By Scott Sullivan
Editor
The Wall
Re: last and this week’s lead stories: So much for practicing law with no brains.
Continuing in that vein, scientists have created a tiny robot that melts, moves and can reform elsewhere, great for escaping prison and other bars where you’re lodged.
Hong Kong researchers say the robot can liquify, then reassume its solid or any other shape, say as a screw for that hard-to-fit hole the hardware store’s given up on.
Inspired by sea cucumbers, Qingyuan Wang, Chengfeng Pan, Yuanzi Zhang, Zhipeng Chen, Lelun Jiang et.al. mimicked the ocean floor dwellers’ gift to change stiffness quickly like guys do with Viagra.
Chinese scientists, of course, are suspect — ask a former president or current columnist on these pages. Using the metal gallium, which melts at 86°F, and a magnetoactive solid-liquid phase transition machine, Wang, Chen tonight can control robots with magnets, prompting them to move, melt or stretch.
Tests show they can jump up to 20 times their length, climb walls, solder circuit boards, escape from a mock prison and, in their solid state, support objects 30 times their own weight.
Wait, you say. You want our equally-suspect U.S. government elected by we the people to spend our hard- earned tax dollars (nothing’s earned softly, unless stolen, inherited or both) on pie-in-the-sky research when it can be better squandered propping up smalltown business (especially newspaper) owners, arms manufacturers and our impoverished Pentagon to ensure mankind stays warring and divided for our own good, rather than sharing knowledge with scholars from other nations?
Nonsense. The Chinese may have dogs and their names may be Jingo too.
Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep, sends human shapes of all kind to dreamers to achieve what we now call “morphing.” Shapeshifting is one of an artist’s most-handy tricks.
I read the famoud physicist Albert Einstein and author Franz Kafka likely met while attending Prague salons between 1910 and 1912. Nothing is recorded about these encounters, but both spent much of their inner lives contemplating the law which abides within and beyond the world.
Kafka’s 1915 novella “The Metamorphosis” tells of a salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a giant insect. Is this dream real? he asks one way or other in many writings.
Einstein dared to dream too, turning what he called “thought experiments,” such as “What would it be like to ride on a light beam?” into theories dismissed by peers as outlandish … until he proved them.
With scientific rigor Einstein tested ideas, in the process advancing theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, light, mass, velocity and more to make better sense of the universe — one more example of wasteful research spending.
Spending billions to build a wall outsiders with dark skin and more cunning can pierce easily, laughing all the way? Hate away, may it bring you joy. Einstein had to work hard, soft and through all friction levels to rocket physics past Isaac Newton.
If it follows Kafka morphed into Einstein and vice versa, this mad theory must be tested using rigor, not rhetoric. Repeating what your favored news sorcerers say so lacks validation why be its parrot?
Does Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence apply too to art and science? Say, Math (M) = Fiction (F) x C (Changing Constant) squared? What does this have to do with light speed and time-space curving?
Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking as when we created them.”
“How do these help a photographer bypassed by photons before his/her shutter snaps?” I ask practically. “Is bombarded by light a good way to go?”
There’s an equivalence between news and cultural content too. One is done poorly, both suffer. What if we dismount our netless tightrope to seek new learning? “Away” is a way as well.