MiniBe: The ROT project

Visual evidence of the past 11 and a half years.

"Distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" wrote Albert Einstein just a month before he died. Not a surprising statement for the author of the relativity theory. Even if that was just a consolation of a man who felt that his life is coming to

an end.

The concept of time definitely deserves a thorough treatment, and I will hopefully dig in it in some future post of this blog. For now I will just agree that time is thus only an illusion, but the progression from the past to the future (and not vice-versa) is really hard to dismiss. Can we have a simple and clear visual evidence of the past? If I take an empty plank at the start and put a nail in it at regular time intervals, then the accumulation of the nails on the plank can be such an evidence.

Instead of the plank I took a tree root. For the time interval I chose a week. Every Sunday I would put a nail (more likely a screw) in it. The root is big enough for 784 screws, 784 weeks, 5488 days or 15 years. That is the estimated time of the rest of my life - based on life expectancy for men of my age. Screws in the root should form a path, so that past can be traced back to every individual moment (week). To make this path more traceable, I should

paint the heads of the screws sequentially with eight colors: black, dark blue, green, light blue, red, violet, yellow and gray. Alternatively, instead of painting the screws' heads I could draw a path between points on the root colored with eight colors. In that case I would not need screws at all. But screws add a bit of dramatic and solid sense.

Before actually starting this lifelong project, I made a computer simulation. On the plane model of the root I generated a mesh of quadrilaterals with approximately 784 nodes. I chose a starting node for the first screw (at the bottom left) and then simulated the path (should I say the time?) so that the next screw was in the next closest node. Both versions (colored heads and colored path) are shown in the pictures and both look quite nice.

I put the first screw in the root on Sunday, 2.8.2020. The head of this screw is not colored, to distinct it from all other screws.

Today, 21.9.2020, I have seven screws in the root and, interestingly, the proportion of their area to the area of the whole root somehow indicates the time left to my death. I therefore could not claim that I was caught unprepared.