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It's not what you hit, it's how you hit it
May. 7th, 2015 10:47 pmI don't know if you've ever zoomed in and watched people in games like Settlers and Children of the Nile. It can be fun. When someone is carving a statue, for instance, in CotN, he stands beside this shapeless lump of rock and hits it with his hammer and chisel, in the same place, over and over again, and then suddenly, the lump of rock becomes a statue. It's like a miracle. It's the same when a settler builds a house; they just hammer away in one place and gradually the building takes shape.
Of course there's a reason for that; it's easier to animate that way, and we can fill in the precise details with our imaginations if we care to do so. But it's always seemed to me, since long before there were computer games, at least hypothetically tenable that a stonecutter with enough skill and the right tools could, by striking a stone in just the right way in just the right place, set up shock waves and shear patterns in the substance of the rock that would, eventually, cause it to assume the desired shape.
...okay, maybe I used to watch too many cartoonies. Stone carving doesn't work that way, and nor does anything else. If you want a lump of rock to look like Ma'at weighing a heart against the feather of truth, you have to take a lump of rock and painfully chip away anything that doesn't look like Ma'at weighing an h. against the f. of t., and if you chip off her nose by mistake you get another lump of rock and start again.
But if that theory doesn't work for physical objects, it might yet be applicable to more abstract and tangible areas. There might be some fields of human endeavour in which the right blow at the right time, even quite a weak blow, might set up stresses and echoes in an unstable system that could generate a feedback loop which, in turn, could reshape the system quite dramatically.
We can hope so, anyway.
Of course there's a reason for that; it's easier to animate that way, and we can fill in the precise details with our imaginations if we care to do so. But it's always seemed to me, since long before there were computer games, at least hypothetically tenable that a stonecutter with enough skill and the right tools could, by striking a stone in just the right way in just the right place, set up shock waves and shear patterns in the substance of the rock that would, eventually, cause it to assume the desired shape.
...okay, maybe I used to watch too many cartoonies. Stone carving doesn't work that way, and nor does anything else. If you want a lump of rock to look like Ma'at weighing a heart against the feather of truth, you have to take a lump of rock and painfully chip away anything that doesn't look like Ma'at weighing an h. against the f. of t., and if you chip off her nose by mistake you get another lump of rock and start again.
But if that theory doesn't work for physical objects, it might yet be applicable to more abstract and tangible areas. There might be some fields of human endeavour in which the right blow at the right time, even quite a weak blow, might set up stresses and echoes in an unstable system that could generate a feedback loop which, in turn, could reshape the system quite dramatically.
We can hope so, anyway.