First Bayou Bartholomew Trail photo

2005

Clouds of early summer 2011

This cloud formation appeared late one afternoon in June above my humble abode on 12th Ave in old Pine Bluff...



The tree at the bottom is across the street in a neighbor's yard.   In regard to my previous post and Erwin Schroedinger's comment about there being a difference in an out-of-focus photo and a photo of clouds or patches of fog--I guess what he means is the out-of-focus photo is a mistake, and an observer of the photo can tell that, whereas a photo of patches of fog or clouds is not a mistake and the observer can tell that also.  AND the idea of a "fuzzy model" coincides with the cloud/fog photo example.  Still, there's the possibility of an out-of-focus photo of patches of fog or clouds, eh?

Also, an observer can't always tell the orientation of a photo of a cloud if he or she doesn't recall it. This also represents a possible mistake, an interpretational mistake, and how to interpret the Schrodinger cat experiment is very much the problem that has made it so famous and given it such longevity.  As far as my cloud photo is concerned, I had to step outside in my driveway to find the tree branch pattern you can see at the bottom of the photo.  For all I knew, that could have been the side of a tree and not the top.  But the pattern matches the top of a tree across the street, so I could figure out the photo's correct orientation.  For the purpose of art, it doesn't matter, except to the artist.  How much it matters in the case of quantum mechanics is something to ponder.

Schrödinger’s cat-in-the-box description

In a 1986 book called The Shaky Game, the author, Arthur Fine, talks about what he calls "Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory."  Chapter Five of the book is "Schrödinger’s Cat and Einstein's: The Genesis of a Paradox."  The chapter includes quotes from correspondence between Einstein and Schrödinger during the summer of 1935, just after the controversial Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper ("Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?") had been published and just before the Schrödinger cat paper (Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik*) was published.  Professor Fine (of the philosophy department at Northwestern University) included this quote from the Schrödinger's cat paper:

"One can even make up quite ludicrous examples.  A cat is enclosed in a steel  chamber, together with the following infernal machine (which one must secure against the cat’s direct reach):  in a tube of a Geigercounter there is a tiny amount of radioactive material, so small that although one of its atoms might decay in the course of an hour, it is just as probable that none will.  If decay occurs the counter tube fires and, by means of a relay, sets a little hammer into motion that shatters a small bottle prussic acid.  When the entire system has been left alone for an hour one would say that the cat is still alive provided no atom has decayed in the meantime.  The first atomic decay would have poisoned it.  TheΨ-function of the total system would yield an expression for all this in which, in equal measure, the living and the dead cat are (sit venia verbo**) blended or smeared out.

      The characteristic of these examples is that an indefiniteness originally limited to atomic dimensions gets transformed into gross macroscopic indefiniteness, which can then be reduced by direct observation.  This prevents us from continuing naively to give credence to a “fuzzy model” as a picture of reality."

After giving that description, says Fine, "Schrödinger finishes by observing, 'In itself this [fuzzy model] contains nothing unclear or contradictory.'  For, he notes, 'There is a difference between a blurred or out-of-focus picture and a photograph of clouds and patches of fog.'"

For me it's all just patches of fog at the moment, and I couldn't really say if that's because the picture is out of focus or it's a photo of patches of fog, y'know?  I mean, when the great Schrödinger says "This prevents us ..." yada yada, what is meant by "this"?  Then there's the later "this" that Fine parenthetically says is the "[fuzzy model]".  Fuzzy wuzzy was a worm...or a bear?

*"The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics"

**"pardon the expression"

Copperhead Trail

Copperhead snakes are the most colorful of the three common poisonous snakes found in Arkansas. Those three would be the water moccasin ("cottonmouth"), rattlesnake (of various types) and the southern copperhead (as opposed to the northern copperhead). I'm not counting the coral snake, a fourth poisonous snake that can be found in Arkansas. It isn't that common, thank goodness.

Copperheads are pretty because they have python-like markings, coppery instead of greenish.  The intensity of the markings varies with the time of year and how recently they've shed their skins. You can check out copperhead photos of course on Google images. The colorful markings contrast with the rather dull markings of water moccasins and rattlesnakes.

So, when a small copperhead bit me on the foot last Thursday, just after 6 pm, as President Obama was giving his jobs speech (good for him!) and I was about a third of the way into the Bayou Bartholomew trail, I identified it quite easily.  "Small" means I'm guessing it was about 8 inches long, maybe even 10 inches.  I didn't try to look at it all stretched out, and only got a glimpse of it in amongst some leaves on the trail, where it was curled after it bit me, cringing I guess from the pain of me stepping on it.

I was wearing sandals, the number one stupid thing to do, and I had just been running and had slowed down to a walk.  While I was running, I was watching the ground, the trail, closely, and it wasn't covered in leaves. After I stopped running, there were quite a few dead leaves on the trail, but--number 2 stupid thing--I was not watching the trail looking for snakes (the only reason I look down at the trail when I'm walking or running is to look for snakes).  I was casting ahead in my thoughts to something like what I'd have for dinner, or I don't know what.  The snake bite makes it hard to recall what was going on in my mind just before it.

