Tuesday 28 October 2014

Little quanta of delight

I heard a comedian tell a joke that went along the lines of, "What I want to know is, with all these wind farms around, what's to prevent the whole country just taking off?" Now, I know why this supposed to be funny, but the physicist part of my brain gets in the way of me finding it so. You just couldn't make a wind-driven propeller that generated lift... I know that this is the sort of thinking that leads to people commenting that physical scientists are "on the spectrum" but that phrase, like the term OCD, is one that shouldn't really be splashed about.
I had a problem, initially, with Andy Scott's sculpture Arria, which stands at the side of the M80 motorway near Cumbernauld. I thought that Arria was beautiful in parts, but something about her disturbed me. After a time, I realised it was her four arms. Not only did Arria apparently have four arms, they were arranged in such a way that it would be biologically impossible for them to move independently. (It's OK to be thinking "FFS get a grip, Gregor!" at this point.) Physics came to the rescue. Arria doesn't have four arms. She has two. We see her at two instants in time, one when her arms are behind her, the other when she has swept them towards us. This gesture is, in itself, quite lovely.
Roadside art gives me a little quantum of delight every time I pass it. Since most of it is beside busy roads, hopefully lots of people get a little ping of pleasure out of it every day. Just as a single photon can't do much illuminating but a laserload can be pretty intense, all the pings surely add up, giving the country more of a lift than a fast-birling wind turbine ever could.

Photo - from Wikipedia, taken by "Bikeparks", Creative Commons License.