Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Connectional Minds

Connectional Minds

I heard on the news the government is embarking on a new Manhattan Project. It will study energy technologies and see if there is a better way to make a mouse trap (Battery) No surprise it will be built outside of Chicago. I hope it turns out better than Solyindra. I wonder if the employees will be members of the United Federation of Geeks.

Anyway this might not be such a bad black hole to pour money into. Since I am talking about the human genome in an unschooled and speculative sort of way, how about looking into the energy that life uses.

Electrical energy seems to be what we know the most about and even there the understanding is murky. We don’t even know the direction in which it flows. We can get electricity to spin stuff around and light things up. There are many devices such as switches, diodes, transistors and batteries that allow man to control it, even if we don’t understand it very well. The same can be said for fire. We know how to use it after a fashion but it isn’t really all that clear how it works.

There are other forms of energy such as gas compression, which operates air tools, hydraulic energy that actuates cylinders and nuclear energy that makes plenty of heat. But what about the energy that animates life?

Isn’t it amazing that living things don’t make much use of the structure known as the wheel? Our bodies are muscle-activated levers and organs that squeeze diaphragms. We know we use energy but what form does it take? We can’t see it , smell it, taste it or hear it. Perhaps we can feel it, in the tingle when men and women play their minor role in the procreation process.

What is interesting to me is that all the energy variations I’m aware of have three components. These are different takes on flow, pressure and resistance. If you know two of these you can determine the third. I’m not sure (A euphemism for “I don’t have a clue”) what the significance of this relationship is but it seems more than a coincidence.

The brightest minds in the sciences have the capacity to absorb but a minutia of the complexity in their specialized areas of expertise. The answers to many things are no doubt laying about gathering dust on the lab tables of the past, possibilities left unexplored, perhaps on the cusp of great discoveries. The Nobel prizes of tomorrow beckon to those with broader visions and connectional minds.