Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts by David Shields, Matthew Vollmer
Authors: David Shields, Matthew Vollmer
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nervous and strange confidence, his razor-nicked chin, his tie too short by an inch, an uncombed tuft of hair. She is charmed.
(h) B humors A.
(i) B says, Well, doesn’t it depend on how windy it is?
(j) Ignore the wind, says A.
(k) But how can I ignore the wind?
(l) Ignore the wind, says A.
(m) Are you saying there is no wind?
(n) A says, The wind is negligible. He says this with a certain pleasure. The other passengers roll their eyes.
(o) A says, It does not matter for the purposes of the problem. Besides, A says, it makes the math too hard.
(p) A looks at B’s dumb, expectant, beautiful face. He feels pity for her meager understanding of physics. How can he explain to her what must be ignored: wind, elephants, cookies, air resistance. And: the morning dew, almost everything in newspapers, almost everything owing to random heat dissipation, the taste of papaya. And: the mass of the projectile, the shape of the projectile, what other people think, statistical noise, the capital of Luxembourg.
(q) A wonders, Can I be with a woman who, however lovely, does not understand how to hold all else constant? How to isolate a variable?
A thinks:
i. she will see it my way;
ii. she will change for me;
iii. I will educate her.
B thinks:
iv. he is lonely;
v. I can make him less so;
vi. I will change for him.
4. A spent seven years (2,557 days, 4,191 cups of coffee) in the town of (6,3).
He was writing his thesis (79 pages, 81 separate equations). A’s thesis is on nonlinear dynamic equations.
(a) In it, he discovered a tiny truth.
(b) When he had written the last step in his proof, A smiled.
(c) A’s tiny truth is about a tiny part of a tiny sliver of a tiny subset of all possible outcomes of the world.
(d) When A brought it to his adviser and mentor, the esteemed P, P smiled. A’s heart leapt.
(e) P said: What it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in rigor.
(f) P also said: What a wonderful minor result.
5. A and B are sliding down a frictionless inclined plane. They are accelerating toward the inevitable. Domesticity. Some marriages are driven by love, some by gravity.
6. THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM
Things continue to get more complicated for A, now traveling in an elliptical path around B. B remains fixed, giving birth to their first child. Doctors and nurses orbit B periodically.
(a) Given the mass of A (now 80kg) and the mass of B (now 55kg), calculate the gravitational force between A and B using Newton’s universal gravitational formula: Fg= G(mA)(mB)/r2, where R is the gravitational constant.
(b) Imagine the situation from the stationary perspective of B. As bodies whirl around you, you focus on the pain, the quiet place, the baby. Look at A, who so lovingly paces around you, worried about your health. You wonder: What is A thinking?
(c) Now imagine the situation from A’s perspective. You wonder: What if the child turns out like its mother? What if the child does not understand theory? You’ve spent so many nights lying awake with B, trying to teach her how to see the world, its governing principles, the functions lying under it all. Hours spent with B as she cries, frustrated, uncomprehending.
(d) This is what is well-known in the field of celestial dynamics as the three-body problem.
(e) Put simply, this is the problem of computing the mutual gravitational interaction of three separate and different masses.
(f) Astronomers since the time of Kepler have known that this problem is surprisingly difficult to solve.
(g) With two bodies, the problem is trivial. With two bodies, we can simplify the universe, empty it of everything but, say, the moon and the earth, an A and a B, the sun and a speck of dust. The equations are solved analytically.
(h) Unfortunately, when we add a third body to our equations of motion, the equations become intractable.
(h) B humors A.
(i) B says, Well, doesn’t it depend on how windy it is?
(j) Ignore the wind, says A.
(k) But how can I ignore the wind?
(l) Ignore the wind, says A.
(m) Are you saying there is no wind?
(n) A says, The wind is negligible. He says this with a certain pleasure. The other passengers roll their eyes.
(o) A says, It does not matter for the purposes of the problem. Besides, A says, it makes the math too hard.
(p) A looks at B’s dumb, expectant, beautiful face. He feels pity for her meager understanding of physics. How can he explain to her what must be ignored: wind, elephants, cookies, air resistance. And: the morning dew, almost everything in newspapers, almost everything owing to random heat dissipation, the taste of papaya. And: the mass of the projectile, the shape of the projectile, what other people think, statistical noise, the capital of Luxembourg.
(q) A wonders, Can I be with a woman who, however lovely, does not understand how to hold all else constant? How to isolate a variable?
A thinks:
i. she will see it my way;
ii. she will change for me;
iii. I will educate her.
B thinks:
iv. he is lonely;
v. I can make him less so;
vi. I will change for him.
4. A spent seven years (2,557 days, 4,191 cups of coffee) in the town of (6,3).
He was writing his thesis (79 pages, 81 separate equations). A’s thesis is on nonlinear dynamic equations.
(a) In it, he discovered a tiny truth.
(b) When he had written the last step in his proof, A smiled.
(c) A’s tiny truth is about a tiny part of a tiny sliver of a tiny subset of all possible outcomes of the world.
(d) When A brought it to his adviser and mentor, the esteemed P, P smiled. A’s heart leapt.
(e) P said: What it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in rigor.
(f) P also said: What a wonderful minor result.
5. A and B are sliding down a frictionless inclined plane. They are accelerating toward the inevitable. Domesticity. Some marriages are driven by love, some by gravity.
6. THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM
Things continue to get more complicated for A, now traveling in an elliptical path around B. B remains fixed, giving birth to their first child. Doctors and nurses orbit B periodically.
(a) Given the mass of A (now 80kg) and the mass of B (now 55kg), calculate the gravitational force between A and B using Newton’s universal gravitational formula: Fg= G(mA)(mB)/r2, where R is the gravitational constant.
(b) Imagine the situation from the stationary perspective of B. As bodies whirl around you, you focus on the pain, the quiet place, the baby. Look at A, who so lovingly paces around you, worried about your health. You wonder: What is A thinking?
(c) Now imagine the situation from A’s perspective. You wonder: What if the child turns out like its mother? What if the child does not understand theory? You’ve spent so many nights lying awake with B, trying to teach her how to see the world, its governing principles, the functions lying under it all. Hours spent with B as she cries, frustrated, uncomprehending.
(d) This is what is well-known in the field of celestial dynamics as the three-body problem.
(e) Put simply, this is the problem of computing the mutual gravitational interaction of three separate and different masses.
(f) Astronomers since the time of Kepler have known that this problem is surprisingly difficult to solve.
(g) With two bodies, the problem is trivial. With two bodies, we can simplify the universe, empty it of everything but, say, the moon and the earth, an A and a B, the sun and a speck of dust. The equations are solved analytically.
(h) Unfortunately, when we add a third body to our equations of motion, the equations become intractable.
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