Monthly Archives: April 2019

You Are What You Do

by in Altitude, Boundary Behavior, Dad, Death, Existentialism, Fear, Identity, Risk | 5 Comments

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

The plane touched down uneventfully, traveling a short distance along the runway before veering right toward its usual place on the tarmac. “Welcome to Jamaica,” announced the flight attendant in a moment of optimistic levity. The sunset over a range of snow-covered mountains visible during the approach betrayed some other latitude.

I’d caught the flight home from Vancouver after my husband left the city for Banff.  Meeting up with a like-minded group, it was a team gesture. I was a sort of fifth-wheel, tagging along… just in case; but I guess that’s a relative statement. Judging from the news, my husband should be heading back to the States shortly. But it was understood from the start that things weren’t going to turn out well.

Mountaineering equipment and gear manufacturing is a fiercely competitive business. And it’s also the kind of business that treads the very edges between function and image. It might seem odd to think of an ice axe or a down parka or a mountain tent as fashion items. But companies that produce better (sometimes, far better) than $100-million per year in profits aren’t doing so by appealing merely to the utilitarian needs of a few niche-market clients.

Just as with everything from shoes to cars to the things that identify our tribal affiliations, the real money is realized when people are willing to pay for an image. Of course, big corporations know this, which is why they spend so much on the endorsements of personalities with whom we can associate vicariously. Talented athletes, extraordinary musicians, spectacular personalities, skilled performers… they become human billboards, conveying an impression of proximity by association. They actually do what most merely imply by brand affiliation.

For the performers, however, this is the way in which they live. Whether a model or an athlete, or a musician or a mountaineer, these are the odd few among us somehow driven to take the really big risks in a kind of all-or-nothing approach to living that the rest of us merely imagine.  Existing in such a rarefied atmosphere can make for a tight group, even across affiliations.  A few become good enough, or perhaps just loud enough, to be noticed. The rest of us line up in admiration of something we can appreciate, even if only from a great distance.

This has been a strange week. My time in this reality was marked by another year, and I’ll confess that I’m beginning to feel the pages turn with startling frequency. Simultaneously, I received an extraordinary offer from someone who had noticed my attentions to one of those doers whose accomplishments have been sadly overlooked. And recent events have me questioning just what it really means to be “young”.

I’m approaching two-hundred articles in here. And yet, I’m not really a writer. This place has been little more than a sounding board for my ego… a lot of talk, not much doing. Another year goes by, and I continue to do the same things as always in the material world… more or less.  And it’s not procrastination; it’s the exact opposite. I’ve always understood the commitment of getting through that first mile and setting up a rhythm for the long run. Committing to the all-or-nothing of a long run is the issue.

Since retiring a few years back, I’ve stuck to short projects. But it’s left me with a nagging sense of complacency.  Youth isn’t complacent. Regardless, I understand that aspect of my own character that refuses to turn back after such a big investment, and that can be a dangerous thing. But it can also be terribly rewarding.

Photos:
Tozan Ridge, Japan — With my dad.
Tozan Ridge, Japan — With my husband.

Yet More Snow…

by in Altitude, Environment, Snow | 7 Comments

Skied-out for the season and finally able to see enough of the footpath across town to be able to run locally, I thought I’d spend a little of this snowy evening (yes, it’s snowing again!) adding some perspective to the region’s winter weather.  This is the eastern slope of the “Sierras”, the mountain range between California and Nevada, running about 400 miles (640 km) north-to-south and some 70 miles (110 km) east-to-west.  Generally speaking, the range slopes up gradually from the west, reaching its highest points to the east.  From there, the range drops steeply either into the mountainous high desert of the Great Basin to the north, or the below sea-level Death Valley basin to the south.

On the eastern slope toward the south, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 ft (4,421 m) is the highest point in the contiguous (connected) United States. Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, is located along the north-eastern slopes. The range also includes the Yosemite Valley,  two national monuments, three national parks, and twenty wilderness areas.

Sierra winter weather forms at the cusp between the cold, northern Jet-Stream, and more southerly currents that swirl against the sub-tropics.   When the polar winds of the Jet-Stream dip south enough, the Sierras can get the legendary, dry powder of skier’s fantasies.  More often, however, heavy snows are the result of large, sub-tropically fueled storms that simply stall-out over the region.   These usually produce heavy, wet, and sticky snows, and sometimes even winter rains.  Moreover, since temperatures can occasionally reach above freezing during Sierra winters, the snow can partially melt and re-freeze into ice or icy layers.

