From Ansatz to Zenith
Binary Bylines By Night & Analog Ass-Lag All Day
Science & Nature with Dr. Adrianna Alphonso
You doomed, illiterate fools! I can’t believe the amount of wretched and unwarranted hogwash you spewed at me for my last article. The grizzly bears are a goddamn scientific allegory! A stand-in for the ceaseless conflict Igor and I must wage to protect my Backyard Mini-Accelerator (BYMPA) against the NIMBY bastards that I won’t dignify by name. You don’t believe that I, a goddamn doctor of scientific journalism with all the structural fortitude of a beached jellyfish, would try fighting grizzlies to the death?!
Yegads. Now that I dropkicked that bull guff to the curb, I suppose I should shovel some scientific slop into the content trough for all of you famished info gluttons and turbonerds. Unfortunately, the status of my Casimir effect experiment and, hopefully, eventually, ideally, the local allocation of zero-point energy got stuck in the mud… even though that’s why those scaly C Suite dust-lickers are paying me.
So, as Igor plows the gear out of the muck, I’m taking an abrupt tack on today’s important scientific journalism news. The creeptilian suits locking me in this godforsaken urban aquarium, bombarding me with its absurd political squabbles and cash grabs, actually led me to freakin Eurekaean realization the other day while scoping the nuclear reactor cooling towers.
So buckle up, chomp a gummy, open your mind, hold my hand, and hang on as best you can cuz we’re taking an offroad mental joyride.
Nature has no shortage of encoded patterns that mirror, scale, and overlap, from Fibonacci sunflower sequences to broccoli fractals sets to the mysterious ubiquity of ~137. Or take Buckminster Fuller’s quote that “love is metaphysical gravity,” a fundamental binding force erasing any distance between bodies until they become one (now that’s a hornball Hallmark movie I might watch… moving along…).
I posit that political power generation also scales like actual energy generation.
First, let’s drop an ansatz and assume a fucking priori and counterfuckingintuitively of a hypothetical “political eigenstate”... a country, city, or even a goddamn HOA that exists in a “bound state of nature” as an undivided whole, a single, if unstable, body… one unified public mass. As an extremely esteemed doctor of scientific journalism, I can’t stop wondering: Where’s the goddamn political energy originating for this political power? And how the hell do you extract it?
I knew I wouldn’t find explicit answers from the likes of Bernoulli, Fermi, Susskind, or Randall, and I needed to trudge through the most degrading of writing: fiction and political speeches.
Teddy Roosevelt caught my interest with this quote: “[T]he main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.”
The short story “Lyndon” by David Foster Wallace picks up on this thread when the fictional Lady Bird Johnson says: “Political Science is the study of power. Power is the accumulation of energy. Energy is the end result of movement. Movement is the basic force of opposition in politics. Control of movement is equivalent to the control of power.”
They’re a half-ass start… but lack scientific rigor.
Breaking it down to brass-tacks principles, nature’s best methods to generate energy involve splitting atomic nuclei (Chernobyl or Oppenheimer) or smashing atoms together (the fricking sun).
Well, lo and fricking behold: electoral democratic power arises from the forceful oppositional movements that split the political mass. A “mass-splitting” election in a well-functioning Eigenstate creates an elastic scattering with the system conserving the public’s kinetic political energy and “channeling” it to the winner as actual political power. In a non-functioning political apparatus, the mass splitting can easily lead to inelastic scattering, where energy is not conserved within the system, spreading and diluting actual political power until the system falls apart.
On the flip side, failing democracies and authoritarian states typically produce belligerent societies with factions constantly “smashing” against each other… until, ultimately, the “last great man standing” emerges victorious, powered by the conservation of energy released from the faction-smashing.
We have a rise in political atomsplitters and atomsmashers — those who know how to spark, conserve, and extract political power more efficiently than ever. I’ve heard the term turbopolitics tossed around, and I think we’re both dancing around the same idea.
Sometimes, though, a quantum fluctuation randomly injects itself into the equation. Much like how two opposing slates set against each other can give rise to zero-point energy or the unexpected power grabber. Or, like the Orator’s Vol 6, Issue 1 newspaper, which quantum fluctuated the everloving shit out of this City’s power base.
I can’t speak to the dipshittery surrounding the last issue, but I will speak to the gigafuckup of Embers giving a copy of Postulations to that dweeby Zweibel instead of me. And I’m absolutely losing it over Zweibel losing it. The whole series of events blows away the biggest fuckups in human history. It’s like my Nana Bozo teaming up with Don Juan Bobo to dress up the family pig in its finest Sunday church clothes and then hobble down to the market square only to get hog-swindled out of a house.
Big mistake not letting me read Postulations. Worst of all, now we have to deal with these unleashed Jubileeists puking out jalopy philosophy and trumping up junker bunco from a clearly counterfeit Quarterquirefolio. As experts of empirical natural phenomena… with burgeoning political insights… we can all easily sniff out when an explanation ain’t even fricking wrong.
They’re worse than the chucklefucks clucking out conspiracy nonsense online. Saw one claiming that the unquantifiably important Wide Open Neutrino Kiloparsec Apparatus (WONKA) opens an interdimensional portal to Oompa-Loompa Land that the global elite use for pleasure trips and indulging in unsavory primal tendencies and that the books and movies are all based on these real-world events. I mean, c’mon. I realize the majority of you are bedolted beyond your own comprehension, but this is some 10th-percentile wacko quackery. I’ve been to the site. Saw WONKA in action with my own eyes. Reviewed the data. But my claims will only further cement the WONKA conspiracy in the eyes of those lunatics because clearly, I’m a plant and a phony.
At least those chucklefucks are just clucking around online. They can all go ride a grass mud horse. But these Jubileeists are organized. And now they dictate municipal monetary policy and snatched the reins on that awful grass mud horse of power. With other factions springing up faster than dollar stores, all this political atomsmashing will not end well for anybody.
Surely, you’re joking, Doc Fonzo! Do I look like some bongo-banging baboon with bad breath?! If I were joking, I would’ve said something more like: “The regge behavior of hadrons in Bootstrap Veneziano Theory…" is a perfectly cromulent phrase in physics that you can easily misread as: "the reggae behavior of hardons in Bootsy's Pinocchio Theory…"
After writing something like that I need to disappear for three months. Plus, I have to leave to catch a meeting with my dealer. You wouldn’t believe how fast a dilution fridge burns through liquid nitrogen and liquid helium.
Fac cum zelo - Doc Fonzo
