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    John's Big Idea
    John's Big Idea
    John's Big Idea
    Ebook42 pages40 minutes

    John's Big Idea

    By John Gaukel

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    About this ebook

    One Quintillion is a really big number. John, a teen aged boy living in a lighthouse, needed to know it’s significance. Teachers, forget it. He had to figure it out on his own. John was no genius, or so others thought. So began his great adventure.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Gaukel
    Release dateFeb 7, 2012
    ISBN9781466174276
    John's Big Idea
    Author

    John Gaukel

    John Gaukel is a Physicist, Inventor, Intellectual Property Analyst, Engineer, Business Manager, Poet and Avid Science Fiction reader.He is a hemiplegic, and has taken up Science Fiction writing to extend himself in new directions. – There are more novelettes and poems in progress.

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      Book preview

      John's Big Idea - John Gaukel

      John’s Big Idea

      Author John Gaukel

      © February 2012 by John Gaukel

      *****

      Smashwords Edition

      Published by:

      John Gaukel on Smashwords

      Cover Art By Julia Chen

      *****

      John J. Gaukel, BS Physics

      jjgaukel@gmx.com

      Smashwords License Statement

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      This publication is purely fiction. Any reference to people’s names or places or products is purely factitious, and bears no relationship to real people places or products. Inadvertent use of trademarked names is unintentional and implies no relationship to trademarked products or their owners.

      *****

      1,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is One Quintillion ladies and gentlemen. That was the number that stuck in John’s head. John was 16 years of age and good at some things and weak in other things. He lived in a lighthouse along the coast of Maine. It was on a small one hundred acre island built by his father with a government subsidy.

      It had cost a pretty penny, but in this year of 2115, it was all the rage. Since the perfection of cold fusion, many things were possible. The Oil industry had all but disappeared. The coal industry was dead. The skies and water were clean. The population was declining, and there was a drive to get people off the land if other options were available. Light Houses were a popular option. They ranged from single-family units to multi-family high risers. Since power was not an issue, deep water wells were used, or desalination. Wastewater was recycled, and food delivery ships operated automatically under AI control. GPS had been refined to resolve fractional millimeters.

      John was schooled by a wall teacher. One whole floor in his home was devoted to it. He had 50 classmates in his class. All the world’s books were at his disposal. So it was that he was a curious student and an avid reader. The trouble was, the more he read, the more curious he became. The more curious he became, the more question he asked his teacher. The more questions he asked his teacher, the more frustrated his teacher became. His questions became harder and harder.

      John wasn’t stupid; he knew what the number was mathematically. He wanted to know what its meaning was in significance. He had derived the number by calculating the number of planets in the universe. He knew he was likely off a few, but he also knew that was not significant. When he asked his teacher what the significance of One Quintillion was, his teacher just looked at him in a sort of pitiful way. It was then that John knew he must reason this out himself. It was important to him, and he was sure it was important to someone else.

      Once John had asked his history teacher something like, "what if this had happened, or that, what

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