Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (16 page)

Jeremy doesn’t appreciate numbers.

I do. Some numbers are intriguing. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 … for instance. See where that goes? It continues on forever. By adding the last two terms together, you get the next one. It’s called the Fibonacci series, and if that isn’t enough excitement for you, then you divide the last term by the one right before it and as the numbers get larger, you get a closer and closer approximation to something called Phi. Try it. 5 divided by 3 is 1.667. 8 divided by 5 is 1.600. 13 divided by 8
is 1.625. And on and on it goes, until you have computed the ratio of the long side of the Parthenon to the short side of the same building. It’s not the way the Greeks did it. They thought of it as a ratio of the long piece of a five-pointed star’s side divided by the short piece, if you can catch the Greek drift. If you can’t, just draw a five-pointed star and start measuring the line segments, and you will quickly understand. It only matters because I am trying to make an argument here that I am not a dweeb. Jeremy is a dweeb. Numbers are as fun as groceries.

T
HERE IS
A
10,000th day in your life. It creeps up on you and nobody sends you a card. It happens about three months after your 27th birthday. Most people fail to take the day off. Too bad. I wasn’t about to go into the lab that day. I went to a nude beach near Santa Cruz. I put my blanket down on about 10 billion grains of sand and let a thousand waves wash over my toes while I watched eleven naked women play in the surf.

You missed your 10,000th day? Don’t worry. Maybe you can catch your 20,000th day. You will be fifty-four and about nine months old then. You have to figure it out from your own day of birth and take all the leap years into account. And don’t forget about this: on the 13th day of your 57th year, you will be 500,000 hours old. During those 500,000 hours, your heart will have beat about 2.25 billion times. You will have breathed in and out about 300 million times, which just happens to be the number of meters that a beam of light travels in one second, and also the number of 1992 U.S. dollars that Hoffmann-La
Roche paid Cetus Corporation for the patent rights to my PCR invention without bothering to even send me a card celebrating my 17,520th day, or make it 301 and send me the change. Screw Cetus and the Swiss! My father’s side of the family came from Flums. And Flums is still reluctantly under the Swiss flag. But Flums is on the Liechtenstein side. The Hoffmann’s live with their dark brown insect associates on the Basel side in that part of Switzerland that neither the Germans nor the French coveted enough to capture. A part of Switzerland, mind you, where they don’t even celebrate the Fourth of July.

Because the Earth is not a clock made in Switzerland, it doesn’t have any gears with a certain number of teeth, so it doesn’t turn exactly 365 times around on its polar axis every time it completes a full circle around the sun. We call its rotations “days” because of the sun coming up at the beginning of everyone of them, and we call revolutions around the sun “years” because that’s how long it takes and we have one birthday in each one, and Hoffmann-La Roche continues to fail to send me even a birthday card on mine. Never mind. What this business about the lack of teeth and cogs means is that years are not evenly divided into days. The number of days in a year is not a number like the number of eggs in a dozen. It is somewhere around 365.2425 … and some more, days per year, which believe it or not was actually figured out in 1582 without computers, or the Internet, by astronomers working for, of all people, the Church—Pope Gregory XIII, presiding.

What this means is that every four years, we have to add a day to the number of days we say are in a year to let the Earth
catch up with our count. That’s why we have leap year, and that would be all she wrote if 0.2425 … and some more, was equal to 0.2500, but it isn’t. So we don’t actually have leap years every four years. We have them almost every four years on the years that are evenly divisible by four—like 1996. But in those years, divisible evenly by four, that are also evenly divisible by one hundred, we don’t add an extra day to February and we don’t have a leap year. For example, 1900 was not a leap year, 1904 was. But it gets more complicated than that, and it gives you a little more respect for the guys who were counting days for the Pope in the sixteenth century—some 300 years, mind you, before the invention of the latex condom. If the year is evenly divisible by 400, like the year 2000 is going to be, we do have an extra day in February and a leap year. The only exception is years that are evenly divisible by 4000. That’s the rules. These years are numbered, of course, from the birth of Holy Jesus. Was that in AD 0 or would that have been AD 1? And if it were AD 0, would it have been a leap year? At least Jesus didn’t have any trouble remembering how old he was, plus or minus one, of course.

