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by Bob Berman

  This atomic theory became a popular explanation of nature’s animation. The reason the belief lasted only as long as the modern “Elvis is alive” concept—a couple of generations—is that it ultimately collided with the genius of Aristotle.

  Aristotle was born on the Greek mainland in 384 BCE. His prolific writings were a mixed bag, although many of his goofs were inherited from his teacher Plato. These mistakes included relatively minor errors, such as his belief that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, and major blunders, such as his insistence that Earth is the stationary center of all motion.

  He spent countless pages exploring the causes and nature of motion in his groundbreaking book The Physics. In one of its subsections (Book II) Aristotle claims that actions begin because nature “wishes to achieve a goal.”

  But here’s the point. In both Greek atom theory and Aristotelian philosophy, natural motion originates from within each object. This is the reverse of our modern thinking. Science now insists that nothing budges unless acted upon by an outside force.

  Many of Aristotle’s ideas provide grist for deep thought to this day. Book IV discusses time as being a quality of motion, which, he said, has no independent existence of its own. He also implied that an observer is necessary for time to exist. Both these concepts are very much in line with modern quantum thinking. Few physicists today think that time has any independent reality beyond being a tool of animal perception.

  Later in The Physics, Aristotle tackles the old “prime mover” enigma by arguing that the universe and its motions are eternal. You don’t need an initial instigator to start the ball rolling. Everything moves; it’s always moved; it’s its nature to move.

  In other words, as we gaze at nature’s endless animation, we see a pageant that has no need for the cause-and-effect business: every moving entity exhibits the dynamic aliveness of the eternal One. It sounds very much like Hindu Advaita or Buddhist teachings.

  Moreover, Aristotle said, matter’s energy never diminishes. In this, too, Aristotle is confirmed by modern science. We have accepted since the nineteenth century that the universe’s total energy never decreases.

  With this mixed assortment of profound and nutty notions, Aristotle is nonetheless best remembered for yet another aspect of his epic treatise on why things move: the elements. He actually borrowed the idea from Empedocles, who was born around 490 BCE in Sicily. Embraced for the next two thousand years, this theory basically states that everything is made of earth, air, water, or fire (or mixtures of them), to which Aristotle added a divine fifth element, ether, found only in the heavens.

  Aristotle said that each element liked to exist in a particular place and would always go there if it could. This, he said, was the central reason for motion.

  A clay pot, for example, is made of earth. This element fundamentally belongs to a realm at the center of the universe (i.e., beneath the ground) and hence desires to return there. So at the slightest provocation a pot falls because its natural motion is downward. That would bring it closer to “home.”

  The element water also wants to go down. Its domain is the sea, which, for the ancients, was the region surrounding the lowest realm—made of earth, clay, and rocks. This is why people, composed of lots of water, easily fall and bruise. Our bodies want to fall. But when bathing in the ocean we don’t fall or even necessarily sink because our body’s watery element is now “home” and at rest in its natural environment.

  Fire, on the other hand, is of a mysterious realm high above us, and thus its natural motion is upward. This explains why fire and anything associated with it, such as smoke, readily rise. The element air is another lives-up-high substance, which explains why bubbles in water always head upward.

  Hence was born the notion of “place”—everything has its preferred position and tries to go there. Aristotle said that natural place has a dunamis, or power to create motion.

  It all made sense. It still makes sense, even though it’s wrong. Aristotle’s notions about why things move held sway for eighty generations, until well into the Renaissance. It was still the paradigm for a no less brilliant observer than Leonardo da Vinci, who made frequent allusion to the four elements.

  Leonardo’s writings make contemporary motion beliefs crystal clear. In particular, he articulately pondered the nature of force:

  “It is born in violence and dies in liberty.”

  “It drives away in fury whatever opposes its destruction.”

  “Force lives always in hostility to whoever controls it.”

  “It willingly consumes itself.”

  “Always it desires to grow weak and to spend itself.”

