Inner Space

There used to be a ride at Disneyland called Adventure Thru Inner Space, in which you rode in little chairs through what looked like a microscope. At first you saw cells and such, but then you got smaller and smaller, and could see cell nuclei, molecules, atoms, electrons... All of it was accompanied by an announcer's voice describing each realm of reality in that classic, booming-but-edgy voice familiar from 1960s science programs. Just as you got small enough to penetrate the nucleus of the atom, the announcer's voice changes tone: "No, we cannot go farther! It seems that we are.... getting... larger again!" The ride was created at a time when we were rather unsure about what nuclei contained :-).

Anyway, I am heading off on a 12-day meditation retreat. No posts for a while.

Speaking of inner space, I was reminded recently of a function I used to like in high school. It is the one where, when you make a solid of revolution out of it, there is finite volume but infinite surface area. (Squaring the function to put in the volume integral makes it converge, but just integrating over it in the surface integral does not converge).

The way I used to think of it was: You can fill it with paint, but you can't paint it. That extra "dx" between the inner and outer surfaces alters it from finite to infinite. Pretty interesting.

It occurred to me that a human being is the exact opposite. We have finite surface area but infinite volume. You can paint us, but never fill us with paint.