Paradigm shifters and paradigm resisters

This is not just another fluffy, feel-good column, and you will need to put your thinking cap on to follow the technicalities.

In the part of Dillon Gym where, since time immemorial, I have been assigned "space" at roughly a hundred dollars per cubic foot, the lockers are arranged along corridors 22 feet long and 5.5 feet wide. On one side are 66 "small" lockers arranged in vertical tiers of three and horizontal ranks of 22. These "small" lockers come with a combination lock, and in their rusting interiors permit-holders are allowed to keep such jock paraphernalia, toiletries and prosthetic devices as can be accommodated in a small space. The bottom row of small lockers, which would take more physical agility than any machine in the gym's torture chamber to use, are not in service.

On the opposite side of the corridor is a range of 20 "tall" lockers, five feet by five inches tall to be precise. These lockers are for the purely temporary storage of what are curiously denominated your "street clothes" while you do your jock thing, take your luxurious shower, etc. You temporarily remove the combination lock from the small locker and use it on one of the tall lockers during the period of your agonistic exertions. Leaving a combination lock on a tall locker overnight is streng verboten.

There is another crucial piece of gym furniture: a wooden bench, 11 inches wide and 16 feet long, running down most of the length of the corridor. Though not fixed to the floor, its central position is canonical. The bench allows you to sit while you lace up your high-tops or whatever, but it creates the following problem. Though the distance between small and tall lockers is not insignificant (five feet by six inches), if you place a long bench in its statutory position right in the middle of it, you then have but two feet and three inches free on either side. If in addition you add one largish person fiddling with his lock on the "small" side and another largish person rummaging around on the "tall" side, you get corridor gridlock.

In distributing locker space, the Athletic Department authorities apparently have two goals in mind: our aerobic health and our social togetherness. That is, most of the people habitually using the gym during its opening hour appear to be assigned to the same corridor of lockers. Hence, for several years the same people have been trying to squeeze past one another, usually one dripping wet and the other freshly dressed, on one or other side of the mandatory central bench.

Professor Thomas Kuhn, the author of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and the inventor of the "paradigm shift," was a personal friend of mine, but I never dreamed I'd ever be lucky enough to witness the birth of a paradigm shift myself. Yet one morning about two weeks ago in our crowded alley of the Dillon locker room, this quiet genius, Tom Rothenbach from OIT, casually asks: "Wouldn't it be better if we pushed the bench up against the side of the small lockers?" In the moment's hush that followed the thunderbolt, you could actually hear the paradigm shift. Thus placing the bench would theoretically impede the opening of the bottom row, but as mentioned above, that bottom row is not in use. It is quite easy to reach above the bench to get into the small lockers, and there is now more than four feet of free space in which the wet and the dry, the nude and the attired, can come and go unimpeded and unimpeding unless an elephant should happen to be using a tall locker at the time.

All great advances in science seem simple once they have been achieved. "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light."

Think of Copernicus. Think of Harvey, Faraday, Pasteur, Edison. Think of Alfred E. Neumann!

I would have expected a statue of Rothenbach in front of Dillon by now, but the peacock never wins the prize at the poultry show. The University talks the talk of innovation and experiment, but it walks the plodding walk of hidebound convention. The drab world of the linear cowers before the challenge of the true lateral thinker.What is a paradigm shift to the mentally shiftless? Every morning when I get to the gym the authorities have officiously moved the bench back into the dead center of the aisle. One morning some dullard was so keen to frustrate the work of genius that the bench had already been moved back by the time I got out of the pool at 7:45 a.m.! John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.