01 May 2006

Big Band Theory







This is a Big Band.









I received a comment from Pictoris ab Lumen on my post about situational digestion (Intermission). He made an attempt to account for my strange digestive and sleep behavior by appealing to the Big Bang Theory and String Theory. Immediately after reading it, I realized that I had accidentally said that these disorders of mine disprove the Big Bang Theory. Here is my response to Pictoris ab Lumen:

I meant to say that they disprove the Big Band Theory. You haven’t heard of it? I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it since it is so closely related to String Theory. It turns out that there are relatively few fundamental frequencies at which strings vibrate, there being many derivates of these fundamental frequencies, of course, but absolutely no anomalous vibration in the in-between frequencies. Believe it or not, if you take the complete works of Glenn Miller, arrange them in chronological order, and take the respective tempos multiplied by the number pi, you can perfectly map them upon these fundamental string vibration frequencies. Once this connection has been made, other obvious correlations emerge. For example, was the title “String of Pearls” just a coincidence, especially considering that the elemental resonation frequency of the elements that make up pearls happens to be exactly the product of the suggested tempo and the number pi? It is obvious that Glenn Miller was a closet string theorist.

In spite of its merits, the Big Band Theory has its anomalies. For example, my digestive tract and my hypothalamus. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I believe that my situational narcolepsy and situational digestion disprove the Big Ban[d] Theory. Most proponents of this theory would try to account for these apparent anomalies by noting that the constructive interference between the resonation frequencies of the bookstore and my stomach (or the chemistry book and my circadian rhythms) gets my stomach (or hypothalamus) “in the mood.” I disagree. Even if it were the case that there was constructive interference, it isn’t clear that this interference would have the adverse effects that I’ve described. The only thing that is clear is that my stomach and hypothalamus simply march to the beat of a different drummer. Maybe Gene Krupa?