THE SAINT (CÉSAR AIRA) AND ARCHIMEDES’ PRINCIPLE

 He wondered why the ship did not sink. He was so unaccustomed to thinking that he found the mental activity novel and entertaining. “I need to get out more,” he told himself. There must be, he supposed, clear and compelling physical reasons why a vessel, even though heavier than water, did not simply go under. But what those reasons were was another matter entirely.

 

We continue with the aftereffects of having read César Aira. Admittedly, I am forcing his appearance into these lines, just as he forces his plots and seems to challenge himself with the subjects he chooses for his novels. The reason ships do not sink is the Archimedes’ principle, a fairly well-known principle, buoyancy and all that. Anyone who has raised an eyebrow at the saintly protagonist’s ignorance should ask themselves why airplanes fly, and they will see that the answer, although it also involves lift, is not quite so simple.

Fortunately, this is one of the things that makes us more human and sets us apart from animals: we do not need to know, down to the very last detail, how every technological advance we use in our everyday lives actually wor

THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE (JONATHAN COE) AND OPTICAL DEFECTS

     Phyl is having a good wander around and occasionally lifting up my glasses so that she can get a better look at everything. Adam notices this and says:

Are you long-sighted, or short-sighted, Phyl?

She laughs nervously.

Long, short and everything in between! she says, and then zooms in on a glass cabinet at the centre of one of the walls.

 

That Phyl, in order to pass herself off as a bibliophile, has put on someone else’s glasses, which is why she has to lift them up to be able to see properly. Adam’s suspicions are well founded: it is not possible for the same eye to suffer from both myopia and hyperopia simultaneously, as they are opposite optical defects. In myopia, the eyeball is usually too long and the image forms in front of the retina; that is why it is corrected with diverging lenses. In hyperopia, the opposite is true: the eyeball is usually too short and the rays would come together behind the retina, so it is corrected with converging lenses. I am severely short-sighted and my wife is an incorrigible farsighted person, and so far our offspring have managed to escape both conditions: they must have taken the average of our eyeballs, so to speak.

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA (JOHN O'HARA) AND INORGANIC NOMENCLATURE

 “Hey, Harry, Julian English killed himself last night.”

“What?”

“He killed himself. He took some kind of poison in the garage. Carbon oxide.”

“You mean carbon monoxide.”

“That’s it. It’s a poison.”

“It certainly is, but he didn’t take it. It comes from the engine.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know that. All I know is that it was a poison and that he took it in the garage.”

 

The IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry)—something like the FIFA of chemists—is very particular, very fussy, about the way chemical compounds are written and named. It passes that rigor on to teachers, and rightly so, because small changes in the formula of a compound—and therefore in its name—can be crucial to its properties and behavior.

The young woman reporting the suicide adopts a charmingly modest and detached attitude toward the names of poisons: “some kind of poison.” She does not distinguish between carbon oxide (CO₂) and carbon monoxide (CO). It does not matter much in the context of the conversation, but in the real world they should never be confused.

MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT (ENLIZABETH TAYLOR) AND REACTION TIME

     Presently, in the silence in which they were sitting, he had an idea. He took from a pocket Mrs Palfrey’s five-pound note. He smoothed it carefully and, holding it by one corner, dangled it in front of Rosie. ‘Do you know this trick?’ he asked. As she did not answer, he went on quickly, ‘You’d think it quite simple. You’ll probably think me simple for suggesting it. But you’d be surprised. All you have to do is to catch it when I let go, and if you can, you keep it.’

She looked at him with astonishment – her first change of expression from disdain.

‘Come on!’ he said coaxingly, as if to a child. ‘Just snatch at it with your little paw.’

He let go of the note and she caught it between thumb and finger and stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then she resumed her disdain and he in his turn looked astonished.

‘I’ve never seen that happen before,’ he said

 

The calculations I demonstrated on the board were based on a €5 banknote, though it is worth noting that a £5 note is very similar in size. As shown in the video, the banknote takes approximately 0.16 seconds to fall. This duration is significantly shorter than the average human reaction time, which typically ranges between 0.25 and 0.35 seconds.

This disparity is exactly why it is nearly impossible to catch the note before it slips through your fingers. In fact, this was once a staple of fairground scams, much like the deceptive tactics used by shell game swindlers.

Theoretically, anyone who succeeds in catching the note is not "reacting" in the traditional sense, but rather anticipating the drop. This is comparable to track and field regulations: an athlete is charged with a false start if they move within 0.1 seconds of the starting pistol. Even if they move after the sound, the rules dictate that a human cannot physically process and respond to a stimulus that quickly—meaning they must have guessed the timing.

