How the Handicapper became a Jockey

The other night, I had a rather intense dream. Intense emotions. Intense realism.

Intense fiction.

When one of my roommates first moved in to my current house and home last spring, he introduced me to the discipline of handicapping thoroughbred horse-races using the structured and tried and true methodology of the Controlling Factors: Speed, Class, Record, Weight, Interval between races, time, and odds. While he has returned to work two days per week, he spends every of the intervening days, for most of each day, betting the horses. Personally, I think it is a bit excessive, but it's not my business, as long as he makes rent each month.

Since then, I've expanded my handicapping knowledge base, including formal studies of various methodologies--but still, I don't have the money to play the races regularly--nor the desire to--but rather continued more formal studies because of my extensive background in forecasting, modeling, and statistical analyses.

But this is just background information for this odd, intense dream I had the other day.

The beginning of the dream started with my estranged wife spending pleasurable quality time together with me, just like we used to do. It was a refreshing change from the cold rudeness she affords me whenever I travel to her parents' house, where she lives with my daughter.

They say time heals all. But surely this is a sign that the intervening year and a half since our separation has had barely any effect at all--that I still wish that a snap of the finger could bring us back to our happy days--that we could once again be a happy family. In my dream we spent happy times, as we did for so much of the almost five years we were together, exploring the natural world together--thinking about the science behind what we take for granted--thinking about such things as why ice floats, for example. We take for granted that ice floats. But because we take it for granted, we don't think about it. And because we don't think about it, we really don't understand what is going on that makes ice float. In fact, ice won't always float. We take it for granted that ice floats in liquid water, but never stop to think that the very physics that makes ice float in water could make ice sink in some other liquids, or that in the microgravity of freefall, such as a spaceship in orbit--that's right, there is a strong gravitational pull on spaceships; the only reason astronauts seem to be weightless (not massless, which would mean they didn't exist) is because, they--and their spacecraft--are in fact very strongly being affected by the earth's gravity. They are weightless because they are in a very controlled freefall in a special condition where they fall towards the earth (quite fast, too--the speed at which they orbit) and they fall at just the right angle that their freefall is just at a rate that matches the curvature of the earth. That's right--spaceships and astronauts are actually in freefall, because of the earth's gravity (and their very fast orbital speed is evidence of how strong this gravity is), but in a special freefall where they fall towards the earth, and just match the curvature of the earth, so the freefall can continue ad nauseam. If the spaceship moved faster than the pull of gravity made them fall, the spaceship would leave orbit--and not be weightless. If the spaceship moved slower than the pull of gravity, it would not keep up with the curvature of the earth and would fall towards the earth until it crashed--and experience negative gee's. The whole reason I expounded on the explanation of spaceships and the illusion that there is no gravity in space is to explain further that ice does not float in space, but not because there is no gravity--rather because the spaceship is in freefall matching the pull of gravity, thus making it seem like there is no gravity, when in fact, there is a lot of gravity in space. Because it the pull of gravity is matched by the spaceship's freefall, ice in water would not float--the pull of gravity on the water and the ice is matched and made to seem absent because the ship that the glass of icewater is in is in freefall.

So why does ice float on earth, when we obviously know that gravity is present?

It is because water behaves strangely around its freezing point. Due to hydrogen bonding and the fact that a water molecule is polar (that is, because of an unpaired set of electrons on the oxygen-rich side of the molecule, and the relative lack of any charge on the hydrogen side, the water molecule is overall neutral electrically, but exerts a slight negative charge effect on the oxygen side and a slight positive charge effect on the hydrogen side). Because water is polar, it experiences hydrogen bonding--that is, an attraction between the unbalanced concentration of negative charge on the oxygen side and the unbalanced lack of negative charge (relative positivity) on the hydrogen side. This attraction occurs between water molecules and is, in fact, what causes water to be liquid at room temperature and pressure instead of a gas; without the cohesion caused by this polarity keeping molecules attracted to each other, at room temperature, water would not have any attraction between molecules, and a substance as light as water would cease to have any cohesive forces within it, freeing the molecules to act as a gas.

So, what does this have to do with ice floating? (Or, more circumlocutionally, what does this have to do with my intense dream?) It is this polarity that causes something strange to happen to the intermolecular interactions of water around its freezing point (perhaps another day, I'll explain that the Celsius temperature scale does not mean that the freezing point of water is "cold" or "hot"--or that 0°C lacks any temperature and, say, -40°C (which coincides with -40°F, incidentally). The Celsius scale was simply defined as 0°C being the temperature at which water turned from liquid to sold (or vice versa) at standard pressure, and 100°C was the point at which water turned from liquid to gas (or vice versa). But as I said, I'll write more at length on this in a future post....

