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Science, Bread, and Circuses
Folkloristic Essays on Science for the Masses
By Gregory Schrempp University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2014 the University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-970-8
CHAPTER 1
Formulas of Conversion
A Proverbial Approach to Astronomic Magnitudes
Finally, there it is. Despite its monumental proportions, you approach it from above as the blast-furnace heat calls to mind Dante's descent through the rings of Hell. It claimed ninety-six human lives. With the Great Depression and lean war years in recent memory, my parents' low-budget honeymoon trip was a sort of early post — New Deal pilgrimage to see and, as attested by some fading photos, to stand on this symbol of hope. They purchased a Navajo blanket nearby. I do not recall the Navajo blanket ever wrapped around me, but I do recall it being draped each night, for the first few months anyway, over our first television set — a monstrous Packard Bell monitor about the size of a piano — when that mysterious new technology first appeared in our corner of the world. There is something poetic here: the latest magic object of rapidly advancing technology shrouded in a gift of ancient technology, namely, the loom.
I seized an opportunity to see Hoover Dam for myself a few summers ago, this particular infernal descent driven by nostalgia but also by serious scholarly motives. For I saw an opportunity to test a hypothesis that had been kicking around in the back of my head for years but which I had yet to write down. The hypothesis is that large-scale, publicly funded engineering projects inevitability give rise to proverbial sayings, or something like proverbial sayings, of this form:
X = Y
or X ≥ Y
where X is an abstract and/or unfamiliar quantity or measure and Y is a familiar or concrete quantity or measure (very appropriate term in this case, "concrete").
Within this formula one encounters recurrent patterns, especially the phrase "that's enough to" and, in the case of linear dimensions, the phrase "if laid end-to-end"; "football fields" is a noticeably recurrent unit of measure.
Immediately, I found confirmation of my hypothesis in the official Hoover Dam Souvenir Guide (2003), on the back page in a section titled "Tell 'em back home," which, given that home for academics means working on books, is what I am doing now. According to the brochure, I am supposed to convey eight factoids. Five of these, indeed the first five of the eight, are formulas of conversion of the type I just described; within these five we have three "that's enough tos" and one "end-to-end." Such formulas also arise in popular science writing, where they can be fairly complex (I present an example later), but those we encounter in public construction projects are rather vaudevillian — intellectual corndogs, if you will. Here they are:
Hoover Dam contains "enough concrete ... to build a four-foot-wide sidewalk around the Earth at the Equator" ("at the Equator" seems also to be an invariant part of this rather standard formula).
"During peak electricity periods, enough water runs through the generators to fill 14 average-sized swimming pools ... in 3 seconds."
Its reservoir "contains enough water to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania with 1 ft. of water."
At its base, it is "as thick ... as two football fields measured end-to-end."
The remaining point, actually number one in the brochure, intentionally or not reflects the eastern- vs. western-US appropriations battles that surrounded the construction of this dam: even though situated below ground level, Hoover Dam nevertheless is "171 feet taller than the Washington Monument." I briefly note that points six and seven of the Hoover Dam brochure are also of direct folkloric interest, though of a different kind. Point six, which I alluded to in my opening remarks, states: "96 men were killed in industrial accidents at the dam. None were buried in the concrete."
The last bit is almost certainly a reference to another inevitable spinoff, for legends of workers buried in the cement show up at virtually every monumental construction site. The legend may be a modern variant on the ancient motif Stith Thompson (1955 — 58) labeled "Foundation Sacrifice" (S261), itself perhaps a manifestation of a primordial anthropocentrism, an insistence that anything in the cosmos ultimately derives its power to hold together from us. These deaths mark the limit of where formulas of conversion can be applied, perhaps again out of anthropocentric conceit; for to have followed the ninety-six deaths with "that's enough men, laid end-to-end, to ..." would certainly have been perceived as a morally callous application of a mathematical calculus.
The seventh point in the brochure is the inevitable bit of pop totemism that similarly accompanies monumental construction, an obligatory juxtaposing of the gargantuan and the cute: we are informed about a dog mascot of the construction workers, buried near the entrance to the visitor center. Perhaps the dog is a substitute foundation sacrifice. If so, a superstitious person might wonder whether this substitution explains the fact that some of the great Works Progress Administration (WPA) dams in recent years have begun to leak.
