MICHAEL ROBERT SMITH--AUTOBIOGRAPHY

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WZCCY1T?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860 "Michael: An Extraordinary Life," is available to buy on Amazon.

EARLY CHILDHOOD  My life began in Tela, Honduras in the jungles of a tropical paradise. I do not remember being born in 1937 at the Fruit Co’s hospital in Tela, Honduras on the Caribbean coast. My family still has the spindle legged mahogany table where I celebrated my first birthday in La Lima, Honduras, on a banana plantation.

The first thing I remember in my life was opening the screen window and sticking out the barrel of my Dad’s 22-gauge rifle…BAM…BAM…BAM. I fired three live rounds into the grassy embankment in the back yard of our home in Golfito, Costa Rica. I was four years old.

The Second World War was raging when we lived in Golfito, Costa Rica. We had blackouts every night; Japanese subs were in the nearby ocean waters. The U.S. Pacific Submarine Force (SUBPAC), based in San Diego, California patrolled for enemy submarines up and down the Pacific coast and would put into Golfito harbor to recharge their batteries.

One of the submariners invited me aboard the USS Barracuda. He let me look out through the raised periscope across at the other submarines anchored in the bay and at the United Fruit Company banana boats docked at the big wharf. Afterwards, he gave me a sailor’s cap as a souvenir.

Ever since the age of six, I built model airplanes and always knew I would be an aeronautical engineer.

 I took flying lessons in Guatemala when I was eleven; but my dad, wisely, would not let me solo, although I was ready.

HIGH SCHOOL IN LITTLE ROCK, AR  I earned money sacking groceries and continued taking flying lessons in high school. The small Luscombe two-seater airplane had two sticks side by side with the instructor, instead of steering wheels. It cruised at only 120 MPH and was so light that after the trim tab was adjusted to achieve level flight, I could maneuver the plane simply by shifting my weight; leaning forward made it dive, leaning backward made it climb, and leaning left or right caused it to bank left or right.

On my first solo flight, as I flew over the Arkansas River, I yelled to myself “Emergency landing!” Then jerked back on the throttle and glided the plane in a proper approach to land on the sandbar…pulling back on the stick to let the wheels gently touch down on the sand; and as soon as the wheels touched down, I shoved the throttle lever back in and lifted off in a touch-and-go maneuver. I decided to fly over Little Rock and try to locate my Uncle’s house…I found the main street where I caught the bus, several blocks away from their house and then located it below me. I circled over it several times, wagging my wings. I doubt that Aunt B saw me. When I returned to the airport, I bragged to my instructor about my touch-and-go landing on a sandbar in the Arkansas River and about flying over Little Rock and finding my uncle’s house. He was livid! “You’re only a student pilot without a private license; you are not allowed to land on a sandbar in the river. Especially, you are not licensed to fly over a city in the commercial airspace—do not ever do that again or I’ll revoke your solo rating.”

I competed in the Soapbox Derby Contest—the racing car I designed and built had a steering mechanism and brakes so I could stop at the bottom of the hill.

I wanted to get into the junior-high concert band my first year there, in the 9th grade. So, I chose the least popular instrument I could think of—the oboe. In short order, I challenged the lead oboe player and became first chair during the concert season.

 During summer vacations, I returned to visit my folks in Almirante, Panama. John Munch and I went spear fishing near the main shipping wharf of Almirante where the United Fruit Company banana boats docked for loading the bananas. We donned scuba diving gear and swam down to a depth of about 20 ft among the large rocks. A large grouper was floating lazily near us. I swam close to it and shot my spear gun into the fish’s side. Immediately, the fish lurched away, yanking the spear from its side, and twisting the metal spear into a bent arc. It disappeared somewhere between the rocks on the bottom. I searched for the hiding fish…two large black eyes were staring up at me from between two rocks. Got it!

 John was always fishing off the side of their boat dock in the bay. John and I hauled the huge shark onto the dock, wrestled it on land, and hung it from a tree limb.

When my folks came to Little Rock for my high school graduation in May 1955, my mom told me what had happened with the strike and the mail service. Communist terrorists had organized a labor strike in the United Fruit Company’s Changuinola farm region where they lived. The Militants had taken over the railways, post office, and all communications from the port of Almirante to the farms. Incoming mail was being seized, and the outgoing mail was being censured; that explains why my mom’s letters were bland and devoid of any current news. My mom had packed bundles of provisions and had their 22-gauge rifle loaded and ready in case they needed to escape the United Fruit Company compound. Her plan was to plunge off into the jungle and make their way to the Changuinola River—the same large river where my mom said she had seen a giant anaconda sunning on a log—which they would follow out to the Caribbean coast near the Costa Rican border. They would have to cross about 5-10 miles of uninhabitable jungle and mangrove swamps. Thank goodness, the Panamanian government and the United Fruit Company negotiated an end to the labor strike, and everything went back to normal.

GEORGIA TECH   It is an amazing sequel to this story to remember the group of Cuban students always hanging out together during my first two years at Georgia Tech. But I was puzzled when they were all gone that fall of 1957; apparently, they had joined Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution when the United States began funding the 26th of July Movement around October or November of 1957. I never saw them again.

The Naval ROTC program at Georgia Tech rejected me because of my childhood asthma history, and I was also exempted from the required freshman physical education courses. So, I made the Freshman Gymnastics Team even though I had no experience in gymnastics and then was a letterman on the Georgia Tech Varsity Gymnastics Team for the next three year, competing on the parallel bars, floor exercise, and flying rings. I won several NCAA events competing on the parallel bars.

My fraternity brother Oscar Zeller organized an adventure up in the North Carolina mountains to slide bare bottom down a perilous waterfall into the rapids far below. We took with us a colored waiter from the infamous Georgia Tech Robbery, our on-campus delicatessen and cafeteria. I wrote an article about it for the school student magazine, The Technique: To the Bottom on It—Article in Georgia Tech Technique Magazine.

