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2003-05-12 - 8:47 p.m. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong –Murphy’s Law 1) Grasping the bulb of a thermometer, he observed how the thread of mercury climbed up the capillary tube and eventually stopped near the 37 degree mark. Sometimes he clutched the thermometer bulb harder, in an effort to squeeze the mercury beyond its terminal point, convinced that a tight fist generated more heat. At other times he willed the cells in his body to produce more heat, as if he had direct, intimate control over mitochondrial labours. If only he could direct his body’s energy, through the workings of a conducting rod, into a more expansive force that could move objects, shoot projectiles, set things on fire. The instrument in his hand only served to record the limits of his physiology. Thus he established a fundamental difference between thermometers and magic wands. 2) As child, he remembered having a thermometer placed under his armpit. The coolness of the bulb, the frosty kiss of the stethoscope’s diaphragm, and the air-conditioning combined to define for him the ambience of a clinic. He recalled the effort in preventing the thermometer from slipping, arm pressed against torso in a frozen chicken-wing mime. While the nurse counted down the arcane seconds, his eyes would rove over anatomy charts and terrifiying posters of blistered skin. As an adult with the good sense not to bite at oral thermometers, he sometimes felt the nostalgia of what growing up had made redundant. Now hardly anyone was interested in his armpit, that mysterious zone that once disclosed the secret of his health. 3) The gesture of a doctor flicking his thermometer to allow the mercury to settle back into the bulb is echoed by the writer who shakes his pen during a sudden inkflow drought. An archaic gesture: there are now electronic thermometers and word processors to remove the need for such moments of deferral. Yet what lessons in humility that pause taught them: that our human endeavours were dependent on the behaviour of a slender column of fluid. 4) There was a time when atmospheric temperature and body temperature were conceived as two separate notions. The thermometer that measured environmental temperature, at its best, was a meterologist’s tool in predicting weather patterns, and at worst, a quaint object of curiosity, used as wall or desk decorations. On the other hand, clinical thermometers could never be accused of being decorative bric-a-brac: taken out from the patient’s mouth, it was the device through which an illness could speak. But since the discovery of global warming, these two different thermometers have merged. The planet is fevered. There is even the Kyoto Thermometer, a kind of patient’s chart which traces the number of countries that have ratified global treaties to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. 5) She was idly playing with the thermometer at her laboratory desk as the teacher lectured the class on the theory that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, a central feature of the First Law. Suddenly, she lost her grip on the thermometer and broke the bulb. A blob of mercury slid across her table, and trembled slightly as it attempted to reproduce a miniature of the laboratory on the convex mirror of its skin. She was admonished by the teacher, as her classmates evacuated the classroom, and as is endemic with the education system in her country, was hardly informed that she had actually provided spectacular proof of the Second Law—that tendency towards disorder. The shattering of glass, the leakage of the thermometer’s contents, the invisible spread of quicksilver vapours. It required some amount of activation energy to overcome the closed system of the thermometer, but the degree required to smash open closed minds was at that moment, incalculable.
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