Editor’s notes, they were transcribed from the cassette tape, apologies for some parts of the interview where I was unable to sufficiently hear Rick’s voice, the interview reportedly took place on board the South Atlantic Oil Platform BHP-17, and the sound of the industrial drilling equipment made the interview hard to discern on the tape.
I never wanted it, I never needed it. Look … what’s your name? Laramie? I know your name isn’t Laramie, it’s probably Jeannette or Yvette. I am fine with you coming in here and asking me dumb-ass questions about some fucking piece of shit invention that I made when those fuggers from United Crushing locked me into that room. But at any point in your training in journalism school, did you think to perhaps ask a question like “hey, maybe I should use some of that expensive education that my Boomer parents paid for while I was pounding frozen margaritas in the sorority house?” I apologize if I’m being rude to you, it’s honestly not my intention. I can see that you’re nervous, I used to be in your position when I was running around with Dwight Eisenhower, I gave him the business. I am just an idiot who got very lucky. That’s the dead nuts money reality of this situation sugar. So if I was able to make Ike laugh at my stupid jokes, then you can relax and take some constructive suggestions by someone whom I would you to consider a friend. When you did your pre-interview work on this one, at some point, you need to take it away from your fucking editor and just do your damned job [inaudible] look, you’re crying and this is going to on that fucking tape that you brought. And now you know why a good reporter should never have a fucking tape recorder. Please stop crying. I need you to stop crying. You’re a lovely young lady, I remember your article where you interviewed Sam Cohen after all those idiots got themselves killed trying to buy Red Mercury. You clearly know what you’re doing. But you’re what 23 years old? Life is going to be over fast sugar, it’s going to end before you have a chance to catch your breath. If you don’t assume ownership of these stories, then they will. And you’ve apparently done this job well enough and long enough that you can be certain that your editor will screw this up because they just don’t know what these ground state functions even are. I know why you’re here, you clearly knew enough about Sam Cohen’s work to actually understand that we were looking at the unit cell of the anitmony and mercury box, and that plutonium was just capture by an exponential tail of the gas-phase distribution, and then we centrifuged the empty boxes out. But I could see you knew what was happening. You and I both know that you let that article get away from you. They turned it into another Red Mercury scam article before they could put the Atari piece on the spike. But they did that because they knew you found the story. So you want to come here and ask me about a bunch of bullshit with that fucking reality clamp piece of shit, then don’t blow your perfumed smoke up my ass and think I’m going to dance around this brig because every asshole on this rig is right now jerking off to their mental snapshot of you when you came up here. You’re not going to shove your titties in my face and think I’m going to talk about that fucking reality clamp. So give some credit where credit is due. Just because you are the single most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen does not necessarily mean that I am now an idiot. Yes, you may have decommissioned two of my three brains, but the remaining one knows why you are here. [inaudible] wait a sec [inaudible] I understand that, and you endure my torment for another couple of moments then you’ll see why it was worth it. [inaudible] I supposedly have all day here if I need it, if you want a sandwich or something, I can have them bring it in here for you. The food on this rig is excellent. [inaudible] it’s okay. The one you need to get here is the tuna melt. They take a bagel, put on the tuna salad, then a thick slice of red onion and they melt a slice of swiss over the top. [inaudible] I don’t plan on kissing you because then I’ll actually fall in love with you like all these other assholes and I’ll spend the next three months in this steel box with your memory and Palmela. I won’t get anything done. So please order the tuna melt with the onion. The onion makes it crispy, it’s just not the same with the tomato slice. [inaudible] For fuck sake, I don’t give a shit. You could change your tampon here and I wouldn’t give a fuck. Just get the food and we’ll get on with this thing. I know you’re hungry because I know you came by the launch and not the helicopter. The launch is half the day. [tape stop/restart] This is the string here, I’ve kept it all these years. [inaudible] Yeah, well now you’re being honest and we can get this fucking thing out of the way. No, it’s this one, the yellow and black one. That was the first production prototype, batch of four. I’m not sure what happened to the other three, they’re out there somewhere, I’m sure of it. But you can see, it is about as simple as we could make it, three components. So the string is essentially test prototype zero one, the black one is the first wrist prototype and the orange one is test prototype zero three. [inaudible] For fuck sake, I’m doing the interview, you’ll bring it home, how long do we have to drag it out? [inaudible] That’s what I was trying to tell you when you started crying because you hadn’t had any food all day and your blood sugar was crunchy and then I was an asshole to you because I didn’t want you wasting time with that fucking reality clamp, and now we still haven’t discussed the ground state work. [inaudible] Yeah, it’s weird, these dumb little things, these stupid inventions, the whole purpose of them all was to just sell the science, get a funding source for the research and get supraluminal probe launched. [inaudible] Yeah, I’ve luanched a supraluminal problem. Laramie, do I look like the kind of corporate prisoner who anyone would allow anywhere near a space program? The only space grommet you’re going to see near me is when I get down to American Samoa and enjoy some tarter sauce waves, I don’t know what the surfers call them, but they’re easier for me to catch the wave when they’re that intermediate size. So those are the prototypes, I never patented it. I told Cassandra to just give whatever IP we have on that to whomever needs it. I guess if I had patented the reality clamp I would now own this rig instead of being imprisoned on it. At the time, it felt right. We knew we were getting close when we started pulling readings off the osmium and they fit the projected voltages better as the mass density increased. We knew we had found the ground state mechanism for photon energy transfer. It didn’t violate any known laws which was a good start of course, that’s always a good start Laramie, make sure that it doesn’t violate and known laws, because you’ll have your hands full defending your baby from the unknown laws. Once you publish those just pop out of the woodwork and the pathologics. [inaudible] Pathologics. That’s what Lev