Age Of Discovery

December 15th, 2013

As a kid, my brother Tom got a boogie board that he used to ride along the beach as the outgoing waves leave a film of water on the sand at the ocean's edge.  Now if there was some way to magnetize the board, he once theorized, and the ocean was magnetic, and one was positive and the other was negative, then he could boogie board all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, from Jones Beach to Europe.

Being the older and wiser kid, I immediately saw the problem in this hare brained scheme.  What are you going to do about the sharks in the middle of the ocean, I asked?

I don't think sharks can eat you when you're magnetized, he answered.

Yeh, but they could bite you, I answered.

No, he replied, the shark is the same polarity as the water so as his teeth started to close on my leg, the different polarities would repel and the shark's teeth couldn't clamp down.

I had to admit this was true.  How would you magnetize the whole ocean, I asked?

Well, you wouldn't need to magnetize the whole ocean, just sections of it, he answered. Run a cable like the Transatlantic Cable across the ocean except that it would have to be a lot bigger.  The magnetic field around the cables would then magnetize the ocean above the cable and it would be like a highway across the ocean.

The late 1950s and the decade of the 1960s was a time when people thought that almost anything was possible.  A trip to the moon was feasible.  So too was the idea that people could one day fly to work in their own personal plane.  I wanted to say that I miss the days when we had grand schemes and big dreams but I realized that I am typing on a computer that is connected wirelessly to a global network called the internet.  This year physicists confirmed the discovery in 2012 of the theorized Higgs boson, the "God" particle that gives matter in the universe its mass. My smart phone is far more capable than the wristwatch communications device that Dick Tracey wore.

Still, we have not solved the problem of traffic congestion during rush hour.  We have not cured cancer, poverty, death or the debility of old age.  These were the "holy grail" discoveries that we thought possible a half century ago after the discovery of DNA and the invention of jet engines.