I am nearing the end of the
second volume of this work – I can’t even refer to it as a book because reading
it has been far more profound than anything that I have ever done in my life. Of
course, I have been reading it for about 10 years now. I go in spurts.
I was a pretty fair student with an IQ of just about 130-ish but I know full
well that there are many, many higher numbers out there. So, I am resigned to
existing at about the 97.5% mark; I am down in the fuzz. I had fun in school,
being an Army brat and traveling from ME, to OK, to Greece and then to NJ where
I decided to try the Air Force in ’68 after Rutgers told me that I was not going
to do math there (and I knew better than to go to Glassboro to learn phys-ed).
Yech. Our high school turned out zero scientists, I believe. We had a couple
good teachers but, overall, the math and sciences were very weak. So, after the
AF, I ended up with a psychology degree from Rutgers, grew my beard and fixed
10-speed bicycles during college. It was only after realizing that I did not
want to baby-sit crazy folks (I realized that they really weren’t all that
different from the rest of us), I ended up in a career of sales.
So, after coming ever so close to retuning to the Air Force as an officer (I
wish that I had, now) I went to work as a lowly salesman of basic piping wares,
into electric and pneumatic devices, and then into pumps and controls, and now
into fairly sophisticated chemical and physical analyzers for chemical process
use.
What is interesting to me is that I love science; I love reading about science
from authors like Dr. Feynman. I started with Asimov, then went to the works of
the physicists like Einstein and Hawking – with a break to try to read Newton.
Hardly a day goes by where something that I read (I give up on the math and
concentrate, instead on the concepts) comes up during my work-day. Like, who
would have thunk that reading about something called paramagnetism would do me
any good at all? Well it does. That is how we detect and measure small
concentrations of Oxygen, for example. That helps me at work because I have to
deal with mechanical, electrical and chemical engineers – not to mention all the
IT guys these days, but I have a pretty good view of computers, so I can fake
that.
I just wish that I had met this witty, brilliant person while he was still here.
It is just like Einstein (I live 20 miles from Princeton), where I go and ride
up and down Mercer Street on my Harley. I just feel the vibes.
Peter Collins