THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON (LAUREN GROFF) AND THE RABBIT TEST

 What did she know about precautions? Vi awoke over the next month with vomit already in her mouth, and felt lethargic and heavy and sick. Even before they injected the bunny with her urine and watched it die, Vivienne knew.

 

In the recent past, this test was very popular, even it was used the expression ´the bunny died´ to name euphemistically a pregnancy. As the text says, the test consists in injecting urine from the possible pregnant woman in a rabbit, in a doe rabbit specifically. If the woman is pregnant, the presence of the hCG hormone will cause changes in the rabbit organism. But the rabbit doesn´t die because of this injection, like the text may show, but it has to be sacrified and dissected by a doctor in order to check wether there is a pregnancy or not. It may seem a very rudimentary method and something like an archaic ritual, but its reliability was quite high, around 98%.

MEN IN MY SITUATION (PER PETTERSON) AND ECO-ANXIETY

 Of the roads. Of the cars, of Mazda and Ford, of Opel, of any brand at all, of manuals and automatics, of petrol-powered cars and cars that were diesel powered, of quiet-running cars and cars that spewed coal-black smoke out over the tarmac in a miserable tail from their exhaust pipes. I hadn’t worked out how much carbon dioxide I emitted on these trips. It was probably a criminal amount, and honestly, it bothered me, I thought about it often, I lay awake at night counting litres of fuel, counting cubic metres in my sleep, but what could I do, should I take pills, how damaging was the pharmaceutical industry, certainly very damaging, though I didn’t know with what substance or how; toxic runoff into the ground, crap in the air, or just narcotically destructive in general.

In this blog we like to keep us up-to-date about scientific neologisms. Letś consider eco-anxiety, which symptoms are well described in this text. Pavese said that a suicide was a shy killer, so in the same way we could say that people who suffer ecoanxiety are like expandable hypochondriacs. As you can see, itñs a very first world problem. Everything contaminates, everything wastes energy, even a simple Google search does it. Indeed, I have just searched it on Google and “one only one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2”

 

GREAT EXPECTATIONS (CHARLES DICKENS) AND THE INFLUENCE OF WIND IN SONIC PROPAGATION

 As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many church-clocks in the City - some leading, some accompanying, some following - struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

 

How useful for the daily life is to have a slight knowledge of the basics of Science! Without reaching the levels of McGyver, here are a few tips about wind so that you can take the most of them: you shouldn´t urinate against wind ( all the boys learn it by scientific method). And the wind has also influence in the sound. Everyone who lives around a futbol stadium knows that with wind-assisted, the sound gets better. You listen to it stronger and better, or less flawed, in Dickens´words. This is because of a type of diffraction that alters less the sonic waves

WHEN WE CEASED TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD (BENJAMÍN LABATUT) AND THE EFFECTS OF CYANIDE

 The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by M.P: Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life.

Itś very short the bibliograhy about the effects of cyanide. Likewise, there are very few records about the effects og guillotine during French Revolution. It really atracts my atention the fact that this Indian goldsmith, hopeless as he was to commit suicide, found time to think about Science and posteriry. He had his reason, the poor guy. Pavese, anothesuicide, used to say tha a suicide was a shy killer. May the bitterness of cyanide be recorded, in case someone was cuirious about it

 

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (JENNIFER EGAN) AND ENTANGLED PARTICLES

 And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us.1

11. I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained

 

I like this nice confession by the author because it shows how the writers sometimes use Science to brag adorning their metaphors. In fact, with a complicated and abstract topic like quantum mechanics, it should be just the opposite, I mean, instead of being a source of metaphors, it would be neccessary to use clever similes to understand their own concepts, because many of them are neither intituive nor familiar. I see Quantum Physics more like a recipient of similes than a donor.

And what a beatiful word is sophistry, isn´t it?