I wasn't sure it was a snake bite, at first.  "What was that?" was my first thought--exactly what I'd read a few years ago in an article a woman wrote about getting bitten by a small rattlesnake she stepped on while wearing sandals.  She had that same first thought.  I also wondered how a stick could have poked me from the side like that, but having read that woman's article (in The Sun magazine), and having thought about it quite a bit since, I almost simultaneously realized, "Snakebite!"  Which was confirmed when I looked down and saw the copperhead kind of writhing down there in the leaves.  I didn't see its head or tail, but from its body width, I saw it was small, but no little bambino.  The bite itself didn't hurt.  It felt like a tiny electric shock more than a piercing of skin.  There was no blood from the bite wounds. They were just two little red marks.


I wasn't angry with the snake, but that has everything to do with not feeling any pain from the bite.  Well, also the snake can't be blamed for what was really my carelessness--my momentary carelessness, which is all it takes, whatever kind of accident it may be. Within just a few seconds after being bitten, I headed for my car in the parking lot, about a half a mile back along the trail.  As is often the case, no other cars were in the parking lot, and Charlie McNew, a friend and also my insurance agent who sometimes bikes on the trail, was not there either. My dog Jessie was with me, but not at the moment I got bit.  I called her a few times and was concerned I'd have to leave her while I drove to the hospital, but she was following me when I  got to the parking lot and looked back.

I called my friend David Matthews on my cell phone while I was walking to my car, asking him to bring a bag of ice and meet me in the parking lot.  But the hospital is about as close to the trail as his house is, only about two miles, and he told me his truck was so low on gas he was afraid he'd run out and his dad was on his way to pick him up to get some gas for his truck.  He said he'd meet me at the emergency room.

My sandal was rubbing the bite as I walked, so I took it off.  I've actually tried walking barefoot on the trail before, but the tiny gravel surface would begin to hurt my feet.  The tiny gravel didn't bother me on my walk back to the car though, a walk that was more of a hobble, with as little weight on my bit right foot as possible. (The bite was on what I would call my instep, midway between toes and heel.) With the bite not even hurting, I briefly considered just going home and putting ice on it myself.

I might as well have done that.  The emergency room nurses put ice on the bite, elevated my foot slightly on the gurney they put me on, and also stuck an IV port in my left arm in case I started having a severe reaction and needed an injection. They also monitored my heart rate and blood pressure.

My foot and lower ankle swelled up, but didn't significantly change color.  The only things that hurt very much were the ice pack itself (only when I took out the towel the male nurse had put between my foot and the ice pack, since at first I couldn't feel the cold of the ice pack; I later put the towel back) and the insertion of the gigantic IV needle.  After about three hours, when a doctor finally showed up (in my case, I had to wait anyway, so that time lag was no problem for me) I was given an injection of pain medication and antibiotics, and prescriptions for both of those.  Matthews drove me to his house in my car (he'd also gotten some water for Jessie and then taken her to his house while I was in the emergency room) where I spent the night in the guest bedroom (my former bedroom when my brother Jeff and I lived there).

I drove myself and Jessie home the next afternoon, and things just gradually got back to normal after I was able to start hobbling around on Saturday, although I wasn't able to get out on my own until Sunday, and then only briefly, with a sock on my right foot.  I took the antibiotic for four days (the doctor had recommended five), but didn't bother to get the pain medication prescription filled.  Now the swelling is almost completely gone, and I'm left with only a story to tell.  Well, the little red bite marks are still there, but are barely noticeable.

Einstein's theory of invariants

Well, my 21st century writing about relativity finally did get published, on the "Voices" page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, on November 3, 2007, almost exactly seven years after I started working on it and tried to interest the NY Times and Harper's magazine, without success.  Publication on the Voices page meant there was no payment involved.  It was really just a long letter to the editor labeled a "Guest Column."  Here it is, slightly edited for clarity that was lacking in the published version:


Once upon a time, in the fall of 1977, I had the perfect job. I was a night watchman at the Old State House, usually working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift. My job was to make rounds through the building every hour. The job was perfect because I was a full-time student at UALR, and making a round took only ten minutes. In theory, I had 50 minutes out of each hour for studying.

In practice, I tended to read whatever interested me and to put off working on my homework as long as possible. I also had the luxury of being able to explore the Old State House all by myself whenever I felt like it. Procrastination, of course, is not an uncommon activity among college students. My happy situation was that I was getting paid for it—with a portion of your Arkansas tax dollar.

Or maybe it was your parents’ or grandparents’ dollar. Whatever the case may be, I’d like to now offer a little in the way of a return on that 30-year investment. I’d like to pass along a little bit of scientific knowledge.

During the fall of 1977, I was taking a beginning class in relativity and quantum mechanics. A good deal of my extracurricular reading during the evenings at the Old State House involved those subjects. Among other things, I was trying to find out if relativity really should be associated with the saying “It’s all relative.” I’d read that statement in a newspaper article about the virtuoso violinist and former child prodigy Yehudi Menuhin, who was asked what he’d learned from his acquaintance with Albert Einstein. Menuhin claimed to have learned from Einstein the same thing everyone else had learned, namely that “everything is relative.”

