“You remember Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper?”
“Never the read it, but saw the movie when I was a kid.”
“Which one. There was a popular version with Errol Flynn, the Mauch twins, and Claude Rains. I saw that on TV one rainy afternoon. I also saw the one with another famous cast: Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston—yeah, the guy who played all those people in robes and armor in El Cid, Moses, Ben-Hur—George C. Scott—yeah, famous for Patton—and Oliver Reed of Oliver, and both Three and then Four Musketeers, plus Gladiator. Lots of actors have played the characters. Twain’s story has been so popular that there have been about as many adaptations as there are elements in the Periodic Table. Even Mickey Mouse, Garfield, and Barbie have versions. Oh! And not just Hollywood versions; there’s a Bollywood version and even a Netflix version. And I read that Thomas Edison made a version in 1909. As I said, as numerous as the elements, all these versions bombard us like unstoppable cosmic rays.”
“I think I saw the one with Raquel Welch.”
“Raquel Welch? Who could forget? What do you mean ‘I think I saw’?”
“Okay, I know I saw Raquel Welch. Fantastic Voyage, One Million Years B.C., Lady in Cement…”
“Let me guess. You’re a Raquel Welch fan.”
“Are you related to Richard Conte? He starred in Lady in Cement with her and Frank Sinatra.”
“Not to my knowledge, but then don’t most of us who share the same name have some common family background by biology or marriage, kinda like the elements, look different, but are all made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Some underlying Conte thread. But I have to confess. Raquel Welch, “The Summer of George” episode of Seinfeld! You know, actors and actresses are like elements and their isotopes. You recognize Raquel Welch no matter what part she plays, from comedy to tragedy, from movies to TV and stage. But as an actress, her characters are different from her real character; the outward stuff always hides the inner realities. Fans’ assumptions about actresses and actors are always based on incomplete knowledge. Did you read her bio? I’m thinking about her becoming a big star on the basis of a role as a microscopic human being in Fantastic Voyage or on the basis of her saying only three lines in One Million B.C., a movie about the past that cast her into the present. Who could forget that animal-skin bikini? But I digress.”
“Look at us. Started talking about Twain’s story and ended up with drooling over Raquel Welch.”
“Geez. The mind unravels on a single thread of thought. But that’s like all our thinking and discussing. One thought leads to another. Start out with hydrogen and end up at uranium all in the brilliance of some burst of explosive digressions.”
“Prince and the Pauper.”
“Right. I was thinking about how Prince and the Pauper, about two kids who look alike but who had different backgrounds ended up being in the same place and apparently playing roles that showed similarities and differences.”
“Why?”
“It dawned on me that the singer-songwriters Prince and Cyndi Lauper are in some ways the same and some ways very different. And that got me to thinking about Twain’s story and about a recent discovery about cosmic rays.”
“Your mind never fails to fascinate and exasperate.”
“Well, both Prince, sorry, the Late Prince or however one’s supposed to say his symbol-name, and Lauper arrived on the music scene about the same time, definitely both stars of the 1980s. Both talented composers. Some might say they had meteoric rises to success, but I prefer to think that they hit the music world like incoming cosmic rays, both causing bunches of imitators to mimic their compositions. You know what I just thought of?”
“No.”
“You know how Twain’s story is about guys who look alike and how the roles have been played by twins like the Mauch brothers? Wasn’t Prince or Love Symbol from the Twin Cities area?”
“Yeah. Your mental thread’s unravelling again.”
“Sorry. Anyway, Prince and the Cyndi Lauper—had to say it—could be a story written by a group of physicists. So, both are musicians. Both have been popular musicians. Both shaped the music industry. Both came on the scene like cosmic rays. But both were different forms of popular musicians. I know, I’m pushing the metaphor. Anyway, though many in the so-called serious world of music might have dismissed their work as mere pop music, both of those songwriters made their mark on the world of music, Prince in Purple Rain and Lauper in Kinky Boots, which tells the tale of two people who seem radically different but who discover their similarities. Just like a cosmic ray producing other cosmic rays, so the music of Prince and the Cyndi Lauper did the same, producing so many similar trends from their original songs.”
“Whoa. That isn’t entirely true. Isn’t one of Prince’s songs the center of a plagiarism case in Italy?”
