Lance Mannion

Why Einstein came to work every day

Posted Thursday afternoon, November 26, 2020.

Albert Einstein (left, in gray overcoat) and Kurt Gödel(in black, right) taking a walk at Princeton University, 1954. Via Prospect Magazine.

Two young mathematicians at Oxford in the late 1980s take a walk in spirit with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel at Princeton in the mid-1950s:

When we left, Zafar suggested that we walk back to college, rather than take a bus, and I agreed, assuming that he wanted to discuss something. The mathematician Kurt Gödel used to walk, setting off at sunset and returning after midnight, and found that his best ideas came to him in this stretch of time. Albert Einstein, who was deeply fond of Gödel, and who was also at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, used to say in his later years, when he no longer engaged in much research, that he went to the institute daily only for the privilege of walking home with Kurt.

---from “In the Light of What We Know”, a novel by Zia Haider Rahman.

Unless...

Posted Monday afternoon, July 20, 2020.

Model of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian.

For some reason this seems relevant...

Later, as we know, just after the flight of Sputnik, Eisenhower brought in James B. Killian as the Scientific Adviser to the President, together with a scientific advisory committee. This form of organization has persisted, and it certainly provides a direct means by which the President can obtain promptly the best of scientific advice on any problem before him. It will not work, of course, unless the President wants to use it.

---Vannevar Bush, among other things in a long and distinguished career, chair of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, writing in 1970 in his memoir “Pieces of the Action”.

The Climate Change Denialist of La Mancha

Posted Wednesday morning, September 25, 2019.

Illustration by Gustave Dore for Chapter LII of “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes.

Every now and again, I forget Conrad’s warning, and get to remembering what a fine fellow I was when I was a young college professor and I think, “Weren’t my students lucky they were in my class!” For example, one semester I taught an introduction to literature the syllabus for which included “Le Morte de Arthur” and“Don Quixote.” (I didn’t have them read the whole of either; just key chapters and passages, so they got the best parts and wrestled with the main themes. “Pride and Prejudice”, “The Age of Innocence”, and two more contemporary novels that I can’t recall at the moment were on the syllabus too, and those they had to read in their entire.) I was a good lecturer and knew how to get discussions going, so, while I’m not sure my students liked the books. I know they did enjoy talking about them. The lecture and discussion I remember most clearly and am proudest of was the one dealing with the transition from narrative fiction dominated by romance and epic to realistic domestic comedy and melodrama. Suddenly stories people were reading stories populated by middle class tradespeople and merchants, ordinary soldiers and sailors, goatherds, barbers, barmaids, and small local landowners whose brains melted because they read too many of the wrong sort of books. This was due to more people reading---being able to read---and they wanted to read about characters like themselves struggling through storylines that reflected life as they knew it 

To introduce the point I showed them two movie clips. The first was the final scenes from the best Arthurian story to have made its way to the big screen, John Boorman’s “Excalibur”. As soon as the Lady of the Lake reclaimed the sword and the boat bearing Arthur to Avalon sailed into the sunset I quick put on the second video---”Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, specifically the scene in which the dancing knights at Camelot sing “Knights of the Round Table.” Almost derailed the class with that one, because of course the kids started clamoring to watch the whole movie.But they got the point. From here on out, “Camelot” was a target and could be treated as a silly place.

I filled out the rest of the hour giving them background on Cervantes and his Don Quixote and the Don Quixote they probably knew of from popular culture---which is to say the tragicomic hero of “Man of la Mancha.” 

The difference is that the musical’s Quixote’s madness is actually a transcendent wisdom and his determination to reintroduce chivalry into the world ennobles him and just about everyone he encounters. Cervantes’ Quixote is just plain nuts, and his interference in people’s daily lives always leads to him getting his head knocked in. Nobody is the wiser for it, least of all him, and nobody’s lot in life is improved, and in fact his attempts to do so threaten people’s livelihoods and disrupt their daily routines of work, play, making love, raising their families, and managing their households. 

