About The author

Jan Andrew Buck is the author of seven full books, prose fiction or semi fiction, publicly available for purchase through Amazon or otherwise.

Mr.Buck was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts and its suburbs where he attended the Boston Latin School and Newton High School. He then matriculated at Princeton University from which he was graduated with high honors. At Princeton he majored in English and trained as a poet and playwright. He was the poet laureate of his Class of 1967. He later graduated from Columbia Law School and served in the US Navy for three and a half years.

Professionally he practiced corporate and transactional law on Wall Street. Thereafter he evolved into being a serial entrepreneur developing a number of technology-based products and companies.

After producing numerous written works in his professional capacity he retired from his commercial activities in the 1980s to concentrate on his creative prose ventures commencing with his first book, Einstein’s Mistake, a love story that embodied some of his insights in the field of theoretical physics and the nature of physical reality. In large part as a result of the enthusiastic response to that book he proceeded to produce his second book, Star Ship, drawn from his experiences on the Flagship of the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1970s. Then at the behest of some in the physic faculty of Princeton he wrote his third book, Bird’s Eye, which fictionally embodied some of that faculty’s discoveries in the field of chaos theory.

To test his creative versatility, he produced his fourth book, God at the Gates, an historical novel about one of the most momentous events in the history western civilization, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in the late 1600s. Upon its conclusion he reverted to combining advanced science with big picture spiritual fiction with his fifth book, Why Am I Here?

Mr. Buck’s sixth book was a tribute to his young grandson who had aspirations to become an astronaut. Mr Buck created a spectacular future life for young Decker in Decker in Space.

Mr. Buck’s final book, so far, A String of Pickles, comprises a series of short vignette stories of difficult or awkward predicaments that certain fictional characters find themselves stumbling into and their entertaining resolutions. A String of Pickles thereby continues Mr. Buck’s penchant for trying his hand at a broad range of literary genres.

Mr. Buck today continues his creative efforts at his home in Princeton, New Jersey where he lives with his creative and productive wife Carol, who remarkably combines the noble practice of being a wife and mother with successes as an entrepreneurial CEO and cancer researcher.

Einstein’s Mistake

Mr. Buck’s first full length book, Einstein’s Mistake, is the culmination of a poet’s latent fifty year study of the esoteric world of theoretical physics.

Star Ship

To illustrate the author’s literary versatility and to entertain his audience, he completed his second full length book, Star Ship, an episodic comedy with geopolitical overtones.

Bird’s Eye

Jan Buck has just released his new book, Bird's Eye, a novel that interweaves the concepts of fantasy and reality, chaos and order into an intriguing page-turner where surprises drop like a school bus plummeting over a cliff.

God at the Gate

God at the Gates is an historical novel set in the late 1600s when the Ottoman Turks were marching up through Eastern Europe with the ambition of overrunning Vienna, then the capitol of all Christendom.

Why Am I Here?

Why Am I Here? tells the story of Jim Ball, a good and earnest man who is becoming something, but what, exactly, he does not know.

A string of pickles (New!)

Mr. Buck’s latest book A String Of Pickles comprises a series of short vignette stories of difficult or awkward predicaments that certain fictional characters find themselves stumbling into and their entertaining resolutions. It will become available on Amazon shortly.

Dark Matter

note from the author…

In my first book, Einstein’s Mistake, the brilliant female protagonist after listening to her male companion’s explanation of some of the weirdness of quantum mechanics emerges from her sailboat stateroom to confront him with a most insightful “Why not this?”

She had been told that science had accepted the proposition offered by the quantum physics elite that subatomic particles simply do not exist until they are observed or measured. It was an absurdity even Einstein could not accept. He would say that “You mean to tell me that the moon does not exist until I look at it?” “Well,” said the scientists of the day, “Yeah.”

“Rubbish,” thought Einstein.

But Neils Bohr and his very distinguished colleagues in Copenhagen in the early part of the last century prevailed with some certitude that such was the case. The universe is permeated with fuzzy probability waves. Humans, scientists though they be, who focus on a piece of this fuzzy stuff make out a particle, say an electron. Then, bingo, it becomes real stuff.

OK, you say. If the wizards say it is so, must be so. Done. Case closed. End of story. Quantum mechanics is just weird.

But Jessica Naughton said to her erudite mate, “No, wait a minute here! If you can by focusing your observation on piece of a probability wave create an electron, from where does that electron get its mass? An electron does have mass. It is a small amount of mass. But it’s mass. And human observation does not create a Higgs Boson to attach to it to give it that mass. So where does it come from?” Only one place she conjectured. The wave.

Harrumph! Waves are not discernable. They are invisible.

“Ok,” says she, “but so is the matter that is holding the spinning galaxies together.”

“Well?” says he. “What about it?” Easy answer—Waves don’t have mass. Period. End of story. Nonsense. No problem.

But why is there still mystery around what holds the galaxies together? She thought.