“Oh! Right. But there’s much in his music that is original. Okay, so the ISS has a gizmo called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It can detect cosmic rays and measure their energies. So, without going into it too much, this AMS device on the Space Station discovered that iron cosmic rays don’t have the identities they were thought to have, that they are very much like the so-called cosmic rays of helium, carbon, and oxygen, the so-called ‘lighter’ cosmic rays. And I don’t think anyone knows the reason any more than anyone could tell the difference between the Prince and the Pauper in novel or film. They look alike but are different; the iron cosmic rays were thought to be different but look the same, or act the same as lighter elements’ rays as detected by the AMS. Same and different. A heavy element acting like a light element.”
“You made me engage in a conversation about Twain’s story and Raquel Welch just to tell me that iron cosmic rays act like lighter element cosmic rays?”
“Well, not completely. You know how on the surface we are different? How we distinguish among ourselves on the basis of obvious physical characteristics?”
“Yeah.”
“So, I was thinking about how unexpected similarities bind us, make us twins in a sense. How it took a special detector on the Space Station to find out that iron cosmic rays have energies—actually, the ‘rigidity dependence of the flux’ in iron is identical to the fluxes of helium, carbon, and oxygen cosmic rays. What we thought was so different wasn’t. Now, what if we had a detector that showed us more of our similarities than our differences?”
“Nice thought, but not the reality of human interaction. It took a bunch of scientists and engineers to make your Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, put it on the Space Station, and read its data. * That was a pretty big effort. And even with all those bright minds at work trying to explain their findings, no one has a clear idea why a heavy element like iron acts like a light element like helium, how the two seem to belong to the same class of cosmic rays and not to different classes as people previously thought. You’re not going to get ordinary people to go through that effort just to get a similar result of not understanding how different people can be so much the same, can have so much in common. It’s easier in our everyday world to classify on the bases of differences, like number of legs, spiders with eight and insects with six—the obvious stuff, people with certain features, the Neanderthal-inherited European bigger nose and lighter skin color, the people with more almond-shaped eyes, and so on. Of course, I guess you can say it’s just as easy to group by similarities, putting all the insects together, for example.”
“But it’s the hidden similarities that I’m thinking about. Twins appearing to be the same, but different. People appearing to be the same, but different in reality, like Edward the VI and his lookalike Tom Canty in Twain’s story. Okay, let me say it another way. Iron seems different from other elements in both real and superficial ways. It’s heavier than helium, carbon, and oxygen, but deep down, it’s the same because it’s made of the same subatomic stuff. And now we know that its cosmic rays should be grouped with those lighter elements’ cosmic rays rather than with heavier elements’ cosmic rays. What’s expected by the surface appearance or characteristics is contradicted by what’s deep down, and what’s deep down actually makes iron similar.
“It’s a strange, a confounding universe. So much that seems different is very much the same and so much that seems the same is very much different. Prince and the Pauper, Prince and the Cyndi Lauper, and iron and helium cosmic rays. I guess the universe really is a place of paradoxes. Maybe it’s just one big Paradox, one filled with irony for those with a sense of humor and seriousness or despair for those without a sense of humor.”
“As usual, or should I say, ‘yousual,’ you go around the long way, like some cosmic ray wending its way across the galaxy, across the whole universe, just to make a point. But I have to say that with this one, you do what cosmic rays do when they enter the realm of Earth’s atmosphere, you make secondary rays of electrons, positrons, muons, and pions: I guess those secondary rays are my thoughts about human similarities and differences and how they aren’t necessarily what they seem to be or are expected to be.”
“Oh! Yeah. Sorry, I lapsed back into that thought of Raquel Welch in her animal-skin bikini.” **
Note:
*Lopes, Ana. 17 Mar 2021. AMS reveals properties of iron cosmic rays: The properties are unexpectedly different from those of other primary heavy cosmic rays. CERN. Online at https://home.cern/news/news/physics/ams-reveals-properties-iron-cosmic-rays Accessed June 19, 2021.
**Yes, you can see that picture of Welch in the bikini. It’s online at https://www.thatmomentin.com/one-million-years-b-c-and-that-animal-skin-bikini/
“Never the read it, but saw the movie when I was a kid.”
