Well, this weekend was kind of weird. On Saturday morning, I woke at some ungodly early hour (as I'm prone to do) and started working on a scene for my writing group. I'd been searching for ideas for weeks, and I'd finally settled upon a theme that, well... suited me. At least for now. So I sat down at my computer, turned on the radio to NPR, and started visualizing a scene, and commenced to put it down on paper. Well, at least into my word processer.
The opening scene, a man standing at a beach, looking at a sunrise... He's wearing long pants, curled up around the ankles and he standing in the water. He looks out over the ocean, sees the sun appearing just above the horizon, and
snap, he takes a picture. Then he takes some more pictures -- the water eddying around his feet, the waves, etc. until he finally turns and looks down the beach, where he sees a group of people -- police, emergency workers, etc. -- and he also sees a crashed plane bobbing in the ocean. There was a plane crash, and our man is documenting the scene.
snap.
Moments after I finished the scene on the page, the NPR radio guy chimed in with news about the Shuttle. It was missing. It should have landed but all communications were lost. I just sat there, thinking about what I had just written. And what happened AS I wrote. It disturbed me. And it reminded me.
Several years ago, in the period of my youth that I affectionately refer to as "several years ago", I was working for a software company that specialized in CAM -- Computer-Aided Manufacturing -- software. We did complex shapes, or parts that required a great deal of precision. Nike shoes, Coke bottles, the landing gear for an Airbus, a Honda bumper, toys, just about anything. Anyway, most of my job was centered on travelling around to give demos, teaching others how to use it, and performing 'benchmarks'. Benchmarking was probably the part I least enjoyed, as it entailed actually
making something, to prove that our software could do it. I did very few of these. But of those I did, the one I remember most was generating a machine tool program to cut an O-ring seal for the Space Shuttle.
Now, this was in the early 90's, well after the Challenger disaster which was caused (gulp) by a faulty O-ring seal. So, I was a little unnerved for the week or so I spent on the project. The details aren't terribly fascinating, but the 'part' had to be cut from a rod of high-grade steel (e.g., very hard steel) to a precision of one-one-hundred-thousandth of an inch... That's 0.000001" tolerance, which, needless to say, is pretty tight. Think of a rubber band shaped like a perfect circle. Now, wrap that rubber band's circle against the side of a steel cylinder. That's an O-ring seal. And it needed to be spot on.
The software did most of the work, and I got a program to generate the shape within the specified tolerance, and then I went out to the MIT laboratory in Boston to actually cut the damn thing. I spent a good day onsite, in a dark warehouse-like machine shop on campus. It worked, and I held the little part in my hand when it was finished. It was amazing to think that perhaps, this little thing that I contributed to would somehow make it into space.
Now, just to set this into perspective, there are tens of thousands of "parts" that go into the making of the shuttle. And my "part", well, who knows whatever happened to it? It could have been a prototype, or used for testing, or for some other boring purpose. Honestly, I think it's pretty doubtful that it actually made it very far. Most probably, never into space...
Still, that's the thought that I couldn't help but think about on Saturday morning. I knew all of the hours that I had spent on that little O-ring program, and how that was unimaginably small compared to making the entire shuttle capable of sending human beings into space. Very humbling. And very sad.
Which leads me back to my story, which I had started without knowing or thinking about any of this. It's a story based, thematically at least, around a branch of mathematics called Chaos Theory. It stipulates that very small changes in some initial input variable leads to unpredictable results. It's used to describe the motion of waves, or the wisp of smoke from a cigarette, or the shape of a snowflake. One small effect can lead to entirely unpredictable circumstances. And I couldn't help but think, what a very humbling, sad thought that was.
