I frankly didn't give a hoot if he blew his lid. My job isn't easy. For a crumb of favorable publicity and respect in the newspapers and an annual ceremony in a silly costume, I spend the rest of the year going hat in hand, asking politely for money at everyone's door, like a well-dressed panhandler, and trying to manage the university on the dribble I get. As far as I was concerned, a department had to support itself or be cut down to what student tuition pays for, which is a handful of over-crowded courses taught by an assistant lecturer. Caswell had to make it work or get out. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to hear what he was going to do for a demonstration. * * * * * At lunch, three days later, while we were waiting for our order, he opened a small notebook. "Ever hear of feedback effects?" "Not enough to have it clear." "You know the snowball effect, though." "Sure, start a snowball rolling downhill and it grows." "Well, now--" He wrote a short line of symbols on a blank page and turned the notebook around for me to inspect it. "Here's the formula for the snowball process. It's the basic general growth formula--covers everything." It was a row of little symbols arranged like an algebra equation. One was a concentric spiral going up, like a cross-section of a snowball rolling in snow. That was a growth sign. I hadn't expected to understand the equation, but it was almost as clear as a sentence. I was impressed and slightly intimidated by it. He had already explained enough so that I knew that, if he was right, here was the growth of the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire, the conquests of Alexander and the spread of the smoking habit and the change and rigidity of the unwritten law of styles. "Is it really as simple as that?" I asked. "You notice," he said, "that when it becomes too heavy for the cohesion strength of snow, it breaks apart. Now in human terms--" The chops and mashed potatoes and peas arrived. "Go on," I urged. He was deep in the symbology of human motives and the equations of human behavior in groups. After running through a few different types of grower and shrinker type organizations, we came back to the snowball, and decided to run the test by making something grow. "You add the motives," he said, "and the equation will translate them into organization." "How about a good selfish reason for the ins to drag others into the group--some sort of bounty on new members, a cut of their membership fee?" I suggested uncertainly, feeling slightly foolish. "And maybe a reason why the members would lose if any of them resigned, and some indirect way they could use to force each other to stay in." "The first is the chain letter principle," he nodded. "I've got that. The other...." He put the symbols through some mathematical manipulation so that a special grouping appeared in the middle of the equation. "That's it."