“Which one. There was a popular version with Errol Flynn, the Mauch twins, and Claude Rains. I saw that on TV one rainy afternoon. I also saw the one with another famous cast: Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston—yeah, the guy who played all those people in robes and armor in El Cid, Moses, Ben-Hur—George C. Scott—yeah, famous for Patton—and Oliver Reed of Oliver, and both Three and then Four Musketeers, plus Gladiator. Lots of actors have played the characters. Twain’s story has been so popular that there have been about as many adaptations as there are elements in the Periodic Table. Even Mickey Mouse, Garfield, and Barbie have versions. Oh! And not just Hollywood versions; there’s a Bollywood version and even a Netflix version. And I read that Thomas Edison made a version in 1909. As I said, as numerous as the elements, all these versions bombard us like unstoppable cosmic rays.”
“I think I saw the one with Raquel Welch.”
“Raquel Welch? Who could forget? What do you mean ‘I think I saw’?”
“Okay, I know I saw Raquel Welch. Fantastic Voyage, One Million Years B.C., Lady in Cement…”
“Let me guess. You’re a Raquel Welch fan.”
“Are you related to Richard Conte? He starred in Lady in Cement with her and Frank Sinatra.”
“Not to my knowledge, but then don’t most of us who share the same name have some common family background by biology or marriage, kinda like the elements, look different, but are all made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Some underlying Conte thread. But I have to confess. Raquel Welch, “The Summer of George” episode of Seinfeld! You know, actors and actresses are like elements and their isotopes. You recognize Raquel Welch no matter what part she plays, from comedy to tragedy, from movies to TV and stage. But as an actress, her characters are different from her real character; the outward stuff always hides the inner realities. Fans’ assumptions about actresses and actors are always based on incomplete knowledge. Did you read her bio? I’m thinking about her becoming a big star on the basis of a role as a microscopic human being in Fantastic Voyage or on the basis of her saying only three lines in One Million B.C., a movie about the past that cast her into the present. Who could forget that animal-skin bikini? But I digress.”
“Look at us. Started talking about Twain’s story and ended up with drooling over Raquel Welch.”
“Geez. The mind unravels on a single thread of thought. But that’s like all our thinking and discussing. One thought leads to another. Start out with hydrogen and end up at uranium all in the brilliance of some burst of explosive digressions.”
“Prince and the Pauper.”
“Right. I was thinking about how Prince and the Pauper, about two kids who look alike but who had different backgrounds ended up being in the same place and apparently playing roles that showed similarities and differences.”
“Why?”
“It dawned on me that the singer-songwriters Prince and Cyndi Lauper are in some ways the same and some ways very different. And that got me to thinking about Twain’s story and about a recent discovery about cosmic rays.”
“Your mind never fails to fascinate and exasperate.”
“Well, both Prince, sorry, the Late Prince or however one’s supposed to say his symbol-name, and Lauper arrived on the music scene about the same time, definitely both stars of the 1980s. Both talented composers. Some might say they had meteoric rises to success, but I prefer to think that they hit the music world like incoming cosmic rays, both causing bunches of imitators to mimic their compositions. You know what I just thought of?”
“No.”
“You know how Twain’s story is about guys who look alike and how the roles have been played by twins like the Mauch brothers? Wasn’t Prince or Love Symbol from the Twin Cities area?”
“Yeah. Your mental thread’s unravelling again.”
“Sorry. Anyway, Prince and the Cyndi Lauper—had to say it—could be a story written by a group of physicists. So, both are musicians. Both have been popular musicians. Both shaped the music industry. Both came on the scene like cosmic rays. But both were different forms of popular musicians. I know, I’m pushing the metaphor. Anyway, though many in the so-called serious world of music might have dismissed their work as mere pop music, both of those songwriters made their mark on the world of music, Prince in Purple Rain and Lauper in Kinky Boots, which tells the tale of two people who seem radically different but who discover their similarities. Just like a cosmic ray producing other cosmic rays, so the music of Prince and the Cyndi Lauper did the same, producing so many similar trends from their original songs.”
“Whoa. That isn’t entirely true. Isn’t one of Prince’s songs the center of a plagiarism case in Italy?”
