ENDURING LOVE (IAN MCEWAN) AND THE LATE EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF EINSTEIN THEORIES

 In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data was in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in nineteen fifteen and sixteen, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in nineteen fourteen to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in nineteen nineteen to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data was overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory. More expeditions set out to observe eclipses and check Einstein’s predictions, in nineteen twenty-two in Australia, in twenty-nine in Sumatra, in thirty-six in the USSR and in forty-seven in Brazil. Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The Theory was already in the textbooks from the twenties onwards. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.

This is one of the reasons why I don´t like teaching the scientific method as a recipe or as an inflexible guide that scientifics strictly follow. Things work in another way because we know that intuitions exist and even tricks to get where you want.  Something typical of human beings, indeed.

Ian McEwan always talks about  Science in his novels. We´ve already posted here about Saturday and Solar. In my head, I have an outline of the analogy between the structure of McEwan´s novels and Sabina´s songs, which both of them repeat again and again. But I admit that I´m not ready to develop it yet

IRIS AND HER FRIENDS (JOHN BAYLEY) AND ACCUMULATORS OF LEAD

 I never saw him start the engine, nor did I wish. I felt it would be farightening experience- but I loced watching him intenly measuring the level of the acid in each massive accumulator . At least he said it was acid and I believed him, although I was surprised the first time I watched him fill up the level from a big bottle marked 'Distilled Water'. I was too polite to point out the apparent discrepancy; and I was in any case highly respectful of acid because Mr Mills had said that if you touched it accidentaly it wpuld burn right through you

I´d dare to say he´s talking about an accumulator of lead, similar to a car battery. So, Mr Mills is not lying to little John because these accumulators  use both  distilled water and sulfuric acid. Mr  Mills was a visionary with regards to protective measures at laboratory because you can really see on every sulfuric acid jar a label with a liitle drawing of a hand pierced by a drop. I´ve always interpreted this drawing as Mr. Mills does, the drop would pierce your hand if it fell on you

SAINT MAYBE (ANNE TYLER) AND PHAGOCYTOSIS

 In his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.

As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death

This is a good example of using scientific terms in a classic comparision.

A  bitter pill to swallow is digested, by phagocytosis in this case, and you get over it when you excrete it, for keeping on with the digestive analogy

THE PAGAN RABBI ( CyNTHIA OZICK), MYRIADS ( CARLOS MARZAL) AND THE (DRUNK) DANCE OF ATOMS

 You must let me go on,' Sheindel said, and grimly went on. '"It is false history, false philosophy, and false religion which declare to us human ones that we live among Things. The arts of physics and chemistry begin to teach us differently, but their way of compassion is new, and finds few to carry fidelity to its logical and beautiful end. The molecules dance inside all forms, and within the molecules dance the atoms, and within the atoms dance still profounder sources of divine vitality. There is nothing that is Dead. There is no Non-life. Holy life subsists even in the stone, even in the bones of dead dogs and dead men. Hence in God's fecundating Creation there is no possibility of Idolatry, and therefore no possibility of committing this so-called abomination."'

Nobody is always still. The orbitals must be gone through and took up and the construction of chaos never stops. The space is displaying alive, like in Myriads, the poem by Carlos Marzal which sang Antonio Arias

On the diagonal of golden light

that frays the calmness of the air

in that ray of untouchable amber

where the space manifests alive,

the dust is dancing in disorder,

And atoms dance drunk.

Myriads from a world we cannot see

BUNKER ( TOTEKING) AND THE INNATE INCOMPETENCE OF SOME PEOPLE FOR SCIENCES

 We were unable to understand Sciences. We had tried everything. We were so incompetents for the subject that we were even useless for cheating: the teacher managed to catch us because we used to make mistakes even copying the exam from the student in front of us. Completely desperate, but with a firm attitude for not repeating a course, we decided to draw up a plan to steal the final exam of Physics. We knew a person who had been succeed: a classmate had chased a teacher to the teacher´s room and had memorized the little cubbyhole where she kept her papers. One day, due to the fact that the teacher´s room was empty and all the teachers were in their classes, he managed to be expelled of his own class because of his bad behaviour . Then, he successfully dodged the teacher who was guarding the hallway, came into the teacher´s room and ended up finding the exam in the cabinet. Of course, he shared it and all his classmates passed with good grades. And naturally as well, the teacher discovered us, deduced our modus operandi and since then, the security system of that room improved significantly

As author of this blog and as a teacher  I should fight against the notion of people being bad at Sciences by nature as well as  accepting the fact that there are people  who are bad at Music or Sports per se . But my experience confirms what Tote´s text points out. What can we do?

