It truly is an Age of Distraction, and no one out there needs me to cite the numerous distractors. The noise in our lives is the product of both social pressure and technology, the latter exacerbating the former even more so since the rise of social media and 24/7 news about everything—even stuff from far away and irrelevant to our personal lives. We are a distracted species as numerous accidents seem to prove. And our attention spans are probably shorter than those whose lives have been quieter and less frenetic.
That many of us are so enveloped in the noise of life isn’t a new observation. So many of us prefer the noise in our lives because it keeps us from anxiety the existentialists foisted on us back in the days of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Ionesco, and the Dadaist artists who were inspired to discombobulate in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich.
Is there a way to get away from the noise? Think of your life as running an experiment on some protons. Now that requires some focus, doesn’t it? And since protons are so small, any “noise” in the experiment can disrupt the process and give a false reading. An experiment on protons requires a mechanism that eliminates the noise.
When Mohsen Arabgol and Tycho Sleator at NYU wanted to observe the nuclear Barnett effect, they faced the problem of noise. What the Barnett effect is, is irrelevant here, except to say that it is basically the magnetization of an uncharged body spinning on an axis. Here’s the part of the experiment germane to this little discussion: Arabgol said, “As far as I can say the beauty of this experiment was not finding an extraordinary technique or utilizing a novel apparatus, but finding the very narrow combination of many parameters in the experiment and running the whole experiment with the highest level of care and awareness about the variety of available noises.” *
And that’s your experiment for the day: Find the combination of parameters with the highest level of care and awareness about the variety of available noises in your life. It’s about the only way you’ll be able to run the beautiful experiment of your life in the Age of Distraction.
*Fadelli, Ingrid. The first observation of the nuclear Barnett effect. Phys.org. 23 May 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-05-nuclear-barnett-effect.html Accessed May 24, 2019. Original article’s abstract available at https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.177202
That many of us are so enveloped in the noise of life isn’t a new observation. So many of us prefer the noise in our lives because it keeps us from anxiety the existentialists foisted on us back in the days of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Ionesco, and the Dadaist artists who were inspired to discombobulate in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich.
Is there a way to get away from the noise? Think of your life as running an experiment on some protons. Now that requires some focus, doesn’t it? And since protons are so small, any “noise” in the experiment can disrupt the process and give a false reading. An experiment on protons requires a mechanism that eliminates the noise.
When Mohsen Arabgol and Tycho Sleator at NYU wanted to observe the nuclear Barnett effect, they faced the problem of noise. What the Barnett effect is, is irrelevant here, except to say that it is basically the magnetization of an uncharged body spinning on an axis. Here’s the part of the experiment germane to this little discussion: Arabgol said, “As far as I can say the beauty of this experiment was not finding an extraordinary technique or utilizing a novel apparatus, but finding the very narrow combination of many parameters in the experiment and running the whole experiment with the highest level of care and awareness about the variety of available noises.” *
And that’s your experiment for the day: Find the combination of parameters with the highest level of care and awareness about the variety of available noises in your life. It’s about the only way you’ll be able to run the beautiful experiment of your life in the Age of Distraction.
*Fadelli, Ingrid. The first observation of the nuclear Barnett effect. Phys.org. 23 May 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-05-nuclear-barnett-effect.html Accessed May 24, 2019. Original article’s abstract available at https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.177202
RSS Feed