I went on to talk about the common superficial gloss on the book as satirizing the romances that cause Quixote to go nuts. There’s some of that at the outset. Cervantes implies to his readers that books like the one they’re about to read are much better written because they portray life as it’s really lived and, not incidentally, are therefore more intellectually enlightening and morally uplifting, not to mention better written and more fun to read. But he’s over and done with that in a few paragraphs. The rest of the first volume of “Don Quixote” is social satire. Quixote himself isn’t there to be laughed at because he’s a clown and a madman. He’s there as a representative of people in real life---social conservatives---who hated the way society was changing and wanted things to go back to the way things were and put people who were benefiting from the changes---mainly the rising middle class---back in their proper places.

Quixote is nuts, but he’s not a lone nut. He’s representative of the many people in Spain at the turn of the 17th Century who couldn’t get their heads around that times had changed and were in the process of changing even more. They wanted the world to be what it was when they were children---when their grandparents were children! and that’s nuts. Throughout the first half of the book, Quixote keeps encountering life as it is now, challenging it (in effect attempting to turn back the clock), and meeting defeat---he usually finishes off an adventure flat on his back with a cracked and bleeding skull. Nevertheless, he persists. Always he has an explanation. His mortal enemy, the evil necromancer Friston, has thwarted him again with his dark magic. Magic happens to be the explanation the traditionalists reached for to explain the social, economic, and climatic upheavals that were causing the changes around them they didn’t like, particularly the ones that called into question the authority of the Church and the Royal Court. 

Yes, climatic upheavals---climate change. This was the beginning of the Little Ice Age. And Don Quixote runs into an effect of that on one of his adventures. 

None of this was original with me. I probably cribbed most of it from Nabokov’s “Lectures on Don Quixote” which I’d assigned myself to read in grad school. The point I was making that day---or the point Nabokov made---was that “Don Quixote” is about the clash between the old societal order---authoritarian, tradition-bound, hierarchical, communal as opposed to individualistic in which people are defined and limited by their more or less permanent place in society, held together by religion as interpreted by priests and enforced by princes and kings---and a new order, more egalitarian, individualistic, with people freer to decide for themselves who they were and what they wanted to do with their lives, more open to questioning, skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism---this was the beginning of the scientific revolution---and held together by trade, commerce, mass education, and books like Francis Bacon’s “The Advancement of Learning”, which was published the same year as “Don Quixote”.

This new world order didn’t need knights riding to its rescue. More importantly, it didn’t need magic to explain and sustain it, which is to say it didn’t need religion---which is to say it didn’t need God. Which was both emancipating and terrifying. The same year Bacon and Cervantes published their revolutionary books, Shakespeare wrote “King Lear”. There was a big change.

One of the books we Mannions have been listening to on our drives hither and yon is “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present" by Phillip Blom. Blom’s thesis is that climate change brought about social change as the old ways of doing business and the going about of getting through daily life were disrupted, and new methods and ways of thinking became necessary to cope. Blom refers to the literature and art of the period---roughly the last decades of the 16th Century into the last third of the 18th---to illustrate the changes in the ways people began to see and think about the world, which, Blom argues, were evolving towards being more like our own here in the 21st. We can see ourselves in them to a degree we can’t in the people of the Middle Ages and even the late Renaissance. And one of the books Blom looks at is “Don Quixote”. Like I said earlier, climate change makes an appearance in La Mancha. Keep in mind that climate change then, as it's doing now, disrupted familiar weather patterns, and temperatures and conditions swung wildly. While winters in Europe grew colder and longer, summers grew hotter and drier.

Blom:

The natural order apparently shaken, many pious or popular commentators also predicted an imminent Last Judgment. Every remote rumbling or thunder was interpreted as the first harbinger of the apocalypse---the clattering hooves of the Four Horsemen bringing death and destruction in their wake. From this point of view, it made sense to conclude that if nature was simply following the divine command by withholding its blessings, Christians would have to restore the balance, making amends in their individual and communal lives in order to return things to their previous harmonious state. Repentance and personal forms of piety...rapidly gained in popularity from Spain to France, southern Italy, and the Alpine region. Dramatic large processions were organized in a show of appeasements, to implore the Lord’s mercy. Holy relics were carried aloft, with flagellants following, whipping themselves repentantly until the blood streamed down their backs.

