A poll

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Poll #1890387]

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Barry Sonnenfeld.

Or Brad Bird. CGI would be better, and them books was funny.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought of Bird, too.

Re-read some of the Mr Tomkins stories last year - not as much fun as I remembered.

And, as the introduction to the new edition points out, someone riding a bicycle near the speed of light would not look flattened as they went past, but rotated, as my relativity lecturer pointed out to me forty years ago.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Nigel Calder actually explained that in detail in Einstein's Universe, and ever since then it's been a pet peeve of mine in other relativity popularizations. But the distinction between what you'd deduce about size in a given reference frame and what you'd see is difficult to make clear.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm relieved to hear that, as I could never make myself understand why the bicyclist was supposed to look flattened however many times I read the explanation.

(I don't chalk this up to superior understanding; I know it's really the same gut ``that isn't instinctive'' reaction most people have at some point or other of relativity theory. But it is one I couldn't get reasoned through.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's quite counterintuitive. Length, like elapsed time, is relative to one's inertial frame, and the bicyclist really is flattened in the other frame. But he doesn't look flattened, because light-speed delays complicate the optics in elaborate ways.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

As I recall it, if relativity didn't apply, an object would appear lengthened if it went past and speeds approaching that of light, because light from the tail of the object takes longer to get to the observer than light from the head of the object.

Another good one I recall involves a pole vaulter running through a barn with doors at both ends. His pole is slightly longer than the barn. The farmer observes that at speed, the pole is now shorter than the barn and he can press a switch that closes both doors momentarily and for that moment the whole of the pole is inside the barn.

To the pole vaulter, the barn now appears shorter than his pole, so if both doors close simultaneously, part of the pole is going to be trapped. But what relativity says is that to him, the doors do not close simultaneously, the door in front of him closing and opening before the door behind him.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

Tompkins Who?

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

There was not a button for this, alas.

George Gamow wrote a wonderful series of short stories about Mr. Tompkins, an Everyman who kept finding himself in (dream-?) situations where one or another of the laws of physics was magnified in such a way as to make its effects apparent/visible on the scales ordinary humans interact on. Quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. They were meant to be educational stories to help ease folks into thinking about various parts of physics in non-painful ways, I think.

--Dave

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Now, who should make the movies for "The Space Child's Mother Goose" and "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown"?

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

For the latter, it's a pity Russ Meyer is no longer with us.

[zotz]

Sadly, Nagisa Oshima has just died.

[xeger.livejournal.com]

Cats.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

That is, of course, always a correct answer.

However, sometimes the question is wrong.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Tarantino does movies about movies, so he's out.

The Wachowskis would make a decent first one, except where the laws of thermodynamics don't quite work right, the second has a gratuitous rave scene amongst atoms, and the third has relativity making no goddamn sense.

Michael Bay's film about antimatter meeting matter and the resulting effects would be awesome! Because Michael Bay demands everything be awesome!

Frank Miller's would, needless to say, have Maud as whoring whorish whore cavorting at the casino while the door was guarded by the Goddamn Maxwell's Bat-demon.

James Cameron would spend years getting everything technically perfect...and then we'd have to listen to years of documentaries and TV specials with James Cameron telling us all, repeatedly, the great lengths he went to to get everything right.

Shyamalan's movie would reveal at the end that the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction wasn't real...alien supernatural plants were actually causing the perception of changing lengths due to hallucinogenic spores they were releasing, only that turns out to be a lie told to Maud by her father so she wouldn't go out into the forest where the plants supposedly lived because she was actually dead.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Slight correction: Frank Miller would have Maud as a whoring, whorish, nun whore, cavorting etc etc etc.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Not Mr. Shyamalan: his career was dead all along.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Hayao Miyazaki.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

+1

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Oo, I missed that one!

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

That was definitely one for ticky boxes.
Surprised that any of your regular readers don't recognise Gamow's name.
Also, James Cameron. Using revolutionary new technology which records the scenes in 11 dimensions, and *none* of them are folded up too small to see.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

But do they know who Alpher and Bethe were?

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Alpher (who did most of the work on that paper) was not happy at all that Gamow added Bethe's name to it just for a joke.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I think it became well enough known that Bethe was added only for the joke (surely Bethe himself spread that news.) And like they say, any publicity is good, so the joke has probably made that paper even more widely known than it otherwise would have been.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I'm sympathetic to a grad student feeling ill-used when the credit for his work appears to be in jeopardy. It's all fine that his adviser Gamow was making a joke, but that paper was critical to Alpher's future career, so I understand him being sensitive about it.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

I recognized Gamow's name, but had never heard of the Mr. Tompkins books. That is my poll complaint.

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

I was inspired by the Tompkins books when my dad passed them on to me when I was just about old enough to appreciate them. It was a long time before I put the author's name together with the physicist who'd pulled the terrible author list gag.

Wonder how that would go these days in one of the journals that ask for each author's contribution to list. "Professor Bethe contributed his surname and an opportunity for a cheap gag which will be more popularly remembered than the importance of the actual paper."

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I have a vague recognition of the name, but I don't think I've read any of Gamow's work; hence my vote.

-- Steve certainly hasn't read the work in question.

[daev.livejournal.com]

Shane Carruth. The movies would make no sense, but you'd feel like they were completely accurate if only you were smart enough to put it all together.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Again the regrettable absence of cats. And ticky-boxes.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Vi Hart.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

No option to write in Werner Herzog. Also, where the hell are the cats? I mean I wouldn't chose them, but apparently, a large portion of your audience demand them on a regular basis...

[carbonel]

My first thought was the Coen Brothers, though I'm not enough of a movie buff to be really sure that's appropriate.

I had to read the Mr. Tompkins stories for an early college physics class, but I had read One, Two, Three...Infinity on my own back in high school.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I know perfectly well who George Gamow is, but no idea who Mr. Tompkins is.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Frank Miller is an inspired choice. The Mr. Tompkins books would do well with that mix of live action, rotoscoping, and plain animation. Visually, the seemingly unrealistic action that's actually a reflection of a deeper, sensorially inaccessible reality would work well in that style. The use of primary colors for QCD unfortunately post-dates Gamow.