(ONE MAN'S ATTEMPT TO HELP THE WORLD UNDERSTAND THE VEXING QUESTIONS OF BIG SCIENCE, ONE BEER AT A TIME.) 

I have finally discovered the answer to a question that has plagued me since I was the youngest boy.  Simply: why do little old men wear their pants cinched so high up their chest?  It seems to be a universal characteristic of little old men everywhere, regardless of culture.  (Given of course that little old men in that culture wear pants to begin with.) 

The answer is simple and to the point:The pants stay the same size but the little old men slowly shrink into them.  At some point, the pants become a major stabilizer and source of vertical support.  In some ways, they function like a splint on a broken bone.  Without the buttressing effect of the pants, some little old men would fall right over or collapse into a heap.  Suspenders serve to seal the deal like the cap on a squishy tube of toothpaste.

I know this because I have a close personal relationship with a little old man.  He is ninety-one years old and lives alone in a local nursing home.  I visit him once or twice a week to walk outside in the sun or talk politics and sports.  I recently received permission from his doctor to bring over a couple of beers so that we could eat popcorn, drink beer and watch the World Series. 

Just like old times.

Little old men are a study in physics.  Take gravity - gravity brings you down, and little old men show the effects of gravity on every sagging, drooping, crestfallen inch of their bodies. It bows their shoulders, bends their spine, hangs on their muscles and tugs on their skin.   When I met this little old man he was a sturdy senior with a firm handshake.  Over the years his posture drooped and his center of gravity leaned forward, transforming him into a gnarled old oak with too many big branches.  At ninety-one, he now walks only with a walker, shuffling along, stooped over like a wizened, wrinkly old wizard, but still with a firm handshake.  A firm handshake is important to little old men.  In some cases, that and life itself is all they have. 

Entropy.  Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system not available to do work.  It is the tendency of ordered states to revert to disorder.  You build a sand castle but it slowly crumbles, a house not maintained falls down, when the life force leaves a living cell, the cell rots back to its constituent molecules. 

Little old men are showcases of entropy.  They drop things, lose things, forget things.  Dresser drawers carefully stacked and ordered by caregivers become disordered and nothing can be found.  Young eyes become old and sightless, bowels fail, a sure step becomes uncertain.  For little old men, routines become altered and a life carefully planned slowly withers and deteriorates around them. 

Inertia. A little old man at rest remains at rest until acted upon by an outside force – like an alarm clock, a person entering the room or a car back-firing in the distance.  Similarly, once in motion, a little old man remains in motion.  That’s why you have to watch them closely as they walk, lest they fall off the sidewalk. 

Don’t laugh.  You’ll be there some day too.   

Momentum.  When it became apparent that this little old man should no longer be driving, I took him to the Department of Motor Vehicles to take a do or die (so to speak) driving test.  On the way there, he asked to drive and I reluctantly let him.  As we approached a red light he became confused and ran into the car stopped in front of him.  Flustered, he threw it into reverse and smacked the car behind him.  He never drove again but he ended his driving career with the difficult and elusive Two-For!  Most people drive their entire lives without achieving that feat.  What a way to go out. 

Light.  Ask a little old man about the theory of light.  “Is it a wave or a particle?” you might say.  “I’m not sure,” he’ll reply, “I can’t see without my glasses.”  I once asked the little old man to read a large road sign with oversized letters as we drove along the expressway. 

He looked and he looked.  Then he thought. 

“Well… I think,” he said finally, “that it has an ‘H’”. 

And you know, he was exactly right! 

Space and time. Little old men are lonely like outer electrons.  They have outlived all of their contemporaries by many years, their bonds have been broken one by one and they have been set adrift upon an uncertain ocean of young people.  They live in splendid isolation, the last of their species, the final dinosaurs, the last of the Mohicans.  As comedian David Steinberg once said in a spoof about an aged Pope: “Most people his age have been dead for 10 years.”

Magnetism.  A little old man can’t tell his north pole from a hole in the wall.  His south pole neither.  But on those rare occasions when his axis is aligned just so, and when charged particles from the solar winds bath his atmosphere with energy, the world of little old men glitters and flutters like the Northern Lights.  The Aurora Snore-ialis. 

No one can see it but little old men.

So the next time you meet a little old man shuffling along on his way from here to there – pants belted tightly below his chin - slow down so that he can focus on you.  Call him “sir” and ask him what’s new.  Walk with him a bit so he can stretch his legs and then offer your hand and give him a chance to show you his handshake. 

In that handshake he’ll show you all the physics you’ll ever need to know. 

(The interested reader is invited to read "Einstein's Hammock #1" and "Einstein's Hammock #2: The Tick-Tock Continuum"