This all tends to make Sierra snow-packs dense and heavy, relatively warm, and high in moisture content, resulting in the local colloquialism, “Sierra cement”.  In some cases, the snow can actually start to flow, creating “wet-slide avalanches”.  These are a serious risk, especially after warm periods.  Some of the remote areas in the “Carson Range” of the eastern Sierras above Carson City are terraced with long contouring berms created in the 1800’s, probably by the same Chinese immigrant laborers who built the first railroad to cross the local mountains, in an effort to minimize these sorts of slides.

In modern times, Sierra winters have become of major concern to most of the state of California, since mountain snow-pack accounts for much of the state’s reservoir capacity.  A succession of dry winters during the last decade resulted in a severe drought for the state.  In some northern regions, several major reservoirs had been drained nearly empty.  However, this part of the US is also notable for its typically desert climate, where many years’ worth of precipitation may come in a single season.

This winter was one of those watershed seasons, and the second such of the last three winters.  As of last Thursday’s (04-11-19) measurement by the California Department of Water Resources, Sierra snow-pack depths ranged from 147% to 164% of normal for the date.  Locally, high elevation snow-pack is still at about 150-inches in depth, and the eastern Sierras maintain a wintry appearance as viewed from the eastern valleys.

Those eastern slopes are also of great importance to the water supply of northern Nevada, where Sierra drainage, including that from Lake Tahoe, ends up in the Great Basin.  This is an extensive region of high desert that drains only into its own low points.  A bit farther to the south, however, this hasn’t prevented California from moving vast amounts of water from the range’s eastern slopes all the way to the city of Los Angeles through a monumental system of canals, “siphons” (more accurately “sag pipes”), and pumping stations.

As a back-country skier, a frequent winter morning routine here is to check the day’s local avalanche forecast.  Given this year’s heavy snows, many of this winter’s reports from the Sierra Avalanche Center were unsurprising.  The back-country was often “red”, with a “high” avalanche risk at all elevations and in all aspects.  So how is this determined?

It’s both art and science.  The people who do this are experts at both meteorology and snow science, and also know the local terrain well.  This, combined with the known results of years of weather patterns gives a good start to making a generalized, regional risk-assessment of things like wind-loading and the moisture-content of a particular snowfall.  However, nothing can take the place of actually traveling into the areas being evaluated.

Overall assessment of localized avalanche risk is usually established by some degree of observation, combined with testing a “snowpit”.  These can be done quickly by skiers as they encounter questionable areas, or as components of more in-depth snow studies such as those of the Sierra Avalanche Center.  Either way, there are some accepted techniques for a snow-pit’s construction and testing that helps to keep the interpretation of results consistent between reports.

Both locally, and while skiing in Japan, usual practice is the column test (“CT”), or extended column test (“ECT”).  This clip gives a pretty good explanation of how they work.  Since the construction and testing technique for column tests as well as the interpretation of results are standardized, even a winter mountain guide in the Japan Alps could come up with numbers that correlated well with my own local experience.

The local winters are among the reasons I choose to live here, but they do demand some degree of respect.  The winter mountains are truly beautiful, and the pace of life slows.  And winter travel in the Sierra back-country is uniquely rewarding.  Regardless, it can get a little tiresome after awhile… especially after yet another day of digging-out.

Photos:
Top: Wind-flags off the peaks after early season snows above the town of Lone Pine.  Mount Whitney is the clearly visible spire of rock farthest to the right.
Second: An avalanche-buried stop sign at the summit of Carson Pass on California State Route 88 over the Sierras.
Middle: Preparing to drop into a chute between cornices…more risk than I’m willing to take.
Fourth: My partner skiing a chute near Split Mountain in the Eastern Sierras.
Bottom: “Hiro-san”, our guide in the Japan Alps, performing a column test in a snow pit.

At the Bottom of Everything

by in Hmmm..., Luminous Aether, Mystery, Numbers, Philosophy, Science | 12 Comments

“…the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and…there is no rational explanation for it.”
– Eugene Wigner (Physicist), from a 1960 article, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

“Science” is built upon the idea that the universe works always and everywhere according the same consistent and measurable patterns. This was a radical concept five-hundred years ago, a time when the workings of the earth and the cosmos were still viewed as fundamentally metaphysical phenomena.  Regardless, this new and heretical idea proposed that understanding these rules could allow humans to make predictions about the universe.

Among the first propositions that developed from this idea was Sir Isaac Newton’s “law of universal gravitation”. Newton claimed that any two objects, anywhere in the universe, will always be attracted to each other according to a single, mathematically describable rule. And from this emerged the “universal gravitational constant“, a value represented by the capital letter “G”. This numerical expression is what is known as an “empirical physical constant”, or a value that can be repeatably found through observations of nature. It’s considered among the handful of fundamental physical constants, a set of basic mathematical laws-of-nature that govern the workings of the universe, everywhere, and all of the time.