ABBOTT AWAITS (CHRIS BACHELDER) AND GEOCENTRIC SYSTEM

 Afterward, his parents had joint custody, so Abbott moved between their residences every two weeks. These transfers occurred on Sundays, in late afternoon or early evening. And there was, as in some convoluted geocentric model of the heavens, motion within motion: His mother, with whom Abbott lived half the time, moved six times in the eight years of the custodial arrangement. One consequence of this Ptolemaic childhood was that Abbott at a young age became preoccupied with luggage

 

This is one of the sharpest comparison we´ve posted here. The geocentric model, according the Ptolomeo´s one, was adding, as the text says, motion within motion to justify its validity. Epycicles and deferents got complicated the schedule but they managed to put the Earth at the centre. Likewise, these parents, with their changes and moves, kept on orbiting around their child. This is a lovely and funny book about fatherhood, and we can read things like these: Husbands are useless ( I admit that I couldn´t disagree more) or something about the institution of marriage: That´s one of the things that marriaged people do, devastate a sanctuary to agitate their loved one

THE VANISHING HALF (BRIT BENNET) AND THE DIVISION OF THE EGG

 But they never returned again. Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg

If this blog were a catalogue of sensible and suitable uses of Science in Literature, this post would be a good example. The metaphor in it, is not the subtlest in the world, but it works pretty well and it fits perfectly to what it wants to show, because the división of the ovule is really mysterious and, on the other hand, is what leads to embryonic growth

The usual reader of this blog may notice that Biology is not my specialty so, I make the most of the situation to speak about this strange novel where we are told, for example, about the phenomenon of the black people which have pale skin and they can impersonate for white people. This such a good material for a novel was also used by Philip Roth in The Human Stain

TOURISTS OF THE IDEAL (IGNACIO VIDAL-FOLCH) AND THE TAMARIND

 The tree on which you are set is called here rain tree . They give it this name because it collects the dew on its flowers and when it dawns and closes them to protect itself from the sun, it pours the water on the one below…if you fall asleep, it wakes you up with a great shower!

Tamarind, sampaloc… this tree has plenty of names. Trees, like birds, can be named in a great variety of ways, according to the place. Linneo´s intervention was very timely to bring order.

Althought the main use of tamarind is to offer shadow for the cattle and it can be comestible, it is best knowm for this hidraulic show described in the text. It is also famous its Majestic top, like the Dragon tree.

May this post serve to recommend the novel  which is good, but even better are the diaries by the same author, Illusion is what matters. In this book, every new post appears wiht a number, 19564 for instance, which means the number of days the writer has lived. It was difficult for me to understand it, but I liked it

ANY SON (EDUARDO HALFON) AND THE BOILED TOAD FABLE

 He told us tha if you put a toad in a boling water pan, the toad Will jump quickly out of the pan for salving itself. But if you put the toad in lukewarm water and you increase Little by Little the temperatura, the toad Will not noticed the gradual rise and it Will died eventually boiled.I am sure that nobody understood the fable and the teacher was writting on the blackboard the First Law of Themodynamics (∆u = q − w) next to the drawinf of a smiling toad

From my point of view, this fable would work pretty well to illustrate the risks of climate change. The average increase in temperature on the planet is so gradual, using a human life as scale, that we do barely notice it. But we might be like the toad which is being heated up little by little. When the old teacher keeps on writing down a formula, his students no longer pay attention to him. It´s something very well-known by teachers and science communicators. In fact, in popular science books, there is a premise of avoiding formulas and working with metaphores and fables. It´s  even said that some editors have quantified ( with a formula!) the number of readers that  would be lost if there were a specific number of formulas on a page.

ANDREW´S BRAIN (E. L. DOCTOROW) AND THE GALVANI EXPERIMENTS

 Andrew was given the lesson plan in biology. It was simple enough and he used the occasion of the frog dissection, and a reprise of Galvani, the leg of a dead frog touched with a metal probetwitching as if still alive, to gradually direct the class to some Elementary facts of brain science. And the more he wandered off the lesson plan, the more they loved it, girls and boys, the inseparable lovers among them. One of the students jumped up on the stage of the study hall and held his fist to his mouth, microphonelike: “Here it´s dorsal, there it´s ventral, this here´s rostral, you nothin´but mental…”

On late 18th century, Galvani applied an electric charge to a frog which he was stuffing and the frog´s leg convulsed. This was the beginning og galvanism, which with te time was alpplied to bigger animals in public demonstrations and even with deaths by hanging. The influence on the later Frankenstein is very obvious

Although lately Volta proved Galvani was wrong by inventing batteries, Galvani´s work was crucial to te development of the study of nervous system, brain and nerve impulse

A REAL BORE ( SANTIAGO LORENZO) AND THE FACTORIAL FUNCTION

 I became intrigued about how he had managed to get in. He told me. He had seen that the door could be opened with the keyboard system that  I´d mentioned earlier when I reminded my arrival to Pacomio´s house, the one that worked dialing a four number code. The possible combinations were hundreds of them. However, they could be significantly shorten. All the buttons were filthy. Except the 3, the 5, the 8 and the 9 one, which were the ones that the real dwellers used to press to get in. Those ones, by the use, were shiny. The four tell-tale keys narrowed down the options to twenty-four attempts. The door opened at the fifteenth one.

