Clifford A. Pickover - Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves

I thank Mark Nandor, Dennis Gordon, Lon Richardson, Teja Krasek, Jamie Forbes, David Jay Brown, Graham Cleverley, Pete Barnes, Steven Andersen, and members of the Clifford Pickover Think Tank for useful comments and suggestions:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CliffordPickover/

Robert Hendricksons The Literary Life is an excellent source of anecdotes on the subject of books, authors, and publishers. Many of the Einstein quotations come from Alice Calaprices The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Information on Marcel Proust comes from diverse sources such as Stephane Heuets graphic novels on Prousts works, Roger Shattucks Prousts Way , Edmund Whites Marcel Proust , and Alain de Bottons How Proust Can Change Your Life . Other influential books, such as those that discuss the psychoactive compound DMT and uncommon psychiatric disorders, are listed in the Further Reading section at the end of this book.

In which we encounter zombie recipes, the dream fish of Norfolk Island, hallucinogenic worm intestines, fugu sushi, Homer Simpson, the larval beings of William Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, parallel universes, ayahuasca, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, the Leather Man, the Malalis Indians, grilled fugu sperm, mushroom-loving reindeer, iboga, the instinct to alter consciousness, Christian Ratsch, Wernher von Braun, Kip Thorne, Carl Sagan, The Lobotomy Club the overlap of science fiction and science, and personal anecdotes of my childhood and home town of Shrub Oak, New York.

My Life in a Nutshell

Shrub Oak is only an hour north of New York City, but it might as well be in an entirely different universe. The town has little pollution, no skyscrapers, few honking horns. The pride and joy of Shrub Oak is its bucolic Main Streetwith the elegant John C. Hart Memorial Library, cottage-style homes, and landscaping with meandering pathways, benches, water fountains, and narrow ivy-covered passageways between quaint stores. Ive always been happy here. Much of this book results from notes I have made while walking down Main Street.

I first became interested in mystical experiences and warped realities while eating sushi and contemplating psychedelic worm intestines. Lets discuss the psychedelic worms in a moment, because first I would like to tell you about my childhood and where I live today.

I was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1957. At that time, my father worked at the Bendix plant in Eatontown on Highway 35. A year after I was born, he got a job at Fort Monmouth where he became the chief of a department of the Communication Electronic Communication Command (CECOM). His team was responsible for designing electronic equipment as well as placing and monitoring military-contractor programs. My mother taught first grade in local schools. My one sibling, Larry, is two years younger than I. He still lives in New Jersey and is a brilliant gastroenterologist. He spends his days placing long, snaking tubes into peoples rectums.

My childhood was happy, conventional, and middle class. We lived in a small house in Shorecrest, New Jersey, just a few blocks away from Highway 35. I remember our split-level home at 39 Richard Terrace and the nearby Bodman Park where I used to play. Both parents helped me with my homework as I grew upmy dad worked with me on mathematics, and my mom helped me with presentations and posters. My father also continually drew mazes for me to solve with pencil and paper.

I fondly recall watching the old black-and-white Outer Limits and Chiller Theater shows on Saturday-night TV, which featured such notables as Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman and Attack of the Crab Monsters. (For film buffs, Crab Monsters was made in 1957 for $70,000, and grossed approximately $1 million, making it Roger Cormans most profitable picture of the period.) Oh God! I can still remember the scenes in which scientists discover a pair of giant crabs mutated by atomic tests on a remote island.

After second grade at Fairview Elementary School, we moved to a bigger home in Ocean Township, New Jersey, where I later completed high school with a class rank of 2. From there, I went to Franklin & Marshall College, graduating with a class rank of 1 in three years. Ever onward, I went to Yale University, where, in 1982, I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. The impressive Yale name was useful to gain peoples respect later in life, but the actual education I got at the smaller Franklin & Marshall College was superior. Professors at the biggest-name schools are sometimes more interested in their research than in teaching.

After Yale, I landed a job at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. A few years later, I got married and had a son. My wife, an Iranian Bahai, came to America with her family about the time Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power. As an aside, because more than 50 percent of Jews will marry non-Jews, as I did, American Jews will essentially vanish sometime in this century, except for fecund enclaves of the religious Hasidim. This extrapolation is based on the tendency for children of mixed marriages to be raised as non-Jews.

Judaism is also coming to an end in Europe. In 1946, there were four million Jews. Today, there are two and a half million. Ireland will be the first to lose its Jewish community altogether. Rather than become depressed about the loss of the great Jewish culture, I hope that other religions, like the Bahai faith, will serve to elevate humanity in the coming centuries.

While on the topic of religion, I should mention that Ive always wanted to write books on God and religion, and did so with such titles as The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience and The Loom of God . However, my science books have generally sold better than my God books. For example, my first book, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty , published in 1990, was one of my biggest sellers, despite its numerous equations. My 30th book was published in 2004.

And thats my life story in a nutshell.

Ive been fascinated by science since childhood. While growing up in New Jersey, my bedroom featured plastic anatomical models of the heart, brain, and eye; posters of the human circulatory system; trilobite fossils, science-fiction books, and Ugly Stickers displaying wild-eyed, grinning creatures with names like Bob, Sandy, and Iris. I recall trekking to a small grocery store called Emmonds on Highway 35 to get a pack of stickers, which included a bubble gum stick. I still have the stickers today.

My childhood interest in science arose from my desire to learn how the world works and from my passion for science fiction. As a teenager, one of my favorite science-fiction tales was Henry Hasses He Who Shrank, originally published in 1936, which describes the exploration of subatomic universes filled with machine civilizations. Many scientists and science popularizers got kick-started in life by reading science fiction.

Today my taste for home decorations has morphed from bedroom anatomy posters to wooden African masks that currently surround a spiral staircase near the dining room. These masks are modern works, some from the early part of the 20th century, some contemporary. Portraiture is one of the great universal traditions in art: the face as expressed in wood is eminently versatile, and a wonderfully direct way to connect with the viewer. My masks spill out into the dining room, complete the frame of the hallway, and threaten to overrun the living room area. At this rate of growth, I estimate that by 2015, no empty square inch of wall will remain in the entire house.