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Impressions |
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For few days a deep periodic sound can be perceived in the building where we live. It is not violent, it is only heavy, low, and has something inexorable. Since just in front of our windows (to the right however) we see Chateau d’If, I have suspected that a sort of Monte Cristo story is re-edited. The prisonnier is digging his way out of the terrifying prison and, by a curious phenomenon of disorientation, he is now traversing the space under the garrage boxes of our building. This should be an error and we have to inform him as soon as possible. He can now get out to full light and a new life, especially because these days the price of the gold is at the highest. Thanks God he has not tried to verify his direction while his tunnel was under the sea. I drop a heavy object on the floor marking a kind of Morse, as Alexandre Dumas has teached us in the novel. I explain that he is now in south-east Marseille and that I want exclusivity for his memoirs. After some silance I receive the message that he wants to get out in Lyon, before Christmas. Again a wrong direction, he is going straight to the Alps. But I feel I talk too much and he has work to do. After few days, when I suppose he was approximately under Centre Bonneveine, we learn that the reparations have been finished. Therefore there was no Monte Cristo, no tunnel. What about his answer, however? This refers clearly to our ability to recognize the true structure in the real things. Science was passive approximately until Tycho Brahe and Kepler, after that it pushed a little trying to impose its suggestions, and today is wildely aggressive, taking the nature as a kind of substance to fill the contours of our theories, especially on turbulence. It is true that nature often takes the pleasure to show us a cloud having the shape of a camel (see Hamlet, Polonius and all that). |
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The absolute victory of individualism and of its social expression, possesion of goods, is obvious. People have luxury objects, but for a scientist, things have always been more sofisticated. Suppose you have an initial condition. The wise thing to do with it is to insert it in the Lax operator of the Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation. The plane of the complex spectral variable can be compactified along the cuts that connect the main spectrum and we get a hyperelliptic Riemann surface, a sphere with handles. Define the auxiliary spectrum, then (Abel-)map the Riemann surface onto the Jacobi torus and wait for the miracle: indeed the equations become linear. The way back is ensured by the Jacobi inversion and you get the solution of the equation. This structure is a brilliant mathematical achievement. We must be grateful for such a wonderful theory, which makes the world an even better place to live. However, in the suspicious ambiguity of the modern world, just keep a cool perception of any possible alternative. We shouldn’t play with nature. Nature has created rules and these are known as conservation laws. You cannot create something wonderful and crystal-clear without having created, simultaneously and by recoil, something absolutely opposite. What is even worse, you can recognize the beauty but you can only fear the unknown and implacable negative version. Which will be its face, this time? If it spreads over the whole surface of things, it may not be so bad, we all contribute: the elevator does not work, it rains over the BBQ, there is a short Metro-strike in Paris. Several great moments of happiness have been build on the basis of the supportability of the dust of trouble spread over the rest of existences. But perfect structures are more exigent: they require an equivalent concentration of the opposite structure, and even more stringent: of being of the same nature. Then, can-we see any theory that should be entitled to proudly claim that it is stressfully confusing to the degree that balances how integrability is clear? Smile, you have just met the theory of turbulence. Let's summarize: we don't discover, we separate. Every clarity is paid with equal confusion. The noble character of the confusion is that it generously sustains a small piece of clarity somewhere. Another reason to make turbulence attractive. |
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I remember the beautiful final scene from “The blue lagoon” and the words said when the children are found in their fragile boat: “They are not dead, they are only sleeping”. Indeed, the childhood is not dead inside us, it is only sleeping waiting naively that we will sometime return to look for it, to live again in that candid happiness that would have to be eternal. Usually when I want to communicate something at a conference, I get the indication to do it by poster way, which means a large piece of paper in front of which I wait indefinitely to catch a curious or imprudent passer-by. Since sometimes the number of posters is huge there are few chances to set off the mine and put particular emphasis on my genial discovery. Science will have to use the same recipe that has made the television a great success: sex and violence. I still hesitate. Not far there are talking sessions, where people explain things via the oral way, as some medicines are taken. Without developing a frustration I notice that I have accumulated a serious amount of unused ability of exposing by words my various truths. A recent occasion allowed me to make not less than six seminaries in three months, wonderful opportunities to send in words and gesticulation scientific messages. With these occasions I have found myself in front of colectivities of different extensions, all watching me and tuning their attention to capture my communication. Every time a screen shone behind me; on it I projected the slides from my computer, a digital poster. As I was proceeding with my passionate explanation, I could see how different reactions were arising on the faces, curiosity, indignation, satisfaction and, frequently, the disappearance of attention to that limit that voids the face of any expression. Nobody was really sleeping (I do not know of anyone to have fallen and roll on the floor in a state of deep sleep, during a conference on plasma theory). The participants affected by a heavy assault of sleep were always fighting heroically before being invariably absorbed in the imperative internal world of peace and dream. Miraculously they were still standing in the right position, but possibly with much more regular breathing, with eyes politely half-closed and approaching the point of loosing the control of the lower jaw. I am very satisfied, because I know that some lessons of foreign languages are made during the state of sleep, so I probably transfer with high efficiency my information. My only concern is they may discover later this information, a strange gift lying on the floor of their memory and, with gratitude to the Providence, publish it before me. Maybe the content of my theory has a hypnotic effect, provoking the regression to an incipient state of innocence. If I loose another two I stop talking and I watch them in silence until the coffee break. The inflexible phenomenon of somnolence may extend and can capture more and more persons, which indeed worries me since I also feel in danger. If I am contaminated by the same abandon and fall asleep during one of my hyperbolic explanations and associated gesticulations, nobody will be left to note the impressive achievements. This possibility is also a dramatic return to original state: if we become motionless under the weak light of a projected slide, we will become a poster. Again a poster, very large and in 3D, but a poster, nothing but a poster. If somebody come in, he would say: Science is not dead, it is only sleeping. |
