As previously mentioned, Mr. Henry Ford, an otherwise capable fellow, supposedly remarked that "History is bunk!" Whether or not he actually said it, I partly agree. I'm not suggesting history can be ignored. It's back there all right, but we don't remember it accurately, and as time goes by some memories get crowded to the side. For example, you may not be aware of what happened in the summer of 1948, but I vividly recall my sisters, who were in high school, being gaga over 'Frankie' Sinatra. I thought they were pretty stupid. I was ten, a serious kid. I had a paper route.
I was a bit scared of the old man who repaired bicycles and lawn mowers--but he knew my father, and my father said he was O.K.
Mr. Seibert didn't remember my name. He called me 'boy'. "Let me show you something, boy."
I was reluctant to stop. I still had thirty papers to deliver, plus, he was crazy. Everybody said so. Not scary-crazy. He was O.K. with me--maybe because he liked my father. Everybody did.
"It'll only take a minute."
I followed him into his shop which was an undersized garage--built for a Model-T. Bicycle parts hung from the rafters. In the center was an old kitchen table he used as a work bench. There was some kind of gadget on it.
"Know what this is?" he asked.
I looked carefully, "A really bright light, and a lens, and a piece of tin with a slit cut in it."
"That's one way of looking at it, or you could say it's the explanation of Universe, if only we could understand it. Watch this." He shut the garage door. It was dark. I was nervous being in the dark with a crazy man, no matter that my dad liked him. He turned on the projector light, which was focused through a small hole drilled in the lens cap. He shined the beam through the slit in the tin.
"Do you see it? Do you see it?"
"Yes."
"Well... what do you make of it?"
"I don't know."
"Right! You don't know. I don't know. Albert Einstein doesn't know. The first one of us to figure it out wins the Nobel Prize."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Really. Well... maybe not. Depends on your definition of Reality--but if we understood it we'd know a hell of a lot more about Light--which is a kind of metaphor of Everything. I shine light through one slit and it's particles. I shine it through two slits and it's a wave. What the hell?"
"It's weird," I agreed. "Is it important?"
"It's the most important experiment of the century. The biggest Question, and also the ultimate Answer, if we could only understand it."
I didn't believe him. His apparatus looked like a toy. Anybody with a bicycle shop could have made one. I knew about Science. It happened at colleges where they had a lot of scientific stuff. So he must be crazy, or pulling my leg. I eased myself toward the door. He didn't notice, still staring at the screen. "They're called 'photons'. One slit and they're little discrete packages of light--and the Universe is probably finite. Two slits and they're waves--so maybe it's infinite."
He shrugged, "And here's the deal, kid... I'm pretty sure Consciousness is something like light--made of memories strung together like a beam. Little particles, or maybe waves, in a field. And our heads are part of the field, attracting all those particles or waves, like gravity attracts photons. I call them 'mnesyons'. Everybody's got them, and they're fundamentally the same for everyone, but how they combine to make ideas, and memory, depends on where you are in space-time, what's happening around you. You and I are pretty close, so we share a lot of them, but maybe in Zululand, they might whirl in the opposite direction. I wrote to Einstein about it, but he brushed me off. He claimed to have '... other questions on his calendar..." A bit 'hoity-toity,, I thought."
He turned off the projector and opened the garage door, "Well... that's what's on my list today. What's on yours?"
"I was hoping to borrow your bicycle pump. My front tire keeps going flat."
Instead of answering, he seized my bike and lifted it into the air as if it weighed nothing. He pinched the front tire, holding the valve close to his ear. He fetched a little tool from his peg-board and tightened the valve. He pumped up the tire and dipped it into a tub of water. We watched for bubbles, which would tell whether the tire was still leaking. There were none. He hoisted the bike onto his work bench, tightened the chain and sprayed it with WD-40. The bicycle was fixed, but I was more obligated than I had intended.
"How much do I owe you Mr. Seibert?"
"How much do I owe you for the paper?"
"It's twenty-five cents a week."
"And how much of that do you get to keep?"
"Ten cents, if everybody pays--but I have to pay fifteen cents for each customer's papers, whether or not I get paid."
"Hmmmm... Capitalism... It sucks, for sure." He thought for a minute, "O.K., you need a bike to be in business, and I need to fix bikes to support my research, so let's say ten cents, half today, and the other half in six months if we're both still in business."
I thought for a minute, but it seemed fair. He gave me a quarter and I gave him the nickel I'd been saving for Coca-Cola.
"Thanks for showing me the experiment," I said.
"Sure. No charge. Let me know if you think of the answer."
We parted on good terms.