In his great Don Quixote, first published in 1605, Miguel de Cervantes describes just one such procession whose participants are accosted by the Knight of the Woeful Countenance (Don Quixote himself), who has mistaken the Virgin Mary statue being carried by the faithful for a noble damsel, in need of rescue by a strong knightly arm...of course the story ends badly for him. Cervantes, however, used a very common event for this story: Processions praying for rain were frequent in Spain, as drought made normal life all but impossible for local farmers. Even in Barcelona, at the coast, two or three rain processions were held annually around 1600. In a religious and superstitious age, divine intercession seemed the best, indeed the only hope for restoring nature to the harmony it had so clearly lost.

That’s the set-up. Now onward, Don Quixote. The knight is just finishing up a brawl with a goatherd he got into an argument with, but the fight is interrupted before Quixote finishes receiving his usual sound thrashing:

At last, while they were all, with the exception of the two bruisers who were mauling each other, in high glee and enjoyment, they heard a trumpet sound a note so doleful that it made them all look in the direction whence the sound seemed to come. But the one that was most excited by hearing it was Don Quixote, who though sorely against his will he was under the goatherd, and something more than pretty well pummelled, said to him, "Brother devil (for it is impossible but that thou must be one since thou hast had might and strength enough to overcome mine), I ask thee to agree to a truce for but one hour for the solemn note of yonder trumpet that falls on our ears seems to me to summon me to some new adventure." The goatherd, who was by this time tired of pummelling and being pummelled, released him at once, and Don Quixote rising to his feet and turning his eyes to the quarter where the sound had been heard, suddenly saw coming down the slope of a hill several men clad in white like penitents.

The fact was that the clouds had that year withheld their moisture from the earth, and in all the villages of the district they were organising processions, rogations, and penances, imploring God to open the hands of his mercy and send the rain; and to this end the people of a village that was hard by were going in procession to a holy hermitage there was on one side of that valley. Don Quixote when he saw the strange garb of the penitents, without reflecting how often he had seen it before, took it into his head that this was a case of adventure, and that it fell to him alone as a knight-errant to engage in it; and he was all the more confirmed in this notion, by the idea that an image draped in black they had with them was some illustrious lady that these villains and discourteous thieves were carrying off by force. As soon as this occurred to him he ran with all speed to Rocinante who was grazing at large, and taking the bridle and the buckler from the saddle-bow, he had him bridled in an instant, and calling to Sancho for his sword he mounted Rocinante, braced his buckler on his arm, and in a loud voice exclaimed to those who stood by, "Now, noble company, ye shall see how important it is that there should be knights in the world professing the of knight-errantry; now, I say, ye shall see, by the deliverance of that worthy lady who is borne captive there, whether knights-errant deserve to be held in estimation," and so saying he brought his legs to bear on Rocinante--for he had no spurs--and at a full canter (for in all this veracious history we never read of Rocinante fairly galloping) set off to encounter the penitents, though the curate, the canon, and the barber ran to prevent him. But it was out of their power, nor did he even stop for the shouts of Sancho calling after him, "Where are you going, Senor Don Quixote? What devils have possessed you to set you on against our Catholic faith? Plague take me! mind, that is a procession of penitents, and the lady they are carrying on that stand there is the blessed image of the immaculate Virgin. Take care what you are doing, senor, for this time it may be safely said you don't know what you are about." Sancho laboured in vain, for his master was so bent on coming to quarters with these sheeted figures and releasing the lady in black that he did not hear a word; and even had he heard, he would not have turned back if the king had ordered him. He came up with the procession and reined in Rocinante, who was already anxious enough to slacken speed a little, and in a hoarse, excited voice he exclaimed, "You who hide your faces, perhaps because you are not good subjects, pay attention and listen to what I am about to say to you." The first to halt were those who were carrying the image, and one of the four ecclesiastics who were chanting the Litany, struck by the strange figure of Don Quixote, the leanness of Rocinante, and the other ludicrous peculiarities he observed, said in reply to him, "Brother, if you have anything to say to us say it quickly, for these brethren are whipping themselves, and we cannot stop, nor is it reasonable we should stop to hear anything, unless indeed it is short enough to be said in two words."