THREE DAYS IN JUNE (ANNE TYLER) AND NUTRITION

     I said, “Is it okay that we’re eating all these scrambled eggs and omelets and such?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked.

“Aren’t they bad for our cholesterol or something?”

“That was last week,” he told me. “Everything’s changed.”

 

It´s true, the opinion of nutritionists changes throughout the time. We have noticed these changes in eggs, oily fish and other food. Since it´s not a fixed law and it may experience whimsical variations, in my humble opinión you should embrace the most convenient for you according to your tastes.

In this case, I find it difficult to believe that eggs, in any of its presentations, can be bad for your health.

I would like to recommend this novel because it has everything what I like in novels: about 200 and 300 pages and a nice story

QUESTION 7 (RICHARD FLANAGAN) AND LEO SZILARD

On 2 December 1942, in a squash court beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field football field, the world’s first man-made nuclear reaction took place in a nuclear reactor built by Szilard and Fermi, now a Nobel laureate, using, thanks to Szilard’s insight, a newly developed, highly purified graphite.

 The goal of this post is to try that Leo Szilard would have the public reconnition that he deserves. Oppenheimer has a film, Fermi has a Nobel prize, Einstein is almost a rock star... but Szilard was the ideologist of the Manhattan Proyect, as it is explained in this novel.

Talking about the relationship between science and literarure, Szilard had the idea, the vision of all the posibilities inside nuclear energy by reading the H.G Wells novel The World Set Free. Leo Szilard, a clever central european jewish was the first of being aware of the dangers in case Nazi German dicovered nuclear bomb. He conviced Einstein to write to Roosevelt in this sense. Lately, Einstein, regretting for Hiroshima said    he ‘really only acted as a mailbox’ for his former student.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS (LORRIE MOORE) AND THEORY OF ERRORS

I knew several kids who for money had been lab rats in pharmaceutical experiments, and they had secretly mucked up the data by doing things like eating doughnuts on the sly or getting high on glue. But after their blood was tested or their sleep observed, the results were sent out as science.

 

Science is a human activity and thus, our simple, seedy and tricky behaviour can have influence on it. The Theory of Errors tries to dignify and reduce this negative influence differentiating between two types of mistakes, the systematic and the random ones, and human mistakes belong to this last type.

Scientifics are usually organized and methodical but by being human, they can be also dirty and cheating. We have another example of this in the space debris, which we have already posted about

THE LINE OF BEAUTY (ALAN HOLLINGHURST) AND JAMES WATT

 He took the long diagonal that went past Watts's monument to, or of, Physical Energy: the huge-thighed horseman reining back and gazing, in a ferment of discovery, towards Kensington Palace

 

Firstly I thought that the Watt´s monument we are told about was referred to James Watt, the Scottish man who perfected the steam engine but not, is referred to the sculptor of the monument.

But we know James Watt has his own sculpture located in Westminster Abbey, and he really deserves it. In addition to what we said earlier, he was also the responsible of the horsepower, a power unit ( I once suggested unsuccessfully the name ponypower as a submultiple) and he has the honor to have an unit of the International System of Units with his name, the watt.

And we have Charie Watts as well, mythical drummer of the Stones (Jagger and Richards used to joke saying ´Watts his name?´). He doesn´t have yet a sculpture but he certainly gave a huge amount of watts to the British band.

HOW LONELY THE DEAD ARE LEFT (MENPO GIARDINELLI) AND CONDENSATION

 There were very few women, a lot of racket, empty beer bottles all around and cold sweaty cans in the hands of almost everybody.

 

I really like this kind of examples where an informal name is given to a physical phenomenon , in this case, condensation. It´s very helpful for teachers in order to present and explain some concepts. Condensation occurs when a substance passes from its gaseous phase to its liquid phase. The air surrounding the can contains water vapour that in contact with the cold surface of the can, condenses. It also takes part another concept more complicated called dew point.

The tittle of this good novel is a verse by Bécquer and it´s the opposite of a greek euphemism that called the fact of dying ´going with the many´

THE ETERNITY OF THE EPHEMERAL (JAVIER VELAZA) AND PHOTONS

 (that photon) that doesn´t know what light is and that itself is light

 

So, photons are involved in the wave-particle duality and in this double ignorance.

Photon doesn´t know that itself is light as the same way atom doesn´t know that itself is matter (neither what matter is). As a defined word can´t be in the definition of that word. Does a dog know that he is a dog and what a dog is? I,d dare to say that , in his own way, yes.

