The meaning of life as found on the Tilt-A-Whirl Chaos and Uncertainty
In which I will prove the Tilt-A-Whirl = Life.
Ahem.
What makes a Tilt-A-Whirl tilt? And whirl?
That’s why physicists Bret M. Huggard of Northern Arizona University and Richard L. Kautz of the National Institute of Standards and Technology set out to discover some 15 years ago. (I’m not making this up. Really.) They developed a mathematical equation describing the motion of the ride.
And what they discovered is a Tilt-A-Whirl never tilt-a-whirls the same way twice. Every variable imaginable — from starting position to weight of the riders to literally anything else — will change the ride. It is chaos, defined. “Even slight changes in starting point lead to radically different sequences of points,” wrote Ivars Peterson in a 2002 edition of “Science News” describing the findings of Huggard and Kautz. “At the same time, it becomes virtually impossible to predict several steps ahead of time precisely what will happen. Such sensitive dependence on initial conditions stands as a hallmark property of chaos.”
Laughter
To be fair, I was not thinking about chaos and uncertainty when I was tilt-a-whirling with my 6-year-old at Jenkinson’s on Easter Sunday. I was just thinking that I had had enough tilting and whirling for one decade. Also, my neck kind of hurt until I remembered to just rest it on the back of the ride and not try and fight the gravity.
As for my 6-year-old? She was laughing. The whole time.
So of course I rode it again with her.
Dizziness and Fear
The Tilt-A-Whirl was my favorite ride when I was a little kid. To my memory, it was the first “adult” ride I was allowed to ride. Farewell flying elephants and check ya later boat with the ringing bell; the Tilt-AWhirl was a real ride, a big boy ride. As a result, I’ve long held a soft spot for the contraption. Haven’t been on one — an official one — in probably 30 years.
It was fun, watching my daughter lose her mind over the ride. It was less fun spinning around and around. I don’t want to say I was scared — because I wasn’t — but there were plenty of people who were. They had to stop the ride later in the day to let someone get off.
I was dizzy, however. More dizzy than I would have been when I was 6 years old.
As it turns out, I’m more of a flying elephant and boat-ringing kind of guy.
Time Marches Forward
The Tilt-A-Whirl was invented in 1926 by Herbert W. Sellner in his Minnesota home. It’s 91 years old. And the one at Jenkinson’s? It pre-dates Jenkinson’s. Been there since at least the early 1970s. No one there knows how long it’s been there.
But the rules of the ride haven’t changed: Pay with your tickets, get a ride, and then it stops. Those are the rules. Always have been, always will.
My Proof
Dizzying. Chaotic. Uncertain. Filled with laughter and fear and a one-time ticket to ride.
The Tilt-A-Whirl is life.