After a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, I won a graduate assistantship which paid full tuition and completed the Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering program at Georgia Tech. 75 per cent of the genes that cause disease in humans are also found in the drosophila fruit fly. Under a microscope I could easily see the damage caused by neutron bombardment on the male and female genes of the fly during cell division and plot the radiation damage over succeeding generations. Several things I learned from that radiation biology course, are that: 1) a full-mouth dental X-ray contributes a large fraction of a person’s annual safe radiation dosage, and 2) that chiropractor’s indiscriminate use of full-body X-rays is potentially devastating and should be curtailed. 

 CASE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Ironically, my nuclear engineering studies led me to a PhD degree in Plasma Physics at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, OH, where Michelson and Morley had invented the optical interferometer. That was one of those irrational quantum-mechanical turning points in my life. My research assistantship’s stipend was enough to pay for all my schooling and most of my living expenses.

The Case publicity department wanted to use a picture of my shock tube experiment in their new Graduate School brochure. I cringed, as the voltage slowly crept up to 15,000 Volts, hoping the discharge would not fire prematurely…so far so good. “Alright, here goes, three…two…one…FIRE.” I pressed the trigger button—a brilliant flash… kahhbaannnng. The high pressure, helium atoms were ionized and stripped of their outer electrons from the intense heat, forming a plasma—as if the superheated gases from Mount Vesuvius had singed them into an immobilized cinder block and left them standing in the square at Pompeii, poised in the act of their daily lives. The side of my face closest to the electrodes was a Rembrandt chiaroscuro portrait, Young Man with Shock Tube—the bright features of my face stood out sharply from the black background, my forehead wrinkled, and my pupils contracted as I stared hopefully at the downstream end of the shock tube.

My entire experiment depended on the electrons from the electron gun passing through the collodion film to enter the plasma, then colliding with the electrons in the plasma and losing energy as they passed through and were finally measured by the electron energy analyzer…SHIT! IT BROKE AGAIN—the shockwave broke the collodion film, and positively-charged helium ions from the plasma in the shock tube slammed into the electron gun, where they pitted deep craters in the surface of the cathode, and it would no longer emit electrons. For over two years, I tried doggedly to shoot the electron beam through the collodion film; whatever I tried did not work. I searched the literature in the science library, reading through the Science Abstracts—shock tubes, electro-magnetic shock tubes, plasma, plasma discharges, collodion, electron microscopy, electron guns, ELECTRON BEAM EXPERIMENTS…oh my God. There it is! Journal of Applied Physics—Drift Tube for Isolating Electron Gun from High Pressure Gas. I read the article...shit! If I had only known about this, I would be done by now. Why had I blindly trusted Bruce, and not done my own investigative research—I guess that’s what getting a Ph.D. was all about, learning how to think for yourself! “It’s easy to do, we just need a bigger vacuum pump,” I told him. “Too expensive; I cannot justify spending NASA’s money on an unnecessary vacuum pump.” Suzanne and I decided to buy the pump ourselves. “You can’t buy the pump yourself. Capital equipment is…well, it’s NASA property…it’s never done.” It was almost worth buying the pump just to see his embarrassment when he tried to explain to NASA that he had forced a common citizen to buy the pump for a NASA experiment. One month after redesigning the apparatus, I gathered all the data I needed to complete my thesis. The semester ended, and it finally dawned on me…Oh, my God I had completed all the requirements for my Ph.D. Everything I had strived for was accomplished; thoughts of despair slogged thickly through my mind—I felt totally lost in a sinking quagmire without any direction, scared that I might never climb my way out of this dilemma. I had nothing further to accomplish in my life. 

HUGHES RESEARCH LABORATORIES, MEMBER OF THE TECHNICAL STAFF LASER GROUP   When I arrived at the Hughes Research Labs for my first day of work, they decided I should join the gas laser group instead of the Plasma Physics department. I almost choked…I don’t know shit about lasers! And, I had never taken a quantum mechanics course. They’ll think I’m incompetent. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) issued a request for a proposal to develop a CO2 laser source for an over-the-horizon Doppler radar to create an early warning of the Soviet fleet crossing the Atlantic. And now, I was the principal investigator on a major research project to develop a 10-kilowatt pulsed CO2 laser system. The master oscillator and the power amplifiers, referred to as a MOPA, would be mounted on top of support structures, placed end to end across the length of the lab. The modular length of the glass discharge tubing was 8 meters (26 feet), and they were stacked side by side and in two layers on top of each other on the support tables.

 I put on a pair of plastic goggles to protect my eyes—the plastic would burn instead of the cornea of my eye if the high-power beam hit me in the face. I yelled up the hallway and directed Ed to point the beam, so it would hit the center of the asbestos paper…there, I feel it in the center of the paper. “Okay. I’m ready! Fire up the laser amplifiers and crank up the power slowly to 10,000 Watts.” The asbestos paper changed color from gray to pink, to bright red, and then glowed white-hot in a spot about four inches in diameter. The heat radiated outward against my face, as if I were standing close to the glowing red burner on top of an electric stove. I prayed that my hand would not accidently cross the invisible infrared beam—the flesh would char before I could remove my hand, and the third-degree burn would disfigure me for life…God, what if Ed bumps the stepladder? The beam might be aimed directly at my face!

CO-FOUNDING BRITT ELECTRONICS The idea of starting a laser company was intriguing. After all, Ted Maiman the inventor of the ruby laser had left the Research Labs and started Korad. Bill Bridges called me into his office the following week. “What are these plans you’re making for a new kind of laser? You’re violating your employee non-disclosure agreement, and I must insist that you leave Hughes as soon as possible.” I was fighting for my technical life against the sickening prospect that a fundamental physical process was thwarting the long-pulsed laser I had promised Clark…No wonder no one’s ever done this before, it was against the laws of physics! THAT’S IT! My car swerved dangerously across the lane divider, when I realized I was rambling on to myself about the actual design that would work with our laser…All I’ve got to do is fill the tube to a high pressure…then heat the discharge tube and keep the throat section cool. I never did solve the long pulse problem; but the “burst” laser I invented was an even better idea—we had created a high average power argon ion laser with the small size and power consumption of a pulsed argon ion laser; and it did not need a huge magnet and a huge kilowatt-sized power supply to run it. Our laser was so powerful during burst mode, that the dust particles in the air lit up in broad daylight, like a brilliant green beacon. 

