Thursday 23 March 2017

Glycerine and physics

Recently I read a book by David Bohm called Wholeness and the Implicate Order.  I don't pretend to understand all of the mathematical physics developed in it; it is 40 years since I did any of that - time enough to forget, and to get out of date.  He presents a case for the existence of "hidden variables"  (an idea that had been discounted) that might underpin the randomness of quantum-level physical observations.



There were a couple of related things in it that got me thinking.  The first is an analogy he drew between the physical world and our perception of it, as displayed by a simple experiment.

You take a large diameter cylinder of glass, put a smaller diameter cylinder inside it on the same axis, and fill the gap between them with (transparent and viscous) glycerine.  If you put a dot of dark ink on the surface of the glycerine and spin one of the cylinders, the dot will gradually stretch out until it becomes too thin to be visible.  But you can turn the cylinder the other way, and the dot re-appears, then disappears again as you continue.

So you can draw a dot, spin the cylinder, draw another dot next to where it was, spin again, repeat several times, until they are all invisible.  Spinning the cylinder back again gives rise to the impression of a dot moving along the surface.

You can expand this idea into different sizes and colours of dots, spread out in 3D in the glycerine, spining the cylinder until you end up with a grey goop that, none the less, contains, in a meaningful way, the lines of different coloured dots you have drawn.  The author calls this the implicate order, and posits it as analogous to the implicate order of the physical world, of which we see only the observable elements that develop through time.

It's easy to see that disturbing any part of the grey goop has an effect spread out through time and space that is difficult to predict.

He then draws an analogy with music.  Our appreciation of any given note, chord, phrase, theme, and our reactions to it, emotional and physical are all dependent on other parts of the music, some of which appear only in the future, others resonate in our memory of what has played out before.  That is, in listening to music, we perceive directly, an implicate order.

Is this why mathematicians like music?  (Related)


1 comment:

James Higham said...

You can expand this idea into different sizes and colours of dots, spread out in 3D in the glycerine, spining the cylinder until you end up with a grey goop that, none the less, contains, in a meaningful way, the lines of different coloured dots you have drawn.

With the greatest respect, Mark, think that would do my 'ead in.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...