Day For A Daydream

While this blog has nothing to do with the Lovin' Spoonful, I cannot resist a musical trivia interlude. Riding high in popularity after several big hits, this jug band turned rock & roll superstars fell from counterculture grace in May 1966. Their Canadian guitar player was busted for pot outside of San Francisco. The police threatened to pull his green card. The record company applied pressure and he "dropped a dime" on his dealer. The underground press had a field day defiling them. I have read that this led to the group's demise. In reality, a change in the generation's musical taste and style was more to blame than that incident.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog:
The intelligence and popularity of Albert Einstein transformed his last name into a synonym for genius. I have read much on Einstein, but recently focused on his proclivity for thought experiments. He would become fixated on an object or action triggering contemplation of mathematical equations. His theory of relativity which led to the space time continuum, began as a thought experiment riding on a bus watching the town clock recede in the distance.

 The phrase, thought experiment, struck a chord. As long as I remember, I have been an inveterate daydreamer. So, a daydream of space time dilation being relative to the velocity of the observer graduates to the prestige of a thought experiment. But, zoning out during Father Louis' Latin class thinking of battling evil forces on some faraway planet is absentminded woolgathering.  An elitist point of view n'est-ce pas?

Ever a language sleuth, I investigated this troubling term. First coined in Germany, Gedenkenexperiment,  is thinking through a hypothesis to a possible conclusion. It postulates a theory. Actual experimentation is required to make it a certainty. 

Einstein's bus ride, Newton's falling apple, Galileo's balls, (two things: 1- get your mind out of the gutter, 2 - despite popular belief, his dropping balls from the Leaning Tower was a thought experiment, not a physical one) all musings that reshaped our knowledge of the physical world in which we live. 

Somehow my musings have never succeeded to such stature. Who knows, in the future one of my daydreams will transform into the more grandiose status of thought experiment. Maybe the one in which I become an actual contributing member of the society transcending the world's petty problems generating peace and understanding among all peoples. Nah, make it the one where I ride a triceratops across the plains of Alpha Centauri leading an army of  minions against the forces of my arch enemy. As ever - BB

"I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering." - Steven Wright