Tag: Carl Sagan

As a young boy growing up in West Virginia, in the early 1970s, my family would take these road trips across the state. We went everywhere, usually with a Scotty camper in tow. Dolly Sods, Blackwater Falls, Bluestone River – everywhere. One day we were on another adventure when we passed a sign telling us to “TURN OFF ALL RADIOS” and as we topped the hill, we saw a valley filled with HUGE radio dishes. As an autistic child, I lost my damn mind, “CAN WE GO? CAN WE GO? WE GOTTA GO? CAN WE? CAN WE? PLEASE!!!!!”

My grandparents, to their credit, wilted to my demands and we took a tour of the Green Bank Radio Observatory. On the bus, we heard the tour guide, “this dish has a surface area of more than an acre,” “this is the dorm where the visiting scientists stay,” “this is the ball field where we wind down on weekends.” The ball field was filled with deer that day. The last thing she mentioned was that a visiting scientist was waiting for us in the auditorium and he had an educational film to show the group. The scientist, speaking with a distinct accent, gave a short lecture – setting up the premise for a film on SETI – the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He explained how our powerful radio waves have escaped Earth and continue out into the universe. Then he flipped it, “what if we listen for the signals that alien species might be broadcasting?”

In those days I was already neck deep in Ham Radio and I damn near lost my fucking mind when I heard his thesis. After the lecture, after the film – when the tour was over, I was a bundle of questions. The scientist patiently answered all of my questions. The last question (I was a dumb young kid from West Virginia), was why he stopped working in the hospital and decided to search for aliens? He smiled and explained “I am not a medical doctor, you can be a doctor in any subject.” I enthusiastically replied, “I’m promise I am going to get one of those!” I had no idea what I was talking about.

Years passed. My family soon moved to North Carolina. I was no longer serving time in the West Virginia Public School System. North Carolina education was light years ahead of West Virginia.

During high school, I had heard of this show on PBS titled “Cosmos”. I knew it was about space and that was about it. I geared up to watch the first episode. I had my cassette recorder, microphone, notepad and several pencils all set to record the knowledge of the universe there in our living room. And here came that man with that distinctive accent talking about the wonders of the universe! It was the guy! It was the guy that I met years previous at Green Bank. Wow, he was on TV! “I guess he finally made something of himself” said the dumb young kid from West Virginia.

I finished high school and charged my way through college. I took calculus-based physics back in 1984 and have been pissed off ever since. There were two brutal lessons I disliked in severe kinds of ways.

The first was entropy and the heat death of the universe. It won’t affect me directly or indirectly, I’ll never see it – it is something I could have understood and went about my life. But nope – a major depletion of serotonin and dopamine creeped into my autism-riddled brain. Greatly depressing.

The second one REALLY pissed me off and it is what pushed me down this path. In a greatly oversimplified description, in physics, we can know the velocity and vector of a particle, but we can’t know the temperature. Or, we can know the temperature and velocity, but not the vector. I get the realities of observational thermodynamics, but that doesn’t mean I am happy about it.

There has to be a way to know all three – there has to be a path to figure all of this out. We are taught that we are NOT able to know all three, but nature knows. The fabric of the universe can’t exist if nature doesn’t know. Physics would cease to work if nature was clueless about the properties of all objects. NOT knowing is an issue.

NOT.

Hmmm, “NOT.” That reminds me of something.

There is an idea there maybe -> NOT, NOR, AND, NAND plus many others added to calculus might create some interesting results.

At the time I took the physics classes, I had been studying Boolean Logic and circuit design for three years. We can’t come up with a way to know all three, but maybe, just maybe, there may be a way to narrow the answer down to where these values are NOT. And thus my exploration of locative calculus (Loculus) began.

Since those sad and angry days of 1984, I have continued working on Loculus – on and off, mostly off, ever since.

The first step was to define Boolean Look-Up Tables (BLUTs) and they were a nightmare. All my ideas seemed like they were fighting me. If I change this, the model changes to that and melts down in a white-hot mess resembling Satan’s taint.

“I’ll just set this aside for a bit,” I would say after the panic attacks subsided.

This level of pearl-clutching, neurodivergent behavior would continue for decades. In 2022, I started on my fifth college degree, BS in Electrical Engineering. I just needed a few classes to complete that chore – I hated it. Online education is the worst. Don’t even get me started on online testing proctors that will only speak to you in Arabic.

Yet, I survived and graduated while swearing that I am done with academics. I warned my friends and coworkers, “if you ever see me on another college website, I have one word for you – chloroform.”

Bastards let me down.

I keep pen and paper by my bedside in case I dream something noteworthy – long story. Suffice it to say, a couple of months after I finished my last EE class, I must have had some sort of crazed dream because I woke up with this written on my nightstand…

… and on that gayly pink post-in note was the key I kept missing, the Loculus Object.
After furiously writing day and night for who knows how long, I now have seven autism-powered papers pre-pub ready, I have begun looking for PhD By Publication opportunities.

IF I get these papers successfully published, and IF I find a school willing to listen to my madness, and IF they bestow a degree upon me, I will make a road trip to Ithaca, NY where Carl Sagan’s headstone lies. There I will recite my Loculus abstract.



That will close the chapter on the promise I made to Carl, all those many years ago.

Seems like “billions…”