A Pendulum Isn't Going Anywhere
The Iran situation is not a negotiation. It's a performance of negotiation. The ends are different.
Okay. So. Here’s a thing that physicists know about oscillating systems that I think is going to be relevant to your life right now, whether you want it to be or not.
When you have a pendulum — just a weight on a string, nothing fancy, your grandfather’s clock or a wrecking ball, same idea — it doesn’t actually go anywhere. It swings left, it swings right, it produces the sensation of motion, and at the end of the day, it is hanging in the same place it started. The whole thing looks dynamic. It sounds dynamic. It has momentum and velocity and all the words that feel like progress. It is not progress. It is a loop with good PR.
Please hold that image. I’m going to need it in about two paragraphs.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
Monday: Donald Trump wins in Iran. Personally. The way you win at darts — something small and satisfying and slightly surprising given what everyone else in the bar told you about your chances. He won. He’s going to bring it up. He’s going to bring it up for years.
Tuesday: Iran had better watch itself. He’s considering blowing them to hell; he’s not joking, and if you think he’s joking, that’s on you, frankly; that’s a “you” problem.
Wednesday: peace is very close. Iran is begging. The representatives have tears running down their faces. They are saying, “Sir, please, sir.” He is being magnanimous. He’s the kind of man who can afford to be magnanimous. You see that? Magnanimous. That’s a him thing.
Thursday: we loop back to Monday.
That’s it. That’s the pendulum. (I told you I’d need it.)
The loop is doing something
Here’s what confuses people about oscillating systems: they look like they’re trying to go somewhere. The pendulum swings left — that’s something, right? — and then right — also something — and you can spend a tremendous amount of energy tracking the swings and writing up detailed reports on each swing, and what you will not have, at the end, is a theory of why the clock is staying in one place.
The American press has been writing pendulum coverage. Every swing is a story. Every story starts from rest. Yesterday’s swing didn’t happen; today’s swing is breaking news, which is to say it is news that broke off from reality and is now drifting freely in whatever direction produces the most engagement.
Nobody stops to draw the arc.
Look: I’ve read about astrophysics. I am familiar with genuinely incomprehensible objects — neutron stars with magnetic fields so intense they would scramble your credit card from a thousand miles away. These black holes are technically a hole in the concept of location, in the fact that the universe is expanding, and in the fact that, somehow, everything in it is fine. These are hard to explain. I understand that. But the thing I never do — the thing you cannot do and still call it science — is treat each observation as unconnected to every previous observation. A pulsar pulses. A pulsar has always pulsed. If you write “PULSAR PULSES” every time it pulses without noting that it always pulses, you are not covering the pulsar. You are covering the light.
The calibration problem
There’s a concept in measurement called instrument drift. Your thermometer was accurate when you bought it. Over time, for reasons that are physics and also just entropy being entropy, it starts reading a degree high. Then two degrees. Then one day you’re telling everyone it’s 72 in the house when it’s actually 68, and you’re comfortable, and nobody questions it because the thermometer has always said 72, and also you’re not cold.
The press has drift. It got trained — slowly, across decades, through the specific pressures of access journalism and the neurological demand for novelty — to treat the powerful as operating in good faith until proven otherwise. And then, once proven otherwise, to treat the proof as yesterday’s story. The instrument is reading high. Nobody is recalibrating. We keep getting told it’s 72.
The fact-checks exist. The transcripts exist. The contradictions are documented in paragraph fourteen, after the jump, below the fold, filed and indexed, and completely inert. Detection without consequence produces its own kind of paralysis. (The thermometer is not the fever. The thermometer has clocked the temperature and gone back to its little hook on the wall.)
A brief endorsement of nine-year-olds
I want to make a modest proposal: nine-year-olds should run the major news and diplomatic desks. Not forever. Just for a while. Just long enough to ask the obvious question.
Nine-year-olds — and I mean this with complete sincerity — are excellent at pattern recognition. They have not yet been socialized out of it. They will look at the Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday cycle, draw a circle with a crayon, and label it a circle. They will not feel embarrassed about the circle. They will not worry about access. They will not soften the circle with contextualizing language about its complex dynamics. They will point at the circle and say: “This is a circle, and we’ve gone around it three times already, why are we acting surprised.
Does a nine-year-old have sourcing skills? No. Do they have twenty years of experience on the foreign policy beat? Also no. But they have something the beat reporter quietly surrendered somewhere around 2017, which is the professional willingness to look at a pendulum and say, out loud, in print: this thing isn’t going anywhere.
What Iran actually is
Iran is not a negotiation. I want to be very clear about this, because the word “negotiation” implies a structure — offers, counteroffers, positions that are stable across time, a direction, an asymptote you’re approaching from both sides. What Trump generates instead is weather. Each day’s statement is a weather event. It bears no causal relationship to the weather event before it, except that they both involve clouds, his face, and someone on television treating it as unprecedented.
Real negotiations are boring. They produce documents. The documents have numbers in them. The numbers are sometimes contested and sometimes not. None of this is happening. What is happening is a performance of negotiation, which serves the purposes of a performance, which are: to be watched, to produce an audience, and to make the audience forget that they were watching last week’s performance when this week’s started.
The thing about loops
Here’s what I actually want to say, and then I’ll stop, I promise, I’m wrapping up:
The universe runs on loops. Planetary orbits are loops. The water cycle is a loop. The carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the life cycle of a star — loops, all of it, loops inside loops, loops that take a billion years and loops that take eleven seconds. There is nothing inherently wrong with a loop. The loop is how the universe gets things done.
But you have to know it’s a loop. You have to track the period, identify the phase, and understand that you are looking at a system in repetition and not a sequence of unrelated events that just happen, coincidentally, to look identical. The astronomer who mistakes a pulsar for a sequence of one-off flashes of light is not doing astronomy. They are collecting dots and refusing to connect them.
Somewhere in an American elementary school, a nine-year-old is doing the thing that used to be called journalism: looking at two things, noticing they’re the same thing, and asking why everyone keeps acting like they’re different.
We could use a few hundred of them. Starting Monday. (Which, by the way, is when the loop resets.)