FIRST CATCH YOUR GOAT

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 305/Dec 5th 2019

In a previous column I’ve confessed my addiction to exotic food videos on YouTube, and one I watched recently sparked off thoughts that went way beyond the culinary. Set in the steppes of Outer Mongolia, a charming-but-innocent young Canadian couple travel to witness an ancient, now rare, cooking event, they call 'Boodog' - though it doesn't contain any dog and is probably a poor transliteration. The Mongolian chef invited the young man to catch a goat, by hand, on foot, which he then dispatched quickly and efficiently (to the visible discomfort of the young woman), skinned, taking care to keep all four legs intact, sewed up all the orifices including (to evident amusement of same young woman) the 'butthole', and finally inflated it like a balloon.

A very small fire of twigs and brushwood was lit in which to heat smooth river pebbles; goat carcase was chopped up on the bone then stuffed back into skin, along with hot pebbles. Chef then produced a very untraditional propane torch, burned off all the fur and crisped the skin, and the end result, looking like some sinister black modernist sculpture, was carried on a litter into his yurt where they poured out several litres of goat soup and ate the grey, unappetising meat.

Puzzled by the complication of boodogging I was hardly surprised it's become rare - but then a lightbulb popped on in my head. This wasn’t to do with gastronomy but with energetics. Mongolian steppe soil is only a few inches deep, supporting grass to feed goats and yaks but no trees, hence the tiny fire and hot stones to maximise storage of its heat, and the anachronistic propane torch (which could hardly have roasted the goat). Hot stone cooking is common enough around the Pacific but always in a covered pit, which is impossible to dig in the steppe. These Mongolians had ingeniously adapted to the severe energetic limitations of their environment, sensibly submitting to the Second Law of Thermodynamics by making maximum use of every calorie.

Having just written a column about quantum computing, this little anthropological lesson sparked a most unexpected connection. We all live in a world ruled by the Second Law, and are ourselves, looked at from one viewpoint, simply heat engines. Our planet is roughly in thermal equilibrium, receiving energy as white light and UV from the sun and reradiating it back out into space in the infrared: our current climate panic shows just how delicate this equilibrium is. Incoming sunlight has lower entropy than the outgoing infrared, and on this difference all life depends: plants exploit the entropy gradient to build complex carbohydrates out of CO₂ and water, animals eat plants to further exploit the difference by building proteins, we eat animals and plants and use the difference to make art and science, movies and space shuttles. And when we die the Second Law cheerfully turns us back into CO₂ and ammonia (sometimes accelerated by a crematorium).   

The difficulty of building quantum computers arises from this fact, that quantum computation takes place in a different world that’s governed by the notoriously different rules of quantum mechanics. The tyranny of the Second Law continually tries to disrupt it, in the guise of thermal noise, because any actual quantum computing device must unavoidably be of our world, made of steel and copper and glass, and all the liquid helium in the world can’t entirely hide that fact. 

What also occurred to me is that if you work with quantum systems, it must become terribly attractive to fantasise about living in the quantum world, free from the tyranny of thermodynamics. Is that perhaps why the Multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is so unaccountably popular? Indeed, to go much further, is an unconscious awareness of this dichotomy actually rather ancient? People have always chafed at the restrictions imposed by gravity and thermodynamics, have invented imaginary worlds in which they could fly, or live forever, or grow new limbs, or shape-shift, or travel instantaneously, or become invisible at will. Magic, religion, science fiction, in a sense are all reactions against our physical limits that exist because of scale: we’re made of matter that’s made of atoms that obey Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, which prevents us from walking through walls or actually creating rabbits out of hats. Those atoms are themselves made from particles subject to different, looser rules, but we’re stuck up here, only capable of imagining such freedom. 

And that perhaps is why, alongside their impressively pragmatic adaptability, those Mongolian nomads - who move their flocks with the seasons as they’ve done for centuries, but send their children to university in Ulan Bator and enthusiastically adopt mobile phones and wi-fi - also retain an animistic, shamanistic religion with a belief in guardian spirits.