Such formulas of conversion might occur in any realm in which our ordinary, everyday experience of quantitative measures fails. It is not that we are unable to intellectually register a measure of a quantity but that we are unable to conjure a feeling of that quantity. In the case of human engineering, this means the more extreme regions of the monumental and the miniature; in science, astronomical and microscopic scales, such as the micro-chip and nano-world. In the organic realm, such formulas often appear as imagined unraveling of organic structures that are fractal in design or, in their natural state, all wadded up: DNA, intestines, capillaries, that sort of thing.
The main reason for linking such formulas to scholarship on proverbs is found in the nature of traditional proverbs. Specifically, underneath the idea of conversion lies an assertion of some sort of equivalence. Note how many well-known proverbs are assertions of equivalence, often with connotations of convertibility or "exchange value":
Example 1: An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure
1 oz. P = 16 oz. C
In American society we recognize two main systems of measures: everyday (quarts, pounds, miles) and metric. The first indexes, and indeed many of its units originated from, practical household quantities; metric measures, by contrast, index the scientific. Rule-of-thumb, everyday prevention and cure would sound stilted were we to convert it to metrics (i.e., grams of prevention and cure), implying a quantitative precision that isn't there.
Example 2A: A Bird in the Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush
Bhand = 2 Bbush
Example 2B: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
Sit = 9~it
2A and 2B offer the same formula — a formula that relegates any intrinsic value of things to control of them — directed respectively to hunting and clothes-making, two complementary domains of archaic economies. It is a commonplace that many proverbs function to orient us to the world. Even when obscure and multiply interpretable, they set us up for decision making, sometimes, as in these cases, within an economics of efficiency.
Example 3: A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
P = 103 W
Wolfgang Mieder (2004a) did a fascinating presentation on this formula at the American Folklore Society annual meeting, detailing the many variations it has undergone, particularly in popular cultural realms and especially as an advertising jingle. In processes of creation and dissemination, the formulas of conversion I focus on are like this advertising formula; they are recently minted marketing content in traditional form, aka "fakelore" in Richard Dorson's famous formula (which he later softened).
One other way formulas of conversion differ from the traditional proverb is that they do not proffer directly useful, practical advice. But consider this: along with those traditional proverbs that assert equivalence and convertibility, there is another set of rather metaphysically inclined traditional proverbs that articulate limits of convertibility:
Example 4: You Can't Make a Silk Purse from a Sow's Ear
SE ≠ SP
Example 5: You Can't Squeeze Blood from a Turnip
T ≠ B
Example 6: Don't Make a Mountain out of a Molehill
Mol ≠ Mt
The last one especially has to do with maintaining a workable sense of perspective. Such formulas do offer advice of a more abstract kind, and that is what the formulas of conversion I am discussing try to do: give us a sense of perspective by translating quantities we cannot envision to ones we can, thus keeping us on scale.
Time and space are particularly common but by no means the only possible foci for formulas of conversion. Some invoke a microcosmic/macrocosmic relation, such as that between a family-domestic economy and the national economy. Everyone has heard the sentiment regarding the size of the national economy: "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money." In the opposite direction, I recently heard an analyst proclaim (and I hope that either I misheard or that he was math-challenged) that every family's share of the national debt is now $450,000. The highly abstract business of probability and its practical dimension of risk management are also common, and a standard baseline is the probability of being killed in an airplane crash (though being struck by lightning is also common). For example, some popular scientific literature I recently received proclaims:
The chance of being killed by an asteroid is about one in 5,000, greater than that of being killed in a plane crash.
It goes on to explain that
this is because an asteroid strike could kill millions, whereas in a plane crash, the numbers are small. No one has been hit in 1,000 years.
As if to alarm, to get you to purchase more factoids, it offers another formula:
More people work in a single McDonald's restaurant than are employed worldwide to monitor asteroids.
Another interesting comparison would be the likelihood of death from asteroids and death from fast food.
Folkloristic studies of the proverb have centered on form, variation, and function — all of which are relevant to these formulas of conversion. But other realms of scholarly inquiry are also relevant to the analysis of such formulas. The first is a possible historical dimension. These examples are secular, but historical precedents are found in the religious sphere, if only because religion is a locus for oversize issues: creation, the size of the cosmos, the end of time. I will mention one example I heard in the context of Catholic grade-school religion class and which I have since encountered in writings of early Christian writers, suggesting that it is at least two millennia old. The scenario is one designed to dramatize the concept of eternity; common to the variants is a yearly cyclic repetition of some minute but incremental act. The variant I heard is that the nun who sweeps the church is instructed to leave one more grain of dust unswept each year until the church is full of dust — and even then, it was said, the big E is just beginning.