“Oh! Right. But there’s much in his music that is original. Okay, so the ISS has a gizmo called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It can detect cosmic rays and measure their energies. So, without going into it too much, this AMS device on the Space Station discovered that iron cosmic rays don’t have the identities they were thought to have, that they are very much like the so-called cosmic rays of helium, carbon, and oxygen, the so-called ‘lighter’ cosmic rays. And I don’t think anyone knows the reason any more than anyone could tell the difference between the Prince and the Pauper in novel or film. They look alike but are different; the iron cosmic rays were thought to be different but look the same, or act the same as lighter elements’ rays as detected by the AMS. Same and different. A heavy element acting like a light element.”
“You made me engage in a conversation about Twain’s story and Raquel Welch just to tell me that iron cosmic rays act like lighter element cosmic rays?”
“Well, not completely. You know how on the surface we are different? How we distinguish among ourselves on the basis of obvious physical characteristics?”
“Yeah.”
“So, I was thinking about how unexpected similarities bind us, make us twins in a sense. How it took a special detector on the Space Station to find out that iron cosmic rays have energies—actually, the ‘rigidity dependence of the flux’ in iron is identical to the fluxes of helium, carbon, and oxygen cosmic rays. What we thought was so different wasn’t. Now, what if we had a detector that showed us more of our similarities than our differences?”
“Nice thought, but not the reality of human interaction. It took a bunch of scientists and engineers to make your Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, put it on the Space Station, and read its data. * That was a pretty big effort. And even with all those bright minds at work trying to explain their findings, no one has a clear idea why a heavy element like iron acts like a light element like helium, how the two seem to belong to the same class of cosmic rays and not to different classes as people previously thought. You’re not going to get ordinary people to go through that effort just to get a similar result of not understanding how different people can be so much the same, can have so much in common. It’s easier in our everyday world to classify on the bases of differences, like number of legs, spiders with eight and insects with six—the obvious stuff, people with certain features, the Neanderthal-inherited European bigger nose and lighter skin color, the people with more almond-shaped eyes, and so on. Of course, I guess you can say it’s just as easy to group by similarities, putting all the insects together, for example.”
“But it’s the hidden similarities that I’m thinking about. Twins appearing to be the same, but different. People appearing to be the same, but different in reality, like Edward the VI and his lookalike Tom Canty in Twain’s story. Okay, let me say it another way. Iron seems different from other elements in both real and superficial ways. It’s heavier than helium, carbon, and oxygen, but deep down, it’s the same because it’s made of the same subatomic stuff. And now we know that its cosmic rays should be grouped with those lighter elements’ cosmic rays rather than with heavier elements’ cosmic rays. What’s expected by the surface appearance or characteristics is contradicted by what’s deep down, and what’s deep down actually makes iron similar.
“It’s a strange, a confounding universe. So much that seems different is very much the same and so much that seems the same is very much different. Prince and the Pauper, Prince and the Cyndi Lauper, and iron and helium cosmic rays. I guess the universe really is a place of paradoxes. Maybe it’s just one big Paradox, one filled with irony for those with a sense of humor and seriousness or despair for those without a sense of humor.”
“As usual, or should I say, ‘yousual,’ you go around the long way, like some cosmic ray wending its way across the galaxy, across the whole universe, just to make a point. But I have to say that with this one, you do what cosmic rays do when they enter the realm of Earth’s atmosphere, you make secondary rays of electrons, positrons, muons, and pions: I guess those secondary rays are my thoughts about human similarities and differences and how they aren’t necessarily what they seem to be or are expected to be.”
“Oh! Yeah. Sorry, I lapsed back into that thought of Raquel Welch in her animal-skin bikini.” **
Note:
*Lopes, Ana. 17 Mar 2021. AMS reveals properties of iron cosmic rays: The properties are unexpectedly different from those of other primary heavy cosmic rays. CERN. Online at https://home.cern/news/news/physics/ams-reveals-properties-iron-cosmic-rays Accessed June 19, 2021.
**Yes, you can see that picture of Welch in the bikini. It’s online at https://www.thatmomentin.com/one-million-years-b-c-and-that-animal-skin-bikini/
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