I’ve been crazy about physics for the longest time and my first choice for a major back in college was to study physics and then become a physicist. After my father rejected that idea because the field was too hard to go into with little financial gain, I eventually switched to Chemical Engineering. Fast forward almost 10 years now and I find that I am not using my Chemical Engineering degree at all in my business or work anymore. Maybe it might have been a better idea going back if I did decide on doing physics. Whatever happened, I always kept on studying as much physics as possible, and for almost all physics enthusiasts, we become inspired by the stories of our predecessors. One of the most brilliant and colorful physicists in the last century was the Caltech teacher Richard Feynman who is famous for his investigation on the Challenger disaster, his work in developing the original Atomic Bomb, and his famous lectures which are today integrated togther into a 3 volume series eloquently entitled “The Feynman Lectures On Physics“, which was mostly written up and put together by his Caltech colleagues Leighton and Sands. This 3 volume collection is extremely famous among the physics community in how well and clear the ideas of basic physics is expressed and many physics majors and professionals go back to reading just these lectures to help them refresh their minds on some physics ideas. The books themselves are not that mathematically intense but in terms of helping the beginner student to grasp the conceptual understanding of the physics ideas at a deep level, it is definitely some of the best written texts on physics.
One of the happiest moments in my life involved reading his semi-autobiography, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman (Adventures Of A Curious Character)” where he talks about the events in his life. One of the most interesting for me was the story where he and his advisor at Princeton John Wheeler decided that he should give a presentation on their calculations and work on the idea of “….subject of advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism. Feynman and his advisor John Wheeler had developed a theory of direct interaction (dispensing with classical fields) by using half advanced and half retarded potentials, similar to the theory developed by Dirac in 1938. (source)”. Suffice to say, I am in not position to give any type of judgement on his work since I never came even close to their level of sophistication. This was for Feynman’s first seminar.
Later on, Feynman learned that some incredible intellectuals would be showing up for his lecture including Einstein, Wigner, Pauli, and Von Neumann. These are giants in their field which have literally changed the human race. At the end of the presentation, the story goes, Pauli raised his objections to the proposed idea and Feynman wrote that years later it was found that his ideas for expressing advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism was proven wrong.
For me, when I first read that story, it taught me a very important lesson which I have always kept at the back of my mind. The lesson is this. Sometimes in our youthful exuberance we come up with flashes of insight and we develop a a lot of confidence in it’s utility and originally. We think we are so clever and smart in being able to come up with the idea. When we start to talk about the theory and promote it, we don’t realize from our peers and contemporaries, as well as mentors and teachers that what we think is a great idea has some major fundamental flaws which will be proved maybe years later to be wrong or ineffective.
It might turn out like the story of Feynman with his “advanced and retarded potentials” theory which had already been proposed by Einstein maybe 20 years beforehand, someone else before us who is more established with more experience has already thought of that idea, proposed it, and worked out the calculations and experiments, and have shown that it was ineffective. We in turn never hear about their failed attempts and go along with our ambition in trying to recreate this metaphorical wheel. This is part of life and we find out about our mistakes, and correct our behavior to avoid those mistakes for the future.
As I grow older and slightly wiser, I come to realize that most ventures in life end up in failure. Out of 100 business ideas, maybe only 2-3 will be profitable and have a real business model. Given also the elements of inexperience and over-abundance in energy fron youth, we over-estimate our own skills and think that the projects we undertake will take a short time that success will be easy to come by. We start businesses thinking we will change the world and becomes as rich as Bill Gates.
When this principle is applied to this project/ endeavor of height increase, I wanted to remind to the readers that we should always try to keep things in perspective and be realistic. People like Sky who worked on his microfracture idea for over 7 years, he was always saying that within 1 year he would find the solution. After multiple times of the same claim, eventually he dropped the project the EasyHeight.com website disappeared (except from the WayBack Machine).
My old collaborator to this project Kazlina expressed her opinion that we can realistically find a solution within 5 years if we really dedicate our energy and focus, I think she was being too optimistic in her guess. I would say that if we find enough breakthroughs and can get the government to loosen its regulation policies over the next 20 years in trying out our proposed ideas on human subjects who are willing, we probably will have a real viable height increase method within 30-40 years. That is my guess.
Working in industry and owning multiple businesses and having to constantly put out fires has taught me that we should NEVER forget Murphy’s Law. This means that anything that could go wrong will eventually go wrong. Life is hard to deal with and as time goes on, it gets harder or at least more complicated. Our carefree life with so much time in childhood gets filled up with adult responsibilities and obligations. And this is usually the real reason why people who were so passionate about growing taller when they were in their 20s give up on that “crazy dream” when they reach their 30s and later. Hell, some of these people even give up on the idea of lossing wight since that idea is also going to become very hard as we grow older.
When I wrote the piece where I said that we could build a LSJL device for around $600, I knew that the real cost was probably more like $1000-2000, if we take into account the possible problems and issues that come up. Very few ventures come out perfectly or right the first time we try it out. In some ways, failure is built into the very fabric of most human actions. If we were to quantify and measure our life and our output for productivity and efficiency we would realize that we fail probably 95% of the time and waste about 95% of the resources we are given. Most of us are very ineffective in our productivity.. This is why I also wanted to extend the time range for the completion of the LSJL device. I had stated before that it would take probably 2-3 weeks to finish building it, but after careful thinking, I would say that the more realistic idea is that it will take around 3-4 months to finish in actuality.
So in conclusion…”Realize that our ventures is probably not original, has already been tried before, will most likely fail, and will take far longer and cost more than we ever thought so in the beginning.” If we go through with building the LSJL device we must also be willing to accept the idea that just maybe it won’t work out and all of the optimism we had will disappear.