The Parable of the Beads

We will be publishing on this blog stories and testimonials from Arts & Humanities faculty addressing issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and Harvard's response to the crisis. Today we share a short parable written by Gordon Teskey, Professor of English.

Imagine white beads in a large, agitating bowl with small holes in the bottom, like a colander. These holes are slightly smaller than the beads, which therefore don’t fall through them. Or at least they don’t do so yet. Shake the bowl yourself. As you do so, the beads bounce around, each one contacting four others every second or so. Now you drop a pink bead into the bowl and every bead it touches turns pink like it, and every newly pink bead touches four others every second, turning these pink as well. And so on.

The interesting thing is, from inside the bowl it’s impossible to see which beads are pink and which white. The difference in color between white beads and pink is visible only from outside the bowl, where you are, as you shake the bowl. Inside the bowl, the pink beads don't know they've changed color, nor can the white beads discern any change in the pink ones: all appear to be white.

But after twenty minutes, the pink beads turn red. The redness is visible from inside the bowl: it’s visible to all the beads, red, pink, and white. That is, when a bead turns red it can see it is red, and so too can any white or pink bead looking at it. The white and pink beads (remember, they think they all look the same) scramble to avoid the red beads, creating more agitation.

But what happens to those red beads? Once a bead turns red, it dehydrates, diminishing in size just enough to fall through those holes on the underside of the bowl. The red beads fall into a lower bowl and there, after twenty minutes, they either turn white again or they dry up altogether and fall through yet smaller holes on the underside of this lower bowl. But there is no third, still lower bowl. There is only the abyss, into which these shrunken and desiccated beads disappear.

Meanwhile, in the upper bowl, which is still shaking, more beads turn pink from the rapid contiguous interactions until most beads are pink and have started turning red, drying out, shrinking, and falling through the holes at the bottom of the bowl. All the time, from inside the bowl, all beads look white or red, with the latter increasing. After more time, the white and pink beads, which all look the same, are surprised to see many all around them suddenly turning red and rattling down and out through those lower holes. This suddenness surprises because the beads in the bowl haven’t seen and therefore find it hard to believe in pinkness.

If at any moment in this process you stop shaking the bowl, then the pinkness stops spreading. It’s still there, and the many that have turned pink will turn red and fall into the lower bowl. In time, most of the red beads, which have fallen into the lower bowl, will turn white again and be lifted back into the upper bowl. Others fall into the abyss. The game goes on toward its end so long as you are shaking the bowl.