E > CF x DY
where CF is a church-full and DY is a dust-year
The next three possible scholarly angles on such formulas all fit somewhere under the realm of "cognition."
The first of these concerns the issue of cognitive forms in scientific vs. so-called folk knowledge; for "folk" is a standard term used by academic specialists, in phrases such as "folk psychology," to designate what is, or is imagined to be, the way the world is understood in everyday terms by non-specialists. Ever since Plato juxtaposed expressions of skepticism toward myth to his advocacy of philosophy — a kind of pursuit rooted in the logic of propositions — there has been some tendency to regard narrative or story as the vehicle of folk knowledge and as a second fiddle, a cognitive vehicle less precise and less powerful than logical analytical reason working through propositions. There is much to object to in this idea, but even if we were to accept it, proverbs would give us pause. For clearly, proverbs are a genre of folk knowledge, and their format is that favored by philosophy and science, namely, the proposition: a straightforward subject followed by a predicate.
One of the most fascinating works on the proverb, without intending to be so, is Max Weber's (1958, especially pp. 48 — 50) classic book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this work, Weber announces that his orienting concept will be the nebulous, cloudy, all-penetrating substance of "spirit" — as in the "spirit of capitalism"; elsewhere he uses the term worldview. When he turns to actually describing the "spirit" or "worldview" of capitalism, the very first thing Weber gives us is a terse proverbial formula that forms the quintessential expression — we might think of it as the E = MC2 — of the capitalist worldview, namely:
Time Is Money
T = M
We have here a kind of popular knowledge, propositional in form, that, like the scientific equation, aspires to a summarizing elegance — and to asserting a convertibility if not exactly of energy and matter, then of quanta at least vaguely reminiscent of these, namely, of industriousness and capital accumulation.
Another relevant scholarly focus would be the recent wave of interest in so-called embodied reason, promoted by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and their many followers (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). The connection of this focus to formulas of conversion would seem obvious, for in many cases the x = y amounts to the conversion of disembodied measurements of quantity into embodied ones. It is not that one has necessarily had the experience of wading through a Pennsylvania that is a foot deep in water but rather that one can put together the experience of the length of Pennsylvania — perhaps from driving through it or at least seeing it on a map and comparing its map size to other states one has driven through — with that of wading in foot-deep water. Lakoff and Johnson argue that even the cognitive forms that give us our most abstract knowledge claims derive from bodily experience. For example, the very possibility of identifying a "category" or "set" (of anything) derives from the experience of the body as container, so that some things are in it while others are outside, thus demarcating a "set." If one accepts that theory of the origin of abstract knowledge, then formulas of conversion provide methods not so much of embodying but of re-embodying knowledge; they raise all sorts of issues regarding the classic problem of the relation of the abstract and, again, the concrete.
Third, one should consider a long-running object of fascination in linguistics, namely, the seeming human capacity to hold together and ultimately unravel so-called linguistic embedding, as in this sentence taken from a book about language by Steven Pinker (1995:204 — 7): "The guy who is sitting between the table that I like and the empty chair just winked."
The basic sentence is "The guy just winked." Embedded in it is "The guy is sitting between the table and the empty chair"; and embedded in that is "I like the table" or possibly "I like the guy." But according to Pinker, we cannot process the following equally grammatical sentence: "The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable."
Not even my computer can process this sentence, for it has underlined in red the second and third "has." Pinker speculates that what differentiates the two sentences is that the former embeds different kinds of phrases, while the latter's embedding is merely recursive. What is confusing is "keeping a particular kind of phrase in memory, intending to get back to it, at the same time as ... analyzing another example of that very same kind of phrase. "
Although I suspect that Pinker's (ibid.) theory may be wrong in some details, I am inspired to suggest an admittedly loose analogy in the realm of quantitative understanding. Exponential notation or so-called scientific notation — basically a terse means to add zeros to an integer — is a powerful but strictly recursive device in formal mathematics. Like the hummingbird sentence, we can parse exponential notation intellectually as we learn in algebra and chemistry, but we cannot, or at least normally do not, process exponential notation in the quantitative sensibility of everyday life. It marks one of those points at which higher-level math disconnects from everyday senses of quantity, those we intuitively feel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Science, Bread, and Circuses by Gregory Schrempp. Copyright © 2014 the University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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