MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST (MARK LEYNER) AND THE PRIMORDIAL SOUP

I asked the waitress about the soup du jour and she said that it was primordial soup — which is ammonia and methane mixed with ocean water in the presence of lightning. Oh I'll take a tureen of that embryonic broth, I say, constraint giving way to exuberance — 

The Primordial Soup Theory is problably the best hyphotesis to describe how life started in Earth. This theory was suggested by Russian Oparin in 1920 and tested by Staney Miller thirty years later. Indeed, the text approaches the primordial soup composition: ammonia, methane...there should be hydrogen and water, of course, like in every soup. Staney Miller shaked this soup like if it were a cocktail mixer, he heated it and applied UV radiation to it so that he could obtain amino acids, which are considered to be the life foundations.

The editors team of this blog think it is an appropiate idea to post about soups, specially in this time of the year - when we are always in the mood for soup.

THE FUGITIVE (MARCEL PROUST), TENTH OF DECEMBER (GEORGE SAUNDERS) AND THE SICENTIFIC ERRATA

“...and the water as a combination of hydrogen and nitrogen (sic)...” (The Fugitive, Marcel Proust)

"He was now approximately three-quarters, or that would be sixty percent, across." (Tenth of December, George Saunders)

A spelling mistake is a different concept that an erratum. You make a spelling mistake because you do not know a rule, but an erratum (unavoidable, as all the editors know) is such a big mistake that it is always because of coincidence or bad luck. We could speak about scientific errata too. Did Proust ignore that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen? It is unlikely. Doesn´t George Saunders know how to calculate a basic percentage? This is more likely, though it could be a sort of joke.

SOLAR (IAN MCEWAN) AND THE QUANTUM MECHANICS AS ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigour defeated commom sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here, the mystically inclined could find whatever they required, and claim sciene as their proof. And for these ingenious men in their spare time, what ghostly and beautiful music it must be- ‘spectral asymmetry, resonances, entanglement, quantum harmonic oscillators’- beguiling ancient airs, the harmony of the spheres that might transmute a lead wall into gold, and bring into being the engine that ran on virtually nothing, on virtual particles, that emitted no harm and would power the human enterprise as well as save it

Whose fault is it that charlatans have claimed the property of the word “quantum”? The opposites attract each other, as they say, and they even touch each other, closing the circle, no doubt. The longest-established physicist or mathematician, whith glasses and a calculator, shares the quantum nomenclature with the pseudo-mystic, bald but ponytailed man who talks about Universe harmony.

Maths are too diffciult, that´s true, and the text words it very well; further in the novel the next question appears: was the starnge reality described by quantum mechanics a descrption of the actual world, or was it simply a system that happened to work?.

I would really like that, as I read last night ‘there wouldnt be disloyalty or contradicition separating the ordinary from the unusual’

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF TREES (ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA) AND THE OBSERVATOR´S POSITION AS THE CENTER OF THE FRAME OF REFERENT

Focus your gaze on the current: the bridge moves forward, we move forward, the water is still, it comes to a halt. That is what Julian, her step father, said on the bridge where he used to take her when she was a child. At the begining it is difficult but then you get used to it, it is like those strange drawings which you have to stare at until you see a figure, a dragon, a bear, somebody´s face; one more time, look, focus your gaze, keep your eyes on the water until you feel you move forward, that the bridge moves forward, until the river is not a river any more. The water loses velocity, and now it is you who moves forward in the water, in a ship

Newton´s first law doesn´t distinguish between an object in rest and an object with uniform linear motion, it´s the same state, and the different perception only depends on where the observator is. Many situations can explain this phenomenon, my favourite is the traveller who looks out of the train window (the train is the most complete experience as a observator traveller) how a cow who is looking at him moves back. But the cow is motionless and sees how the train progresses. Indeed, both of them, traveller and cow, move together with Earth around the Sun

THE PALE KING (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND THE INTRINSIC MISTAKE IN MEASURE

 ‘If you´re pretty,’ Meredith says, ‘it can be hard to respect guys.’

‘I can understand that,’ Drinion says.

‘Because you never even get to see what they might really be like. Because the minute you´re around, they change; if they´ve decided you´re beautiful, they change. It´s like the thing un physics- if you´re there to look at the experiment, it supposedly messes up the results’

‘There´s a paradox involved in it’, Drinion says

Meredith says that the thing you watch changes because of your own look, but even more is important is that the observator also changes. She doesn´t respect guys now. Obviously all of us influence each other.

