Were he alive today, Myles na gCopaleen would undoubtedly have an opinion about recent events in Cern, where sub-atomic particles appear to have exceeded the speed of light. It was one of his many boasts that he not only understood the Theory of Relativity (now apparently in some doubt) but that he was on personal terms with Einstein and most of the other great scientific minds of his era.
Here Myles picks up on British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s ideas about the number of particles in the universe and riffs upon the theme for his own amusement and that of the very small group of people who could have any possible idea what he’s talking about.
FRANK McNALLY
A NOTE in my diary says: “Ten to the power of seventy-nine. Write on this joke”.
Very well. Why not? I wish I had the money to finance real scientific research. You remember the worry we had back in the thirties (this century, I think – or was it?) about the electron, how to determine its mass. Eddington had an amusing angle on the thing. But first let us recall the previous situation where you had the crude journeyman’s approach of calculating it as 10 (to the power of -27) of a gramme.
Most of us looked on that as a sort of music-hall joke – mass audience reaction makes you snigger but you are not really amused, you are sorry for having forsaken for the evening your monogram on Cicero's Pro Malony.Because it really boiled down to this – that if some smartie broke into the place, at Sèvres and stole the so-called "standard kilogramme", your "10 (to the power of -27)" immediately became more obviously arbitrary, unfunny gaff, essentially it was.
Very well. The “scientist”, in sum, had been deluding himself that the Heath Robinson experiments which led to that “discovery” could be solemnly called observational determination, whereas it is just make-believe and whimsy, all essentially feminine. The “problem” – as one then thought of it – was to relate the mass of the electron to . . . to something real (like, for instance, sleep). The point, of course, about Eddington’s handling of the experiment was his realisation that it could only give information about a double wave system which “belonged” as much to the electron as to the material comparison standard necessarily used. Very well.
To reach a result it had been necessary to investigate the circumstances where the double wave can be replaced with single waves (really, this sounds like barber-shop talk!) – or in other words, to examine the process where you are slipping from macroscopic to miscroscopic; call them “magnitudes” by all means, terminology is unimportant.
Eddington, as you know, tied this up with his engaging patent “comparison aether,” a retroambulant nonentity moping about introspectively way below the xx axis, whose mass can be calculated, needless to say, from a formula expressed largely in terms of the fundamental constants of macroscopical physics – the time- space radius, velocity of “light” . . . and all the particles in the universe.
Now when this mass is m and the electric particle-proton or electron, it doesn’t matter a damn which – is, as usual, m, you have this incredible quadratic:
10 m - 136 mm + m, = 0
What is quite curious is that this new equation and formula for m yield (for this velocity) a maximum value of 780 kilom. per sec. per megaparsec . . . which, of course, accords with the “ value” found by observation! (!!!!!)
But here is what I am really getting at – the uniquely prolonged sneer that Eddington embodied in the paper he read to us at the Royal Society in the fateful autumn of ’33.
“In the maze of connection of physical constants,” he said , “there remains just one pure number” (Ho-ho-ho , I cannot help interjecting) “which is known only by observation and has no theoretical explanation. It is a very large number, about 10 (to the power of 79), and the present theory indicates that it is the number, of particles in the ‘universe’.
“It may seem to you odd” (not at all, not at all, one murmurs) “that this number should come into the various constants such as the constants of gravitation. You may say, how on earth can the number of particles in remote parts of the universe affect the Cavendish experiment on the attraction of metal spheres in a laboratory?
“I do not think they affect it at all, but the Cavendish and other experiments having Riven the result they did, we can deduce that space will go on and on, curving according to the mass contained in it until only a small opening remains and that the 10 (to the power of 79) particle will be the last particle to be admitted through the last small opening and will shut the door after it.”
Bye-bye, 10 (to the power of 79). Mind that step!
To celebrate the work of Myles na gCopaleen, The Irish Times will print one of his Cruiskeen Lawn columns each day during October