Preparation for Jack Kilby’s ‘Eureka’ came in part from university studies. “I graduated in 1947, just one year before Bell Labs announced the invention of the transistor. It meant that my vacuum-tube classes were about to become obsolete.”

Jack recalls that the bulky, fragile, fickle, power-gobbling vacuum tubes could not enhance any significant evolution of computers, but the point-contact transistor “offered great opportunities to put my Physics studies to good use.” The transistor’s developers at Bell Labs earned Nobel Prizes in 1956. Robert Gibney, a Metallurgist/Physical Chemist who helped develop their configurations of crystals, was not a winner.

Turns out, those awards are limited to no more than three persons in one field at any one time. Gibney had been key in the “miracle month” of 1947 that culminated in the transistor's invention. Lisa Kudrow points out that Rosalind Franklin too may have deserved a Nobel in 1962 (like Watson, Crick, and Wilkins) for her work pointing to the structure of DNA.

The exclusions of Gibney and Franklin somehow flabbergast me. I am all for giving them Nobels now, on the spot. Posthumously (which also is disallowed).

Not to put too tangential a point on it, I am also for recognition of those family members who have to put up with absent Laureates during those miracle months of theirs when they are chasing big discoveries. Lisa and I are wired for empathy and so we lift our glasses in support of all those discoverers' overlooked wives and children. We feel sorry too for those men in those crunch times -- they may have their soaring career trajectories, but often they miss out on chances to enjoy and help guide their families.

(Of course, talk about people who miss out! Just yesterday, December 6, we commemorated those 14 very young women shot dead at a Montreal university in 1989. Yesterday was an international day of remembrance and of female solidarity. That weighs on me still.)

I would like to be a post-feminist, encouraging and supportive, avoiding the gender wars and divisive male-bashing of certain Boomers. But am I now being a Trouble-Maker to ask our guests about Scientists ducking out of domestic responsibilities while tracking down professional mysteries? Am I going overboard tonight in championing the left-behind wives of young professional guys who hole-up for 14-hour workdays?

Excited, I am really on a roll for the just society and the sisterhood, I add that women are still outsiders in Science, Technology, Law, Investment, Architecture, Politics, Aerospace, Corporate Boards, and Evolutionary Biology. Men in those fields miss out on chances to...oh, I said that already.

Men around the table rebut: my perceptions are off-base, without empirical support. High proportions of their breed are indeed excellent husbands and fathers, even fathers and husbands of excellent Scientists. My sweeping correlation of hard-working Scientists with absentee fathers/husbands fails to explain Cause.

They blather so. About how it's now an exception for scientists to 'forget' about their families. About Scientists being excellent outside their labs -- at Frisbee, chess, diaper-changing, picking up their infants’ toys, showing-up to watch their kids play baseball, beer-drinking, playing tuba, and so forth.

In fact, except for Lisa, every guy down-table cites a different pastime that dedicated Scientists do marvelously. Talking almost like feminists (Third Wave), the men claim women’s “situatedness” in Science is advancing: that there are "more women in more labs" undercuts my “passé narrative of exclusion.”

Whoa, Nelly! I have just learned never to ask Scientists and Inventors about their boys’ clubs. They gloss over the gendered nature of their organizations.

“Well," I rest my case, "Here's to more husbands accompanying their Prize-winning wives to Nobel ceremonies."

Rick asks me to pass the gravy.

Over his beer stein, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau holds that, when he has performed songs by different authors, for each piece he has to become an altogether different singer: The song’s interpreter should completely disappear. You shouldn’t be able to detect him.”

For an opposite tack, Kenny Chesney reflects that in the past, he has been fairly consistent in his good-time persona. Further, he is attuned to what designers call consolidated aesthetic totality. “That’s where what you wear sounds like what you sing, where your haircut and teashirt looks like it belongs with the instrument you play, or where your flip-flops fit the chair you’re sitting in.”

Alluding to his own musician son, Dietrich says that it is pompous to give advice to the young or the young middle-aged artist, except maybe ‘Never compromise.” Nonetheless, he, Dietrich, cannot help feeling that within him, Kenny has the stuff to work well not only as a songwriter (something Dietrich is not) but as a fine performer in other genres too.

Dietrich is more cautious, indirect, and considerate in tone than I am here, given my constraints of time and blogspace. For instance, he invokes Science to comment on changes in heartbeat that come with aging and that accordingly affect a singer’s tempo. Dietrich is Mr. Tactful, cloaking his message “in words that will not cause emotional distress.” As boiled-down by me, Dietrich’s counsel is that Kenny could build upon his natural curiosity, broadening-out from his country-rock niche.

It is plain that curiosity is a high virtue for Dietrich: “For many years, I literally learned a new piece every day.”

Kenny, he with the traveled smile, resonates to the forementioned heartbeat-tempo link. Altogether he is nonchalant and not offended by Dietrich’s suggestion that to be his best self, he might diversify his repertoire. The cowboy agrees that one becomes stagnant unless one continues to grow. "In my quiet moments of self-evaluation back home, I'll give some thought to broaden-outing...and to broadening-out."

"We all need to check our alignment with our soul's purpose," Anna says, presumably by way of encouragement. In my experience, however, the soul's purpose is rarely singular...