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Lady Chaterly

Episode One

By Ian Beardsley (completed May 2, 2011)

Copyright © 2011 by Ian Beardsley

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Scene One

Lady Chaterly, wearing a wide brim straw hat with tea bags hanging off the brim stands
behind an acquaintance, an existentialist novelist who is writing about the
meaninglessness of existence.

Lady Chaterly: “When a spaceship orbits the earth, which direction is up and which
direction is down, for the astronauts?”

Writer: “There is no such thing as up or down in space!” he says with a quick temper.

Lady Chaterly: “No way, I mean how do they orient their equipment?”

Writer: “So that the top end of the equipment points north.”

Lady Chaterly: No way, what do they think of that in South America?

Writer: “Currently your average citizen in South America has more to worry about than
the protocol of NASA. Now stop chattering, I am busy thinking!

Lady Chaterly: “No way, how rude, I mean like gag me with a spoon!”

Scene Two

Lady Chaterly decides to visit the astronomer Professor Morrison at the local University.

Professor Morrison: Yes, Lady Chaterly, your friend is right, there is no such a thing as
up or down in space. Down is determined by the direction gravity pulls you towards the
center of the earth (keeping in mind you stop at its surface) but even though a ship in
orbit around the earth is moving tangentially to the earth, it is also falling in towards the
earth (that is why the resultant motion is a circle) but you fall towards earth at the rate of
its gravitational acceleration, so you are weightless, what is called being in free fall. A
ship in orbit around the earth could consider down the direction towards the center of the
earth, but for an astronaut moving around the earth that direction is always changing.
That is as he is above North America, he is falling towards it, but by the time the ship
moves around the earth to the others side, down is in the opposite direction and points
towards China.

Lady Chaterly: I got it: So at one moment an astronaut is American and at another time,
the astronaut is Chinese. Very democratic, but I am still concerned about South America.

Professor Morrison: What does South America have to do with it?

Lady Chaterly: Now you just think about that, professor.

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Scene Three

Lady Chaterly: I decided while space travel has its ups and downs (no pun intended) it is
not always democratic. So, it occurred to me maybe the key to world peace is not in
space travel but is in looking at space from earth, given the Universe is everything. I went
to the library and checked out a book about telescopes and found the more popular type
of telescope used mirrors as opposed to lenses. It turns out these telescopes, called
reflecting telescopes, use a property of a geometry called a parabola. The book states for
a ray of light bouncing off a surface the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection
and that given the curve of a parabola where ever a ray of light hits it, its curvature is
such that it is redirected to the same point as any other incident ray, regardless of where it
bounces off the surface. The result is that a great deal of light can be collected – aperture
– and focused to one point. It is simply a matter of directing that light, with a second
mirror, to a lens where it can be magnified. Now consider what my Yoga instructor told
me: “One world, One people.” That would be like all light rays from a star in one place.

The Writer: You are chattering again. The problem is you cannot apply physics to people.
You have to ask what one people everyone would agree upon?

Lady Chaterly: But are we not learning about philosophy from examining science?

The Writer: Now you are talking. But you have to have values, Utopia is not a purely
physical property. People are alive and spaceships, planets, telescopes and stars are not.
Mathematical constructions are abstractions of reality.

Scene Four

Lady Chaterly: What is meant by: mathematical constructions are an abstraction of

reality?

Mathematician: Well, an example would be, we define in mathematics a line as that

which has extension, but no width or breadth, where width and breadth would be
thickness. But there does not exist anything in reality that has only extension, or what we
call in mathematics, length. For example I may talk about the length of a wall in a room,
and represent it with the mathematical definition of a line as being 20 feet long, but a
mathematical line has no thickness and it is impossible to have a wall that has no
thickness. However the definition of a line suits me because it may be that I am only
interested in the length of the wall. For example, I have so much material to construct the
perimeter of a room, say enough for 400 feet of perimeter, and I want it to enclose the
most area for a four-sided shape with all lines straight. It is a problem in Calculus called a
maximum/minimum problem. There are many arrangements I could use, like a rectangle
with two sides 50 feet long and two sides 150 feet long, but the answer is a square with
each side 100 feet long.
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Lady Chaterly: Okay, I can understand why you call it maximizing, but what does the
minimizing part refer to?

Mathematician: Well, with calculus I can show what shape will enclose the smallest area
for a given perimeter. It turns out that shape is a triangle.

Lady Chaterly: It doesn’t sound like you are maximizing your returns, I sometimes
wonder about you mathematicians, perhaps you should be required to study economics.

Scene Five

Lady Chaterly is back at the house of the existentialist writer.

Lady Chaterly: I think the problem humanity is having is that it does not maximize the
use of its resources. Consider the square: with it you can have more room than a house
built in the shape of a triangle with the same amount of materials, though I will admit
more houses are shaped like squares than triangles, but…

The Writer: You are chattering. It has nothing to do with squares and triangles. The
current political systems are not compatible with the science of nature, and nature is
resources, which determines completely the economic wealth of the world. Furthermore,
there is not an infinite supply of resources, and those that do renew, like water and air, are
threatened by the way we treat nature, which is fully determined by our economic
systems. The solution to ensuring that renewable resources renew, rests, in steady-state
economics, what has come to be known as bioeconomics. Here let me google it. There it
is, Wikipedia Encyclopedia writes:

“Bioeconomics is the science determining the socioeconomic activity threshold for which
a biological system can be effectively and efficiently utilized without destroying the
conditions for its regeneration and therefore sustainability.”

Lady Chaterly: So in other words nature is the basis for which all life exists.

The Writer: Precisely