"I will say it in one," replied Don Quixote, "and it is this; that at once, this very instant, ye release that fair lady whose tears and sad aspect show plainly that ye are carrying her off against her will, and that ye have committed some scandalous outrage against her; and I, who was born into the world to redress all such like wrongs, will not permit you to advance another step until you have restored to her the liberty she pines for and deserves."

From these words all the hearers concluded that he must be a madman, and began to laugh heartily, and their laughter acted like gunpowder on Don Quixote's fury, for drawing his sword without another word he made a rush at the stand. One of those who supported it, leaving the burden to his comrades, advanced to meet him, flourishing a forked stick that he had for propping up the stand when resting, and with this he caught a mighty cut Don Quixote made at him that severed it in two; but with the portion that remained in his hand he dealt such a thwack on the shoulder of Don Quixote's sword arm (which the buckler could not protect against the clownish assault) that poor Don Quixote came to the ground in a sad plight.

Sancho Panza, who was coming on close behind puffing and blowing, seeing him fall, cried out to his assailant not to strike him again, for he was poor enchanted knight, who had never harmed anyone all the days of his life; but what checked the clown was, not Sancho's shouting, but seeing that Don Quixote did not stir hand or foot; and so, fancying he had killed him, he hastily hitched up his tunic under his girdle and took to his heels across the country like a deer.

And there he is, on the ground, again, beaten, bruised, and unconscious.

His friends gather him up and take him home where he’s cared for by his loving niece---there’s another difference between the book and the musical. In the musical, everywhere he goes, the don is met with hostility, scorn, derision, and threats. His niece is a selfish social climber who only puts up with him for the sake of an expected inheritance. In the novel, many of the characters treat him kindly. A number are hostile, but some of them are naturally upset with him for meddling in their affairs, not scornful of his idealism, and they even forgive him for the trouble he causes when they find out he’s just a lunatic. His niece genuinely cares for him and, if we read closely, we can see that her life is devoted to looking after him. I point that out for two reasons. One it shows both a change in the way madness and dementia were understood and treated, and an unfortunate change in the way the sick and the old were expected to be cared for---by the family and not by the community. Individualism often meant you were on your own when life turned against you. The other reason I want to call attention to the niece is on behalf of my college friend Ann, who played the niece in our college’s production of “Man of La Mancha” and who in real life had to be caregiver for her parents in their last, declining years and has lately been reaching out across a great distance to help me take care of things here.

The world we live in now may not need knights or a god, but it does need saints.

What came before---->"This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience"

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"Nature's Mutiny" by Philip Blom is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Silence conveys assent

Very early Monday morning, September 2, 2019.

“Examination of a Witch” by Thompson H. Matteson. 1853. University of Virginia Library Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.

Clearly there are limits to the use of skepticism. There is some cost-benefit analysis which must be applied, and if the comfort, consolation and hope delivered by mysticism and cynicism and superstition is high, and the dangers of belief comparatively low, should we not keep our misgivings to ourselves? But the issue is tricky. Imagine that you enter a big-city taxicab and the moment you get settled in, the driver begins a harangue about the supposed iniquities and inferiorities of another ethnic group. Is your best course to keep quiet, bearing in mind that silence conveys assent? Or is it your responsibility to argue with him, to express outrage, even to leave the cab---because you know that silent assent will encourage him next time to think twice? Likewise, if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition---even when it seems to be doing a little good---we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate… ---Carl Sagan, from "The Demon-Haunted World".

