Kris Houston is a high school student. I suppose you might wonder why I would ask a young kid to do my art work for me as opposed to getting an experi-enced profes-sional to do it. So would I... to some extent. Maybe it would cost less? No... actually, I'm paying him more than I would pay a profession-al-quite a bit more. Some-times I do things, knowing they're the right things to do, somehow, but not really knowing why until later.

A lot of my friends are young, some even half my age. I think the reason for this may be that they see me as a bit more open-minded than most other "adults." There's a very good chance however, that most adults don't see me as an "adult." Maybe I've never really "grown up"-which may be the reason that most of my friends are kids (twen-tyish and up). I suppose I don't see anything wrong with that, although many people will. But then, I don't really care if they do or not, so it doesn't really matter.

But I think that most young people, when they first meet me, seem to find a friend and an ally against the world of adults. This is conjecture on my part, to be sure, but then, let's face it; kids who are out on their own for the first time often find the world a pretty mean place, and having a friend who is willing to stand with them against the "system" is a pretty rare find-particularly if that friend happens to be a "grown-up," such as myself.

But a lot of kids grow up carrying dreams and visions with them. Unfortunately, too many of them lose those visions on their way to adulthood. "Reality" sets in and they take "whatever comes along" instead of paying the higher price and going after what they really believe in. Whenever I make a new friend it is everything I can do to keep him (or her) from losing sight of those dreams and visions---especially if he (or she) is young.

But Kris Houston is an artist. Or a musician. And he has some other interests, one of which is physics. I'm not sure if he knows what he wants to do with his life yet, but I am sure that he still has dreams and visions that haven't been "crushed" by the realities of life. He still has that "sparkle" in his eyes which is typical of young people who dream of greater things in life.

Of course, when I asked Kris to do the art work for this book, I said to him, "I want you to impress me." At first I thought that was a mistake. Later I realized that what I really wanted to say was, "I want you to impress yourself." I'm not certain if that's possible. I rarely, if ever, even impress myself. Asking someone else to impress himself may tempt arrogance into the formula, which can ruin things. He impressed me anyway.

So he came up with a few drawings after I told him what the book was about and then showed them to me and asked which one I liked best. The problem was that I liked them all. So I picked them all and used the one I liked best for the cover. The others mark the beginning of each part in this book.

Oh, yes, "About the front cover"... I thought this cover best illustrated some of the essential aspects of the theory, where matter exists at one point in time, disap-pears, and then suddenly reappears elsewhere. Matter is also properly depicted as a "square wave," existing only momentarily and then (temporally) moving on. Kris did a fine job of depict-ing this square wave without making the book look like a digital design text, and was still able to give the appearance of the wave-like qualities which typify most of our present understandings of the world.

Tim Houston is Kris Houston's older brother and, by no coincidence, one of my prior students. Tim is a college student waiting to become a leader. But he is also a very driven and technically creative individual. And he knew I was looking to add color to the front cover. So, for the Second Edition of this book, Tim came to me with an idea.

For some time, he had been exploring some of the graphics capabilities of the newest

MAC® computers and some modern scanners. I have been an "IBM® PC man" for as long as personal computers have been around with only occasional rendezvous with the "Apples," so I had not realized how impressive their graphics software had become.

Anyway, this new cover is a color version of Kris' original hand-drawing. More importantly, however, it is the result of a "scanner accident" while Tim and I were "toying" with some ideas for giving the old cover a little bit of color (the original cover was black & white). In fact, it happened before we tried anything else. The scanner typically does three scans: one each for reds, blues and greens.

As we were scanning the old cover into the comput-er, we accidentally moved the cover after the first scan. While attempting to recover from the first movement, we moved it again during the third scan. At first, we figured we would have to simply do the scans over again-this time more carefully. But when the resulting scan popped-up on the screen it was so remarkable that we decided to keep it.

Unfortunately, we had only scanned about half of the original cover, because at that point we were only consider-ing "possibilities." For several hours after, we attempted in vain to reproduce the effect we had achieved with a mere slip of the hand. Everything that came afterwards could be "gently" described as "pathetic." We gave up and left, leaving the original scan and some other attempts on the local network drive.

Two days later, I went back and for several hours made a few more ragged attempts at reproducing the original mistake. Tim had left me on my own after showing me a few of the MAC's capabilities, not realizing (or not remem-bering) that I am not an artist.

That was when I met David McWhertor, an enterpris-ing young student (and artist) who was familiar with the MACs and what they could do. I did not want to damage the concept of the original drawing (or the drawing itself), and certainly did not want to allow one artist to impose his ideas onto the work of another artist. David came over to the computer and did, in ten minutes (or less) what I had been attempting to do for the four previous hours.

So I want to give David some credit here for achieving this marvelous effect, which Tim and I had gotten by accident, without intruding upon the original concept or drawing. At worst, he had to extend the drawing beyond its original borders in order to be able to incorporate the new ideas into the cover. He did this with remarkable consisten-cy, somehow realizing what Kris was attempting to achieve. In the end, the original drawing has been preserved in this new cover. Can you spot it?