First impressions of Bloom in Calypso suggest many
differences from Stephen, one being his interest in modern
experimental science. Whereas Stephen can think, at the end of
the previous chapter, "My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder,"
without displaying the slightest interest in the nature of
teeth, Bloom brims with questions about empirical phenomena.
Having only a high school education—an education from which he
is twenty years removed—he comes up with some clownishly
inexact answers. But he does have both curiosity and a nose
for the scientific truth, as his thoughts about cats "in the
dark" and black clothes in "The sun" demonstrate.
Looking at his cat's "bristles shining wirily in the weak
light," he thinks: "Wonder is it true if you clip them
they can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark,
perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps."
It is indeed true that cats whose whiskers are cut back become
spatially disoriented; they sense their environment less well
and lose their grace at walking and jumping, not to mention
hunting. The whiskers do not shine in the dark. Bloom's second
hypothesis, however, is substantially correct. The cat's long
facial hairs (known anatomically as vibrissae) are
organs of touch. Lodged in follicles beneath the rest of the
cat's hairs, they connect to sensitive nerve endings and
register the slightest movements of air, allowing the cat to
perceive things that it cannot see or directly touch. Trimming
them not only profoundly alters a cat's proprioceptive sense
but also distorts its picture of its near surroundings. It is
fair to say that they are "kind of feelers in the dark."
Bloom's experiential sense that on a sunny day he will be
hotter in his black clothes than "in that light suit" prompts
him to dredge up some concepts of how solar radiation responds
to different materials: "The sun was nearing the
steeple of George's church. Be a warm day I fancy. Specially
in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts,
reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat." The triad
of technical terms perhaps comes from Bloom's high school
classes, but he misremembers one of them and muddles the
distinction between light and heat. A ray of light (today
described as a wave or beam of photons) encountering matter
can behave in several different ways. If it is not simply
"transmitted" through the material with its vector unchanged
and its energy intact, it will undergo "absorption,"
"reflection," or "refraction." If absorbed, it imparts its
energy to the surrounding material in the form of heat. If
reflected, it bounces off the surface of the material at the
same angle at which it approached. If refracted, it passes
through the material at an altered angle. (Two other
phenomena, "diffraction" and "scattering," occur when the beam
is broken up into many separate beams traveling in different
directions.)
The scientifically correct answer to Bloom's question is that
a black material absorbs most of the incoming solar
radiation. (A white material like snow will reflect most of
it, absorbing only a little as thermal energy and thus acting
as an insulator for the snow beneath. A red material will
reflect the red wavelengths of the radiation and absorb most
of the others. And so on.) But although he substitutes "conducts"
for "absorbs," and then wanders off into correct terms that
offer the wrong answers, Bloom's first instinct is on the
right track. Conduction is the process by which "heat,"
once imparted to matter by the absorption of radiant energy,
is transmitted from one region of the material substance to
surrounding regions that possess less thermal energy. Its
action in the dark clothes is thus closely related to the
absorption of sunlight that imparts the energy to the clothes
in the first place.