As far as I can figure, the essay in “The Demon-Haunted World” I’ve been quoting from, “The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder”, was written sometime after 1984 (the date, not the book, of course) but not very long after or Sagan would have had on hand newer poll than the one he cites. For the sake of discussion, let’s put it in 1985 only because that was one of my favorite years and, ah yes, I remember it well. In 1985, Marianne Williamson had only recently moved to Los Angeles and was just beginning to make a name for herself as a spiritual guide and lay minister and teacher. It’s possible Sagan had heard of her. If he had, though, he’d likely have lumped her in with countless self-appointed spiritual guides and self-help gurus like her. The point is this taxi Sagan hypothologizes has been plying for hire and annoying passengers in just this way for nearly thirty-five years. Marrianne Williamson stands out in the crowd because her books sell and her preaching style is warm, witty, personable, and---here comes one of my least favorite words---”relatable.” That is, she puts on a good show. Well, she did major in theater in college. She knows how to play a part, and she’s cast herself in the role of a lifetime for a lifetime. In this season’s story arc, she’s running for President. 

There’s no doubt that if Sagan was still alive he wouldn’t be conveying any silent assent, either in the backseat of that cab or to the face of the likes of Williamson and her flocks of disciples and voters. He’d be making the rounds of the talk shows---Colbert, Oliver, Myers, Noah, and Kimmel would be thrilled to have him on. I imagine, with disgruntlement, Maher would be too and he’d probably have a regular seat at the table. A forum’s a forum.---writing and giving lectures, talking about climate change, white nationalism, the death of expertise, and the Trump administration and the Republican Party’s war on science, education, fact, and truth. He’d probably be more explicit in categorizing religion as superstition. He’d still be kind, temperate, forgiving of human weaknesses, and as cheerfully and humorously more encouraging of scientific thinking than dismissive of “belief”.  “See with your heart and not with your eyes” says the marquee in front of a church near here. Sagan would enthuse about the wonders and treasures of seeing with your eyes without disparaging the heart’s point of view, and he might add, with characteristic impishness, "But have your eyes checked regularly." But I think there’d be more of an edge in his voice. And it’s likely he’d be incisively critical of the political media. For at least the thirty-odd years since Sagan wrote the paragraph up top, they’ve been conveying silent assent to that cabbie, that is, to the racists, bigots, white supremacists, know-nothing and yahoos he’s a synecdoche for, you know, the economically anxious just folks and regular Americans who voted for Trump and to the Right Wing fundamentalists who are Trump’s and the GOP’s real base.

But “The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder” isn’t a polemic against superstition as much as it’s a caution to scientists, intellectuals, and academics against arrogance.

We’re far from repeating anything like it, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the Salem witch trials were a “scientific” inquiry.  The prosecuting judges and ministers saw themselves as being on the side of rationalism versus superstition. They were rational men, open to the scientific thinking of the day. The Reverend Cotton Mather, notorious for his role in legitimizing the trials, was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Isaac Newton was president of the Society when Mather was elected. He owned over 3,000 books. He was a proponent of inoculation, an early 18th Century anti-anti-vaxer.  He was criticized even mocked for it too. By free-thinking liberals of his day. Ben Franklin’s brother James was one of them. James might have been one of those too skeptical skeptics Sagan identified as a type who actually get in the way of understanding and progress with their grumpy adherence to what has been proven over what might yet be proven. The goal of the trials was to end the dangerous superstition of devil worship. That some of the judges and ministers actually believed in magic as a “scientifically” proven fact isn’t beside the point, but it isn’t the whole point. What they were out to do was discourage people from looking to magic as the solution for their problems. They discouraged nineteen people by hanging them and one by crushing his chest with stones. But Giles Corey could have saved himself simply by admitting to superstition and promising to give it up. Two-hundred people were accused of witchcraft. The reason more of them weren’t executed is that executing witches wasn’t the point. Conversion was---re-conversion, a return to the truth faith. Instead of relying on magic and superstition, people were meant to think for themselves and rely on science, law, and rational faith---well, ok, religion and religious authority---to help them, as Sagan put it, “figure out how the world works and what our place in it might be” and not incidentally create a just and well-ordered society. In his popular and influential "Essays to do Good", Cotton Mather urged ordinary New Englanders to take on greater civic responsibility.

