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.