It was spring in 1978 before the department quite believed that Shaw was abandoning his superconductivity thesis. He was so close to finishing. No matter how bored he was, the faculty reasoned that he could rush through the formalities, get his doctorate and move on to the real world. As for chaos, there were questions of academic suitability. No one at Santa Cruz was qualified to supervise a course of study in this field-without–a-name. No one had ever received a doctorate in it.
