3 Oct 98
My Lord, I am freezing.
I'm sitting in my office for heaven's sake. I'm used to my fingers being
cold but this is getting ridiculous.
I made the mistake of engorging myself with funnel cake. I ended up
throwing out half of it, but I don't feel that wasted food guilt a lot of
people feel. Whether for environmental or economic reasons. Or the old
"there are kids starving in China!" which really makes no sense as an
argument. I mean, most kids are extremely willing to send starving
Chinese kids any of their hated foodstuffs. I paid for the privelege of
doing whatever I want with that food, and it shall stay thrown out.
One of the biggest draws of me to the State Fair is lacking in this
street-fair-every-weekend season of fall in Manhattan. There's a Guinness
Oyster Fest going on in the block I pass by on my way home. I think I'll
be able to resist. I hate shellfish.
I had other incidental thoughts, but as this is a momentary break from
studying differential equations -- whether partial or ordinary -- I will
get on to the rub. (I think someone took one of my checks --- whoever
you are, I'm onto you.)
So on Friday (yesterday) I went to a talk by Jane Wang, one of the
PostDocs who resides on my floor. She is studying the dynamics of insect
flight, and I didn't realize it was so complicated. One of the popular
saws around here is about how bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly.
It's up there with the infinite number of monkeys banging away at an
infinite number of typewriters....
But anyway, it seems that insects are in a special realm of flying things:
airplanes and large birds shed vortices in starting flight (or during
flight) so they have mainly laminar flow over the wings -- small things in
fluid like fungus spores or bacteria in water, etc. are ruled by the
viscosity -- they move with the liquid. I really can't say much more
about that -- I've never taken fluids so I barely even understand what a
Reynolds number means.
Insects get alot more lift on their wings than is predicted by classical,
large-scale aerodynamics. The vortices that are shed from their wings
stay close to their body -- they must use these somehow to increase lift
and maneuvarability. In Jane's research, she found that in a 2-D model of
a dragonfly wing there was a higher stalling angle for these small winged
things.
Anyway, that got me thinking to transition areas still open in many fields
-- like the boundary between the quantum, probabilistic world and the
gross world of Newton (forgetting about how general relativity fits in),
how the first undifferentiated cells switch over to becoming organs (is
there a way to go back? grow new cells?), the interaction of "static"
coded info in DNA with its chemical surroundings, the physical difference
between life and death, the mutability of languages and species -- what is
the dividing line from when it's part of the original to being a separate
entity of its own? (How the hell can dogs be all one species?)
That kind of stuff.
In some cases, its a problem of reconciling a mathematical model to real
life (or to other models) -- a question of getting numbers to match up, or
even think about what's going on. Mostly, though, it's probably a subtle
continuum. It's like that paralyzing thought I get every so often when
I'm thinking too hard about the physics of the really small: where do I
end and the air begin?
On a gross scale, I can tell the difference between my skin and the air.
But if one goes down to the level of subatomic particles, there is no
difference between the two. My skin is grabbing and losing electrons to
the air all the time. Electrons have no consciousness as to what they're
a part of -- they're always an electron, whether in the yarn I'm
crocheting with, in my brain, in my ring, in the air. The only difference
is how they're assembled, how they're bound.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say, is that perhaps these questions tell us
more about how we(I) think, than the answers would tell us about how the
world works.