We are not going to insist on

TRISTAM SHANDY (LAURENCE STERNE) AND THE IDEAL ANGLE FOR ORATORY

 He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon;——which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well, to be the true persuasive angle of incidence;—in any other angle you may talk and preach;—’tis certain,—and it is done every day;—but with what effect,—I leave the world to judge!

The necessity of this precise angle of 85 degrees and a half to a mathematical exactness,—does it not shew us, by the way,—how the arts and sciences mutually befriend each other?

This angle is really important and you´d better not abuse of it. Between the Moonwalker by Michael Jackson and backing away from someone or dodging a bullet in Matrix, there are lots of intermediate situations. In my opinion, the people who use the angle of 85 degrees are usually a bit annoying and their breath is likely to smell badly. Anyway, as the text itself says, what a good example of how well Art and Science support each other

TO DIE EQUALLY ( RAFAEL REIG) AND GALILEO´S PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY

 He told me that one time, the rear admiral William Parry, explorer of the Artic, went to the north in his dog-driven sled. He advanced easily for several hours, but at nightfall when checking the latitude, he found himself further south from the point he had left

-        How is that possible?- I asked, amazed

-       Elementary,  dear Ochoa.. He didn´t know he was moving forward above a huge ice floe which was swept southward by the current, with greater velocity than his dogs could reach, they must have been Siberian huskies . The same happens to you. The ground you consider firm, diverts back to the past. No matter how much you advance, it takes you back to the start point

This principle, which inspired Einstein in his Relativity Theory, establishes the importance of the observer position. Everyone who has watched how a cow moves backwards through a train window has verified it. To fully understand a movement, you have to have sort of kinematic empathy and put yourself in the standpoint of the observer. This way of putting yourself in the shoes of your counterpart should be follow in others aspects of life.

CHERRY ( MARY KARR) AND ANOTHER ARGUMENT TO CONVINCE GIRLS TO STUDY SCIENTIFIC DEGREES

 His final sentence, pronounced just at the door in front of the administrative staff, says like this: I can assure you, without Maths, you´ll end up being a vulgar prostitute. (Later on, you´ll find out that most of the girls had to hear the title of ´vulgar prostitute´, while the boys had to face with the ´vulgar criminal´)

These are the alternatives  which used to establish the school principal where Mary Karr studied. Without Maths, vulgar prostitute, there are not intermediate situations, le t’s say a classical philology for example. We do not know whether this pioneer's eccentric and radical method of motivation in the fight against the gender gap would succeed.

GLOBAL WARMING ( DANIEL RUIZ) AND THE THICKNESS OF THE OZONE LAYER

 The plane keeps going up, overtaking blocks of clouds, until the sea and the land are barely noticed down below, there is just a bed of greenish and cyano colours, a kind and quiet seat. In a short while, they´ll reach the maximum height, around twelve thousand metres, with an outside temperature about fifty degrees below zero.  Very close to there, just five kilometres higher, the ozone layer is located. Between the km fifteen and fifty, that zone of the stratosphere is displayed, that which concentrates the 90 per cent of the ozone from the atmosphere, absorbing the most part of the high-frequency ultraviolet radiations. It is imperceptible, with  a thickness just under five milimetres, but its  effect is decisive for skin and ocular protection of people. Like from here, as well, is imperceptible the effect of global warming.

So finite  the ozone layer is !, and even thinner  if it were under normal pressure on the Earth's surface. Very weak, very dim, just 5mm; don't even think of throwing deodorant or hairsprya on a plane.  The certainty that our skin health or the climatic stability of our planet depends on a 5-millimeter shield gives very little security, in fact.

