Columbia Blues
the space shuttle Columbia - a story totally out of the blue.
Columbia Blues
Wings & foam have a complex relation: it’s the world turned on its head. The way foam flows, as compaired to usual fluids like gasses or liquids, is quite surprising. We’ll tell the story of the upside down wing.
(http://www.echobase.be/labOrint/index.php/foam/?title=foam-flows-versus-air-flows)
Wings are a poetic image for extacy, the permanent stage of us foam.scientists. Or are they? Muses don’t have wings. Our breath floats through the atmosphere in soap bubbles without wings. But perhaps the design approach can help. The shape of a wing as an example of thought figures?? As an example of how simple it can be: "turn it on its head and it works in a different context". I want to say how simple it is, just like switching your perception in the visual trick with figure and background: "is it a vase or two faces?".
The broken off bit of insulation foam of the fueltank hit and penetrated the insulation corbon/ceramics tile of the shuttle wing. The result is a dent in the heat shield of the wing, which eventualy is the cause of more heat when the wing cuts through the atmosphere. To be precice, the atmosphere at the dent will increase even more in temperature and turbulance, exceding the heat shield’s capacity . Thus the atmosphere will dig into the dent, to finally make a hole and the super-heated atmosphere will invade the interior space of the wing.
One can focus the story on the relation between the different walls: insulation foam, heat shield, atmosphere.
On the other hand, there’s the human tradegy and the response. The search for the cause, technical and strategical. The collection of the debris and tracing of responsabilities in a supposedly transparant organisation like NASA. Plus the global scale of the response, the frontpages announcing it all around the world!
Columbia = human factor / contamination in objective science <- versus -> foam as homo faciendo or factoris (the species is what it makes) But it’s no good to equate the human factor with a mistake, or even with the ungraspable.
And of course the whole Columbia tragedy is a hyperbole for the crush our two protagonists have for each other (or not). And my struggle is than focused on their relation to such a hyperbole. Humor, yes, but how to start the joke.
And in the margin of the story, there’s the saved hard disk with foam.data and the fire fighter turned black box hunter.
a science nest to avoid a liquidity crisis
To avoid a liquidity crisis, we have to convince our sponsors to squeeze the sponge…
We must make them an atmosphere within our own danger zone. It must be a lovenest, the blind love kind. Cause seeing is not believing any more. We must let them feel that even the expression “it is what it is”, does not apply to foam.science. Foam.science is out of the blue. There’s no trace of where it came from. It is here, a trace of itself.
I made myself a little mathematical niche. My own research project. Science is always on the edge they say. I have to keep moving to stay where I am. The object I study is not known by any but a handful of co-researchers. Each of them is also extremely specialized. We hardly know of each other what we are doing. In my nightmares I run around like a white little rat in a laborint, and my neighbors conduct experiments on me. Still, in spite of the risk of getting lost, we follow each other very closely. We haunt each other, so to speak.
So where is this research-niche? I collect things to build my nest. Research is a deceptive word. I don’t search, I find things out. And in between the things, there’s space for refinding. Or for definding. (The extra d’s, you could say, that’s the dada of science, but it needs some verifinding, before it will appear in any textbooks!). I say “refinding” in stead of refining, because, as we’re getting more and more niched, there is no more small and big, no more rough and precise. “Here” has no scale. So I can’t draw maps or make approximations. So I nest in things as such. Not objects that are planned and controlled, but things that lead a life of their own and that other scientists make their nest in as well.
As the collection grows, the space in between becomes more intricate. One thing becomes a container for an other, or its skeleton, or its abstract, or its extra dimension. Or they add up, divide, multiply … each other. This in-between-laborint can’t be entered simply. There always needs to be something doubled. So as the mathematical collection grows, I go from simple to double. There is no more “us and it”. I don’t ever reach the point of understanding or seeing an overview. So I start letting the things inhabiting me. Or I pair up with one of my neighbor scientists and we are in a medium of things.
It’s tempting to start building mathematics from scratch. Where has a geometry of strings and sticks lead us to? Drawing circles and squares, and unsuccessfully trying to square the circles. I consider it a joke of mathematical history, that Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love and beauty is said to be born from foam. All our search for beauty in truth, has finally stumbled on that foam. What if mathematicians had started by building a foam-refinery?
But I think starting from zero again, would be a mistake too. Better begin at two.
XML Feeds