Thread by @ashunningpanda

Some etymology (and some physics):

Baron Munchausen and his horse get stuck in a swamp. So, how does Munchausen pull himself out of the swamp?

(1/n)

Well, Munchausen is a fictional character created by Rudolf Raspe, and is quite a storyteller himself, narrating stories of his unimaginable feats. In one such story, he does something impossible: he pulls his horse and himself out of a swamp by pulling on his own hair.

(2/n)

In later versions of the story, he does so by pulling himself by his bootstraps. Yes, bootstraps!

But the first documented use of the idiom “to pull oneself by one’s bootstraps” to denote an impossible feat came when someone “devised” a perpetual motion machine.

(3/n)

A perpetual motion machine can do work infinitely without an energy source. Well, it cannot. Because laws of thermodynamic tell you so. And you should believe the laws of thermodynamics. Why? That’s a thread for another day.

(4/n)

In 1834, a man called Nimrod Murphree announced that he’d discovered perpetual motion. This claim was justifiably dismissed with the words, “Probably Mr. Murphree has succeeded in handing himself over the Cumberland river, or a barn yard fence, by the straps of his boots.”

(5/n)

“Bootstrapping” became a common computing term in the 20th century referring to a self-starting process supposed to proceed without any external input. And it continues to be used in multiple different contexts — along with my personal favourite: high-energy physics.

(6/n)

You know how everything is made up of tiny little particles, a very large number of them — physicists call them a zoo of particles. Quite apt a name, perhaps. In the 60s, physicists were trying to understand ways to fit all these particles within a single framework.

(7/n)

Then the American physicist Geoffrey Chew came up with a theory where particles do something similar to what Baron Munchausen did — these particles hold on to each other by “exchanging particles”. Difficult explaining it here, but Chew’s theory got a very appropriate name.

(8/n)

Bootstrap! What was once used as a snarky remark about the “discoverer” of perpetual motion has come to represent a set of ideas instrumental to an entire area of physics. And somewhere along the way is Baron Munchausen pulling his own hair!

(9/n)

If you want to read about bootstrapping — the one physicists are using in their attempt to understand nature, then you should check out this brilliantly written @QuantaMagazine piece by @nattyover.

quantamagazine.org/using-the-boot…

(10/n)

Image 1:
Munchausen Rides the Cannonball, August von Wille

Image 2:
Baron Munchausen's Remarkable Leap, Adolphe Alphonse Géry-Bichard

(11/n, n = 11)