First, take a mental deep breath. Second, read the context. Third, agree, disagree, or dismiss as an overreach not worth your time (in which case, you’ll say “All that, for this?”).
 
The All That
 
Ferromanganese nodules are one of the pelagic (open) ocean’s deep mysteries. They are generally concentrically accumulated accretions of heavier metals whose core is some small particle like a bit of shell that serves as a nucleus around which the nodules grow. Slowly. Really slowly. Maybe 3 to 10 millimeters per million years. Thus, ferromanganese nodules are usually small with the largest measured in centimeters. Now, here’s the mystery that surrounds these benthic nodules. In spite of a rain of detritus that falls through the ocean column, the nodules remain at the surface of bottom sediments, usually forming with a hemispheric band, a kind of equatorial belt or girdle, at the sediment-water interface.* How do they stay at the sediment surface? Why aren’t they buried by the detrital rain of particles that fall through the water? Some say fast currents along the bottom sweep the detrital rain from the nodules. Others say that organisms like holothurians that eat the sediment clean the nodules on the deep (miles down) abyssal plains. One problem with the latter explanation is that what goes in one end of a holothurian comes out the other end, so cleaning off one nodule might simply result in burying another. And as for the former explanation? Well, many of the fields of nodules occur in places where current velocities are very low; and even if the currents were capable of washing off one nodule, they would pile the sediments on another. A third explanation lies in the quantity of detrital rain and in the slow diagenesis of ocean floor basalts. Nodules abound beneath the so-called “ocean deserts,” vast gyres of pelagic waters with comparatively little surface life and, thus, with relatively little detrital rain precipitating upon the seafloor miles below. And as for clay formation through diagenesis of basalt, the dominant rock of the ocean, it is a slow process, so slow that many rocks moving from the ocean ridges during seafloor spreading soon get buried by deposits of the tiny shells of foraminifera, coccolithophores, and diatoms, effectively keeping them from undergoing decay. Of course, seafloor spreading plays a role, also, because nodules that form beneath one pelagic ecology move beneath another, sometimes at a rate, in the eastern Pacific at least, of 15 cm/yr. Mystery of mysteries, these nodules.
 
That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the nodule mystery and the context for what is to follow: Slow growth, but no burial in spite of a rain of detritus. Is there a human analog?
 
The This
 
How do you define Time? How do you define Existence? Tough to define either or both. But you already know that. If you are concerned that there’s a gap in your knowledge and understanding where a definition of time should lie, you are not alone. You stand with St. Augustine of Hippo on this. He said, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Same for existence? I mean, think, what more can one say than that existence is, to use a Heideggerian term, the opposite of “no-thingness”? You might think that Being would be easy to define, given that you exist, that you have “being,” “are a being,” or “are a manifestation of being.” Anyway, here’s the mystery of mysteries: How is it that after about 2,500 years of philosophical thinking, the development of logic, and the exploration of all things physical and biological, that we haven’t come to a complete understanding of, again to use Heidegger’s terminology, Being and Time?
 
The nodules: After the ancient Greeks invented philosophy and geometry, the West’s intellectual life moved like a nodule on a spreading seafloor, moving from Greece to Rome and then slowly spreading throughout Europe and eventually the New World, remaining at the surface of intellectual life and slowly accumulating thin concentric layers of qualifications, many of them theological, such as the Neoplatonism as applied by St. (Bishop) Augustine of Hippo and Thomism initiated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Those nuclei of Greek philosophies that attracted slow growth with slight variations underwent some dissolution and destruction in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then major dissolution in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Martin Heidegger’s “rethinking” of philosophy centered on his idea of no-thingness and Being and on the “physical side, culminating with the “science” of physicists like Planck, Bohr, and Einstein, all three of who spent their lives rethinking the very nature of Space and Time and the question of a continuous or discontinuous universe.  
 
