Some things are harder than I expect them to be. Building a boat doesn't seem that difficult, initially. Yes, you've got to know something about working wood (or metal or fiberglass or whatever, but wood in my case) and you've got to understand the basic engineering. But I've got a good set of tools, and I've got a good grasp on the working principles, and for good measure I've just gone all the way through a fairly serious text on hull design and checked some of the math. There are some details about hull speed and keel design that are still a mystery to me, but I'm not trying to win the Americas Cup here, I just want something that is reliable and reasonably easy to handle.

Nonetheless, I'm uncertain. I'm surrounded by ribs and planks, and I think I know how they are going to fit together, but there is still some doubt. When it's all put together will it be what it needs to be? Am I sane to trust my life to something I've made like this?

Perhaps it's a neurosis of sorts. It's sinking in that I haven't built anything complicated since the Frieburg Experiments. Not because I've been avoiding it. Circumstances just happened that I stopped needing the student fellowship where I worked in the machine shop, and then my studies took up time that I would have devoted to projects like this. But I do have to admit I take the whole thing a bit personally, and it colors the way I'm working now. Of course, building a virus and building a boat are two very different propositions. People have been building boats for thousands of years, but still...

All the professors who we worked with in the shop at first assumed it was a failed experiment. They all saw their lives flash before their eyes vicariously. Imagine Frieburg spending that immense amount of money, devoting years of his life to putting together the machine that will do the atomically perfect copy, filing the grant proposals, publishing the papers. Then he turns the thing on and... it ... doesn't ... work. And not a simple kind of not working like it's not plugged in, or some part blows up and has to be replaced. It does what it does, and out comes a plausible looking data set for all the atom positions, then later out comes a plausible looking virus specimen. And it's not viable. Somewhere in all those years of work is an error. When you're running a milling machine precision cutting molybdenum for some Ph D's heavy particle detector this is not a distant story that fills you with mild amusement. It doesn't matter if it happened on the other side of the world, in a totally different field of research. When a story like that makes the newspapers everybody who does Big Science spends the next few weeks with a little voice in the head saying "Oh Shit, are we next?"

So that's one kind of neurosis. Here I am wondering if I'm going to put this thing together, drop it into the water and watch it sink like a stone. Never mind that the wood itself will float no matter how badly I mangle it. Never mind that it's perfectly wonderful wood. Even the fact that it's so easy to work with sometimes seems like a bad sign, because it adds to the mystery.

The wood, after all, comes from Alex. When I was talking to him about this project he agreed to select the wood for me. "Select" being one of those perfectly normal words that he manages to impart an odd significance to. With Alex, you can be talking about something perfectly sane one minute, and next thing you know he's saying something that (although it appears superficially to be on the same topic) is completely incomprehensible. The idea of Selecting Wood was just such a trigger for him. So now he has supplied me with this wood that he has "carefully selected for it's virtues" which is, in fact, of very good quality, but which he has made many claims for that I can't even properly recite, let alone actually understand.

And, of course, all the neurosis is bound up together. If I'm made nervous by some friendly lunatic giving me mysterious wood, I'm even more nervous in the context of the virus experiment. There was a period of relative safety in the Twentieth Century, when you could pretty much recognize who was saying something meaningful and who was a hopeless crank. The problem with Frieburg was that he threw the door wide open. Sure, one failed experiment was probably an error of some sort. But then he did it again. And a third time. And his colleagues did the X-ray diffraction tests, and then other people got into the game. Once the dust had settled a little, and it had become pretty obvious that the property of being alive depended on something other that what atoms you were made of and what order they were put together in (and nobody in the scientific community had any idea what that something might be) the boundary between legitimate scientific inquiry and total booga-booga mystical nonsense became kind of blurry.

So when a friend of mine utters just such booga-booga talk, while at the same time seeming to be improbably successful in a wide variety of endeavors I begin to wonder whether he knows something I don't.

We physicists are an arrogant bunch, who believe we can explain everything. Note I still consider myself a physicist even though I dropped out of graduate school and am sitting here on a pile of wood shavings instead of working on a dissertation. It's all about radical reductionism. We like to assume that all of chemistry can be explained using physics (which we've actually been having pretty good luck with). Then we want to say biology is chemistry, and sociology is just biology and statistics. And all the soft sciences like economics and meteorology and political science and divination and ethics and art history are somehow going to be just combinations of biology and physics and information theory, even if we don't know exactly how yet. Every century or so, we try to declare the job finished. With Newton's mechanics, then again with electrodynamics, then with relativity, then quantum field theory. There's always someone who's willing to stand up and say now that we've done this everything else is just detail work. This thing we've just figured out is THE fundamental result. And then we all smirk around and pat ourselves on the back for a few decades until something else happens to knock everything back down again.

When I was in undergraduate school, it was fashionable to make fun of the Druids. At the time the International Druidic Agricultural Society was going through one of the periodic fad cycles where people who didn't grow plants for a living actually listened to what they said. Those of us in the physical sciences considered the whole thing sort of loopy. Of course they have a lot of good ecological data that isn't available anywhere else, and if you're in the business you have to take them seriously about certain technical subjects, but all the religious and philosophical stuff they layer on top of it get a lot of abuse. We generally believed that there were a few crazy people in the organization who actually believed in all the ritual and everybody else just went along with it because what the Hell else are you going to do on the Solstice days and besides it's probably a better way to meet chicks than going to another conference on crop rotation strategies. It didn't help that one of those years the Festival of the Return of the Light got held up in the Scottish highlands (you know, where all the sheep are). With material like that how could a comedian resist?

That was less than ten years ago, and now some of those people who were telling the jokes are analyzing tracts on the genesis of life force, or standing around with field detectors at the blessing of the wheat, hoping to get a Ph.D. thesis out of it.

Anyway, I should probably stop scribbling and get back to work. The glue should be set by now. After all the complaining is finished, I guess I'm still doing this. I don't know a thing about how any of it works, but I'll set out on the boundless ocean anyway because of some totally unjustified trust in the fates. But why not? it's a tradition. People have been doing it for thousands of years.