Chapter 3: Genii That Move In The Depths Of The Purple Sea
Once you see her in one place, you see her in all places.
From a slightly grungy subway window on another morning commute, he chances upon a sight of her gliding sideways down a pavement, except that she is not on a snowboard or skates, but sitting on a curious two-wheeled contraption steered by hip-level handlebars at both ends and pedaled like a bike in a plane perpendicular to the wheels [1]. Strapped on her ankles and the vehicle are some electronic devices. Wisps of hair caress her soft cheeks in the wind. Her eyes shimmer in the early light, speaking of indescribable dreams in daytime. His may be the faster vehicle, but she seems to be moving at a greater speed, in an unimaginable dimension.
While waiting for a lift on the 15th floor of a commercial building, he spots her cruising along the corridor of the opposite building on a self-moving, sleek white seat with an ovoid base [2], high-fiving workers passing by. At one point, she turns her body a little and the transporter starts rotating slowly towards the window. He stiffens. The lift doors open just then with a chime.
On a sandwich break in a park, he hears a commotion among a bunch of kids who have been throwing Styrofoam toy planes around and follows their line of sight. There she is, jogging and pushing handlebars on the front legs of a giant tricycle which central frame hunches above her back [1]. Harnesses around her torso are tied to the frame. In a second, he finds her smiling brightly at him [1]. She calls out to him, "Hey!" Time stops for a while. A scowl then crosses his face. After the contraption gains enough speed, she adeptly places her feet onto pedals on its rear leg and sails like a seagull down a sloping, meandering path.
One weekend, he is leafing through The Death of Ivan Ilych and Confession by a lake when her voice drifts across the water, "Is that a happy or a sad book? Saturdays are for pick-me-ups." He looks up to see her lying on her stomach in a sheltered hammock perched between two outward-bending poles on a floating milk-white platform [3]. The twinkle in her eyes dazzles as ever.
"Seeing as you are asking this question, you do not know very much about Tolstoy. Not enough," he holds up the paperback cover with a deadpan expression, "to tell that this one publication bundles together two works—a fictional story of a judge and an autobiographical account."
"Ah, mansplaining!" she turns away and mutters to herself.
His eyebrows raise slightly. "How is that mansplaining when you queried and I answered?"
"Well, you could have just said it may be half happy and half sad, for instance. Or perhaps the writings have been paired for some common theme, which would make my question perfectly sensible."
"That's a revelation. I would not have thought that the idea of coherent pairings could occur so readily to someone who uses insects as robots, skis on what is essentially a bike, scoots around on a glammed-up high stool, glides through the air on a mangled, oversized tricycle, and now, forcibly hangs a hammock on a raft."
She blinks at him, contemplates for a beat, then chuckles. "Tell you what, I'll pull off one more criminal act."
"What?"
"Invite my greatest dissenter to my most cherished underwater race!"
"In this weather?"
That is how he finds himself in a buzzing computer laboratory filled with T-shirt-wearing young people of various nationalities huddled over pairs of flat-panel monitors. In front of him and her team on one screen is a cream-colored blob they stare intently at as its location on a blue surface changes every few minutes. On the adjacent screen is a pulsing green pattern which resembles a cardiac rhythm on a black background. A video feed of huge, cylindrical metal instruments attended to by technicians in cleanroom garb is displayed high on a wall. That is a multi-tip scanning tunneling microscope, she chirps, located two floors below that the teams control from here to view their macromolecules and and induce currents which move them along an inverse S-shaped track a thousandth the width of a hair. Cameramen at the perimeters train their lens on each color-coded team. One of them zooms in on a bespectacled, white-bearded man waving a black and white checkered flag on a podium:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have seen the black team's 2x3 carbon ring wheel sonic fox racer and the blue team's nano-hovercraft finish first simultaneously two hours ago, and now the third-place winner has emerged: the judges have just confirmed that the red team's whistling dog nanowagon has streaked across the finishing line!"
"WOOHOOOO!!" she pumps her fist in the air.
He gives her a half-admiring and half-befuddled look.
