Changing all the givens

Changing all the givens is Mike’s phrase for Jennifer’s alteration of the parameters in her scientific work, and for the larger disturbance he sees behind it. After revisiting his interrogation of Trader, Mike reconsiders what he has learned from Bax Denziger: the errors were not characteristic of Jennifer, but the way she made them seemed characteristic of her. The phrase holds the scientific problem and Mike’s attempt to understand its human context together, without resolving that context into a simple account of intent.

The Phrase in the Investigation

Mike returns to the interrogation transcript before his date with Trader, judging his original effort misdirected but struck by its persistence. In the conversation that follows, he asks whether Bax had described Jennifer’s work as deliberate. Mike’s answer resists that conclusion: he discusses how a person can go wrong in research when invested in a desired result, then distinguishes Jennifer from that pattern. The phrase changing all the givens becomes a way of describing what happened to her work while leaving open how much conscious choice it involved.

Scientific Parameters and Seeing

Mike explains the phrase through the problem of scientific interpretation. Givens are not just the candidates in an election, but the parameters that define the whole question; Jennifer, he says, had difficulty becoming interested in an election because, for her, the thread had been lost long before. His account shifts the emphasis from a single incorrect value to a breakdown in the framework that makes values meaningful.

He illustrates the risk of distortion with the astronomer Sandage’s quasar discoveries: the results were contaminated by brown dwarves, which can resemble quasars. Mike compares this to tennis, where wanting a ball to be good can make someone see it as good when it is not. The analogy clarifies the difference he draws between motivated misreading and Jennifer’s case. He says she would not see something that was not there; in his interpretation, changing the parameters belonged to a broader pattern associated with her mental illness, rather than a calculated attempt to force a preferred result.

A Pattern Beyond the Research

Mike connects the scientific errors to other changes he learned about: Jennifer began buying paintings that he considers poor, and galleries continued sending them even after the family turned deliveries away. The paintings do not explain the research, but their arrival adds another concrete element to the pattern Mike is assembling. His account also notes post-dated checks for the purchases, including checks dated April 1; the date’s April Fool association makes the transactions feel like another disconcerting alteration of ordinary expectations.

Interpretive Significance

The expression works on two levels. In the immediate investigation, it describes changing scientific values and the uncertainty over whether those changes were deliberate. In Mike’s wider reconstruction, the givens are also the assumptions that make a question, a result, or an ordinary interest intelligible. His reflection does not establish a definitive cause for Jennifer’s actions; instead, it records his effort to recognize a pattern without mistaking that pattern for proof of intention. The phrase therefore carries both the precision of research parameters and the unresolved difficulty of making sense of Jennifer’s mental illness.