GABRIEL CELAYA AND ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

Last 18th of March was the centenary of Gabriel Celaya´s birth and since this blog is very involved with the present, here we have some lines by him.

And why so neutral, so sure of himself,

Mr Neutron?

One is going round and round with his electric charges

and he, stable, does not even notice

that one, although tiny, as if were a joke,

could make an ungodly scene,

disintegration.

A jump is enough, quantum or tantum

and it’s over, big fish!

When I hear someone mention Celaya, I always remember Atlético Celaya, a Mexican team where Rafa Paz retired, a bloody great footballer who played the World Cup in Italy in 1990.

SNOW WHITE AND PROPERTIES OF WAVES

Either we open a new section of “cinema with science” or you´ll agree with me that Snow White is a tale and therefore, literature.

Without taking into account that the echo just appears when it´s necessary for the chorus of the song and that the prince jumps over the wall from his horse so easily, let´s consider how many physics laws are broken in this video.

From my humble amateur opinion, it would be very difficult for a human sound wave to reach  enough intensity to disturb the water surface. Besides, it would be a spherical wave which would crash several times into the walls of the well and that´s why it wouldn´t be able to make an isolated impact, as if it were a stone. In addition, the well doesn´t seem to be deep enough and finally, the synchronization between the sound and the impact into the water is kind of weird

THE MORPHINE THIEF (MARIO CUENCA SANDOVAL) AND BIOCHEMISTRY

I read this book attracted by a hyperbolical review by Andrés Ibáñez in the cultural magazine of ABC, newspaper published on Saturdays which goes together with the supplement “Today´s Woman´s Heart”. It´s really good, but from my point of view, it´s not a masterpiece. I´ll keep it in mind: you can´t trust Andrés Ibáñez 100%.

The plot takes place in Korea. There is a new trend among many young Spanish writers to do this, I mean, their books do not take place in Spain.  I neither agree nor disagree, but the writer takes certain risks. You can laugh where he does not intend us to do so. As happened to me in the film “Volver a empezar” by José Luis Garci when Antonio Ferrandis (well-known by his role of “Chanquete”) checked in a hotel as a North American citizen. To be honest, this does not happen in this book. Even though “The morphine thief” is a Spanish book about the Korean War, it does not cause laughter, and I think this is one of the best things of this book.

Because all mystery in man is the result of Chemistry. Don’t you agree? Love. Maternal instinct. Or survival instinct. Everything which seems to be bigger than us, everything we are attracted to and make us feel as Gods, is nothing but the product of our pure and simple carnality.

PEDRO SALINAS AND THE BIG BANG THEORY

In the blog http://claratic.wordpress.com/  Chilindron points out that there´s a poem by Pedro Salinas (nobody better than him to link it with the last post) which, although it´s clearly about love, reminds him of the big bang theory. He also talks about the heterosexual side of the generation of Spanish poets of ´27, who, despite their appearance of dull office workers, they were quite flirtatious. And he´s right because the other part, the homosexual one, really seemed more interesting and experienced people.

What a big eve, the world!

Nothing had been made.

Nor matter, nor numbers,

nor stars, nor centuries,… nothing.

The coal wasn´t black,

and nor was the rose tender.

Nothing was still nothing.

 What innocence to believe that

it was the past of others

and in some other time, now

irrevocable, always!

No, the past was ours:

It did not even have a name.

We could call it

to our likeness: star,

hummingbird, theorem,

instead of this, “past”;

take away its poison.

Toward us

a big wind blew mines,

continents, motors.

Mines of what? Empty ones.

They were waiting for

our first wish

to be at once

of copper, of poppies .

Cities, ports

would float over the world

with no place yet:

they were waiting for you

 to tell them: “Here”

to launch the vessels,    

the machines, the parties.

Impatient machines 

without a destiny yet;

because they would make light

if you told them to do so,

or the autumn nights

if you did want them to.

Verbs, indecisive,

looked at your eyes

as  loyal dogs,

trembling. Your command

was to indicate them

their paths, their actions.

To climb? Its ignorant energy

was shaking.

Would  “to climb” mean

going up? And where would “going down”

lead to?

With messages to Antipodeans,

to bright stars, your command

was to give them a sudden awareness

of their own self,

of flying or crawling.

The big empty world,

useless, was in front

 of you: you would give it

its momentum.

And beside you, vacant,

unborn, anxious,

with my eyes closed,

with my body prepared

for the pain and the kiss,

with my blood in its place,

was me, waiting for

-oh, what if you didn´t look at me!-

you to love me

and tell me: “Now”

JUAN DE MAIRENA (ANTONIO MACHADO) AND THE COMPOSITION OF THE SEA WATER

The poetic, in the poet himself, is not the salt, but the gold which, according to what is said, the sea water also contains.

What Juan de Mairena says about gold, not very confidently to be honest, is true: There is some gold in the sea water, but there are also many different elements in amounts that scientists call traces. These amounts are roughly worth the value of the clembuterol found in Alberto Contador´s steak.

Everyone knows that the sea water contains NaCl, which is responsible for its taste. Many Chemistry teachers like to delight their students by telling them that we can find all the elements of the periodic table in the sea. And they do that while pointing at the periodic table hanging on the wall, as if they were the weather forecaster when he is marking the tempest that will affect the whole east of the peninsula.

I think salt is the only substance, or one of the few, whose extraction from the sea water is economically profitable. For example, the salt mine of San Fernando mentioned in Camarón´s song. If you ever happen to buy some salt in these salt mines, the smallest parcel you can take weighs 30 kg at least, which is enough to cook some gilt-head breams on a salt bed.