Clark took to our prototype instrument to Dr. Patz at Johns Hopkins hospital, who had obtained the informed consent of a long-standing diabetic patient to be treated with our new instrument. The patient was rapidly becoming blind. Clark was ecstatic when he got back from Johns Hopkins hospital. “Dr. Patz thinks our photocoagulator is fantastic; he’s going to buy our first production model.”

SENIOR STAFF SCIENTIST AT SINGER LIBRASCOPE, HEAD OF ELECTRO-OPTICAL INTERNAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT   Jerry Dietz, Vice President for Engineering, nodded and smiled. “Librascope wants to get more heavily into the electro-optics area. We’d like to offer you a position as Senior Staff Physicist, reporting directly to me, and working under Bob—you’ll be responsible for our internal research and development program in electro-optics.” The scientists at Bell Labs instructed me on how to fabricate a smectic liquid crystal light valve—the trade-secret we learned from Bell Labs, was to coat the inside ITO electrodes with an organic surfactant, which caused the smectic crystals to align perpendicular to the cell walls.

This new product solved the shortcomings of our original metal film projector and became a significant product for Librascope’s Tactical Data Systems business.

Singer’s Link Division wanted Librascope to develop a new cockpit display for their Boeing 747 flight simulator using a multicolor laser system to create the view instead of the TV camera system they were using. I spent the next month figuring out how to build the laser projector. We would use a high-speed rotating polygon mirror to scan 950 TV lines for each picture frame, 60 frames a second—24 mirrors turning at 76,500 rpm would work. 

The three-color laser beam projected outward through the 1-millimeter aperture of the objective lens at the tip of the laser TV camera and scanned across the model board scene. I watched the video monitor in amazement. “Oh my God, it actually works…look at that! I can see the individual trusses of the power-line tower, and the railroad ties under the tracks.”

CO2 LASER EYE SURGERY  Jim Miller reached in and pulled something out of the second sack he had brought. “Here let’s see if we can cut one of these.” He dropped a pig’s eye into the pan of water…plopp. The sightless eye looked up at us as it floated in the water—a white globe of scleral material, a little smaller than a ping-pong ball, with a black pupil surrounded by a grey iris, looking out the top. Tiny bubbles rose up through the water from the cut tissue as before, bearing the odor of burnt flesh—he had cut through the wall of the eye with the laser beam under water. “Wow! That’s fantastic.” I knew it would work…the first wet-field surgery with a CO2 laser! I opened my notebook and drew a sketch of the apparatus we had just used for our ground-breaking experiment. I signed and dated each page in the notebook, Michael Smith 2/28/75. Behind me, Miller and Mary bent over the small, white furry form stretched out limp on top of the makeshift operating table—bright lights shone down on the lifeless form like a macabre theater stage. Intravenous tubes dangled from the overhead IV bottles, attached to nails in the garage rafters, and dripped down around the lifeless rabbit’s head, administering their Lethean elixir of forgetful bliss. An apparatus, looking like the murderous laser in the James Bond movie, Goldfinger, loomed menacingly at the far end of the collapsible surgical table, with a telescoping mirror arm that directed the laser beam from the large laser to the surgical probe Miller wielded in his hand. Our plan was to enucleate the eye of one rabbit immediately after surgery and study the histology of the acute lesions; then, to study the long-term effects of the CO2 laser surgery. The next rabbit would be kept alive for one week before sacrificing it and taking out the eye and performing a histological study of the lesion one-week post-operative. Continuing after that, we would study the results two weeks post-operatively, then four weeks, eight weeks, and finally after sixteen weeks post-operatively. We did not know what the treated retinal tissue would look like half a year from now.

The FDA approved our surgical protocol and gave us approval to conduct clinical trials. We gowned up and walked through the door into the operating suite where he performed his retinal surgery. He wheeled the Zeiss binocular operating microscope across the floor, over to the head of the operating table in the middle of the surgical suite. The overhead flood light illuminated the operating table—a beautiful naked woman with silky blonde hair was lying there with a detached smile on her face, her perfect breasts looking firm and youthful. The full-sized human dummy that the hospital used for demonstrations would be our surgical model.

Big Red CO2 Surgical Instrument

“Oh, my Gott! I am almost blind from thees horrible disease. And you say this will cure me?” Ghattas said. “We use a special infrared laser beam to cauterize and stop the retinal vessels from bleeding, like yours are bleeding, without any bad effects that we know of—the animal results are extremely encouraging. The treatments we made on the rabbits have remained stable for longer than a year, so we believe it is safe to use on human eyes.”

“What ees the reesk...?” He talked to himself under his breath, “...to go blind? I em already blind.” Then, he turned his face toward Dr. Miller and smiled broadly. “Do it now. I weell be your first—how you say eet? Guinea pig? Where do you want me to sign?” He spoke like a young child trying to convince himself that he was not afraid of the dark.

I donned surgical greens and followed Miller and his partner, who would assist him, into the washroom where we scrubbed our forearms and the fronts and backs of our hands. Mr. Ghattas was lying anesthetized on the operating table. He was draped out of existence—an anonymous, impassioned eye sat on top of the surgical drapes and stared up with incomprehension. Like a large marble sitting on the tablecloth of a dining room table, while the doctor and his surgical team stood and sat around the table having their afternoon tea. I set the power level and the exposure duration on the control panel. “Half a watt for four seconds, all set,” I confirmed. For the first time during the operation, I was scared that something might go wrong—my glasses fogged up from my rapid breathing under the surgical mask I was wearing. We had done this same procedure so many times before on rabbits. What if the timing circuit for the exposure duration failed again—that had happened once before with the early prototype in my garage; the rabbit’s retina had been destroyed.

