Squirrel in a Cage
When I was a junior in high school, my physics teacher and I were able to finagle a grant from Harvard University that funded us an amazing six weeks of physics over the summer before my senior year.
They supplied us with the equipment to experience classic physics experiments. They even gave us a laser. That was a big deal then, but it really wasn’t much stronger than the little laser pointers you can get at the drugstore today, but much larger.
There was an article about holograms in Scientific American. At a mirror shop near 3rd and Vermont there were the half-silvered mirrors that are needed to make them. In the school dark room making a photo sensitive glass plate wasn’t difficult.
And one evening after dark, I made a hologram.
On the strength of that I got a lot of attention here and there. I got a lot of attention from corporations, and I got early admission into Caltech.
TRW, which was a think tank and research concern at that time, gave me a full scholarship, along with a great job I was expected to accept.
I was taken on a few tours of Caltech. There were many amazing and wonderful things. There were cool biological experiments. There were moon rocks that had been on the moon only a week before.
I was taken to the mysterious U S Air Force Base in El Segundo that has no airplanes or runways. There I met one of the pioneers of holograms. He showed me amazing holograms that 50 years later popular science is just now saying are possible. He had his own lab, but not what you imagine. His lab was a large modern three-story building.
We were put together so he could sell me on working there after college.
At the end of the tour, he asked if I had any questions. I asked…..
“You have everything a scientist wants. You’ve got unlimited funding, you’ve got a giant lab with bright people working under you. How does it feel?”
He gave me the enthusiastic and encouraging answer that you would expect.
Then I asked, ” How do you really feel?”
He took a couple of beats, he looked me right in the eyes, and said, “I feel like a squirrel running on a wheel in a cage.”
That changed my perspective. That subtly changed my way of understanding the whole experience.
Later, when I was supposed to start at Caltech, I made the phone calls and told them I wanted a year off. A year later I was in Europe.
I never went back again to college in any serious way.
“Would you tell me which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where…”
“Then it doesn’t matter, which way you go.”
Louis Carroll