{"id":687,"date":"2023-05-04T03:58:25","date_gmt":"2023-05-04T07:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=687"},"modified":"2023-06-05T17:58:51","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T21:58:51","slug":"silver-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=687","title":{"rendered":"Silver Water"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/span> 7<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span>\n

Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

(For Winston and Theodore) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.<\/p>Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet<\/em> <\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Next to our kitchen sink is a tall, nickel-plated, double-barreled water purifier resting on stilts that looks from a distance like the holding towers atop older high-rise buildings in cities like Manhattan. Into its top tank, Kari and I regularly pour unfiltered tap water. Powered only by gravity, the raw input slowly makes its way through a series of filters\u2014their glossy specs assure us that in a pinch, the filters could purify water from our pond\u2014before dripping into the purified holding tank below. From the attached spigot at the base of the lower tank, we channel purified and excellent-tasting water into drinking glasses and cooking pans several times each day. Because of its shiny nickel plating, whenever they visit, our North Carolina grandsons call the contraption\u2019s output \u201cSilver Water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until recently, the merits of drinking silver water were not as convincing as they might have been. The water tasted better and, by all accounts, was healthier for us. But because its stacked canisters were fashioned from germ-repelling stainless steel, their opacity prevented our seeing where, and how much, water was at any moment tied up in its top-to-bottom journey. Unable to calculate at a glance how much volume had made its way from the raw input tank, through the various filters, and into the purified tank, Kari and I could not readily know when the upper tank needed to be topped off. We could sometimes guesstimate that if we hadn\u2019t refilled the upper tank in a while or if the strong, steady flow from the spigot ever weakened, both tanks were probably low. But, like Schr\u00f6dinger before us, we could not know for sure without standing on tiptoe to remove the lid and peer inside the top canister or clumsily lifting the sometimes heavy top canister from atop the purified water tank on the bottom. Why was the sure knowledge of the combined water levels inside our silver, black box <\/em>important? Because aside from running out of purified drinking water at inopportune times, if we got the levels wrong\u2014if, say, Kari filled the upper chamber at 9 am, and I, not knowing of her prudence, filled it up myself at 10 am\u2014we could cause, and for years periodically did<\/em> cause, a kitchen flood, not just from water breaching the top of the bottom canister to drip onto the counter, but when that same water made its way to the countertop falls that spilled to the hardwood kitchen floor below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you pick up one end of the stick you also pick up the other.<\/p>African Proverb<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Several years ago, after an arduous bike trip in the hills of southern France, the soreness in my left thigh and calve muscles did not repair itself as rapidly as it usually did. On a visit to the local medicin<\/em>, I was warned that the varicose veins on the back of my thigh and calve might have already led to a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, that could put my lungs at risk for a pulmonary embolism. I needed surgery. When I asked what he planned to do about it, the elderly country doctor merely shrug-puffed his lips as if to say, “Alors, ca?<\/em>” before replying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMais, non, monsieur,<\/em> this lovely but tiny corner of Provence is not the place you will wish to have such a risky procedure performed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On consulting vascular specialists in Geneva, Switzerland, a city I lived before moving to France, I was told that surgery should be avoided if it could be known or predicted that its aftermath would show little or no reduction in the probability wave that, deep inside my leg, a blood clot had already formed, or might soon do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHeureusement<\/em> pour vous<\/em>, monsieur<\/em>, we have just the device to help us solve ce myst\u00e8re<\/em>. Do you know the \u2018U-tube\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(We have all by now heard of YouTube<\/em>, whose trademarked name is a clever portmanteau for \u201cYour Own Boob Tube.\u201d My time in Europe predated that kind of YouTube but not its homonymous connection to the less obscure but not entirely unknown word \u201cU-tube.\u201d A U-tube is a U-shaped tube or pipe used to measure the pressure of a liquid or gas. (See Perpetual Moment<\/em><\/a> to learn of my failed but fun college try to employ a U-tube to pit the forces of gravity and buoyancy against one another and thus power the entire world forever with free, renewable energy! Hehe) One of the principles of a U-tube is that absent a semipermeable membrane at the nadir of the \u201cU,\u201d the pressure of a gas or liquid will always be the same on either leg or side of it. Picture pouring colored water into a clear glass-shaped U-tube. The water level on the left will always equal the water level on the right.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere you see the visible side of the U-tube,\u201d continued the Swiss physician after his assistant had wheeled in and somehow connected me to a new machine. (I must have, all these years later, repressed the gory details.) On the top of the contraption, I could see what looked a little like an oversized but curvy mercury thermometer, but without the mercury. Its vertical limits were measured by some other means that I couldn\u2019t figure out at first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd here,\u201d he said, touching my bad leg, \u201cis the invisible side of the same tube.