Number 9

In the vortex of love, wormholes, and dead men

MATH/MANIFEST

Nikola Tesla, eponym of my car, had a photographic memory, described having an out-of-body experience transporting him to faraway lands as a child, and invented, among other things, alternating current (AC) and the induction motor. Along with harnessing electricity, he was also supposedly obsessed with the numbers 3, 6, and 9, claiming (in a quote no one can actually directly attribute to him) that they held the key of the universe.

The factor of three indeed looms large across science, history and Tesla’s (OCD?) habits according to this article in allthatsinteresting.com:

For example: doubling 1, then 2, and so on creates a pattern that excludes 3, 6 and 9. Scientist Marko Rodin believes that 3 6 9, then, represents a “flux field” or a vector from the third to the fourth dimension.

Triangles have three sides—as do pyramids. Trinities abound in human history, as in the “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Tesla himself would point to the trifecta of “energy, frequency, and vibration” which he believed contained the “secrets of the universe.”

In his life, Tesla manifested his obsession in numerous ways. He would walk three times around the block before entering the building. Tesla would wash his dishes with 18 napkins (18 is divisible by 9, 6, and 3). The inventor would also only stay in hotel rooms that had a room number divisible by three.

Now creators with their woo-woo numerology videos like to spiral out from all the 3-6-9 combos in Fibonacci, number squares, and others, suggesting ideas such as manifesting a goal requires uttering it 3 times in the morning, 6 times in the afternoon, and 9 times in the evening. The #9, largest single digit integer, is popularly considered the most powerful among this trio, “a sacred number” which “contains all of the attributes (both positive and negative) of all the other numbers.”

Any number added to 9 retains its original value when you add its digits and keep reducing until you reach a single digit.

For example, 9 + 4 = 13; 1 + 3 = 4 and so on. This property is not shared by any other number.

Put nine dots equidistant around a circle and start connecting dots through these digit sum calculations and you land in the mystical realm of the Vortex.

I love this Vortex math video delightfully narrated by this unnamed Mathologer man in a “3 3 3 Only Half Evil” tee with a childlike giggle who calls elegant number symmetries and a slew of Spirograph sort of diagrams “cute” and astoundingly—mad props to the math nerds!—has nearly 4M views. He also, gasp, debunks the specialness of 9 and the mysticism of the Vortex as “simply ridiculous,” since it all hinges on our (arbitrary) base of 10 (from our 10 fingers which could change for, say, an 8-fingered alien using a base of 8). Math, as a whole, on the other fingered hand, is where the actual magic happens.

“So what about the claim that the Vortex is the key to the understanding of the universe? Well, today’s discussion was really about presenting a sound explanation of the mathematics that comes with the Vortex, an explanation that demystifies its supposedly super special properties. I hope it’s clear by now that the Vortex is really not as special and amazing as it is made out to be in all these Tesla videos and that proclaiming it to be key to the universe mainly based on these properties is simply ridiculous… Having said that, I am convinced that mathematics as a whole is the master key to the understanding the universe. And of course the mathematics we talked about today is a tiny, tiny part of the key.”

LOVE POTION #9

If 9 is not the key to universe, how about the key to love?

Last week, I talked about how the quest for chemistry in our times might be rendered rudderless without our natural pheromones—or even often our physical bodies as we float willy-nilly online—to guide us. I fantasized about creating a perfume to capture/inspire that elusive “spark,” and was about to label the imaginary bottle Love Potion #9, which sent me down the wormhole of wondering: where does this Love Potion #9 reference come from?

From Wikipedia:

Love Potion No. 9 is a 1992 American romantic comedy film starring Tate Donovan and Sandra Bullock. The film takes its name from the 1959 hit song [by the Clovers (with covers to follow)], “Love Potion No. 9.” The story is about a love potion that enables a person to make people of the opposite sex become completely infatuated with them by simply talking.

The film is actually more about the disaster of Potion #8, with 9 to follow later as a fixer. Paul, the biochemist with a crush on his biologist coworker Diane, gets a bottle of this #8 potion from the palm reader Madame Ruth (borrowed from Rue in the song) that he cynically tosses. His cat however takes a sip from the garbage and attracts all the feline strays in the neighborhood. The colleagues bring this into the lab, test it and divvy among them, leading to all kinds of sexual shenanigans and misalliances. Paul returns to the Madame potion dispenser to ask for an antidote, which “unlike number 8, does not create feelings of love, but removes the things obscuring it (such as potion No. 8) forever. Solidifying eternal true love between those who drink it together five minutes after they share a kiss. However, if Diane was never truly in love with him, Paul will love her forever, and she will eternally hate him.”

If you’re like me and don’t give two hoots about the awkward love plot but want the wonky explanation of how the heck such devices that get us there are actually supposed to work—as when man becomes man-fly in The Fly—the film obliges with this pseudoscientific explanation:

When swallowed it affects the vocal cords directly so that when you speak micro-tremors encoded within your voice stimulate tiny little hairs in the inner ear of the opposite sex. The hair vibrates, sending a signal along a nerve to the brain, which in turn produces a combination of mood-altering, endogenous chemicals responsible for the biochemical process of falling in love. It makes members of the same sex hostile. It only works for four hours at a time.