THE CORRECTIONS (JONATHAN FRANZEN) AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

Unfortunately, metal in its free state—a nice steel stake or a solid brass candlestick—represented a high level of order, and Nature was slatternly and preferred disorder. The crumble of rust. The promiscuity of molecules in solution. The chaos of warm things. States of disorder were vastly more likely to arise spontaneously than were cubes of perfect iron. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, much work was required to resist this tyranny of the probable—to force the atoms of a metal to behave themselves.

There isn´t much to add to a text like this, so full of “synalephas”, as a friend of my brother’s calls metaphors and any literary resources. I just want to point this out to my beloved readers.  I always quote the books´ writers, but never the authors who created the scientific theory in question. I noticed this not long ago and I think it´s due to that tendency nowadays which makes you believe that the authorship of an artwork entails a bigger grade of possession for its author than a scientific law does. In other words, there´s no Teddy Bautista in charge of collecting money for Einstein´s heirs or for any other heir of any scientist when anyone uses their discoveries.

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA AND THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION

NEWTON

On Newton´s nose

the big apple falls,

meteorite of truths.

The last one hanging

from the Science tree.

Great Newton scratches

his Saxon nose.

There was a white moon

over the barbaric lace

of the beech trees.

QUESTION

Why was the apple

and not

the orange

or the  polyhedral

pomegranate?

Why was this pure fruit

so revealing,

this soft and

placid apple?

What admirable symbol

sleeps deep inside?

Adan, Paris and Newton

carry it in their souls

and they caress it but

they cannot glimpse it.

Great Federico García Lorca dedicated a bloody good poem to Isaac Newton. Above we have only the first and the last stanzas. Sir Isaac Newton was probably some kind of weird guy. After reading this poem, I like to picture him as a charismatic scientist full of magic and always surrounded by rosebays, rings, owls and all the typical stuff that critics call “Lorca´s universe”, which is by the way, a recurrent expression in this blog.
Some people say and I agree that God made the ancient Greeks so the teachers of the future could have a living. Similarly we can say that Lorca was made for the bullfighting and flamenco critics to have an appropriate vocabulary.
(I hope you like this poem better than the last I posted here)

THE GREY NOTEBOOK ( JOSEP PLA) AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

As all antirationalists do, Corominas makes nice , brilliant phrases. He says, for example, that the discovery of the hertzians waves may be caused mainly by the poetical intuition rather than by an effort of systematic observation. My brother gets angry.

It has already been said here that The Grey Notebook was a kind of blog with a very high literary quality. The brother of Pla´s we mentioned above was a chemist.

I daresay that perhaps it´s true that the scientific method is neither so methodic nor so scientific. Besides, it may be arguable its mandatory presence at the beginning of many Science school manuals.

SPANISH CONVERSATIONS (CELA) AND THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

In his book “Spanish Conversations”, Camilo José Cela interviews different well-known people from Art and Politics. In the interview to the musician Andrés Segovia, you can read, among other wits, the following:

• Do you love velocity?
• Relatively, I´m not really into velocity either. Furthermore, one more thing: the speed of light is wonderful. So, what do we have to make an effort for, if we won´t ever reach that speed?

First of all, I like the question. I think you can know a lot about a person according to his answer to that.

However, what I really love is the answer. I love its beginning with “relatively” and its ending with the knowledge of relativity that the musician shows. Because it´s true, a particle can´t exceed the speed of light.

In case that Chilindrón points it out to me, I must say that I know that once there was a piece of news in papers about the possibility to exceed the speed of light. But I only believe what I studied in text books, not what I read in papers.

FOAM OF THE DAZE (BORIS VIAN) AND THE FICTIOUS FORCES

“The floor of the lift swelled under their feet and with a big and soft spasm, it took them at their flat”

Boris Vian describes the feeling you have when a lift stops very well. Something similar happens, but at horizontal direction, when a bus starts and we are surprised standing without being grabbed. We notice how something pulls us backwards (or forward if the bus stops).
However, this “something” doesn´t exist, there´s no force which pulls us backwards. These forces are called fictitious forces (this is science fiction indeed)

Another very well- known fictitious force is the centrifugal one, which doesn´t exist either, like all the fictitious forces. They appear in order to apply the fundamental equation of Dynamics to the no inertial reference systems.
( An issue that is not clear for me when I read this quote by Boris Vian is if the lift was going up or down before stopping,because both of them produce a similar sensation) 

DNA (LUIS ALBERTO DE CUENCA) AND THE STRUCTURE OF DOUBLE HELIX OF ADN

DNA or ADN, it doesn´t matter

 in Spanish or in English, the point

is that I´m dying for your proteins,

for your amino acids, for everything

what you were once, when your parents

came back from dinner a bit tipsy

and, after pulling the chain,

they made a new one with your name,

with your curves and with your fantasies.

Give me a photo of your DNA,

ID card size, that I writhe

with wish for looking at it all the day

It´s a nice and funny poem, although it may have a too friendly tone, as a Borbón skipping the protocol, or as a song by Joaquín Sabina

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (J.D. SALINGER) AND THE ANOMALOUS PROPERTIES OF WATER

There is a recurring joke in the book: Holden Caulfield asks various  characters what happens with the ducks of Central Park´s lake or where they go when it becomes frozen at winter. Most  people get angry at  the question, but there is a taxi driver  that, apart from getting angry,  responds with some basis: he says  nothing about the ducks, but  states that the fishes stay at the lake  during winter time.

  And he is right, because under the ice surface there is water where  fishes can live. I guess water is the only substance that in solid form shows a lower density than as a fluid  and so it´d float over. Because of this property, life is possible in the poles.  

But, what happens with ducks? They also stay at the lake in Winter (and it seems they  could  leave more easily than  fishes if they wanted to), they stay right  at the center of the lake, because this zone never gets frozen.