This...and That!

An unusual string of no apparent purpose

It has been some time since I've posted anything regarding Gordon's String Theory, because it occurred to me one evening (well, early morning actually) that there was an issue with GST. To wit: even if the universe is loosely tied together with string, which prevents all its components from just drifting off to nowheresville, what is to prevent these drifting continents, planets, galaxies, etc. from eventually bumping into each other when they get sort of to the other side of the universe?  Or, to bring it down to our own scale, given the Law of Gravity, why don't things just fall down, even if they are loosely tied to other things? Fortunately, as the case is with most of Gordon's Scientifical Theories about 3am, it turns out that one answer suffices for many questions. I must admit that I owe this flash of brilliance to Quantum Theory, which more or less suggests that if there is a 'This' in the Universe, there must also be a symmetrical 'That'. Somewhere. This is how things that don't exist are discovered. Thus I realized that the missing 'That' required in GST would be the symmetrical opposite of the 'This' (which, of course, is String!)* And so I spent considerable time considering 'What is the symmetrical opposite

An unusual stick of no apparent purpose

of String?'  Could it be a ball, for example? But then, there are balls of string...Could it be some leftover roast beef? But then, not only are roast beefs sometimes stringy, they are often tied together with string! A thing cannot be the opposite of itself if it includes itself. Could it be some pancakes? A bag of Ms. Vicki's chips or some caramel crunch frozen yoghurt? This suggested to me that my line of reasoning was being compromised by peripheral personal concerns, so I had several snacks, which allowed me to remove those items from the equation. Could it be another glass of Malbec? Ditto. I will not bore you with all the twists and turns of my research, except to say that red research is preferable to white, and screw tops do not work well with a corkscrew. These minor technicalities dealt with, I turned my mind to considering the Essential Common Qualities of String: 1) limp  2) draggable but not pushable  3) can not stand vertically due to the Law of Gravity...Were there any others? No! So what were the opposite qualities? Rigidity, pushable (and draggable), and capable of standing vertically, or at any angle, if not completely on its own, perhaps by leaning on something or being inserted in a hole. Bewildered and exhausted by this quandary about That, I absent-mindedly addressed myself to the sticky residue of a spilled snack, and Eureka!! Of course! Stickiness! A stick! This is how science happens, not with a bang, but with an early morning mess. And so, faithful readers, we embark on another great adventure: Gordon's Stick Theory (GST2)! Stay tuned.

* this roundabout way of arriving at the beginning again after numerous loops and tangles is known as a Gordonian Knot.

Flying Pigs and Balloons to the Moon (in June)

It is not always well-known that the invention of flying machines began with a bag of air, a stick and a piece of string. Pig bladders had been used for centuries for a variety of uses that exploited the fact that the lightweight, tough membranes could be stretched to a rather large size and stuffed with...stuff...which became known as 'stuffing'. Also sausages. It was during a Fasching parade in Bad Ausee (not to be confused with f___g parades of bad Aussies) in the mid-19th Century, during which inflated pig bladders tied to sticks were traditionally paraded in a parade (no, I am not making this up. Times were simpler, then; people had to make their own fun...), when one of the bladders seemed a little underinflated. 'Not to worry!' exclaimed the parade marshal, who was also the wealthiest burgher in the burgh, as well as the mayor, chief of police, dog-catcher and member of parliament. He grabbed the bladder, and with a few mighty puffs, inflated it to its maximum size. Imagine the surprise of the crowd when, upon being released, the pig bladder floated serenely away into the clouds, hauling its festive stick into the heavens! Decades of discussion and controversy followed: was it a specific kind of pig bladder? Was it a magic stick? Was it simply an unusual wind current? Sherlock Holmes finally solved the mystery, in his deducing way (see The Mystery of the Mysteriously Inflated Bladder) and fingered the mayor, who by now was a withered old man barely surviving on the largest pension he had been able to award himself, in fact the largest pension in the burgh's history, but that's another story. Confronting the old mayor, Sherlock asked him 'Please blow into this bladder, sir!', to which the mayor replied 'I haven't had a drink yet today, and besides, I don't even own a car...' (actually, it was rumoured that he had a dozen Mercedes Benzes, several Porsches and a Chevrolet because they were usually seen all parked neatly in front of his palace, though he claimed they belonged to 'temporary foreign workers').

why won't it fly?

would you like to ride...?

