Spot the similarity

In the Polish film “Potop”, a cod-historical epic set in Poland during one of the many eighteenth-century central European wars which found that abused country as the unwilling venue, there is a battle scene which rises somewhat above the rest of the work.  With its sweeping cavalry charges, and the characteristic feathered pennants strapped to the infantry as they ran around the enemy, it had a certain power and visual momentum, a sense of the mad thrill of battle.

This dramatic composition certainly seems to have struck a chord in a fellow Pole.  In one of his own films, the director Andrzej Wajda showed the same scene, but from a rather different perspective.  The riders were there, as were the pennants of feathers, but by enlarging the frame, Wajda showed how what looked like a flood of charging soldiers was in fact the same man.  After moving from left to right on camera, he then passed back from right to left unseen out of shot before re-emerging in the frame to repeat his action again and again.

In this case Wajda is pointing out how in the heat of battle – or of watching one – we fail to distinguish the individual, seeing instead component parts of a larger mass.  It has been suggested that the reverse effect – that of seeing many distinct individuals where only one in fact exists – lies at the heart of one of science’s biggest mysteries.

It is one of the universe’s riddles why every sub-atomic particle – the electrons, the protons, the neutrons and the rest – should have exactly the same mass, and indeed exactly the same properties.  Theoretically, at last, you might expect the odd variation, a tiny divergence.  Instead, there is perfect reproduction.  A bold but brilliant solution has been put forward to explain this: that the unimaginable trillions of particles are simply different manifestations of the single existent electron or proton, found at different points in space and time.

Of course, as ever, there are hitches with this theory, since it implies that for every particle there is somewhere an anti-particle, the merest contact with which will produce annihilation.  Happily this seems not to happen.  So, an intriguing but imperfect solution.

It has an analogue in a rather more mundane realm: that of printing.  We take for granted that the letters in a book or magazine look the same: that one “a” is the same as another.  But until recently, every “a” was different, a unique piece of metal – each with its own tiny but often visible variations.  It is only with the advent of computerised typesetting that we know that every letter “a” is indeed identical with every other “a” – because it is the very same “a”, called up from the computer’s memory before its image is placed on the page.

So within a book or newspaper you are effectively reading the same single set of 26 letters, copied tens of thousands of times, sprinkled through the printing, hiding beneath the page until their next occurrence.  Rather like the Polish actor passing before the camera.  Maybe even like the particle which goes to make up you and everything in the universe.

(24.12.91)

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