Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Shakespeare for the Scorched


"Woah, hang on, it's only 2100 degrees; that's not hot enough!" For my senior design class, my team was given the project to design a piece of hardware for Rio Tinto's copper refinery: a sacrificial enclosure to go inside a molten metal bath and keep the electronics it protects cool enough to survive. After working on this all year, we finally were ready to test our design in the heat treating ovens here at BYU. We got a steel enclosure and placed the insulating material we've been working to develop inside, and stuck it inside. The video below is me putting the enclosure in an oven very appropriately named Lucifer. (This has a tie to Shakespeare; just hang with me.)
The furnace has to get up to about 2200 degrees F inside; as a point of reference, a flame burns about 1800 degrees F. Without gloves and protective gear, I couldn't even get close to such heat. Even my gloves, just from being close start to smoke, and if they are close long enough burst into flame. Even something that you think of as being indestructible like steel can't take the heat forever; when the steel enclosure started out, it was a bright and shiny steel. After just a couple hours in the furnace, it was black and beat up. Every time we put it in, more of the metal oxidizes and more of it oxidizes and cracks and peels off. The picture shown is a pile of steel

shavings that came off after one of our tests. Although there are certainly metals that can withstand such temperatures, the analogy still was impressive to me. There are things in life that take their toll on human souls and no matter how toughened and hardened a soul might be, it cannot withstand forever the heat. This is a theme Shakespeare treats often in his plays, and one which I think would be very appropriate to include in our own version of Shakespeare. Lady Macbeth really is the inspiration for this analogy--even she, a tough and hardened character ("unsex me now") that wishes to be impervious to the weaknesses of a conscience can't stand forever the memory of the black deeds which she has committed and to which she contributed. Like the steel, though initially she appears untouched by her conscience, and curses her husband and his, eventually starts to crack under the pressure. She begins walking in her sleep, confessing her terrible deeds. She rubs her hands together trying to cleanse them. Macbeth calls a doctor and asks,
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”
Isn't there something you can do to cure her of her guilt? The doctor's response?
"Therein the patient must minister to himself."
There's nothing any outside person can do about such guilt. The damage is irreversible unless repair is initiated by the guilty party. Unfortunately for steel, that pretty much seals the deal. For Lady Macbeth it apparently does too: she breaks completely and goes crazy and dies. Her guilt and suffering are a huge theme in Macbeth, and one Shakespeare treats so well it has drawn countless references over the years. (One of my favorites is a gospel classic from Elder Holland.) Anyway, thinking about themes from Shakespeare made me think of these themes of guilt and suffering, and how damaging they are to the human soul to the extent that they frequently lead to the end of the afflicted party's life. They are so well addressed in the tragedies. If we do end up doing a tragedy of some sort for our final project, this is a theme that must be included.


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