A lifelong journey from childhood discoveries to artificial intelligence
Science and technology have been threads running through my life for decades. This page will bring those chapters together — the early discoveries, the computers, the experiments, the work, the projects, and the questions that still keep me curious today.
Science, technology, and a lifetime of asking “What can we do with this?”
The chapters ahead
My Science & Technology Journey
This page follows that journey in eight chapters—from childhood curiosity and early ideas, through computers and work, to the questions about artificial intelligence that fascinate me today.
01
Introduction & Cape Cod Science
Why I built CapeCodScience.com and what I hope it gives people.
This is the doorway into the whole story: why science matters to me, why I created CapeCodScience.com, and how the site brings together resources, subjects, organizations, ideas, and opportunities for people who want to keep learning.
CapeCodScience.comA growing Cape Cod resource for science, technology, STEM/STEAM, education, discovery, and community.
Tap or click the image to visit CapeCodScience.com.
Why I Created Cape Cod Science
I created CapeCodScience.com for the explorers, students, teachers, dreamers, and lifelong learners who understand how important science and technology are—not only to our everyday lives, but to the kind of future we choose to create.
My fascination with science began when I was very young. Like so many kids growing up, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut and traveling into space. I haven't completely given up on that dream. I would still love, at the very least, to see Earth from space someday.
That dream connects closely with another project that means a great deal to me, the Global Pledge. I believe that if more people could see our planet from space—even if only through the eyes and experiences of those who have been there—we might begin to understand something very important: there are no borders visible from space. We are all living together on one small, beautiful blue world floating in an enormous universe.
Perhaps we would treat both the planet and one another with a little more respect if we truly understood that.
I had originally hoped to pursue a formal education in science. But my high-school years were anything but conventional. I moved around quite a bit and attended five different high schools. Without the scholarships and financial support I would have needed, a traditional scientific education never quite came together for me.
So I learned another way.
Much of my education in science and technology came through my own curiosity—reading, experimenting, building things, working with computers, asking questions, following new ideas, and teaching myself whatever I needed to know next.
And that is really the foundation of Cape Cod Science.
I wanted to create the kind of resource I would have loved to have when I was younger: a place where someone can begin with curiosity and discover an entire world waiting for them.
It is a resource for the young person wondering whether science might become a career. It is for the teacher trying to inspire tomorrow's scientists, engineers, inventors, programmers, doctors, environmentalists, astronomers, and explorers. And it is for people like me who simply never stopped wanting to understand how the world works.
CapeCodScience.com brings together subjects ranging from biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, marine science, environmental science, and space exploration to computers, artificial intelligence, robotics, STEM and STEAM education, citizen science, museums, organizations, and many other areas of discovery.
My goal is for it to become one of the most inclusive and useful science and technology resources possible—not just a collection of links, but a doorway.
A doorway to curiosity.
A doorway to education.
And perhaps, for someone visiting the site today, a doorway to a future they haven't even imagined yet.
Science has given humanity extraordinary power. Technology continues to expand that power every day. What matters now is how we choose to use it.
I hope Cape Cod Science helps people use that knowledge wisely, creatively, and ultimately for the good of humanity and the planet we all share.
02
My Early Science Discoveries
The childhood curiosity that started the journey.
By almost any definition, I was a pretty perfect science nerd—and I fit the description to a tee. Growing up, while many of the kids around me were collecting and reading Sports Illustrated—although I have to admit I always appreciated the swimsuit issue—I was eagerly waiting for my next issue of Science News, the publication that had originally been known as Science News Letter. I looked forward to it every week.
Science wasn't just something I read about. It shaped the way I thought about the world. Even as a kid, I often felt that my mind worked differently from those of many of the other kids in my neighborhood. At one point I even wondered whether I might have been visited by space aliens, because I sometimes felt as though I knew things—or imagined possibilities—that no one around me seemed to be thinking about.
Whether that was childhood imagination, an unusually curious mind, or simply the influence of all the science and science fiction I was absorbing, I was constantly trying to create explanations for things. By the time I was about thirteen years old, around 1970, I had already developed two projects of my own: The Logical Alphabet and Gerard's Möbius Time Strip Continuum Theory.
Why “Gerard”? At thirteen, I simply thought Gerard sounded cooler than Jerry.
Looking back, I don't think the important part is whether the ideas of a thirteen-year-old were scientifically correct. What matters to me is that I was already trying to invent systems, challenge assumptions, and find my own way of explaining language, time, space, and reality. That instinct—to ask “Could there be another way to understand this?”—has stayed with me ever since.
Project One
The Logical Alphabet
From my early notebooksI am gathering the surviving notes, drawings, or artwork connected with The Logical Alphabet.
About the project
I was about thirteen when I created this idea. As I reconstruct the details, I want to preserve both how the system worked and what I was trying to solve at that age.