Physics can minimize this influence.

As a fellow countryman said ‘the eyes that you see is not an eye because you see it, it is an eye because it sees you’, and I think the quote is appropriate. In a José Cervera´s talk I discovered that the human eye was the only eye with a white sclerotic and that´s why you can know where a human is gazing. This fact has lots of social and evolutive connotations, all of which I must admit I don´t remenber .

THE ADVERSARY (EMMANUEL CARRÈRE) AND THE JOY OF KNOWING THE SCIENTIFIC TAXONOMY

… I gazed the flight of bird whose names I didn´t know across the grey sky; I am not able to distinguish either birds or trees, and that seems sad to me

If you know the name of birds and trees, your conversation while strolling gets richer. This is a kind of knowledge that is more appreciated by old people. It´s also a kind of knowledge which divides science people: the pure scientific type even pay no atention to it. Indeed, many students decide to study Science and things like Physics or Math because they want to escape from memoristic studies. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, when a lot of new particles began to appear in Physics, said: If I were able to remember so many particle names, I would have studied Botanics

JOSEPH WALSER´S MACHINE (GONÇALO M. TAVARES) AND THE ANATOMY OF HAND

He had opened the anatomy textbook to the chapter entitled “Hand.”

There was one drawing after another of hands in different positions, each one with five fingers.

Joseph Walser looked at the names for the first time. Names of things that had belonged to him for quite some time. The “opponens pollicis (thumb muscle),” the “flexor retinaculum of the hand,” the “adductor,” the “abductor.”

The skeleton of the hand made a real impression on him. In the wrist area, eight little bones were stacked on top of each other: “carpal bones,” he read. Then, between the wrist and the fingers, the five metacarpal bones, one for each finger. Each of the fingers, in turn, was made of three consecutive bones, “like train cars,” he muttered; their names were almost infantile: “proximal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, distal phalanges.” The thumb was an exception in this case: it only had two phalanges, instead of the three phalanges the other fingers had.

Today we have to speak seriously about a terrible personal testimony. On 30th April, 2013 I cut my hand tendon while I was cutting jam. I had to wear an arm sling for three weeks and I had to do rehabilitation. In the rehabilitation room I was embarrassed because, while I was apparently hanky pankying with the nurse, there were people there with serious injuries.

At the beginning, as a bullfighter who has just been injured, I thougth I was longing for a full recovery to cut jam again, that the accident would not make me give it up. But I have given up and now I eat only cut and packed jam.

From this blog I want to show the youngsters that it is possible to overcome this and that packed jam is a respectable option.

THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA (1913-1924) AND A HUMBLE WAY TO APPROACH TO THE MISTERIES OF LIFE

As a boy, I was as innocent of and uninterested in sexual matters (and would have long remained so, if they had not been forcibly thrust on me) as I am today in, say, the theory of relativity.

Another good example of how to use scientific concepts in literature. And the text is also a lesson of modesty on two topics  which people usually tend to brag:  sex and the theory of relativity, as the following about anecdote shows:

In the 1920´s a journalist asked the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington if it was true that only three people in the world understood the general theory of relativity , After a moment of hesitation, Eddington is said to have replied:

- I was wondering who the third one might be!

SATIN ISLAND (TOM MCCARTHY), COHERENCE AND SCHRÖDINGER´S CAT

 It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesis devised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems — the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison — cyanide, say — would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through — well, the atom would only choose to have jumped through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had already jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather, both alive and dead, until the scientist, post hoc, peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.

If you try very strongly to get away from the cliches, sometimes you omit important facts. Schrödinger´s Cat is a classic. People use and abuse of this concept and, frequently, in a wrong way. As the text says, two physicist conepts are mixed, but it also says that Einstein was the author of quantum theory when he tried to deny it with the famous sentence 'God doesn´t play dice'
We haven´t talked about the Cat in the Box until the post number 155; to compensate it, we offer a scene from Coherence (a good film, by the way) about the topic.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTGNESS OF BEING (MILAN KUNDERA) AND THE FACE AS AN INSTRUMENT BOARD

Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera 21 take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought. Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice. But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.