I’m simplifying, possibly to the point of being simplistic, but there’s a reason Massachusetts became the most liberal state in the Union.

Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology<---What came before.

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"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology

Very early Monday morning, September 2, 2019.

Sagan again. This time on his way to making a deeper point. But I’m using it as an excuse to let you know that I know what the precession of the equinoxes is because I do my homework and looked it up. And as an excuse to post the painting up top because any excuse to post tasteful nudity. The painting is titled “Astrologer observing the Equinox and a scene of parting Adonis and Venus”. It was painted in 1684 or thereabouts by a lesser known Dutch contemporary of Vermeer, Domenicus van Wijnen. I looked him up too. The young man in the turban is the astrologer. The couple, um, dancing in the air in the background are Venus and Adonis. That they’re doing a parting, um, dance tells you the equinox in question is the autumn equinox. Zeus allowed Venus and Adonis to spend half the year together, ‘spring and summer. Adonis had to spend the other half of the year in hell. The demonically smiling nude rising out of the water is supposed to be Charon come to collect Adonis’ soul for his half a year in the underworld.  I don’t know why Charon didn’t take his boat. Anywho. Sagan...

Many valid criticisms of astrology can be formulated in a few sentences: for example, its acceptance of precession of the equinoxes in announcing an “Age of Aquarius” and its rejection of precession of the equinoxes in casting horoscopes; its neglect of atmospheric refraction; its list of supposedly significant celestial objects that is mainly limited to naked eye objects known to Ptolemy in the second century, and that ignores an enormous variety of new astronomical objects discovered since (Where is the astrology of near-Earth asteroids?); inconsistent requirements for detailed information on time as compared to latitude and longitude of birth; the failure of astrology to pass the identical-twin test; the major differences in horoscopes and such psychological tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory…

---from “The Demon-Haunted World”.

I also looked up the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. You’ll have to do your own homework and look it up for yourself, as well as the precession of the equinoxes (if you need to) and Domenicus van Wijnen. Just follow the links.

So...the point Sagan was on his way to making was this: astrology we'll always have with us and the reason for that is that science and skepticism don't do as good a job of addressing the fears and anxieties of people living in a troublesome and unpredictable world:

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called “Objections to Astrology” and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign---not because I thought astrology had any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for religion, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy, to mention only four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge astrology came from, but what is its present validity. Then there was speculation on the psychological motivations of those who believe in astrology. These motivations---for example, the feeling of powerlessness in a complex, troublesome and unpredictable world---might explain why astrology is not generally given the skeptical scrutiny it deserves, but is quite peripheral to whether it works…

What I would have signed is a statement describing and refuting the principal tenets of astrological belief. Such a statement would have been far more persuasive than what was actually circulated and published. But astrology, which has been with us for four thousand years or more, today seems more popular than ever. At least a quarter of all Americans, according to opinion polls, “believe” in astrology. A third think Sun-sign astrology is “scientific.” The fraction of schoolchildren believing in astrology rose from 40 percent to 49 percent between 1978 and 1984. There are perhaps ten times more astrologers than astronomers in the United States. In France there are more astrologers than Roman Catholic clergy. No stuffy dismissal by a gaggle of scientists makes contact with the social needs that astrology---no matter how invalid it is---addresses, and science does not. 

