Can You Hear Me Then?

While watching the extra content on a DVD of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus,” an Irish filmmaker says he has discovered what looks like a woman talking on a cell phone, in 1928. Of course cellular phones had not been invented yet so the likelihood that she is having a “can you hear me now” moment is slim. So did this woman have access to some sort of pre-1940s walkie-talkie, or pre-1970s cellular phone wireless communication device, or is she just a time traveler?

The time traveler scenario has taken some hits online because the necessary infrastructure to support cell phones was not in place in 1928. Namely, cell towers. Also the walkie-talkie was not to be invented for 12 years, and when it was invented and used extensively in World War II, it was the size of basset hound and had an antenna that could double as a fishing pole. What this woman is holding up to her head is no basset hound. But as any conspiracy theorists worth his salt will tell you, time travelers have extremely sophisticated communication devices that not only don’t need cell towers to operate, but they are powered by nuclear fission, can broadcast through wormholes, and have very reasonable family plans that let your kids text free. Or so I understand.

But I still don’t think it was a time traveler for a different reason. If you could travel back in time to anywhere, why would you go to the set of an obscure silent movie in 1928 Los Angeles? Why would you travel back in time to Los Angeles at all unless it was to kill Sarah Conner? Would not there be more interesting places you could visit? What about the birth of Christ, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 World Series?

What we are probably looking at is a woman who is walking along just taking out loud, to nobody, and happens to have her hand to the side of her head. With the miserable invention Bluetooth, the people talking out loud, loudly, in public, are movers and shakers. They are tomorrow’s entrepreneur working the deal. Back in 1928 they were just considered nuts and when you came across one you just crossed the street.

The Della Effect

In physics there is the term “The Observation Effect.” What it means is sometimes just observing something can have an effect on that thing. I’ll use an example from my job. Sometimes I have to watch a router to determine why it may be using too many resources to provide the services for which it has been installed. It may have been purchased to translate IP addresses from our private network to the Internet’s public network. A process called NAT. So I’ll crank up that router and start the NAT process, and see how much memory or CPU usage it uses for that process. The rub is, I have to start another process to observe this, usually a debug process, and it uses these same resources. There are ways to calculate out the debug’s usages, but I’m just using that as an example to show how watching something can affect it behaves. Here ends the technical portion of my essay.

This Observation Effect shows up in other disciplines. For instance park rangers tranquilizing bears, interrupting their behavior, to take samples; and mechanics measuring the pressure of a tire, releasing some of that pressure, to read it on a gauge.

There is another place where the Observation Effect happens but I can’t prove how. Most of my family believes that the act of observing a Giants’ baseball game has an effect on the outcome. We get this from our maternal grandmother Della. She wasn’t actually our grandmother, but a great aunt, but we called her Grandma Della from the moment any of us could speak. Kind of like calling 2000 the first year of the 21^st Century, it’s not technically correct, but most people understand what you mean.

Our Grandma would turn off the radio when the Giants would fall behind, and then later turn it back on to check to see if they won. As if somehow her listening, and later in life watching, affected their play. But how? Could it be that the players, knowing that thousands, millions, were watching became either nervous or amped up and it changed their play? Could it be that somehow radio and TV signals changed the electricity of the atmosphere, causing minute changes in the physiology of the players that affected pitches and swings, or perhaps the path of the ball? Does glove leather interact with radio waves to change the structural integrity of the mitt turning soft-handed Brooks Robinsons into an iron-fisted any dodger?

Here’s what I think. I figure that the baseball gods, seeing that she had a stake in the outcome of the game, punished her, as gods are want to do, by having easy grounders doink off of shins, fastball strikes right down Broadway called balls, and monster fly balls suddenly bend their trajectory and drop into outfielder’s gloves. How else? Ulysses ran afoul of numerous disasters until he finally admitted that the gods controlled his destiny. So maybe if we Giants fans admit that the baseball gods control the destiny of the good old Orange and Black, the winds of fortune will blow them past the Girl Horses from the City of Brotherly Love and on to victory over the Evil Empire in the city formally known as New Amsterdam. It couldn't hurt.