Worlds within worlds


It’s been said that our original wants and desires are the correct ones and that we screw it up later by changing our minds and second guessing ourselves. That’s when we make mistakes. Your original hunch is usually the correct one. I don’t know if this is true or if it’s folklore but right about now it sounds like the absolute truth and this is coming from one that doesn’t believe in absolutes.
JFK had been assassinated three years earlier but you’d never know it by looking at my eleven year old self. It still stung though and it never really healed. But as a kid I had plenty of distractions being the science nerd that I was. Even in Southern California there was plenty to explore and enough flora and fauna to capture the imagination of a budding mad scientist. That’s what I wanted to be. I’m not sure if they would have let me be maniacal but I knew that I wanted to at least be some kind of scientist, probably a paleontologist. So you’d see me digging up rocks or picking up some dead insect and examining it on a daily basis. I must have driven my parents nuts. I was too precocious and impulsive with way too much energy, hell, I probably was an undiagnosed hyperactive and didn’t even know it. How they put up with me I’ll never know. But they did. Even better, they indulged me. I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do but I loved them for it.
So one day Mom and Pop indulged me again and took me to the department store to get something I’d wanted for all of two minutes…a microscope set made by Microcraft. The Porter Chemical Company made Microcraft microscopes and did quite well marketing them to youthful mad scientists all over America in the late 1950s and 1960s. The boom in science education was fueled by the space race between the Soviets and Americans but after the moon landings when it was apparent we’d won the latest bout in penis comparison the interest in science faded and was replaced in the 1970s with great movies, bad fashion, and classic rock. I went to bed that night with the Microcraft set by my bedside. Twenty minutes later I heard my brother, Rod, come in the house and shortly thereafter a soft knock at my door. The door opened and I heard my brother whisper "Hey, I came in to see your new toy!" I switched on the lamp by my bedside and opened up the metal case for my brother. "Pretty neat" he exclaimed. "I swear, you're probably going to be a scientist or something." I beamed with pride.
The Microcraft set was encased in a two piece metal box that separated in the middle on hinges to fold out into a kind of display case. In spite of it’s mass produced nature the build quality of the scope was very good as well as the images it magnified. This wonderful toy that my parents had bought for me would take me on a great adventure. But first things first…a mad scientist has to have a secret lab and I had one of those too. Bear with me. You see, this was Southern California in 1966. We had moved there from New England in 1963 and bought a tract home in one of the bazillion suburban housing boomlets that spread across the western United States during post World War Two America. Being New Englanders we thought the houses were great, spacious and clean compared to the ramshackle and run down properties we were used to. I would one day grow up to detest the cookie cutter nature of this kind of housing and to this day being around these kinds of structures gives me the creeps. More like loathing actually but I digress. If memory serves there were three basic designs. The first had the garage curved around to the front of the house, the second had the garage on the left and the third had the garage on the right. I lived in “left garage”. In the back of the garage Pop built himself a work bench. A man has to have a work bench. My friends and I were frequently seen climbing the rafters in the garage over the work bench and one day I talked Pop into putting down some wood planking up there along with a ladder made of wooden rungs so I could safely make the climb into my arboreal nest. It was a simple matter to pull up an extension cord from Pop’s work bench to supply me with the electric power I needed to use the backlight on the microscope. You know what I mean, the light that attaches underneath the scope to illuminate whatever was on the slide. My lab was complete. So I moved the Microcraft set up into The Lab and got to work.
The Microcraft set supplied me with a few things I needed to get started. Inside a plastic vial contained shrimp eggs which were fascinating in and of themselves when seen magnified. I looked at blades of grass, grains of sand, and anything and everything that I could get my hands on. The magnified images I was seeing for the first time were incredible. Such detail, and the colors were breathtaking. They were backlit by a small light suspended underneath the stage which was the flat area with a small hole in it that one placed a glass slide upon. A small hole in the stage allowed light to enter from below. One day I got tired of looking at inanimate objects and went looking for bigger prey. At the end of my street near the intersection of Gonzalez Road and Ventura Boulevard there was a drainage ditch which always had standing water. I traipsed down there and scooped up a jar full of the stagnant water in the ditch and ran home to see what wonders were contained within. It was a cloudy and overcast day in Southern California, a Saturday, a day completely free for me to play as I wished. As I climbed the ladder up to my lab I could barely hear the faint tapping of rain on the roof of the garage as I settled in. I hardly expected the great adventure I was about to embark upon. With an eyedropper I extracted a drop of that pond water from the jar. I carefully placed a single drop on the glass slide and placed it under the microscope. I turned on the light underneath the stage and adjusted the focuser. Imagine for a moment that you've been blind since birth and suddenly you have just been given the gift of sight. That's how I felt as I watched a whole new world unfold before me. I saw amoebas and parameciums and a host of other microscopic creatures that I couldn't identify but had seen in science textbooks. I knew that these things existed but it had never become so real as it did right now. I followed the wanderings of an amoeba as it slid across the surface of the slide absorbing everything it came into contact with. I watched with morbid fascination as one microscopic creature would chase down and devour another. This was as real as it gets. But I noticed something else as well, there were smaller creatures that I couldn't see clearly which required much more magnification then this microscope could muster. And then it hit me, there is a microscopic world even smaller than the one that I was currently observing that was totally unaware of the larger world above it. It was almost too much for my eleven year old mind to conceive. I began to realize that this universe worked in a very similar way to nesting dolls. A big doll held a smaller one which held another smaller one and on and on. Then I had my next epiphany, how far down does this go? Does it go on forever or is there a limit? At what point do we reach the end where something can't get any smaller? I barely had time to absorb all this when something went wrong in this newfound world. The creatures weren't moving around as much and the colors were fading. Something was amiss. I soon found the answer. The lightbulb which was illuminating their world was incandescent in nature and the heat was evaporating the water droplet very quickly. The water soon disappeared and all that was left were shadows of their existence. To them it was a Holocaust and I learned an early lesson in what it was like to play God. But my Shangri-La was gone and I had to get it back so with my eyedropper I put another drop of pond water on the slide and I watched in fascination for the next two hours. I went to bed that night contemplating the concepts that had dropped into my lap that day. Yeah, I'd probably end up being a scientist. But it never happened for reasons that would take far too long to explain.
"Pop, do you know what a black hole is?" I asked my father this question nearly thirty years later. He shook his head. I grabbed a yellow legal pad and sat down with him at the kitchen table. I drew the best pictures I could and showed him what an event horizon was, a photon sphere, and the most difficult concept of all to understand... the singularity. I told him how a massive sun could shrink down to the point where it couldn't stop its own shrinking anymore because of its own massive gravity. That this small ball would actually squeeze itself out of the universe entirely and have the distinction of exhibiting infinite mass and occupying zero volume. When I was finished I asked him if he understood what I just explained to him. He slowly nodded yes and said "You should've been a teacher". "Or maybe a scientist?" I replied. He nodded yes again.
I use a scope of a different nature these days. The one I'm using now looks outward into the stars. It's a magnificent telescope made by a legendary manufacturer and I still ask myself similar questions some fifty years later. How far does it go? Is there an end? The questions never end. They never will. I'm reminded of a quote by the anthropologist and writer Carlos Castaneda...
“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”
As a child I found that path, as an adult I've strayed a bit. But I'm always looking. Breathlessly. Endlessly.

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