36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [12]

“I must of necessity break your heart.”

Meaning: I have lain here in my silence and I have fallen in love, as you, too, have fallen in love in my silence. It is symmetrical, absolument, in the abstract.

Meaning: Therefore, it is necessary to love Micah McSweeney.

Meaning: Therefore, it is impossible to love you. A tout à l’heure, devoted Cass. You have served the muses well, in your time.

For all these years, it had been impossible for Cass to think of Pascale, her starved-wolf eyes and the long coarse black hair that always held an intoxicating fragrance that he had thought of as the scent of ethereality itself, without a gasping contraction round the ventricles of his heart.

Lipkin must have miscalculated the length of his talk. It was nearing the end of the hour, and he obviously still had a lot more material to get through. He was powering through his PowerPoint at a maniacal clip.

“Oh dear, don’t tell me he’s going to throw in the Milgram experiment now, too? Lipkin, Lipkin, where will this end?” Lucinda was laughing deliciously in Cass’s ear.

Lipkin had clicked up onto the screen the famous picture of Adolf Eichmann in his bulletproof glass booth, the three Israeli judges, in their heavy black robes, sitting above him like buzzards. The top of the screen was labeled “Only following orders.”

And, sure enough, remarkable Lucinda had been right that Lipkin was using Eichmann as a segue into the famous Milgram experiment about following orders that had been conducted at Yale in 1961, a few weeks after the Nazi SS-man, who had been hiding out for ten years in balmy Argentina, was kidnapped by the agents of the Mossad and smuggled back to Jerusalem to go on trial for his enthusiasm and efficiency in loading Europe’s Jews into trains.

“I think,” Cass whispered back to Lucinda, “that Lipkin’s performing his own psychological torture on us.”

Cass was perhaps getting just a bit punch-drunk. This gibe fell a little flat and, if you thought about it, didn’t really make that much sense.

“It’s amazing, the sputum that passes for science in these parts,” Lucinda responded. This witticism was all the wittier given that Lipkin was a spitter, but it had made Cass’s grin go a little shaky around the corners, since it touched a sore spot. Did Lucinda know what his own specialty was? Was she aiming a gibe at him as well? Given her camaraderie, it was hard to believe, but his experience had been that those occupying the more technical reaches of the field could be pretty dismissive of people like him. Sebastian Held, for example, who was a Mandelbaum wannabe, was downright rude. Did the enchantress beside him have similar tendencies? There was nobody who went further in the direction of the technical than Lucinda Mandelbaum.

Her first book, Mathematical Foundations of Game Theory with Applications to the Behavioral Sciences, based on her doctoral dissertation, had formulated the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium, and she had been trailblazing ever since. After receiving her Ph.D. from Stanford, she had spent the next three years at Harvard’s dauntingly elite Society of Fellows, had garnered the Distinguished Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and the Troland Award in cognitive psychology from the National Academy of Sciences, awarded to an under-forty scientist.

By the time Lucinda went on the job market, post-Society, she received offers from every top department in the world that had an opening, which had been her goal. She had accepted Princeton’s offer. All the other job candidates in the field that year who got hired elsewhere were aware that they were employed only because Lucinda Mandelbaum hadn’t wanted their jobs. That was three years ago, and her productivity had not suffered since. Only last year, Newsweek had included her in their cover story of “Thirty-Five Scientists Under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields.” She had stared out of the pages, one of only six women, and the single representative of the “soft sciences” among the cosmologists, molecular biologists, and computer scientists. Of the thirty-five who had been featured, it had been, unsurprisingly, Lucinda’s striking face that had been reserved for the blowup photo on the first page of the article, her pale-gray eyes staring straight at the reader as if daring him to be the one to look away first, her measured mouth only hinting at her victory smile.

Game theory is the attempt to use mathematics to capture the relative rationality of different strategies in various situations, where how well a person fares isn’t just a matter of his own decisions but of the decisions of the other players. It’s a theory that analyzes behavior in terms of rational agency, meaning the theory assumes that each agent wants the biggest payoff, or utility, for himself. Each agent wants to balance a minimum of expected loss with a maximum of expected gain. Lucinda Mandelbaum is famous for having found applications for game theory everywhere, not just in economics and statesmanship and warfare, which are the most obvious places to look, but in areas that don’t seem to involve rational agency at all. All living things, down to the level of the so-called selfish gene, are following strategies that people like Lucinda are elucidating.