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...
