jumpingfish

1. Son of a Theoretical Physicist

Books line the back wall of my study.

Morse and Feshbach; Poincaré; Jackson; Goldstein; Misner, Thorne and Wheeler; Courant and Hilbert; Margenau and Murphy; Abraham and Marsden. And others.

I am my father’s son. Many of those books were his. And more than a bit of my father’s theoretical physical nature runs in my veins. 

2. Fallen Branch 

We’ve known for some time that the neighbors’ Walnut tree was going to be a problem.

Many years ago, they cut back the branches overhanging their house and their power line, leaving the those hanging this way (although truth be told, at the time they probably did so out of deference to the then-owners of this house who might have enjoyed the tree).

Then a few years ago, twigs and small branches began dying and dropping into our yard and onto our roof — mostly small stuff. We had our tree guy cut back some dead branches when he was here.

Finally, the first sizable branch fell a few days ago. And wouldn’t you know it, it got hung up on our power line. The taut line seemed to be growning under the load but didn’t seem in jeopardy.

F = ma, as the saying goes. A little bit of dynamics. A little bit of statics. Theoretical physics of a sort — visible just outside our kitchen window.

3. Applied Physics at Work

Our tree guy had told us, “Once the branches start dying, the tree goes fast.”

So we talked to the neighbors about it. But that was a while ago. And now they were out of town. And that branch was on our power line. So I gathered my loppers and my saws and and went into the back yard.

I had a plan — a strategy based on my estimation of the relevant physics, my general expectations for the branch’s trajectory after I lightened its load. It was a good plan, because the branch would fall away from me. Which it did.

I know you expected me to say that the branch fell top of me. I am happy to report that it didn’t. It followed the trajectory I expected and fell away from the ladder, away from me. But here’s the thing of it.

When the branch hit the ground, it twisted. And when it twisted, a small sub-branch of it swung around. And when that sub-branch swung around, it clomped me on the shoulder. Hard. And I’m lucky it didn’t break my collar bone.

So you see, the problem here is this… I am indeed my father’s son. I have a theoretical approach to things. I understand Newton’s laws. I can work with Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. I can derive the Planetary Equations. I can tell you about the mathematics of the Earth’s gravity field. Hand-wavy, general principles, big-picture physics. 

It’s the nitty gritty that gets me. And that, my friends, is why I shun power tools. Because sadly, theoretical physics.

1. What’s the purpose?

“What’s the purpose?” I sometimes hear that guy in my head ask. “Why post those doggerel-worthy drawings of yours?”

Aside from the fact that the question makes me feel ashamed, he does have a point. Just what is their purpose — especially since some of them are so lousy?

Here’s how I look at it: these are just sketches about which I make no claims other they the fact that I sketched them, and I often spent shockingly (and obviously) little time at it.

I tell the guy, “A man can doodle; skip ‘em if you don’t like ‘em.”

2. Pushing me aside

Yet, often my sketches do have a purpose.

I remember a time when I was new on a development team and I walked up to one of the old hands and asked him a question. He didn’t quite understand and muttered something about needing to draw it out, at which point I (almost in glee) dashed back to my desk to retrieve my notebook with a sketch. 

When I sat back down, he seemed to be ignoring me, which was confusing.

“Here, I’ve got it drawn here,” I said, but he turned away from me, continuing to try to sketch on his own.

He didn’t want to see my circles and arrows. I felt invisible.

3. Fancy pipes

There was another time, when I shared a diagram to different effect.

A friend, with whom I hadn’t worked for a while came to my cubicle and asked if we could talk. We had a mini design meeting in which, among other things, I stood up at a pad of paper on an easel that just happened to be next to us and drew a diagram. There were boxes and arrows and little file-shaped shapes and my rendering of a sitting person stick figure. 

“I miss your diagrams,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “you should see my new way of drawing pipes!” And I showed him.

He laughed. 

Was that a picture of graduation day you sent? I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume so. What a fine thing.

Congratulations to the grad. And to the parents, too! What a fine thing.

Miss Izzy and I went out tonite to walk under the clear night sky. The sickle of the Big Dipper hung over us, and a waxing gibbous moon meeting up with Jupiter. And there was a Nighthawk sweeping thru the air high above the parking lot lights.

She and I slowly made our way to the soccer fields, around the gravel elementary school track and around the middle school track that they resurfaced last fall and is so spongey to walk on. Izzy found many excuses to take many detours.

Miss Izzy, does Mr. Guinness tell you about his running days, when he and I would go out to the lake? Does he tell you these things as he raises his head from his slumber when you get back from a long walk like this? Does he whisper his stories into your ears when he greets you?

He was a fine running buddy. Although perpetually distracted by everything at walking speed, when we would start running, his ears would lie back against his head, and he would run faithfully beside me, barely flinching at the other dogs and runners we passed. Does he tell you that? Does he tell you about how he would go for five miles with me and how one time he ran the seven mile loop?

Oh, those were the days, Miss Izzy, when he and I would go out there for a run around the lake and make this long walk of ours look like the child’s play that it is. I think we could do better than this, Miss Izzy — for Mr. Guinness’s sake. Ask him; see what he thinks.

When watching me work in the yard a long time ago, one of the three sisties said to me, “It’s a good thing you don’t do this for a living.” She had noticed my slow, inefficient way of doing things and correctly observed that they wouldn’t scale well if I charged for the work. Of course, my time in the garden isn’t a money-making venture. It’s an escape from the daily keyboard and monitor. I am content with the dirt under my fingernails, even if it comes only slowly.

That having been said, there are tasks I dread. And for these, I concede that I need to learn to work efficiently so that I can dilly-dally in the fun stuff. Improving clay soil is one such dreary task.

I can attest that there is no joy in thudding a shovel into clay, in struggling to scrape gunk off the blade, in breaking up sticky clods or in trying to mix good stuff in. Yet the formerly rich topsoil of the garden bed outside our kitchen window has been diluted with big clods of brown and red clay (as the result of the deep holes we dug for the new grounding plates), so the soil there needs improving. I confess, I have no interest in applying my inefficient approach to that task.

However… I have been trying to create a rain garden to capture the (usually rare) rain that runs down our driveway and pours off our roof. And as I have been digging, I have found earthworms by the handful. I spent more than an hour digging today, and as I dug, I collected the worms and dispersed them on the mulch outside the kitchen window. Handsful of them, many handsful. At the end of my otherwise inefficient labor, I must have distributed one hundred worms. And with each toss, I could see that the previous batch had already burrowed down into the mulch, no longer visible on the surface.

Somewhere down there under that mulch, my army of worms is even now at work breaking up the clods and aerating the gunk and pulling organic matter down into the soil — doing the dreary work for me. The paradigm of efficiency. 

The sisties would be proud.