Okay so about 30 or 40, maybe 50 years ago my father, who's a bartender, brought for me a saloon sign, a beer sign, a neon beer sign for Ballantine ale and beer. I mean it's a neon sign! Been in my attic for decades.
You know, there's something cool about the Ballantine logo. It used to say purity, body and flavor. I hauled this out of the Attic, got a neon sign transformer up, and figure - hey I gotta light this up.
Throw a switch and hot damn! Ballantine ale and beer! The beautiful thing is this is the neon representation of a Borromean ring.
The cool thing about a Borromean - or as some people say a borro-mean - ring is it's a knot that's not a knot. One circle, another circle, and another circle intersect and you can't tear them apart from one another. This can't be removed from this, can't be removed from this - and yet they don't even have to touch one another.
As an aside you can prove that you can't make this out of three perfect circles - don't intersect. These three circles; purity body and flavor, are interlinked under, over, under, over, under, over, under, over. The - of course the neon is a cheat!
Look at this: it goes under, over, over, over, over, under and on. So it's a projection of the Borromean rings onto the front window of a saloon. They had to do this; the neon sign maker couldn't make a neon sign that had these correct without pretty much standing on their head.
Partly because making three circles that intersect like this, you can show that they can't be planar circles, they have to be - at some point or another each of them has to be slightly out of the plane; which is gonna be a challenge for a neon artist. (Brady: But you can do that cos they're slightly out of the plane. ) Yeah!
Notice how this guy is out of the plane and this, this cheat entirely - they should really go under and back over and then down. So moreover I'd have to do it electrically with three different circuits. Each ring, of course, would need to be a separate electrical device because these aren't electrically connected - they're not physically touching one another.
Here I've got every electron going through this letter E, goes through all three of these almost circles, and then continues on to the B in beer. The cheat, of course, is they want it to look like it's right. And that's good enough to attract people.
to hang out the bait in front of the bar. - (Brady: I think that's cleverer! ) Neon people are clever.
Look - look what they've done with letters, like the letter A. Euler's topology suggests that the letter A should not be a makeable letter. Happily people who make neon don't listen to topologists.
More than that, they don't keep their entire neon sign in 2-space. They're perfectly happy to use 3-space and project their message onto the 2-space of the window and ultimately onto the 2-space of our retinas. Meanwhile I got this wonderful gift - someone gave me a hot glue gun.
And I'm playing with this hot glue gun, I realized - hey, you know I can use this to attach - check this out - to glue magnets onto strings so that I can make strings that hook up to one another. Mathematically this isn't a knot. It only becomes a knot when the ends are connected.
So a mathematical knot must have continuity. This is called the unknot; it's a circle. The unknot can be wrapped around itself, you know it's not obvious now that this is an unknot, but it is.
An overhand knot, like this; this is not yet a knot but becomes a knot when I connect the ends together. So here's an overhand, or a trefoil knot; mathematical trefoil knot. Okay, so I made three strings that have magnets on 'em; and I want to make Borromean rings.
Let's go over here, under here, below here, below here, above here, above here, above there, below there - connect these. Now let's make this one the bottom one, this one goes up there, this one goes up here; and although it's not as beautiful as the neon knot, here's a Borromean ring! Over, under, over, under; this guy's over, under, over, under.
This guy, the purple one: over, under, over, under. Now what's wonderfully neat is these are completely linked with one another, but disconnecting any one makes everything fall apart. So I'll disconnect just the purple, and the other two although still tied to one another, fall out.
The Borromean rings require each other in order to form these links. If you can find a glue gun, a couple magnets and a couple pieces of string - you've got it made! There's, there's all the ingredients that you need to explore knot theory!
But meanwhile I'm saying; well I'm playing with these knots, I can look over at the at the knots of neon from a beer company; well I head over to the glass shop and I say - oh I'll make a knot out of neon! My friend Lucas Clark makes a neon knot which, as far as I know, they're kind of rare. He makes a neon knot out of, out of tubing and as you can see it's not a true knot.
Remember how real knots have to have their ends connected? So this looks to some people to be a knot, but in fact it's homeomorphic to a cylinder unless you're an electron. If you're an electron you have to travel in an entire circuit through a transformer and back to the other way, so to an electron it's a knot.
To my eyeball - ah it's still cool looking. (Brady: What happened to your dad? ) He died 22 year- 32 years ago.
- (Brady: What was his name? ) Cliff. I'm Cliff jr.
He was a wonderful man. The kind of- my dad, oh! He lived to be around his kids.
All he cared about was having fun with his kids. So, okay Brady, so I'm six years old my father comes home from the bar, where he's worked a long time. He starts drinking some beer and I say, hey Dad can I have some of your beer?
He says nah, when you're older. So I turned 12, 13 years old - we're listening the radio together I turned to my father and say, dad can I have some beer? He said you're only 12, you can't have beer!
The day I turned 18, went to the draft board got my draft registration; came home said dad can I have some beer now? My father says no not right now, I'll tell you when it's okay. Well, I never asked him again.
In my whole life I've never had a drop of alcohol. Never had a beer, wine, vodka - nothing. But I can't see a beer sign, I can't see an advertisement for a wine or a liquor, without thinking wonderful thoughts about my father.
So it's going back in the Attic now. My wife and I put it in our front window for a few days, entertain our neighborhood. People started coming up on our porch banging our door saying, where's the beer?