 The bandage covering Mr. Ghattas’ right eye also covered part of his balding forehead, but it did not hide his grey hair, or the sallow olive-drab tint of his cheeks. Amber worry beads passed nervously through his fingers—the string of beads dangling loosely from his right hand, while his fingers worked the individual beads in perpetual agitation. He stood up from his chair and walked over to Dr. Miller’s desk, picking up the glass paperweight, holding it up to the light, turning it around in his hands—a rainbow flashed across his face. “Oh, my Gott, I ken see the beautiful colors of the rainbow.” “Nedda.” He turned to his wife and stared intently at her face, touching her cheek tenderly with his hand—his own face in a rapturous trance. “You are so beautiful—I thought your hair would be grey.” Then he read the smallest line on the eye chart, and turned and laughed, proud of his little joke. “I em see everythink—oh my Gott,” he repeated over and over. Then, he embraced me, kissing me first on one cheek, then on the other cheek, and again on the first cheek—three times, in the sign of the Trinity. Turning, he spoke to Dr. Miller. “Doctor, you and thees wonderful scienteest, who ef invented such an eemportant machine. I em see—you give me bek my sight—thanks Gott! Now I weell no die weethout seeink my grandson.” Ghattas was sobbing. He laid his face against his wife’s, and I could see the tears running down her own face.

I began designing and building a much smaller and friendlier machine.

Miller phoned me at work three months later. “Mike, I’ve got exciting news. We’ve been accepted to present two papers at the Academy of Ophthalmology Conference in San Francisco on November 5th—will you have the 20-gauge probes ready by then?” The handpiece had two lenses that reduced the diameter of the CO2 laser beam, so it would pass freely through the 0.6-millimeter diameter 20-gauge cautery tube without hitting the inside wall. Our new, miniaturized handpiece and surgery probes were considerable smaller than our original designs for Big Red.

EXOCOR TECHNOLOGY  I decided on the name Exocor Technology when I left Librascope and launched my new consulting company—standing for technology outside the corporation.

ROCKWELL BI BOMBER California Lutheran University was interviewing me for their physics faculty position, and I described the diverse projects I had completed during my aerospace career. “Rockwell hired me to study the use of a defensive laser weapon on board the B-1 bomber, to blind the eyes of the Soviet fighter pilots.” “What?” Dean Jim frowned.   Oh shit! Should not have mentioned that at a Lutheran University. “Sounds inhumane, I know, but in wartime sometimes the circumstances justify it. Imagine the scenario—it’s 1984 and the Soviets have just launched a full-scale intercontinental missile attack on the United States. SAC headquarters frantically dispatches a batch of B-1 bombers to Moscow in a last-ditch effort to change the course of destiny…a Russian fighter gets within striking range and locks-on his weapon’s radar. The alerted B-1 gunner presses the trigger and fires an intense laser beam—the Soviet pilot’s vision chokes in the scarlet blood of a retinal hemorrhage flooding his eyes; his entire vision is a deep, red-blurred, blood bath. By the time he can turn his jet fighter around for a second sortie, the SAC bombers have reached their destination, and the US is saved from total annihilation.” Lyle eyes opened wide and lit up like flashbulbs. “Wow! The public is never told about these things.”

 ROCKWELL SPACE SHUTTLE   A week after Columbia’s inaugural flight in 1981, when the tiles first fell off, Dr. John Tracy, a director at the Rockwell Science Center in Thousand Oaks said Rockwell wanted me to make two instruments to inspect the Rockwell’s space shuttle’s tiles: the first one, a microscope that was only one-millimeter thick, and could extend five inches down the one-millimeter gap between the space shuttle’s tiles with an integral illumination light, look across at right angles to view of the bottom edge of the tile, and have a calibrated reticle for measuring the height of the gap; the second instrument was a go-no-go gauge that would be inserted down between the tiles to touch the filler bar and shine an illumination light across toward the gap—if the gap was within the specified dimensions of eight to ten-thousandths of an inch, the illumination light would reflect from the bottom edge of the tile, travel back up through the illumination fibers and register an acceptable voltage on a light meter; if the gap was too small or too large, the meter would register a null signal, indicating that the tile gap was unacceptable. Rockwell was extremely pleased with the performance of the inspection devices I made for them. Saturday morning, February 1, 2003. I shook my head, gritting my teeth. The Columbia was disintegrating; the hot plasma must have entered the wing when they entered the atmosphere and the tiles fell off—burned up like a meteor…those assholes! “Shit, the entire shuttle crew’s been incinerated!” I stared at the TV set, and the tears rolled down my cheeks. “And they never did anything about inspecting the tiles!” I jumped up from the sofa and shook my fist at the TV. “My inspection instruments could have saved them.”

LITTON’S LASER GYRO  I solved Litton’s laser gyro erratic manufacturing problem by proposing an interferometric technique which created an interference pattern between the reflection from the mirror surface and a reference surface and did not rely on an individual worker’s skills with the autocollimator.

 GOULD’S ADVANCED AUTOMATION SYSTEM (AAS) Gould was competing against two other giant, corporate teams for the initial phase of the Advanced Automation System (AAS)—a multi-billion-dollar research, development. Gould’s team of corporate partners that would include my own consulting company Exocor Technology. Instant replays of the same movie scene, on each of the projection screens in the cabin, followed me down the aisle—suddenly, the screen went dark! “I’m sorry we will not be able to show the movie this flight.” The head flight attendant announced over the intercom. “The movie projector is jammed.” What a ridiculous projection system—threading a continuous roll of movie film the entire length of this monstrous behemoth. The film traveled from the front cabin all the way to the rear and then back up to the front again, using a series of film rollers to guide the film through a tunnel in the ceiling. I hurried back up to the first-class cabin and held my empty glass up to the head flight attendant. Fred Ponzi was standing beside her. She immediately filled it from the bottle of Cote du Rhone Chateauneuf du Pape she held in her hand. “Do you realize that Fred Ponzi, right here, designed the 747-film projector? Got a screwdriver? And we’ll also need a wrench and a pair of pliers.” Fred and I climbed over the railing of the spiral staircase leading to the upper cabin in the forehead of the “guppy” shaped aircraft. I straddled the railing with one leg and passed him the tools with one hand while I directed his activities with a flourish of the wine glass held in my other hand. The projection cabinet swallowed his head and arms—sounds of banging and drunken expletives echoed inside the projector cabinet before mumbled out into the cabin. Eventually, a hand emerged holding a bunch of machine screws, washers, and several sprocketed film rollers for me to take. Fred continued working inside the enclosure—then, he asked me to hand him the items he had taken out, one by one…somehow, he managed to get all the rollers back in place and aligned properly—there were no unnecessary parts left over. He nodded to me. “All right. Turn it on,” I told the head flight attendant—I held my breath…whrrrrrrrrr…the movie appeared, as the film strip began to thread its way slowly toward the back of the aircraft. A cheer and applause bellowed forth from the first-class section. A few minutes later, the less fortunate hoi polloi traveling in tourist class, saw the reason for the jubilant uproar—they also clapped. I slumped back in the luxurious leather-covered seat and savored my glass of Rhone wine—all the demands of the past week drained out of my bloodstream and vanished slowly from my thoughts. I slept in a sound stupor for several hours on the way back to L.A. “Why don’t you build a full-scale mockup of the FAA air-traffic control suite for the Navy League show?” I said, waiting for the suggestion to sink in before adding. “Exocor will make the entire mock-up.” Then I threw in the kicker. “And a working prototype of the ultrahigh-resolution FAA display.” I spoke with confidence, as any good salesperson must. I had no idea how we would do it; but my trump card was, they did not know how to do it either! The members of my Exocor team agreed to take on the job and we completed the work in time for the Navy League show.

