Becquerel’s Plate Volume Two

About the Book

Taking up where Becquerel’s Plate Vol. I left off , this 2nd volume in Judith Lauter’s history of her life in science (the fi fth in her overall autobiographical series) joins the story in January 1980, just after she had received her PhD from the Central Institute for the Deaf Research Department at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). As she says in the fi rst pages of this volume: “With my years of coursework behind me, I was on the verge of a broad plain with wide horizons. I had my compass and my bearings. I was ready. I found out very quickly that there was still much to learn, but during this stage, I was learning to be an ‘educated listener,’ an audience not to any human teacher, but to the universe, at least the part of it I wanted to study. I used to tell students with me in the laboratory, whether we were watching speech spectrograms scroll out across a screen, or evoked potentials slowly building their beautifully unique waveforms, that those patterns were the universe talking to us in a ‘still, small voice.’ To hear what it said, we had to be patient and attentive, trusting that an open mind is a creative mind. We could use our knowledge to be prepared, to frame the questions and set up the experiment the best way we knew, but we also had to have the humility to know that we could not totally predict the outcome, what the universe would say in response, what its whispered answers might be. As Robert Frost says, ‘We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle, and knows.’ I was coming to realize that the job of a scientist was to listen for whatever the Secret might say next. And over those next fi ve years at CID, I went on listening as hard as I could.”

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