What I’ve learned over the years is that Einstein’s theory means the opposite of what it sounds like it means. When I started teaching physics about ten years ago, I came up with a way of paraphrasing the usual textbook description of the two ideas Einstein used in creating his theory. The ideas, or postulates, can be stated as 1) the laws of physics are not relative, and 2) the speed of light is not relative.

Those are the requirements that went into relativity. In actually finding equations for laws that satisfy these ideas, Einstein rewrote Newton’s laws of motion, simplified the laws of electricity and magnetism, and discovered several new laws, the most well known of which is the equivalence of energy and mass, E = mc².

Besides the laws themselves, other mathematical entities are invariant in relativity. In particular, space, time, and the speed of light combine together in a simple equation for an invariant quantity called “proper time.” (This is a mistranslation from the French word propre, meaning “own”.)  Proper time is the time you read on your own watch. Since you and your watch never move relative to each other, you never observe your own watch to speed up or slow down--contrary to the popular misconception of time slowing down the faster you travel. The slowing down of time is only valid when you compare your time to the time of the clocks in another rest frame, such as the one you left when you went moving off on your own.  "Moving on your own," however, is just like not moving at all.  That is the real message of relativity.

Relativity is not the name Einstein chose for his theory. He would have preferred it to be called the theory of invariants. This misnaming can be blamed on several of Einstein’s older contemporaries, including the French mathematician Henrí Poincaré and the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein unfortunately in his first relativity paper in 1905 used the accepted terminology of the time and called his first postulate "the principle of relativity". He later objected to his entire theory being called relativity, but he acquiesced to common usage among physicists in 1915 when he named his theory of gravity the general theory of relativity.

Gerald Holton, the grand old man of Einstein studies and an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard, wrote something of an off-the-beaten-path book published in 1996 called “Einstein, History and Other Passions.” Holton neatly summarizes the relative/relativity name confusion: “The cliché became, erroneously, ‘everything is relative’; whereas the point is that out of the vast flux one can distill the very opposite: ‘some things are invariant.’”

So, “everything is relative” may be a balm of hurt minds, but physicists are looking for those things in the universe that are invariant. Invariance, by the way, is related to symmetry, but you’ll have to look that up for yourself.

Harper's query letter of a decade ago (rejected)

David W. Trulock
100 Riverbend Dr.

Apartment F9

West Columbia, SC

29169

Ann Gollin

Editor’s Assistant

Harper’s Magazine

666 Broadway, 11^th Floor

New York, New York 10012

September 3, 2001

　

Dear Ms. Gollin:

I’m interested in writing an essay for Harper’s about the mistaken idea that relativism has legitimate roots in relativity. I am guessing there will be a lot of “relativistic” articles published between now and the 100^th anniversary of Einstein’s relativity in 2005, and I would like to get the subject started off in the right direction for Harper’s readers.

I’ve enclosed some writing samples of mine, two of which are about relativity. The published piece, “Relativity is Not Relative And Einstein is Misunderstood,” appeared in Spectrum, a now-defunct alternative newspaper. “Displaying Little Regard for the Mysteries of Life” also appeared in Spectrum and was reprinted in A Spectrum Reader (August House, Little Rock, 1991). Spectrum was published bi-weekly in Little Rock from 1984 until 1990, when it became Spectrum Weekly. It may have weakened as a weekly, since it ceased publication in 1993. In any case, I moved from Little Rock to Austin in 1987 and didn’t write much for Spectrum after that. I wrote one full-length freelance article (enclosed) for the weekly Austin Chronicle, which is not defunct.

The short manuscript I’ve included in this query is my unsuccessful attempt to put the correct ideas about relativity on the New York Times Op-Ed page on April 18 of this year. In naming Albert Einstein “person of the century” a year and a half ago, Time magazine published some incorrect ideas about relativity. Walter Isaacson, for example, in his article “Who Mattered and Why,” implied that Einstein’s relativity destroyed the meaning or the existence of absolute laws. I hope from my enclosed writing samples you can see this is not true.

Why should I be the one to write this article? Because it’s likely no one else is going to bother to write it—many physicists accept the “two cultures” of relativity. Also, I’ve studied relativity for 25 years, independently and in graduate and undergraduate classes, and as a research project with Dr. John Safko here at the University of South Carolina, where I’m seeking a physics PhD. I have a master’s degree in physics from Southwest Texas State University, where I taught some physics classes, and a BA in physics from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. I also attended Columbia University (Summer 1978) and the University of Texas at Austin (on and off as a non-degree-seeking student).

Sincerely yours,

Turtle orgasm on Bayou Bartholomew trail

It happened two or three years ago.  I was carrying my Pentax K-1000, which hasn't had a working light meter in umpteen years, but I've still managed to get some good photos from it.  (This is one beauty of writing in a web-log,  especially a very private one, I don't worry much about correct grammar.)  I chanced, those several years ago, on the B.B. trail, upon these turtles.  The photo turned out discreetly dark. The male's mouth is widely open..."Oh, god!"