I have, for the past twenty-three years, taken my morning coffee
at the Alpine Espresso Bar on Edelweiss Strasse, a small shop
operated by Dr. Ephraim Lamb, a retired solid-state physicist (see
this publication's April 18 report on the uranium-ditelluride
anomaly) out of the front ground floor of his own home. The Alpine
Espresso Bar is not, by any reasonable account, a commercial
operation. Dr. Lamb serves coffee. He accepts cash. He does not
advertise. The bar operates six days a week, from approximately
7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., Monday through Saturday, and his regulars —
of whom I am one of nine — know, from year to year, where to go.
The week of January 4 through January 10 produced, at the bar, the
most extensive sustained cold-snap discussion of my twenty-three-
year attendance. I logged, in my pocket notebook over the six
mornings I was present, forty-seven distinct observations from the
bar's nine regulars on the subject of the cold.
The observations were:
"It is cold," offered sixteen times.
"It is colder than yesterday," offered nine times.
"It is colder than it has been in years," offered five times.
"It is not as cold as Augusta," offered two times (both by the one
regular whose daughter lives in Augusta).
"It is not as cold as it looks," offered three times.
"It is colder than it looks," offered three times.
"It is colder on the way here than it was when I left," offered
four times.
"Back home in Kiel, it was colder than this," offered once (by me).
"This is actually not that cold," offered twice.
"The car would not start," offered twice.
The forty-seven observations, I confirmed upon review, all relate to
the same underlying meteorological phenomenon: a period of sustained
atmospheric temperatures, at the Alpine Espresso Bar's 1,470-foot
elevation, below approximately 20°F, with overnight lows reaching 6°F
on Wednesday morning.
They are all, in the sense of corresponding to a measurable physical
quantity expressible as a real-valued scalar function of time and
place, saying the same thing.
The philosophical problem
The philosophical problem that has, in a way I had not previously
considered, struck me this week is as follows. A cold snap, on its
own terms, does not exist.
Temperature exists. Temperature is a scalar function of time and
place. It is measurable. At any given moment, at any given place on
the North American continent, a temperature measurement yields a
single, definite, real-valued result.
A "snap," however, is a comparative claim. A cold snap exists only
relative to some expected temperature range; and the expected range
is itself a statistical abstraction computed, by convention, over a
sliding thirty-year climatological window. On Wednesday at 4:47 a.m.
it was, at the Alpine Espresso Bar's elevation, 6°F. This is cold
relative to the 1991-2020 climatological mean for this date, which
is, per the NOAA-NCEI record, approximately 25°F. It is not cold
relative to the ordinary climate of, say, Hiyama Prefecture in
northern Hokkaido.
A cold snap, in other words, is a comparison between the present and
an abstracted population of past weather observations. It is a
social fact as much as a physical one. In an entirely different
climate — one in which 6°F at 4:47 a.m. was the ordinary January
expectation — Wednesday morning would not have been experienced as
cold. It would have been experienced as unremarkable.
The forty-seven observations my fellow regulars made were,
therefore, not observations of temperature. They were observations
of a departure from expectation.
The response
Dr. Lamb, at the counter Thursday morning, listening to the last of
the forty-seven observations (it was "It is cold"), asked me whether
I wanted a refill.
I said I did.
He refilled my mug. The coffee was, at the moment it poured, 183°F
(this is measurable; he has a thermometer). The air in the room
was 68°F.
The temperature differential between the coffee and the room — 115°F
— is a real physical quantity. It is not a social fact. It does
not, in the philosophical sense, depend on any comparison to an
expected distribution. It was warm coffee, on a cold morning, in a
warm room.
I drank the coffee. I paid the three dollars. I walked, in my coat,
back out into the cold.
I will file this piece.
— Dr. Wilhelm Brüning
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