  Judging by these quotations from a 1517 Leonardo manuscript, it’s obvious that he saw force, another initiator of motion, as an almost sentient presence. It had deliberate objectives. Like Mona Lisa, it schemed and dreamed.

  It took another 170 years—until 1687, when Isaac Newton spelled out his three laws of motion in the Principia—for modern concepts of how and why things move to finally appear.

  Of course to us, as observers and participants in nature’s nonstop action, the real enjoyment lies in simply watching the pageant. And here, I was to learn, even sluggishness brings jaw-dropping surprises.

  CHAPTER 2: Slow as Molasses

  How We Learned to Love Lethargy

  I’m ready to go anywhere…

  —BOB DYLAN, “MR. TAMBOURINE MAN” (1964)

  The human brain has a bias. We are wired to notice abrupt motion.

  If we stare blankly out a window, thinking about our taxes, we’ll be snapped to attention if the still life is punctured by sudden movement. A rabbit darting from a bush, say. The scene may already be pregnant with countless slow movers—caterpillars, subtle swayings of branches, clouds mutating—but we will be oblivious to all of it. A shame. While we may pay attention to the sudden fast things, Earth’s oozing, creeping entities influence our lives far more than the darting bunnies.

  Our bias toward speed is at least as old as written language. Though the pace of life in olden times was far more leisurely than it is today, classical and ancient literature showed little interest in “slow.” True, everyone knew the sun set 180 degrees away from where it first appeared at dawn. And agricultural societies cared about wheat growing taller. But only the final result mattered. They didn’t know or care that corn grows an inch a day, an imperceptible motion twenty times slower than a clock’s hour hand.

  We are all prisoners of our experience, and human motion was the standard for what we’d call slow or fast. The speediest person who ever lived is alive today: Jamaica’s Usain Bolt. He ran the hundred-meter dash in 9.58 seconds in 2009 for a speed of twenty-three miles an hour. This is the very fastest a human has traveled using no more than his own legs. As if to prove it was no mere ephemeral fluke, he virtually equaled that speed when he left all competitors behind during the 2012 Olympics in London.

  Of course, nobody can maintain that pace for long. The fastest mile, at three minutes and 43.13 seconds, amounts to sixteen miles per hour. And the best a marathoner has achieved is to average 12.5 miles per hour. We consider animals slow or fast based on the ancient important issue of whether they can catch up to us from behind.1

  But our exploration at the moment is of the far more prevalent realm of slothfulness. Speaking of which, those three-toed mammals didn’t earn their reputations for nothing. A sloth, even when motivated, only walks at 0.07 miles per hour. “Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it”—as Ice sang in West Side Story; the most excited sloth would need a long summer day to cover a single mile. Even giant sea turtles lope 25 percent faster.

  Perceived speed is a tricky business. We regard something as fast only if it moves its own body length in a short time. For example, a sailfish swims ten of its lengths per second and is thus viewed as very swift. But a Boeing 747 airliner approaching for a landing only manages to traverse one of its lengths, 230 feet, in a second. It’s visually penalized by its own enormit
y. From a distance, a descending jumbo jet seems virtually motionless because it takes an entire second to fully shift its position. Yet it actually moves four times faster than the fish.

  Now consider bacteria. Half the known varieties have the ability to propel themselves, usually by whipping their flagella—long helical appendages that look like a tail. Are they slow? In one sense, yes. The fastest bacteria can traverse the thickness of a human hair each second. Should we be impressed?

  Zoom in, however, and this motion becomes remarkable. First, that bacterium has moved one hundred times its own body length each second. Some manage two hundred body lengths. Relative to their size, they swim twenty times faster than fish. It’s equivalent to a human sprinter breaking the sound barrier.

  Moreover, the covered distance quickly adds up. Germs can transport themselves one or two feet per hour. That’s the speed of a minute hand on a wall clock. No wonder diseases spread.

