THE BLUEBERRY PIE EFFECT

“This is a very stupid idea,” thought Quack McSplat as he was thrown from the airplane. “A very stupid idea, indeed,” he thought again as he tumbled through the whistling air at a speed he never thought he’d reach.

“Of all the stupid ideas, this is perhaps the stupidest,” he thought one last time before deciding not to think on it anymore out of pure spite. It wasn’t much of a new thought since Quack was a rubber duck and rubber ducks, not having many ideas themselves, tend to think that most ideas are stupid.

Quack McSplat (as he was recently christened) was as surprised as he was annoyed to find himself in his current predicament. He was just a regular bright yellow PVC ducky with a little orange beak and indifferent black eyes (which successfully hid his general peevedness) and there was no particular reason why Quack of all the millions of bath toys made every year should find himself hurtling downwards through the sky towards a raging tornado.

As the stamp on his underside indicated, Quack was first made in a factory in China before being shipped off and stamped with the blue ‘Aquatec’ logo on his front. Along with a few hundred ducks he was distributed as an inexpensive Christmas gift to Aquatec employees at their company headquarters, where he sat for many years on the desk of meteorologist and amateur physicist Kurt L. Hendricks.

Life as a desk tchotchke and occasional squeeze toy wasn’t exactly fulfilling for Quack but what really made the little duck fed up was being forced to listen to the endless stream of very, very stupid ideas that came out of Hendricks’ head. Quack heard all about such nonsense as ‘the butterfly effect’, ‘the junkyard tornado’, ‘Boltzmann brains’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘self-organisation in thermal convection currents’ and thought little of them.

Hendricks’ favourite and perhaps most stupid musing was a kind of reverse butterfly effect, that if a minuscule ordered event like the wing flap of a butterfly could unpredictably alter a chaotic tornado many miles away, perhaps the reverse could be true, perhaps a great mass of swirling chaos like a tornado could coalesce to create something very small and ordered, like a butterfly.

If everything is made of the same electrons, protons and neutrons, surely it was possible that the wind could rearrange itself to form anything at all? Highly improbable, yes, but still possible.

Hendricks argued this point often with his colleagues who protested that such an idea violated the law of entropy (chaos), but he would point out that the second law of thermodynamics described confined systems, of which a tornado was not one, therefore so long as the entropy of the whole system (the earth) increased then the theory was sound. In other words, if the tornado created chaos elsewhere, it could create order. After all, what is the solar system, the planets, our earth and humans themselves, but a tiny speck of order found in the swirling chaos?

What a stupid idea.

Nevertheless, the Aquatec board ignored Quack’s sage advice and gave the go-ahead for Hendricks to conduct a series of experiments monitoring the nature of tornadoes. The goal was to gather data on the entropy within the storm itself. Any downtick in chaos, any increase in order whatsoever and Hendricks would consider his test a success.

It was when Hendricks was planning the experiment, specifically who would comprise the flight team that he looked to the rubber duck on his desk and the duck stared bitterly back. In a moment of spontaneous playfulness, he snatched up the toy and packed it into his case for the trip. A little in-joke with himself and a nuisance for poor old Quack.

The plane was ready and the equipment was set, all they had to do was wait for a storm then fly above it and disperse the devices; thousands of minuscule instruments able to record numerous variables whilst being buffeted by the tornado itself. These instruments could potentially end up miles from where they had begun and from these recordings, Hendricks could create an accurate model of the storm.

The night before the bad weather, the Aquatec team were holed up in a hotel and one of them remarked after Hendricks’ unfeathered friend.

“Oh, him? He’s just along for the ride,” Hendricks said with a smile before explaining that the inspiration for this experiment came from a story he’d heard about twelve containers of 28,800 bath toys that were washed into the ocean during a storm. The toys floated for years in the water before running aground on beaches all over the world many miles from their starting point, thus allowing for ocean currents to be tracked and modelled in ways that they had never been before. The duck would go first, Hendricks joked, check the coast was clear.

The team rather liked the idea and a name was suggested, ‘Quack McSplat’. Someone grabbed a pen and wrote onto the duck, ‘Live fast, quack young’, which the duck himself thought was rather stupid.

The day of the experiment came. Quack, Hendricks and all the team went up in the plane but before the equipment was dispersed, Quack McSplat was ceremoniously hurled from the plane down into the tempest below.

And so, as Quack hit the storm and thick turbulence threw him about like a rubber duck in a tornado, he thought over all the stupid ideas he’d ever heard and how the stupidest of them all, that something could spontaneously appear in a storm was the one that brought him here. It just didn’t make…

A blueberry pie.

For a brief moment Quack stopped spinning and right in front of him there it was, a steaming hot blueberry pie.

It was quite real; golden crusted pastry latticed over a delicious blueberry filling and it was completely out of place. It seemed to come together from whisps of the wind itself, formed from thin air.

One moment it appeared and then, a fraction of a second later, it disintegrated into nothingness once more.

The recording instruments were still many metres above the storm and so Hendricks would never know that perhaps the most monumentally rare physical phenomenon had just occurred beneath him and the only witness was a plastic rubber duck.

“How stupid,” Quack thought.

ANAX.