Pendulum

Most people don't associate the words "cold" and "Brazil" very often, but winter here in Florianópolis can be very unpleasant.  Last night it was in the mid thirties, with cold winds and rain, and today the sun didn't warm things up much at all... in most places in the US, such weather would be little more than a drag, but here, where no houses have central heating and few even have a fireplace, the outside and inside temperatures are exactly the same, so we have had to swaddle Helena Iara up tightly.  She hasn't liked it very much, and she gets very impatient.

Wrapped in layers of blankets, there aren't many ways to play with a little baby, so we have had to resort to other techniques.  Helena loves to swing, for instance, so we have rigged a rope down from a roof beam, and then tied it to her bassinet, which allows us to swing her in a pendulum with a more than five foot arc.  She enjoys the movement, calms down, and often will even sleep, even when wrapped in heavy blankets.

As Helena Iara swung back and forth today, I explained to her how the pendulum lays at the root of modernity.  The story is almost mythical, and probably too good to be true, but it goes like this: Galileo Galilei was bored in church one morning when a wind came in the windows of the cathedral and began to swing the chandeliers back and forth over the nave.  More interested in the movement than in the sermon, Galileo began to use his heatbeats to count how long it took for one chandelier to swing back and forth, and then compared it to another chandelier, swinging on the other side of the church, but with a much smaller arc.  Though one sung much more than the other, both took exactly the same period of time to complete their passage back and forth.

I can only imagine Galileo's heart beating faster and faster as he got excited by the discovering, thus destroying his data, but that's not so much the point.  What matters is that Galileo had discovered that all pendula with the same radius will have the same period, in spite of how far they swing.  The insight would be fundamental in working through modern physics, but with Helena, I focussed on what that discovery meant for time: suddenly, one could measure hours, minutes, and even seconds with the use of a pendulum, something much more accurate that the sand and water clocks of the middle ages.

Marking time is one of the major characteristics of modernity: time is understood as something that passes, something that can be measured, used, or lost.  It is divisible and universal, valid for all people.  Pre-modern (or simply non-modern) people don't think of time in the same way, nor, more applicably to this blog, do babies.  For them, time functions in a different way, not measured by the swing of a pendulum, but by periods of play or boredom, eating and sleeping.

But what time means for babies... that will have to wait for another day.