  In our homes, other eerie motion unfolds as well, all the time. Dust in the air, for example, much of which consists of tiny bits of dead skin. Watch a sunbeam cast its rays through a window and your home’s omnipresent suspended dust becomes obvious. After all, light rays are invisible in and of themselves. In our homes we see a beam only when it strikes countless slow-drifting particles. In very humid conditions, minuscule water droplets catch the light. But in dry air it’s always dust.

  A quick glance makes it seem as if the suspended particles aren’t going anywhere. They move up or down with the slightest air current. But leave the room alone—at night, for example, when nobody is disturbing anything—and all this dead skin and other detritus settles at the rate of an inch an hour. That’s ten times slower than all those scurrying bacteria. Who suspected that our homes are so creepy?

  In the visible realm, the standard archetypes for intimate slow mo are our fingernails. And hair.

  Fingernails grow a quarter of an inch longer every two months. That’s half the rate of hair growth. If we neglected our barber appointments the way Newton and Einstein did, we’d find our hair six inches longer each year.

  But nails vary in interesting ways. Our longer fingers grow their nails more speedily. Pinkie nails advance sluggishly. Toenails grow at only one-fourth the rate of fingernails. That is, they grow at that rate unless you like to walk barefoot, which stimulates growth. Fingernails respond to stimulation, too. That’s why typists and computer addicts enjoy the fastest-growing nails of anyone. Maybe this explains why so many of us writers like to bite them.

  Nails grow faster in summer, faster in males, faster in nonsmokers, and faster in pregnancy. But nails do not grow at all after you’re dead. That macabre myth probably started because the skin on dead fingers pulls back, exposing more nail within two days after a person has passed away.

  Probably the most dramatic example of slow motion on earth is the earth itself. In caverns, stalactites and stalagmites typically extend at the rate of one inch every five hundred years. By comparison, mountains are downright speedy; they push themselves higher—in the case of the Himalayas, anyway—by a couple of inches a year.2

  Stalactites are mirrored in this reflective pool in Luray Caverns, located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. It typically takes five hundred years for each of these downward-pointing structures to grow one inch.

  A 2006 study showed that mountain ranges typically rise to their full height in only about two million years. Mount Everest has grown measurably taller since it was first scaled. Some activities just keep getting harder.

  Actually, you yourself are moving even when you’re doing the couch-potato thing. All landmasses are shifting, carrying you and your TV toward the west if you live in the United States. You can lie in bed and sing, “California, here I come!” But at half an inch a year, you’d better bring your own trail mix.

  This tectonic drift was first discovered by Abraham Ortelius, a well-regarded Flemish mapmaker, in the late sixteenth century. He wrote, “The Americas were torn away from Europe and Africa… by earthquakes and floods” and went on to note that “the vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”

  Independently, Alexander von Humboldt, in the mid-nineteenth century, while mapping the eastern coast of South America, wrote that its emerging outline seemed like the adjoining jigsaw-puzzle piece for the western side of Africa. The only logical conclusion was that continents shift. But neither of these men was credited with this astonishing revelation. Nor did any other scientists take the idea and run with it. It wasn’t until Alfred Wegener’s 1912 theory of continental drift that people started taking it seriously, even if there remained more critics of it than believers for the next half century.

  Here was a case where you had an effect—landmass motion—before you had any conceivable cause. Yet it always stared us in the face. What’s below Earth’s surface? Lava, obviously—what we now call magma. This is a liquid. Suddenly it seemed plausible that continents float on this thick, dense fluid. And if they float, they obviously could shift. The problem was coming up with a mechanism or force that could propel them sideways. Ever try pushing a stalled car? Imagine the torque required to budge an item like Asia. Continents are not pond scum.

  That’s why the idea of drifting continents was not widely accepted among the top geologists. It was, in fact, ridiculed for decades. No proposed mechanism that seemed truly plausible came forth, at least none in which the math would work. It took until the 1950s and particularly the 1960s before the true reason for landmass motion finally came to light. The cause had been hidden beneath thousands of feet of murky brine.