We can read later in this book ´The fact of not knowing is the gift that makes /every simple thing that happens sublime`. You can agree or not with this verse, but on reading it I recalled my childhood, where all of us were ignorant photons.

With regards to the ignorance of inanimate things, I remember this poem by Manuel Alcántara

The sea doesn´t know that it´s Sunday

the waves unaided

reveal themselves inmortals

every time one dies

the same one reaches its place

The sea doesn´t know that is a survivor

without watch and friends

the sea floats on the sea

neither accomplice nor witness

lost in thought of its blue

and indifferet like God himself

While it comes and goes on the shore

the sea doesn´t know that I´m gazing at it

SPECIMEN DAYS (MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM) AND LIGHT POLLUTION

 Then he understood that here, so far from the city proper, the smoke was dispersed, and the stars were visible. He nearly lost his balance, looking up. The stars sparked, brilliant and unsteady on a field of ebony. There were thousands of them.

He knew them, some of them, from the map in the schoolroom. There was the Great Horse. There was the Hunter. There, so faint he could not be sure, but there, he thought, were the Pleiades, a cluster of minor stars, the seven, a circle of phosphorescence

 

I think it´s not the most suitable moment for this post after the power outage of the other day, but let´s do it, let´s talk about light pollution. All of the astronomical observatories are in remote places far from the cities for this reason, just like some animals that need the night. Even some trees go wild with so much light. But, as it was said in the film “Amanece que no es poco” about americans, nightlights have also some good things.

About the power outage, I´ll post soon a poem called “Defeat of Bill Gates” by José Emilio Pacheco. Meanwhile, we have Camarón and his flinty rock

With rock of flint

I´ve made a candelabrum

For me to be able to illuminate

Because more light, I don´t want it

Because more light I don´t want it, I live in darkness

I´m following one to one the stars in heaven, among red and yellow

Under the black ribbon of a silence

In a night so cold

And dark like velvet

When I put her mop of black hair

As a mantilla

Her mouth crashed next to mine

giving me kisses

And she even cried with joy

ARMADILLO (WILLIAM BOYD) AND SERENDIPITY

Serendipity. From Serendip, a former name of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. A word coined by Horace Walpole, who had invented it based on a folktale, whose heroes were always making discoveries of things they were not in quest of. Ergo: serendipity, the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident

It´s really funny the origin of the term serendipity. With regards in Science, one of the most well-known serendipity discoveries is, of course, penicillin by Alexander Fleming. But there are more examples, like X-ray or radioactivity. Both were discovered by chance largely. But the action of serendipity can be noticed in other subjects, not only in Science. The famous sentence by Picasso “muses have to find you working” is a kind of adaptation of serendipity to arts.

THE BURGESS BOYS (ELIZABETH STROUT) AND THE ORGANIC METAPHOR

 Pam had already established her own interest in science and she saw society as one large organism working with its million, billion cells heaving itself alive. Criminality was a mutation that interested Pam, and she joined tentatively in these discussions.

 

This is a really nice idea and I think it deserves more credit and appreciation. The term organic metaphor was coined by Herbert Spencer who is considered a forefather of Darwin. Society as one large organism or society as an ecosystem are both pretty images. We can compare many things to a living organism: a novel as a living organism, or a family as a living organism, or a school,…

How lucky was Herbert Spencer, a wise man of Science and Philosophy, with the time he lived! I can imagine him, in the 19th century in England, with some money and prestige enjoying in the Royal Society with his mates.

GILEAD (MARILYNNE ROBINSON) AND THE TRAJECTORY OF MOON

 It was one day as I listened to baseball that it occurred to me how the moon actually moves, in a spiral, because while it orbits the earth it also follows the orbit of the earth around the sun. This is obvious, but the realization pleased me.

 

Well done, Marilynne, the text illustrates the relativity of movement perfectly. And it´s also interesting the satisfaction in understanding a phenomenon, the feeling of pieces that fit together. When Physics is getting more and more complicate and you can´t understand anything in a intuitive way, this feeling disappears.

To add a pretentious remark, I´d dare to say that the moon would trace an helix more than a spiral in its trajectory

ENDLESS LOVE (SCOTT SPENCER) AND INTERMEDIATE VALUE THEOREME

 I sat for a very long time and the night got cooler, degree by degree, ticking them off like a clock.