Heidegger didn’t think that philosophy had advanced much over the centuries and that it had to be rethought in a new philosophical language, a new way for the mind to handle the old problems. He proposed some kind of poetic-artistic-aesthetic as an approach. If you read through some of his works, you’ll see references to both art and poetry, his way of taking dry logic out of the philosophical equations and of providing a new perspective. In short, he didn’t want to add another thin layer to the nodules on the bed of philosophy. He wanted to rethink philosophy and turn over, bury, or dissolve those old philosophical growths.** But in devising a language to handle the nature of Time, could he or anyone else do nothing other than develop a psychology of Time Consciousness?  
 
In the ocean of thought of all humans up to the present, has anyone definitively resolved the questions about either existence or time? Did Heidegger or those physicists define either time or existence to our satisfaction? Have we now a universally accepted explanation? Does it flow like water or lie in a path like pebbles in a wadi?
 
Curious about my own inability to have ultimately resolved the matter for you and all future humans, I turned to YouTube, the ultimate source of knowledge, for guidance, where I found a discussion on the subject “The Richness of Time” by physicist Brian Greene, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano, and cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.*** Why tackle both subjects at once I asked myself? Let me see what the bright and learned have to say about time. As long as I exist, I can always address the question of existence, of Being.
 
I watched. And at the end, I asked, “What is Time?” because I still didn’t know, at least not in the sense that Augustine wanted us to understand by being able to explain. The neuroscientist mentioned the brain’s “spatializing of time,” and the cognitive scientist mentioned linguistic differences that make people express time differently in different cultures. Seems that we can discuss how we both view and handle time, but not define it. Here is a thought-nodule that has grown very slowly for 2,500 years by the accumulation of thin qualifications, usually none of which added anything new, even though the topic has remained at the surface of thinkers of all kinds.
 
Are you at the point of asking, “All that, for this?” If so, I can empathize. That’s where I was after watching the Greene-Buonomano-Boroditsky discussion. The thin layer that the discussion added to my “sense” of time is that the brain handles time spatially, Boroditsky apparently having picked up on the spatialization mentioned by her neuroscientist colleague on stage. And her examples make sense, since we orient timelines according to favored directions (usually left to right in western societies) and the flow of time as a river flows or as it moves from one cardinal direction to another or up or down, also dependent on our choice of metaphorical understanding. We "go toward the future," or the "future comes to us," as in "I've got a birthday coming up"; or we say the "past recedes" or that the past is some kind of continuously more distant repository, as in "That's buried in the past." 
 
If you recall the opening page of this website, I mention that place is primary and that if I ask you to remember ten minutes ago, you really can’t do that separately from including place. You were, after all, in a place ten minutes ago, and the place, the space characterized by its components, lends images to your temporal experience. And of course, you can guess that the statement by physicists that time began with the Big Bang also meant that there had to be a somewhere, a physical somewhere, for time to exist and eventually for consciousness to arise to spatialize it. 
 
Spatializing? We have enough trouble with the concept of Space, don’t we? Is it continuous or discontinuous? Do we also have a duality in our concept of Time? Do you picture seconds ticking in a jerky one-by-one on a digital clock or in the smooth sweep of a second hand on an analog watch? Is there a smallest unit of Space that is related to the smallest unit of Time? The Planck Length? Each length an individual grain like riverbed sand in the channel. Is that tiny length the starting point for all measurements of Time like seconds and minutes, those arbitrarily chosen units, including the smallest of all units physicists use, called Planck Time, the “time” light takes to travel a Planck length, or 5.39 times 10^-44 seconds? When we speak of “units” like seconds or even parts of seconds like the unimaginably small Planck Time, are we saying that Time is like that channel of individual grains and not like a channel of flowing water? I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine either of the Planck units, but I can imagine that anything small can be composed of something smaller, and the physicists tell us that those two short units are just the points of departure for the ways in which gravity and the other fundamental forces work in our universe. So, even if Apple comes out with a new watch that reminds you to stand every so often, say every other unit of Planck Time, the company will attempt to increase sales the following year by having you stand every fourth half Planck unit.
 
