The Mother of Ten Thousand Things

“The named is the mother of ten thousand things” is the conclusion of the first quatrain of the Tao Te Ching. This is particularly poignant for me, being conversant in numbers, and a wrangler of words. The quantity “10,000” is decent estimation of human comprehension. It is about as large a quantity as a western mind can grasp before it becomes “too many to understand.”

The dot-grid that accompanies this newsletter illustrates the point. It is a matrix of 100 horizontal dots multiplied by 100 vertical dots. Most everyone can count to a hundred. Add up the zeros (100 x 100 or 4 zeros) and you get 10,000.

The notion that a single word can blossom out to 10,000 ideas is borne out by words like “ocean,” or “earth,” or “The Economy.” But I have found that words like “million,” or “billion” are just words bearing few ideas

By way of example (and same math as above) a million is a thousand, thousands (1,000 x 1,000 or 1,000,000), a billion is a thousand millions (1,000 x 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000). Way too many zeros to make any sense. (I may have actually lost many readers in this very paragraph due to all the zeros…)

I got into my line of conservation work back in 1992 when there was a proposal to project very loud sounds across the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The project was called “Acoustic Tomography of Ocean Climate” (ATOC) at was a program designed to (among other things) verify the truth of global warming by monitoring the effect it had on 10,000-year stable temperature of the deep iso-thermal layer of the ocean.

The project was being advanced by a team of physical oceanographers who were quite conversant in physics and numbers and were trying to explain their proposal to an auditorium full of passionate environmentalists. And when you have a panel of physical oceanographers facing off with an auditorium of passionate environmentalists, communication is bound to get opaque.

And most of the confusion was around numbers.

The broadcast transducers were able to deliver 200 acoustic watts, which doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider that a stick of dynamite delivers about one acoustic watt. But a “watt” is not how loud something is, it is how much work gets done. A stick of dynamite produces an acoustic watt of sound “work,” but about a million watts of mechanical work (1Mjoule/sec = 1MW)

Then there was how LOUD it was – some 220 decibels, according to the physical oceanographers. This was shocking to anyone in the audience who might have known that for us humans 120 decibels is the threshold of pain, and 130 decibels would cause irreparable hearing damage.

But “decibels” are not an indexed measure of loudness either, rather they express a quantitative relationship to a referenced number. And as a matter of convention, airborne sound is expressed relative to human hearing thresholds and tempered by how poorly sound transmits in air. Decibels in water, on the other hand, are expressed in terms of a not-so-arbitrary reference pressure of 1 micro-Pascal and tempered by how well sound transmits in water.

So while the physical oceanographers were speaking in measurable quantities, numbers, decibels, and watts, the passionate environmentalists were speaking in dimensionless similes and metaphors (“…as loud as a Saturn Rocket” was one of the more tenacious ones).

This was when I found my niche – inhabiting the chasm of misunderstanding between the numbers folks and the simile and metaphor folks – attempting to fill it with meaning. This has been my 10,000 things.