| Of Jetpacks and Monkey Telekinesis
Nights at the Philosophical Society of Washington
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Fifteen minutes late to a 60-minute lecture on nuclear fusion, David Anspach bangs into a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Washington through a side door, with what looks like the entire Sunday New York Times spilling out of his arms. Panting as he finds a seat, clutching the newspapers, he leans over, scrunches his face, and whispers, “How much did I miss?”
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He’d shaved his head since the last society meeting two weeks earlier, and suddenly looks older than 45. But unlike that meeting—which he also arrived 15 minutes late to, again with piles of newspapers—Anspach isn’t sweating through his polo this time.
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I tell Anspach he missed very little. He listens to the rest of the lecture (about an international fusion research project) calmly for him, only coughing occasionally. But as the lecture wraps up, he leans in and asks again, “How much did I miss?”
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His urgency is understandable. A heavyset, bespectacled, civilian civil engineer at Andrews Air Force base, Anspach wants science to provide solutions for crises, and he believes nuclear power “has a lot of hope for solving some of our energy problems.” And he’s found the right place, the society, to search out solutions. It sponsors lectures every two weeks on boundary-pushing topics like “The Nuerosurgical Management of Pain,” “The Promise of Biotechnology,” and “Superconductivity: Who Cares?” But society members do care. Its meetings are possibly the last place on earth where Sputnik still hurts: Virtually every guest lecturer cites losing out to the Soviets in 1957 as a formative experience, and society members nod along sometimes in the audience.
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Told again he missed very little, Anspach joins in applauding for the speaker, slapping one palm on his thigh, his other hand still full of newspapers. But he’s not placated. In the Q&A session that follows the applause, his hand shoots up first in the room of 70 people. He actually waves it. Anspach says he has attended society meetings regularly for five or six years, though the society president, when asked, has no idea who he is or anything about him. Nor do other members. But despite being unknown, Anspach has a talent for getting called upon. Or else his desperation shines through. Amid all the raised hands, the president points and nods at him.
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Now, this was worrisome territory for Anspach. Eagerness for nuclear power had got him in trouble before. In a February 2006 meeting, he’d asked the former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about “cold” nuclear fusion—fusion at room temperature. That in itself wasn’t surprising. Though considered thermodynamically impossible, cold nuclear fusion has a cult following, mostly among people interested in the Area-51 side of “science.” The thrust of Anspach’s rambling question was that cold fusion is not only possible but probably exists, and that the dearth of power plants running on cheap, clean nuclear power proved conspiratorial things. This left the former NRC head—a man who’d simultaneously earned a PhD in physics from Stanford and a law degree from Harvard—so incredulous he could only stare.
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Anspach again asked about cold nuclear fusion 14 months later, interrogating the chief of a research division in the Department of Defense. After that question—“Are you doing any work on cold nuclear fusion?”—a boom of silence fell in the yellow-marbled hall where the society meets. The defense chief dismissed the question civilly but curtly. (“No.”) But none of this apparently deterred Anspach. He had another question for another agency executive about another nuclear power project.
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“Do you know anything,” Anspach projected from the fifth row, “About Bussard, boron-drive fusion? Does this have any promise?”
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It was a real question. The guest speaker considered it before shaking his head. “I’m not competent to speak on that,” he admitted.
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As other hands shot up, David Anspach, on who’d been on the verge of standing, sunk back in his chair. He hugged his arm around his newspapers and regrouped.
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Meanwhile, questions continued. Most people in the room were scientists at government agencies and local firms, many retired. They had been absorbed in the lecture, and they asked for flow charts about the management structure of the international fusion project and for gossip about negotiating with the Japanese and Russians. By every logical gauge—common interests, stinginess, style of dress, willingness to sacrifice a Friday night to hear about nuclear fusion—Anspach should have fit in.
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He doesn’t. The Washington Philosophical Society, surely the oddest collection of “philosophers” in the city, lacks a place for one of its own. And as the night continued—for the Q&A is hardly the end of a Friday night for society members—it became more and more clear why.
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To understand the society, it helps to know its name is a misnomer. Founded on April Fool’s Day as The Saturday Club in 1871, it soon changed its name to the Philosophical Society—which, as Anspach says, “makes you think they’d talk about Immanuel Kant and Socrates.” And the society does tackle speculative topics at times, like jetpacks and monkey telekinesis. But it normally restricts discussions to measurable scientific phenomena.
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Given its pedigree—it’s the oldest scientific club in Washington and was founded by Joseph Henry, a physicist who would have won a Nobel Prize had the prizes existed then (he settled for a statue near the Smithsonian’s Castle Building)—there’s supposed to be a certain decorum and protocol to meetings. It doesn’t always happen. President Ruth McDiarmid, a kidney and diabetes researcher at the N.I.H., opens each meeting with introductory remarks and actually wields a gavel. Despite your initial guess, she is in fact tall enough to see over the lectern, though not the lectern plus a large remote control that blocks all but her puffy hair from view. When something haphazard happens—when she can’t figure out how to shut off a laser pointer, for instance—she puts one or both palms on her cheeks in a parody of despair, and smiles elfishly between her fingers. Other gaffes, such as when she called the 2,222nd meeting in the society’s history the 2,223rd meeting, escape unnoticed.