Factorial function is a pretty math tool known from long time ago. It is symbolised by the exlclamation point and it indicates the number of combinationsin which you can order n objects (n!). You can calculate it by multiplying all the whole numbers from 1 to the number. For instance, for 4 would be 4!=4x3x2x1=24. Well done, Santiago Lorenzo, the choices were of 25 attempts. And I want also ti congratulate you for this novel that has made have a good time

RUNAWAY (MARTÍN LUCÍA) AND FLUIDS DYNAMICS

 The belly and the top of the legs got soaked everytime the wind changed its direction and  contradicted the Universal Law of Gravitation. The wind maded drops moving almost horizontally, flooding what should be protected by human invention and Physics

Fluid Dynamic is one of the ugliest branch  of Physics and it´s very unpleasant to study with its Reynolds numbers and others. In general, the more Science simplifies the object to study, the more beautiful it is. This is why Engineering degrees are ugly to study if you compare them with pure Sciences and their famous simplifications.

With wind, water doesn´t behave itself in an ideal way, but willy-nilly. So, it´s difficult to model it using  Physics. Then, things like  the rain upwards may happen. It´s very common in Cádiz in days of levante wind, by the way.

This post is also useful to recommend this novel, the first one in putting the VAR tecnology in Literature

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION (OTESSA MOSHFEGH) AND THE CONCEPT OF VACUUM

 “Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.”

First of all, these words come from the mouth of an extravagant ‘psychologist’ who in fact looks more like a witch or a fortune teller­. Vacuum has always been a controversial concept, not only from a scientific perspective. Torricelli experiment, so simple, so smart, proves the existence of  vacuum. But the text doesn´t speak about vacuum as a no-matter space, which is what Torricelli showed, but about the emptiness inherent to the matter, a gap, a hole inside the matter. And that´s what Rutherford exposed with his famous gold-foil experiment. Furthermore, the woman in the text is fully right when she warns us that we´ll probably die if we go through a wall

NEVER MIND (EDWARD ST AUBYN) AND THE RAINBOW OF THE ROAD

 He had read about rainbows in a soppy picture book, but then he had started to see them in the streets in London after it rained, when the petrol from the cars stained the tarmac and the water fanned out in broken purple, blue, and yellow rings.

It´s not exactly a rainbow, but we all have seen it on a rainy day on the road. The description in the text is very good, rings are formed, not  archs, the complete circumference. This effect is produced because petrol, like oil, is immiscible with water and stays upon a puddle on the road. Then, a triple layer air-petrol-water appears, which produces a game of refractions that separates the light into its colours

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (SHIRLEY JACKSON) AND THE TOXICITY OF THE AMANITA PHALLOIDES

 “The Amanita phalloides,” I said to him, “holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting—”

Careful with this mushroom, whose nicknames are green hemlock, fungus of death or death cap. These nicknames themselves make you mistrust them.

With regards to the three different poisons, I don´t know if you can choose one or the three of them act simultaneously. If I had to choose, I´d have doubts between phallin or phalloidin. But you must know that if you eat it, you´ll be on the list of victims of this mushroom, and there are two emperors on this list, Claudio and Carlos VI.

And Wikipedia says that ´according to some reports, its taste is nice´…

THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE (MAGGIE O´FARRELL) AND THE SPEED OF GLACIERS

 Elina sits in traffic on Pentonville Road.  The cars ahead of her stretch out like a glacier of chrome and glass.

I think both of them, the metaphor and the hyperbole, work pretty well so, I  have nothing to correct here. And this is perfect because I´m on my holidays and we, the teachers, need to disconnect from work avoiding  telling off  or correcting anything.

I knew glaciers move very slowly but I have found out in a Google search that their average speed is 50  meters per year. Really frustrating for a jam, indeed.

´A  glacier of chrome and glass´ sounds good, even like a line in a song by Javier Krahe.

