My view of the world changed when I met Andrew J. Galambos. His ideas occupied a large part of my life from the summer of 1973 until 1977. The ideas and concepts I heard during that time influenced and directed my life long after I stopped being directly exposed to them.

My first exposure to Galambos began over a cup of herbal tea with our best friends who had called us over to discuss something serious. We were very close. We lived across the street and often vacationed together. She taught my daughter at a private school. He was a college buddy of my husband. But now, they said, we couldn't be friends in that way anymore unless we attended a class they called V50.

They had just finished this course and claimed it had changed their lives and would do the same for us. But what was it about? we protested. Well, they couldn't tell us. Was it a secret? No, but sort of. They reassured us that if we would just attend one of the three sessions we would understand and realize how important this could be or if we didn't get it, just walk. And it was guaranteed. Our money back if we felt it wasn't worth it. Money? How much money? $50 dollars per person. Not a lot by today's standards, but in 1973, having just bought our first house for $25,000, it was a sum worth getting back if we felt unmoved.

And so, the guarantee plus the earnest faces of our friends brought us to the first of many lectures that we were to attend, mainly in the Orange County/LA area over a period of three years. I have never actually added up the time but I imagine it to be somewhere in the vicinity of 2000 hours sitting in a usually, fully packed lecture room, listening intently for hours at a time to Andrew J. Galambos, fifty something, dark haired, horn rimmed glasses, 100 pounds overweight stuffed into one of two suits, one brown, one blue. Dr. Galambos, speaking, speaking, speaking, demanding attention, creating ideas, provoking, challenging, influencing.

I know he was a physicist by education. Dr. Galambos, he was called, at all times, the son of an immigrant, Hungarian perhaps. He was a large man. Obese, and his obesity for me was a difficult fact in stark juxtaposition to his logical thoughts. That and his fatal flaw. His inability to share or advertise his ideas to a waiting world. So great was his fear (albeit justified in many cases) that he was unable to leverage his powerful message beyond the classrooms in which we, the unquestioning hundreds, gathered, week after week, month after month, year after year.

What did he teach? What was it that attracted and held us so steadfastly? I have been asked to explain that.

V-50 was the introductory course which was a prerequisite if you wished to proceed further into other courses. I was fortunate enough to hear it live, not by Galambos, but by the Institute's lecturer, Jay S. Snelson. ' V" of V-50 stands for Volition. It was not a word that meant much, if anything, to me at the time. Now it is part of my vocabulary. The " 50" referred to the course number for the basic course which is titled The Science of Volition. Volition is the act of choosing. We are volitional beings since we make choices.

It was an alluring idea. A world where all the choices you make are ones you want. Where society functions according to natural laws, as the laws of physics are natural and not manmade. He designed a society where no one would or could hold a gun to your head to do or be any particular way. An example: the V-50 definition of a "fair price" would be "the price at which one person is willing to sell and another person is willing to buy."

The basis of the Science of Volition is the definitions. The definition of property is basic to the science. He identified two kinds of property: Primary and secondary. Primary property is our ideas. Secondary property includes all the material things we own. Houses, businesses, cars, anything that flows from our most important property which is our primary property, that is, our ideas.

Having complete control over our own property was indeed the basis of his new social structure, a society in which all individuals own 100% control over their own property. This is defined as Freedom. Think about that. A society in which Einstein has a say over what happens to his idea, his primary property, instead of a political state which uses his idea without his consent to build and drop a bomb on innocent people. Where everyone is given credit and royalties for their ideas and they own them in perpetuity. After they die, their estate continues ownership of the primary property. Galambos suffered by having to live in a world where it is considered an acceptable part of the social fabric to steal another person's ideas. He would often state this principle, "There is no such thing as a small interference with property." To him, theft is theft.

This concept of property was the foundation upon which I raised my daughter. We would easily settle childish disputes with the question "whose property is it?" That was a finite concept and indisputable in use.

FEI, The Free Enterprise Institute, is the name of his school. To say the man was 180 degrees apart from Socialism was an understatement. Laissez-faire was the word for the day, every day. What, he would query, could government do better than private enterprise? Little or nothing, according to Galambos.

He introduced a plethora of authors and books for us to read. Frederic Bastiat's The Law, Henry
Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson and Ludwig von Mises' Planned Chaos, to name a few. He was a huge fan of Thomas Paine and promoted heavily the idea that Paine, while an Englishman in America, actually penned the Declaration of Independence.

He had solid economic planning ideas based on cash and carry and often pointed out the difference between productive investing and consumptive investing. My husband and I once paid a thousand dollars for a full weekend of financial planning lectures and we never asked for our money back.

For me the best time was spent in his two-year physics course. Once a week I would go and listen to a three hour audio tape, taking copious notes and learning more than I had in five years of high school science. It was how he tied the physical universe to the social environment that fascinated and illuminated all of us. He was a magnificent generalizer.

But I think what stuck the most were his lectures centered around the dysfunction of the human race and how, as a result of bad timing, we teetered on the brink of destruction. The way he explained it, he saw mankind as having achieved huge technological advancement. We had the ability to fly, to communicate instantly, to travel in outer space and to blow up the entire planet if we chose. Socially, he said, we have barely crawled out of the cave. We were primitives still, settling our differences with guns and death. It was this cultural chasm that would be our undoing. If only we could develop a society based on natural laws such as we have in physics, we could then mature and sail on to the stars.

The Science of Volition and the Theory of Primary Property will soon be in the marketplace of ideas. Galambos reached thousands of students with his concepts. In 1997 Galambos' ideas will finally be in print

Ashely Gardner is a video producer, writer and actress.