If you are paying attention, you have noticed that I, like so many before me, seem to add little more than a thin layer of qualification to the thought-nodule as it continues to develop on the nuclei of the earliest philosophies. Or, maybe no layer at all. When I look over what I have written, what Martin Heidegger writes in Being and Time, and what Brian Greene and cohosts tell me about Time, I see nothing new about Time itself, but lots new about how we perceive Time or what it means to us. Instead of providing an ultimate definition of Time, I can suggest only this: We don’t have a mechanism in our brains to understand Time beyond recognizing 1) that we associate it with change that is independent of our experience yet simultaneously tied to it and 2) that we spend our efforts on how we deal with time, for example, spatially and linguistically.
 
Thanks to Einstein, we know that Time is relative, not just for individuals, but for the universe, that it changes under the influence of mass and velocity, that one twin staying on Earth will age faster than a sibling traveling at the speed of light to a distant star, and that our car navigation systems would be useless without correcting for differences in velocity and gravity between Earth and the orbiting satellites. We know of “Time’s Arrow,” the unidirectional “movement” toward the future that is irreversible. We know that we experience Time differently under different circumstances, that it appears to slow during an accident or while a pot of water boils—that is, if we watch. That at the end of a life, it appears to have flown by rapidly, as we say, tempus fugit, that we can’t believe summer is here already, or winter, or Christmas, or a 20th anniversary, or even that on Monday, Friday seems far off during working hours, but on Friday the week seems to have gone by too fast.
 
We seem to know much about our relationship to Time and how it affects us. But we still have many questions. We know what Time is—unless someone asks us.
 
   
 
 
*For a picture of nodules, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303108085_Deep-ocean_ferromanganese_crusts_and_nodules  Ferromanganese nodules are also called polymetallic nodules because they contain not just iron and manganese, but also some other precipitated metals.
 
And for similar nodules in Lake Michigan, see: https://wgnhs.wisc.edu/minerals/ferromanganesenodules/
 
For a terrestrial analog called desert varnish, see: https://www.livescience.com/31332-desert-varnish-images/2.html
 
**If you read through the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, you will see that nodules found east and northeast of the East Pacific Rise are larger on the surface than under sediments. Apparently, but by no means surely, nodules that undergo burial seem to have undergone some decay, rather than further growth. The largest nodules (maybe 3 cm or so) lie at the surface. However, the sampling is small if one considers the vastness of the abyssal plains and the diameters of a relatively few cores of sediment. By comparison, imagine taking a 4 to 6 centimeter diameter core of Manhattan and no more, and then describing the entire island on the basis of that one sample. If the core went into Central Park you might describe Manhattan as an idyllic garden of walks, fields, and trees, but if the core went straight through the Empire State Building you would describe the island as a steel-stone-and-concrete place filled with unexplainable gaps where the core passed through offices.  
 
***”The Richness of Time.” Online at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJWvEbeBps

When businesses hoard their wealth and prevent it from entering the active economy during hard times, central bankers consider negative interest rates, that is, charging for storing money. In a sense, checking accounts that require fees yield negative interest. The customer gets no return on an investment; the bank, by storing money, makes money as the customer pays the bank for the storage.
 
Almost every belief system works the same way for those devoutly committed to a belief. And that includes political beliefs. Political parties are the central banks that store ideas for a price, that is, for maintaining the belief system.
 
As long as people keep hoarding, i.e., keep holding onto, their ideas rather than spending them in philosophical debate and idea exchange, negative interest rates will govern the economy of the political mind.
 
Wish for a positive return on your intellectual treasure? Go out and spend some ideas in debate. If others begin to spend similarly, the economy of the mind will emerge from its long recession.   

