SF Synchronicity

One reason I enjoy SF is all the esoteric trivia and useless facts that get absorbed into this mushy cerebellum somehow connect up in weird and interesting ways. “Synchronicity,” I believe the term is, coined in the early 20th century by psychologist Carl Jung. I envision some invisible ethereal realm, definitely Platonic, in which these ideas inexplicably exist, awaiting to be captured or encapsulated by our finite minds on some higher dimension we cannot have direct experience.

No, I am not stoned.

I do believe this, though not in any particularly thought-out or well-developed system.

Anyway, I’m reading this very, very good SF book, The Godwhale. And as I’m reading, I’m absorbing a lot of this esoteric trivia and useless facts that you’ll find in any well-written work written by a well-read writer. (alliteration!) Mr. Bass, who I still have not researched for my review, not having finished the novel just yet, knows his stuff well enough to convince me he knows his stuff. There’s a lot of medical jargon thrown about, things from surgical terms to biochemistry, which makes me think either Bass is a scientist-writer or doctor-writer, or that his major hobby must be reading medical journals. But more interesting to me is that, since most of Godwhale takes place on and under the ocean, there’s a lot of sea science thrown in.

There’s a lot of discussion about the bends in the novel (where it’s called the “pops”), that painful and potentially deadly situation that occurs when nitrogen bubbles into the bloodstream if a diver depressurizes too quickly (as in rushing to the surface from a deep dive). This triggered a memory in me: I researched all this stuff almost a decade ago when I wrote a short story called, vividly enough, “The Bathysphere.”

I flicked on the dusty old laptop and searched through my ancient word docs – all 400-plus of them – and found my notes on, let’s call it “sea science” for lack of any particular theme or direction. Got them from a neat little book I read entitled The Eternal Darkness.

Want to hear a couple of tidbits? Who knows, they may be the questions to tomorrow’s answers on Jeopardy …

- Every 33 feet you descend under water, the pressure doubles. At 33 feet below the surface, you’re at 2 atmospheres. At 300 feet, you’re at 10 atmospheres.

- An “atmosphere,” that is, the pressure of the air pressing down on you, is 15 pounds per square inch at sea level. You don’t feel it because you’re body is built to withstand such pressure. But if you descended to 300 feet below the surface, you’d start to feel it, as it is now 150 pounds per square inch of pressure.

- For most of the history of mankind, we’ve only descended to about a maximum depth of 100 feet. Think of all that undersea splendor, hidden from our eyes!

- In the 19th century we started to reach depths of about 500 feet. Remember those old divers with the iron helmets and the air tubes attached to them, with weights on their feet to help them descend? Here’s where the bends start their unwelcome knocking at the door of Scientific Advancement.

- Bathyspheres begin reaching greater and greater depths during the early 20th century, reaching significantly greater depths but still only in the low thousands of feet.

- The greatest depth in the ocean is the Mariana Trench, a couple hundred miles off the coast of Japan. It’s 35,800 feet deep. That’s over 6,000 feet deeper than Mount Everest is high.

- The average depth of the ocean, though, is about 12,500 feet.

- The average temperature at the bottom of the ocean is about 4 degrees above freezing, or 36 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s cold!

- Not only is it cold, but it’s dark. Pitch black. Due to the properties of water and the scattering ability of particles within the water, light does not reach much further down than a couple tens of feet. So don’t forget a flashlight.

- Nuclear subs can only reach a maximum depth of about 1,500 feet. This surprised me; I thought they went down farther. But again, it’s that pressure that stops them from going further, past “crush depth.”

- The pressure at 1,500 feet is about 45 atmospheres, or 675 pounds per square inch.

And so on.

Now the circle is going to be complete. Reading The Godwhale brought me to digging out my notes from a book I read in 2002, which now, in turn, is bringing me to a short story I wrote in 2003 using all these bits of trivia and knowledge about the sea. I, who have never been more than twenty feet or so off the shore in the ocean.

I think I’ll pull it out and read “The Bathysphere” before I go get my girls at the airport this afternoon. Maybe a review in the next couple of days ...