THE NAME I´M SAYING NOW (ANTONIO SOLER), THE TRANSLUCENT BELL JAR (ANDRÉS TRAPIELLO) AND A GOOD METAPHOR ABOUT SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS

 With the first ones I saw worse; distant things also got bent, and with the second ones, it was the same. With others I just saw  blurred,  hazy things, and so I kept trying while Montoya would open drawers and look at paintings without being quiet; and I would see him sometimes very far away, other times with his head in a place and his body elsewhere, or submerged in water. And suddenly, when I put on one of those glasses and opened my eyes, I saw everything different, Montoyas´face, the painting he was looking at and the glasses Hidalgo had in his hands, and it was really like everything had been removed from the bottom of the sea, and I was afraid because it seemed as if I emerged from some place where I had always been  hidden and now I was out of my hideout, exposed. I was told that on putting on the glasses, my eyes were wide open, they became bigger and my pupils seemed to almost touch the lenses. That was what they told me, and that was what I thought on looking at myself in a mirror, that my eyes were some fish stuck to the glass of their fish bowl staring at the world

The Name I´m Saying Now, Antonio Soler

Albano was a skinny, small-framed, and short-sighted man, thus endowed with very big glasses which exaggeratedly enlarged his eyes. Those enormous eyes observed the word with veiled astonishment. He looked through the spectacles just like a red sea bream would from inside its aquarium; and he moved in this world like one of those taciturn fish that swims around in circles all day without knowing what  they are after, woolgathering

The Translucent Bell Jar, Andrés Trapiello

As a person with deep myopia, I think it´s a right analogy;   you  see as if you were underwater. To be honest, I can´t check wether this is true, because I haven´t opened my eyes under the water for ages just because  my contacts would fall off.

The refraction index of vitreous humour is very similar to that of the water , but different from the one of the air, where our outlook is necessarily more frequent  

T

NUNS AND SOLDIERS (IRIS MURDOCH) AND A PARAGRAPH WITH A MISHMASH FULL OF SCIENTIFIC JARGON

He felt extremely quiet, but absolutely stretched as if space were bending and he were bending with it. Everything seemed to vanish including his own personality. He was a tiny scrap of being, a particle, and yet also he was the surrounding area which seemed infinite. He was an atom, an electron, a proton, a point in empty space. He was transparent. It was this transparency which made him feel invisible. He was empty, he was clean, he was nothing. Yet at the same time he was refined energy, pure activity, pure being. The experience was not in itself painful, though frightful pain somehow existed too, nearby, half hidden, sometimes like a black hole, sometimes like a dense mass of indestructible matter.

Iris Murdoch isn´t very prone to introduce scientific matters in her novels, she is more into Philosophy. But she has loosen up here: protons, electrons, black holes, atoms…they are all welcome so we can bring this author to our blog. 

THE INNOCENT ANTHROPOLOGIST (NIGEL BARLEY) AND CURATIVE PROPERTIES OF THE GUAVA

 Some kind soul at the mission at N’gaoundere had passed on to me the secret of curing hepatitis – a decoction of guava leaves in hot water. It certainly seemed to help more than anything else. Later I learned that a German pharmaceutical company was testing a drug based upon just this compound.

Poor Nigel! He had a really rough time in his hamlet of Cameroon. In the end, he had to have faith in traditional or alternatives methods, like everyone desperate does. The guava must have many virtues because if you write down in Google ´guava for…´ the predictive keyboard ends the sentence with ´diahorrea, anaemia, diabetes, flu, hair loss,…´ and many other illnesses that poor Nigel was bound to suffer from. So, if I had to go to some city in Cameroon by any chance, I´d look for a hut next to a guava.

HOMO ZAPIENS (VIKTOR PELEVIN) AND THE MYTH OF THE RESONANCE IN BRIDGES

-         - Do you know what resonance is?