Anyone who has read the Declaration of Independence has at least an inkling that the topic of equality isn’t a twenty-first century concern. The “all men are created equal” of that document reveals that the topic was on the minds of the American Founding Fathers. Of course, the government they engendered had to undergo revisions ensuring further “equality” as elaborated in the Bill of Rights and the other Amendments. That people are still concerned about equality is evidence that the term’s definition is incomplete and that the topic still weighs heavily on the minds of individuals and groups.  
 
Some people, particularly those who lean toward socialism, believe that equality in its several meanings can be forced on a society by a government’s redistributing wealth, jobs, and opportunities, all achieved through agency programs and funding. But can governments impose equality, especially economic equality? Think of those who ran the Soviet Union, government officials who had second homes while the Soviet citizens lived in government-designed housing.
 
Addressing “inequality” in their recent paper on what they term “one of the most serious challenges for the global economy,” authors Atanu Ghoshray, Mercedes Monfort, and Javier Ordóñez conclude with regard to past efforts “that inequality is persistent and government redistribution policies through taxes and transfers did not significantly reduce inequality persistence.”* Their finding doesn't appear to be Earth-shattering news. But in what sense do they mean “most serious challenges”? Should we infer that they assume there is a way to eliminate persistent inequality? Are they thinking that such challenges can be met? 
 
Look, you and I both know that nothing save the x and y on either side of an equal sign or the elements in a balanced equation can be equal. And every attempt by social reformers to enforce rules and laws designed to eliminate inequality has failed, fails now, and will fail. Equilibrium is rare at best and always temporary. According to the researchers, “inequality is persistent for a set of 60 countries over the period 1984 to 2013.”
 
And yet, there will be those who will this year and next, and the years to come, insist that they have the key to equality, the method to undo what no one has yet undone. And there will be those who, like the authors of the study, will suggest “that persistence in income inequality is of structural rather than cyclical nature, and structural reforms are needed to cope with the undesired effects of increasing and persistent inequality,” in spite of the very data on the economies of 60 countries they use to say inequality is persistent. Are the “structural reforms” the “serious challenges” the authors mention? And if they are, how will someone or some group make “structural reforms”? What will those “reforms” look like? Who will be the reformers? And what guarantee could they offer for the persistence of their form of  “equality”?  
 
It lies in the nature of some to wish for a world that doesn’t exist, has never existed, and will never exist. Some will say, again as we know, that the reason for past failures to eradicate economic inequality lay in the corruption of individuals. “If only we had truly ethical economic leaders…” the argument commences. The ethical ones will guarantee economic equality. So, then, should we buy into the hype about how the current bevy of American “democratic socialists” will impose economic equality? Will the wealthy presidential candidates advocating socialist policies give up their extra cars and homes? If they keep one extra TV set, car, or home, or have rooms they don’t use in their multiple houses, aren’t they putting the economy in disequilibrium? And am I incorrect in thinking that members of Congress exempted themselves from participating in the "equality" of Obamacare? Why would they not have wanted to join a program they said would ensure equality?
 
None of this is a new argument against socialism, or so I thought until I read surveys that indicate many young Americans favor socialism and, therefore, must never have studied its actual effects on past and present societies and individuals. I suppose no one can convince the uninformed until after the effects of imposed “equality” take hold of their lives, holding individual economic circumstances in check to eliminate an imbalance of wealth or ownership. By the time millennials who favor socialism at this time become its victims, those who sold them the Brooklyn Bridge Economy will have passed on, ironically leaving a world far more unequal than it is today—or one so equal that no one will be able to fulfill any personal desire.
 
 
 
*1 Jan 2020. Re-examining inequality persistence. Economics (online). No. 2020-1. http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/journalarticles/2020-1
PDF downloadable.

Science researchers seem to hold one common principle unless they refer to their own previous research: To be valid scientific and technical writing must be in passive voice constructions. What’s the reason? They can’t insert first person personal pronouns lest their work smacks of subjectivity. Somehow, they believe the passive voice is inherently objective. If they resort to the active voice, they place the “doing” in some acceptable third party, i.e., “The experiment has shown….”
 
