Topical Guide 636
Mark Dorset
Subatomic Phenomena
Wishful Thinking
Revisionist History, Personal History division
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 33:
I was going to creep back to bed, leave my father sitting there in silence, tiny in his comfortable chair, his range circumscribed by the limits of his own mind, his thinking hobbled by his fears, his views nothing but a hodgepodge of suppositions and superstitions, but then, before I’d even stood fully, something happened.
Who can say exactly what it was? Perhaps a cosmic ray, zipping along through space, passed at that moment through the atmosphere, through the roof of our house, through my bedroom upstairs, through the floor and ceiling, through my father’s skull, and into his brain, where it knocked out of its orbit a single electron in a single atom of his hippocampus, the seat of memory, conviction, and superstition, causing a tiny imbalance of electrical potential between two neurons, just enough to make those neurons fire across their synapse, exciting other neurons, which fired, exciting others, which fired, and so on, until neurons were firing all over the place, like mousetraps on a Ping-Pong table, and all my father’s wrongheaded ideas were flushed from his hippocampus and dissipated into nowhere, into the Zwischenraum, transforming him in an eyeblink from an unthinking bigot to a true homo sapiens, […]
Well, if you ask me, there’s more wishful thinking than physics in that passage, but I will remind you that the following appears among the epigraphs to this book:
Electrons exist both on their own, as free particles, and as constituents of atoms, and they can change from one role to the other and back. An electron forming part of a carbon atom in the skin of your wrist could be knocked out of position by a passing cosmic ray and become part of the tiny electric current in your digital wristwatch, and then in turn become part of an oxygen atom in the air you breathe as you raise your arm to look at the time.
Frank Close, Michael Martin, and Christine Sutton, The Particle Explosion
See also:
History: Nature of, Alternative Versions of, Distortions of, Personal Version of TG 35
Wishful Thinking TG 43; TG 91; TG 547; TG 622
The Topical Guide and I have been absent from the past six episodes. I’ve been sick. Here’s something to make up for the absences, a treat: Maki Namekawa playing Philip Glass’s Piano Études 9 and 20 in videos by Andreas H. Bitesnich.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.