-         - More  or less

-         - Well then: if a battalion of soldiers marches across a bridge in step, then the bridge can easily collapse- there have been cases- and so when a colum crosses a bridge, the soldiers are ordered to march out of step

It´s a very ugly thing to point out mistakes, something that we don´t want to do in this blog. Ever worse it´s to show exagerations like this, beautiful but fake. Bridges like Tacoma´s felt down because os several causes, not only resonance.

Lont time ago before Tacoma, they said a bridge in Brougthon collapsed because soldieres were marching on it, and Napoleon was known for asking his soliers to march out when they cross a bridge.   

DERIVATIVE SPORT IN TORNADO ALLEY (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND THE OMNIPRESENCE OF MATHS

 When I left my boxed township of Il inois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I al of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. Col ege math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hil y Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.

Calculus was, quite literal y, child’s play.

Maths are eveywhere, although some landscapes are more explicit than others. For example, the Mid-West, but also the olive groves in the province of Jaén.
The ability of thinking abstractly about mathematical entities of Nature, typical of huge intelligences, is one of the shortest ways to madness.
I,ve read Foster Wallace tennis texts yet again ( I used to love them when I was younger) because I,m playing tennis these days due to Covid ( a sport full of geometry and trigonometry, by the way). So, we can say that the Covid  has  transformed me from a player of friendly games of football to an amateur tennis one.
In fact, when I knew the news about Maradona death, I was playing tennis and  this paradox made me feel a bit guity

TENDER BAR (J.R MOEHRINGER) AND BARS AS FORUMS WHERE DEBATE SCIENCE

 Sometimes the bar felt like the best place in the world, other nights it felt like the world itself. After one especially grueling day at the Times, I found the men in a circle at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar. They had arranged cocktail garnishes in the shape of the solar system, a lemon as the sun, and they were moving the olive around the lemon, explaining to each other why New York gets dark before California, why seasons change, how many millennia we have before the whole thing falls apart. I stood behind them, letting their conversation orbit around me. What’s a black hole anyway? A thing that sucks up everything in its path. So it’s like my ex? Yeah only smaller. I’ll tell her you said that. A black hole’s like the Grand Canyon with extra gravy. Not gravy, dipshit—gravity. What’d I say? Think of it this way—the universe is held together with gravity, your ex is held together with gravy. Don’t use an olive for the earth, I hate olives. Whaddya got against olives? Pits—I don’t like food that fights me. Who the fuck ate Mars? Sorry, I see a cherry, I eat a cherry. How big is the fucking earth anyways? It’s twenty-five thousand miles around. That sounds almost walkable. You don’t even like to walk to the corner for the Daily News. You mean to say everyone in this joint is going sixty-seven thousand miles an hour right now? No wonder I feel so fucking dizzy.

Apparently, a bar is not the best place to discuss science (it´s very difficult to argue about science, in any case) , but alcohol can do anything. In the text, it´s all very well explained: black holes, the solar system, translation speed of  the earth, which is higher in the winter, the earth´s diameter…

What an extraordinary thing is a bar with a good parish!! As the song goes:

“if the place is warm

With people to laugh and argue with

It doesn’t matter if it’s a bar or home”

THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION ( EDGAR ALLAN POE), THE COMPOSITION OF THE AIR AND A VINDICATION OF NITROGEN

It had been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen, in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a total extraction of the nitrogen? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book

We´d rather talk about the composition of the air with this post by Poe than with the famous song by Mecano ( oxygen, nitrogen and argon) It´s more suitable to the spirit of this blog. The role of Nitrogen, so low considered, is very important to temper the explosive character of the oxygen avoiding the spontaneous combustions. Nitrogen has its own cycle as well, which is essential at different levels for life in our planet.

So, there it is the Nitrogen, so noiseless but basic and majority in the air, quiet and vital.

HERETICS (CHESTERTON) AND SCIENCE ANALITIC LIMITATIONS

Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful.

