Storyborn

Physics interpenetrating my story.

I’m learning three subjects right now. Of them, physics is my favorite.

Chemistry is too concerned with the real. It’s mired in the minutiae of the small. So concerned with how electrons act, unable to come with any rules that hold true for everything.

Calculus is too vague, too theoretical. It turns everything into numbers. Pure, clean, unfathomable, everything is one step removed from reality. Godly.

But physics is the interpenetration of God and the world. It is calculus made real, it is chemistry made manifest in the observable. Today I stood up and swung my mouse around my head to test if gravity effects an orbit.

Calculus is the moral, and chemistry is the details. Physics is the story.

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Objects keep moving unless acted on by an external force. This is contradictory to the way we perceive the world. Air resistance, friction, gravity, these things conspire to slow the object, change its course, and bring it down. Yet beneath it all, there lies an underlying law. Objects remain in motion unless stopped.

On a quantum level everything is in flux. In chemistry we can’t even tell you where an electron is at any given point in time, just a probability. Yet probabilities add up. By the time you get to a molecule we can tell you exactly how it’s going to act.

Random choices turn into patterns. Patterns turn into laws. Laws arise as emergent processes of chaos, so secure in their probabilities that every time I touch a table my hand doesn’t go through.

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Tell me again. The story of how I was conceived.

“I was in Olympia, just finishing up my masters in teaching. One day as I sat listening to Jean and Brian they mentioned they were driving up to Seattle. Your father would come down to Olympia and spend time with me, but I had never been to his house in Seattle before.

“Suddenly I had an impulse, it was like a gong went off in my head, and I told them I wanted to drive up to Seattle with them.”

My father takes over now. “No phone call, nothing, she just showed up ‘Here I am!’ We spent the weekend together. Nine months later, here you are.”

I was born into a story, from a story, to a story. I was raised with stories. From my family anecdotes to tales taller than the sky and older than time. Both parents writers, depth psychologists, lovers of lore.

“Tell me a story” was never something you said in my house. You just sat and listened.

Tell me the story again? . . .Perhaps.

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Forces have sources. When analysing a physics problem, you look for everything that’s touching it. The earth is so big it gets to touch from a distance. Sometimes we invoke chains of force, every molecule in the rope exerting force on every other, until a sled dog exerts force on a sled.

The further into physics I go the more I begin to see the endless connections. The complex interrelationalaties between matter and itself. To truly represent an action we must capture it in a snapshot. In an act against man made rules, we take a derivative, divide by zero, and conceive of something zero times over. We take time removed from its context. We must strip all extraneous details. Isolate. Insulate. Recombine.

And in that act of coming back together, the world grows picture perfect. Illuminated for its deeper nature. We’ve made a movie from reality. Fastforward.

Rewind.

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Tell me again. The story of the first time I almost died.

“Our apartment in Fremont was on the third story. A set of iron stairs led up to it, with these thin little railings along the sides for an adult to grab onto.

“We had a visitor, and when she left for the day, she left the door ajar, just a crack. Your father and I were sitting on the bed talking when suddenly I got as what I can only call alarm bells going off in my head. ‘I have to check on Pan.’ I said.”

“She really did suddenly sit jerk upright all of a sudden.” My father adds. “One moment we were talking, and the next she was rushing out.”

“I found you had crawled out onto the balcony, and had just put your hands on the first step down, about to topple head over heels down three flights of stairs,. I can’t imagine moving faster as I whisked you up.”

In stories, the world works a little different than it does in real life. Things are fated, and you see them foreshadowed in the storyteller’s eyes. Everything works out just right, for good or ill, clicking into place with an audible snap.

In stories things come in threes. Magical creatures come and help our heros. Good happens to the good, and in the end evil always befalls the evil.

In stories. Things were meant to be.

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Invoke the collision. When two objects collide, when one object explodes, in that instant we can set aside everything else and focus in on just those two. Just that one. Later we’ll notice gravity if our impact happened in the up-and-down, friction as our objects recoil, but in out zero’d out instant it’s just the two of them, or just the one.

In  a collision this lets us do all sorts of interesting manipulations. An object at rest will trade places with an object in motion. Equal and opposite. If they stick together we can calculate their new speeds as easily as one plus one. If they both were moving in opposite directions, we can tell what they were doing before by what happens after. Fastforward. Rewind.