G ≈ 6.674×10−11 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2

The speed of light in a vacuum was first successfully approximated by the Danish astronomer, Olaus Roemer, in 1676.  But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that investigations would reveal that it’s another fundamental physical constant.  Denoted by the letter “c”, the speed of light in a vacuum never changes.  No matter the relative speed of the light’s source, whether toward or away from the point of measurement, it is always the same. Einstein’s great revelation about the implication of c is that everything else must then change around it, including time and distance.  This is the basis of “relativity”.  In a rather more profound interpretation, c represents the maximum speed at which “information” about one point in the universe may be transmitted to another.

c = 299,792,458 metres per second

In 1900, the physicist, Max Planck, reluctantly concluded that the only sensible solution to a mathematical relationship between the frequency of an electromagnetic wave (such as a specific color of light) and its total energy required the application of some arbitrary, but constant value. A photon’s energy is equal to its frequency multiplied by the Planck constant.  Denoted by the character, “h”, this value forms the basis of “quantum mechanics”. It describes a smallest allowable amount of change in the universe, or “quanta”. Though unimaginably small, this is the fundamental unit of measurement for the universe itself.

h = 6.62607015×10−34 J⋅s

In 1916, the physicist, Arnold Sommerfeld, introduced the fine-structure constant.   Represented by the Greek letter, “α” (“alpha”), it describes how the force of electromagnetism affects electrically charged particles, such as electrons and protons.  Today, it has been measured to an accuracy of 250 parts-per-trillion, and astrophysicists have even investigated whether α has varied over cosmological time-spans.  But to date, most evidence indicates that it has always been the same.  It’s among a few “dimensionless physical constants”, or “bare numbers” independent of the units used in its calculation.

α ≈ 0.0072973525664, or 1/137.035999139

Scientists don’t agree exactly how many fundamental physical constants describe the universe, which ones merely emerge from the interactions of others, or even how many are truly constant. Some fundamental constants even create questions among themselves, such as why G describes such a comparatively minuscule force. Regardless, nearly all scientists do agree that there are some limited number of universal and unvarying values that describe all of nature. Most include things like the measured “rest-masses” of elementary particles, and various “coupling constants” that, as with α, describe the interactions of other forces.

We also exist in a universe with three expansive spacial and one uni-directional time dimension, and it turns out that this is pretty important. There’s no apparent reason that our universe couldn’t just as easily have any other number of dimensions, or that time couldn’t work in an entirely different manner. But if it did, then the fundamental constants couldn’t work to create the kind of order that we experience. So in a way, the very fabric of “spacetime” upon which the mathematics of nature are painted is itself another fundamental constant equal to exactly 3+1.

Curiously, if any of the fundamental physical constants, and especially the dimensionless physical constants varied by much from their measured values, then the universe would be a very different place. Most notably, intelligent life could likely not exist. So perhaps it’s merely the case that for beings to exist who can measure the physical constants, those constants must be such that the beings who do the measuring can exist. So we, and everything we see around ourselves might be but a mere coincidence of mathematics.  But there are also other more interesting, though speculative explanations for this seemingly peculiar “fine tuning” of things.

So where lead the strings of the marionette?  What is it that determines those numerical rules that give rise to our experience of this magnificently complex universe in which we exist, and upon what page is written the script?  What does this radical new idea that uniform and knowable rules govern a logically comprehensible universe find when the means-of-knowledge it creates peers toward the source of the mathematics at the very bottom of everything?

As Max Planck observed, there’s a boundary to science implied by its dependence upon our senses. On one side is a powerful ability to very accurately describe the universe our senses experience. Beyond is merely a rabbit-hole down which science yields to philosophy.  But it’s also a place where philosophy should not be mistaken as science.

“…scientists have learned that the starting-point of their investigations does not lie solely in the perceptions of the senses, and that science cannot exist without some small portion of metaphysics. Modern Physics impresses us particularly with the truth of the old doctrine which teaches that there are realities existing apart from our sense perceptions, and that there are problems and conflicts where these realities are of greater value for us than the richest treasures of experience.“
— Max Planck, The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics, 1931, translated by W. H. Johnston.

Images:
Top: Portrait of Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller, 1689.
Middle: On the dimensionality of spacetime, (1997), Max Tegmark.
Bottom: Max Planck, Archives of Max Planck Society.
Very Bottom: Fields Arranged by Purity, by: Randall Munroe, XKCD.com