Physics on the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim

Author:Margaret Wertheim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books

Chapter Seven

Smoke Rings

On Catalina, Jim had come across a curious instance of the circlon form, wherein skilled scuba divers would blow circular-shaped bubbles underwater. Aerodynamically, the process is the same as smoke rings. Jim had learned about the possibility of bubble rings from the work of diver-cinematographer Al Giddings, who would direct the underwater photography for James Cameron’s epic The Abyss, and he determined to learn the art for himself. In The Cosmic Ring, he reproduced a grainy black-and-white photograph of Giddings accompanied by a huge underwater ring that hovers in front of him like an eel. Thin and sinuous and quivering with vitality, it seems almost alive, a marine exotic that, like the creature in Cameron’s film, appears to have been conjured from the water.

Divers aren’t the only ring-making mammals. Dolphins do it, too, and mother dolphins who have acquired the skill will often pass it on to their offspring. Dolphins actually use a different technique from that practiced by divers: Instead of blowing rings directly, they create a vortex in the water with their fins or tails, then they shoot a bubble of air into the whorl with their blowholes. As the water swirls, it spins the nascent bubble into a circle. Dolphins in captivity have been observed playing with such rings, shepherding them through the water with nudges of their snouts and cutting them in two with their beaks. Dolphins have even been observed drawing bubble rings into a helix, creating shimmering spirals in their pools.

As toroidal structures, bubble rings have the same form Jim was proposing for subatomic particles, and he began to wonder if he might use these rings to study how circlon-shaped particles interact with one another. In Jim’s theory, circlons link together in networks. Was it possible he could get bubble rings to do the same? In The Cosmic Ring he had written that “I have measured photos of air rings, and I have yet to find one that varies in the slightest from … the proportions circlons should have.” Bubblons, as he called them, seemed to offer a clue as to how he might proceed with a practically applied circlon science. If he could make ring-shaped bubbles on cue, his theories would become amenable to empirical test, and Jim speculated that with bubblons he might be able to engage in a new kind of experimental nuclear physics.

The ocean, however, is an inconvenient laboratory, and soon it became one that Jim no longer had access to on a daily basis. In 1976, he and Linda purchased the Green River Gorge property and moved their little family—now with two young sons, Paul and Eric—to the wet wilds of Washington, where they set about building the trailer park. By the time he relocated, Jim had the backbone of his circlon theory figured out. But like all contenders for a major worldview, his idea needed to be fleshed out with details, and for the next thirty years he would pursue his physics wherever and whenever he could make the time.

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