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By her, at least. After McDiarmid, a man with hints of Groucho Marx sans mustache reads the previous meeting’s minutes. He notes when meetings start at 8:16 p.m., not the customary 8:15, and also the outside temperature, 12 Centigrade. He then recaps the previous lecture’s contents for the official minutes. Occasionally someone challenges the minutes, but this is usually a dry bit. A notable exception was the recap of a recent lecture that included more than you’d expect anyone to know about lady-killer Ben Franklin’s sex life.
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After the audience approves the minutes, McDiarmid takes over again. And either at this point or during her opening remarks, she makes a plea. The society meets a few blocks off Dupont Circle in an auditorium owned by the Cosmos Club. And each meeting, McDiarmid is forced to ask society members to reimburse the treasurer—who waves—the $10 the Cosmos charges for every unauthorized car parked in its lot.
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This is the first hint of something odd in the two groups’ relationship. The society meets in the Cosmos’s gilded auditorium, with light fixtures that look like torches, 20-foot ceilings, pillars of swirling yellow marble, and raised wallpaper like an old hotel’s. You’d host a ritzy charity event there. Yet here’s the president begging to help defray a chintzy $10 penalty (lately raised to $10.50). And McDiarmid insisted this article make a very philosophical distinction: that the society is in but not of the Cosmos. That is, despite the clubs’ co-existence in various buildings since 1878, joining the Cosmos does not entail philosophical society membership, and especially not vice versa. Go to the wrong (i.e., main) entrance of the swanky Club seeking the society, and the 200-pound tuxedoes will not even hold the door open, much less let you cut through to the adjacent auditorium for meetings. One man from Annapolis drove in for a recent meeting and, instead of being directed around the corner, just 100 feet to the side door, was told to leave. So he did, and missed the lecture.
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Still, it’s hard to blame the Cosmos for getting sniffy sometimes: Only about half the attendees at any meeting abide by the Club’s dress code. Most attendees don’t dress sloppily, though shower sandals and hooded sweatshirts aren’t uncommon. But many folks do dress like the civil engineers and economists they are, with clip-on cell phones, cardigans, and black jeans. Others dress up when perhaps they shouldn’t. A walrus-shaped man with a mustache (who films every meeting with a camcorder on a stick that resembles the thing audiologists look into your ears with) wore to the 2007 spring gala a navy blazer with a short-sleeved shirt underneath and a brass “Toastmasters” badge the size of a credit card.
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The Cosmos also charges rent, which explains McDiarmid’s plea for parking reimbursement. The society’s 150 members pay only $75 in yearly dues, and each Friday night lecture—what with rent, and the beer, cider, cheese, and crackers provided at the end—costs $690. That’s steep, but the society won’t charge admission. In fact, it strives to keep lectures open to people like David Anspach, who admits he wouldn’t come otherwise. He says, without laughing, “I’m a skinflint.”
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Where the lack of funds really hurts the society is speaker selection, since it can pay neither travel expenses nor an honorarium. A few blocks away, the flush Carnegie Institute of Science hosts a series of lectures with scientists from Harvard, Cal Tech, and the University of Chicago. In comparison, the Philosophical Society’s Washington-heavy lineup seems provincial. Still, elite government agencies and local universities ensure the society’s speakers are not lightweights. And (most) meetings, even when technical, can get feisty, especially during Q&A. The questions about cold nuclear fusion were nothing.
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One mischievous bearded man—who always sits in the back row, and who likes prove himself well read in professional management literature—challenges executives by asking non-questions that end with lines like, “The literature proves that the successful manager often doesn’t know the reason for his success.”
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That same bearded man, like a paunchy Freud, also once asked a linguist something like (and I’m condensing this question down to about a fifth of its original length), “Let’s say I’m a paranoid schizophrenic, and I’m bilingual. I speak one language in daily life, but I hallucinate in English. Could I deal with my hallucinations in a second language, if I did all my therapeutic work in the first language? What does linguistic theory have to say about that?”
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The speaker’s response was automatic. “Nothing.”
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Other amateur philosophers want to prove themselves smarter than the speaker. The Philosophical Society pulled a coup last May for their 136th anniversary gala by bringing in NASA-Goddard astronomer John Mather, then the reigning Nobel laureate in physics. Over 200 admirers turned out, forcing the society to shanghai chairs from the Cosmos Club, and Mather spoke about his 20-year quest to map the universe’s “cosmic microwave background radiation.” His work—which Stephen Hawking gushed over, calling it the most important discovery ever—proved the Big Bang did in fact bang.
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After lathering up the audience for an hour, Mather proved an irresistible target. He handled one supposed stumper, about ionized hydrogen and the transparency of the early universe, with as little mental strain as if asked the name of his third-grade teacher: It took a second, but just that. But the walrus-shaped man with the camcorder succeeded in pulling Mather’s pants down with a trick question about 12-billion-year-old photons that shoot off in opposite directions at the beginning of time.