These rules are called the Gregorian calendar, and they have been helpful in organizing events in history. The work done, to establish them, was paid for by the Church, the purpose of which was to prevent Easter from ever happening on the Fourth of July.

All that being as it may well be, you can count the number of days you have seen, and I suggest you do. It’s hard for people who travel a lot, and especially for people like Story Musgrave, who spend a lot of time in orbit. But you can put a mark on a stone that you carry in your briefcase every midnight,
or tell your computer that whenever t = 00:00:00, then N = N + 1. You can know how many suns have come up while you have been alive. Every now and then it will be cause for taking the day off.

But on those days that you have to go to work, what can you do about the continual passage of time, and the fact that the morning mail delivered to your “in” basket always brings you some new variety of grief? Caught in the giant clockwork, you wish that it were Friday afternoon, at one minute to five, and everyone was tidying up their desk. Couldn’t you just live in that moment forever? John Kenneth Galbraith, in a book called
The Affluent Society
, written before the Age of CNN, suggested that the reason James Watt harnessed steam in 1765 was to allow us all, eventually, to live in that final 1 billion nanoseconds before five o’clock on Friday afternoon. “Ahhhh! Weekends,” he thought, as he strolled across a well-mown lawn in Scotland and realized that if the steam were condensed by a piece of metal in contact with the boiler, a steam engine would work so well that no one else would have to.

Perhaps I was more enthusiastic about this than either Watt or Galbraith, but in 1982 I discovered that the Industrial Revolution had truly arrived. I put a simple laboratory robot on my desk at Cetus and programmed it to relieve me of the scourge of passing days. On entering my office in the
A.M.
, I could activate a toggle switch on the robot’s base. It would elegantly swing its arm around, doing a little preliminary dance that I had choreographed for it. It was a lovely instrument. Just a rotating base with a single arm, ending in what they referred to prosaically in the handbook as the “gripper.” A graceful hand with two padded fingers. The hand would slide into my “In”
box and carefully grip the mail. It would slide out, just as gracefully, and holding itself perfectly balanced over the trash can, open the grippers. The grippers would then close delicately, and the arm would swing around and downward. It would pause, for a moment, to savor the occasion, then press the closed gripper onto the off-side of the toggle switch. The robot and I would have finished our day, living out the dream of the Industrial Revolution.

I have become lazier. Counting one’s days can be exhausting. This coming winter, I plan to retract my feelers from the whole process, temporarily, while I take a long nap. Bears do it, and not a single forest ranger complains. Next winter will be my fifty-fourth. Fifty-four is nine times six and six is two times three, and three to the second power is nine. That makes it a certainty. I’ll sleep next winter from December until the end of February, except for Superbowl Sunday—unless the cumulative score in the playoffs is evenly divisible by 400.

Jeremy may come up to Mendocino for Christmas and find me sleeping, instead of celebrating the 17.51411 millionth hour since the birth of Christ. When I get up in February, I will begin a correspondence with him by e-mail about which of us is a dweeb.

I
BEGAN TO
think about astrology in the mid-1960s after three strangers had correctly classified me as a Capricorn. The probability of that happening by chance is 1 out of 1,728.

The first was Emma, a ten-year-old neighbor in Atlanta, where I was a student at Georgia Tech. I was walking up the steps with my groceries when she proclaimed, “You’re a Capricorn, aren’t you?” I stopped in my tracks. How did she know? I asked her how a Capricorn acts.

She replied, “Like you.”

If Emma was just guessing, it was a good guess. There are twelve signs that your sun can be in when you are born. When people say that you are a Pisces or a Capricorn without being any more specific, they are saying that the sun was in that part of the sky called Pisces or Capricorn when you were born. So they have a one out of twelve chance of being right.

