Paul and Corinne's Southwest Adventure

Santa Fe, NM (Plaza)

May 2007

World Peace, Take One. This guy has been around Santa Fe's plaza forever, but I've never photographed his
shtick until this trip. You see, he's trained a cat to ride around on the back of the dog. And he's trained a mouse
to ride around on the back of the cat. So it is, at the same time, a demonstration of expert animal training and a
metaphorical display of how we really can all just get along, as long as the proper positive stimuli are applied
on a variable-interval training schedule. However, that sounds much more cynical than I actually feel about the guy,
his dog, his cat, and his mouse. Really I think they're pretty cool.

But the interesting story from that night's stroll around the plaza is below the photo...

Not long after this, Corinne and I ran into the man who calls himself, simply, "The Manhatten Engineer." He was a very
old man with a very long bushy white beard who wandered past just as we'd sat down on some steps to listen to the live
jazz quartet on the balcony of the building across the street. He walked up to us, wagging his finger in our direction, saying,
"I just can't believe your generation...." He then proceeded to tell us about how none of the accounts that have been
published of the development of the atomic bomb have been correct, because they've been interviewing the wrong people. He
knows all the details, because he was the military engineer in charge of the project. Oppenheimer and all the rest, they
reported up through a different chain of command. They knew some of the details of the project, but by no means all of them.
They were essentially contractors, he said, and he would have known, because he was the guy who had the red phone on his
desk. Edward Teller himself had been the guy's mentor, he said.

He talked to us for about half an hour, and he was just interesting enough to listen to. He quizzed us on our knowledge
of fusion, and Einstein's equations, and all the rest. He knew just enough about these topics to convince us that he may
actually have worked on this project. For instance, he knew the atomic numbers of all the relevant elements. He knew some
of Robert Oppenheimer's personal details (that he dated and later married a nurse). But his understanding of these topics
was foggy enough in some places (such as his claim that black holes are black because they're heading away from us at faster
than the speed of light), fossilized enough (he kept referring to particles and theories of particles that fell out of favor
in the fifties), or anachronistic enough (he said that Roosevelt didn't want to know about the details of the research because
it probably violated the Geneva Conventions, even though the Geneva Conventions weren't signed until several years after his
tale was supposed to have taken place) to convince us that he was probably just a sad schizophrenic old man wandering the
streets of Santa Fe, entertaining (or frightening) tourists with his stories. He showed us the chart that he'd shown to Dr.
Einstein. It had columns labelled 'positive', 'neutral', and 'negative' across the top, and 'massy' and 'massless' down the
left side. He used this chart to demonstrate that they had misnamed what they'd discovered because they were using a lowercase
p for the massy positively charged particle, when really they should have used a capital P. At this point, we thanked him
for his story and wandered on, explaining that we were late to meet a friend. He showed us the letter they'd sent him, which
explained that they were going to shut off his water if he didn't pay his bill, and he explained why they had no right to send
him such a letter. We waved goodbye and hurried around the corner.