The man’s desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven

Ok then, Science says how much Phosphorus there is in a chop, which is no mean feat. But, as Chesterton points out, Science doesn´t say too much about human desire about chops or other human desires. We have other stuff for this purpose, such as Arts or Poetry. Something like that we talked about in this blog regarding Emilia Pardo Bazán and Ramón y Cajal

THE LOVED ONE ( ISRAEL FERNÁNDEZ, DIEGO DEL MORAO) AND FIRST DEGREE EQUATIONS

 For having you beside me

I have to deceive time

I want the hours to stand still

to recreate myself in your body

For having you beside me

I don´t know what I´d give

I´d fight against time

to stop our lifes

my heart and my mind

are having a long fight

if my soul doesn´t give up

that it´s the one which sleeps with you

24 hours a day, if it had 27,

three more hours I´d love you

24 hours a day, and you´re the owner of my body

and you´re for me my whole life

the little sheets of my bed

have sorrow for me

have sorrow for me

in noticing how I cry for you

when I remember you

You gave to my heart

a few disappointments

but I´m still loving you

what am I going to deny it for?

my heart and my mind

are having a long fight

if my soul doesn´t give up

that it´s the one which sleeps with you

24 hours a day, if it had 27,

three more hours I´d love you

24 hours a day, and you´re the owner of my body

and you´re for me my whole life

I have forced a bit this post to talk about this record, ´Love´, that is going to be really important in flamenco. The operation included in the lyrics is easy to calculate, but it´s the way to begin in algebraic language, actually. So, the equation would be 24 +x = 27, where x is the extra hours of love

THE THIRD POLICEMAN (FLANN O`BRIEN) AND THE SLOWNESS OF MIRRORS

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object to the eyes of a man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the of the reflected image in his eye

What a strange argument, I always feel the opposite: I look older than I think I am. Someone says you should never look at yourself in the elevator mirror, not even when you are 20 years old, and I guess he is right

As for O´Brien´s text, it´s an excessive version of the famous twin paradox of Einstein, in which a second brother is not even necessary. As they say, an exaggeration is sometimes the most accurate lie

A TRIP BY BUS ( JOSEP PLA) AND THE ETOLOGY OF SPARROWS

 There are, finally, varieties of birds which live in complete freedom even at the breeding moments. The sparrow- a rascal bird, fornicating and individualistic- may be an example of these ungrateful animals. Sparrows live in a regime of systematic and perpetual social gathering and they don´t mind neither the blood ties nor the birdie feelings, that although rudimentaries, they exist somehow.

Now I understand  the expression ‘Hey, Sparrow!’better, the one which is used by males of human specie when they see each other in a delicate situation or when they tell some naughty plan to  one each other . I would never think of a bird  in such  a way  with such a pacific appearance. Most birds (you can also say: Hey, Bird!) interrupt their social-gathering or café rules while their breeding time, but   sparrows keep it even in this critical situation. In this time, their chest swells up so much  that they seem to be more male doves than sparrows.

A TRAM IN SP (UNAI ELORRIAGA) AND THE PHYSICAL -CHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF MERCURY, WHICH MAKE IT SO ATTRACTIVE

 Mercury, for example. Imagine a drop of mercury on the top of a marble table. Then, lift the table and let the mercury slide. It´s like water but more perfect, because it´s metal and because it doesn´t dry up. If you throw water to a crystal, it spreads and melt. And it dries, besides. Mercury not. Mercury is the most perfect drop that exists. And although steel is really spectacular, mercury is more spectacular than steel because it´s liquid and cold. Mercury is a funny thing

The mercury thermometers used to be one of the first experiences of scientific surprise in the childhood and their desaparition makes the children loose it. When you were ill and the thermometer broke down, the drops of mercury looked like a strange flock.

The mist of fever joined to the amazement made the experience really odd. We were told about this in the poem metales pesados by Carlos Marzal.

In other post, we´ll talk about the Mad hatter from the book Alice in Wonderlad. He was mad because of an intoxication of mercury, something very usual in that job

THE BUSINESS OF LIVING (CESARE PAVESE) AND THE INVISIBILITY OF THE VITAL FUNCTIONS

 Everything our body does, other than the functioning of the senses, escapes our notice. We know nothing of our most vital processes-circulation, digestion, and so on. It is the same with our spirit; except for the superficial pattern of ideas, we are ignorant of its activities and changes, its crises. Nothing but an illness makes us aware of the profound workings of our body. In the same way we realize those of our mind and spirit when we become unbalanced.

