What’s Your Word?
Fellows’ Meeting
January 13, 2016

::: More photos

“There are tens of thousands of words in use in English,” I said to the collected Fellows, sitting round the table. “What’s your word?”

With that I opened the serious business of our first meeting of Fellows for the term. The goal is simple. We had four new Fellows sitting round the table. They need to be inducted into our little community of Fellows from last term. We need to do it quickly.

The plan is that we will each take a turn describing what we work on, what we care about academically and where we would like help. That is a speech that will last about ten minutes. To get things started and to show that it is quite easy, I go first. I quickly run through my projects from the last year: inductive inference, idealizations and reversible processes in thermodynamics and finally how "Einstein did not discover (fill in the blank)."

Now I had to choose just one word that captured it all. For me it was easy: induction. That is the project I eagerly return to after visits elsewhere. I want to know just how it is that science has its powerful evidential support. I’m quite dissatisfied with the current orthodoxy. I am not a Bayesian.

The room was ready and set up for the words. There are nine of us. So, a few minutes before we met, I had drawn nine large squares on the whiteboard. The table had been set with brightly colored clementines and flakey palmieres. It may be cold outside, but it will be fruity and buttery inside today.

The discussion moved round the table. This is an interesting exercise. As each Fellow speaks, unexpected connections are made across the table. These connections would likely have happened by chance in the hallway eventually. This little exercise just speeds up the process. That is good. The four months of term will pass very quickly.

The theme for the term emerged quite quickly. It will be life at its boundaries. Several Fellows share the interest. Where is the division between life and otherwise? How did life arise? What fringe forms are there? How do we define life? That last question was too much. It triggered a rapid exchange that jumped like a grasshopper around the room. Why should we define life at all? That was the challenge issued and accepted.

The whiteboard slowly filled with words. My word had been dreary and I immediately regretted my lack of creativity when Mike produced the winner:

POLKAROO

That, it turns out (for people like me bereft of Canadian culture) is the name of a well-known character in the Canadian children’s television series, the Polka Dot Door. The character is distinctive in saying only one word, polkaroo. It provided the entry to Mike’s real interest: imagination.

We had two hours set aside for the meeting. We had already spent over half an hour before on the essential rituals of welcome. The new Fellows stood before the Center world map and taken their colored pin and placed it. That is “pinning.”

Each posed for their instant photos, which they then stuck onto the Wall of Fame.

Then they were encouraged to decorate the glass boards outside their offices in a way that would reveal their true inner being, or perhaps just what they happened to be thinking about.

Shortly before the meeting started, I had found Matthias doing just that: a new decoration for a new term.

The discussion moved along briskly, with each Fellow taking his or her turn. We aim for a six o’clock halt and, somehow, as if guided by an invisible hand, the last Fellow finished her speech just a few minutes after.

We had already taken the decision of where we would go to eat. We wanted somewhere close. The temperature outside was in the teens “F” and there was snow on the ground. This was not a day to venture far afield. After a vote, the strong favorite was the Yuva Indian restaurant on nearby Craig Street. The papadams were great, but they were, once again, out of Lion Stout.

John D. Norton