Project Two · An idea that began around 1970 — revisited today
Gerard's Möbius Time Strip Continuum Theory
The ramblings of a thirteen-year-old, more than half a century later
When I was about thirteen, I became absolutely fascinated by the Möbius strip. Take a strip of paper, give it a half twist, join the ends, and you have something that seems almost impossible: a shape with just one continuous surface. I made them all the time. And then one day, I asked myself a question that stayed with me for the rest of my life.
What if time worked like a Möbius strip?
At thirteen, I wasn't trying to write a physics paper. I was playing with an idea—and with a real piece of paper. The easiest way to explain it now is to rebuild that little experiment, one step at a time.
First, a numbered strip of paper
I took a long strip of paper and numbered it from 0 to 20, with the numbers spaced evenly. At one end I wrote Begin 1, and at the other I wrote End 1. I flipped the same paper over and repeated the numbering on the reverse, this time writing Begin 2 and End 2. Both numbered sequences were complete and in order.
Then I gave the paper a half twist and joined its ends into a Möbius strip, so that End 2 met Begin 1 at the join. The other pair, End 1 and Begin 2, met at that same physical join on the reverse-facing part of the paper. I could still follow both numbered sequences around the strip. The twist changed their orientation to one another—not their numbering.
The numbering before the twist. Each row represents a different face of the same sheet of paper.
When we struggled to recreate the model on a computer, I finally made it again by hand. These are photographs of that reconstruction—not idealized drawings. They show how I meant the strip to work.
My reconstruction: Side 1, Begin 1 to End 1.After flipping the paper over: Side 2, Begin 2 to End 2.The actual strip after twisting and joining it. End 2 meets Begin 1 at the front of the loop.
To my thirteen-year-old mind, the join could represent something like the Big Bang—and perhaps also the end of a previous cosmic cycle. What if a universe expands, eventually contracts, and begins again? My strip suggested a kind of endless return. That idea reminded me of infinity, although it didn't prove that the universe was infinite or cyclic.
A red dot called “The NOW”
Next I imagined a tiny red dot placed between 0 and 1. I called it THE NOW: this instant, the present moment, you and me. Here was my little change in perspective: the dot doesn't travel along the strip. The strip moves beneath the dot.
Imagine standing on the ground while the ground itself keeps moving to the left. First you're between 0 and 1; then the number 1 passes beneath you, followed by 2, 3, and all the others. The entire Möbius strip turns clockwise, but the NOW stays essentially stationary. In the model, that is what experiencing forward-moving time feels like.
A close-up of the motion—not a replacement for the complete Möbius loop shown above. The red marker remains fixed; the numbered strip advances underneath it.
What might be happening on the opposite-facing portion?
Now came the part that really excited me. Because of the twist, the numbered paper on the opposite-facing portion appeared to run the other way relative to the side I was watching. I began to imagine two directions of time coexisting around the same NOW. We experience one as our ordinary forward-moving world. What if the other were associated with something moving backward through time?
Years later, when I read about electrons and positrons, protons and antiprotons, that childhood thought came rushing back. I imagined ordinary matter associated with one temporal direction, and antimatter with the other. In my picture, both belong to a single reality and can be present at the same NOW. We do, after all, observe both matter and antimatter.
I even wondered whether the meeting of matter and antimatter might be like two opposite movements colliding—as dangerous as stepping into the path of a speeding car. It was my imaginative way of thinking about annihilation. I later learned that physics has a well-developed explanation for particle–antiparticle annihilation; the idea of antimatter literally colliding with a backward-flowing time is my speculation, not an established result.
Time travel, without moving the NOW
Once I pictured time passing beneath a stationary point, another question almost asked itself: what if I could step off the strip?
Imagine lifting the red dot away from the paper into a space outside the timeline. The strip continues turning below. Decades—or even centuries—pass. If the dot could somehow remain unaffected by time while it waited, I could return to the strip much later without having aged. In my mind, that would be a journey into the future—not by rushing through time, but by letting the timeline run on without me.
And what about traveling to the other temporal direction? At first, I imagined passing straight through the paper. But I worried that entering an opposite-moving stream so abruptly might tear a traveler apart. Again, that speeding-car image came to mind.
So I invented a possible detour. I called the space outside the timeline “between-space.” What if a traveler could leave one stream of time, shed whatever temporal momentum they had, move through between-space to the opposite-facing portion of the strip, and only then reenter? Perhaps that would avoid the violent transition I feared. Of course, I had no physical way to define temporal momentum or between-space; they were ways for a curious kid to think through the problem.
Two imagined journeys: stepping out of time until a later moment, or making a detour through “between-space” before entering the opposite temporal direction. These are thought experiments, not proposed working technologies.
