Sticking a Laser up his Nose and Emailing Perfumes. To simplify the narrative through-line, we cut this from the chapter "Russia." This is a failed experiment that illustrates both a fascinating offshoot line-of-thought toward proving Vibration and the scientific process, which is composed mostly of failures.

He was jumpy. The baby was due March 7. And also he was preparing to stick a large Lithuanian-made laser up his nose.

The laser thing had an odd genesis. A man named Steve Bennett, a combination physicist/ entrepreneur, was working at Hewlett Packard's corporate research labs as Product Manager on telecommunications, e-commerce and the Internet and saw the BBC *Horizon documentary. Bennett got Turin's number from the BBC web site and invited him to give a lecture at HP, and, there, when Turin said that the bonds were vibrating in the infra-red range, Bennett asked if there might be any possibility of the nose's picking up infra-red radiation from other sources. Turin's reply Bennett found intriguing. Apparently, said Turin to the HP audience, survivors of the Hiroshima bomb had remarked that at the same moment that the bomb flashed, they smelled burning rubber. What was odd about this was that these people were miles from the blast site- which meant that though the light reached them almost instantly, it was impossible for any smellable molecules from any burned area to have gotten into their noses at that instant. So what were they smelling? There was another fact: An atomic bomb gives off a very powerful and broad-frequency range of electromagnetic radiation, including infrared, the flash we see being just the radiation that happens to be in the visible part of the spectrum. Perhaps the burning rubber smell was to those people's noses simply the infrared light equivalent of the visible light flash to their eyes.

Bennett was extremely excited. He mulled it over, then called Turin up and asked logically "Well, if you shine an infrared light at a certain frequency up your nose, shouldn't you smell something?" Turin's mouth almost hung open. (Why the hell hadn't he thought of that?) A terrific experiment; to Bennett, commercial guy and private sector entrepreneur, the logical segue to this idea that we smell vibrations was that, well, commercialization: It should in that case be possible to record and transmit digitalized smells electronically (just use the infrared range) just as we can with digitalized pictures and music, which meant that you could beam smells over the Internet. Tele-smell. Turin and Bennett could go down in history as the Alexander Graham Bells of fragrance. It would be a hell of a way to market the new Calvin Klein for women: Email it to someone.

It just so happened that at exactly that point, Turin was buying a tunable laser from a Lithuanian company. The laser was for starting his new research, into energy storage in proteins (he would be aiming the laser at the protein vibrations). This laser could be tuned to four microns, which is... the same frequency at which Sulfur-Hydrogen bonds vibrate. Giving, according to his Vibration theory, the sulfury smell. Right, then: How to attach a single fiberoptic cable to the laser and stick it up someone's nose-his own nose, in this case, since it would be scientifically irresponsible to accept a volunteer. It was a long shot, but the plan was to fool the smell receptors, feed them a Sulfur-Hydrogen vibration and, if everything went according to plan, cause them to vibrate at that frequency, which would make them think they were smelling Sulfur. "Assuming it doesn't blow your head off," Turin added nonchalantly. "It's a pretty intense beam. But the strong prediction is that you should push a button, shoot the Sulfur vibration up your nose, and the smell of rotten eggs should appear out of pure light."

He tried it. It didn't work. He wasn't quite sure why, though he'd known that experimentally it was a long shot; there were a zillion things that could go wrong, and the laser was proving extremely difficult to operate. He set it aside. The all-important decaborane test in Russia was coming up, and he focused on that. On December 29, he emailed a friend: "Hope you had a good Christmas!! My mom came over for a few days and we had a good time, by which I mean good vibes all round and no arguments, thereby breaking with tradition." Moscow was looming. "For some reason I've been feeling rather insecure of late (reality distortion field needs new batteries), am rather nervous about the Moscow experiment (sniff _and_ drop dead !). I am bracing myself..........."