Love Potion No. 9 prevents love from fading, and overrides the effects of Love Potion No. 8.

Not much liner notes to help us understand the magic of #9 of course—that just seems to do what it does regardless. The film was a box office flop with a Rotten Tomato approval rating of 25%. And the song lyrics that you can’t put back in the bottle:

I took my troubles down to Madame Rue
You know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth
She’s got a pad down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
Sellin’ little bottles of Love Potion Number Nine

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I’d been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said “What you need is Love Potion Number Nine”

She bent down and turned around and gave me a wink
She said “I’m gonna make it up right here in the sink”
It smelled like turpentine, it looked like India Ink
I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink

I didn’t know if it was day or night
I started kissin’ everything in sight
But when I kissed a cop down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
He broke my little bottle of Love Potion Number Nine

DEEP SPACE 9

Right after the sloppy rom-com Potions of 8-9, there was the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 emanation of the franchise from 1993-1999 (slightly overlapping with The Next Generation before it and the Voyager after), blurbed on imdb.com as: “In the vicinity of the liberated planet of Bajor, the Federation space station Deep Space Nine guards the opening of a stable wormhole to the far side of the galaxy.”

I love floating alongside an opening to a stable wormhole! The public did too; while not as popular as The Next Generation, Deep Space rated well enough to endure 7 seasons. But I’m way more interested—in this context of exploring #9s—how this name/number came to be. The answer, or stabs at it, can only be found in the bowels of Trekkie subReddits.

Dilweed999 asks of the Deep Space Nine group:

I know the actual reason is “the creators thought it sounded cool” but is there ever an in-universe explanation for the name? According to Memalpha the “deep space” moniker is usually slapped on starbases that are not in interstellar space but also not really close to a celestial body. I suppose if we don’t consider the wormhole a celestial body it kind of works, but they were calling it DS9 at the start of the pilot when it orbited Bajor. IMO it’s kind of a slap in the face to the Bajorans, akin to Bashir’s “frontier medicine” faux pas. JUST A SPACE STATION IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, ORBITING... NOTHING WORTH MENTIONIN

The deep internet crowd weighs in that anything outside of Federation bounds but owned by the Federation gets the Deep Space moniker. As far as 9, well there is mention of a 4 being shut down, there’s a “disturbing report” from Deep Space 5 once, and 8 seemed to have vanished without a trace. So perhaps 9 was just next in line, with more such stations to follow up to a dozen. Don’t blame the wormhole, said Joe_TheOne: “Nobody knew about the wormhole until the show began. It had nothing to do with the naming. O’Brian had to do a bunch of techno magic to make it stop orbiting Bajor and get close to the wormhole. Far enough that Keiko couldn’t commute and alleviate his suffering.”

Talking about wormholes in the Trek universe is its own special brand of wormhole, and I can follow these threads into the farthest reaches of splicing tiny plot points. Or we can go play a record backwards.

TURN ME ON, DEAD MAN

I mentioned once how my high school physics teacher had us searching for subliminal messages in print ads and deciphering backwards records. Perhaps the most memorable moment of my education was just hearing a series of number 9s chanted on a Beatles album become “turn me on, dead man” in the reverse, as demonstrated here:

The Beatles “Revolution 9” from the vinyl LP The Beatles better known as The White Album issued in 1968, Apple records. Of all the infamous “Paul [McCartney] is dead” rumor clues, this arguably the most popular of the ones found on the records—where “number nine ... number nine ...” played backwards is heard to be “turn me on dead man ... turn me on dead man ...” so here’s that clue for you all ... from side 4, track 5 of The White Album, the first 40 seconds being played in reverse—you get to hear that bizarre piano passage as it normally sounded…which I found out that “bizarre piano passage” was from Robert Schumann ‘12 Etudes, Op. 13,’ for anyone who ever wondered) ... then ‘turn me on dead man.’

My physics teacher loved a good conspiracy theory and told us how Beatles member Paul was rumored to have actually died in a car crash in 1966 but was replaced by a lookalike to spare the world’s fans such great grief from the loss of their idol. Sleuths can have fun finding innumerable “clues” hidden in songs or album artwork, perhaps even planted by the band as a twisted game, since.

For me now, again his begs the question: why 9?

“Revolution 9” is a sound collage made by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which has been described as a piece of experimental, avant-garde, musique concrète, surrealist, and psychedelic music, with its repeating motifs of “number 9” and B minor piano theme. McCartney however thought it was schlock and apparently objected to its inclusion on the album when he heard it. Lennon later said of the track and its production:

Revolution 9 was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution. All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects. One thing was an engineer’s testing voice saying, “This is EMI test series number nine.” I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn’t realise it: it was just so funny the voice saying, “number nine;” it was like a joke, bringing number nine into it all the time, that’s all it was.

It’s not a key to the universe, silly; it’s a joke. The question to ask is not why 9, but why not.

Tell that to poor Pluto, demoted from the ninth planet we grew up with to a mere dwarf in 2006. And so it goes.