Not one to be out-witted, Sherlock stated in his best imperialist British upper crust accent 'It is for science, my good man!'. The mayor reluctantly huffed and puffed until the bladder was adequately inflated, at which point he died, but Sherlock, not to be upstaged, lifted the bladder above his head in front of the townspeople, released it, and as the town collectively gasped in amazement, watched triumphantly as the pig's bladder sailed away into the still-uncluttered heavens. 'Elementary', he was heard to remark, but not to Watson, who was off trying to discover the 'bad' in Bad Ausee...'hot air rises'. Several persons in the crowd were heard to mumble 'I still think it was the stick'. The resulting schism between 'Stick Persons' and 'Hot Air Persons' has plagued science ever since. The relationship between politicians and pigs is well-known, and continues to plague the rest of the world. Indeed, every promise made by a politician ever since has been met with eye-rolling and the observation '...and pigs will fly...'.

Be that as it may, people began to dream about flying. If a stick could fly attached to a pig's bladder, why not a human being? It's completely logical. Tests began, but as most people with any sense were reluctant to leave the ground tied to a bunch of pig bladders, human substitutes were used. To quell dissent from the Stick Persons, the Hot Air Persons showed that anything tied to a 'balloon' (the new scientific term for 'inflated bladder', thanks to Michael Faraday) could be lifted off the ground, a bunch of carrots, for example (now the famous 'carrot and stick' theory, of course). Other tests were less successful. The famous Pony Cart Experiment (above) just would not fly, but not to be easily defeated, the best minds in the world deduced that it was not just the balloons that needed to be inflated, it was also the pony! Thus was launched one of the greatest periods of scientific experiment ever known to ponies.

this could work...M. Testu-Brissy

Alas, after many unfortunate, albeit sometimes interesting, attempts to inflate ponies, it was deduced that 'pony balloons' were not likely to be a commercial success, with the possible exception of Monsieur Pierre Testu-Brissy, who made about fifty balloon flights on a horse in the early 19th Century. The subsequent invention of the automobile made this less attractive as a means of transportation; however, as we shall see, his experiments were not forgotten...

up...up...and aweigh anchor, b'y!

In any case, this didn't stop the dreamers, of course. Even children, entranced with balloons and the possibility of an exciting and lucrative career in science, were found conducting brilliant experiments in local parks. Many went on to become astronauts. Others continued their pointless experiments well into middle age, or to an untimely and frequently messy end, or the cancellation of their government grants, whichever came first. Some were able to scrape out a living by inflating ponies for special events. Some still believe, that if one has a large enough inflated pony, expensive trips by steam ship could be avoided simply by hooking up the family car with strong ropes, an unusual branch of string theory which has not, as yet, produced practical results; nevertheless, an interesting extension of Monsieur Testu-Brissy's work.

Perhaps the most interesting branch of study currently being pursued  is by a sub-group of Horse Whisperers called Horse Flyers (also known as the Pegasus People), who have dedicated their lives to teaching horses to fly. Again, successful results are spotty, and practical applications are still not well-articulated, but not everything in science is immediately apparent. After all, who would have thought that an inflated pig bladder on a stick could lead to such fantastic advancements in human knowledge and accomplishments? Think about this next time you're on a transatlantic flight feeling like stuffing in a sausage...you are, sort of.

A Horse Flyer brings her steed in for a smooth landing...

  

The Unbearable Lightness of Being String...(part 2)

Sinking of the Titanic...the painting, not the movie

Icebergs, in spite their usefulness in chilling one’s drink(s), pose some difficult problems in Gordon’s String Theory. Unlike continents, which drift apart or along or whatever with relative predictability due to being loosely tied together, icebergs careen hither and yon with such unpredictability that they have to be individually monitored or we risk utter chaos on the high seas! Remember the Titanic (the ship, not the movie)? So, the more astute amongst you will say (yawn), ‘Throw a rope around them and tie them to something. Problem solved. Where’s my rum and iceberg?’ Exactly! ‘Har har’ others scoff, ‘Do you have any idea how big an iceberg is?’ Ditto exactly! Last question first: In 1987 an iceberg with an area of 6350 square kilometers broke from the Ross Ice Shelf. That berg had a mass of around 1.4 trillion tonnes and could have supplied everyone in the world with 240 tonnes of pure drinking water*.  Try throwing a line around that bad boy! Of course that’s Antarctica, where nobody lives except mad scientists and penguins (with whom some have formed questionable relationships involving dancing, which fortunately for them is not a subject for this blog). Nearer to us, however, the largest recorded iceberg was encountered near Baffin Island in 1882. It was 13 km long, 6 km wide and had a freeboard (height above water) of about 20 m. The mass of that iceberg was in excess of 9 billion tonnes - enough water for everyone in the world to drink a litre a day for over 4 years*. Still, you might think, one can’t just tie something like that to a solid object and expect it to stay there. True. But that doesn’t stop people from trying, and it has been proven possible to lasso an iceberg:

An iceberg lasso awaits use in Newfoundland.

