The other day I overheard two women talking about baking cakes. I wasn’t eavesdropping; they were sitting at the table next to mine. Nor was I paying much attention to the conversation, engrossed as I was in the technical manual that so often serves as my lunch partner. But then one of the women said: “You bake from scratch?” That totally broke my concentration. It was time to go anyway.

As I walked back to the office, I got to wondering what this magical “scratch” stuff is that people make things from. I often hear people say that they bake from scratch, but that’s not all it’s used for. I hear programmers and builders say they’re going to “start over from scratch.” In almost every field I’ve examined, there’s somebody making things from scratch.

It took me a while to track this down, but what I discovered flies in the face of all the science we’ve been spoon fed over the years. Scratch builders have learned how to transmute matter and make wondrous things from seemingly nothing. Science teaches us that you can’t turn lead into gold–that you can’t change the fundamental properties of matter. I haven’t seen a scratch builder turn lead into gold, but I wouldn’t put it past them. Why would they want to, anyway, when they can take beans from a plant, add some butter and sugar, and come up with chocolate? Gold has nothing on chocolate, right?

Scratch is, despite what your science teachers will try to tell you, the basic building block of the universe. Forget chemistry and quantum physics with all their arcane formulas, quirks, quarks, electron orbitals, and difficult math. Those fields of study are just red herrings intended to divert your attention from where the real action is. You won’t see “Scratch Studies” at even the best universities because the powers that be don’t want the word to get out. They don’t want just anybody knowing how to transform scratch into all the wondrous things that we see every day.

The Scratch Police let amateurs dabble in the field–baking cakes or building clunky radios from spare parts. They do this because it turns out that the principles of scratch are quite simple and they can’t stop people from discovering them. But they keep a close eye to ensure that a baker, for example, doesn’t figure out that he can use the same principles of scratch to make a CD player, a car, or anything else. If that knowledge got out, the economy would crash like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

But it’s time the word got out. We can no longer be held hostage by the Scratch Police and the small group of people who hold so tightly the knowledge of scratch. My life is forfeit, I know. The Scratch Police will come track me down when they see this blog, and I doubt that Charlie will be able to protect me from them. If you see this blog, please copy and email it to everybody on your address list. Help spread the word and free us from the tyranny of those who would keep this fundamental knowledge to themselves.

Free the Scratch!