Landua called them. [inaudible] It’s in one of the forwards of his Landau-Lifshitz books, I think you’ll need the American edition to get it, the international editions may not have it. I think it’s in his classical mechanics book. I haven’t checked what is in the front of his fluid mechanics book. By the time I get to his fluid mechanics book I already feel sufficiently stupid compared to him that I can’t bear to read his forward. It took me a whole year before I was able to read the forward about him in the classical book. He had a logarithmic rating system for physicists. I think four was pathological, three was an egg and cheese physicist. I’m a three point two at best. Two was a very good physicist, I think he put himself in that one initially and of course he was just as crazy as I am, so he raised his number later in life. A really low two would have been Newton or Dirac. And one was Einstein and only Einstein. But I might have that all wrong, maybe it went down below one, or maybe the worst physicists were zeros, and Einstein was the only five. I don’t remember, look it up when you get back, please don’t quote me on that, because then I’ll have half a dozen students correcting me on it for the next six years. My point was that I was only an average physicist at best, Matt could run circles around me in the park while flying a kite and high on cough syrup. He was probably a half more competent than say Julian Schwinger. [inaudible] You probably should not mention Schwinger if you want this thing to be get through your editor without being ripped into a bowl of ribbons. [inaudible] I had met him back in the 1970s, he was simultaneously the most terrifying and the most mesmerizing human I have ever known. His brain moved at a speed where he figured out what you meant before you finished even asking him something. And that’s your full-circle for that stupid reality clamp article, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, Laramie. They aren’t paying you to be an actuary. I’m stuck down in that brig when I worked on the ground state theory. The fucking United Crushing suit jabbed his finger into my chest and I barely tapped him back, and he goes flying across his cabin into his precious piece of shit plastic bowling trophy. And I’m not trying to imply that I even punched him. He stuck his finger in my chest and I did no more than a one-inch punch to his sternum, next thing I know he’s standing there like a dipshit with half the trophy in one hand and half in the other, it snapped where the bowling pin was bolted into the marble base. And it was actually a really nice trophy, I felt bad about the trophy, I offered to fix it for him, he just left me in there with the broken pieces. I couldn’t find any glue and it was just plastic. I got back to my cabin, I was still emotionally fucked from my previous gig in Haiti, all those kids, half of them were hovering a foot above death at any given moment. I drank a lot on the compression fitting gig. I knew the system, and I fucked it up with that explosion not because I was drunk or because I didn’t know the equipment but because I had fallen asleep while I was monitoring compression on valve. I made the ultimate rookie move, I overworked when I should have been sleeping and getting shitfaced. The system was installed correctly, and it didn’t need me there. But I thought I could have made a good compression engineer since I designed the system. They didn’t know that I designed it, they thought I had bamboozled the supplier into telling them that I had my credentials. But it was because ultimately I’m not an engineer, and I had no idea how to pace myself like an engineer. I went to sleep in my cabin and I woke up in that piece of shit brig that they made out of a storage room. And I wasn’t that drunk. They had picked up my bed while I was sleeping in it and moved me in there without me ever waking up. I don’t know how the fuck they did it, but they did it. {tape stop/restart]
I spend my time in that room, got some of the best work of my career done in there because I didn’t waste it on bullshit. And my single most profitable invention that I never made a dime off was that reality clamp, and the reason I wore that reality clamp is to remind me to use Julian Schwinger’s approach and never let the particle trajectory overwhelm the field constraints. [inaudible] Yes. [inaudible] Yes. And that’s why you should eat a tuna melt with an onion instead of tomato, because when you have a good head on your shoulders, no matter how beautiful you are, you will forever think of yourself as ugly because the truth is ugly. The truth is that my grandfather’s axe is in fact my grandfather’s axe, even though the blade had been replaced five times and the handle time times. That photon that reacts with your retina is not the same photon that left the dying ember of that flashlight. The energy you receive in your retina is a particle only because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. But in every other way, the energy you receive in your retina is just like the light we receive from a distant star when I wish that I could hold you. It’s gone. The star is probably gone, the people who lit that fire are gone, and here we are. The photon that tunneled under the ground state gave its life like a marathon runner to hand that little baton of energy to the next photon before it died in the time that it took to run its little heart out at the speed of light divided into the Planck length. And this whole process repeated itself. Up to six time ten to the thirty four photons all lived and died so that you could see that dying flame. Life is short for a photon, it’s a little bit longer for us, but our lives are only about three times ten to the fifty two times longer than a Planck time, and that’s not really even all that much. So take ownership of the story, make sure you’re properly fed, don’t assume that I didn’t know that your cry was fake but I still saw a little bit of a tear, and just let it go when you hand it to them and move on. Who was the Australian newspaper woman who said “never give your heart to the newspaper because it will surely break it”? Laramie, don’t give your heart to the newspaper. If you know hot to calculate a state function, then finish your real training, because you’re far beyond where I was when I started. [inaudbile] You can leave the plate, I’ll wash it. As you can see, they now apparently trust me with sharp objects [inaudible] Oh! Is it still running? I almost made you leave without the money shot, maybe you’re a born reporter after all. Yes, I put wore the little reality clamp so that I could remember to continue to revert to Schwinger’s field considerations whenever I got stuck. It was a memory aid. I spent more time on that than I did on the actual physics. But it worked. We got the voltage readings off of osmium a few years later and then we took it from there. It’s been a ball of confusion ever since, but it’s been a good ball of confusion because we finally have to admit that we know even less than we did before this whole thing started. And that’s good science, my dear, to create more questions that we can answer.