The best thing that has happened to me since the february 1983 Amtrak conversation about Superman comics, Wagner and quantum mechanics with a 16 year old wonder was Greenland. A combination of scientific frustrations caused by the chaos workshop and emotional frustrations caused by unfulfilled cravings for looooooooove drove me to pure misanthropy. The issuing claustrophobia could be cured only by a continent of ice.
Chris Pethick and I flew into Narssassuak (an abandoned US military hospital complex where uncountable Korean war GI's gave up the remnants of their mangled bodies), walked out the terminal and into the hills and saw no humans the next eleven days. We soon understood why. Greenland is in no danger of being overrun by tourists and becoming another Costa Brava. Unlike Normandy, the best weather prediction rule is: tomorrow the weather will be different. If one day it didn't rain, it would certainly rain for uninterrupted 24 hours the next day. Or snow. August temperatures are -6 to +10 degrees Celsius. It was sunny the first and the last day, just so we would come back.
In Greenland everything is out of scale. The trees are horizontal and two-dimensional. The boulders are table-sized, when they are not chair-sized. The streams are roaring rapids. The flowers are brilliant in color and pinhead sized. The icebergs are any color, from blinding white to blue to green to red to pitch black. The horizon is inverted, bright below and dark above: the clouds are lit from below, by the sunlight reflected on the ice. And the ice, there is more than enough ice to cover entire Europe.
There were three distinct moments, each etched into my memory, and each one by itself worth the entire trip. Each one was a suddenly revealed vista, surpassing in grandeur and drama anything I have seen in Alps, Rockies, or Andes.
The first revelation occurred after a day long slow climb up a canyon. We reached a snow balcony at the water divide, and for the first time saw inland Greenland. Few thousand feet below us was a strange volcanic-like black boulder pocked plateau, with a chain of small black lakes; further on, a canyon and a chain of dark hills followed by a bluish gray lake filled with enormous icebergs; more mountains, glaciers, and then the sea of ice, merging into the dark skies above.
The second moment occurred a few days latter, further inland. We spent the day walking along a chain of high-altitude (here it means 1000 meters) iced-over lakes, and were descending toward something called "The Hole" when the wind momentarily swept away the clouds bellow us, and we saw it. It is the largest strip mining operation we have ever seen. It is huge bowl of scree into which three dying glaciers mouth. Something like a sand hole dug out by a child on a beach, only scaled up to ten kilometers. At the bottom, a gray colored lake filled with armies of majestic (I should start writing tourist pamphlets for Greenland Tourist Association) icebergs, progressing imperceptibly, and every morning greeting us with new formations.
The third moment was the one that we have labored toward the entire week; we reached the highest peak on the edge of inland ice that we could reach without crossing the glaciers. It was only 1800 m, but this far north this is high altitude, snow and ice the entire year. The mountain was a finger stuck into the inland ice, with glaciers pouring by on both sides, and the view was indescribable. On one side chain after chain of dark mountains and ice filled lakes. On the other side, the inland ice at sunset - brilliant white, shifting into burgundy reds and deep violets. Clouds, clouds and clouds, ripping across the skies in most violent formations and colors. And the sensation that the ice never ends - the continent of it, continuing into the arctic and across, down into Canada... And here I am, the microscopic bundle of microscopic frustrations...
If I come back, it will have to be with ice axes, crampons and ropes - the expenses of ice beckon us irresistibly onward. I would love to come back, but I do not know whether I will be able to. Two things brought me eventually to snail-crawl, and I do not know what to do about them. One was the water - the incessant rain, and the water surging up everywhere from the ground. My boots were drenched for two continuous weeks (when they were not frozen), my feet swollen, soles burning. The other nuisance was a bleeding hemorrhoid - scrambling over slippery sharp edged boulders menstruating freely, with blood running down ones thighs.
There is no fleeing from oneself, though. I discovered that I suffered from insomnia every other night, just like in Copenhagen. And every night awake was a night back into my civilized present. I took along nothing to read, determined to do nothing but sink into the nature around me. But having to lie in tent 24 hours every second day, waiting for the rain to stop, eventually broke my determination down.
I started to think. The last day in Copenhagen Boris Shraiman told me that Farey numbers can be rewritten as self-similar continued fractions, and that they have a binary labeling. I worked out a self-similar continued fraction formula, and a binary labeling. Actually, I have no idea whether they are the ones Boris meant - but they work beautifully. They yield several different scaling laws for the stability intervals for the circle maps. The most amazing one is totally analogous to the scaling function sigma for period doublings, except that instead of organizing the trajectory splittings in the iteration space, it organizes the stability intervals in the parameter space. That the same bifurcation tree structure organizes both one-dimensional period doublings and the circle-map phase lockings I find astounding (as long as I cannot convince myself that is trivial). In any case, it is the best thing that happened to the universality in chaos since the invention of smoked eel, or at least since Feigenbaum's scaling function for period doubling. It remains to be seen who publishes it first - many people know by now that there must be such a scaling function.
After Greenland I went to lecture on chaos in a place called Szczszczszscyrk and was told that I am a famous physicist in Poland. It was a step into the time machine - the peasants toil behind horse-drawn ploughs, maidens turn into spherical little bundles as soon as they get married, people are dressed into socialist drab, and prices make no sense; physicists get the same salary in zlotys that I get in kroner, but on black market 1 krone = 100 zloty. Our colleagues run underground radio stations and papers. Still, they despair - they are defeated and believe that no change is possible as long as there is no change in Soviet Union.
Actually, a small comedy of potential import form my future is taking place here. The government has announced a series of 5-year (non-tenured) "super"-professorships. The stated goal is to prevent loss of the top research talent to emigration to other countries, and one would think it was designed just for me. The stupid thing is that it is called (and salaried as) professorship, so instead of uniting themselves behind one youthful hopeful, 10 of Niels Bohr Institutes middle-aged lecturers have applied for the position. The result will be that physics will not get a single professorship. My colleagues disappoint me, because it looks like they are just going to let me float; particle physicists do not consider me theirs, because I have been doing chaos the last year, etc..
It would clearly be a great loss for Denmark if they let me go, especially in the light of the fact that I have started taking a university course on the late 19th century danish literature. I know everything that Georg Brandes has to say about romantics of the first half of the 19th century; how many born-in-Denmark Danes can say as much?
What else do I do? Instead of fucking a lizard of my choice, I spend nights coaxing Olivia into printing out graphics on Oki - but she's so slow, so excruciatingly slow...