In truth, experiments don’t run themselves, and we are a long way off from artificial intelligence that acts as intuitive and insightful creators. Experiments and machines are the products of humans, and, as the quantum physicists are wont to say, “Just by being there, just by observing, humans play a role in the results.” Ultimately, it’s the researcher who chooses what to research, and it’s the researcher who concludes.
 
Humans have a difficult time abstracting themselves. Everything—okay, maybe most things—is personal in some way, if only in the motivation for inquiring about it in the first place.
 
“Not so,” you say. “What about astronomy? That’s just a matter of looking at images or at the night sky. Maybe observers insert themselves in the latter, but in looking at images made by the folks who work the antennae at Green Bank or at digitized images produced in the visible spectrum by the Hubble, there’s no insertion of human desire.”
 
Would that were so. Astronomers do make the choice to observe in some band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and they do explain their findings. We play a game when we write, “Gravity waves were detected by LIGO.” What’s wrong with “Hey, Everyone, guess what WE found? Gravity waves. Yeah. They’re real. We’ve seen them—well, not in the sense that we see a tree, but, you know what we mean, and we have proof they exist.” And thus, our collective minds come to a scientific discovery—no differently from a discovery announced in the passive voice. The machine, even one as sensitive as LIGO, is simply an extension of us, nerves in our fingertips, so to speak. Galileo observed sunspots and mountains on the moon. Hubble observed and then concluded, and now astronomers use his namesake telescope to make further observations. Penzias and Wilson observed the Echo of the Big Bang, and then “we” used the COBE satellite to image its immediate aftermath.
 
We play games to eliminate ourselves from what we do and how we understand in the belief (and it is simply a belief) that those games—i.e., the passive voice constructions in scientific papers—lend objectivity to knowledge.
 
“Again, not so,” you say. “Think math; think formulas; think models. E is the product of mass times the square of lightspeed. There’s no disputing that, no personality involved. Atomic bombs explode, and nothing subjective stops them from exploding, though I will admit that it is the human behind the making and exploding of the bomb. Certainly, discovering that the Sun is a fusion reactor is an objective finding.”
 
But I’m not really saying that the world can’t exist outside human experience as though I’m a follower of George Berkeley. I’m with Dr. Samuel Johnson in refuting Berkeley because I have kicked a stone—and a tire or two. Yes, there was a world before there were humans; we’ve come along late in the game of existence. There is a world outside the human mind. But without the human mind, it has no meaning.
 
I suppose what I’m after is an admission from scientists that what they do they choose to do and what they find they, and not some entity outside themselves, discover. We don’t need to play games with language, to assert that inserting a personal pronoun we diminish the value of  the finding.
 
I’ve mentioned a parallel to this elsewhere in writing about the use of BCE for “Before the Common Era” instead of BC for “Before Christ,” or in writing CE (or C.E.) to substitute “Common Era” for Anno Domini. Silly distinction without a difference designed to give the appearance of freedom from any religious association. But when does the Common Era begin? With the approximate date of Christ’s birth? Then it is a term that uses Christ as the starting moment, the temporal point of departure from what came “before,” that is, before the Common Era. And yet, the Common Era begins some 2,000 years ago—by coincidence with the birth of Christ. Isn’t this all just a game? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. How are the last two millennia different in kind from any preceding millennia? They aren’t, are they, except in marking a beginning point at Christ’s birth? If they are not different as millennia, why separate the last two from any previous millennia? Why bother with C.E. unless there is some meaningful significance? Oh! The games we play in the name of objectivity and political correctness.
 
Yes, the world appears to obey “laws” that exist without human interpretation. Recognizing this in part, Sir James Hutton and then Charles Lyell noted that the processes that operate in the natural world today operated in the natural world before Anno Domini. There is an objective world. Berkeley was wrong. We do stub our toe on a rock. But in the stubbing and in the knowing that we stubbed a toe, we, and not some pseudo objective interpreter, insert ourselves into the equation of reality. What difference, what objectivity, occurs if we write, “The toe was stubbed on a rock.”
 
