When I was about fifteen years old, I took the Greyhound bus to visit my Grandparents in LA. I remember this extremely well, because this is where I first had the desire to study “Outside Atoms”.
While sitting on the bus looking out at all the cars below, I was suddenly struck by the fact that the tires of the cars touch the street below. It was as if I was a visitor inside the rubber of the tire (I would have to have been microscopic). Traveling through the rubber, I might come to the edge, to the boundary of where the rubber stopped and the street began. I began to wonder what it was like to be an atom at the spot where the rubber hits the road. How would it feel.
It’s one thing to be an edge, but it’s so much more intimate to be at the atomic level, i.e. to be at the atomic outer edge of the edge.
I have put off grant-writing for this project. I know I would need funding to pursue this project to a successful conclusion. But meanwhile I am content to contemplate.
And besides, I’m not a scientist.