Michael Graham Richard

Here’s a physics riddle that I just thought up. The only problem is that I’m not sure what the answer is. But I like the question, so here we go:

Let’s say you have a very long piece of string, and it has absolutely no elasticity, it’s perfectly straight, and it’s totally frictionless. The string is floating out in the void of space and it takes light 1 year to travel from one end of the string to the other.

What if you and I are at each end of this string, and I pull on it (or I have an incredibly powerful machine do it for me). How fast would you feel the pull?

Intuitively, it seems like it would be instantaneous, but that can’t be right because it would be traveling faster than light. The answer is probably that it would depend on the mass of the string and the amount of energy in the pull, but that whatever those variables are, it would take at least 1 year, and that while that isn’t intuitive, our brains haven’t evolved to intuitively think about this kind of situation. But what if the string is massless? But then, if I add this premise, is it even a real question for physics anymore? Anyway, I thought it was a fun thought experiment.

Switching Costs and Incentives
Google makes most of its money from ads (over 95% of revenue), and a very large portion of these appear on search results.

If Google wants to keep making money, it must encourage people to keep using its site for search. But the switching costs for search engines are very low (change a browser setting and/or a bookmark and that’s it). Right now, the average internet user probably doesn’t know how to do that, but that’s mostly because there hasn’t been a need for it so far; if Google was to significantly fall behind the competition or anger its users (and then turn a deaf ear to the complaints), how to switch to a different search engine would become common knowledge in the same way that people figured out how to switch from Altavista and Lycos a few years ago.

So Google’s incentives are aligned in such a way that it has to keep making products that are liked and very functional, and it must avoid at all cost giving its users reasons to switch. They also benefit from a vibrant web ecosystem with users constantly going from one site to the another (not staying on Facebook all day) and looking for new things.

Things are different at Microsoft. It makes most of its money from the Windows operating systems and the Office suite of applications. With these, switching costs are significantly higher than with search for the average user. We’re not talking about a few simple clicks anymore. This is scary enough that most people will endure a lot of pain and put up with a lot of inconveniences before they’ll consider dropping Office or Windows (especially the latter).

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I Can’t See You, But I Know You’re There
I don’t think I spent a day of my life without thinking about invisible things. Of course I’m not talking about truly invisible things as in supernatural thing, but rather things that are invisible to the naked eye but that we know are there because we can see or measure them with instruments.

Every single day I randomly think about things like allergens (the photo above is of pollen), DNA, cells, viruses, atoms in various conformations (proteins, lipids, hydrocarbon chains, neurotransmitters, etc) and of various kinds, radio waves, photons and electrical flows (from how much energy is used when I flip various switches to the incredibly fast pulses that encode everything in my computer and over my broadband connection). I also often think about the large invisible things, like stars, galaxies, nebulas, black holes, and the vastness of space in between it all.

Our brain has a hard time with these things because, as Richard Dawkins would say, it has evolved in “middle world” and is simply not equipped to grasp these things properly at scale.

What’s Your Relationship With the Unseen?
I know that it’s probably not that way for everybody, and it makes me wonder how it changes my perception of the world.

How do you see the world? Do you naturally think about invisible stuff, or do you rarely consider these things? Please let me know in the comments below.