Last Friday I made a seminar on basic rheology in Tokyo for 2.5 hours (!). After that I rushed into Shinkansen train to attend the ceremony for 90th anniversary of Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University. Because the institute is my previous work venue, I enjoyed to see some professors including Prof. Osaki, Prof. Watanabe, Prof. Inoue,…. many.
In the rheology seminar, I attempted to convey some basic concepts of rheology. One of the issues is relaxation time, which would be rather familiar for people who learned about reaction kinetics or LCR circuit. But if not in the case, viscoelastic relaxation might be not handy. I show silly-putty movie or even I demonstrate the bouncing and flowing of putty. Actually, the silly-putty behavior exhibits the solid-like reaction in a short time and the liquid-like behavior in a long time. But these are not sufficient to present the relaxation (or transition) from solid to liquid.
Nevertheless, for the explanation of relaxation time, my favorite way of doing is to list some typical relaxation times of our emotion and our body. For instance, a couple of days relief of muscle pain can be shared. Among the list, I have included 6-seconds as the relief time of anger. I have found this description in a Japanese book for anger management. When one has something nasty, the suggested way is to step back for 6-seconds before saying something terrible. This story is quite appealing for the audience, and actually most of them take a note.
However, I would remove the 6-seconds story from the list, at least temporary. For some reason, I have been attempting to seek the original research paper of the 6-second anger relief experiment. But no success. Indeed, the 6-second story is famous in Japan, but no English literature. Due to such an observation, now I am somewhat skeptical for this story. Well, in my rheology seminar, the 6-second story is not the main subject but just a kind of fun. But I wish to see an adequate reference.