At your birth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and the rest of the planets are also in some particular part of the sky, but those things move around in their own pattern and only people who are more conversant with astrology than Emma would concern themselves with them. When Emma told me I was a Capricorn, I didn’t know anything about astrology.

When you look at all the planets and include the sun and moon, their relative positions define a shape at the moment of birth. That shape represents the Native, the person being charted, in an overall way. Several of the planets might be arrayed in a really striking pattern. Or they may not be. In mine, the planets are spread all around but there are these two ominous sets of three planets referred to as T-squares. In my first wife’s chart, there are three planets in a perfect equilateral triangle called a Grand Trine. T-squares predict that the Native will have a hell of a time getting his shit together and be late handing in manuscripts and may do a short time in jail or even worse. A Grand Trine means that the Native will be born with a silver spoon. She might be lazy, but she knows what she has and that’s exactly what she needs. That made sense to me from what I knew about us. When I did our daughter Louise’s chart, I found that she was a perfect blend of our charts. Louise had the shape of an Aquarian Kite. That’s like a Grand Trine mated to a T-square, with her Ascendant headed into her mother’s Aquarian sun sign. Out of phase with the kite, she shared a Capricorn sun with me. Totally weird, I thought.

I knew Louise would reflect us genetically—but astrologically?

The next time somebody came at me out of the blue with my sun sign was three years later in Berkeley. I was at a party talking to some woman and she stopped in mid-sentence. “You’re a Capricorn. I know it.”

How did she know?

She said it was the way I was waving my hands when I talked. And the way that I held onto the countertop when I was not waving them. I was also leaning forward, then backing off.

In terms of the number of people who had told me my sign, and the number of people who had been right, that was two for two. They both could have been guessing. It’s one in twelve. Two for two on a one in twelve is one in a hundred and forty-four.

Being a scientist, the important thing to me was the long odds. When something unusual happens, a scientist worth his thick horn-rimmed glasses and shoddy clothes gets moving. I went back to the astrology books, drew up a few more charts for my friends, and decided that in order to save myself a lot of calculation time and trips to the library, I would write a computer program to do that for me. That turned out to be difficult. Isaac Newton had written down the rules for how things move around each other due to gravity. It was fairly easy, knowing the starting points for two things like the Earth around the sun, to predict where the Earth would be a hundred or even a thousand years later. A computer program could easily do the math. But the problem with the solar system is that there is not just one planet. There are too many planets. Each of them is affected, not just by the sun, which it dutifully orbits, but by each of the other planets. The big ones like Jupiter and Saturn have the greatest effect, but even the little ones make their little perturbations every time they make a close encounter, and after a hundred years things get fairly complicated. Naval Observatory astronomers had been writing programs for years trying to simulate the movements of the planets and they were pretty accurate, but they were still working on it. There were reasons other than astrology for this work by the Navy. Things like navigation and satellites and trying to drop a missile into Red Square.

One night about a month after that party in Berkeley, I was
camping by the Navarro River in Mendocino County. People were walking all around from fire to fire and some guy stood outside of our circle listening to me tell a story. When I was done, he stepped into the light and announced that I was a Capricorn. He turned around, and I called to him.

“How do you know?”

He turned. “Because of the way you come on, really strong and then back off. You act like one.” He left haughtily, a swagger in his step, like a goddamned Scorpio.

Three for three of one in twelve—1 out of 1,728. That’s the probability of three consecutive people independently announcing your sign correctly.

I was convinced that it was not a matter of chance. Those people were observing my behavior and making a reasonable estimate of my sun sign. If people can really do that from a little bit of information, then astrology is worth investigating.

One little experiment I did was by accident. I had my chart done by a shop in La Jolla that sent your birth date, time, and place, to a company in L.A. that used a computer to do the calculations and then to select a number of paragraphs about you from a huge number that they had about everybody. It was what you would call a computerized expert system. Most of the things that the fifty-page document said about me were correct. But some of them were entirely wrong. It turned out that the ones that were wrong were derived from my rising sign.