Not all scientific research deals with quantities, of course, thus the rise of “qualitative research” in recent decades and in the “social sciences.” Whereas many in the “hard sciences” might look with condescension upon those researchers, the world, though not Berkeleyesk, does include that which is a matter of subjectivity. Is it folly, then, to see studies in the social sciences that cannot be by the standards of “hard science” repeatable? Given, for example, a “scientific survey” of a certain group of people, can the survey’s results be repeated in a different group of people? Can we apply irrefutably and exactly the results of one to the other?
 
Much of what we do is subjective through and through. Why not admit it? Why play “passive voice” games to pretend an objectivity that doesn’t exist or that only partially exists?
 
Have you ever seen one of those TV shows about ghost hunters? Have you noticed that they never give conclusive proof? Have you also noticed the attempt at objectivity by the inclusion of some device? Who knows what the physical device is supposed to detect? Does it use the electromagnetic spectrum? Are ghosts as electromagnetic as we? As chemical?
 
Mind gives or finds meaning even in a world with real stones upon which real people stub real toes.

Have you noticed that at times you prefer ambiguity over precise meaning? Certainly, you’re not going to say in answer to how much you love someone, “To the last decimal of pi.” Honestly, “a bunch” works just as well—though it isn’t a very poetic or romantic term. “I love you a bunch” is, of course, ambiguous, because bunch is undefined. Love doesn’t lend itself easily—if at all—to quantification.
 
But then, we really have little choice at times because ambiguity is the best we can do. Take 02/02/2020, for example. Punxsutawney Phil emerged as usual (Actually, he was pulled from his rather confining digs) to pronounce via a “bunch” of be-tuxedoed men in top hats that spring for 2020 would come early. Of course, for people in near-tropical and tropical climes, Phil’s prophecy means very little unless that climate is also associated with the beginning of some monsoonal weather. But in the middle latitudes and especially for the millions who live in the temperate zone, Phil offered hope for the day, a promise of a return to mild and tolerable weather, birds chirping, and Phil’s free groundhog brethren roaming for the first leaves. And yet, we know that spring has never come suddenly; it doesn't spring forth on the Vernal Equinox. Remnants of winter weather mix in with the coming summer warmth, and late frosts can disrupt the budding growth.  
 
Would that the predicting of milder times were so easy. But, as they write, “alas,” it isn’t so. The conditional is unreal and thus requires the subjunctive. Ambiguity prevails as the fashion of the future. What, for example, does “spring” mean? Remember the “Arab Spring” of turmoil, death, terrorism, governmental overthrow, bombing by US warplanes, and the eventual retaking of the Egyptian government by the military in an overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood? Across northern Africa, various groups saw the “spring” differently; the term was ambiguous at best. Now think of the American “spring” in an election year on the tail end of divisive political bickering on the large stage of Washington, D.C., where men in suits made their dire predictions.
 
“What’s to come” anyone in the early morning of 02/02/2020 might have asked, “other than a continuing ‘winter’ of disgruntlement?” Surely, there’s no disagreement on the future: The specifics that lie ahead are the specifics of the past: Complaining, Accusing, Fault-finding, Anger, and actual Hate. Where’s Phil when you need him to insert the potential for joy with a prediction anticipated by thousands gathered for Groundhog Day?
 
So, what’s your prediction? Do you forecast a prevailing mildness interrupted only by a few episodes of cooler or colder atmospheric conditions. Are you a harbinger of spring or a continual or continuous denizen of winter moods. Do you predict a continuing winter of discontent? Are you personally determined to bring spring to the world around you? Or, like Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III, do you say, “I am determined to prove a villain/and hate the idle pleasures of these days/Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous/By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams/To set my brother Clarence and the king/In deadly hate the one against the other….”
 
