Making Waves

Yes, I've been writing, just not blogging away, until today.

A new thought on A Serious Man: the first words in English in the movie are “when the truth is found to be lies…”  This is what eventually happened to us, the innocent viewers, with the Coen Bros’ movie Fargo.   They billed it as a true story, but it wasn’t.  I was rather happy to hear that, however, and all the joy in me did not die.  Given all the suffering that goes on in the world, it was and is good to know that the particular suffering shown in that movie had not actually happened.  The trick of telling viewers it was a true story had the desired effect, at least in me.  It intensified the emotional experience of watching the movie. So I’m not pissed at the Bros for lying.  I can imagine the subterfuge of Fargo was on their minds while they were writing A Serious Man, which is itself a subterfuge on a more humorous level. 

Now, how is the three-polarizer experiment a demonstration of quantum superposition?  I wanted to talk about Gary Zukav’s description of the experiment, but I haven’t found The Dancing Wu Li Masters amongst my approximately 1,000 books.  I was reading from it earlier this year, so it’s around somewhere, but I’ll have to do without it for now. 

First of all, what the heck does “superposition” mean?   Sounds vaguely sexual to me, but then so does about everything else.  Classically, as opposed to quantumly, superposition means just what it sounds like, at least in the case of waves being superimposed.  As Frank Blatt, a physicist with a physical sounding last name, puts it in his first-year physics textbook, “when a transverse wave on a string is reflected at a fixed end, the incident and reflected waves superpose so as to create a standing wave.”

You can create this condition by tying one end a rope or cord to a doorknob (works best with the door closed) and shaking the other end up and down.  If you shake at the right rate, you can see a standing wave pattern: one hump, two humps, three humps, etc.   Under these conditions, waves traveling in opposite directions are combining with each other (linearly) to produce a standing wave.  It’s also called resonance.

If you yourself have taken a first-year physics course, you might have seen the demonstration of this standing wave phenomenon in the lab, where a mechanical vibrator is used (yeh, the sexual innuendos again).  I myself have done that experiment many times as a lab assistant or lab instructor.  With the rope on the doorknob, ya cain’t hardly get a good standing wave, but with a long piece of string in the lab, it looks very neat—big good vibrations, showing a larger and lower frequency version of what happens with stringed instruments as they are being played

In addition to standing waves on strings, there are acoustic standing waves (wind instruments and singing—in the shower especially), and electromagnetic standing waves, and water or other liquid standing waves. You know about the “rubbing the rim of the wine glass” sound, right?  You get standing waves in the wine and the glass then.   Also, waves combine with each other to produce the phenomena of interference and diffraction. 

Like waves on a string, electromagnetic waves are transverse.  For transverse waves (try the polarization hand waving thing again) the oscillatory motion is perpendicular to the direction the wave is traveling.  In contrast, sound in air is composed of longitudinal waves.  The oscillatory motion of the medium is along the same direction as the direction of travel of the wave.  If you and a friend stretch a Slinky along a flat surface, and then one of you pushes on the Slinky and pulls back, the compression travels to the other end as a longitudinal wave.  The same thing happens with air when it carries a sound wave: a back and forth motion along the direction the wave is traveling.

Going back to the cord tied to the door knob: you choose the direction of polarization of the wave by choosing whether to move your hand up and down or sideways, or in between.  So now do you think you’ve got the idea of the polarization thing?  Sure you do!  Congratulations!  So you can see that a longitudinal wave isn't subject to being polarized!  (Gettin’ out of the necessary range of the eventual quantum superposition discussion now.  But anyway, happy 4^th of July weekend.)

Fire and Rain

Nice to be on vacation and actually feel like writing.  First thing that comes to mind is the irony of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was created during the years 1943-1945, possibly being consumed by fire.  A 50,000 acre forest fire is currently said to be "threatening" the facility, which has been temporarily closed.  The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated.  The irony is because of the Los Alamos-designed-and-built bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki by fire.  These were mainly secondary fires, not the primary fireball of the explosions.

