12.07.2015 Views

Simple Nature - Light and Matter

Simple Nature - Light and Matter

Simple Nature - Light and Matter

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Chapter 9CircuitsMadam, what good is a baby? Michael Faraday, when asked byQueen Victoria what the electrical devices in his lab were good forA few years ago, my wife <strong>and</strong> I bought a house with Character,Character being a survival mechanism that houses have evolved inorder to convince humans to agree to much larger mortgage paymentsthan they’d originally envisioned. Anyway, one of the featuresthat gives our house Character is that it possesses, built intothe wall of the family room, a set of three pachinko machines. Theseare Japanese gambling devices sort of like vertical pinball machines.(The legal papers we got from the sellers hastened to tell us thatthey were “for amusement purposes only.”) Unfortunately, only oneof the three machines was working when we moved in, <strong>and</strong> it soondied on us. Having become a pachinko addict, I decided to fix it,but that was easier said than done. The inside is a veritable RubeGoldberg mechanism of levers, hooks, springs, <strong>and</strong> chutes. My hormonalpride, combined with my Ph.D. in physics, made me certainof success, <strong>and</strong> rendered my eventual utter failure all the more demoralizing.Contemplating my defeat, I realized how few complex mechanicaldevices I used from day to day. Apart from our cars <strong>and</strong> my509

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