We all know that Phil can’t predict the weather and that humans speak for him, probably on the basis of the National Weather Service predictions or on those of the most recent Farmer’s Almanac. But on Groundhog Day in 2020, those men forecast some hope for human weather. That others put words into Phil’s mouth is not unlike what happens in a world filled with prognosticators who tell us how to think and how we will live, prognosticators whose lives and predictions bespeak their own discontent. Most of their predictions are dire; spring lies in the distant future, well into June and the arrival of the Solstice. But every so often, someone—or some group like the Punxsutawney officials—proclaims, “Things are looking up; we have much to expect in a bright future.” So, Phil predicts an early “spring” in a year that began in political turmoil and in fears of a pandemic. Of course, we never know what the future portends until it becomes the present sliding into the past. But, for a moment at least on a cold February morning in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a bunch of middle-aged and old men held up a groundhog for the world to see and proclaimed a hopeful message for all the world to hear.
 
That message? “The world doesn’t have to continue its winter of discontent. A spring of milder times is possible, but it comes only when we, unlike Gloucester, refuse ‘to prove a villain’ and ‘to set my brother...In deadly hate the one against the other.’ We don’t have to be modern versions of Gloucester.”
 
Spring will then mean peace. And regardless of the ambiguity inherent in the word peace, we can all look forward to its coming.
 
So, again, what’s your prediction for 2020? Try to make it specific.   

“These are for you,” he says as he presents roses at the door during a first date.
 
“How sweet,” she says as she smells the bouquet of roses. And then she thinks, “This might be the guy.”
 
But what’s he thinking? Especially since he just read that the red flowers’ scent can improve learning. Is he thinking, “I heard she wasn’t very smart, so these roses should take care of that.”
 
I can see the trend and its repercussions. As soon as word about a study linking the smell of roses with increased learning power gets out, there will be a blossoming (sorry, couldn’t resist) of sales at florists’ shops, sales of room sprays, and sales of scent atomizers, all to acquire the brain-enhancing power of the flowers. No doubt there will be a book or two. And the repercussions? “What? You’re giving me roses! You think I’m dumb?”
 
Remember the Mozart Effect? Now it will be the Rose Effect. Babies will have to fall asleep listening to Mozart while breathing the scent of roses wafting about their rooms. Makes me wonder about all those people who got us to this point in civilization without such advantages. Really! How’d they do what they did, breathing, for example, the smell of sulfur from coal fired furnaces that their parents used to heat the homes during the nineteenth and continuing into the first half of the twentieth century? Did no one think to do a study on how soot and sulfur enhanced brainpower.* Sulfur is, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, an element essential for life as we know it (Roses, however, don't seem to contain much, if any, sulfur).  
 
Roses. Now we know. Air Wick and other companies in the scent business will soon put the products in their atomizers: The Scent of Roses—Ideal for Your Child’s Bedroom. And someone will patent a nightlight that plays Mozart while releasing the scent.
 
You might experiment on yourself to see whether or not you become smarter. It seemed to have worked for 54 six-graders in a study conducted by Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier and Franziska Neumann in southern Germany. Now, you’ll add roses or their extracted scents to the ambience of places of rest and study. Of course, studying how roses affect learning doesn’t rule out that other scents might also enhance learning. There’s room to experiment, of course. So, here are my suggestions: Study in a bar, next to a hamburger joint, in a locker room, on a ship, in a slum, next to a factory, or in a library. You might demonstrate that regardless of place, those who concentrate on what they study and those whose native abilities make learning easy will seem to be smarter after studying, regardless of background sounds and scents. That our olfactory sense deadens with prolonged exposure to a scent might mean that no reliance on scents makes sense without a concerted effort to learn.
 
A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, and a scent of any other kind might make learning easier with some hard work.
 
 
*University of Freiburg. 31 Jan 2020. The scent of rose improves learning during sleep. Medical press. Online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-scent-rose.html   Accessed February 1, 2020. The study was conducted by Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier, head of the Perception and Cognition Research Group at the Freiburg-based IGPP and scientist at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center in Germany.