Crackers, Entropy, and Time

Sebastien broke a cracker the other day.  Lately, he has been trying to put the broken ones back together before eating them.  This invariably frustrates him and he looks to me while making that pouty face.  I tell him "Sorry, you just can't fight entropy - it's always gonna win in the long run!"

All the different ways that cracker could break - so many possibilities.  Yet, only a very few, carefully lined up ways to put it back together.  Statistically, it's just not gonna happen with the two of us pushing the pieces together with our fingers.  Statistically, it's much more likely to remain broken, or, to break further as we try.  I know this from experience - he's just finding out the cruel nature of entropy for the first time.

We are going "forward in time" for the same reason: entropy.  The only thing giving a "direction" to time is that statistically crackers are more likely to break than they are to be made whole again.  Break a few more crackers and now you are 40 years old instead of 20 months old.

"Aha," Sebastien may be thinking, "I will cheat time by making a cracker factory in which we turn cracker crumbs into crisp new crackers!" 

That is all fine and well inside your factory, but the cost to the outside universe!  You will be dumping waste heat and sowing disarray with your discards at a rate exceeding your cracker making capacity.  Global entropy increases and time moves forward.

Sebastien scratches his head (very cute) and then thinks "What if I am very, very small and I don't interact at all with the rest of the universe?  Then can I cheat time?"

Hmm, he has a point there.  If you completely isolate yourself and don't break any crackers yourself then you may indeed have made time an irrelevant concept.  That's what's happening with different quantum states for subatomic particles when we say "we know they're in there somewhere but we don't know exactly where until we go looking for them".  Those isolated, non-cracker-breaking subatomic particles are not "buzzing around, skipping from state to state" - there is no sequence of events to them.  For time has no meaning to them and all their options stack up on top of each other into one big past-future-now stack called a "superposition".  No remembrances of things past and no excitement for the future in that world.

Maybe breaking crackers is a good thing? 

Deciduous/Evergreen

Struck again by sparse dark branches naked on a blue sky

A canvas upon which I sometimes project my thoughts

My younger self grasping for the imponderable

An older version of myself will someday do the same

This image threads together the stages of my life

Scattered white clouds; gentle swayings in the breeze

These lonely, dead branches will be/once were lushly green

At those times, I wonder about their future/past stark barrenness

Deciduous thoughts leading me to contemplate the Evergreen

But those trees are ever-changing

They will/were not always be here

Even the sky was not ever so

Am I pondering the Eternal

or the Changes that make me pine for it?

Creating Energy as We Roll Downhill to Iron

If you put a bunch of random nuclei in a box and rattle very hard and for a very long time, eventually all the atoms would transmute into iron.  The lighter elements would undergo fusion to fall into lower and lower energy states while the heavier elements would undergo fission to fall into lower and lower energy state.  All the energy being created in the universe since the big bang is coming from this big squeeze.  The iron nucleus has the strongest bonds between its nucleons and is thus at the bottom of the energy hill that other nuclei can roll down by fusing and fissing.

Something has long bothered me about the classic binding energy/nucleon chart we all first see in chemistry class:

The problem is, simply, that this is upside down.  I have written before about the problems people have with bond energy and the problems that people have with negative numbers, but it didn't click with me at those times that this chart is a classic example.  The top of this curve represent the most binding energy, which means it take the most work to tear those nucleons apart, which means they are sitting at the bottom of a very deep well (negative potential energy).  When you look at this chart, it is not clear that everything lighter releases energy when undergoing fusion and everything above can releases energy via fission.

The curve should be presented more like this all the time:

(from The Essential Cosmic Perspective, Bennett et al.)

 

Why is the first chart more popular?  Because people want things to be taller when they are stronger, not deeper.  This is yet another example of the deep problems people have with negative numbers.  Read the first few paragraphs of this great New York Times blog entry for more examples.  Sorry folks, bigger bond energy means a bigger negative number and things just make more sense when you picture it that way.

