I love dipping into physics, so long as no-one expects me to understand it properly. Things like the cloud chamber fascinate me. Physicists who study the elementary particles can’t actually see these particles, they can only see the trails they make in the clouds of a cloud chamber. By following these trails they can see how they interact with other particles and so deduce many of each particle’s properties.
Call this a foolish leap, but this reminds me a lot of characters in a story. In a good book, you get to know characters not by direct description (“he was a hard, uncaring sort of man”) but by how they interact with those around them; by the trails they make in the clouds. If characters are like particles, then their traces are all the subplots that trail away from them. In the end you don’t need to see the character at all – like the physicist, you can pinpoint him purely from the trails he leaves behind.
On a totally random digression, don’t those particle tracks in the picture remind you of the Nazca lines? Just a thought.
3 comments:
Good point about characters.
Exactly like Nazca Lines.
The metaphor is a bit of a stretch, I think... but it is interesting how physicists at the very frontiers of science seem increasingly to have to use the language of arts and philosophy to capture their findings... whereas I seem to have ended up doing the reverse.
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