 The only way that degrees can drop is one by one, as the intermediate value theorem says: if a function is continuous on a interval, then it takes all the intermediate values in said interval, i.e. if we admit that temperature is a lineal function, it can´t go down two degrees suddenly, unless you have a very low sensitivity thermometer. You can see this linearity of the temperature especially in mercury thermometers, where there can´t be little jumps

LINCOLN HIGHWAY (AMOR TOWLES) AND THE ATTENUATION OF WAVES

 

And this was my favorite rocking chair, said Woolly to no one.

He was standing on the porch, a little while after Duchess had gone to the general store. Giving the chair a push, he listened to the thwapping of its rockers as it rocked back and forth, noting how each individual thwap came closer and closer together as the back and forths became smaller and smaller, until they stopped altogether.

The loss of energy due to friction processes makes the amplitud of the oscillation of the rocking chair lesser and lesser. It´s like a tennis ball released from high. The ball is loosing height until stopping on the floor. With friction forces acting, the mechanical energy is being lost. When the armonic motion moves into the space, this is why the wave intensuty become lower when get away from focus

How many readers have read the whole paragraph? As it were a wave, the number of readers have been decreasing while I was inserting technical terms.

 

THE GIRAFFE'S NECK (JUDITH SCHALANSKY) AND THE HETEROTROPHIC NATURE OF HUMAN BEINGS

 Plants turned energy-poor materials into energy-rich. Animals did the reverse. We just weren’t autotrophic. Day after day, in every little leaf, in every tiny chloroplast, the miracle that kept us all alive occurred. Epidermis, cuticle, spongy mesophyll. If you were green you wouldn’t have to eat anything, you wouldn’t have to go shopping, you wouldn’t have to work. You wouldn’t have to do anything at all. You would just have to lie in the sun for a bit, drink some water, absorb carbon dioxide, and everything, really everything, would be fine. Chloroplasts beneath the skin. It would be ­wonderful!

 

I couldn´t disagree more about the author´s thesis. I don´t want chloroplasts under my skin and that wouldn´t be wonderful. When you say ´plant life´, there´s rightly a negative connotation. I say hurrah for heterotrophic organisms with their pleasurable activities!

Nevertheless, it has been written and fantasized about this for years. There´s another novel, Solar by Ian McEwan, with no exactly the same plot, but with a kind of MacGuffin about something similar.

JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI (GEOFF DYER) AND TON AS AN APROXIMATE MEASURE

 The wood was stacked, chopped, weighed and carried down to the water again, probably weighed again. Each cremation required a ton of wood. Ton in the sense of a lot, not a specific unit of measurement

 

I think it´s an subtle clarification of the term ton, unnecessary, but subtle. Nowadays, a ton is equal to a thousand kilos, but its name and its origin are quite confusing because of its relation with the whimsical English imperial units.

The text could have told us about the diferences between a literal ton and a metaphoric one. Curiously, when teenagers, in their current language, say literally a ton, they mean both meanings, because literally is used as figuratively now.

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW (AMOR TOWLES) AND PRIME NUMBERS THEOREM

 “The list of prime numbers begins with two, three, and five, as you say. But prime numbers grow increasingly rare the larger they become. So it is one thing to land upon a seven or eleven. But to land upon a one thousand and nine is another thing altogether. Can you imagine identifying a prime number in the hundreds of thousands . . . ? In the millions . . . ?”

 

It´s clear that the larger a number is, the more difficult is to find out whether this number meets the requirements of being a prime number. I´d dare to say, using a quirky analogy, that it´s also harder and harder to find a mate as you become older.

And yet, as a very well-known theorem by Euclides says, there´s an infinite number of prime numbers. So, according to my analogy, there´s hope for singles.

THE TEMPTATION OF FAILURE (JULIO RAMÓN RIBEYRO) AND LIGHT POLLUTION

 On the terrace of my bedroom, with lights off, in midnight, watching the firmament. Startling spectacle. In the clear sky, millions of stars. Impossible to orient yourself. Sense of vertigo, of dread. Why? An artificial satellite passes.

I´m using this post, in spite of its forced relation with Science, to talk about a diary that I really enjoyed and I like its title too. Someone wrote once that Ribeyro used to tittle his books badly, but I think ´the temptation of failure´is a good tittle and it also works the reverse, I mean, ´the failure of temptation´.

It has to be difficult to see satellites nowadays because of this kind of light pollution which has so many negative effects in some ecosystems, besides the waste of energy. But, of course, artificial lighting has their good points too.

These days I´m watching good films in the summer cinema of the council of Seville, like ´The sun of the future´or ´Saben aquell?´, but if the film wasn´t a good one, I´d be able to look up the screen and see the stars in the sky.