“The mathematical technique of decomposing wiggling wave forms into sine waves which can then be summed again to make the original wiggly line is called Fourier analysis, after the nineteenth-century French mathematician Joseph Fourier. It works not just for sound waves (indeed, Fourier himself developed the technique for a quite different purpose) but for any process that varies periodically, and it doesn’t have to be high-speed waves like sound, or ultra-high-speed waves like light. We can think of Fourier analysis as a mathematical technique which is convenient for unweaving ‘rainbows’ where the vibration that makes up the spectrum is slow compared with that of light.
To go to a very slow vibration indeed, I recently saw, on a road in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, a wiggly wet line which followed the course of the road and apparently traced out some kind of complicated repeat pattern. My host and expert guide told me that it was a trail of urine from a male elephant in musth. When a bull elephant enters this curious state (perhaps the elephantine equivalent of an Australian on ‘walkabout’) he dribbles out urine more or less continuously, apparently for scent-marking purposes. The side-to-side waving of the urine trail on the road was presumably produced by the long penis acting as a pendulum (it would be a sine wave if the penis were a perfect, Newtonian pendulum, which it is not) interacting with the more complicated periodicity of the lumbering four-footed gait of the whole animal. I took photographs with the vague intention of later performing a Fourier analysis.
I am sorry to say I have never got around to doing it. But in theory it could be done. A tracing of the photographed urine line could be laid over squared paper and its coordinates digitized for feeding into a computer. The computer could then perform a modern version of Fourier’s calculations and extract the component sine waves. There are easier (though not necessarily safer) ways to measure the length of an elephant’s penis, but it would have been fun to do, and Baron Fourier himself would surely have been delighted at such an unexpected use of his mathematics. There is no reason why a urine trail might not fossilize, as footprints and wormcasts do, in which case we could in principle use Fourier analysis to measure the penis length of an extinct mastodon or woolly mammoth, from the indirect evidence of its urine trail in musth.”
—From Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, one of my favourite bits in any book ever (although I have issues with the book). We all use math every day etc. etc.
[inspired by]
[Former Star Trek writer] Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
La Forge: “Captain, the tech is overteching.”
Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”
La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t work.”
Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”
People are always telling you that “we have always done thus,” and then you find that their “always” means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips, compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have “always” done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice…
[Happy belated birthday, Mrs. Le Guin.]
You just made that up, dude.
The Scene:
After The Final Battle, the Enterprise gets too close to the black hole! They’re getting drawn in, and Scotty says that if they eject the warp core and blow it up, the explosion might propel them to safety.
The Science:
Simply put, that won’t work. Sorry Scotty!
On Earth, detonating a bomb creates a shock wave, an expanding wave of pressure as the force from the explosion propagates through the air. In space — wait for it, wait for it… — there’s no air! So you don’t get a shock wave. When the matter and antimatter in the core combine, you get a fierce blast of electromagnetic radiation (fancy science-talk for light) in the form of gamma rays, and an expanding very thin shell of vaporized atoms from the material in the warp core itself.
To propel the Big E to safety, the bomb would have to transfer momentum to the ship. […]
» taken from: Bad Astronomy Review: Star Trek
The Writers:
“Hawking proved that Black Holes actually devaporate. And that in the event horizon virtual particles can be created that sap energy from the Black Hole and actually real particles can escape it as the fake, virtual particle falls in and the real particle goes out. The anti-matter/matter reaction from that didn’t exactly just push it away, that’s a simplified movie version. What it did was stretch space and create space and get you away from the event horizon.”
» clumsily transcribed from: Star Trek Q&A with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (download)