Steve Thomaseas, the president of Gould Aerospace was beaming as he walked over with the Secretary of the FAA: “I want you to meet Michael Smith, president of Exocor Technology—a key part of the Gould corporate team. His company created the concept for the common console and developed our ultrahigh-resolution display. Mike is fantastic—the best at what he does.” I smiled and shook the Secretary’s hand, feeling proud of the remark, but I doubted that Thomaseas really knew what I did, because I didn’t know myself. What I did know, was how close we came to failure. 

DIGITOUCH LIMO CONTROL SYSTEM Exocor Technology evolved into a commercial manufacturing venture where we developed and manufactured a line of digital electronic control systems for the stretch limousine industry, with customers all over the United States from California to New York. We set up one of our control systems on a table in Kelly’s booth, in prominent view to demonstrate our new, copywrite ‘Digitouch’ control system. A poster rising at the back of the table showed the picture of a limousine with highlighted pictures of the various functions we would control. Our complete system was hooked up—the membrane switch control panel connected to the computer, which was connected to the relay board; the wiring harness plugged into the relay board and wires ran to each of the highlighted limo functions on the poster.

Vinny called me from Dillinger Limousine Company in Long Island, New York. “Got a customer here says the fuckin’ moonroof opens by itself. Guy’s really pissed…” “…That’s impossible—must have been screwing around with the control panel.” I said. “Who’s the customer?” “Big limo fleet in Manhattan. There’s this young couple on a hot date—fuckin’ storm going on outside, and the goddam moonroof opens up right in the middle of Central Park…fuckin mind of its own, or sumpin. Party in the back’s getting fuckin drenched. Water in their champagne. Ruined her ball gown. Washed out their love making. Want their money back and a new wardrobe. You gotta fix dis right away! It’s your fuckin system.” Over the next three months, every one of my customers cancelled their orders, and our sales declined precipitously. A huge inventory of worthless wiring harnesses, printed circuit boards, membrane switches, overlays, automotive relays and fuses, and boxes of computer controllers and other electronic components piled up in the back room. I wore my black pin-stripe suit with a red paisley tie. What could I say this time? I dreaded making my quarterly report. “It might take six months—I need you to extend the loan for another year. Our cash flow will recover by then, and we can continue paying down the loan.” He was silent for a long time before answering—a mask of sadness came over his face. “I’m terribly sorry, Mike. I went out on a limb for you last time when we extended your loan. But now, I have no choice but to call the loan.” I could not think of any clever way to break the news to Suzanne. “Honey, the bank called the Exocor loan. We’ll have to mortgage the house to pay it off.” The party had gone on long enough. It was time for me to make the announcement. I lowered my glass and looked across the room at Suzanne. “I’m sad to announce that Suzanne and I have grown irreconcilably apart over the years…we have decided to go our separate ways and live separate lives.” My knees shiver forlornly against the chill. The thirty-year melodrama is over. I am Odysseus musing over the ruins of Troy; gathering my wits after the devastation of that interminable war, hoping for a favorable wind, excited and scared about the new adventures—the pleasures and delights, the hardships, and calamities, that will surely befall me on my long journey to find an Ithaca.

 CALIFORNIA LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY  As fortune would have it, my limo venture’s failure led me to becoming a physics professor and heading the physics program at California Lutheran University, mastering, and teaching the entire undergraduate physics curriculum. My breathing quickened, and I tried to swallow, but a tightness constricted my throat. I struggled to bury the fearful thoughts that kept popping out of the surface of my mind like a boiling cauldron full of lye…I didn’t know anything! How could I teach all those physics subjects…QUANTUM MECHANICS? Physics foremost, Obedience to our calling, Determination to learn, and Integrity above all—I chose the four guiding precepts, so the acronym spelled out the Greek word ΠΩΔΙ, foot, The Flying Foot Society. The exclusive physics club I had created for the calculus-based students and the physics majors was an amalgam of a social fraternity and a professional society. “Does the Dean know about this?” One student asked. “Of course not! It’s a secret society—we’ll have a secret handshake and meet in clandestine places, just like a college social fraternity. “I think PODI should enter a float in the homecoming day parade,” a girl said. I spoke out. “Let’s build a flying foot.” I was thinking of Hermes, Zeus’s winged messenger.

A concealed student pulled on the rope attached to the lever bar and made the hinged wings flat up and down—ΠΩΔΙ, our giant flying foot with wings flapping at the ankle. The wings flapped perfectly as we flew past the reviewing stand. Homecoming at California Lutheran University had become our tradition. At the next homecoming, the horse’s head was a comical caricature of Einstein with a tousled gray mane and mustache—actually, a caricature of my own curly, gray hair and mustache. I turned out the room lights and focused the lens a little better…wow! The projected image of Einstein the Horse was sharp on the cardboard screen at the front of the lab—Einstein and Dr. Smith made a handsome horse. I made two of them, one for each side of the float. “Okay, here’s how I want you to paint the horses,” I said. I watched while the students finished painting the horses’ bodies—just as I imagined they would look in my fantasy…horses of a different color. “Hey, those horses look great!” It took me about an hour to paint the details of Einstein’s face and the mane on the two horses, using black paint with a small, artist’s brush—I swirled the curly bangs that hung down the forehead, and curled the flowing mane; the thick grey mustache hung over Einstein’s curled upper lip above the full-toothed smiling equus mouth. I stood back and admired my work…yes! That’s a great caricature!

