All this presupposes that the launch is successful.

It makes sense that perfect rigidity should be impossible when you think about the fact that your string is composed of smaller particles (atoms, molecules) with forces acting to hold them together while maintaining a particular pattern of distances between them. Even under Newtonian mechanics you couldn’t have perfect rigidity for any force that varies with the distance between particles — one particle has to move relative to the others before any forces can change, and it takes time for the other particles to accelerate in response to the change in the forces acting on them.

My “burn cycle” consists of two processes, resentment and reward, that keep the crank turning, giving life its dynamism. Resentment comes from a feeling that one is under the control of other forces, and how they are _treated_ as part of that subjugation. Since it is threatening to them to try to challenge these more powerful people and their institutions, they instead seek resolution through rewarding themselves, like buying Faith Popcorn’s “small indulgences.” Much of our consumption of food and of buying things feeds this half of the cycle, the “burn” cycle. As a result, their resentments are not ‘solved,’ but only masked for a short period of time.

The “learn cycle” is, as suggested, a constant churning of the mind, mixing refraction and reflection. The terms are from optics, but used here to refer to the way the mind builds mental models. One acts through a refractory medium, one’s surroundings, and we actively use slow periods and sleep to reflect on how our actions impacted other people and things in our locality, if any. That reflection is used to refine our mental model of reality, sometimes by tearing some component down and building it in a different way, and more usually, continuing to add to it in ever-widening circles of complexity, as in a fractal (a major rebuild can often be viewed by others as a kind of mental breakdown.)

The “burn cycle” is self-defeating, as the cost of rewards, both in money and in other factors such as poor health and stress, cause each person to have to expose themselves to more and more situations that produce more unequal- (asymmetrical) power situations, each of which simply increases the feelings of resentment. One descends gradually (or dramatically) into a pit of one’s own making (of course, few people in this situation feel they were their fate’s author).

But the “learn cycle” person soars ever higher, with a mental picture that continues to explain more and more. But, the fate of such a person is never to be satisfied with their knowledge and understanding, but to continue to work for more insights and enlightenment.

Could this explanation produce the same dichotomy as Dweck’s model? (see my earlier treatment of this at: http://hearthhealth.wordpress.com/about/previously-published-works/feet-first-early/using-our-feet-to-reduce-our-footprint-the-importance-of-scale-in-life/)

I would be a great person for the author to study.

Thanks for the book! I bought 4 and gave them to my children’s teachers.

The apostrophe being that of a possessive one…

I think you have probably already realised the signal will travel at c (the speed of light), and are trying to build a mental model that helps you understand why your intuition that it should be instant is wrong.

Here’s how I would look at the problem: given that the string has mass per unit length rho and modulus K, we can work the wave speed v. When solving with purely Newtonian mechanics, we get v=sqrt(K / rho). We are interested in the limiting case of K->infinity, which suggests v->invinity. This Newtonian solution is not valid.

Instead we should work out the Special Relativity equivalent, but it’d be a lot of maths. however we can recognise that when solved using special relativity, the solution will give a speed that ->c as K-> infinity, perhaps something like v=Sqrt(K/rho) *Sqrt(1-K^2/(c^2*rho^2)).

In simpler terms, our intuition that the wave speed goes to infinity is based on Newtonian mechanics, which is invalid in such cases. Special relativity will give a correct speed.

I guess when you start to make these theoretical scenarios, you have to decide where to stop making unrealistic assumptions… I decide to stop a bit past that point where you can actually pull on the string