The whole physiology occurs in the dark, the human body is like a fridge, dark until you open it. Everything takes place in the dark, hidden to the daylight but microscopically. Only when things go wrong, we are aware of them and begin to pay attention to. " We know about love for what it illuminates, for what it twists and increases and rules". We have to make do with this indirect knowledge of our body, in the way as with the knowledge of love in these lines by Manuel Alcántara

DESPERATE CHARACTERS (PAULA FOX) AND THE EXPIRATION DATE OF PERFUMS

He sniffed at her hair. There was a faint trace of the perfume she always wore, but it floated on a rather stronger chemical smell. That monstrous bottle he had given her had probably turned to alcohol. Next birthday, he would buy her three small bottles instead

Once opened, perfums begin to loose their volatile compounds ( especially esters, aldehydes and ketones). These compounds are in charge of their smell and due to the passage of time, they may smell to alcohol sometimes. Not everybody knows that cosmetic industry is an important career opportunity for many chemists, where the composition of the perfum is as important as the addition of masked agents that avoid copying the scent to the competition.

OTHER´S MEN DAUGHTERS (RICHARD STERN) AND SCIENTIFIC DEFENSE OF SUPERFICIALITY

 It used to be thought the body was more “sensitive” as it got deeper. But no, it’s like the earth itself, the vividness is at the surface. You can crush an organ and get no pain, but look at the skin. One cm. of human skin contains two sensory machines for cold, twelve for heat, three million cells, ten hairs, fifteen sebaceous glands, a yard of blood vessels, a hundred sweat glands, three thousand sensory cells at the end of nerve fibers, four yards of nerves, twenty-five pressure apparatuses for tactile stimuli, two hundred nerve cells to record pain. This fantastic factory is our surface. No wonder our feeling is so exposed. Our hearts are on our sleeve.

How many things on the surface which we disregard for not being deep! All the stuff the skin has! Who needs more? It´s better not to go in depth hardly ever, you have to surf throughout life . Everything gets better, the friendship, the work,...if you keep on kindly superficial

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO ( GEORGE SAUNDERS) AND THE CONSERVATION OF CADAVERS BY THE METHOD OF ZINC CHLORIDE

Sagnet had pioneered the innovative use of zinc chloride.

Five quarts of a 20 percent solution of zinc chloride injected through the popliteal artery not only preserved a body for a minimum of two years, but also wrought a wondrous transformation, giving the body the

Extravagant claims were made of the Sagnet process, stating that the remains became a “shell in effigy; a sculpture.”

In effect, the antiseptic characteristics have been used to embalm and recompose cadavers throughout time, especially in the XIXth century. With this method, the facial features were restored in case of violent death. So, it was bound to be very used in funerals with militar honours.

I´m not quite sure that this Sagnet really exists, because this book is as interesting as weird.

LIVING DOWN ( GUSTAVO FAVERÓN), THE BULB FROM LIVERMORE AND PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

I was like the electric bulb of the fire department from Livermore, California, which a hand switched it on in 1901 and no hand has switched it off until today

This bulb is indeed famous for being on for very long. You can see it streaming via this webcam, where people from anywhere in the world can admire this phenomenon, which goes to show that things aren´t made nowadays as well as they used to.

Its only secret is that it´s made of more and better materials than current bulbs, which are surrendered to planned obsolescence.

HOW FAR CAN YOU? (DAVID LODGE) AND THE SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACE ( OR THE BIG BANG WASN´T REALLY A BANG)

“The silence of infinite space terrifies me,” he murmured, squinting one night through Martin’s telescope at a faint smear of light that the boy assured him was a galaxy several times bigger than the Milky Way.

“Why?”

Austin straightened up and rubbed the small of his back. “I was quoting Pascal, a famous French philosopher of the seventeenth century.”

“Interesting he knew that space was silent,” Martin remarked, “that long ago.”

“You mean, there’s no noise at all up there? All those stars exploding and collapsing without making a sound?”

“You can’t have sound without resistance, without an atmosphere.”

“So the Big Bang wasn’t really a bang at all?”

