Once I spent the week at the house of a nuclear physicist. Dick had just gotten a new automatic drip coffee maker, so that week was testing week. Each morning, Dick took out the coffee, a gram balance, a graduated cylinder, and a small notebook. He weighed out the coffee and noted the weight. He then measured the water and noted the volume. He brewed it, poured out a cup, and made tasting notes.
Each morning of my stay, Dick repeated the process making small adjustments in the relative amounts of coffee and water as he honed in on the balance that produced the optimum taste to his palate.
I said he was a nuclear physicist. His actual specialty was health physics. His work was in attempting to identify at what levels were exposure to radiation a risk to health and safety.
Dick valued quality. He valued having a plan that led to quality results. He liked having events execute according to plan; and he didn’t like surprises. I want people like Dick managing air traffic control and nuclear power plants.
Identifying a safe level of radiation exposure is tricky. First, there is no control for zero exposure. We're routinely exposed to approximately 300 milliRems a year just from natural exposure at sea level, half again more at Denver's mile above sea level. Any exposure beyond zero raises our risk for cancer. It turns out, our greatest risk of death comes from being alive.
During the years after the US made two densely populated Japanese cities the targets of nuclear bombs, the limit for radiation workers and soldiers was 25,000 milliRems per year. In those years, there was still above-ground nuclear testing. Dick was among groups of scientists and soldiers who positioned themselves as close to ground zero as was considered safe from being killed or injured by the blast. Dick recalled the protocol was to turn their backs to the blast, allow the shock wave to pass over them, then race toward ground zero with cameras and geiger counters to measure the damage and radiation at different distances.
As a result of research including groundbreaking work on childhood cancer by Alice Stewart, MD, the allowed exposure got reduced first to 15,000 in 1950, then to 5,000 in 1957. It's still 25,000 for astronauts on the ISS. Outside of Earth's atmosphere the natural exposure is higher. On the opposite end, the maximum exposure limit now for children is 500 millirRems.
From my experience with Dick, many would see obsessive compulsive disorder. I saw distinctly active sequential, active listener, observer, mover, reader, and talker. This combination makes one rarely alert to small details, and unusually alert to hard to discern risks and opportunities. His morning coffee ritual was his mind's rehearsal for its more advanced work.
Was Dick Obsessive -- Compulsive, or possessing the extraordinary gift of awareness of exceptionally subtle factors and the ability to focus on the minute and long-term sequence of consequences?
We can all stand in the same place at the same time, look in the same direction, and, nonetheless take in a different set of information, which leads us to divergent ways of thinking.
Does this mean we need help understanding each other? Yep.
Let's start by recognizing each other as divergent, not disordered or disabled.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
radiation exposure: https://news.mit.edu/1994/safe-0105
Alice Stewart: https://news.mit.edu/1994/safe-0105