I am not no so sure as my friend Milanku about the fact that if you know the inside of your body better, you feel less feeling of unease. Indeed, it is exactly the opposite for a kind of hypochondriac.

What really worries me about the inside of the human body, is that it is totally dark (I think it was Agustin Fernández Mallo who made me notice that) except when you open it. I mean, like a refrigerator. When you see the beatiful Anatomy pictures whit plenty of light, it´s difficult to imagine all that mechanics that we have inside working in complete darkness

NANCY´S THESIS (RAMÓN J.SENDER), THE FIRST GAY-LUSSAC´S LAW AND THE FRACTIONS

- So… If he had promised marriage it would be different, beacuse the gipsy´s illusions spread like gases and who knows how high they get

- Don´t talk about Curro like that

- Why?

- Curro has no more than an eighth of gipsy

- Sorry lady. Curro has eigh eighths of gipsy and one of sonofabitch

Gases expand when they are heated, just like illusions; if in addition, the gas is ideal, its expansion occurs to the infinity. I don´t now if, in the case of illusions, there is also a distinction between ideal and real illusions. Following and forcing the analogy (why not?) when the pressure increases, the gas, instead of expanding, contracts. Do illusions also collapse under pressure?

Regarding the eighths of gipsy and of ‘son of a bitch’, I think the math doesn´t work

(1999-2003) DIARIES (IÑAKI URIARTE)AND HOW SHORTSIGHTED PEOPLE COULD GET BY BEFORE OPTICS DEVELOPED.

It is true that people used to read aloud at that time or, at least, by moving their tongues. And it is also true that the first person known for reading silently was Saint Ambrose. We know that thanks to Saint Augustine in his “ Confessions”. I heard about that many years ago in an article by Borges, and this image was etched in my memory. It seemed wonderful to me that someone had invented silent reading suddenly and so late , especially because it implies something unbelievable: apparently neither Plato nor Seneca, for instance, had never known how to read in low voice. Somehow I did not really believe it. Seneca was said to have read all the books in Rome with a water-filled balloon. Since glasses did not exist, he used that gadget as lens. I do not think that he could even do it by reading aloud.

The first glasses did not seem to appear until around the 13th century . Before that, people used to get by quite well with home-made solutions, like -Seneca´s or the so-called “reading stones” which managed to magnify the size of the letters. In my view, the invention of glasses is, together with that of the toilet, one of the things that make us real civilized human beings.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING (JULIAN BARNES) AND THE TIDAL BORE

 I don’t want to give the impression that all I did at Bristol was work and see Veronica. But few other memories come back to me. One that does – one single, distinct event – was the night I witnessed the Severn Bore. The local paper used to print a timetable, indicating where best to catch it and when. But the first occasion I tried, the water didn’t seem to be obeying its instructions. Then, one evening at Minsterworth, a group of us waited on the river bank until after midnight and were eventually rewarded. For an hour or two we observed the river flowing gently down to the sea as all good rivers do. The moon’s intermittent lighting was assisted by the occasional explorations of a few powerful torches. Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished as the river simply seemed to change its mind, and a wave, two or three feet high, was heading towards us, the water breaking across its whole width, from bank to bank. This heaving swell came level with us, surged past, and curved off into the distance; some of my mates gave chase, shouting and cursing and falling over as it outpaced them; I stayed on the bank by myself. I don’t think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn’t like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I’d witnessed either) – nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed, and time with it. And to see this phenomenon after dark made it the more mysterious, the more other-worldly.

Sergiomumo

The tidal wave is a curious phenomenon  and very appreciated by surfers, beause it gives a huge a regular wave. I lived for a summer in Bristol but I have never watched one. One day I saw how the Gualdalquivir river did something strange in Coria and also, in another occasion the Tajo river confused me while I was eating in Rana Verde Restaurant, but this the nearest I have been to a tidal wave.

Surfers must be attentive to the wave timetable because if they lose it, the next one will pass twelve hours later.