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we can connect together both sides of the U-tube\u2014your leg and this ‘contraption,’ as you call it\u2014we can simulate the effect of performing the ligation (stripping away your bad veins) by regarding the visible pressure of your blood when we manipulate the invisible pressure inside your leg. Since what we see on the meter will always be equal to the pressure we cannot see in your veins, we know they are the same number. We can predict with approximate certainty the impact of the ligation before taking such a risk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn other words, we\u2019ll be looking at the blood flow in my leg through this surrogate here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExactement! <\/em>‘Surrogate’ is le mot juste<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The doctor and his assistant began to manipulate my leg by pinching and pressing on various places on the visible varicose veins to simulate removing them. With the amplification of an auxiliary microphone, we were also able to hear the difference each time the pressure changed. Still unable, decades later, to picture how the docs connected the liquid in my veins to the visible half of the U-tube, I only remember seeing (and hearing) that when they simulated removing the veins, the \u201cneedle\u201d did not budge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs you can see, monsieur<\/em>, a ligation will have no impact on the surface circulation nor the underlying veins at risk for DVT. Performing the operation might even compromise the vasculature of the leg. We highly recommend you do not undertake this risk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I didn\u2019t. Not then and there, anyway. Persuaded by the physics experiment, I accepted from the Swiss that I was not at risk but decided not to return to France. I stayed in Switzerland four months and then returned to the States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On examining my leg, my parents\u2019 go-to surgeon, who had not heard of what he termed the experimental U-tube test, took one look at the visible tip of my vasculature iceberg and recommended he be allowed immediately to put my leg under the knife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We really need to reduce all possible risk of DVT.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as the Swiss predicted, within months of the surgery, all the veins grew back, look just as bad today as before they were stripped, and whose ligation, I am now told, may have contributed to conditions leading to my saddle pulmonary embolism earlier this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, after the hardwood floor in our kitchen began to show signs of being periodically bathed overnight in a puddle of silver water\u2014the occasional miscalculation of the height of the probability wave that predicted that in this universe, at least, the combined chambers of our water tower were just too much for it\u2014we now have a U-tube in our kitchen. The makers of our water tower had experimented with a black plastic beta version of a spigot connected to a glass tube. (What would Winston and Theodore have made of plastic parts dispensing silver water?) But when the stainless steel version finally came out, I just had to buy one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tube attaches to the top of the spigot and runs to the full height of the bottom purified water canister. Like Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s vile of cyanide\u2014silver water sounds exotic but is not lethal\u2014is made of clear glass. Its transparency allows us to “see” into the lower tank without removing the top canister. We need only look at its surrogate. And because the U-tube sits outside the tank\u2014that\u2019s the point, right: to echo the same information about the water level inside the tank?\u2014the transparency of the glass tube and of the water inside it allows light to pass through both substances to reveal behind them the nickel plating on the lower tank. Depending on the light in the kitchen, Kari and I must sometimes squint to differentiate the slight refraction that signals the top of the water in the glass tube. Winston and Theodore were correct. It really does look like silver water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as the visible portion of the Swiss U-tube that allowed my doctors to \u201csee inside\u201d the vasculature of my leg without breaking its skin, so to speak\u2014as I said, I don\u2019t recall how the Swiss doctors connected my vein to their contraption\u2014the U-tube on our water tank allows Kari and me to peer inside at the actual water level without lifting Schr\u00f6dinger’s lid. These two half-circle U-tubes bring this indirection full circle to Rudy Rucker\u2019s interpretation of Abbott\u2019s Flatland. In that classic 1884 novel, a surgeon living in a higher dimension is able to perform heart surgery on a patient in a lower dimension without breaking her skin1<\/sup>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the message here, besides there being more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in our philosophy? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As above, so below, we are surrounded by the sometimes invisible, visible<\/em> ends of a thousand U-tubes we can put to use\u2014if we squint\u2014to predict\/guess\/estimate\/know with precision a thousand hidden things about their opposite number concealed beyond our reach. With much, much more to come about this rich and ubiquitous phenomenon, I\u2019ll close here with just one more strange loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blood is full of visible markers for invisible conditions. I once helped AstraZeneca create a biomarker data mining system whose object was to bait signs of disease in order to catch their cures. In hospital earlier this year, I underwent five days of tests attempting to recreate what might have caused the \u201cshower\u201d of blood clots that gummed up both my lungs. Home these past two months, I can no longer see inside me as the ER radiologists must have done, and am told that for a host of reasons, I will not need additional scans as my recovery presses onward. Like walking back the Big Bang in hopes of determining not the moment but the driving force of creation, my blood has now been mined for dozens of biomarkers, none of which directly revealed to my medical team the precise condition of my lungs before or after their unwanted shower. But like the visible end of the U-tube in my leg or in my kitchen, the visible markers in my blood told my team\u2014indirectly\u2014the condition of the invisible furniture inside the temple of my body without even (other than a dozen annoying pinpricks) breaking my skin. What other ends of the stick might I practice picking up in order to peer under my lid?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NOTES:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. In Then, Now & Yet<\/a>,<\/em> I expand on Rudy Rucker’s thought experiment where a “heightful” being from a three-dimensional world such as our own passes through Edward Abbott’s Flatland<\/em>, a two-dimensional, “heightless” existence whose objects possess only length and width. In Rucker’s version, such a supreme bring could empty a Flatland home of all its furniture by passing through neither window nor door.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    <\/span> 7<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-changefulness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}