Schrödinger’s Hair

I take Louis on a good long walk every day that I can, and it does us both good. We walk on local roads, Bayside boardwalks, park trails and forest hiking paths. If I’m not mistaken, it seems like there is less litter along the pathways than I remember in times past, which is very heartening. But there’s still some. There is one item in particular that I seem to find more often than any other, by far. Care to guess what it is? I won’t reveal the answer until the next paragraph.

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It’s not candy wrappers or empty cans of Red Bull. It’s those little elastic black cloth-covered rubber bands used to hold ponytails together. They’re sometimes known, I believe, as scrunchies. It seems like I see these on fully half the walks I take, and I have no idea why.

Is there some sort of fundamental flaw in its structure that causes it to work its way loose while the wearer is walking, then drop off without being noticed? Does its drab black color and unadorned design give off some “worthless” vibe that makes it prone to being thoughtlessly discarded, the way smokers used to carpet the ground with used filters and butts?  I just don’t know.

I probably first noticed these scrunchies on the ground because I use one for my own ponytail. I confess my first thought when I realized how abundant they were was “Neat! Instead of buying them at Walmart, I can just pick one up whenever I need one! Live off the land!.” Fortunately, my second thought was “eww. Cooties”

I have a ponytail because stopped cutting my hair in the Covid year, when Kathleen and I were strict quarantine observers. After the quarantine lifted, I noticed that my quality of life had not been impacted in any way by my lack of hair cutting, so I thought screw it! I just won’t bother cutting my hair any more since the act is not doing me any good.

I was perhaps channeling my inner child a bit when I decided this. Fellow Third-Agers will remember that back in the Age of Aquarius, hair was the medium of choice for expressing one’s defiance of one’s parents and society in general. I was a bit young in the 1960s for full-out rebellion, but I did make my dad crazy by refusing to wear my hair short. Ah, fun times.

In an attempt at compromise, my dad suggested had I could keep it long on the top if I cut it short on the bottom. Or maybe the suggestion was to cut it short on the top and keep it long on the bottom, I don’t remember.  At any rate I do remember being absolutely horrified to my bones at the thought of his suggestion. Funny about what horrifies you when you’re young. 

Now that I’m old, I’ve developed prejudices of my own. I particularly don’t like how the young people these days sport huge bushy beards they look like they are trying to mimic civil war heroes except with shaved heads. Kids!

I have this one hair style prejudice that is so specific that it feels like it came to me in a vision. When I was younger (I can’t remember if this happened when I was 5 or 50 or somewhere in between), I developed an abhorrence at the prospect that some day I would simultaneously have both a ponytail and bald spot.

This of course is exactly the look I’m sporting now, at least from the back. One of my neighbors pointed it out, and my forgotten vision came flooding back to me. Oh well, I’m old now, I don’t have to be horrified by anyone’s fashion choices, including my own.

From some angles, it’s not at all obvious that I’m nearly bald on top. Growing up watching the inexorable deforestation of my dad’s head, I was pretty confident of what was in store for me, but I feel like my hair has gotten something of a stay of execution. I’m not sure I’m any less bald than my dad or my baby brother, but I inherited from my mom (who probably got it from her Irish ancestors) the tendency to go white early, and my white hair captures more light, and gives a better illusion of fullness, than my brother’s or my dad’s darker tresses.

The discussion might be enhanced at this point by a picture of me. Because this post is all self-report (as opposed to, say, facts), it would be more informative if I provided a picture of how I see myself, rather than a photograph of how I objectively look. I assure you, though, the differences between the two are practically negligible.

It’s now been five years since the Covid hit, and almost five years since I stopped cutting my hair, and I’ve noticed something remarkable: I’m pretty sure that the overall amount of the hair on my head hasn’t changed in that time. Yes, my ponytail has grown longer, slowly. But at the same time the number of hairs making up that ponytail, and the average thickness of each individual hair strand, have reduced by an amount that seems to exactly counterbalance the length increase.

Were I to graph the length of my ponytail length against the number and thickness of the hairs that comprise it, I predict it would extend asymptotically to an infinitely long ponytail composed of an infinitely small number of infinitely fine hairs.

I can already anticipate your objection to my prediction: both the number of hairs on my head, and my hair’s thickness (measured in, say, atoms), are positive whole numbers that can’t keep getting smaller forever. Sooner or later, one or both of these quantities must go from one to zero, and the asymptote ends.

Or does it?

I believe the hair on my head is getting so fine that it can no longer accurately be described using Newtonian concepts of particles and mass. As my hair gets finer and finer, its properties are becoming less particle-like more wave-like, and quantum effects must be considered. In other words, my hair is getting wavy. (Ha ha ha, “wavy”, see what I did there?)

Anyway, I have developed a theory that the material that inhabits the top of my head is approaching the point where it is best described as a probability cloud, and I’d like to figure out a way to test my quantum-hair theory.

If I cause my hair-cloud to interact with a macroscopic object, for example by dragging a comb over it, I find the hairs have collapsed back into their fully particle-like form and are stuck in the teeth. I believe this is called “quantum entanglement”. But there is a simpler explanation—that the comb simply yanked out some weakly-anchored normal Newtonian hairs from my dome—and Occam’s Razor requires that I select the simplest explanation. (Speaking of which, I gave up shaving years before I gave up cutting my hair, and that process has a physics all its own. For example, did you know that, like the poles of planet Earth, the human head has two cowlicks?)

I wish I could come up with experiments that could prove or disprove the existence of my hair probability cloud, but so far I haven’t thought of any. If any readers have suggestions of how I can further explore the quantum physics of hair loss, I would love to hear them. But I won’t shoot electrons at my head, or sit in a box with a cyanide pellet that will kill me if I am observed to be bald, so don’t bother suggesting anything along those lines.

Thanks for reading,
Dorn
4-23-2024