Keith Douglas
Last time, we discussed wetness and related matters. Alex liked how the column related the social and the physical. Thank you, Alex! David asked if forces are always measured by an indicator that is an angle. He wonders, then, whether forces should be held to be fictitious properties. I am a realist: I think that instrumentalism is a misleading and somewhat impossible-to-use epistemology and have discussed this from time to time in other columns. Perhaps next time I will explore the topic in more detail. I think it is quite possible that there are other ways to measure forces — ones using, say, net charge — in an inversion of the famous Millikan oil drop experiments. I am, however, reasonably sure that changing to another property (e.g., energy) would not change the discussions too much. Thanks, David, for your comment as well!
Puzzles From Childhood
Instrumentalism, however, is often the spontaneous epistemology of many science textbooks, and with that I offer this month’s column, which is all about our early-in-life thoughts and thinking. You will see that many of the little puzzles I raise are NOT from books (though many are from school).
I would like to pose what I will call “puzzles from childhood.” All of these are connected to things I was taught as a child, that I thought about as a child, or that others thought about. This does not entail that they are particularly simple (or particularly hard). I include nine of them in varying domains. If by chance any of the other people involved read this column and are sure I am misremembering anything, forgive me! I think the puzzle is interesting anyway. Use the comments to correct me.
- Grade 10 physics lesson. Our teacher demonstrated a theorem in geometric optics that if you could see your friend, she could see you. Yet these days we see signs on trucks that say “I cannot see you.” What do you suppose is wrong with either the sign or the physics lesson?
- Elementary school age macroeconomics. My sister and I used to read the newspaper on the living room floor on Saturday morning and ask our parents questions. My sister at one point read about the debt crisis and how every country seemed to owe a lot of money. She asked: “What would happen if suddenly and at once all the debt was simply canceled?”
- Wildfires. I once asked my father what would happen if Earth were to suddenly lose all the nitrogen in its atmosphere? (The label is a clue, but why?)
- Gambling. Every year in my high school, homerooms had to come up with a way to fundraise for a local charity. One year a classmate of mine proposed that we run a casino. Our homeroom teacher said we could not do this because it might lose money. I thought this was ridiculous. Discuss. (There is a part of this puzzle that I know now that I didn’t then that I will hide until later.)
- Muffins. In the same spirit as the previous, another homeroom tried to create “A Million Mini Merry Muffins” or something like that. This was proposed by a classmate who was eventually our Governor General’s Gold Medal winner and the class valedictorian. Her intelligence and ambition notwithstanding, she had told another classmate that this project title was to be taken literally. Comment. (The second classmate thought our first classmate was crazy.)
- Folded paper. My grade 6 teacher challenged the class to fold a piece of paper in half, and then in half again, and so on 50 times, or alternatively, to guess how many times one could. I had classmates guess anywhere from 5 to 100. What is your guess?
- TV. One of my weird hobbies as a child was flipping the “cable type” switch on our family TV and observing that this changed the over-the-air reception in a repeatable but weird way. I never did find out what exactly went on. UHF channels were totally different, and there was reception outside the range of something. VHF, by contrast, seemed correct, but the “offstation ghosts” were different than the over-the-air setting (e.g., channels 11 and 13 produced the sound of channel 12), despite the fact that the setting was still allowing the TV to pick up over the air, which I never understood. Ah, the fun kids are missing with their cable and IP stuff everywhere! What did I find on channel 95? (Or explain anything else I saw?)
- TV inspiration: I remember a segment from 3-2-1 Contact’s episode “The Bloodhound Gang,” where the child detectives nab a car thief by giving him just enough gas to escape the parking lot of used cars and then run out. I was impressed that one could do this; this is sort of the “magic of science.” (“Nice calculation, kid!” as the episode has it.) However, in retrospect, this is a bit weird. No presentation of the calculation is on offer (unlike when they figure out a location of a recording by counting cricket chirps in another episode!). Is the feat to catch the thief realistic?
- Numbers. In grade 1, I was doing a math worksheet when I wondered what all the 1s have in common. (I regard this as my first question in philosophy!)
Puzzle No.1: If I can see my friend, but she can’t see me, then we are in a Zoom session, and I have not turned on my video camera.
As for the safety warning “I can’t see you” attached to the rear of huge transport trucks, I have seen hundreds of them while driving 10 times from Ottawa to Phoenix and back. The full text on the sign says, “IF YOU CAN’T SEE MY MIRRORS, I can’t see you.” It works well to get highway drivers to distance out for safety.
Puzzle No.2: If all international debts were cancelled, I think it means that either the finance ministers of all the lender countries are drunk, or else all the debtor countries went bankrupt.
Puzzle No.4: The teacher is right. Anyone running a casino, a lottery, or making book needs to first hire an army of actuaries to work out all the odds and probabilities in advance.
Puzzle No.6: Assuming that the paper was as thin as can be, one could keep folding it in half until the remaining area of the folded paper was smaller than the folder’s fingertips.
Puzzle No.7: I can remember old TVs that had a VHF/UHF switch, but my parents forbade me to play with it. At the time, I thought that they were so strict because they came from Europe. Years later, while studying R,D,Laing in college, I found out that I came from a dysfunctional family. Either that, or European TVs didn’t have VHF/UHF switches.
Puzzle No.8: Fiction and screenplay writers can devise any dramas or actions that they think the viewers or readers will accept as possible real events. Leaving just enough gas for the car thief to run out in a few seconds is possible, but the kids would likely have to siphon off the existing gas in the tank, and know exactly when there would be only a few drops left. Those kids were really smart!
These days, it’s easier to thwart carjackings by driving only cars with manual transmission. It’s amazing how few car thieves know how to drive manual.
Puzzle No.9: Please don’t say that the second philosophical question was, “Why is there air?”