Several years ago, I saw an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” in which was told the strange story of former Iron Butterfly bassist, Philip Taylor Kramer. Kramer also just happened to be something of a physics genius and rocket scientist who had apparently figured out the nuts and bolts to a faster-than-light communication system, a “transporter beam”, and several other seemingly unattainable sci-fi pipe dreams in the late eighties and early nineties. He had also apparently gone completely nuts and disappeared one day in 1995 (my favorite year, incidentally). His disappearance - an apparent suicide - launched a conspiracy theorist’s dream: was this man who had extensive knowledge of fantastic technology and nuclear missile trajectory programming kidnapped and brainwashed by Iran? North Korea? Some kind of evil splinter faction of the NSA? VH-1?
Yesterday, during a Wiki-binge, I decided to Google his name and find out what the hell had happened (since I hadn’t heard anything). Ends up that his body turned up in 1999 and all the forensic evidence pointed to the fact that he had in fact committed suicide. I had to admit to being a bit disappointed; were he still missing, then the conspiracy theory would still have that mystique.

But I was still curious about Kramer’s alleged inventions. While I wasn’t able to find any evidence that his ideas were successful nor viable, I did find an interesting statement from Milton A. Rothman, a former physics professor and research physicist, from his book Science Gap: Dispelling The Myths and Understanding the Reality, disputing the far-out-there concepts that would have been the backbone of Kramer’s claims:

The conclusion to which we are forced — unsatisfactory as it might be to many — is that we cannot depend upon the discovery of new and radically different kinds of forces in the future to help us go faster than light, to hold vehicles suspended in midair, to make objects move by directing thoughts at them, or to transmit messages telepathically. We must make do with the forces that exist.

So then, what if Kramer had discovered the “new thing” in physics? I don’t know much about physics, but I do know that, like any finite science, the driving force behind it is that there is far less that we actually know put against what we don’t. And when we discover the things that we don’t know, we find out that a lot of things that we thought we knew were wrong.

Kramer probably didn’t discover a “new thing,” because by accounts he had grown paranoid and mad during his final years. But this idea that a serious paradigm change in the way that we study physics can be precipitated by a new idea that, on the surface, appears rooted in the rules of the “old ways” got me thinking.

Where could this new thing come from? As human beings, we are quite limited in the way that we perceive things simply because we have evolved enough to be aware of things around us, but we do not have the comprehension to “ultimately observe” the universe as it truly is. There certainly must be forms of matter that we cannot feel, hear, or see and dimensions which we cannot understand which have direct and definite consequences on the things that we actually do sense. But my understanding is that science has it spread all over the place: dimensions over here, matter over there, light somewhere up there, and because it’s chaos, there is a specific equation to it all that we can’t really parse right now.

But if, for a minute, we could think of physics as a giant infinite cone-shaped object that encompasses the entire cosmos itself at its widest, and the tiniest sub-atomic structure at its narrowest (These are only reference points, of course - the cone is infinite) maybe we could simplify things a bit so that we could maybe understand the universe a little better.

As humans, as animals, we think big; even the dumbest of creatures knows that it cannot fit into a space smaller than itself, and so we, as more intelligent beings, view the universe as place to expand. Up until the last two centuries, we never really thought nor had the wherewithall to pay attention to “the other half of the universe,” which is too small to see with the naked eye. When we want to see further out into space, we build a bigger telescope; if we want to see what is going on in the subatomic world, then why don’t we just build a smaller microscope?

Enter nanotechnology. When it really takes off, it’s going to fix a lot of things, hopefully. Take cancer for instance: our current criteria for fighting cancer is quite barbaric and the oncological community has no problem admitting that. The three major treatments are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, or “cut,” “burn,” and “poison” as they are known. The reason why these treatments are so inefficient is that cancer is a problem that occurs on the molecular level yet is dealt with from a human-sized perspective. It’s like dropping an H-Bomb on a fly. You do more damage to the total body when you are fighting blind like that. Medicine is starting to realize that we have to start fighting the battle at cancer’s level, and that nanotechnology will be absolutely key in being our infantry.

Well, what about that smaller microscope? The physical principles are exactly the same only on a smaller scale, be it optical or electrical, with some kind of data relay to send the pictures it takes all the way back up to us. It’s not an impossibility, as scientists built a working guitar out of atoms a few years back. If it took mankind 25,000 years to invent the guitar, I’d say we’re on the fast track with this nanotechnology business. With that tiny little device, we could look deep inside atoms, deep inside protons, electrons, and neutrons, deep inside quarks, gluons, and so on, each step of the way, discovering ways to manipulate smaller and smaller particles to make smaller and smaller microscopes.

On this journey downward - or inward - that’s when we’ll start seeing the goods, which are the “new things” discussed earlier. If we are still using the idea of the cone to shape our view of physics, then we’ll start to see that the actions on the narrow end of the cone are creating reactions on the wide end and vice versa. And furthermore, we’ll learn more about how to manipulate time and space on the human level once we actually see it in action on the subatomic level, giving way to the stuff of fantasy.

In conclusion, I suppose the point of this long and potentially clichéd rant is - to quote Sir Steve Martin - “let’s get small.”

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