As lush Vietnamese jungle gave way to choppy gray water, we exchanged a few pleasantries about the view – and further commiserations about the ordeal of reaching the conference. Despite my gaffe, I was intrigued by Lee’s profession, and I finally worked up the courage to raise the subject again. “What’s the attraction for you, in devoting your time to studying physicists? I mean … if it was the science itself, you’d be a physicist. You wouldn’t be standing back and watching them.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Isn’t that exactly what you plan to do, yourself, for the next fortnight?”

“Yes – but my job’s very different from yours. Ultimately, I’m just a communications technician.”

She gave me a look which seemed to say I’ll deal with that one later . “The physicists at this conference will be there to make progress on TOEs – right? To trash the bad ones and refine the good ones. They’re only interested in the end product: a theory that works, that fits the known data. That’s their job, their vocation. Agreed?”

“More or less.”

“Of course, they’re aware of all the processes they use to do this – beyond the actual mathematics: the communication of ideas, the withholding of ideas; acts of cooperation, acts of rivalry. They could hardly fail to know all about the politics, the cliques, the alliances.” She smiled, a proclamation of innocence. “I’m not using any of those words pejoratively. Physics is not debunked – as groups like Culture First continue to insist – just because some perfectly ordinary things like nepotism, jealousy, and occasional acts of violence play a part in its history. But you can hardly expect the physicists themselves to waste their time writing it all down for posterity. They want to purify and polish their little nuggets of theory, and then tell brief, elegant lies about how they found them. Who wouldn’t? And it makes no difference, on one level: most science can be assessed without knowing anything about its detailed human origins.

“But my job is to get my hands on as much of the real history as possible. Not for the sake of ‘dethroning’ physics. For its own sake, as a separate discipline. A separate branch of science.” She added, in mock reproof, “And believe me, we don’t suffer from equation envy anymore. We’re due to outstrip them any day now. The physicists keep merging theirs, or throwing them out. We just keep inventing new ones.”

I said, “But how would you feel if there were meta-sociologists looking over your shoulder, recording all your messy day-to-day compromises? Keeping you from getting away with your own elegant lies?”

Lee confessed without hesitation: “I’d hate it, of course. And I’d try to conceal everything. But that’s what the game’s all about, isn’t it?