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Historians already knew that the cathedrals had been erected over decades, one bay at a time, from east to west.

Mark’s models showed how adjustments in design made by the builders
— the slight differences from one bay to the next
— were probably responses to problems they had observed along the way.

A crack in an early pillar led to a different approach for a subsequent pillar.

This is how people unable to multiply or divide had erected these miraculous structures:
by trial and error.

This enterprise was the SpaceX of its day.

By the time Chris was aware of what his father did for a living,
his father had become a tiny bit famous.

He’d been featured in Life magazine and Scientific American and was soon to be the subject of a PBS documentary.

Chris was the eldest of three sons and the one whose mind most resembled his father’s:

Their thoughts rhymed in all sorts of interesting ways.

He was usually the smartest kid in the class.

Technically gifted, he, too, crossed the usual academic boundaries.

He, too, loved art and history.

“In kindergarten, I’d ride a tricycle and pull my socks over my pants because it looked like Napoleon in garters.”

He was naturally self-contained and inclined to see the world for himself rather than how others wished him to see it.

His parents encouraged the quality.

When he was 5, he asked his mother, how come the rest of the world goes to church and we don’t?

“She said, ‘Well, they’re wrong and we’re right.’

And what I took away from that was that I should be able to make my own decisions about right and wrong,
and whatever anyone else thinks doesn’t matter.”

He had a feeling in him that his father lacked, however,
or perhaps he could afford to develop a side of himself that his father couldn’t:

the side that questioned the structure not just of churches but of society.

“I have a very fine nose for elitism,” said Chris.

“And it bothers me.

And I was in Princeton.

There’s a kind of idea at a place like that:
‘We’re the smartest and you should just shut up and let us run the world.’

And this just really bugs me.”

The younger Mark was coming of age in what seemed to him a revolution.

His weeping mother had awakened him in the middle of the night, when he was 12 years old,
to inform him that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been killed.

The Vietnam War was roiling the Princeton campus
— and it wasn’t Ivy League kids being sent to fight and die.

One day, flipping through one of his mother’s magazines,
Chris came across photographs from Vietnam.

They showed children killed and wounded by American napalm and shrapnel.

Next to them was a piece about an American company that had figured out how to make plastic shrapnel,
so that it couldn’t be detected by an X-ray.

“This sent me off the deep end,” said Chris.

“Everyone knew what napalm did to kids in villages.

This was the same mentality used in a different way.”

By the time he reached high school, he was joining campus war protests
and entering a running one-way argument with his father.

“Chris was very political,” recalled his brother Peter Mark.

“Very antiestablishment.

He used words like ‘bourgeois.’”

His father, still working for the Defense Department, didn’t share his son’s taste for politics.

“My father didn’t like to argue,” said Peter Mark.

“He’d just listen to Chris and say, ‘you got funny ideas.’”

The roof of their family home had yet to collapse, but the structure exhibited obvious cracks.

One was that Chris identified less with the class his father had ascended to than the class he’d come from.

“He always wondered why the police didn’t use horses more often to scare demonstrators,” said Chris.

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