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Mather was good natured enough to laugh, and McDiarmid called off the questions a minute later. At this, Mather, a gaunt man dressed in a tuxedo only inches too short for Lurch, looked relieved. He didn’t get far, however. While most society members drifted toward brie and Bud Light along the back wall, a dozen people—and this happens every meeting, with every speaker—flanked and surrounded Mather. Some pressed business cards into his hand. Others promised not to ask dumb questions, then proceeded to. One pocket-sized elderly woman in a red dress, whose nose looked pounded flat, sputtered, “I—how do we—what is this . . . dark matter that makes up—you said 70 percent of the universe?”
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“Dark energy,” Mather corrected, recalling a pie chart in his presentation.
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“I don’t even know enough to ask the question!” she said, laughing with despair.
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That happens commonly at the society. You simultaneously feel very bright (you’re talking with a Nobel Laureate about cosmology) and very stupid (you’re talking cosmology with a Nobel Laureate).
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The chance to hobnob with the likes of Mather, then stay for beer, proves the Philosophical Society of Washington’s name isn’t a total misnomer. Society, interactions among guests, make up much of its appeal.
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Strangely, that camaraderie also drives David Anspach away. After asking his nightly question, he usually flees—last to arrive, first to leave. When asked why he skips socializing and hardly seems to know other members, he says, “I’m really not geared toward interpersonal stuff. I’m a loner.”
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That may be true, but something deeper, more fundamental, also keeps Anspach apart.
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For whatever reason, Anspach laid down his newspapers on his chair and stayed late after the lecture on the international fusion project. As usual, eager amateurs crowded the speaker, Michael Roberts. As half-scientist, half-diplomat for most of his career, Roberts seemed comfortable with the intimate questioning, and it continued for some time. So for twenty minutes, waiting his turn, David Anspach skirted the crowd’s perimeter, never stepping up to a vacancy in the ring when someone left. He rocked side to side on his black Velcro shoes and sometimes took measured, highly repetitive paces toward the back of the yellow, well-lit auditorium, as if counting his steps.
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One by one, patrons peeled off until just Anspach, Roberts, and a pink-shirted man with a Bic-ed head remained. Anspach continued to hover, politely. But he grew increasingly antsy as the pink-shirted fellow asked stupid questions. The man knew the sun used nuclear fusion to generate its energy; but he seemed unable to grasp that the solar energy collected from solar panels on Earth was different from the type of nuclear energy also produced at, say, Three Mile Island. When he finally got this fact down, he began asking why scientists had never replicated nuclear fusion on earth. Roberts explained that he, Roberts, had just spent an hour explaining the ins and outs of a 20-year, multi-billion dollar project that did nothing but produce nuclear fusion.
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So what’s the problem?, pink-shirt asked.
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Anspach couldn’t take it. He burst out, “The big issue is getting more energy out of it than you put in.” Not sure he’d been heard, he repeated louder, asserting himself. “The big issue is getting more energy out of it than you put in.” Roberts, interrupted, seconded this point. A bulb went off in the pink-shirted man’s head. He thanked Roberts, and left to socialize, probably content he understood everything.
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Finally, Anspach had Roberts to himself. In his lecture, Roberts had compared the giant fusion reactor he’d spent twenty years trying to get built to an “artificial sun.” Anspach picked up the term and tore into a question: “So once they get this artificial sun working, how do they get the energy from the torodial field coil magnet devise outside to the …”
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At that point, a little stunned, I lost the quote. Somehow, the same man who’d asked in all seriousness, twice, about cold nuclear fusion was now discussing technical details of one of the great engineering projects ever devised. And watching Anspach ask questions one on one, he seemed more serious, more hungry to solve problems than other members of the society. I got the sense the full-fledged, paying society members were always playing around a little. They attended lectures to learn science, sure; but also to entertain themselves, to socialize, even to show off the questions they’d devised that week. Anspach wanted answers.
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And when he didn’t get them, he left.
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Minutes later, two people exited the Cosmos Club. One was a well-fed mustached man in a white bowtie, white gloves, a black tuxedo with tails, and polished shoes. Though he resembled in body shape the man with the garish Toastmaster’s badge, a row of ribbons and medals over his tuxedo pocket formed a dignified contrast. He exited from the Cosmos Club proper and crossed the parking lot.
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Exiting from the side door and the Philosophical Society meeting was David Anspach, who’d again plastered his chest with a mailbag’s worth of Washington Diplomat and other free newspapers, the kind he admitted he preferred to novels and magazines and available to any “skinflint” at Metro and bus stops.
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The two crossed paths near Massachusetts and Florida Aves. and followed the same path briefly before getting on different streets. Streets that, because set at a diagonal, grew more and more divergent with each block into the night. The well-attired figure wandered over to a fete at the Order of the Cincinnati building, where he was greeted warmly outside and ushered in.
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Anspach continued on, flat-footed and stepping heavy. He walked very slowly, veering a little on the sidewalk as if he might walk into something. When it was quiet, his shoes squeaked. At the Dupont Circle Metro stop on Q street, he made a pass of all the free newspaper stands, balancing his pile on his knee as he grabbed a few more.
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©SamKean
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