JF Ptak Science Books Post 2164
Johannes Mueller (1801-1858), a heavyweight physiologist/anatomist and idea-adventuring-synthesizer, had the idea that the speed of nerve impulses in humans was about 11,000,000 mps—that’s somewhat like the Enterprise’s Warp 2, almost two orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. At about the same time the remarkable and thorough Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), a universal knowledge guy who knew pretty much everything, a polymath’s polymath, had a different idea about this speed, performing a series of elegant experiments and showing the speed to be about 150-300mph.
[This is a detail from an image by the great Santiago Ramon y Cajal ( 1852-1934), who drew the first accurate picture of nerve cells in the cerebellum (found in one convolution of a mammalian cerebellum), which helped formulate his theory that the basic structural unit of the nervous system as the neuron.]
At the time of Mueller’s appraisal the speed of the nerve impulse seemed an unknowable entity. I wonder about other unknowables like this and what their estimated speeds might be that might put us more in touch with the major domo Mueller’s imaging the impossibility of knowing this reclusive and invisible speed?
What is the speed of attribution? The speed of recognition? Of growth? Of absent love resuscitated? The speed of caring and not so? The speed of being in a space that you want to be in? The speed of imagined motion, of a bending cane, of finding the perfect broken seashell?
Perhaps though the most interesting thing about the idea of speed is the speed of ideas.
An Alphabet of the Suggested Speed of Various Types of Ideas
Abstract idea: 35 mph
Bad ideas: 375 mph
Cryptic ideas: 50 mph
Dangerous ideas: 250 mph
Envious ideas: 350 mph
Fanciful and farcical ideas: 100 mph
Great ideas that are not Your’s: 28 mph
Half-an-idea: 150 mph and a buck-two-eighty
Ideas that are not ideas: 200 mph
Jokingly-said ideas that are taken for real ideas: 200 mph
Knowledgeable but sniffily restrictive ideas: 30 mph
Lyrical ideas told in a non-lyrical way: 31.23 mph
Mincing, broken tea-cup weak-tea ideas: 4 mph
Nonsensical ideas: 150 mph
Overheard-from-someone-else’s-cellphone idea: 300 mph
Practical ideas that have no direct application: 45 mph
Quixotic, queenly-quizzical, and not understandable ideas: 125 mph
Random idea: 125 mph
Salacious ideas: 450 mph
Tiresome ideas that are really notions: 20 mph
Underthought and underwhelming ideas: 55 mph
Vexating, poorly-ventilated, porous ideas of multiple misunderstandings: 44 mph
Wonderful ideas that belong to someone else: 4 mph
Zealous and impudent ideas: 75mph
Of course I’ve had some fun with this idea—but it came to me in a flash (at 250 mph) so I went ahead with it. And possibly it delivers some sense of the impossibility of knowing something that even the leading lights of those fields sensed as being unknowable.