Judith Lauter
Taking up where Becquerel’s Plate Vol. I left off , this 2nd volume in JudithLauter’s history of her life in science (the fi fth in her overall autobiographicalseries) joins the story in January 1980, just after she had received her PhDfrom the Central Institute for the Deaf Research Department at WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis (WashU). As she says in the fi rst pages of this volume:'With my years of coursework behind me, I was on the verge of a broadplain with wide horizons. I had my compass and my bearings. I was ready. Ifound out very quickly that there was still much to learn, but during this stage, Iwas learning to be an ’educated listener,’ an audience not to any human teacher,but to the universe, at least the part of it I wanted to study.I used to tell students with me in the laboratory, whether we were watchingspeech spectrograms scroll out across a screen, or evoked potentials slowlybuilding their beautifully unique waveforms, that those patterns were the universetalking to us in a ’still, small voice.’ To hear what it said, we had to be patientand attentive, trusting that an open mind is a creative mind.We could use our knowledge to be prepared, to frame the questions and setup the experiment the best way we knew, but we also had to have the humilityto know that we could not totally predict the outcome, what the universe wouldsay in response, what its whispered answers might be.As Robert Frost says, ’We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But theSecret sits in the middle, and knows.’ I was coming to realize that the job of ascientist was to listen for whatever the Secret might say next. And over thosenext fi ve years at CID, I went on listening as hard as I could.'