Sound

There has been some science recently conducted at Columbia and Carnegie Mellon that suggests that sound waves do in fact have mass. The experimentation goes on. But scientists are a very cautious bunch. If certain of them were to turn the whole scientific community on its ear by propounding that a wave, albeit a sound wave, has some mass, they might be thrown out on their ears much like the paranormal phenomenalogist “scientists” in Ghostbusters. And that latter experience occurred at Columbia.

And they go on to say, “Well, relativity has nothing to do with it.”

Nice try, boys. But let’s look at the math, or maybe rather the algebra.

The Unassailable

Albert Einstein is credited with a formula that no scientist dares to challenge, It is that E (energy) =m (mass) X c(the speed of light) 2 (squared). The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.

Actually the equation predated Einstein by generations, but he through a very astute public relations strategy and promotion claimed it as his. Its premises have always held firm in the scientific community. Einstein used it to bolster his contribution to the atomic bomb and all kinds of nuclear proliferation.

The principle is simple. Energy exists in our universe. We see it, feel it, every day. Scientists have propounded that the mass that we are familiar with is really a concentration of energy neatly trapped through nuclear phenomena by strong forces, weak forces, quarks and a cacophony of other wonders to hold in its powerful potential. Then one finds a form of matter whose bonds are weak and prison unstable, like, say, uranium 238, such that the contained energy can be released. Then release it and… BOOM. Armageddon.

OK. So E=M C 2 works.

What happens if we apply elementary school algebra to this powerful, accepted formula by dividing both sides of the equation by C 2 . In so doing we see that M becomes equal to E over the square of the speed of light. The latter is a big number- 186,000 miles per second times 186,000 miles per second. So however big the Energy level is, the M (mass) is quite small. But it is not zero. It is mass. And as the scientists are discovering, the modest modulations of sound waves suggest that there is mass in that E somewhere. Consider that some amount of E must be in light waves if they can be converted into heat in solar panels to electrify your whole house and even entire cities.

There is mass in that E somewhere. And even if it is infinitesimally small in its component parts, there is so much of that light out there that it can have a significant effect. Remember there is not only the light from our sun but the aggregate of all the suns in all of the galaxies in the Universe together with the light emanating from the big bang itself.

1+1=2

So if the galaxies are being held together by some form of gravity, and light waves have mass, is it not a reasonable hypothesis that there is a form of mass that we cannot see through our limited senses such as that in the waves of light that proliferate in our universe that are doing the work?

And By the Way

If light waves have mass, isn’t it as likely a proposition that the light that Sir Arthur Eddington went down to observe in the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa at the time of the 1919 solar eclipse was not bent by the transfiguration of space-time itself as Einstein conjectures, but by the mass of our sun, simply the gravitational attraction of the sun on the mass of the light waves passing by from that distant star? There are times when truth is found through just keeping things simple.

Notwithstanding the simpler explanation of the eureka moment on Principe, I am still pleased to have a bust of Albert Einstein adorning a local park in Princeton.

But Wait a Minute

Over eons men have debated the nature of light. The default conclusion has become that Light has both wave and particle properties. Particles of light are termed photons. And everyone knows that photons have no mass. So how about that, smarty pants?

OK, maybe it is useful to explore that incongruity.

Say you’re at a gathering of common folk, and someone asks “What’s a cake?”

One of the more knowledgeable blokes at the session blurts out, “It’s made of flour.”

The newly educated simpleton then goes out, buys a bag of flour and returns to the gathering and says, “I got some flour and ate a whole tablespoon full of it, and it was nothing like cake. It was awful.”

It was then that all gathered around the poor simpleton to educate him on advanced cake. They explain that one has to mix the flour in a bowl with butter or oil, add sugar and salt and maybe some form of liquid like milk or water so that the mixture becomes a soft pliable glob. Then you bake the mixture in a heated oven. Then when the heat has done its job, you have cake.

“Oh,” says the newly educated cake student. A lot goes into it, huh.”

Yes, a photon may have no mass, but correspondingly it has no energy.

And then not be undone by fellow simpletons, another asks, “Ok then, what is music?”

“Oh boy,” says the crowd, “It’s notes.”

So this new curious fellow goes home to string together notes. The result is as you might imagine. Cacophony. He comes back to tell his crowd, “I put notes together, and it hurt my ears.” After being told what you have to do with notes--timing, pitch, rhythm, instrument tonality, and the like, he said, “Oh.”

The Point

Light waves are not just photons strung together in a row. They are a physical phenomenon of great complexity that possess and express enormous energy as they oscillate and speed through the universe. And that energy is a coefficient of their mass. And there is an awful lot of it out there. Enough maybe even to hold galaxies together. Even if you cannot see in it mass’s customary form of visible matter.

And to be complete, are you sure a photon has no mass? If your answer is that by itself it has no energy, how then can a photon fly into an atom to displace an electron from its orbit, or energy level? Someone or something must have thrown it in, giving it at least kinetic energy. Consider a baseball. No energy just sitting in a ball bag, but hand it to a strong-armed southpaw, and it can speed across the plate at a hundred miles per hour.

A lightwave’s energy though is constant and unrelenting. Jessica just might have been on to something. Janek Kozielcek seemed to think so.

Jan Andrew Buck