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decreaseI should be used to it by now but I am not used to it even after forty years.
What is IT? Einstein. In the May 8, 2010 issue of Science News in an article titled Inventing the Light Fantastic about lasers it is noted that Einstein did work that presaged laser theory and subsequent technology in 1917. Quote:
"1917--Albert Einstein publishes work predicting that an electron tickled by a photon could drop to a lower energy level and release additional radiation, later dubbed stimulated emission, the "se" in laser."
I mean, how smart was this guy? How abnormal was his brain? In 1917, few people even knew what photons and electrons were and he was predicting accurately their interactions using math and his brain. So, was Al (I call him Al) one hundred times smarter than I am smart? One thousand times smarter than I am smart? What? And his appearance on Earth seemed so random. Did anybody check for grass burns from flying saucers? He just popped up.
So . . . sometimes I look around at the Thais in my little world: the children selling flowers, the shoe repair guy on the corner of Soi 4 and Sukhumvit, the taxi drivers, etc. Is one of them the next Einstein? It's possible. First came Newton, then Einstein. Is Somchai or Wan next? Will a rice farmer's son or a rice farmer's daughter be able at age nineteen to tell us how to travel at the speed of light in an altered state of consciousness and without regard to matter? How about traveling at greater-than-the-speed-of-light speed? It's possible. Anything is possible if you consider the impossibility of Albert Einstein.
What came after Einstein's early work? Quantum mechanics. But quantum mechanics is all about minutia and measurement and prediction and physics matching reality on mostly a small scale. Quantum mechanics won't allow the grandchildren of Thais to travel among the stars. For that we need the next Thai Einstein, Somchai or Wan, to tell us how to slip the bounds of gravity and space and time and finally be free.
I think about stuff nobody else thinks about. Sometimes it is kind of lonely. But I think and I feel that it would be great if the next Einstein was a Thai. Why? Because it fits into Why Not? The reality of Einstein didn't make any sense so why not a Thai to solve the infinite Rubic's Cube of reality? I'm rooting for them.
© Dana. All rights reserved by the author.
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July 2, 2010, 21:42
Sweet Jesus on a cracker this story finally punched through 100 views after weeks. I think the problem might have been the picture. If the picture had been of a waterskiing squirrel taken off U-tube I would have had eleven million reader hits in the same amount of time. Therefore I am requesting the webmaster to use only pictures of waterskiing squirrels with my stories. Since it is a Thai-centric website they can be Thai squirrels wearing Go-Go boots, etc. But they have to be squirrels and they have to be water skiing.