The Column: There must be some payoff in 'lost motion'

Anyone who attended Brooklyn Technical High School — even those who performed dismally and had no alternative after four years but to take night classes conducted sadly enough in Tech’s austere basement — knows about “lost motion.”

To be sure, instructors may have remarked in the faculty room that a particularly hapless fellow, booted out of the class of ’58, was the very embodiment of “lost motion” — i.e., movement with no results.

Here’s the idea:

Let’s say you are measuring a machine part with the gauge known as a micrometer. (Nothing of the sort in mind, you declare? Come on, play along, anyway.)

The first turn of the knurled “thimble” likely will not advance the “spindle” toward the tiny “anvil” between which lies the metal piece awaiting evaluation.

All right, this is a very Brooklyn Techie sort of conversation. Hang in.

There is “play” in the micrometer, you understand — a kind of momentary reluctance to engage that has application in life, or so I say noticing that another morning has gone by and that it already is 1:30 p.m. and the most I can say for myself is that I emptied the dishwasher and scanned the morning headlines.

Those are “lost motion” activities that do not satisfy the more urgent household demands of, say, cleaning the gutters or covering the air conditioners for winter — ladder-related tasks are ripe for substitution — or, during the holiday season, churning out greeting cards as deadline approached.

“How many more?” I groan.

“Keep writing,” says Wink, my wife.

“Why do we do this?”

“So people know we’re still alive.”

Like poor Bob Cratchit, I return to my labor.

I have always been dazzled by the go-getters — the multi-taskers, the world-beaters, the Renaissance types who not only perform neurosurgery but master Classical guitar, exceed at watercolor landscapes and are cited for volunteer work in far-off lands.

“Depressing,” I mention to Wink, coming across a reference to Molly Ringwald in The New Yorker magazine noting that Ringwald is an actor, a writer of two novels, the translator (from French) of a memoir, “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” and author of a New Yorker article on the film director Jean-Luc Godard.

I fight my impulse to sneer, “Oh, isn’t that special,” and sulk toward the window to ponder the accumulation of dry leaves in our backyard and think that sooner or later I will have to find a rake and plastic bag. Just not now.

The universe, brimming with energy, is expanding you know, just like Einstein said, and it can be difficult keeping up with the attendant buzz here on Planet Earth. This is not a matter of age, but inclination. How is it that some people accomplish so much, while others of us do this or that and cause no trouble but will not be remembered for the ability to straddle a cello and treat the crowd to a Brahms sonata?

Along these lines, by the way, I took piano lessons for six years as a boy in Brooklyn and now cannot play a note. At the keyboard, in other words, my fingers were a study in lost motion.

You are apt to pay a price for such shameful lack of initiative.

One time, at college, I watched in envy as a young fellow settled himself at a piano in the dormitory lounge and — no sheet music — began playing ragtime with such flair that Scott Joplin might have applauded.

Girls swooned and gathered round. I would have tried harder to memorize “Turkey in the Straw,” had I known.

“You’ll be sorry someday,” my mother would say when I grumbled that I wanted to practice stickball not the D-major scale.

“Boring, Mom.”

“Wait and see.”

But what’s the point of recalling this now?

Pardon a cosmic leap here.

Only that I was struck by the news of a big scientific breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Researchers used fusion to get more energy out than they put in. This could be big — a power source that down the line saves the world. No guarantees, of course, but let’s hope.

It took years of work — lots of trial and error, time and patience. Every so often lost motion is found. It’s 2 p.m. and I’m still looking.