  It was the dramatic but unknown reality of the sea floor spreading apart. Mid-ocean volcanic activity creates widening fissures and forces a growing separation between the floating continents. The greatest fault line, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, is the primary point of separation for the earth’s crust. New techniques of seismology and, finally, GPS tracking sealed the deal.

  Nowadays we know of eight separate floating landmasses, each chugging along in various directions. The Hawaiian chain is the fastest moving, as it heads to the northwest at the rate of four inches annually. We can now also easily match geologic features on one continent’s edge with those on another’s, proving they were connected in the not-so-distant past. For example, eastern South America and western Africa not only share specific unique rock formations but also contain matching fossils and even living animals found nowhere else. Similarly, the Appalachians and Canada’s Laurentian Mountains are a perfect continuous match with rock structures in Ireland and Britain. All the evidence proves that the separate continents were once a single supercontinent—the famous Pangaea. It formed three hundred million years ago and started breaking apart one hundred million years later.

  Before Pangaea there were long periods of multiple drifting continents separated by several oceans alternating with periods in which single, unbroken supercontinents were surrounded by water, which encircled the entire planet. The monolithic supercontinents that preceded Pangaea have names like Ur, Nena, Columbia, and Rodinia. We humans got to see none of it. Even the Rodinians, 1.1 billion years ago, never strutted around with proud Rs on their sweatshirts. They were microscopic creatures who lived exclusively in the sea.

  So in continental drift we have something continuous and certain that vastly changes the appearance of Earth over tens of millions of years. Here is slow, epic, ceaseless movement—unseen and unfelt. And suspected by not a single pre-Renaissance genius.

  In our human obsession with measuring and categorizing things, we find one very obvious end point when it comes to speed: The bottommost terminal. Nothing can travel slower than “stopped.” Yet it’s surprisingly hard to find anything that exhibits no motion on any level.

  If we look closely, even a sleeping sloth stirs. It’s breathing, and its atoms jiggle furiously. But it’s especially cool to note that the colder something is, the slower its at
oms move, so true motionlessness means reaching a state of infinite cold.

  At the chilliest place on earth (the Antarctic, where a frosty negative 129 degrees Fahrenheit was registered in 1983) there’s still plenty of atomic motion. Atoms stop moving only at 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. That’s absolute zero. It was first recognized by the brilliant if cantankerous Lord Kelvin in the mid-nineteenth century; his posthumous reward was the increasingly utilized Kelvin temperature scale, which places its zero at that momentous point (rather than at water’s freezing point, as Anders Celsius did, or at the temperature of an icy brine slush, which is where Daniel Fahrenheit chose to position his scale’s starting position).

  Until the mid-1960s, astronomers thought that if thermometers were positioned far from any stars, they would register absolute zero throughout the universe. Now we know that the heat of the big bang produces a five-degree warmth that fills nearly every cosmic crevice. It’s usually expressed as 2.73 degrees on the Kelvin scale. (And the universe keeps getting colder all the time, chilled by its expansion like a discharging aerosol can of whipped cream: it was twice as warm eight billion years ago.)

  The universe’s coldest known place, its ultimate Minnesota, is right here on earth, in research laboratories where temperatures less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero were first created in 1995. This technological deep freeze yields an Alice in Wonderland of bizarre conditions. When atomic motion stops, matter loses all resistance to electrical current, creating superconductivity. Strange magnetic properties also arise (the Meissner effect), making magnets levitate like magician’s assistants. Then there’s superfluidity, in which liquid helium defies gravity and flows up the sides of its container, escaping like some resourceful mouse by simply scampering up and out. Finally, a new state of matter materializes as any substance approaches absolute zero. Neither solid, liquid, gas, or plasma, it’s called the Bose-Einstein condensate. Shoot light into it and the photons of light themselves come to a virtual halt.3