The Solomon Scale (1 of 6)

Dear Grandmother,

In your last letter, you wrote to me asking about the Solomon Scale and how it related to the research I am now doing. I am writing to you to explain the system, including a bit of its very exciting history. Since you left your chair at Harvard, I know that you have trouble keeping up in fields not your own; impenetrable writing is the rule in science these days. I do not fear that the science or math will be beyond you, for I know you are truly an educated woman in the truest sense; but I apologize in advance if I complicate it with Goodness Science jargon.

The story of Goodness Science started ten years ago. According to the father of the science, the scientist and theologian John Solomon, God spoke to him in a dream and told him to build a machine. He said that He wanted to show men their depravity, and that they seemed blind to all but numbers; so He would give Dr. Solomon the plan to build a machine to measure the goodness of a man. Like Moses building the tabernacle or Solomon the Temple, he followed this vision very carefully.

He completed it, and it looked like a hat and vest connected to a box. The subject would sit in a chair next to the machine, and relax. The machine would analyze the state of his soul based on the decisions he then would make in that moment. It would probe the soul and put it through 2.3 million moral tests (which was the minimum number for a consistent reading) to see what it would do in that moment if tested. He would be put through ten thousand temptations, prove his courage on ten thousand battlefields, be annoyed by his boss ten thousand times in ten thousand ways; he would be injured by his brother 490 times and then tested to see if he could forgive. It would then take into account the subject’s upbringing, his genetics, his mind and his intentions; that is, it would consider the raw material with which a man’s decisions were made. Finally, after all that happened in twenty minutes, the machine would read out an absolute score of goodness. The “Solomon Scale,” as it was called, was similar to the Kelvin scale in that both were based on an ‘absolute zero.’ A score of zero Solomons or 0S would mean a perfectly depraved human being.

I hope this clears up the early history of the story.

Your loving grandson,

Jeremy Paul

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