As an acupuncturist in the scientific, go-go modern West, one of my pastimes is to listen for things that science doesn’t understand and then attempt to explain those things using my education and experiences as a practitioner of breath-centered exercise and classical Chinese acupuncture. I heard a good one on the radio the other day.
There is an insect called a sharpshooter which has developed an effective evolutionary response to a big challenge it has. It drinks so much sap (80 times its body weight per day!) to get its nutrients that it has to pee like crazy, and it's so small that if it peed the usual way, it would constantly be inundated with its own urine. So the sharpshooter developed a unique and efficient way of getting rid of all that pee. Through a series of spring-like muscles and other structures, the sharpshooter flings urine away from itself like a machine gun, and here’s the interesting part: after it leaves the sharpshooter’s body, the urine droplets speed up! This shouldn’t be possible, according to the physical sciences – the stone can’t fly faster than the catapult’s bucket was moving. At the moment, scientists are hypothesizing something to do with the droplets being deformed and then springing back into shape – they think the rebound accounts for the increased speed.
However, an American acupuncturist says, “Surfing! And Frisbee! I bet rotation is involved, somehow.” In surfing, by traveling diagonally across a (rotating) wave a surfer can accelerate to speeds way higher than the forward speed of the wave. And a skillful Frisbee player can throw a disc so that it seems to pause and then speeds up (an air bounce, among other throws). In each of these cases, rotation applied against an existing plane of motion (a Frisbee against an air current) or leverage applied against a rotating plane of motion (a surfboard’s skeg against a rotating wave) results in acceleration beyond that of the existing plane of motion. Physics tends to only focus on the initiation of the movement, and assumes simple and predictable vectors of movement after it is initiated. However, life shows us other possibilities.
My bet is that the sharpshooter’s “buttflicker” (the technical term, believe it or not) also provides spin, or rotation, or a spiral in football terms, to the urine droplets. This spiral helps the droplets screw through the air, just like a football or Frisbee, helps the droplet regain its form, and combined with the rebound effect scientists have hypothesized, seems likely to add enough kinetic magic to account for the acceleration that has been observed. Because the droplets are tiny and essentially transparent, spin is probably very difficult to detect, but I bet it’s there.
Bringing things back to the human sphere, I don’t think its an accident that we Frisbee players and surfers tend to be philosophical people who regularly live outside the mainstream, seek alternative approaches to common problems and tend toward being iconoclasts. We have been told our whole lives that there are immutable laws – of physics, morality, legality – but we have been able to see with our own eyes that those laws are NOT always immutable – there are various situations where they don’t seem to apply. When it comes to “immutability,” a single exception blows the whole thing out of the water, and we surfers/Frisbee players/acupuncturists are perverse enough to say, "Nuh, uh," and to keep on saying it.
This is the thing that surfers, Frisbee players and acupuncturists have to offer the Western scientific world, if it cares to listen: sometimes it is the movement that is meaningful. Science focuses on the structures, chemistry and mechanisms of life, but because that focus is especially trained on the pathological, actual normal function sometimes is overlooked. There are consistent, regular illustrations of nature’s ability to accelerate across a plane. Among other things, focusing study on this reality may unlock some of the mystery surrounding dark matter; may help with deep space calculations of star ship movements; and may help us better understand the way things work right here on our tiny, beautiful planet.
Including understanding more fully how bugs pee.
