Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 25 The Ecole Normale Superieure

Rather than return to the US to get his PhD, Max took advantage of his mother’s heritage and his good French and obtained a fellowship at an applied physics lab within the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Laboratoire Pierre Aigrain. Alas, he found more Fucking Idiots. The French even had their own special way of saying it, a con fini. He applied the term without caution, particularly to the students who surrounded him. And they had a term for him, a crack, a term of admiration mixed with contempt. They were undecided whether he was also a polar, roughly equivalent to the American term nerd. When he was most insulting, consensus had it that he was a polar.

The girls from France’s elite classes, whether the academic elite at the ENS or the simply chic at the Sorbonne or the Université Paris Descartes, were tantalizing fauna for him, and for them, he was a disappointing toy. Generic Cheri or Sophi or Marie found him lacking, they told him, in philosophie at the bars and savoir-faire between the sheets, even after the education Vera had given him. That they may have been insulted by the fact that—as he told me later—“I could give a fuck in a flying baguette” about their vaunted local heroine status as normaliennes, he would have to guess. He thought the young men—generic Pierre, Philippe, Michel—were fops, with their scarves and berets, twenty-nine-inch waists, confidence in securing a future, no matter how mediocre their minds full of Marxist discourse, and the whatever-it-was with the girls that he so lacked. What he did like, in addition to the world-class assemblage of laser and condensed-matter physicists, was the food and the gambling. And there were some other things, too.

A Career-Defining Choice

If Max was good at one thing more than any other, it was problem selection, the art of knowing where to find gold in scientific research and its application.

It’s a conundrum, or at least it’s odd, that the world would need more trained scientists than there are worthy problems for them to solve. Example: when Prof. A strikes pay dirt, many others jump in immediately. Ms. B may have her tools trained on something else, just a few degrees off course of A, but they’re not yielding results, so she asks, “Can I make them work where A is working?” “Can I put my grad student B* on it and be an early mover?” Variations on questions like this come up all the time, and if the course correction is small and the cost of graduate students is low, B hops on A’s bandwagon. When Dr. C sees this, C* is thrown into the ring immediately. This is not objectively bad. It’s good to the extent that ideas that work draw the talent to advance them. It’s good in that A’s findings are tested right away, and if they’re flawed, exposed. It’s bad to the extent that ideas that are hard to explore get abandoned to fads. Max sensed earlier than most where the fads were going to be, and he achieved pioneering first results in several fields.

The history of twentieth-century biology is full of physicists, dating back to the 1920s and the emerging quantitative study of the effects of radiation on matter, living or not. Their work on the genetics of viruses and in discovering the molecular structure of DNA was pivotal. So, in the early 1990s it was not exactly news that physicists had discovered biology. But, there was a seismic shift underway because DNA, the centerpiece of moby, was being cracked open with ever better tools. Physicists had played a part in that, through instrument design, methods of data analysis, even at the bench, or as theorists, if there is such a thing as a theoretical biologist.

Richard Feynman, one of the two folkloric figures in modern physics history, famously lectured in 1959 on what is now called nanotechnology in a talk entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” or less enigmatically, “Tiny Machines.” In doing so he inspired generations of scientists and engineers to miniaturize everything under the sun, from motors to laboratories to books. Even before college, Max knew of that talk, as he’d seen clips of Feynman on TV, riveting the world with his simple hypothesis of the space shuttle Challenger’s demise. Feynman’s influence was fermenting slowly. In Paris, Max’s own ideas bloomed within him.