Towing icebergs was first scientifically demonstrated in 1971 in Newfoundland (of course! Where else? – ed.). It is now a common practice in the management of icebergs for the offshore oil industry. Towing may not be the best term however, as often massive icebergs are merely deflected slightly from their paths. The tow is arranged by a vessel navigating around a berg while paying out a floating tow line. A junction is made so that the berg is

Was the island in the background once an iceberg?**

lassoed and then tow tension is applied carefully to avoid rolling the berg or pulling the line over the top*. Well, there you go – the solution to Continental Drift is exactly what we need to solve Iceberg Drift! Big strings! What’s next? Glad you asked. Once you have a line around an iceberg, you just drag it towards shore until it grounds on the ocean bottom. Then you throw some dirt on it, plant some grass and before you know it you’ve got a new island! With lots of water inside. People and animals could live on it. There is credible speculation that this is exactly how the Vikings created Iceland (hint: the name!) a couple thousand years ago; in fact, most islands north of the 53^rd parallel were probably icebergs at one time, although the scientific proof of this is still being assembled. OK, there actually isn’t any yet, but it could be true, eh?  Never underestimate the tie that binds, that's what I say. Speaking of which:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U4PkMuw0mU

*True iceberg facts courtesy of www.IcebergFinder.com
Made up facts about everything courtesy of the author.
** Photo courtesy of Bonnie Lillies of Ferryland, Newfoundland, professional iceberg lassoer, who personally made the island in the photo and is working on another one using the iceberg in the foreground, as soon as she collects enough dirt. So she says, but it could just be the Black Horse talking, if you know what I mean, b'y...

The Unbearable Lightness of Being String ...(part 1)

There are times in the study of Gordon's String Theory when one is taken by surprise at what can only be described, however inadequately, as the 'absolute stringiness of string'...perhaps it is an odd location, or a particularly beautifully executed functionality, or even just an unusual colour or pattern. One finds oneself imagining artistic purpose behind our strung out universe...or not.

all the elegance of a sonnet, with none of the words...

In this installment we shall look at such examples of random perfection, the inherent entropy of string contrasted with its undeniably purposeful purposes. How, for example, are we to comprehend the utterly and beautifully pointless arrangement of a few feet of white string on an Irish beach, except in terms of poetry? It ties nothing together, it meanders, stranded on the strand between strands of seaweeds, sinuously beginning to insinuate its way around a sea urchin, carelessly casting a shadow while all the time lying motionless. The next tide will move it somewhere else, perhaps to rest again like a line of free verse in the sand, or perhaps coiled around some other detritus, at the whim of waves and particles, time and tides. I should have been a pair of ragged claws...whoops! lapsed into some real poetry there for a second! Sorry, won't happen again.

Not Butler's Garter Snake, but still a bit creepy when you're just strolling along

Or this, like snakes sunning themselves in the mud of the Fraser River floodplain? Wrapped around a doomed stick, the headless, tailless 

Butler's Garter Snake

form of a striped rope has all the menacing qualities of a simple garter snake, even though we easily see the two ends, still purposeful in their intention to connect to something......while beyond, another pale, dishevelled, twisted form lies like a cast-off skin.

Do not open the gate...if you wish to fall, climb over the fence

All that keeps the ocean at bay...

Highly specialized functional string: knitted iceberg grabbers

Far, far across the continent,  about as far across as one can go, in fact, another string is wrapped around two  pieces of reinforcing rod, pretending, it would seem, to be keeping the North Atlantic far, far below at bay as it chews away at Ferryland Point and the magnificent lighthouse thereon. Not very far (certainly not far, far) along the same cliff edge, a gate inexplicably perches, an invitation to the curious walker to the edge, while numerous strategically knotted knots prevent the inevitable plunge downwards, while mere inches to the right, a few thin strands would hardly accomplish the same, and, it would appear, perhaps haven't...Yes, that is an iceberg off in the distance. Other than almost endless winter from October to June, complete with howling gales and the lashing of blizzardly winds, frozen rain, snow, somebody's laundry, shed parts, small boats, dogs and cats, hail, gravel, moose* and forty kinds of driven sleet, Newfoundland is stunningly beautiful, when it isn't raining, drizzling or foggy. The locals prize the occasional bit of free ice in the hot, sunny summer day(s) - and who wouldn't at that price!- hence the readily available mittens, (knitting being possibly the most brilliant adaptation of string to the needs of humanity, with or without the adjoining idjit string) on these nearby posts for catching bergy bits as they drift into shore. Now there is ice cubes in a drink, but then... there is BERGY BITS in a drink! The difference is captured gasses highly compressed in 25,000-year-old bergy ice that create the most amazing effervescence when dropped into a glass of room temperature rum. Of course, you really have to be there to get the grand effect of the wonderful science, b'y!...