The bearded man continues, "So the fourth position goes to the orange team, which windmill-shaped vehicle with four steering points was stuck on the surface 11 nanometers and one hour into the race. With the green team's paddling molecular caterpillar put out of the race by a software crash after traveling one nanometer and the purple team's curvy buggy sadly unresponsive to electrical pulses, there is no more moving racer on the track. The world's first nanocar race is over! We are very thankful to the many spectators from around the globe for witnessing this historic moment with us through this live webcast. Let's have a break before we move on to the awards ceremony. Grab a TV dinner, or breakfast bar if you're on the other side of the world, while we see if any team prefers a nano-trophy!"
Postdocs and graduate students in raspberry red around her hug one another and wipe their spectacles. Reclining in the chair, she unties her hair, tousles them and sighs contentedly, "This is not part of my research projects, but it feels so good to help out the chemistry department! Do you know that the blue guys' hovercraft was originally designed for use in solar cells converting sunlight into electricity? How interesting that it ended up transforming electricity into movement in this race. One day, I want to try propelling other nano-sized molecular vehicles with photons, load medicinal drug molecules on them and drive them along blood vessels." [4] [5]
"Nice show of driving a car with a microscope," he broaches the topic slowly. "You clinched third place in a race with three functioning cars."
"Right? We were in the half of the contestants who got to experience the entire course! I feel so sorry for the other three teams. But they were already great for trying! In what has been said to be the first motoring competition in human history back in 1887 Paris, only one car showed up [6]. Can you imagine that?"
"Your, well, imaginative approaches always need some getting used to. I've been thinking if I should imagine that your method of exacting revenge on your greatest eye-rolling dissenter is to make his eyes roll more."
"No," her eyes shine again. "My crime will be the heist of that beating organ in his chest."
He looks down as her index finger points straight at his left breast.
"The more I'm turned off by someone, the more I want to be a version of me who feels love for him."
Behind-the-Scenes Science:
An official international nanocar race was held for the first time in the world, with molecules of the aforementioned designs and competition outcomes but different timings and names, at Pico Lab in Toulouse, a city in the south of France in 2017 [4] [5]. It began at 11am on 28 April and ended at 5pm the next evening [5]. Scanning tunneling microscopes have probes so sharp that they have just one atom each at their very ends. Electrical signals are generated as electrons travel between these charged tips and the surfaces of samples being scanned. These signals would change with varying distances between tips and sample surfaces. In a typical scanning process, however, the height of the probe is adjusted as necessary as it moves across the sample to keep the signal and thus distance constant. This vertical movement of the probe is recorded and fed into computational processes that, in turn, map the contours of the sample surface. [7] In this race, the signals have the additional function of inducing structural changes, electron excitation, or repulsion/attraction in the molecules, thereby producing vehicular motion [5].
References:
1. Kiniry, L., 2012. 9 Unusual Human-Powered Contraptions, Popular Mechanics, viewed 27 December 2017, http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/g893/9-unusual-human-powered-contraptions/
2. Corley, A., 2010. Riding Honda's U3-X unicycle of the future. IEEE Spectrum. URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/041210-riding-honda-u3-x-unicycle-of-the-future (Model for the seat in the paragraph)
3. Wenz, J., 2017. 10 Weird Boats Weirding It Up Across the Sea, Popular Mechanics, viewed 28 December 2017, http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/g2998/weird-boats/
4. Centre national de la recherche scientifique 2017, Nanocar race,
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, viewed 4 January 2018, http://nanocar-race.cnrs.fr/indexEnglish.php (All race details in the chapter have been adapted from this actual race.)5. Rapenne, G. and Joachim, C., 2017. The first nanocar race. Nature Reviews Materials, 2, p.17040. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/natrevmats.2017.40 (All race details in the chapter have been adapted from this actual race.)
6. Duchene, P., 2007, 'For Sale: ’84 Model. Runs Great.', The New York Times, 19 August, viewed 4 January 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/automobiles/collectibles/19OLDEST.html
7. Nobel Media AB 2018, The Scanning Tunneling Microscope, Nobel Media AB, viewed 5 January 2018,
https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/physics/microscopes/scanning/ (All information on how scanning tunneling microscopes work in imaging in this paragraph has been obtained from this source.)
8. Shelley, P.B., 'The Cloud' in Eliot, C.W., 1909. English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald. The Harvard Classics, 41, pp.1990-14. URL: http://www.bartleby.com/41/517.html (Origin of chapter title)
