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.

When I first sized-up Tim Berners-Lee at the door tonight, he seemed mellow, low-key. But look at him now, all animated at Jack Kilby's talk of crystals, chips, and putting Physics to good use. Tim too was turned-on as Physics major. Not only was that undergrad subject exhilarating, it was “in fact a good preparation for creating a global system.” Which I understand he did at age 24.

Our two physicists and onetime biologist Lisa Kudrow get into a conversation about whether Quantum Mechanics includes waves, energies, and materials that occupy space, the traditional stuff of Physics. Jack suggests not, that Quantum is really more about relationships among observables, data, and likelihoods. Sadly, I hadn't the foggiest that was an issue.

Okay, so some Scientists slave away on such matters. And yep, often they are apart from their families. Yet in the end, I somehow feel comfortable with those guys. They are so calm about creating global systems.

Among Jack and Tim, dear Rick is odd man out. His major was Folklore. I love him because of that or in spite of that. Not sure which…

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...

Somewhere along the way, I frame an artistic injustice I’ve long felt -- it's a topic I've had up my sleeve to wind-up tonight's interactions. My notion is that talented musicians can bring audiences jubilantly to their feet whereas other artists such as sculptors, carvers, or potters never get that sort of bountiful applause. "Not fair," I maintain.

Anna: "I don't think that's a fair understanding. Each art has its own magic."

Dietrich wants to stay with music's transcendence. He quotes a neuroscientist on the source of music’s magic: all of us are able to apprehend music, and indeed we can be manipulated by it into an intense visceral experience. "Okay," I repeat, with more of a whine, "yet given the huge amount of work behind other artworks, music’s bewitchment isn't fair."

Kenny Chesney chuckles that various art forms are so different, "different, but not deficit," echoing Jeremiah Wright earlier this week when that minister over-generalized his Chicago church as representing all black churches. "Look," Kenny re-chuckles and resumes our conversation's thread, "Audiences don’t usually watch master painters working on their canvasses."

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau concurs, and goes on to unveil the fact that he’s been painting for almost 50 years. Painting “directs itself to completely different sense organs, and I think that musical ideas can only be reproduced metaphorically with lines and colors. It’s true that I sometimes try to represent subjects that I have sung, but that is not the important thing. The important thing is to be creative myself: that I can really shape something myself and don’t have to put myself as interpreter in the position of subservience to a thing, as I have been accustomed [as a singer] to do. From the first stroke, a dialog arises with the thing that I am bringing to the canvas. This dialogue can be very exciting, but also very painful. It isn’t a holiday pastime but rather a genuine discussion.”

In what is evolving into a round-robin, Barb argues that artists do draw upon music for inspiration. In various Cubist geometries, Picasso painted a mandolin, violin, and crudely shaped clarinets. Anna asks Barb, "How do you happen to have that arcane bit of specific knowledge at your fingertips?" I don't know exactly what prompts this query -- perhaps Anna thinks that I set up this conversation so that Barb could show-off, but no.

It turns out that Barb's clarinet teacher hung prints at his studio of those early Picassos, something I haven't known about. Barb adds that the great Pablo possibly was influenced by his "growing up surrounded by innovative Catalan tunes. And he married a dancer with the Ballets Russes. You know too, he regularly swapped ideas with his composer-buddy Stravinsky."

To those specificities, Anna smiles, "Well, Barb, my 'arcane' is obviously not your 'arcane.'

Dietrich: "Then there's the Art Students League of New York. Sponsored a series of music and art performances. First, jazz musicians played a tuba, clarinet, sax, trombone, and shaku-hatchi piano. Several abstract artists then responded in their visual medium. After observing the artists' paintings and drawings, the musicians offered a co-interpretation of what they saw. They had the last word, or note."

Barb folds in the news that when she taught elementary school, she'd play tapes of Prokofiev's Peter & The Wolf and Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, which her students would interpret in paintings. It's getting to be a cliche in my blog posts, but once more I discover something fine about my life companion.

Anyway, I’m still dubious, and say as much, 1) about putting music on the highest pedestal and 2) about interactions between various arts. Anna's much earlier point about the magical perspectives of all the arts may have gotten short shrift in our talk, and that may have prompted her to quiz Barb about Picasso's musical instruments. Now she gleefully grasps one of my concerns. A close friend of hers, Anna recalls, even wrote an important work on The Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting. After much debate, that musically gifted friend bypassed the life of a singer, committing herself solely and successfully to painting.

Which leads to Barb saying that music only changes the world for some people. Others here agree, citing such turn-ons as snorkeling (Kenny), politicking (Anna), crossword-puzzling (Barb, but she doesn't do them in ink), walking 45 minutes a day (Dietrich), and so forthing. Harking back to reunions of our extended family, I add "playing touch football with my kids and their cousins." Hah! When I was a lot more limber, that's something I wish I'd done more of.