Wednesday Afternoons, If There Are No Meetings
We have solved every material constraint that slowed Baghdad or Toledo, and reintroduced the only one that mattered. Al-Khwarizmi would be asked about pathways to impact.
A junior lecturer in philosophy at a good British university gets up at a quarter to six to catch a train she cannot really afford, from a flat she can barely rent.
She teaches four modules. She supervises twelve dissertations. She sits on three committees. There are 187 unread emails in her inbox.
Her research time, the hours formally allocated for thinking, is Wednesday afternoons, when no meetings are scheduled. Meetings are usually scheduled.
She is on a fixed-term contract. She will be assessed on her research output in eighteen months. Her student debt clears in 2049.
She has not had an original thought in six weeks.
Set her beside Ibn al-Haytham, from an earlier chapter here, who wrote the scientific method under house arrest because it gave him ten years in which nobody could ask him for anything.
Same species. Same intelligence. Very probably the same love of the work.