Those were the ideas I was wrestling with around 1970. I was quite impressed with myself, although they weren't exactly the kinds of conversations most of my thirteen-year-old friends wanted to have! Eventually, like so many of my ideas, I put the strip aside and went on with life. But I never entirely forgot it.
Many years later: from a strip to a string
As the years passed, my imagination kept returning to the same little loop. Suppose we made the paper narrower and narrower until the entire Möbius continuum appeared to be no thicker than a string floating in space. The string is a shorthand for the original strip and all its ideas, not a claim that the mathematics of a Möbius surface literally becomes a string.
Now place another string beside it. And another. And thousands—or millions—more, until they form something like an apple, with a common core. A doughnut or torus is another useful comparison, but the apple feels closer to what I have in mind. Each string is a possible continuum. And somehow, in this expanded picture, all the continuums share the same NOW.
My apple-shaped thought experiment: countless thin continuums surrounding a common core. I don't yet know where—or even how—to draw their shared NOW.
Here's the honest part: I don't know how to represent that common NOW geometrically. I can barely picture four dimensions, let alone however many might be needed to describe such a thing. The apple is an aid to my imagination, not a claim that reality is literally apple-shaped. A shared present is one of my open questions.
Two different ways I picture the apple
1. Coexisting dimensions
Perhaps the strings represent parallel dimensions that exist alongside and sometimes pass through our own reality, even though we cannot ordinarily perceive them. Do they all rotate at the same speed? Could different rates relate to what I think of as different vibrational levels? I haven't decided. Those are still questions, not answers.
2. Branching universes
Or perhaps the strings suggest alternative versions of the universe—new paths associated with the choices and events that could have unfolded differently. That recalls the many-worlds idea, although I haven't worked out how a branching structure would fit into an apple of closed continuums. This is a different interpretation, not an automatic consequence of the first.
Where I leave it—for now
I haven't proved a theory of time. I don't have equations describing between-space, a mechanism for stepping outside aging, or a solution to the problem of a universal NOW. And I don't want to pretend that I do. What I have is a series of questions that began with a piece of paper when I was thirteen and kept growing as I learned about physics, time, and our extraordinary universe.
Maybe the universe is stranger than I imagined. Maybe the answers will eventually rule out every part of my model. Either way, I still think there's something wonderful about taking a simple object in your hands and asking, “What if?”
Perhaps it's time to find another strip of paper.
— Gerard (Jerry) Schmeer
03
Gifted Students Program & Science at School
Learning in an environment that encouraged deeper exploration.
This chapter looks back at my time in the Gifted Students Program and at the role science played in my school years. It is a part of the story I want to tell carefully—through the teachers, challenges, opportunities, and moments that helped shape the way I learned.
Gifted Students ProgramSchool scienceTeachersLearning differently
04
The Radio Shack Years
A major technology chapter told in three parts.
Radio Shack deserves more than a passing mention, so I have divided this chapter into three parts. That gives me room to show how the experience evolved instead of compressing an important period into a few paragraphs.
Part One
The Beginning
The first Radio Shack chapter—how I arrived there and what the technology world looked like at the time.
Part Two
Growing With Technology
The people, products, computers, responsibilities, and experiences that expanded what I knew.
Part Three
What Came Next
How those years influenced the next turn in my technology journey and the ideas I carried forward.
There is much more to this period than job titles and products. The people, machines, changes, and unexpected turns are what make it part of my larger technology story.
05
Autosoft — Almost Microsoft
My technology time in Hawai'i.
Autosoft belongs to my Hawai'i years, at an intersection of computers, ambition, experimentation, and a place that became a major part of my life. The phrase “Almost Microsoft” is a little playful, but there is a real story behind it—what I was trying to create, why the idea seemed possible, and what happened next.
My years at Cape Cod Community College brought computer systems, programming, reports, and day-to-day problem-solving into the practical side of my technology life. This chapter is where I can preserve the work itself—and what years of watching computers change taught me along the way.
The side projects, experiments, websites, and ideas that kept appearing.
Not everything fits neatly into a job title. This chapter is a home for the smaller projects and experiments that appeared along the way—the things I built because I was curious, saw a need, or simply wanted to see whether an idea could work.
What fascinates me, what I am building, and what I am asking today.
This is the living chapter—my exploration of artificial intelligence and the many things that interest me today. It can grow with the work: AI, robotics, creativity, knowledge, websites, human possibility, and the question of how emerging technology can serve people rather than diminish them.
This chapter is intentionally open-ended. Artificial intelligence is changing too quickly for a final paragraph, and I expect the questions, experiments, and projects here to keep evolving with it.
Still learning
The Story Is Still Being Written
One of the things I have always loved about science and technology is that there is always another question to ask, another tool to understand, and another possibility waiting just beyond what we know today.
