Robert Kowal

While floss­ing this morn­ing, I had an epiphany.

As an avid cyclist, I have for some time been con­cerned about the increas­ing inci­dence of “road rage” over the past few years. Last night I was read­ing up on cur­rent ideas con­cern­ing the cos­mo­log­i­cal infla­tion­ary model (par­tic­u­larly João Magueijo’s highly con­tro­ver­sial asser­tion that C may not be con­stant). As I wrapped a sec­ond strand of floss around my fin­gers to tackle a sesame seed lodged between molars it all coalesced.

I ≈ (Vp – Vmc)2

Where I is Irri­ta­tion, Vp is the max­i­mum poten­tial veloc­ity any par­tic­u­lar loco­mo­tive mode may achieve and Vmc is the min­i­mum con­stant velocity.

Irri­ta­tion is pro­por­tional (for­give the ≈, WP doesn’t have com­plete set of math sym­bols) to the square of the poten­tial veloc­ity minus the min­i­mum con­stant veloc­ity. Essen­tially, the faster your car the more angered you are by slow traf­fic. I shall refrain from any util­i­tar­ian or Marx­ist inter­pre­ta­tion (although the con­se­quences will surely tit­il­late social the­o­rists) and limit my com­ments to the exper­i­men­tally verifiable.

Con­sider the pedes­trian. Rarely is an ambu­la­tory excur­sion to the cor­ner deli delayed by any­thing more retard­ing than cross­walk, thus the min­i­mum con­stant is quite close to the max­i­mum poten­tial veloc­ity: Vp – Vmc is small. True, one may be annoyed occa­sion­ally by a tan­dem stroller monop­o­liz­ing the side­walk but such encoun­ters are brief and have a neg­li­gi­ble effect on one’s veloc­ity. Our for­mula sug­gests that pedes­tri­ans should have a very low irri­ta­tion num­ber and sure enough, there is no recorded inci­dent of a pedes­trian shoot­ing another because of side­walk rage.

Let us move on to cars: I drive an old diesel vehi­cle with tremen­dous torque but poor accel­er­a­tion and a mod­est max­i­mum cruis­ing speed. It is extremely rare that I find myself annoyed by trucks or buses ahead of me; indeed I some­times have dif­fi­culty keep­ing apace with them. But every­one in a Porsche Boxer or Audi TT who passes me is unmis­tak­able miffed^[1].

How about air travel? You might think that, since once an air­craft is aloft it trav­els con­sis­tently near its max­i­mum poten­tial veloc­ity, fre­quents fliers would be a most cheery lot. But, as we know, this is not the case. Remem­ber that it is the dif­fer­ence between the max­i­mum poten­tial and min­i­mum con­stant veloc­i­ties which is impor­tant. A plane trav­els very fast, but while you’re sit­ting in the board­ing area your veloc­ity is nearly 0: Vp – Vmc results in a large num­ber. I would fur­ther spec­u­late that all the tran­sit required to arrive at the air­craft should be accounted for in the value of Vmc but this will require fur­ther consideration.

Things get really inter­est­ing when we start talk­ing about inter­stel­lar travel and here is where Magueijo enters the pic­ture. If we were able to con­struct a ves­sel capa­ble of approach­ing lumi­nal veloc­ity (a.k.a. the speed of light) any pas­sen­ger aboard would lit­er­ally boil in their own bile long before reach­ing their des­ti­na­tion due to the stag­ger­ing irri­ta­tion induced. This would seem to rule out manned inter­stel­lar travel — at least for us; sen­tient alien species capa­ble of space travel would no doubt be intel­li­gent but might not nec­es­sar­ily pos­sess a ner­vous sys­tem sus­cep­ti­ble to irri­ta­tion. If how­ever, as Maguejo sug­gests, C is not con­stant and if it some­how were to drop it to near the max­i­mum veloc­ity of say a mail­man, then the sky’s the limit.

1. ^[1] A sur­pris­ing cor­rob­o­rat­ing exam­ple lies at the far end of the auto spec­trum. Accord­ing to U.S. Cen­sus life sat­is­fac­tion rank­ings Nascar dri­vers are among the hap­pi­est pro­fes­sional groups in the nation. This is likely because they nearly always travel at the max­i­mum veloc­ity of their vehi­cles. ↩