Address of Pak Smith At The DCBC

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA November 18th, 2178

I have been asked many times how I developed the mathematics that led to the ability to receive sound from Before. The most honest answer is, “I do not know.” Looking back at my thesis today it is as if it were written by a different hand, and in a sense it was. This answer would lead to an unsatisfying lecture, and as the Parkinson’s and Carnegie Foundations have thoroughly satisfied our appetites with this most excellent dinner I would have failed to return the favor. So while keeping in mind that this lecture is to some degree my fantasy, I dare say my fantasy on the subject of that celebrated mathematics is as good as anyone’s and better than most. So let us begin.

Begin at the very beginning. I was born the son of Pak Sung Je and Howard Smith. My parents as mathematicians were opposed to the practice of hyphenation of last names as this would lead to exponential growth. Should a Sackville-Gutman marry a Lewis-Baggins then their children to avoid slighting any grandparent must be Sackville-Gutman-Lewis-Baggins. You see the problem: family names would grow without bound. My parents came up with a solution which solved this difficulty in our particular case, though unfortunately not generalizable. In Korea the family name comes first, in the West it is last. So I was christened Pak Smith. In Korea my family name was Pak, in the West it was Smith. At the earliest possible moment I was introduced to the idea that the same thing could be quite different from different points of view yet somehow also the same both ways. I have never known any other life.

In my earliest youth we lived in a coastal town in California. I learned that the Pacific coast ran north-south, a basic fact. But no one bothered to tell me that our town was on a bay in which the coast ran east-west. By the time I discovered the truth it was too late, the directions were inerasably fixed in my brain. I had to learn to adjust. When I moved to the east coast of the United States to attend college to have the ocean to the east instead of the west was disorienting. It all came to a head one day on a visit to Provincetown, which is on the end of a cape and almost completely surrounded by ocean. The ocean was to the west, north, and east and the mainland to the west. I felt as though my head would explode. It was most uncomfortable. Then I recalled in my home town a similar peninsula, though smaller. There the ocean was to the east, south, and west, with the mainland to the east. That was comfortably familiar. I imagined that I was looking up from inside the Earth. This reversed east and west. Next there was a mirror above the earth and I was looking at life through that. As long as I was lying on my back with axis east-west this would reverse north and south. I was able to orient myself comfortably in this way. This quickly became an unconscious process that I carry to this day.

There was one more thing of this nature. Early in my life my parents noticed that my choice of clothing was somehow different. The colors I chose to where looked quite strange to them and seemingly everyone else. This brought attention that made me very uncomfortable. They wisely took me to a doctor Hyram Weiss who quite quickly and cleverly discovered that my color sense was reversed. Red was violet, orange was purple, yellow was blue. The only color I had in common with the remainder of mankind was green. Dr. Weiss showed me how to use my computer to reverse the colors of images. At first these looked strange and ugly to me but with study I learned to mentally reverse the colors so I could see how the world looked to other people. Then when I chose clothing and automobiles and such I could chose combinations pleasing to others. I would find a combination that I liked then buy the reverse. Though it looked strange to me, in this way others would see what I had seen. This seemed fair, since while I was wearing the clothes I could not see them but they had no choice. I still have some rooms in my house for work and relaxation that I decorate in my natural way, though my wife Anne makes certain that the doors to these rooms are locked whenever company comes. [Laughter.]

My graduate thesis was on a possible geometry that might allow coherent sound to be transmitted from the Local Cosmic Microwave Background, the LCMB. It was a difficult problem in that while light is outside of time and does not age, sound is a physical thing and ages quickly. Others before me had realized that if the sound could be converted to light near the source things would be much easier. With the invaluable assistance of Dr. M. S. E. Kidd [some polite applause, as he was present] a device was placed thusly. But transmission was unusably faint, practically indetectable. There were fundamental difficulties. My thinking was of the space between two worlds, between our world and the world of Before, which to myself I called Between. How would these worlds look from within Between? The smallest might be largest and largest smallest. The main difficulty was that there was so many ways in which this could be. I resorted to the time-honored custom of the pure guess. That and Dr, Hawking’s celebrated story of the drunk who looks for his keys near the street light because it is too dark to see in the place where he dropped them. [Polite laughter.]

There was one more lucky thing. The problem could be seen as to how to amplify or collect the waves. Kindly recall that small and unusual peninsula known from my youth that aided me that day in Provincetown. The geometry of this peninsula had a unique ability to amplify the waves of the ocean. Ocean waves are essentially the same as sound waves but can travel very large distances. In developing my mathematics I held this peninsula in mind, how to induce something like that in the Between. Or more like there was the one peninsula in Before and the other in our world. Or that both of these things are happening, in opposition or isolation or conjunction or possibly all or none of these things. As you can see, I cannot say that I truly understand it today, or even that I ever did. [There was a pause while Dr. Smith drank from a glass of water.] I would have you know that many mathematicians at least as clever as I studied this problem and their ability may well have been greater. I owe my success largely to luck and to a hard-won ability to see from other points of view, upside down and backwards in a mirror being my way of life in a sense. If things had been only slightly different it may have been they standing here addressing you today. If Klaus Veerman [polite applause, as he was also present] and others had not believed in what I had done, things might have been very different as well.

In close let me say that I do not believe anyone could have learned the essence of my methods here today, since I do not myself truly understand them. Nor do I think that all funding should go to the most unusual ideas, since I have seen many such come and go without success. But I would like to humbly note that should a young person come up to you with an idea that is upside down and backwards with a twist or two or three, perhaps with stripes and polka dots that move and change colors in some strange but somehow lawful way…. [Pause.]

That is all I have to say. Thank you so very much. [Loud applause and whistling.]

---

Dr. Pak Smith received his doctorate in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in 2149. After some years at Rice University he became a professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He and his wife Anne Mullis Smith reside in Soquel, California, close to Pleasure Point where they met.during a surfing competition. Anne Smith, granddaughter of Nobel laureate Carey Mullis, is a former junior sectional champion in figure skating, an avid dancer, and surfs still. Of the sport of surfing says Dr. Smith, “My back can’t take it anymore.”

See more at http://www.billybunt.webs.com/
and http://www.soundclick.com/masonclub