In my blog entry for November 9, I talked about how the large-scale conflagration of Hiroshima was caused by ordinary fires that started after the bomb's fireball instantly incinerated a small area around the ground zero point.  This is mentioned in John Hersey's book Hiroshima, but is not widely known.  You (and formerly, I) looked at the photos of the utter destruction of the city and thought all that was done by the bomb's fireball.  The bomb was powerful, but it wasn't that powerful.  If the ordinary fires after the buildings had been knocked down by the shockwave (an unbelievably strong and quick blast of air)  could have been extinguished, the destruction would have more resembled the aftermath of the recent tornadoes in Joplin and in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa:  buidlings destroyed, flattened, gone, but not burned.

What about the "rain" part of this entry's title?  After weeks of hot, dry weather, Pine Bluff and the surrounding areas are getting some cool rain.  And wind.  There's a severe thunderstorm warning in effect until 7 p.m.  Makes a  vacation out in the country, at my grandparent's former farmhouse now lived in by my aunt (who, to make things more strange, is in New Mexico, Albuquerque not Los Alamos, but still), that much more enjoyable. The reason I posted the photos below in the previous entry today is because they were there--here, on this computer at the farm.

Random Photos

Some of my mother's classmates at LSU.  She (middle row right) graduated in 1946.

Alien dog adjusting to her new home, 2010.

Speaks for itself. See http://www.flexyourrights.org/

Yin, yang, and superposition (a beginning)

On May 5th I raised the question, "what is light?"  I meant visible light, and my answer would be that it's a cacophony of electromagnetic expectorations from atoms.  

I also said I'd be discussing photon counting next, but that will have to wait. Also, CCDs, not yet mentioned here but ubiquitous in the world of photography, will have to wait.  The first order of business will be quantum superposition, and a good place to start is with the detection and suppression of polarized light.  The interesting and very peculiar thing about superposition is that a polarized component of light that you were sure you had suppressed or killed off is able to reappear later on down the line when you look again.

Most light we see is unpolarized, or you could say randomly polarized, but quite a bit of sunlight reflected from glass surfaces (car windshields, etc) and bodies of water (lakes, etc) is polarized, which is what allows polarized sunglasses to do their thing in helping eliminate or reduce glare, a very desirable thing for driving and water sports (fishing in clear water, for instance, where polarized sunglasses allow one to see under water better) and snow skiing.

To visualize what polarized light is, first think of a symmetrical cross, like the Red Cross.  Now imagine it to be so skinny that it’s just a horizontal line and vertical line, or in math language, an x-y coordinate system.  A light wave consists of undulating (sinuous you could say) electric and magnetic fields.  For a horizontally polarized beam of light coming toward you, the electric field is undulating horizontally, along the x-axis. To get a feel for what this means, hold out your hand, palm down, and move it right and left.   That’s analogous to what horizontally polarized light is doing, and reflected glare largely consists of horizontally polarized light.  Look up Brewster's angle.

Now imagine yourself behind bars, or in front of them, moving your hand back and forth horizontally while trying to pass it through the bars.  Can’t do it!  Polarized sunglasses act like vertical bars against the passage of horizontally polarized light.  Now if you turn your hand so your palm faces left or right  and move your hand up and down, you're mimicking vertical polarization.  Vertically polarized light is all that gets through polarized sunglasses lenses. Unpolarized light, what we encounter inside and outside most of the time, has components horizontally polarized, vertically polarized, and polarized along all the angles in between horizontal and vertical.  Now try imitating that with your hand—easy, but you look like a nut doing it.   This motion should be centered on the center of the cross, meaning your hand is supposed to be passing through the origin (0, 0) of the x, y coordinate plane.  And don't move your hand closer or farther away from your body while you're doing this!  That's better.  Earlier I said to imagine the light coming toward you, but as long it's either coming  directly at you or moving directly away from your body, along the + or - z direction, your hand motion is representing the undulations, the increase and decrease of the electric field as the waves move toward or away from you.

So, a polarized sunglass lens acts like a filter, only allowing vertically polarized light to pass through.  Those waves with polarization angles between vertical and horizontal, well, the filter only allows the vertical component of their electric field to pass through.  (For instance, imagine an arrow pointing northeast.  Yeh, mapwise north is positive y and east is positive x. So this northeast-pointing arrow is leaning at 45 degrees from the vertical, hovering 45 degrees above the horizontal, and so has equal vertical and horizontal projections or components. Other polarization angles have smaller or larger x and y components, depending on whether they're closer to vertical or to horizontal.  So there.)

