Hjem

My name is H. Frank Gaertner. The young woman shown below on the book's back cover is Sally Reynolds, a fictional character whose water-color image pretty well matches my imagination for an 18 to 21-year-old, literary-foil. Sally Reynolds is also the main character in Sally and the Magic River, a fictional story about a 10-year-old who has a tragic experience. Such an experience happened to me at age 10. The result of our individual tragedies led both of us to live lives filled with magic. As over 1000 reviews on Good Reads confirm, Sally and the Magic River is wonderful and made even more so by its presentation on Audible.com. How so? It's narrated by the magnificent, story-telling voice of Rebekah Nemethy. It took a while, but I now understand why Sally and the Magic River was so dear and easy for me to write. Many events in the story reminded me of my own story. Over the years, Sally has become more real for me, especially now at my age of 86. You will learn in Photons Don't Glow, i.e., the book you now hold, how our attempts to understand consciousness have taken Sally and me on a fantastic mental trip. For example, the following has been made obvious. With rare exceptions, each of us humans is, in effect, neural-inked to a second conscious being! We each have two cerebral hemispheres. It's like we have two interconnected people living within us. Each hemisphere has its own domain of experience. For example, my left hemisphere, which I like to call Sally, controls my right hand, plays the piano by ear, and remembers most everything my right hemisphere has forgotten. Interesting, isn't it?

The object I'm holding in the picture above is my version of the nucleus of an atom, i.e., the one that makes up the largest alkali metal in the periodic table of elements. I assembled its 87 protons and 136 neutrons using nothing but fabric tape and ping-pong balls. I show in volume two of Our Self-Assembling Universe how one can construct all of the atomic nuclei in the periodic table this way. This fun method of assembly was used to introduce the basics of nuclear physics to over 300 8^th-graders. However, as was made abundantly clear, such models only help one's initial grasp of quantum reality with its fields of force, forcefields, photons, light, perturbations of virtual particles and antiparticles in empty space, and, therefrom, manifestations of quarks et al.