The story you are about to read is true. The names, to be sure, have been changed, but not to protect the innocent. Professor Mozart would have been only too pleased for me to use his real name, but we agreed that you, dear reader, might think you were reading a piece of special pleading on behalf of a particular person. Far from it. The point of my tale is not that one physicist has been badly dealt with by the National Science Foundation; indeed Mozart has been very well treated over the years and considers himself lucky to have escaped this time with the wherewithal to keep supporting a solitary graduate student. No, the point of this tale is to illustrate more vividly than reams of surveys or statistics could possibly convey what has happened to NSF support for research in condensed-matter theory.

Condensed-matter theorists have been maintaining for some time, in these pages and even on the op-ed page of The New York Times, that their discipline is being starved by NSF. In reply, NSF has insisted that things are hard all over, and scientists from all over have tended to agree. So I offer the tale of Professor Mozart as a benchmark against which to test the plight of your own field. Have things like this been happening to people in your corner of science?

My tale begins several months ago, when NSF phoned Professor Mozart to tell him that a small condensed-matter theory grant he shared with Professor Beethoven would be renewed, but with a 20% cut—Mozart was to lose 30% and Beethoven 10%.

Mozart was told that four of the five reviewers had given the proposal E's (the highest possible rating) and one a G (two notches down from the top or two notches up from the bottom, depending on the case you're trying to make). Mozart was informed that he, not Beethoven, was responsible for this blemish, and was urged to get his act together if he expected to get any support at all in the next round.

Mozart, who knows perfectly well how things stand in condensed-matter theory and had been expecting far worse, was actually relieved by this turn of events.