Here’s a little experiment you can do with polarized lenses from a pair of sunglasses:  take ‘em out, hold ‘em up, one in each hand, and put one in front of the other.  Turn one of them clockwise or counter-clockwise, and observe how much light is getting through both lenses.  If you have them turned 90 degrees relative to each other, no light will get through.  Just what you expected, right?, since their polarization axes are perpendicular.

In different words: the original light is a mixture of yin-light and yang-light.  As I was saying in more standard terminology two paragraphs ago, everything in between yin and yang can actually be partly projected on the yin axis and partly on the yang axis, so all directions in this plane are taken care of by only talking about yin and yang (or, sure, x and y components). Let’s say the first lens is a yang-type filter—all that’s left of the original light is its yang-light once it has passed through this lens.  If the second lens is a yin-type filter, it’s going to stop any yang-light. But that’s all that is left, so no light gets through.

The mystery occurs when a third polaroid lens is placed between the yin and the yang lenses, with its polarization angle aligned somewhere in between the perpendicular axes of the yin and yang.  Now some light does get through all three of these lenses!  The yang-type filter has, we thought, suppressed or killed off any yin-light.  But somehow the in-between filter, turned at let’s say a 45 degree angle to the yin and yang filters, brings back to life the supposedly killed-off yin components, allowing them to pass through the final filter. 

The first book I read on this subject was The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav.  I read it in the summer of 1980, and don’t recall him using the yin-yang analogy in this context.  But he probably did.  I’ll have to check on that and get back with you, and also, when I get back, explain how this three-polarizer set-up is  an example of quantum superposition.  Meanwhile, summertime beckons.

Letters, yeh

What I enjoy as far as writing and reading are concerned is letters.  How’s that for a probably grammatically incorrect sentence?  But that’s the thing about letters, they are a free-form creative writing experience.  My aforementioned schizophrenic-diagnosed cousin is the only person these days who I receive actual letters from on a regular basis.  He doesn’t wax schizophrenic in his letters except once in a while.  Usually he makes positive comments (“I love you very much, David!” “God bless you and your brothers and families!”) with a few current events in his life thrown in, in about a half-page letter.  He has a good memory, and when my brother Jeff and I visited him last weekend at Van Buren Health & Rehab (danged big place) one thing he asked about was who was in the auto accident in Missouri.  That would be Jeff, in 1976, when he was returning with a friend for a visit to Westminster College, from which he'd graduated the previous year. (Jeff’s spleen was removed, but before the surgery was done, it was touch-and-go because of internal bleeding and  Jeff had to be airlifted from a small town hospital to Springfield.  Jeff and I were living together in Little Rock at the time, but that night I was staying in Pine Bluff with two of my younger brothers when the small-town doctor called, asking for Jeff’s father.  For some reason, maybe the tone of the man’s voice, I said I was Jeff’s father.  The doctor was pissed when he found he’d told the info to Jeff’s brother, but I told him I’d get my parents, which I promptly did.  They were at an annual Charity Ball on Main Street, in that era when such things still took place in Pine Bluff.)

But the point here is, (Jeff's friend wasn't seriously injured, by the way) what I’m interested in is at least one person to correspond with.  More than one would be fine.  Yeh, I mean e-mail, not actual handwritten letters, although that is what I really like to write and receive. This thing of having comments made and responded to in the public way of the normal blog, no thanks, not for me.  I'm an inveterate letter writer--that's about all my fragmented mind can concentrate on.  Well I did finish a short story recently, after...eight years.  Have a good Memorial Day.

(note added in proof:  yes, I do exchange e-mail with family and friends, but except for a few good ones such as Pat's below, they are pretty much utilitarian.  and on the other hand, i'll have to say some people, including me sometimes, can write blog posts that are very creative-literary-letter-like.  i even fantasize on occasion that some such other people were thinking of me in some way.  that's like a fantasy letter substitute for the real thing, I guess. )

Ghost(s) at the Saenger Theater

The Saenger Theater in Pine Bluff, built in 1924, has been mentioned in the statewide newspaper lately because the building is deteriorating and needs its roof repaired to the tune of $150,000 to prevent its imminent demolition.  This news comes at the same time a historic building in Morrilton that was still in use collapsed this week, killing a two year old girl and seriously injuring her mother. (Unlike that building, the Saenger is not still in use.)  The statewide paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reminisced in an editorial today on the heyday of the Saenger and lamented that it has not been restored like one of its sister theaters in Texarkana (it was a Saenger theater also, but is now the Perot Theater, due to Ross Perot putting up a million dollars to help get the theater restored).  The Pine Bluff Saenger was close to being restored eight or ten years ago, when a Pine Bluff film festival was still in existence, but has since further deteriorated.

