Sunday, August 17, 2014

Chapter 5: Varun subs

Consider a bead of oil, whose size Millikan would approve, falling gracefully through one of those civilization altering furnaces. The surrounding air molecules possess a kinetic energy of such intensity that they violently pummel the inanimate drop's surface, bruising it with an unrelenting and absurd rage. In an inexplicable urgency to rush into the drop's core, the rabid air dislodges the drop's own molecules, surrounding, evangelizing and authorizing them with their newly bestowed absurd fury. The drop's unleashed rogue remnants join the absurd army of chaos by the quadrillions, breaching the shrinking drop which is, beyond certainty, doomed to a most horrifying annihilation. Many of these rogues purposelessly collide against the air molecules, some collisions merely reorienting the rogues and original assailants, but others, with  just the right amount of maddening bloodlust, enjoin in a fierce kiss. A kiss that lasts just long enough, that the mating molecules transfigure into harder, tougher, stabler species by discharging yet newer, evermore violent berserk rogues! An aging fraction of these rogues, as though overwhelmed by the exponentially increasing action, "relax". That strange principle of physics that says that there's no free lunch, that all phenomena are really transactions of some kind between an object and the rest of the universe, insists that this relaxing be necessarily accompanied by an emission of a prescribed number of photons, particles that put all others to shame when it comes to weight and speed. A speed so raw and large, they reach the Sun in a matter of minutes if nothing stops them! That the word "blitz" was reserved to describe fast - yet again absurd - war is by no means an accident. The absurdity deepens when one realizes that a portion of this light that happens to be obstructed by clueless gazing eyes appears blue to them only because the voids in said eyes that are quote blue-sized feel them! As a certainty buff in my undergrad days, that sentence - uttered by a Physics Professor with a similar aim as mine today - emblazoned in what has since then felt like a vacuous skull, the agonizing realization that not only is there no capital-T-truth but only capital-P-perception, but that all capital-P-perception is itself inherently capital-I-incomplete! If like me, you seek the comfort of a one-size-fits-all explanation, you may, like me, feel haunted while asleep and awake! Please pay attention to what you students have chosen to embrace! The matter in this course is incredibly amusing, but you may need to seriously revise your notion of what an explanation means. This narration which to some of you may sound grotesquely anthropocentric, is more elegantly slash coldly - depending on where you come from - presented by relationships between symbols in a language, don't forget designed by humans, called mathematics. Some of you may think that the truth is in the math, but I submit to you that you'll have better luck finding proofs in puddings! In this course you will find yourselves so frantically masturbating over these symbols, especially on the mornings of your midterms, that the so-called truth starts appearing weird in the way a word starts appearing weird when uttered over and over again. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Pronouncing it differently doesn't make it any better. Taruth. Taaaaaruth. Truuuuuuuuth. Taaaaaaaaruuuuuuuuth. How bizarre! I'm told this is called semantic satiation. And I don't feel any wiser knowing that! Back to the realtime-non-relativistic-millisecond sized action movie whose denouement you may have pieced together, which is that the stormy volume of hot gas engulfing the now faint wisp of an oil drop has burst into a Dodger blue flame that will consume the central wisp before a final disappearing act that's a worthy metaphor for the neubulous bind between all life and death! And in a plot-for-a-sequel-that's-so-good-it-write's-itself, the rogue molecules who weren't recruited for the  quote full-burn begin to coalesce into giant factions of nasty black solid particles, who harbor a dissipating anger that radiates bright yellow! This is soot. It's carcinogenic and deadly to humans; the universe is indifferent to it. The next time you see a candle flame and feel a blessing of peaceful serenity gracing your optical apparati, I invite you to recall the spectacular chaos that is taking place underneath it all. I take it that you all received the memo saying that the principle requirement of this class was the staunch belief that however chaotic slash complicated phenomena might seem and however impossible it is obtaining a quote final solution, there exists a set of fundamental and immutable processes that when deftly superposed can sufficiently approximate the capital-T-truth. By sufficient, I mean that the set of phenomena a certain number of you will be toiling away in a basement lab trying to perfectly reproduce at any time of the day, another group of you must be able to develop an accompanying working model for; a model that we can use to make quote predictions. If that sounds like a Sissyphusian sort of deal, I promise you that I'll do my best to make the climbs and descents interesting. Speaking of interesting, let me begin today's class by introducing to you this beast of a brainiac called Ludwig Boltzmann...

2 comments:

Seeker of Truth said...

Apparently there is an American and a British quadrillion. If the post was written in British English, then what's describing may not strictly be an oil 'drop' experiment (unless of course 'drop' is used as a gerund of sorts and not a descriptor of size of something that could well be a blob). In any case, it will be interesting to see how much these matters of size mattered to Millikan's experiment, as they might have mattered if Archimedes got funding for his earth-lift thought-experiment. Would Archimedes have identified the right equipment if he had been pressed to, or was he engaging in some rhetorical flourish like this post, rather than numerical exactitude?

Seeker of Truth said...

Does this blogger do a good-enough job of motivating the masses to learn more about 'combustion science' and 'combustion engineering'?
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html