PBEFUCE XI
solid background in advanced physics, I would be forever speculating
about futuristic technologies without understanding whether or not
they were possible. I realized I needed to immerse myself in advanced
mathematics and learn theoretical physics. So that is what I did.
In high school for my science fair project I assembled an atom
smasher in my mom's garage. I went to the Westinghouse company
and gathered 400 pounds of scrap transformer steel. Over Christmas I
wound 22 miles of copper wire on the high school football field. Eventually I built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator,
which consumed 6 kilowatts of power (the entire output of my house)
and generated a magnetic field of 20,000 times the Earth's magnetic
field. The goal was to generate a beam of gamma rays powerful
enough to create antimatter.
My science fair project took me to the National Science Fair and
eventually fulfilled my dream, winning a scholarship to Harvard, where
I could finally pursue my goal of becoming a theoretical physicist and
follow in the footsteps of my role model, Albert Einstein.
Today I receive e-mails from science fiction writers and screenwriters asking me to help them sharpen their own tales by exploring
the limits of the laws of physics.
THE "IMPOSSIBLE" Is RELATIVE
As a physicist, I have learned that the "impossible" is often a relative
term. Growing up, I remember my teacher one day walking up to the
map of the Earth on the wall and pointing out the coastlines of South
America and Africa. Wasn't it an odd coincidence, she said, that the
two coastlines fit together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle? Some scientists,
she said, speculated that perhaps they were once part of the same, vast
continent. But that was silly. No force could possibly push two gigantic
continents apart. Such thinking was impossible, she concluded.
Later that year we studied the dinosaurs. Wasn't it strange, our
teacher told us, that the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for millions of
years, and then one day they all vanished? No one knew why they had
solid background in advanced physics, I would be forever speculating
about futuristic technologies without understanding whether or not
they were possible. I realized I needed to immerse myself in advanced
mathematics and learn theoretical physics. So that is what I did.
In high school for my science fair project I assembled an atom
smasher in my mom's garage. I went to the Westinghouse company
and gathered 400 pounds of scrap transformer steel. Over Christmas I
wound 22 miles of copper wire on the high school football field. Eventually I built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator,
which consumed 6 kilowatts of power (the entire output of my house)
and generated a magnetic field of 20,000 times the Earth's magnetic
field. The goal was to generate a beam of gamma rays powerful
enough to create antimatter.
My science fair project took me to the National Science Fair and
eventually fulfilled my dream, winning a scholarship to Harvard, where
I could finally pursue my goal of becoming a theoretical physicist and
follow in the footsteps of my role model, Albert Einstein.
Today I receive e-mails from science fiction writers and screenwriters asking me to help them sharpen their own tales by exploring
the limits of the laws of physics.
THE "IMPOSSIBLE" Is RELATIVE
As a physicist, I have learned that the "impossible" is often a relative
term. Growing up, I remember my teacher one day walking up to the
map of the Earth on the wall and pointing out the coastlines of South
America and Africa. Wasn't it an odd coincidence, she said, that the
two coastlines fit together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle? Some scientists,
she said, speculated that perhaps they were once part of the same, vast
continent. But that was silly. No force could possibly push two gigantic
continents apart. Such thinking was impossible, she concluded.
Later that year we studied the dinosaurs. Wasn't it strange, our
teacher told us, that the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for millions of
years, and then one day they all vanished? No one knew why they had