Anyway, today's editorial didn't mention the legend of the ghost in the theater.  Supposedly an electrician was electrocuted while working overtime in order to get the final connections made for the theater to open.  Also supposedly, his wife was waiting outside in their car so they could leave immediately for a vacation.  This would not mean much at all to me, except for the fact that my best male friend in junior high and high school, Pat  Calkins, worked as the Saenger's assistant manager for several years and has told me he saw the ghost.  He's not one to make up something like that.  The cleaning ladies also told him they'd seen this ghost.  Apparently, strange noises were common in the theater late at night, but sightings of the ghost were not.

Last year I asked Pat to tell me about his sighting of the ghost and to provide if he could any leads I might follow relating to other people having seen it.  I was thinking of writing it up as an article for the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly.  Pat is a word person, but not so much a sentence or punctuation person.  Here is his email to me about the ghost:

Maybe Commonwealth Theaters  could check old employee files and find the old gals. what I saw , Every night after everyone had left the theater The Projectionist Zappy turned on the auditorium light and left I locked all the doors leaving my keys in the lock on the front door next to the boxofice then same routine as always I walk through the foyer taking a look in the auditorium for sleepers lovers drunks then hit the light switch under the stairs that led to the balcony , but that night I saw a figure coming up the isle I stopped looked and it was the ghost he was wearing a smock and carrying a tool box as if he was simply on the way out. It shocked the piss out of me I ran to the door unlocked it stopped out locked it back jumped in the old Flag car drove off with tears in my eyes checking the back seat. The next Coke Show I asked one of the maids if they ever saw anything unusual in there and she grabed my arm and said you seen him didn't you then started laughing and said look at those goose bumps I'll tell you exactly what you seen ,describing him exactly followed byhow he got there and he didn't bother anybody like the mean one up in the balcony . I'm running out of library time so so long adju to you  Pat

Anti-Social Network, no aneurysm detected, light

I started an Anti-Social Network some months ago.  So far it's been very successful!  No one at all has signed up.

This very blog which you are reading by some set of unlikely circumstances or perhaps accidentally is rather anti-social itself.  No comments allowed for all to see and perhaps for some even to further comment upon.  "Send him an email, huh!" you say. "That  a-social a-hole, who'd bother?"  Ha.  One significant person is all I'm fishin' for.  Yep, statistics are against me (only out of many comments, procured by being widely read, says statistics, would you likely encounter that significant one).  But if someone likes his life like it is, why should he cast his net upon the statistical muddied waters?

I've also kept a journal for thirty years.  Compare that!  Not even available to be read by anybody.  Not until I publish parts of it, if I ever do.

My brother and his family in Birmingham & Tuscaloosa, from whence I received my current best friend, Jessie, are fine, thanks

Me too.  I actually imagined I possibly had an abdominable aortal aneurism, like Dr. Einstein did, but by a convoluted set of circumstances and in the end by no doing or asking on my part (3rd time was charm), I was checked via sonography for that ailment and others on Tuesday at my gastroenterologist's office, and was sent away with a clean bill of health.  No, he didn't do the test himself, like the MD giving the chest X-rays does in A Serious Man. 

What is light, or a better question would be how is light that we see generated, and what kind of properties does it have?  We get into statistics in answering those questions.  Spontaneous emission and stimulated emission (of light from atoms) are the ways it's generated.  But it's also scattered by "objects," meaning all the things we see that are not sources of light.  Light from the sun or from an incandescent or fluorescent lamp, or from this screen you're reading, is nearly all generated by spontaneous emission.  Laser light is almost all generated by stimulated emission (thus Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is where it gets its name).  The statistics of "counting photons" in different types of light is what we will stumble into next time.  Oh, yes and also eventually the all-important concept of superposition in quantum mechanics and its role in Schroedinger's Cat and the EPR problem.

Back to my booth at the Pine Bluff Business Expo for now.  Peace.