FIVE AND ME (ANTONIO OREJUDO) AND THE ARISTOCRACY OF SCIECE

 Quintin always believed he was a genius who was going to renovate Maths. His fathers´ dream was that he studied aeronautic engineering.  That’s why,  his resolution to study Pure Maths disappointed his father. He asked him why did he do it and Quentin answered that applied sciences was for weak people; Pure Maths were the aristocracy of Science

In the last post we talked about the reciprocal misgivings between Science and Arts. In this post Arts are not even involved. As a chemist, I have to admit that the difficulty of  an university degree is directly proportional to the contents of Math in it.  Although we are not only told about difficulty here, but the plebeian aspect in the fact of looking for an application in everything you learn.  The romantic vision of Knowledge for its own sake is not actually exclusive of teoric or pure Mathematics because degrees as classical philology for example,  share this vision.

THE KINGDOM (JO NESBO), WE WERE THE MULVANEYS (JOYCE CAROL OATES) AND BEAUTY

 'Symmetry,’ she said at last. ‘The golden ratio. Shapes that imitate nature. Complementary colours. Harmonising notes.’

I nodded, relieved that the conversation was back on the rails again but knowing I’d have a hard time forgiving myself for that slip.

‘Or in architecture, where you have functional shapes,’ she went on. ‘Which are actually the same as shapes that imitate nature. The hexagonal cells in a beehive. The beaver’s regulatory dam. The fox’s network of tunnels. The woodpecker’s hole of a nest which becomes a home for other birds. None of these are built to be beautiful, and yet they are. A house that’s good to live in is beautiful. It’s actually as simple as that.’

Symmetry, which is a geometric concept, is essential to define Beauty. Therefore, Beauty would be something objective, outward and superior to human beings. Pure Maths are  this way somehow .  This is something you can withhold from  Nesbo´s text. All the attempts of breaking this harmony in Music, Painting,  can’t help being   a naughty childish behaviour.  Not only is there the famous Golden Ratio named in the text but  also there is another proportion in the Alhanmbra ,called Arabian  by some people , which appears in most of the rectangles of this monument. Or, maybe, it´s just the opposite, who knows,  and so  Beauty is the quality most affected by  subjectivity and full of prejudices , as it is said in this passage  We were the Mulvaneys, by  Joyce Carol Oates:

Of course, he knew beauty doesn't exist. He hadn't known then but he knew now. Beauty is a matter of perspective, subjectivity. Cultural prejudice. You require a human eye, a human brain, a human vocabulary. In nature, there's nothing. 

Still, beauty gives comfort. Who knows why?

OLIVE KITTERIDGE ( ELIZABETH STROUT) AND THE BIOCHEMISTRY OF ASPIRIN

 His smile would linger as he arranged his bottles, typed up labels. Denise’s nature attached itself to his as easily as aspirin attached itself to the enzyme COX-2; Henry moved through his day pain free

This is a bold metaphor, because not many people know how the active ingredient of aspirin works. By contrast, if you use good similes, you can give us the feeling of reminding  more than discovering something unknown.

The enzyme COX-2  allows the appearance of pain and inflammation and aspirin inhibits them.

Henry manages to pass the day without pain at the expense of his own personality, which ends inhibited, and I´m not sure that this is what the author wants to mean

Anyway, it´s great to see that someone takes the risk of using this daring metaphor

I´m also going to use this post to recommend this novel about the wanderings of a dull teacher of Maths ( redundancy?) of which there is a TV series that I haven´t seen yet

LITTLE FAITH (NICKOLAS BUTLER) AND THE INACCURAY OF METEOROLOGISTS

 These meteorologists don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground anyway,” Otis said. “I worked in academia over half a century. Meteorologists had to be some of the least respected scientists on campus. At the end of the day, they look at their fancy radars, they punch in their projections on a computer, shake some chicken bones on a table, light a black candle, and say a hundred Hail Marys. Somebody could sneeze in Seattle and disrupt their forecast. This could be a whole lot of nothing. Go home and wish for warm weather

Poor meteorologists! They are not well considered.  This text tries to take off any scientific bass to this part of knowledge. Sometimes, as the referees, meteorologists have been insulted, and their mothers too. It´s difficult to stand that pressure, not everybody is prepared to be a meteorologist. Because not only farmers are attentive to the weather forecast, also the amateur sport men, or the Brotherhoods of Holy Week. Now, with our mobiles, we want the information in real time ( and I wonder if there be a virtual time).  But also people tend to say ´three minutes per clock ´and I guess it´s to distinguish them  from the minutes of a thermometer

I have checked that it always rains less than my mobile says, I think it may be a strategy to keep us happy. Like when my mobile lies to me, with the help of Google maps, about the time that takes me to get to a place by bike, it always takes me more.

