The Gardner Centennial

I left my testimonial about what Martin Gardner’s writing meant for my intellectual development.

Round-Trip Journey to the Center of the Earth

Nathan DeHoff today posed several questions of how physics works in the land of Oz and surrounding countries, with the general conclusion that it’s questionable.

One particular matter is the tunnel through the center of the Earth depicted in Tik-Tok of Oz, redundantly called the Hollow Tube. The Nome King tricks all the book’s heroes into falling into one end of the tunnel, and they exit the other end like this:

Tik-Tok popped out into broad daylight and, after making a graceful circle in the air, fell with a splash into a great marble fountain. . . .

Queen Ann sailed up from the Tube, took a ride through the air as high as the treetops, and alighted squarely on top of the Peculiar Person’s head…

Later in the book, Quox the adolescent dragon takes all those heroes on his back and crawls into that end of the tunnel. When Quox comes out,

he shot into the open air a hundred feet or more and sailed so far away from the slanting hole that when he landed it was on the peak of a mountain and just over the entrance to the many underground caverns of the Nome King.

Does that accord with the laws of physics? Martin Gardner addressed that very question in The Annotated Alice, in his discussion of Alice’s fall into the Earth. And the basic answer is: gravity doesn’t work like that.

In a frictionless environment, people would travel exactly as far from the center of the Earth as they traveled down into it. Tik-Tok and his companions fall into the tunnel while hiking through some mountains, so conceivably they’re at a higher altitude, farther from the center of the Earth, than the garden at the other end. That would make it possible for them to pop up to some height on the other side and, with some wind and movement of the Earth, not fall right back down into the Tube.

But there are two problems with that scientific explanation:

• The return journey wouldn’t work at all. Starting from the garden, Quox wouldn’t fall far enough to reach the other end of the tunnel as he rose, much less fly out the other side.
• The tunnel is not a frictionless environment. In fact, Quox slows himself down by scraping his claws against the Tube’s inner walls.

In an environment with friction, Gardner wrote, air resistance would slow the travelers enough that they wouldn’t rise as far as they had fallen. They would therefore fall back down into the tunnel, pass the center of the Earth again, and rise not quite as far as where they had started from. Those unfortunate folks would continue to oscillate for many trips of decreasing length until coming to a stop at the gravitational center of the Earth.

So what explanation is there for how the Hollow Tube works? I can only assume that it’s magic. It does, after all, run from one fairyland to another, and the Nome King can even shift the opening around.

When creator Hiergargo the Magician first used the tunnel, according to Polychrome the rainbow fairy, “he tumbled through the Tube so fast that he shot out at the other end and hit a star in the sky, which at once exploded.” That hints that Hiergargo juiced the Tube with magic to make the journey faster, and some residual or revised magic might remain.

L. Frank Baum admired science, deliberately mixed it into his fairy tales, and even wrote a bit of science fiction. Occasionally he got some things remarkably right, but he never worked in the field, and never really treated science as more than a jumping-off point.

Feeling Grateful for Martin Gardner

I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of Martin Gardner, longtime columnist for Scientific American and, somewhat surprisingly, one of my favorite childhood authors.

I may have first come across Gardner’s name as coauthor of The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was, which Michael Patrick Hearn built on to create The Annotated Wizard of Oz. Gardner also wrote introductions to most of Dover’s 1970s reprints of L. Frank Baum’s non-Oz fantasies, and I was abundantly pleased to follow in his footsteps in introducing a centenary edition of John Dough and the Cherub a few years back.

But Martin Gardner stimulated my growing brain even more outside the Nonestic world. My parents had a copy of The Annotated Alice, and I read and reread that book many times—eventually only the annotations. Gardner later assembled another volume of Alice annotations and a short Annotated Hunting of the Snark, though the original contained his best material. I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis on Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark.

Another book I reread several times was Gardner’s The Incredible Dr. Matrix, collecting his columns about a fictional numerologist and con man. Like the Wizard, Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix is a charming humbug—but in his tales there’s always the whiff of money changing hands. The essays in that volume and some later additions are now in The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix.

Gardner’s books showed me how stories, even children’s adventures, could be read at many different levels, some possibly intended by the author and others just for fun. They showed that storytelling and mathematics didn’t have to be separate disciplines, though I must admit I didn’t even try most of the puzzles. Gardner’s amused take on Dr. Matrix fed my interest in con men and how people delude themselves.

One of my most important lessons from Gardner was skepticism. In 1974, he wrote a Dr. Matrix column about “pyramid power,” parodying ideas that had circulated in France for some decades. Soon American authors published books titled Pyramid Power, trumpeting how this marvelous discovery had been discussed in Scientific American! In The Incredible Dr. Matrix Gardner laid out that sequence of events for me, thoroughly amused by the folly.