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it. Insulate it so, like a tumor, it can be excised, and in doing so the Department could move on as if it never happened. Or perhaps by circumscribing it, it can be safely quarantined and thereby allow the Department to proceed further down the Reidier road, comfortable that what happened was an isolated incident.
    Accidents
, on the other hand, are an altogether different type of beast. Bear in mind the root of the word:
ad-
“to” plus
cadere
“fall.” Every accident is an act of falling—an act devoid of control, an act impossible to govern. There is no inherent singularity within. An accident could happen again and again. By definition, its occurrence is always undesirable, unintentional, and unfortunate. But accidents also are so very valuable because they are devoid of fault and blame. Of course, this cuts both ways. While accidents often lead to damage, sometimes they are merely unexpected events that can occasionally yield wondrous results. Still, chance and fortune do not makedependable partners. It is not too difficult to understand why some at the Department would be eager to avoid blame, while others would be frustrated by the inability to replicate results.
    Long before the jargon balkanization within the Department, competing terminologies were finding footholds in Providence’s various network affiliates. NBC’s WJAR provided all-day coverage of the “catastrophic accident,” while ABC’s WLNE provided minute-to-minute updates on the “Gould Island Incident.” Oddly, while Fox’s WPRI based in East Providence had a running banner on Ocean State of Fear, its Providence counterpart bounced all around from “tragedy” to “marine mishap” to “waterloo” to “cataclysm” to “debacle” to “disaster.” 3 Despite the frenzy of captions, the majority of the news coverage focused primarily on the fish kill: the swaths of dead marine life that washed up on the shores of both Jamestown and Newport, and the Naval Station (NAVSTA) on Newport. Suppositions were made about oil spills, chemical pollution, secret Naval weapons testing, 4 and algae blooms brought on by global warming. The algae bloom was supported by the discovery of a film/residue that coated some coastal rocks. (It was later determined that this was very fine iron/manganese/cobalt-based dust, not algae.) There was almost no mention of an intense, incinerating flash of light. WJAR’s meteorology report referred to an aberrant lightning discharge, but that was about it. As the news is essentially a visual medium, the imagery of fish kill occupied significantly more airtime than nomenclature or reporting.
    None of the stations ever mentioned
The Reidier Test
, or Reidier himself. A few weeks after, the Providence
Journal
ran an obituary on Reidier referring to his untimely death in a freak lab accident. No connection to Gould Island was ever made or has yet to be made publicly.
    Having considered the various factions within the Department, as well as the sensationalist impulses of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, we can see that the classification of
The Reidier Test
has as much, if not more, to do with the observer as with the observed. Nevertheless, it is also important to consider Reidier’s own worldview. He vehemently denied the idea of accidents. As he himself said while discussing serendipity at a colloquium, “. . . It echoes tones of divining and fortune smiling down on you, but really it’s just a highfalutin way of saying you pulled something completely out of your rear end . . . The thing is, though, you would have never discovered your answer to begin with if you weren’t already looking for it. Archimedes didn’t take a bath and accidentally discover that the volume of displaced water equals the volume of the displacing object. He was already trying to figure out how to calculate the density of King Hiero’s golden crown. It just happens that he found the answer in the tub. ‘Chance favors the prepared