McGuireville Arizona

McGuireville Arizona

There is nothing here in McGuireville except Arizona, and if you don't like that, then you should stay home. I just had a month long journey along the Pacific Coast and down the Rocky Mountains which was pretty amazing thing for most people, but I did it without really thinking too much about it.

Remembering how cold it was in some places is interesting. The coldest place along the early trip was Spokane where there just didn't seem to be any warmth in anything or anyone, it seemed colder than a night I spent in Central Oregon where it got below freezing. The next place it seemed kind of cold was up in the Yellowstone Park. Butte and Bozeman didn't seem that cold, and in fact Bozeman is one of the loveliest small college towns you will ever find.

But Yellowstone was cold, and the Grand Tetons were not. Glenwood Canyon was not cold, but those Colorado people are busy busy busy, and not really friendly. I liked Glenwood Springs downtown a lot, and those hot spring pools sure look nice. It was cold again going over the Tennessee Pass at 10 thousand feet, and I sang in the car to make my lungs work so that I wouldn't get nauseaus like I used to do at high altitude. Down in Salida it was warm again, and on a Sunday noon, the local police were on the ball, noticing me coming into town the back way and so on.

From there I got into Taos, and it was cold both nights at the rest stop by the bridge. There was a guy living in one of the shelters with his motorcycle, I don't know where he went during the day. But it was sure cold at night. On the second day in Taos I got a shower and a short swim at the city pool, feeling the 7 thousand feet and taking it really easy. Boy the water in the pool felt clean, I wonder if it has anything to do with air pressure and the way the air can't hold up the dust particles up there. The water was really clean, and felt like glycerine.

Those were the cold places, Spokane, Yellowstone, the Pass, Taos at night. CouerdAlene was warm, so was Medford and Bend, and Butte, and Missoula. and Bozeman. The pass down into Sante Fe was fantastic in fall colors along the river, but Poajoque was grim and dusty, and Sante Fe was not exactly cheery. Albuquerque seemed a little gay, I dunno just the people in on some private joke. In Gallup its better, they smile and are relaxed and pay attention to strangers, and in Flagstaff its fine, people are enjoying life.

Where I left off last time was with Harry Potter waving a dowel rod. The spell he might be casting is whether it is going to rain or not. If the barometer falls, the weather is likely to turn bad. If the barometer is stable, then no change. So if you were a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you should be able to use a stick to predict rain, and people will think you are a witch.

But its worth a discussion of what might be happening to the air molecules when you wave the stick. In dry air when we hit the molecules with the stick the nitrogens are likely to have a high angular momentum, but the stick is overwhelming. So the nitrogens get kicked pretty far, and since they are rotating, they precess when they hit other things. This is turbulence. The oxygens behave similarly but with less angular momentum they get bounced around, and they don't precess, so the overall effect is diffusion. You could do a statistical analysis and predict the turbulence in a statistically predicable way, if this model is close to what actually happens.

Another thing to consider, before adding the water, is local changes in the number of molecules (changes in pressure). If the nitrogen goes pretty far there might be local change in pressure near the stick - that is low pressure - as in a wing. It seems likely that the nitrogen vacates the area faster than the oxygen. The oxygen then is in a region where collisions are less likely. The oxygen expands to fill this gap, absorbing heat, and cooling its environment.

This is a pretty far fetched description of waving a stick, but it might be close to what is going on. You bash the air with a stick, and the nitrogen and oxygen behave in somewhat different ways, causing turbulent flow. Once I worked out a similar model for the expansion of gas. In this model, when the air goes through the nozzle, the oxygen expands somewhat explosively compared to the stubborn nitrogen. In this model I imagined that the oxygen expansion forces the nitrogen away, forcing the translation explosively and leading to precession and turbulence.

But these two motions are fundamentally different, bashing the air and expanding the air, although both result in turbulence. It may be that there are two different kinds of turbulence, one from an overwhelming collision with a stick, and one from expansion as from a nozzle. There may be two kinds, but even if that is so, the model to predict the turbulence may be the same for either realm, with slightly different initial conditions.

What happens in turbulence has been a hot topic in the journals. Heisenberg had some reason to comment on turbulence back in the pre-war days. He wrote a mysterious paper in German which I tried to read once, and von Karman (who as Hungarian) was offended and wrote an angry reply. The debate continued in a not very gentlemanly way, and I think von Karman was offended that Heisenberg would dare to comment on something so far from his field. But maybe it was part of Heisenberg's field, he had to deal with diffusion and so on of moving particles, just as air is moving particles.

What the result was I don't understand. I am not sure what von Karman and Heisenberg thought about turbulence. Clearly Heisenberg's atomic particles were moving in a very different environment, but the concepts should be general enough that one model would describe all motions.

To confuse the issue even more, the contemporary mathematician Mandelbrot also weighed in on turbulence, providing some very simple statistical models based on complex functions that produce maps very similar to the development of turbulence. When considering the von Karman/Heisenberg feud, it is interesting that the only other similar feud that I am aware of is the Mandelbrot/Herbert Simon feud concerning probabilities in natural language.

Either way the turbulence problem is interesting, and the addition of water to the air adds another molecule, one that includes an ionic attraction, and the likelihood of condensing at low pressures. The motion is complicated, the likelihood of condensation is even more complicated, there is probably a statistical likelihood that some water condenses no matter what you do, but all of these reactions can be modelled for the gas in a statistical way so that the system can be fully described.

But the important thing to know about fluids that have magnetic and electric properties is that they swirl when moving through magnetic fields. This is why the water in your sink swirls the way it does. Now, when there water in the air it is natural for it to form swirling patterns, and when the amount of water increases it is probable that the swirls will become larger in diameter. GK Bachelor's book covers the theory that there are various values of atmospheric swirling that are stable, and that the system will seek one of the stable patterns of rotation.

In the case of our atmosphere filling with water due to warming, the larger diameter swirls are predictable. Under these swirls the arctic zones get a regular dose of warm weather and there is a danger of the icepack melting. But what seems to be happening these days is that the atmosphere is filling with water, and when it is generally "full" it is dumping ALL of the water as rain, flushing the land and cleaning it. If I am not mistaken this is the same phenomenon that people wrote about in 1810 just after the Battle of Tippecanoe. There was an earthquake, the river ran north, and it rained for thirty days.

The whole thing might be caused by the reversal of the planet's magnetic poles, something that might have been triggered by a nuclear explosion or bomb. It has happened before, and is probably not serious enough to require new fangled high tech vehicles populated by healthy young men and busty young women looking for a place to settle down. its not as serious as the reversal of the earth's poles. "Oh, the magnetic poles reversing. Nevermind."