Les Hardison is an ninety-five-year-old retired engineer. He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1950 with a degree in mechanical engineering. During his working years, he was a Facilitates Manager for Universal Oil Product company which later became UOP, Inc.. Petroleum Process Design Engineer for UOP, Inc., and later Technical director of UOP Air Correction Division. During the last twenty-five years of his working career, he was President of ARI Technologies, Inc., a small environmental control company that developed, among other things, the LO-CAT Hydrogen Sulfide Oxidation Process. He has recently been awarded a US patent for the development of a system for viewing ordinary TV programs in 3-D without special glasses or alterations to the television set or program production. He holds over 60 US patents.
He has never had any special training in physics or cosmology but was impressed that in college he was taught physics by doing experiments aimed at verifying the commonly accepted laws of physics which were easy to do. This required that you get confirmation of what was being taught in the classroom.We always knew the result we were supposed to get, For things which were to difficult to check in the physics lab, like the speed of light we were taught to use the “currently available science”. which was presumed to be the results of the best efforts of the people who ran the experiments. There was little or no suggestion that the authorities might be have made mistakes or misinterpreted the results.
Several things about the speed of light seemed absurd to me. That the stars we could see fight now were not there now, in our present time because it took the light a million years to reach us seemed absurd. How could they measure this. How could radiant energy turn into solid matter? Einstein said it did if the matter moved fast enough.
I never had to use any of the things which seemed so strange to me, except perhaps the concept of potential energy, which seemed to work but involved storing energy somewhere that was noy obvious.
As a retired person. i was allowed to think about whatever I chose to, and these are some of ten things I thought about.