* all items, you will note, except for rain, snow, hail, gravel and sleet, that should be tied to something! Except moose. Don't try tying a moose to anything...

(to be continued)

Wanna get tangly?

Part of an entangled universe...

One of the problems with string, and therefore by extrapolation* with Gordon's String Theory, is that left to its own devices, string tends to get tangled. Anyone who has ever gone lake fishing knows that while you are quietly being a boat potato, minding your own business and opening another beer, your fishing line is mysteriously tying itself into a big knot, so when the big one gets hooked you can reel in about seventeen feet of line and then...big tangle. Again! So after the appropriate amount of cursing, out comes the rarely-used filleting knife and away goes the fish, with that $1.99 spinner from Can Tire. Hence the homily 'Give a man a fish and you'll save him a day of untangling his line; teach him to fish and you can untangle the goddam thing yourself'. 

Tangling is also a human phenomenon. Left to their own devices, humans will tangle as readily as any piece of string, sometimes in a friendly fashion to make more humans, or just for fun, but often not so, which explains war. Tangling as practiced by idiotic commercial fisherpersons on the high seas is why we can't have nice whales any more, amongst other creatures. However, we were talking about GST...which leads us to Entanglement Theory, today's topic. So if you pull one end of a piece of string that's just lying there doing nothing, the other end moves towards you, right? The opposite, pushing a piece of string, does not actually work, for some unknown reason. What you're really doing when you pull that string is you're pulling a bunch of atoms towards yourself that just happen to be lumped together and visible as string...but what if you just grabbed an atom and pulled IT towards you - would a bunch of invisible atoms follow along? Who knows? Just don't be trying this in public. But nevertheless, people who think about stuff like this (scientists), have devised ways to get 'particles' ** to more or less behave in ways that if you do something to one of them, a reaction occurs in a particle elsewhere in the universe because those particles are entangled, meaning they are somehow invisibly connected, like that invisible string you're trying to use to pull your beer along the bar (shortly before you get cut off). A lot of human tangling is, oddly enough, initiated in bars, although scientists have yet to study this to the extent to which it should be. 

In theory, any action at any point in this 'tangle' will cause a reaction elsewhere

To our right we have a model of the universe which fits all known laws of physics (not to mention our human sense of environmental aesthetics), which is clearly in a state of entanglement. What anybody can see is that if you push or pull or kick any part of this universe (or, at a quantum level, any 'particle'), something will happen almost instantaneously somewhere else in the tangle (but no faster than the speed of light, so you should be able to get out of the way). Regardless of what happens and where, however, the action and reaction will have occurred along a classical communication channel, or an observable physical pathway, even if it happens really fast.  What quantum physicists are trying to figure out is how to be able to predict where, what and how the 'something else' would happen and, if possible, without the need for a classical communication channel. Actually they sort of know how, but the where and what and why are still elusive. BUT, and this is the big but, if they could figure this all out and predict where the entangled particles would react to something done elsewhere in the universe, they could in theory make something that happens on earth, or anywhere for that matter, generate an instantaneous reaction somewhere else in the universe. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there are a lots of physical laws that prevent us from actually doing theoretical things. Right now with even the best entanglements and channels, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light, which is pretty slow if you want to send somebody you're entangled with to Alpha Centauri for a vacation, for example (about ten years to get there and back at almost the speed of light. I mean, lots can change in ten years, eh?). Although the theoretical beauty of entanglement is fascinating, so far it's mostly being used by computer applications for encrypted information.  In science fiction, of course, it's the basic idea behind teleportation. It's also generating some interesting research in pure creativity and why we humans make various kinds of art. Here's a nice tune about entanglement:

https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=tangled+up+in+blue+bootleg+version&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35

* 'extrapolation' is one of my favourite words, as it can be used in the phrase 'by extrapolation' to suggest that something should be obvious to anyone with common sense, when it's not obvious at all!

** 'particle' is one of those words used by scientists to try to make things make sense. They aren't particles at all, at least not what normal people would call particles. Some particles are just theoretical, meaning they don't exist at all except in somebody's imagination. Somehow, some people get away with that kind of thinking, but lots don't. Artists do, sometimes, provided they actually do some work and don't just go around babbling about stuff in their imaginations.

Just walkin' and driftin'...

Our human stompin' grounds, Old Terra Firma...

