Rare Earth

I took my wife to visit a friend, Dan, when we were newlyweds. He was a strategist at heart and by vocation. Strategists do not plan wars so much anymore. Absent feudalism and fiefdoms there are too few sovereignties to go around. Modern strategists go into marketing, corporate take-overs, and other such private-sector pursuits. Dan called himself a marketer, though his real expertise was probably chess, at which he'd beaten me and all my friends countless times at church picnics.

Dan was enraptured and quite indistractable when we arrived. He had purchased a set of rare-earth magnets and was experimenting with them. Dan had a deep curiosity about the world, and "rare earth magnets" is exactly the kind of eBay product title that reels in Dans from every corner of the world.

Dan asked his wife to bring the orange juice. She left the quaint living room where my wife and I were sitting on an overly soft couch from the previous decade. We were all crouched over a couple of jewelry boxes. He kept one magnet in each. As he opened the little, white boxes, Dan explained that two times he's had to pry the magnets apart, using different high-leverage apparati.

Dan's wife returned with a quart carton of Tropicana and a wide, glass tumbler. Dan requested she pour half a glass and swirl it. While she nursed the drink, Dan put the magnets on either side of the cup and began his pitchman's patter. I can't remember all of what he said. A marketer like Dan will cite five market studies, four chemical formulas, three journal articles, two laws of physics, and a partridge in a pear tree all within two minutes. The goal of the patter is at once to educate, mystify, amd mesmerize. I was right with Dan in the moment and my bride seemed to be, too. We were watching the little orange vortex, waiting for the punch line.

At last, the big reveal: Dan asked me to take a drink of the juice. I obliged... and wanted to ask how old it was. Dan continued earning his salesmanship badge: "Didn't you just get that out of the fridge?," he asked his mate. She nodded. "Does that taste fresh to you?," he queried me. "No," I replied, very honestly. "What's the expiration date on that juice, honey?" I expected bad news. Sure enough, the juice was as fresh as Florida juice in California ever could be. It had at least a week to go. The juice was not warm or even tepid. It just tasted old, and none of us seemed to know why.

Dan repeated the experiment with a fresh tomato slice. Swirling a tomato is difficult. Dan swirled the magnets around it instead in a bicycle-pedaling motion. This time Dan's patter was about the "control" aspect of scientific experimentation. He had forgotten to give me a taste of the good juice, so this time he would let me taste both slices of the tomato. I am not certain, but I believe my wife may have been drinking some of the good juice while Dan shoved me a sample of the good tomato. As a Californian, I truly enjoy oranges, but as a Sacramentan, I love tomatos. The garden tomato slice Dan gave me to test first was lovely. My mouth thought the second, the swirled one, was three weeks old. It wasn't mushy yet, but the flavor was dead: the acidity diminished and the aroma extinct.

Enjoying fresh juice and tomatoes, we volleyed theories about the flavor change and uses for this new technology. The ripening of fruit? The softening of water? Curing diseases? The potential grew like the greatest of fantasy worlds. We didn't even know what it was, but it was something. Dan was familiar with patent law from previous ventures and couldn't wait to hit UCDavis and other local schools to buy some cheap research with venture capital. The intermediate steps are what usually derail a discovery. Well, that and mortality. Dan took a million secrets with him.

Thoughts collude. They gang up on a few people. They use certain minds as a thoroughfare and others feel left out. Best to pass them on as soon as you can. The next one might be better--earth-shattering, even--so don't covet your ideas. Who would have thought that we would learn to cut matter with light? Share the light and define a new world.