WET SCIENCE

[With superficial and superfluous explanations]

Walter A. Aue, April/May 2002

The blue of the bluejay

is not a true color.

The truth is layer and light.

      [Sorry for adding to the confusion. Turns out that almost all animal and plant colors are "true" colors: you can extract them, analyze their chemical structure, and put them into your toothpaste or wedding cake.

The color of the bluejay, however, is not pigment but light. Preciser, it is the interaction of light waves - called "interference" by the tweedies - weaving its ways through thin layers of jay feathers.

      The moral? Extracting the bluejay destroys the blue: Truth and illusion are often intertwined, multilayered, and will not survive simplistic extraction. So there...]

Beyond, beyond...

Look through gold leaf

to see the blue...

[Pure gold leaf can be hammered so thin that light will shine through it. That light is dark blue. As scientists are wont to say, gold is the reflection, blue the transmission color.

Let them say it: It does not detract from the beauty of the process. Just remind them: Silence is golden. And if they insist on further technobabble, tell them to go and take a haiku. Or tell them to go and take their profession past the gold and to the sky, where it rightly belongs...]

Bound by chains of sugar

Water sits in jail:

Man is but a mobile tree

[This haiku has nothing to recommend it except sweet science. Science?

Well, trees are mostly cellulose. And cellulose consists of long winding chains of sugar (glucose). The cellulose capillaries of trees hold water very strongly, they literally suck it up. In fact, they'd better, or water couldn't reach the top of high trees.

Note, however, that those "chains of sugar" that hold the haiku together are internal to trees but external to humans. Some weak link in that chain... Still: a metaphor without weak link would become truth itself and cease being a metaphor, wouldn't it?]