It´s a pity that in Spain there is no river in which this phenomenon appears, because I would pay money for doing surf under the Triana Bridge in Seville.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY (MICHAEL CHABON) AND THE EINSTEIN TWIN PARADOX

His face seemed to have aged less than Sammy´s or than, God knew, her own, and his expression, as he puzzled out the unfamiliar sights and smells of the cozy kitchen of their Penobscott, had something  of the old bemused Joe that she remembered. Rosa had read about the Einsteinian traveler at the speed of light who returned after a trip that had taken a few years of his life to find everyone he knew and loved bent or moldering in the ground. It seemed to her as if Joe had returned like that, from somewhere distant and beautiful and unimaginably bleak

Sergiomumo

It is well explained. The twin paradox is a famous thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment) proposed by Albert Einstein and has been depicted in films like Interstellar. I have always cosidered the concept of 'Thought experiment' to be an oxymoron, but the question is as follows: a twin stays on Earth and the other travels at near light speed into space; the perception of time is different for both brothers. The one who has been on Earth is older than the traveler. It's actually an old problem, perception of time and synchronization of clocks.

THE UNTOUCHABLE (JOHN BANVILLE) AND LOWER INCIDENCE OF CANCER IN PEOPLE WITH PARKINSON'S OR ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Perhaps it is the first, shivery sign of the onset of Parkinson´s disease? The bleak comedy of this possibility is not lost on me: nature being conservative, two major ailments simultaneously attacking a single organism would seem  prodigal, to say the least. One would have thought cancer quite enough to be going on with

Reverse comorbidity is the name of the phenomenon that seems to reduces the risk of certain types of cancer in patients with neurodegenerative diseases.

So it is not about the Nature being conservative, as reflects the protagonist of The Untouchable but about this genetic association which has been studied recently and opens new avenues of research in the treatment of both diseases

EXTRACT FROM ALICE´S SCHOOL EXERCISES NOTEBOOK ( JOSÉ FLORENCIO MARTÍNEZ) AND THE INDETERMINATE FORMS.

We hadn´t posted a poem here since last summer, so today we have one by José Florencio Martínez from the book Πoetas, an interesting anthology of Poetry with Maths published by Amargord editorial. It´s about the indeterminate forms, which are studied at High School included in Analysis.

 

( Operations with infinities)

1)- Is it possible to add 17 infinities?

2)- What is the square root of 3 infinities and a half of chocolate boxes?

3)- If we subtract 5 infinities of Gods from 1 infinity of Gods, do we have -4 infinities left?

4)- How many infinities of fleas can run on a horse of light?

5)- Is an infinite butterfly the same as an endless number of butterflies?

6)- If the circumference is an infinite shape, how many infinities cover the two wheels of a bike chasing after Buster Keaton´s lost cow in a field without bounderies?

7)- If infinity costs zero euros, how much does an infinite of zeros cost?

8)- If we assume that the result of the previous problem is zero, was this zero included in the infinity of the infinitude in question?

9)- What is bigger, an infinity of sleeping elephants or an infinity of birds awake?

10)- If the genealogical tree of infinite numbers got autumned , how many autumns would be necessary to lose all its leaves?

11)- Can a giraffe with an infinite neck drink the reflection of the moon in the water of a two-dimensional pond?

12)- The numbers of poetry a) are they round? are they infinitesimal? b) are they cut on the bias of parallels that join in the infinity? c) do they resist the tension of the rose to infinity?

13)- What is the result of the addition of the pain of 10 poor if we divide this number for 5 rational realities and subtract it from their own dreams multiplied by 7 infinities?

14)- How many white mountains can the Queen of Hearts jump with a horse of an infinite whiteness in the innocence of the dawn?

15)- If you make a bread trail for ants with the leftovers of the snack, could its memory lead you to the “ non-place maze” without the White Rabbit unmasking the night over the poetry of infinite numbers? In affirmative case, isolate the unknown and explain the answer.

MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS (GERALD DURREL) AND THE HETEROGENEOUS LIBRARIES

Thedore would wellcome me in his study, a room that met with my full approval. It was, in my opinion, just what a room should be. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves filled with volumens of freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folk-lore, and similar fascinating and sensible subjects. Intersperced with these were selections og ghost and crime stories. Thus Sherlock Holmes rubbd shoulders with Darwin, and Le Fanu with Fabre, in what I consideres to be a thorroughly well-balnaced libarry

Obviously it won't be in this blog where the mix of science and literature will be critized, but you can order you books, it is, together but not scrambled. I didn't know who was Le Fanu, but once I have invesutage I would like to read his books