Beauty, As In the Eye of This Beholder
If you’re likely to jump on a bicycle to go for a ride in the country, then today would have been a great day to do just that. With all of the uncertainty as the world seems to be wobbling these days, neither a precession nor Chandler wobble, it’s nice to get out, get the heart pumping, and flush the confusion from the noggin. But where to go?
Ben Hur Road is a great stretch through that golden foothill country — oak savanna, old ranches, Chinese stone fences, the kind of place where you might round a bend and find a cow, a red winged blackbird, a covey of quail, or apparently a roadside meditation on the nature of the universe.
The full foothill ecosystem we observed included upland birds (turkeys, quail, woodpeckers), raptors, songbirds, a jack rabbit and some coyote scat. There were Fiddlenecks (Amsinckia) — those coiled orange-yellow clusters that carpet entire hillsides, Lupine in both blue and white — gorgeous against that green grass and some yellow/orange small flowers that were likely goldfields (Lasthenia) — or butter-and-eggs (Triphysaria). Buckeye (Aesculus californica) and deer brush (Ceanothus integerrimus) were in full bloom before the summer heat and lack of moisture will force them into dormancy.
Indeed, I got to dust off the California Naturalist credentials that lie dormant in my CV. But, there’s something more in that zero-sum question sign in the midst of the verdant rolling hills that resonates with Sisyphus. Was it a witty philosophical cowpoke or some clever mathematician on a Sunday drive in the country wanting to challenge those passing by?
In case you’re not familiar with this equation, Euler’s identity is celebrated for its beauty as it elegantly links five fundamental mathematical constants: e, i, π, 1, and 0 in a single, surprisingly simple relationship. I taught sixth grade math for a quarter century. Before that, ten years in an elementary classroom or a classroom of teachers as a staff developer and curriculum guy. Mostly arithmetic with a smattering of probability, algebra, and geometry. Oh, and measures of central tendency. You might know that as the mean, median, and mode that are used to summarize data sets, AKA statistics. So don’t count on me to explain Euler’s identity beyond how my buddy Claude explained it to me.
I do have a Euler’s disk that was a gift from a student. For those who don’t know — a Euler disk is that mesmerizing spinning disk that precesses faster and faster as it loses energy, the spinning becoming almost frantic right before it suddenly… stops. Silence. Zero. It’s a beautiful physical demonstration of a system summing to nothing, but the journey to that zero is hypnotic and spectacular.… Kind of like when Sisyphus reaches the summit and the heave-ho cedes to wheeeee…
The question ‘ZERO SUM GAME ???’ is the clever bit. A zero-sum game is an economic/game theory concept where one party’s gain equals another’s loss — the total always nets to zero. The sign is asking: is life a zero-sum game? Then it answers with Euler’s Identity, which literally equals zero — but gets there through an extraordinarily rich, interconnected web of mathematics spanning complex numbers, exponential functions, and geometry. At least that’s how it was explained to me.
Like I said, nothing I taught in sixth grade, but I hope I at least approximated the beauty in the math I did teach to sixth graders to that of Euler’s interconnected math. So, the implication of the sign being: yes, it sums to zero, but the journey there is anything but zero is what resonates. Now Sisyphus gets it!
It’s a genuinely witty piece of roadside philosophy — the universe might net out to nothing, but the structure and beauty along the way is staggering. Just like today’s ride. Spending three hours huffing and puffing uphill, and zooming down hill is the Sisyphusian bike ride. It’s the structure and beauty along the way that makes so much more than zero. Besides, once the atoms reach the summit, they just jam down the opposite slope. Have I stumbled upon Sisyphus’s new and improved motto?
Someone out there on that road has clearly got both a mathematical mind and a philosophical one. The setting makes it even better — that sweeping green hillside backdrop, barbed wire fence, wild grass in the foreground, coyote scat on the road. Euler’s Identity stenciled on a barn-red board feels completely at home among the Mariposa foothills in a way it never would on a city wall. Especially in Merced.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you slow down (literally and mentally) on what might otherwise just be a ride through the county. We whizzed by descending that section of Ben Hur Rd. It was on the uphill return I stopped to consider the sign, so slowing down wasn’t a problem. The sign was near a ranch, with a gate that had another sign,”What do you call a cow that is laying down? Ground beef…”
The “howdy neighbor” groan worthy dad joke followed by Euler’s Identity questioning the zero-sum nature of existence was, let’s say, unexpected. From the lowest form of wit to one of the deepest ideas in all of mathematics, all within probably a hundred feet of each other. And not far from the Pea Ridge Pioneer Cemetery where profound ideas go to die (Ugh, a failed attempt to out-wit ground beef).
It’s that kind of discovery that makes road cycling special over driving. At bike pace you actually see things, smell things, feel things — you would have blown right past that sign at 60mph in a car, or maybe just glimpsed it without being able to read it as we did on the descent. On a bike you can slow down, stop, pull out your phone, snap a pic, and really take it in. The dad joke on the gate got a groan from SMAP, which was right there with my commentary on the 12%-er as we climbed. That had something to do with inertia, another of my middle school topics.
Is the boulder rolling uphill a zero-sum game? The equation says it nets to zero, but the experience — the green hills, the lupine, the turkeys, whizzing down the hills or wheezing up the climbs — is anything but. It captures both the physical reality of hill riding and something existentially honest about why we keep going back. Not futility, but meaning found in the repetition itself. Spice up the familiar routes with what is inevitable, some heretofore unobserved glimpse of life affirming detail, and there you have it.
The wobble seems to be a little less worrisome.
Sisyphus and Associates 