12
THE MOVIE Miss Rheingold showed us was called Quanto the Minimum. It was developed, or at least sponsored, by the telephone company, and it featured a tiny cartoon character, Quanto the Minimum himself, who explored the constitution of matter as it was then understood. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to scare up a copy of this film to review for this book, so I will have to rely on memory to summarize it for you.
As I recall, Quanto was an impish sort, sarcastic and even a bit nasty. He seemed always to be telling us, the captive audience, how stupid or ignorant we were. This abuse started right off the bat, when Quanto stood with his little hands on his cartoon hips and said right at us, “Hey, kids, I’ll bet you think you’re really something, don’t you? Ya-ha-ha! Well, get this—you’re really mostly nothing! Just wait till I get through here. You’ll find out that you’re mostly empty space. Ya-ha-ha! Come on! Come on along with me! I’ll take you on a remarkable voyage of discovery—from the farthest reaches of the universe to the tiniest heart of the tiniest atom—from the vastness of your ignorance to the tiniest little twinkling photon of enlightenment, which is really about all I can realistically expect to pass on to you with the budget they’ve given me to work with. So hang on! You’re in for some surprises. You’re about to find out that most of everything is nothing.”
Quanto did take us on a remarkable voyage, as he promised, but he was a difficult guide to follow because his style, like Miss Rheingold’s, was discontinuity. He jumped from one topic to another with no more transition than saying, “Wow! That was really something. Aren’t you excited? I am. I’m really excited!” Then, foom, off he’d go. He seemed to whiz right off the screen and rocket through a radioactive blue miasma for a couple of seconds, eventually reappearing in another location, calmer, a little worn out, breathing heavily, his snazzy red outfit torn here and there, to tackle the next topic. “Whew!” he might say. “That was quite a ride. Where are we? Ah! Alamogordo. Wait till you see this.”
We saw many things, a fascinating jumble: an atomic bomb blast flipping battleships like toys in a tub, solar flares lashing out like the whip my favorite movie cowboy carried, a Tinkertoy lattice that represented the molecular structure of some crystal or other and made chemistry look like lots of fun, and more. We learned a word that all of us went around using whenever we got half a chance since it was such a pleasure to say. It began with a funny buzzing, hissing, and shushing, generated a lot of saliva along the way, and its ultimate syllable made my mouth a cavernous space in which a howl resounded. This wonderful word was Zwischenraum, the word Quanto used for the empty space that is most of everything, the nothing that permeates and separates it all. I now had quite an incantation: Zwischenraum, shandy, ontology, epistemology, bills of lading, splines.
Among all the marvels in Quanto the Minimum, however, the universal favorite was a demonstration of the mousetrap model of a fission reaction. In this demonstration, a Ping-Pong table was covered with mousetraps, densely packed, but set at angles to one another, so that the model wouldn’t seem to be regularizing matter too artificially. All of the mousetraps were cocked and ready to spring, and resting on the wire bail of each was a Ping-Pong ball. An announcer appeared at the side of the Ping-Pong table. Quanto leaped onto the screen, said, “Keep your eye on this guy,” and leaped off, laughing.
The announcer waved his hand toward the Ping-Pong table, taking in its entire magnificent array of cocked traps and ready balls, and said in defiance of all logic, “This is Uranium 235.”
Then he went on to explain some things he seemed no clearer about than we were. He seemed to keep losing the distinction between the Ping-Pong ball he was holding as the Ping-Pong ball it actually was and the neutron it was meant to represent. Whenever he said that a neutron was used to bombard the Uranium 235 he made a dart-throwing motion with his hand, suggesting that the bombarding process was a heck of a lot like dart throwing, or at least that was the impression it left on most of us. When he had finished his taxing explanation, he said, “And this is the result,” and with coy insouciance tossed the ball into the array of traps.
Wow.
What resulted may or may not have been a good demonstration of what occurs during nuclear fission, but I am certain that I will never see a more vivid demonstration of an idea that my parents had tried to hammer into me back when I was just a kid, before I took up junk browsing as a pastime, whenever I became bored on rainy vacation days and pleaded with them to mitigate my boredom with a new model airplane kit or a dozen comic books. What they said—and this Ping-Pong ball experiment so spectacularly proved—was, “You don’t need model kits and comics to have fun. You can have a lot of fun with the things you find around the house if you just use a little imagination.” Definitely so, provided you could find a few dozen mousetraps and Ping-Pong balls.
[to be continued]
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