My favourite weather man has always been José Antonio Maldonado, who is Sevilla FC supporter and he used to sit next to me in Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán stadium.

ORFEO ( RICHARD POWERS) AND BRAVO FOR CHEMISTRY!

 At fifteen, he fell in love with chemistry. The pattern language of atoms and orbitals made sense in a way that little else but music did. Balancing chemical equations felt like solving a Chinese puzzle box. The symmetries hidden in the columns of the periodic table had something of the Jupiter’s grandeur. And a person might even make a living with the stuff.

I´m about to start my Chemistry term showing this text to my students, because it´s full of Chemistryphilia, word that I´m inventing in opposition to Chemistryphobia, which gives to the chemist  work all  evils, and it´s a decent job, even could be an art, like Juncal used to say to Búfalo.

I think that ´balancing chemical equations´ should have been translated by ´adjusting chemical equations´.

To round off this cute image of Chemistry, or this ´whitewash´as it´s said nowadays, we can add another passage of this interesting novel that equates  Chemistry and Music in several times. Both of them have developed an own language, for example.

Freshman year exhilarated him. He sat in the auditorium alongside four hundred other chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit writing from the world inside this one. The labs—titrating, precipitating, isolating—were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument. Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine, Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.

TAKE ME HOME ( JESÚS CARRASCO) AND MOURNING AS A BLACK HOLE

 The mother beside him, stooped over, decreased by her own mourning. Her closeness is a black hole which consumes his energy.

I find appropriate this image, in a real mourning there is nothing else. The one in mourning, suffers inwards and decreases himself, as we are told in the text, and all in the surround end up being absorbed by the mourning. It doesn´t let escape anything, as if it were a black hole.

One of the most fascinating conversations I´ve ever heard in my life was in a bus in Seville. It was between two gipsy girls, quite young both of them. One of them was explaining to the other how to cook when you are in mourning and she was telling her how inappropriate was to add peppers, red or green, to the lentils. I would have felt like listening much more, but I arrived to my bus stop and I had to get off

DECLINE AND FALL (EVELYN WAUGH) AND THE MONKEY AND THE HUNTER PROBLEM

 “ ‘Aim high’ has been my motto,” said Sir Humphrey, “all through my life. You probably won’t get what you want, but you may get something; aim low, and you get nothing at all. It’s like throwing a stone at a cat. When I was a kid that used to be great sport in our yard; I dare say you were throwing cricket-balls when you were that age, but it’s the same thing. If you throw straight at it, you fall short; aim above, and with luck you score. Every kid knows that. I’ll tell you the story of my life.”

´Aim high ´is a good  piece of advice in general, but in this case  I think it´s not quite correct. Or at least it doesn´t agree about the solution of the famous mental experiment of the hunter and the monkey. With some simple equations of elemental Physics ( which I don´t write here in order not to chase any hipotetycal reader away) can be proved that if the monkey ( or the cat) falls at the moment of listening the shot, the hunter always scores  if he´s aiming to the monkey. But if you throw a stone at a cat, he can react and fall a bit later, that´s why Evelyn  Waugh suggests this adjustment in this novel whose tittle, by the way, is so suitable for this post

LIT: A MEMOIR (MARY KARR) AND DARWINISM AS BASIS OF LOVELY BUT FALSE THEORIES

 An old sociological or Darwinian theory holds that when we’re looking to gin out babies, we’re biologically propelled toward the partner who’ll color in dull spots in our own genetic code. So when opposites attract, they’re biologically combining to form the perfect offspring

It´s a pity that these compact and satisfactory explanations are not scientifically rigorous, because they work as well as fables. Their problem is that they explain everything in hindsight, they don´t have the capacity of prediction. In this way, they seem like Psychoanalysis. It would be nice if there were an evolutionist justification for each old saying or proverb, like ´Think  the worst and you won´t be far wrong´, ´Spare the rod and spoil the child´,… I think it wouldn´t be very complicated, using Darwin´s theory as an excuse, to explain each topic or maxim

THE MAN WHO INVENTED MANHATTAN ( RAY LORIGA) AND CONTINENTAL DRIFT

 …with that invisible movement similar to continental drift that separates people who love each other.