Amanda laughed. “Dr. Smith, the horses look just like you.”

Dean Pamina took a page out of the folder and placed it on the desk in front of me. “Look at these student evaluations from your physics 101 class last semester—they are way below the average.” No wonder they could not deal with physics—breast-fed on a regimen of memorization and multiple-choice exams and never taking a course that requires logical thought; they never learned how to think! My own faculty position was being advertised and would be filled by someone else in less than a year from now…fuckin’ Pamina. I had to resign after 6 years because I was stressing out the liberal arts students, trying to make them learn physics! An image of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing of Salome danced in my brain—Ludhefish is the lascivious demon who choreographed the dance and who plays the music; while Pamina, flaunting her hermaphroditic sexuality, drools with her ultimate power over the faculty’s souls—she holds my severed head by her manicured fingers, while a garden of fresh candidates awaits her relentless vendetta. Judas Fang, one of my own colleagues who had turned against me and cast the traitorous vote, is unaware he is the next victim to be ripped out of the University’s hallowed ground.

IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME We were at the closing of the Intersection Cafe on New Year’s Eve in 1985. Shortly thereafter, several of the members started a new Greek dancing club in Pasadena called Kypseli, which means beehive in Greek. I started dancing at Kypseli at that time. In the ensuing years, I attended numerous Greek dance seminars in the U.S., and became sufficiently proficient to become one of the dance teachers at Kypseli. 

When I became a physics professor at California Lutheran University, I acquired the benefit of three months’ vacation during the summer, a luxury I had never enjoyed during my twenty-five years of working in industry. I discovered a laser research laboratory in Crete that welcomed my unpaid services for a month each summer, in return for which they provided me with living accommodations in a hotel or apartment. I became a private tour leader and took friends on organized two-week tours to various regions of Greece, so I could get a free airline ticket for myself and help defray the cost of being in Greece for the summer. I also attended dance seminars when I was in Greece during the summer so I could continue to learn new dances that I would teach when I got back to the U. S.

 FOUNDATION OF RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS (FORTH) I visited the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) in Crete, Greece. Stratis pointed to an optical apparatus with a glowing crystal rod placed between mirrors. “I’m developing a Q-switched YAG laser.” “We have a contract from the Greek Government to clean the years of dark stain from the marble surfaces of the west frieze of the Parthenon, in the ancient Acropolis of Athens. We have done some preliminary experiments, and it appears that an extremely short laser pulse, either in the green or in the ultraviolet can safely ablate a thin surface layer without damaging the underlying painting, or the marble substrate.” “I’ve been developing a diode pumped YAG laser for a company in L.A, and I may be able to borrow one and bring it next summer.” “Really! You could help me a lot.” Stratis looked like a young kid who had just been given a new bicycle. I was elated. This was my ticket to Crete, and to work at the lab next year.

The optical apparatus with the YAG crystal rod placed between mirrors was still where it was a year ago, when I helped Stratis develop his Q-switched YAG laser. It did not look like he had made much progress since I left last summer. Stratis was sitting at his desk waiting for me. “Michael, I’m so glad to see you. I’m excited about working with you on the laser project. I think using a diode pumped YAG laser for the source will work much better than the flash lamp pumped approach. So glad you’re able to bring the diode pump.”

ARCHANGEL MICHAEL I had this image of myself as being like the Archangel Michael—he was a rogue Archangel, first the defender of Heaven, and then of the world, smiting things and probably having his way with the women. I wanted an ikon of the Archangel Michael to keep as a reminder of what my ideal should be, so I commissioned Antonis to paint one for me. Each afternoon, when I got back to the hotel from working at FORTH, I stopped by the studio to check on the progress of my icon. Antonis leaned back and admired his painting. The finished face of the Archangel had the soft contours of a woman’s, but the eyes were intense with a worried look—the eyebrows knitted together in a slight frown. His long brown hair was braided across the front of his forehead and gathered at the nape of his neck with a red decorated ribbon that curled out on both sides of his face.

Archangel Michael has an awesome responsibility—protector of the world; and yet, he presents the soft face of a vulnerable woman. It is hard being an archon, always testing myself to find out if I can prevail in my career, always hiding my fears and weaknesses because that would have frightened those I loved. Sometimes, I wished I could share my fears and uncertainties with a woman; but then, she might ridicule me. At least, a man is permitted to frown, just as the Archangel is frowning…I’ve got to be strong enough to prevail!

 OLYMPOS The bus to Olympos waited for the arriving passengers, on a road around the corner from the waterfront. The bus descended slowly toward the western side. The transportation bureaucracy must have had a field-day with this one—first the boat-ride up the eastern coast, then the bus trek across to the opposite, western side of the island. Why didn’t they just take us around to the western side in the first place? Suddenly, an ephemeral village materialized in the distance across the gaping canyon…

I marveled at the decrepit windmill near us with its cloth sails rotating about its axis—a giant pinwheel like I had made as a child. The constant wind pouring over the ridge from the Mediterranean Sea far below filled the sails.

A wizened, old woman with deep creases in her leathery, windblown face and dressed in a black caftan, squinted intently up at the rotating sails. Suddenly, she grabbed the rustic mast arm of one of the eight sails as it swung past. Her feet almost lifted off the ground—suspended by the sail like a child dragged aloft by an errant kite string in a sudden windstorm. Her black-slippers slid across the scattered gravel on the ground, but the tiny woman held on and dragged the giant wind-wheel to a halt. She trimmed the jib sail with the rope attached to the billowing end, then let it fly from her hands to resume its rounds.

I worked all afternoon on the sign. Finally finished. I signed my initials at the bottom right-hand corner and dated it, MRS ‘93, then stood back and admired my original artwork…that really looks good! “Bravo, Michali,” Vasilis said. He sawed off the extra length of board with a carpenter’s saw. “Come, now we put up the sign.” Vasilis picked up a hammer and nails; and together, we carried the six-foot sign up the winding pathway from the pension. Past the small square, to a building on the lane I had passed with the villagers on the way to the graduation ceremony, just before we got to the windmills.