In an explosion it’s even more amazing. Every force pushing out from our object will equal zero if you add them all up. From nothing comes something. Yet add up the somethings and you again have nothing. Physics tells us what the old stories knew. That from the void came not one, but two. Always two. Equal and opposite.

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Tell me the story of the second time.

We were living in Port Townsend, at the Walnut Street house by then. One morning you just began coughing, and wheezing. We thought maybe you’d caught a cold. All day we took turns holding you as you tried to breath. These ragged little pants. Heaving air in and out. We thought it would pass, we waited several days and finally took you to Doctor Jansson, I still remember his calm dry voice.
“Do you want to drive him to the hospital or would you like me to call an ambulance?”
I had bronchial infection induced asthma.

This time, not by the grace of the gods, but by my own strength I survived. Probably some grace  thrown in. Every time I become conscious of my breath. Of the power of my lungs, long outgrown the asthma that took me then, I remember.

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Energy is not a vector and translates between the X and the Y. Where force pushes in a direction. Collides and explodes. Expands and exerts. Energy is directionless.

Yet it is force that creates Work. Work which adds energy to a system. Energy increases or decreases by way of force.

On the other side, Force is defined as mass multiplying acceleration, and mass is matter, and matter energy multiplied by the speed of light, and so as we circle round, like an algebra problem where we discover that one equals one, force is energy given movement, and energy is force made abstract.

Directionless.

A chemical could be ready to explode. Its direction defined simply by the pattern of its matter melded together, high energy, force poised, yet zero.

Miracles. From nothing. Something. Time the only storyteller.

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Tell me the story of the third time.

I actually have a memory attached to this one. I’m up on something high, with a bright light to my right and above me. There’s something blue in front of me. Mama enters, and I turn around very proud.

“We found you had piled up boxes on a chair and gotten up on top of the file cabinet where we kept your asthma medicine.”
“Look Mama!” my Father will mimic in a super squeaky voice. “I drank all my medicine!”
- they called poison control right away. They were told a whole bottle of albuterol on child my size would kill me, unless they could get it out of my system. They were told to get Syrup of ipecac - make me throw up.

My father takes over “But for it to work we had to make you move around a lot. Get your belly stirred up. So we put on some dance music and put a bowl in the middle of the floor and all started dancing. Sure enough, you’d dance around, then throw up in the bowl, then get right back up dancing. Finally all tired out we put you to bed, and you survived the night.”

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Set momentum before and after equal and solve for unknowns. How much time did it take? How much Force was required? Every conflict has a story. Every story can be recalled. Look at the past and you can conceive the future. Physics or foresight I don’t care how it's done. In a world where time mirror's time. Where chaos rises into order. Where everything follows rules, the future is ours to touch.

Thrice touched by death I rose into memory. Rose to an age where I could participate in the making of stories. For a long time I made them up, before I realized the best are built of true things.

After a while I began to realize I don’t live in the real world. Perhaps I never have. I live in a fairytale As one in it I can never see what is truly ahead, but in the way of stories I can guess.

Yesterday I walked in on a conversation of friends wondering about how to reduce the most suffering in the world. Wild ideas like that the amount of suffering in a wild animal’s life is more than the moment of their death, so that an effective means of reducing suffering is death.As always with these conversations I tend to keep my mouth shut. I doubt the premise of the conversation, that suffering needs to be alleviated at all. Certainly the amount of suffering you cause is reflected on your soul. Certainly one should not turn aside if another is suffering and it is easy for you to pull the splinter, or tend the wound. But my friends think the point of it all is to get rid of suffering.

The point is to create a good story. Cruelty arises and as is the way of stories heroes arise to fight it. It is our moral duty to help where help we can, knowing life will provide more pain, large and small, that stories might arise once more from their ashes.

Some pain is too great to bear. Some pain makes stories too hard to hear. Come then effective altruists and ready your weapons against Auschwitz and the atom made bomb. Come then and save the lives of the many that  their tongues may craft stories from experience less dire.

But don’t save me from suffering. Were I not thrice touched by death I wouldn’t know that I live in a fairytale. I wouldn’t know my mass and velocity. My make and my motivations. I couldn’t set my momentum equal, and solve for my future.