There's this interesting mathematical modelling device called random walks, which amongst other things demonstrates that if you do a two-dimensional drawing of a random walk of a certain number of steps, you'll end up with a picture of something fairly random, not to mention abstract (try it! You'll see what I mean!). Apparently this is a useful tool with a lot of random applications, such as financial planning, or gambling as it is also known. But anyway you slice it, one thing is constant: any random walking is done on dry land (well, except for you know who...). And that dry land is/are our continents, as per the photo to the right. Random walks are associated with Brownian Motion, which is how we get on and off rapid transit, and which in turn is associated with entropy, a means of quantifying the energy in a system. All systems move naturally to a state of greatest entropy, which is a kind of universal laziness and explains readily observable phenomena such as couch potatoes.

...and a whole lot of random walks...

To the left we have a plot of a random walk of quite a lot of steps (I appropriated this, more or less, from a Wikipedia page, so it's real information, not just made up! - gt) . You'll notice that the walks are more or less separated into two clumps of information. Let your eyes wander back up to the satellite photo of the world, and you can see where I'm going with this...Continental Drift, a mechanism by which our planet seeks greater entropy, or 'couch-potatoeness', was probably caused by billions of people going on random walks over the past few hundred thousand years (I use the term 'people' to include everybody since we got down from the trees and started stomping around, more or less randomly, looking for a convenience store to get some smokes and a six-pack, maybe a hoagie and a 649 'financial planning' ticket). You'll notice there was a lot of random walking in Africa and up through Asia and Russia towards the Bering Strait - and also a lot around where Alaska is now, probably due to the land bridge that used to be there across the strait to the Walmart. Then there's a bunch of random walking up and down the Americas, probably after that land bridge disappeared and everybody was trying to find a way back home. All that stomping around must have had some effect on the planet, and sure enough the continents kind of got fed up with being treated like door mats and decided to split. By then it was too late, of course; people were procreating everywhere like rabbits, and the days of easy continental entropy on the Big Earthy Couch went the way of the dodo. This was before string was even invented, but the necessity was clearly beginning to be felt, if only to keep more 'stuff' from just drifting away, so to speak...Here's what Paul Butterfield had to say about it all, back in '67 at Monterey...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3LEhfbKCSc 

My sources tell me that was originally called 'Random Walkin' Blues', but who knows? Now, did you notice anything about that audience? Yes, some of them were stoned, or more precisely, a few of them might not have been stoned, or more precisely, totally stoned, but what about this: Did you see a single person who was looking at a GADGET!! No. You didn't. Peace, sisters and brothers.

Whither Continental Drift...?

A Continental String End in British Columbia...?

Everyone knows about continental drift, one of the physical manifestations of Tectonic Plate Theory, which essentially describes how Earth's largest land masses, aka continents, were once One Big Continent which split into smaller chunks which then began to move away from each other, mostly rather quietly and often at night when most people were sleeping. So we didn't really notice that Europe was a little bit further away each morning, until that fateful day when we realized we'd need more than a good pair of rubber boots to get there...Scientists have tried to explain how this could happen by suggesting it took place over billions of years. Fair enough...most people can't remember what happened last week, let alone where Australia used to be a million years ago (behind the shed with the barbie). But for G-String Theorists, there's a small problem: how come these continents haven't moved so far apart that they're not bumping into each other again on the other side of the world? Exactly! Enter Continental String Theory, a sub-theory of GST which postulates that the continents are tied together in a loose formation that prevents them from drifting too far apart. The actual mechanics of Continental String Theory are poorly

...while a brave pony keeps Ireland secure

understood at this time, as the theory is dependent on finding both ends of a what must understandably be very long Continental Strings, then proving that they are the same string. Nevertheless, new discoveries of possible Continental String Ends (CSEs) are raising tremendous excitement about possible new Continental String discoveries*. The above photo shows a possible CSE tied to a prehistoric lawnmower frame apparently abandoned in mid-mow on the banks of the Fraser River in British Columbia. The other end disappears into the river not far away, but the string is clearly under tension! Another example (right) is a possible CSE, also clearly under tension,  attached to a very fine and friendly pony in Ireland's Inishmaan, the middle of the three Aran Islands. Is it possible that this pony is all that prevents Inishmaan from floating away across the Atlantic Ocean to bump into New York City one dark and stormy night? Or Boston, which oddly enough seems to be a particular obsession of the Aran Islanders? Was Boston once part of the Aran Islands that floated away? These questions remain unanswered, and we must admit, highly speculative at this time.

*statements like this are intended to suggest something important is happening  that could procure additional research funding, so please don't point out that it actually says nothing. Think of the pony - wouldn't she like a nice juicy apple? You can help make that happen!