This sign is now part of the heritage of Olympos.

THE QUANTUM ISLANDS Another school year at California Lutheran University had ended, and I had come again to Greece. It was Friday, and my week on the island of Paros had ended. I had made a lot of progress studying quantum mechanics, but I was still struggling with the meaning of the uncertainty relationships that arose because variables, such as momentum and position did not commute. The ferryboat would take me to Naxos. I shuddered at the thought—not much time left, and so much more studying and work to do before my lecture notes were ready. Well, I had written the lecture notes for the optics course last year during that week on the island of Kea. So, I could do it again—except, I had understood optics because I worked in that field my entire career, but I did not know crap about quantum mechanics—the basic concepts were bizarre and counterintuitive. How can a particle be in every possible state at the same time? Or interact with another particle that was not even there yet? High above my head, stars rained down through the huge, marble portico of Apollos’ temple that framed the sky. The stars passed through the rectangular entry and transformed into silver minnows—flying fish plopping like shooting stars down onto the wet rocks at my feet, arching their bodies and flopping about on the slippery surface. The equations flashed through my mind, simple in their complexity—the motion of the stars transformed mathematically into the momenta of the silver minnows, which could be expressed in terms of the minnow’s position basis-states. The amplitude for a star to transform into a minnow was just the amplitude of the star’s momentum vector projected onto the complex, momentum state-vector of the minnow. The Milky Way flooded across the sky above me; it was still night, and the surf surged and crashed against the rocks on the shore every ten seconds. The moist air clung against my forehead and cheeks like a wet spider web. I looked at my watch…a little after midnight. I must have been asleep for several hours…crap, it was all a stupid dream.

  LASER INTERFEROMETRIC GRAVITYWAVE OBSERVATORY (LIGO) Only one more day to prepare for my interview with the Caltech LIGO scientists—I would never understand enough about the theory of general relativity in time for the interview. I closed the book and dropped it down on the sofa table, then slumped back into the sofa. This was hopeless—Kip Thorn, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech; and Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton, had spent their entire careers studying this stuff…who the hell did I think I was? He called me a few days later. “Mike thanks for taking your time to come to the interview. We had several qualified applicants, and it was a tough decision. After a careful review of your qualifications and your previous experience in the electrooptic field, and the qualifications of the other candidates, the hiring committee has decided…” …Shit, I knew it was too good to be true; damn technical director had blackballed me. The other candidates probably had more recent experience. “…that you will be an excellent addition to the LIGO team. The committee was especially impressed with your extreme versatility. They felt confident that you could help them on almost any task they required. They want you to start immediately.”

“Mike,” Jordan, the head of the optics group, said. “Stan wants you to lead the Core Optics Support (COS) task…there’s a lot of optical stuff you’ll have to design inside the vacuum chamber of the interferometer—baffles and beam dumps to block and catch the scattered light and stray light beams and keep them from adding phase noise to the gravity-wave signal of the interferometer, pick-off mirrors to sample a portion of the interferometer beam at various locations to be used for pointing and positioning the interferometer mirrors, and telescopes to reduce the size of the pick-off beams before they exit the vacuum chamber through a vacuum window. This is a new subsystem that no one’s thought much about until now. It’ll be your job to define what all these optical support items should be—and then design and build them.” An orphan task with an undefined scope—here I go again…hired to do something I know nothing about. A shudder ran through my body. I took charge of mitigating stray light and developing all the auxiliary optical systems needed to control the 2 ? mile long laser interferometer. Rai Weiss, his hair glinting like a fine spider’s web in the room light—as silver-gray as my own, looked down at the piece of paper where he had been making some calculations as I spoke…studying the numbers for a while, and then shaking his head and frowning. “I think you have overstated the scattered light noise in the output port. You should have gotten a displacement noise of about 1 x 10-22 meters per root hertz,” he said. My answer’s a hundred times larger. Where had I gone wrong? Where…I glanced around the room, and my eyes focused on the telescope pointing out the window…that’s It! Rai had ignored the effect of the beam-reducing telescope! Rai wrote down some more numbers on the paper. Then he looked up and smiled. “You’re right. I should have remembered that the radiance of the beam is an optical invariant. When you decrease the cross-sectional area of the beam with the telescope, the solid angle increases—it’s a fundamental energy-conservation law of physics.” His bushy eyebrows raised. “Yes, you are within a factor of two of my estimates…that’s close enough.” I was in awe of this man. It had taken me weeks of computer calculations to obtain my answer, yet Rai had calculated approximately the same result on a piece of scrap paper in a few minutes.

Four years since I started COS, not even knowing what a beam dump was—the job LIGO hired me to do was essentially over. All the baffles, the beam dumps, the pick-off mirrors, and the telescopes I had worked so hard to design, manufacture, and install at the sites were performing according to design. The National Science Foundation (NSF) knew that initial LIGO would barely be able to detect a benchmark gravity-wave—the coalescence of two neutron stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy, or in our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy, and planned to fund the complete redesign of LIGO, with a bigger laser, better seismic isolation, and quadruple pendulum suspensions for the mirrors to increase the sensitivity for detecting gravity-waves by ten times, called advanced LIGO (aLIGO). We could look out ten times farther into the vast universe within a volume of space one thousand times greater than before and see gravity-waves coming from hundreds of galaxies that were as far as three hundred million light-years away. The construction funds for aLIGO were not expected until 2008. What was I gonna do ‘till then? Maybe Dennis could get me a job at Livingston, LA. I did not want to go to Hanford, WA; it was too desolate.

 ROMANZA EN VERACRUZ--An Evening of Latin Love Songs Ever since I had visited Veracruz and Tlacotalpan, Mexico, the home of Agustin Lara, I had it in my bucket list to perform a solo concert featuring the nostalgic Latin songs of my childhood written by Agustin Lara in the 30’s and 40’s, and by Ernest Lecuona from Havana in the 30’s. This was the era of Xavier Cugat and Carmen Miranda. Lara was known as El Flaco, the thin one. That fit my description too.

I hired a group of studio musicians to back me up for my Veracruz concert—a guitarist, a percussionist, and a keyboardist. Wendy would do the piano accompaniment. An experienced sound technician set up the mikes and speakers.