As I just mentioned, the polarity causes something "strange" to happen around freezing temperature. First, I must make something else we take for granted--and therefore don't really understand--perfectly clear; I must define what, precisely, a "liquid" and a "solid" are. A liquid, as I alluded earlier, is a state of matter characterised by intermolecular attraction strong enough to cause the molecules of a substance to maintain contact with each other (without molecules having a strong enough attraction to maintain contact with each other, the substance ceases to "stay together" and becomes a gas). But this intermolecular attraction is not strong enough to form a structure (i.e. the intermolecular forces are not strong enough to maintain each molecule of the substance a fixed position relative to each other--a solid). What is the force opposing intermolecular forces, determining what state a substance will be? It is temperature, something else we take for granted. Temperature, technically defined by the Kinetic Molecular Theory, is simply defined as the amount of kinetic energy (energy of motion) the substance's molecules have. The faster the molecules move, the hotter a substance is. The slower a substance's molecules move, the colder the temperature. Therefore, although it is "temperature" that determines what state a substance will be--solid, liquid, or gas--a more meaningful explanation is that whether a substance will be a solid, liquid, or gas, is determined by the balance between the intermolecular attraction and the motion of the molecules (temperature) which acts opposing the intermolecular attraction. A solid is thus the point at which intermolecular attractive forces are stronger than the motion of the molecules. And since we do not change the intermolecular forces of a substance, the only variable is the temperature--or the motion of the molecules. A liquid is a substance within the range of temperature/molecular motion where intermolecular attraction is able to maintain a cohesion between the substance's molecules (i.e. intermolecular attraction is strong enough to prevent the substance from being a gas, but not strong enough to maintain fixed relative positions of the molecules--a solid), but not strong enough to make it a solid. When the molecular motion is high enough to overcome the intermolecular attraction, the substance ceases to maintain cohesion between molecules and the molecules have enough energy to roam freely--be a gas.

So what happens that is "strange" with water around it's freezing temperature? What is "strange" is that liquid water--water with enough intermolecular attraction to maintain cohesiveness of the substance to itself but enough molecular motion/temperature to prevent its molecules from settling into fixed relative positions/structure--has a certain average distance between its molecules. I don't know what it is numerically, but it naturally has a certain average distance between the molecules. Because of its polarity, when the temperature is low enough/molecular motion is slow enough/defined in the Celsius scale as 0°C, the water molecules are moving slowly enough that they do not have enough energy to move out of a fixed orientation/structure. But just before water "freezes" or "settles into a fixed position of molecules relative to each other," the polarity of the water molecules cause them to orient themselves in a hexagonal 3-dimensional structure. At temperatures/motions around freezing temperature, there is enough molecular motion energy to keep the hexagonal structure having an average distance between molecules that is farther apart than the average distance between liquid water molecules.

Why does this make solid water (ice) float in liquid water? It is because of this differential in distance between water molecules as a solid and as a liquid. (It should be noted that at slower molecular motions than around the freezing point, the molecules do not have enough molecular motion energy to keep the perfect hexagonal structure and the intermolecular forces win over the motion of temperature, causing the intermolecular attractive forces to draw water molecules closer together. This causes solid water to become more dense. At some theoretical point, the intermolecular attraction is strong enough to pull the water molecules closer together than liquid water's molecules, making ice sink.

But around the freezing point of water, when the hexagonal solid structure maintains a distance between molecules farther apart than liquid molecules, the concentration of mass is less in the solid structure than the concentration of mass of the liquid.

This is where I must point out that you should realize that it is not really ice that floats. It's really the more concentrated mass of the liquid water that is trying to fall as close to the earth as possible. Because it has more concentrated mass than the solid water (ice), it pushes the solid water out of the way. It could be sideways, upwards, diagonal--it doesn't care; the liquid water only cares about being as low as possible. So if it pushed the ice sideways, it would not gain any advantage in being lower. The only way to make as much liquid water sink as far down as possible is to push everything less dense than it upwards. This means, of course, that if you had a balloon filled with carbon dioxide and a balloon filled with helium as well as ice chunks in a swimming pool, the water would push the helium balloon and the ice upwards. But the carbon dioxide-filled balloon has more concentrated mass than liquid water (i.e. is more dense), so it pushes everything out of the way to get to the lowest position. This means pushing water, helium balloon, and ice out of the way to be lowest.

Now, I think you will never look at a glass of icewater the same way again.

And now, I can get back to my dream.

It was the enjoyment of exploring such simple physical properties for the sake of understanding that my wife and I shared. And in my dream, we blissfully discussed such properties.

After my dream took a sharp change in story, it went from the blissful to the exotic.

Enter my father, my sister, one of my friends, Brad, his dream-generated brother, my father, my father's girlfriend, and my other roommate, Alex. Somehow now there was an understanding that we would all participate in a thoroughbred race--not bet on it--we would be jockeys. What began to drive me crazy was that each person, in turn, caused a delay for some reason or other, to the point that Brad decided that he no longer had time to race his horse. Then his brother dropped out. Then my father's girlfriend, and then him. My sister stuck with me the longest (but strangely caused the first delay for taking a bath). Then I blew up at my father. Probably repressed emotions from waking hours, I lashed out at him for not understanding my situation. I lashed out at him for never even trying to understand my difficult emotional, financial, and life situation. He was lying down on a couch at the time, and completely out of character when he drew the blanket up to cover his crying face. Of course, in real life, I know his obstinance would result in the confrontation ending with his storming away, even more righteous than before, even less understanding than before.

At this point, the craziness of the idea that we would jockey horses yielded to the insanity of my intensely resentful, painful emotions. The fact that because the numbers worked out such that I and my friend would be jockeying two horses--just as insane as the idea that we would race a horse in the first place--was even overpowered by my anger of being delayed by everyone close to me, one by one; was even overpowered by my resentful feelings of being betrayed by everyone close to me when they decided not to race, after causing all the delay; was even overpowered by my disappointment that my parents had become increasingly less supportive and understanding as time has gone on--was even overpowered by my losing my wife and daughter a second time.

When I first set out to write this exposition, I thought it would help to verbalize all this pain.

But now, over an hour after I wrote the first words, the emotional pain has become so intense--the tears accurately prophesied in my dream now a reality--I realize that time has done nothing to heal anything.

Rather, time has caused my emotional wounds to fester and ripen--and rot.

If not time, what--if anything--will save me?