Cryptonomicon

The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.

Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.

And, Randy's favorite,

As to luck, there is the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find it."

So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's looking at endless staggered grids of random letters (some kind of predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author would not have put into the document if they did not convey some kind of useful lesson to the reader. Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even psychoanalyzed.

Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff. He wonders about Chester. Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester's ceiling just a monumental act of bad taste, or is Chester actually making a Statement with that thing? Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some kind of deep thinker who has transcended the glibness and superficiality of his age? This very subject has been debated by serious people at some length, which is why learned articles about Chester's house keep showing up in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he's ever had a serious experience in his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce it to a pithy STOP-punctuated message in capital letters and run it through a cryptosystem.

They must have flown right by the site of the wreck. In a few days Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make what meager contribution he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He's only going to Manila to take care of some business there; some kind of urgent meeting demanded by one of Epiphyte's Filipino partners. The stuff that Randy came to Manila to do, a year and a half ago, mostly runs itself now, and when it actually requires his attention he finds it fantastically annoying.

He can see that the modern way of thinking about stuff, as applied to the Cryptonomicon,isn't going to help him very much in his goal of decrypting the Arethusa intercepts. The original writers of the Cryptonomiconactually had to decrypt and read these goddamn messages in order to save the lives of their countrymen. But the modern annotators have no interest in reading other people's mail per se; the only reason they pay attention to this subject at all is that they aspire to make new crypto systems that cannot be broken by the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The Black Chamber. Crypto experts won't trust a cryptosystem until they have attacked it, and they can't attack it until they know the basic cryptanalytical techniques, and hence the demand for a document like this modern, annotated version of the Cryptonomicon.But their attacks generally don't go any further than demonstrating a system's vulnerabilities in the abstract. All they want is to be able to say in theorythis system could be attacked in the following way because from a formal number-theory stand point it belongs to such-and-such class of problems, and those problems as a group take about so many processor cycles to attack. And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.