The canal in Scotland that allows ships to cross from east to west, Edinburgh to Glasgow, was begun just as America completed the Independence it had fought for. And it was an inspiration for the Erie Canal, which opened up America and made inevitable that New York City would become the great city and port of America.
At that time, and for some time, Philadelphia had long been the largest city in America. The Erie Canal created Chicago as the mid point between barge traffic that could now transfer from ocean ships at New York City and barge all the way to Chicago, and then short canals to the Mississippi took ships all the way down to New Orleans.
The canal from east to west in Scotland did none of these grand things, but an article in the Economist a few years ago told a story about a man of science on a horse at that canal. He noticed that when two barges had bumped, that waves began to move away from the place of the event, and he followed one wave.
He followed that wave so carefully, that even with other bumps noticed the wave stayed free. He followed that wave for almost two miles, until darkness and the calls of nature took him home again. But he and science have pondered long on what that meant, and how to make it apply in some useful way.
And if you have have an aha moment about this in the middle of the night, you might write it down, and see if it makes sense in the morning. As it is, America had began to build just such a massive testing ground for this in Texas but wars got in the way so it has been shelved indefinitely in Texas. But not in Europe.
Running in a vast underground circle under the French-Switzerland border almost completed is the most massive nuclear particle accelerator in the world ever, that runs in a vast twenty seven mile circle. It will do what smaller experiments have done, and that is to fire atomic sized particles-waves- at each other just under the speed of light, and see what they can see.
We humans are so like that curious bear who just had to go up over that mountain; to see what we will see. Some scientific articles have hesitantly suggested we are pushing science a bit on this, and we are at that point again perhaps when we were testing the Atom and then the Hydrogen Bomb.
Will they melt the Alps? Or discover more cures for sicknesses we actually have? Like the bear, we will see what we will see. Hope springs eternal, and science brings more good than bad, fingers crossed. Eyes too. |
