All the really big ideas are simple. Sort of. In the big picture, anyways. Fine, whatever. I was never really good at this rhetoric stuff, so just let me explain.
“All men are created equal.” Straightforward, right? It's not a complicated idea – everyone is equal. But, if you’ve ever tried to actually apply it, life gets complicated in a hurry. And let’s not forget that mankind took a few thousand years to even start trying. Sciency stuff is the same way. Take evolution, or maybe gravity. Gravity is the force that pulls mass together. It's the force that drops that apple on Isaac Newton's powder-wigged head. Easy enough, we teach it to elementary kids and they get it. Of course, it took mankind a few thousand years to nail that one down, too. And even after we figured it out, it took a while to figure out the math, and we still haven't quite figured out what we can actually do with it. Although I guess we use it to sling satellites around the planet?
Other big ideas are the opposite – simple to apply, incredibly difficult to understand. Like music. Nearly anyone with ears can work out a tune, find a rhythm, and croak along. But have you ever tried to work out exactly why some songs practically force you to move with the beat? You'll be a while. I’ve got friends who are making a career out of studying those recipes. Just working out why some frequencies pair well in the ear with other frequencies can drown a lifetime in frustration. And yet ignorant halfwits can regularly con the devil out of a golden fiddle.
That's me, the ignorant halfwit who managed to win a golden violin. A Stradivarius, no less. A dropout English Major who discovered how to make a material harder than diamond, stronger than steel, and more conductive than gold. I own it, I market it, and I license it, but I’m still so ignorant I can't even come up with a better description than the stuff. And trust me, I am fully aware of how much the engineers are cringing at the moment. I’m sure some physicists are going to get even more irritable when I try to describe what it is. That’s my point. What I do or don’t understand matters less than the detail that I own the patents that really let humanity escape our homeworld, brought free – nearly free - energy to the world created what is effectively a post-scarcity world, and let all the irritating Star Trek, Star Wars, and Warhammer fans fill the world with technobabble. I'm sorry about that last one. Really, I am. I never dreamt that words and phrases like 'subspace,' 'warp drive,' 'phasers,' and 'plasteel’ would not only become common language but actually refer to stuff used by people every day. Really, I'm sorry. The Federation and the Prime Directive can't be far off now, although fortunately there’s still no sign of Skynet or Cylons.
I was just another college student. I was learning about post-modernism and deconstruction, listening to droning about Joyce and Woolfe and Kerouac, Looking for Godot, and wasting far too much of my time on things that were actually memorable. Like girls, pranks, and video games. Best weekend of my life? Probably the one where I spent 30 straight hours playing Halo with my roommates.
Predictably, I did that for a year and found myself on academic suspension. Apparently, schools don't like it much when their students don't show up for class and miss tests entirely. To be honest, there was some criticism involved at the time. Lots of talk about wasted potential, how smart I was, and stuff like that. I was given plans to follow, things I had to do to continue towards graduation, checklists for every little thing.
But none of that mattered, not really. The biggest impact was simple: I lost my scholarship. Whether I stayed in school or not, I now had to work for a living. And that sucked.
My academic counselor was one of those ladies where you can't tell how old they are. She could have been an athletic and active seventy, or a forty-year-old who liked tanning and anorexia. You know the type – more bony than skinny, and the only wrinkles on her face were the ones that made it clear that her only facial expression involved pursing her lips into the shape of a cat anus. I was in her office – a narrow little space with barely room for a desk and two chairs, and every horizontal surface was filled with pop psychology books and vacation souvenirs.
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Those lips opened, “Ok, I see your worries. But I'm concerned, students who work generally struggle even more to maintain good grades.”
She should have thought about that before taking away my scholarship. I'm just as smart as I was, and now I could manage 15-kill streaks with a needler. That should count for something – it was a new skill that I hadn't had before college. Her mouth was opening again, “It's up to you, obviously, but I think you'd be best off working here on campus. At least they can be flexible about class schedules, and we can make sure...”
I interrupted her with a smile, “I’m sorry, but I can’t work in the student union. I've worked food before, within a week everything I own will smell of pizza, or old grease, or pretzels. I can find a decent job that will let me study.”
She was quiet for a moment, letting the silence fill the room, almost as though her Niagara Falls snowglobe was sucking in the sound. I kept going, “Maybe it’s just pride? I dunno.”
She did this thing that made me think she was trying to smile but maybe had never seen someone smile before. You know what? I just realized I don't remember her name. I'm sure I knew it at one point, she had one of those triangle name bar thingies on her desk, and I'm sure her door had a removable plaque, but it's been so long since I even thought about her that I have no idea. But she needs a name, just to keep people straight. She was certainly memorable enough. I'll call her Steve. I don't think there are any other Steves in my story, so that'll work.
Steve did that teeth-baring grimace that didn't touch her eyes, chin, or soul, and said, “We can keep you out of the cafeteria. Do you mind working nights? Say four hours a night, six to ten on Monday through Thursday nights, and four hours at some point on the weekend?”
I shrugged.
There was probably more conversation while we filled out forms and finalized details – who I’d report to, how much I’d get paid, that sort of thing.
And so I found myself sweeping, mopping, and trash-emptying in the school's new propulsion physics building.
I call it the new building, but the building itself is well over a hundred years old. It had been renovated a few years back, they were planning on turning it into an environmental science building but changed their minds last minute after Angat's discovery.
Angat hadn't officially won his Nobel yet, but everyone who thought twice knew it was just a matter of time. Figuring out how to detect, collect, and channel dark energy/matter was causing major waves at the time – it was even making mainstream news a bunch if you remember. There was a couple of years where we didn’t even hear about every new cancer cure. His gizmos had an energy output efficiency that apparently put even cold-fusion speculation to shame, he could even generate reactionless propulsion that had all sorts of people getting excited about Mars and the Jovian moons. Which is not to say that anyone had built anything useful yet, but if you asked one of those scientists they tended to sort of sneer and say it was an engineering problem. Angat's experiments had finally bridged the gaps between quantum theory, relativity, and old-fashioned Newtonian physics, leading the theoretical guys to throw out string theory entirely and start from scratch. They still weren't to a Theory of Everything yet – new gaps appeared about as quickly as they filled the old ones, but people were excited.
I wasn't, as I still officially found Russian literature more interesting, but I was aware of it. My job made me more aware of it because I was now sweeping and mopping up the messes of those eager little physicists and engineers busy expanding on Angat's work. Lots of messes – it seemed those generators and engines and drives and scanners and widgets failed after producing just a few watts worth of energy. Or Newtons, I think? Doesn't matter. A generator that makes a lightbulb flicker before breaking down isn't worth much, even if the generator didn't need any fuel. So that building was full of people trying different circuits, different wiring layouts, different materials, cooling mechanisms, and so on, trying to make a working motor. It also meant that there was plenty of sawdust, metal shavings, burnt plastic, spilled oil, and other minor and major health hazards that I got to tidy up.
It was a pain, but I got to do the Einstein thing where I worked a boring job and got to be alone with my thoughts.
I still know more about cleaning solvents than most fortune 500 CEOs.