"Why don't you do it in one jump instead of walking backwards and forwards?" John Thay asked.
"Can't," I said. "It's got to be a perfect model of the crystal lattice of quartz. If you calibrate it for too big a jump in size it gets distorted. No one knows why."
"You don't tell us, Morry. Hell, the marvel is that it works at all."
I threw the four-foot-long crystal over to John and he put it in the trailer, after nearly losing it on the slight breeze. It is difficult to disbelieve your eyes and remember that an overblown specimen has very little more than its original weight. The grain of quartz was merely expanded. Its molecular and nuclear structure stretched out in a magnified volume of space. It was almost all holes, an open arrangement of spaces between the force points of its matter; a direct magnification of the original without any other change.
We used these specimens in the Desert Institute because everyone could see the details of the crystal lattice for themselves, instead of having to use an electron microscope. It removed the practical difficulties of the principle of indeterminacy, David Adam Smith said. If light was too coarse to let him see the contents of a nucleus, he was damned well going to bring the nucleus up to a size where he could see it. And so he did, eventually, with this apparatus.
I was one of the very few students ever allowed to touch the apparatus, probably because he thought I was too dumb to do anything with it. There were several sets but they never left the Institute. The world was not ready for them, he said.
There was quite a lot of stuff that David Adam Smith kept to himself in the Institute. Not because the world was unready, but simply because he didn't think he would get maximum applause at that particular time. He only produced inventions at the right theatrical moment. David Adam Smith was quite a ham.
I was not supposed to tell anyone how this apparatus worked, but the three of them sitting facing me in the shade were not going anywhere after this. I didn't think it mattered. If you are not chosen at birth for emigration within the System, and if you also fail at the Institute or one of the dormitory-universities, you're just an extra unit of overpopulation.
I thought I'd give them something to think about instead of brooding over the bubble dancer and their expulsion.