“’Sright.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, though, Martin, the sheer size of the Universe?”

“Nope.”

This is the most common way to find science mistakes in films. Sound is a mechanical wave, so it needs a medium to propagate. In contrast, electromagnetic waves, like light, can travel through vacuum.

I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first film to show outer space as silent. “No one can hear you scream in space”, according to the advertising of the film Alien. I am not fussy about this, a film with noises in outer space doesn´t bother me, I understand it´s a poetic license. Indeed, if we want to be very strict, the concept of vacuum is also very controversial

HERE COMES THE MAPLE (JOHN UPDIKE) AND THE FOUR KINDS OF FORCE OF NATURE

... he read every scrap he was sent, and even stooped in the alleys to pick up a muddy fragment of newspaper and scan it for a message. Thus, he read, it was already known in 1935 that the natural world was governed by four kinds of force: in order of increasing strength, they are the gravitational, the weak, the electromagnetic, and the strong. Reading, he found himself rooting for the weak forces; he identified with them. Gravitation, though negligible at the microcosmic level, begins to predominate with objects on the order of magnitude of a hundred kilometers, like large asteroids; it holds together the moon, the earth, the solar system, the stars, clusters of stars within galaxies, and the galaxies themselves. To Richard it was as if a faint-hearted team overpowered at the start of the game was surging to triumph in the last, macrocosmic quarter; he inwardly cheered.

I don´t have much to add, since John Updike himself comments on the original text, which we are told is from ´The Forces of Nature,´ a conference by Steven Weinberg. Physicist dream of being able to reduce all these forces to one, precisely the goal of the big unification theory, as has already been accomplished with electricity and magnetism being unified as electromagnetism

I think that, when I was a student, the interaction electroweak, unifying the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force, has almost been completed. I don´t know how things stand now.

How can one not like and identify with gravitation, which among the four forces, is the only one we are familiar with?

THE ESSEX SERPENT (SARAH PERRY) AND THE PALEONTOLOGIST MARY ANNING

What’s more, he blamed himself for Cora’s adoration for the geologist Mary Anning: she’d never shown the least interest in grubbing about among rocks and mud until finding herself at an Ambrose dinner party seated beside an elderly man who’d spoken with Anning once and been in love with her memory ever since. By the time Cora had heard his tales of the carpenter’s daughter who grew strong after a lightning strike, and of her first fossil find at twelve, and her poverty, and her martyrdom to cancer, she too was in love and for months afterwards talked of nothing but blue lias and bezoar stones.

This blog wants to join the trend of recognizing female scientists. We want to add the paleontologist Mary Anning (although the text calls her a geologist) to the list headed by Marie Curie.

Paleontology and Geology don’t have a good reputation among scientists. So, the unfortunate Mary Anning suffered a double discrimination: one related to her gender at the time, and the other by ‘authentic,’ hard scientists.

I have a soft spot for the clever English women of the nineteenth century, how they had to deal with overbearing men, boring clergymen...
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-essex-serpent/sarah-perry/9781781255452

BARONI: A TRIP (SERGIO CHEJFEC) AND MIRAGE

Still at that hour, or again, the temperature seemed to make things tremble. Those situations of intense heat, which make you rehearse descriptions with vague outlines, refractions of light, objects in slow motion, etc. And yet I was impressed by the opposite, the speed; as if temperature proceeded to disintegrate in terror, and reality itself, in its multiple joints, was struck by fear and wanted to escape this situation immediately.

As soon as you went out to the garden, neither having taken the first step nor having already felt the impact of the heat, you noticed the unease, nature at once watery and squelched.

You knew that underneath that calmness lay a latent combustion encompassing all the elements, revealed by isolated and spontaneous reactions.

This is something that literature can do with physical phenomena: illuminate them with images and so make them better understood. We physics teachers always try to do this. Everybody has seen this optical illusion on the horizon of the road on a very sunny day. You yourself melt by mimesis upon seeing, that´s why we call it a mirage

Once you understand and feel the phenomenon, by virtue of the text above, it almost matters less to know that it´s caused by the different densities of...