Simple Wisdom, the Beauty of Work, and Tarrh

Year ago when I worked in the family winery in Corsica, I worked very closely with an old Moroccan guy named Etari Ahmed (nicknamed "Tarrh" by my uncle).  Tarrh is on my left in the picture.  Saltana is the chubby fellow on my right.  Saltana drove one of the tractors so I only talked with him briefly while he was dumping out the grapes at the winery.  Tarrh worked in the winery so I spent all day with him.  Saltana is the one who told me that planes had "hit those big building in New York" on 9/11 just a few hours after it happened.  How he found out before me when he was in the middle of a field in Corsica I will never know.

But Tarrh is the one I was thinking about today.  When I asked him how old he was, he said, "My mother said I was born in the Year of the Good Fig Harvest".  He had two or three years of schooling and literally signed his name with an "X" on legal documents.  Seventeen people back in Morocco lived off his minimum wage salary.  He lived in an actual shack so as to save money and sent home almost every dime he made.  His one indulgence was to buy Marlboro Reds for himself (which he would smoke when he was tired, cold, or hungry) .  He would give me cash folded in a paper napkin on certain nights, and I would stop at the store on my way to the winery the next morning and buy him a new case.  My uncle said this meant he liked and trusted me.  He went home for only 8 weeks a year and was apparently worshipped by his extended family for supporting them.

He once asked me why there were time zones  ("Why is the time differerent in Morroco, in France, in America?") and I had to start my explanation with, "Well, the world is round, a big sphere sitting in space." He nodded vigorously and I continued.  "Everyone wants noon to be when the sun is overhead, but it's not overhead at the same time for everyone so we change the clocks from zone to zone to make it noon for each zone when the sun is overhead".  He grunted and shook his head in wonder then smoked another cigarette in contemplation.   A few weeks later he would ask me the same question and we'd do it all over again.  Tarrh spoke in bad French with a heavy Arabic accent and I would answer in bad French with a heavy American accent. My uncle would tell us to knock it off and get back to work.

Every day started with a handshake; if someone's hands were dirty then you grasped the other's wrist and shook that instead.  The handshake was nonnegotiable.

If an elderly person was sick, Tarrh would ask, "Does he eat?" If the answer was yes then he would declare, "He will get better."

He told me, "Never throw stones at the elder, for one day you will be old too."

When we were in the 14th hour of a 16-hour work day and I would give him a suffering look he would shrug and respond, "The work is the work."

If my uncle complained about spider webs in the corners of the winery, Tarrh would smile while grabbing the broom and say, "He [the spider] works the night, I work during the day!"

If I wanted to know where a tool was, Tarrh would respond, "You look - you find."

Tarrh had a theory on race: women from different races had hotter or cooler wombs so the babies came out different colors.  (White women must have the lowest temperature.)

One day I dropped a bucket right into a vat of fermenting red wine.  The outgasses of carbon dioxide was so strong my eyes were watering and I almost fainted while trying to reach it.  (I could see it perched on top of the crust of pressed grape skins and seeds floating on top of the liquid.)  I asked Tarrh to help and he had me lower him by the ankles into the vat while he grabbed the bucket and I pulled them both out.  When my uncle found out he called us both idiots and bummed a Marboro from Tarrh.

Sometimes, the three of us would enter into a "dance of work" that I think few have experienced where one would be on his way to start a pump and grab a wrench the other needed to complete his job and silently slide it into his hand without breaking stride, signal the third guy that the pump was about to turned on so that he would open a critical valve downstream before heading up the stairs.  The three of us were so in tune with the operations we were carrying out that we would be doing 5 to 6 things at once, processing tons and tons of grapes and never exchange a word.  A look here, a nod there and we were making wine. 

I count myself lucky to know the simple wisdoms of Tarrh; the greatest of which is the bliss of work well done learned by working beside him.

Pulling for You!

Some students you know will stay in your head for your entire life.

Erinn "2N" is one of those students; she validated my choice of career early on and is one of those people that lifts everyone around her with her sincerity and humanity.  After I wrote letters of recommendation for her to get into college, she reciprocated by writing letters for me when I moved on to other high schools.

She made this pillow from scratch when Isabelle was born because "every little girl needs to have her own pillow".  She has gone on to do great things and will, hopefully, go on to do so much more.  But, today, she is in a coma (has been for a while) after being struck by a car and her future is uncertain.  I just wish I could let her know that I am thinking of her, thanking her, and pulling for her.