I'm just starting my second play through of the game and I had a thought about Simon and Catherine's first encounter via comm.
Why is it that Catherine, initiator of the brain scans on Pathos-II, doesn't recognize Simon's name when he introduces himself? Isn't it Simon's scan that revolutionized the scanning? Seems to me like his would be well known among doctors and scientists. Why then had Catherine never heard of him?
I might be forgetting certain dialogue or details. Some insight? (Sorry if the topic has been broached already!)
Because everybody was using Nakajima's Nanami-composition. (That's my guess.) Munshi's and Berg's scans weren't that special, but were included as the first HUMAN templates. ...and then last, Simon's scan is the scan of a man with brain damage and a huge hole in his head. Who'd want to use that instead of a complete brain?
I just came to the part where you find Simon's scan among Munshi's, etc. (site Theta?) and Catherine explains how it got there.
But it obviously doesn't come as a surprise to her since she's so familiar with it. She even says that she spent most of her time in the lab when she was stationed there. It's at a time like this when I would have liked seeing Simon call her 'bluff', but that's just me. I like making her out as a suspicious character.
I doubt that she would recognize his name based on that scan. Simon's brain scan was used as a basis for a lot of AI research, but by the time Catherine gets around to doing it, the science has moved on to using more refined and stabilized foundations. Like Catherine said (and I'm paraphrasing), "No researcher would ever use a legacy scan anymore."
And even if she were using Simon's scan for whatever reason, she would be using it for the data. His actual name would be the least important part of that data. So even if she were using that scan every day for years, the most I would expect of her upon meeting the real Simon would be a very faint recognition that may or may not even make it into words.