic that I had had to wait for the poop talk before I could make any significant contributions.
After the dinner at Pi we were going for dessert at Bissinger's. The crowd had narrowed down at that point. But a small group went into the exclusive establishment and ordered hand-crafted chocolates and chocolate-y drinks. The conversation slowly moved from poop and back to the fundamental questions. Now we were making fun of journalists. I still felt intimidated. Sure, I have had journalists interview me after talks but for me that was quite exceptional; for my physicist colleagues it was an everyday event. Even the waiter came up to us -- apparently he knew that most of the crowd consisted of physicists -- and asked about the speed of light. The people I was with were joking about neutrinos sliding through secret dimensions of the universe.
Then things changed. Almost every big question had been torn to pieces and put back together again and then, and only then, did the question of consciousness come up. I immediately felt at home. After elegantly juggling the topic for a little while, I had one of those big aha! moments. The speaker from Georgetown was asking me questions and during this process, this elite physicist was conveying to the table how philosophers intimidated her, how jealous she was that philosophers got to think about the big questions and actually had real answers to offer to the journalists. She even said that she would have gone into philosophy, if she had to do it all over.
I no longer felt intimidated. I felt proud. Even if I wasn't able to address the question of whether the infamous neutrinos had entered hidden dimensions of the universe and in that way had exceeded the speed of light, it was still quite okay to be a philosopher.
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