MAKING OF RAINBOW FACE An intense pressure filled the room and pressed against my chest…I breathed with long, slow breaths to avoid the feeling of panic that threatened to make me hyperventilate. There was no more time! Tomorrow I would make my technical presentation to TAMA, the Japanese experimental gravity-wave interferometer. And the next morning would be Saturday…on the bullet train to Kyoto, where I would propose to Lorraine. The poem had to be finished tonight. What had happened last night? The ink was bleeding. What did I do wrong? That didn’t happen when I drew on the white computer paper…yes, now I remember, the characters started getting sharper and clearer the more I continued to draw…that’s it! The brush needs to be drier for the rice paper! Thank goodness, I had bought a second plaque. I dragged the brush repeatedly over a piece of white computer paper until it was almost dry; then, I took a deep breath and poised the brush above my last plaque…I touched the tip of the brush to the beginning of the first character. My hand, with a mind of its own, pressed the brush down to broaden the line as it curved and then lifted gently, feathering the arching stroke into thin air. Wheeough…I let out my breath. The character was perfect! And now, down the last column to the final character…only one more character to go! Please don’t screw up now! I touched the brush against the paper and danced the last character…just one more movement; my fingers lifted the brush with a final flourish, feathering the final stroke…I DID IT! I laid the brush down on the table—exhausted…my mind and body limp from the emotional and physical effort…my body drained…breathless. It was beautiful, at least to my untrained American eye.

Tanaka-san, the director of the observatory, was a real calligrapher. He handed the poem back to me…the corners of his smile faded, and his slanted eyes drooped with a look of melancholia. “The poem is very beautiful,” he said with a husky voice. “A touching, love story. And your calligraphy.” His eyes opened wide with surprise. “Amazing. Are you sure you are a westerner? It is better than most Japanese.”

 “Do you see the rainbow?” She pointed toward the little pagoda temple on the rise beyond the trees. The afternoon sun dazzled the atomized water droplets from the creek below, and a child’s rainbow poured out of the mountain and arched across the sky toward Kyoto in prismatic radiance, painting the distant fairy-tale pagoda like the stained-glass window of a fantastic cathedral. Her rainbow face glowed with the same pastel colors. Her wavy hair gleamed with a mature elegance, intertwined with gray highlights hidden among the natural auburn…childlike, smooth skin—a legacy of Bohemian beauties. I had made a pencil drawing of her pretty face several years before.

“Something good is going to happen.” She looked at me and smiled, squeezing my hand; then turned away to watch the rainbow, caressing the tops of my fingers with her own fingertips in an absent-minded, nervous way. The wedding ceremony took place inside the regal fireplace room of Caltech’s Athenaeum.

Lorraine and I walked down the aisle together and gave each other away in April 2002.

NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS 2017  Dave Reitze the current Director of LIGO called me at home in January 2016 and asked if I wanted to be included as a co-author on the historic scientific paper that was about to be announced and published in Physical Review Letters; GW151226: “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger.” Oh my god! We did it! Of course, I wanted to be included as a coauthor…they could not have detected a gravity-wave without me! My seventeen years’ contribution would finally be acknowledged! The gravity-wave signals detected first at Livingston (L1) and 7 milliseconds later at Hanford (H1), within the speed of light travel time between the two sites, are shown in the top row of the figure above. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017—with one half to Rainer Weiss, LIGO/ VIRGO Collaboration, and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne, LIGO/ VIRGO Collaboration. Prize amount: 9 million Swedish kronor (approx. $1.1 million). On Sunday evening, Dec 10, 2017, we gathered in the banquet hall of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm to watch a live videocast of the Nobel Prize awards ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

The success of LIGO was made possible by the many unheralded little turtles that worked in obscurity at the bottom of the pond to design and build the LIGO detectors at the two sites—Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA. We held up the three luminaries on our backs atop the LIGO pyramid, rising higher than the moon and basking in the brilliance of their Nobel prize glory…they should be thankful that, unlike Dr. Seuss’ littlest turtle Mac at the bottom of the pond, we didn’t burp!

Each step along my way, I was constantly diverted into some branching pathway, other than the one I had consciously chosen. In retrospect, my entire life has been a living, breathing, walking, and talking case of quantum entanglement. You will discover that fact for yourself as you read this account of my extraordinary life. 

Figure 1: Michael’s First Birthday-Reaching for the Cake

Remember that time you snatched Sing’s crutches and pushed up the hook to get out the screen door? You ran as fast as your little legs could carry you, down to the company swimming pool. Your Jamaican nursemaid finally caught up with you and grabbed you just as you were taking off your little cowboy boots, with the tiny holsters in the sides for the tiny guns, before jumping into the deep end of the pool.

Figure 4: Michael Wearing His Little Boots

The first thing I remember in my life was opening the screen window and sticking out the barrel of my Dad’s 22-gauge rifle…BAM…BAM…BAM. I fired three live rounds into the grassy embankment in the back yard of our home in Golfito, Costa Rica. I was four years old.

The Second World War was raging when we lived in Golfito, Costa Rica. We had blackouts every night; Japanese subs were in the nearby ocean waters. The U.S. Pacific Submarine Force (SUBPAC), based in San Diego, California patrolled for enemy submarines up and down the Pacific coast and would put into Golfito harbor to recharge their batteries.

Figure 7: WW2 Tender Ship with Submarines in Golfito Harbor

One of the submariners invited me aboard the USS Barracuda. He let me look out through the raised periscope across at the other submarines anchored in the bay and at the United Fruit Company banana boats docked at the big wharf. Afterwards, he gave me a sailor’s cap as a souvenir.

Figure 8: WWII Submariner Boy

I had taught myself to play the button accordion and was featured along with my friend Peter Heinz at one of the school performances.

Figure 14: Mike Performing on the Button Accordion

Ever since the age of six, I built model airplanes and always knew I would be an aeronautical engineer.

Figure 17: Building Model Airplanes in Guatemala

I took flying lessons in Guatemala when I was eleven; but my dad, wisely, would not let me solo, although I was ready.

Figure 18: Flying Lessons at Age Eleven in Guatemala