Bravo for Ray Loriga! This is a brilliant example of how Science can help Literature on giving a great presence to your metaphors. You can tell, for things like this, that a good basic scientific education at school is worth it! They are also very interesting the metaphors in the opposite way, I mean, those you have to create to explain a physical phenomenon without using Maths or another Science. For instance, in Physics manuals, the waves are described as a transmission of energy without transmission of matter and someone thought it was like a rumour spreading troughout the country without nobody  moving.

So, metaphors are a kind of communicating vessels between scientists and litteratours and you can use them to give an elegant touch to a literary text and to get people without  great scientific knowledges to glimpse some complex physical phenomena

THE CUNNING MAN (ROBERTSON DAVIES) AND THE TWELVE CRANEAL NERVES

 I tried to pass the time by recalling mnemonics which had helped to get me through my medical examinations, but for so many the "clean" form gave way to the form preferred by young men in excellent health whose instruction in science and medicine had done nothing to quench their natural lusts -- did, indeed, encourage them.

Consider, for instance, the Twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem:

I Olfactory On Oh!

II Optic Old Oh!

III Oculomotor Olympus' Oh!

IV Trochlear Towering To

V Trigeminal Tops Touch

VI Abducens A And

VII Facial Finn Feel

VIII Acoustic And A

IX Glossopharyngeal German Girl's

X Vagus Viewed Vagina

XI Accessory Some And

XII Hypoglossal Hops Hymen!

Science students have always had the ability of taking unbelievable detours to study. I have seen for myself how some people used to do strange things to study the periodic table.Mnemonic techniques  tend to be naughty because then you reach a win-win situation, I mean, on the one hand you end up learning the twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem but on the other hand, you make laugh your mates. And although many of these rules have a collective authorship, there is usually someone talented for these jokes.As Gerardo Diego said about his future and hypothetical students on toasting for his position of a teacher,

And another , surely the most clever one,

will give me a definitive alias

The naughty mnemonic techniques and the definitive alias of a teacher are stuff not well appreciated in your official CV but they give you a lot of prestige with your mates. However, students of tough sciences as Physics or Chemistry are not very keen of this method, even they disregard it, as we can see in what The physic Enrico Fermi said when the subatomic particles began to increase: ´if I could remember the name of all of these particles, I´d have been a botanic´

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (CORMAC MCCARTHY) AND THE SPEED OF BULLETS COMPARED TO THE SPEED OF SOUND AND LIGHT

Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzlebrake the rifle bucked up off the rest. When he pulled the animals back into the scope he could see them all standing as before. It took the 150 grain bullet the better part of a second to get there but it took the sound twice that. They were standing looking at the plume of dust where the bullet had hit. Then they bolted. Running almost immediately at top speed out upon the barrial with the long whaang of the rifleshot rolling after them and caroming off the rocks and yawing back across the open country in the early morning solitude.

Moss felt something tug at the bag on his shoulder. The pistolshot was just a muffled pop, flat and small in the dark quiet of the town. He turned in time to see the muzzleflash of the second shot faint but visible under the pink glow of the fifteen foot high neon hotel sign. He didnt feel anything. The bullet snapped at his shirt and blood started running down his upper arm and he was already at a dead run. With the next shot he felt a stinging pain in his side. He fell down and got up again leaving Chigurh’s shotgun lying in the street. Damn, he said. What a shot. 

We can see in these two texts some topics that films usually don´t represent quite well. In the first one, some antelopes can see the dust where the bullet had hit and in less than a second after , they listen to the gunshot. So, it´s a rifle with supersonic bullets that they move faster than the sound (340 m/s). This is something usual in rifles and machine guns . I think it would be easy to representate it in films but they don´t do it because the result wouldn´t be very intuitive.

A bit more complicated is the second text because of the inclusion of the speed of light, higher than the speed of sound. If you were shot by a sniper with one of these rifles, you´d notice the following order of things: firstly, the burst of light, especially if you were shot at night. After that, you´d notice the impact of the bullet (or you´d listen to the whistling of the bullet nex to to you) and in the end, you´d listen to the ´bang!´.It´s a bit confusing and the opposite of the natural order you can imagine. I think that´s the reason why film directors don´t take the opinion of fussy people like me into account.

Cormac McCarthy is really into the topic of the speed of bullets as he also talked about it in The Road

THE LIVING FOREST (WENCESLAO FERNÁNDEZ FLORES), IRIS AND THE FRIENDS (JOHN BAYLEY) AND THE UNJUSTIFIED GREAT REPUTATION OF PLANT KINGDOM

 Trees have their fights. The big ones give shade to the small ones, which  grow quickly then in order to be the owners of their ration of sun, and on spreading the roots under the ground, there are some of them, maybe too much greedy, that hinder the rest in their legitimate determination of nourish themselves

The living forest, Wenceslao Fernández Flores

It´s depressing to see all this biologically. The Woodlandres again: Hardy´s vision of the beautiful trees battening on one another, helpless not to profit from their neighbours´ wounds and death. If the tree close beside me dies, I have that much more light and air

Iris and the friends, Jhon Bayley

The rocker Silvio used to say:´Everyone does their own thing but me, that  do my own thing´. The same is true for plants, as we can see in the two texts of this post: they try to survive in a wild way, even over the heads of their congeners. And yet, they enjoy a great and unjustified reputation compared to the animals´one. In fact, nobody tends to say things like this: ´ man is a fern for men´. And a geranium, for instance, would act like a hyena or a fox if it could. Even plants like bougainvillea or rose bush, well-regarded in Literature, would attack other plants, primarily the same kind´s ones,  if their limitations of movement didn´t prevent it

But we have an exception in this benevolent treatment of the language to plants with the verb ´to thrive´, that is what plants do since they are small. So, the next time you find a social climber workmate, don´t use animal analogies to describe him or her, you can just say, for example, ´this workmate is a vine´or ´my boss is a pothos´. In this way you enrich your vocabulary at the same time that you render justice in balancing the fame of animals and plants

WE THREE: MY ECHO, MY SHADOW AND ME ( THE INK SPOTS) AND HOW PHYSICAL PHENOMENA PROVIDE YOU WITH COMPANY

 We three, we’re all alone

Living in a memory
My echo, my shadow, and me

We three, we’re not a crowd
We’re not even company
My echo, my shadow, and me

What good is the moonlight
The silvery moonlight that shines above?
I walk with my shadow
I talk with my echo
But where is the one I love?

We three, we’ll wait for you
Even till eternity
My echo, my shadow, and me

“We three we’re all alone. Seems like we’re livin’ in a memory.
That’s my echo my shadow and me.
We three we ain’t no crowd.
Fact is we ain’t even company.
That’s my echo my shadow and me.
You know I been wonderin’ what good is the
moonlight that silvery moonlight that shines way, way up above?
Yeah, I walk with my shadow, I talk with my echo, but where is that gal that I love?”

We three, we’ll wait for you
Even till eternity
My echo, my shadow, and me

We have a song this time. I discovered it listening the fantastic podcast by BobDylan and I also found out that this song, ´My echo, my shadow and me´ was popularized by Frank Sinatra earlier.

This is the way Physics accompanies you; if you want to talk, you have your echo, which is exactly a reflection of your sound waves. With regards to the shadow, can there be anything more faithful that your own shadow? To illustrate this wonderful optical phenomenon, you are bound to remember a little kid discovering his shadow for the first time.  There are two kinds of reaction to this discovery which even are two kinds of attitude to life: some of them run away desperately and others play with it, testing their capacity of imitation.

Someone could think that Philosophy, Art or Religion are also capable to accompany: with the soul. But the soul has the problem of its controversial existence and above all, that which Douglas Coupland wrote in The Gum Thief : ´I don´t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know  because it hurts

ENDURING LOVE (IAN MCEWAN) AND THE LATE EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF EINSTEIN THEORIES

 In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data was in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in nineteen fifteen and sixteen, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in nineteen fourteen to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in nineteen nineteen to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data was overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory. More expeditions set out to observe eclipses and check Einstein’s predictions, in nineteen twenty-two in Australia, in twenty-nine in Sumatra, in thirty-six in the USSR and in forty-seven in Brazil. Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The Theory was already in the textbooks from the twenties onwards. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.

This is one of the reasons why I don´t like teaching the scientific method as a recipe or as an inflexible guide that scientifics strictly follow. Things work in another way because we know that intuitions exist and even tricks to get where you want.  Something typical of human beings, indeed.

Ian McEwan always talks about  Science in his novels. We´ve already posted here about Saturday and Solar. In my head, I have an outline of the analogy between the structure of McEwan´s novels and Sabina´s songs, which both of them repeat again and again. But I admit that I´m not ready to develop it yet