“The Demon-Haunted World” is a collection of essays published in 1995. But the essays were written over a period of years and this one I’m quoting---”The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder” appears to have been written in the late 1980s. I wouldn’t bet that astrology has become less popular in the thirty odd years since, although I can’t help cynically hoping that there are even more astrologers in France than there are priests now, and everywhere else, but only if that signifies a decline in the number of celibates in backward collars and not an increase in the number of astrologers. Astrologers have done less harm. But we do live in a complex, troublesome, and unpredictable world, we are mostly powerless to do anything about it, and people don’t like feeling powerless. Astrology is something people can turn to to help them figure out, as Sagan puts it an another part of the essay, how that world works and what their place in it might be. Oh well. It’s not the most pernicious belief system going at the moment.

"If you're only skeptical..."<---What came before. What follows--->Silence conveys assent.

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"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

"If you're only skeptical..."

Posted very early Monday morning, September 2, 2018.

Detail from “Philosopher in Meditation” by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1632. Louvre via Wikipedia.

If you’re only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything. You become a crotchety misanthrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) Since major discoveries at the borderlines of science are rare, experience will tend to confirm your grumpiness. But every now and then a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you’re too resolutely skeptical, you’re going to miss (or resent) the transforming discoveries in science, and either way you will be obstructing understanding and progress. Mere skepticism is not enough. 

---Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

None of us come into this world fully equipped<---What came before. What's next---Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology.

None of us come into this world fully equipped

Posted very late Sunday night, September 1, 2019.

Trying to figure out how the world works and what their place in it might be: Detail from “Consulting the Oracle” by Henry Nelson O’Neil. Circa mid-19th Century. Courtesy of Glasgow Museums Media Resource Centre via Art UK.

Have I ever heard a skeptic wax superior and contemptuous? Certainly. I’ve sometimes heard, to my retrospective dismay, that unpleasant tone in my own voice. There are human imperfections on both sides of this issue. Even when it’s applied sensitively, scientific skepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless, and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated skeptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse. Sometimes in looks as if the skeptical conclusion came first, that contentions were dismissed before, not after, the evidence was examined. All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based---or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug---it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault…

...In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudo-science are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our place in it might be. Their motives are consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

---Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

What follows--->If you're only skeptical...

 

Math as liberation and resistance

Posted Friday night, August 16, 2019.

Soviet junior high school history classroom, circa the mid-1970s.

To a Soviet child, the afterschool math club was a miracle. For one thing, it was not school. Every morning Soviet children all over the country left their identical concrete block apartments a little after eight and walked to their identical concrete school buildings to sit in their identical classrooms with the walls painted yellow and with identical portraits of bearded dead men on the walls---Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the literature classrooms, Mendeleev in the chemistry classroom, and Lenin everywhere. Their teachers marked attendance in identical class journals and reached for identical textbooks that they used to impart a perfectly uniform education to their charges, of whom they demanded uniformity in return. My own first-grade teacher...actually made me pretend my reading skills were as poor as the other children’s, enforcing her own vision of conforming to grade level. The first time I spent an afternoon solving math problems...I sat for what seemed like an eternity, holding a pencil over a drawing of some shape. I do not remember the problem, but the solution required transposing the shape. I sat, unable to touch my pencil to paper, until a teaching assistant came by and asked me a very basic question, something like “What might you do?”

“I might transpose it, like this,” I answered.

“So do it,” he said.

Apparently, this was a place where I was expected to think for myself...I hunched over my piece of paper, sketched out the solution in a couple of minutes, and felt a wave of relief so total that I think I became a math junkie on the spot...The joy of feeling my brain rev up, rush toward a solution, and be affirmed for it felt like love, truth, hope, and justice all handed to me at once.

---Masha Gessen,  “Perfect Rigor”.

Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything

Posted Sunday night, August 11, 2019.

VASILY FEDOSENKO / REUTERS

That Russia produced some of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians is, plainly, a miracle. Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything. It promoted argument; it studied patterns in a country that controlled its citizens by forcing them to inhabit a shifting, unpredictable reality; it placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand, making the mathematical conversation that was indecipherable to an outsider; and worst of all, mathematics laid claim to singular and knowable truths when the regime had staked its legitimacy on its own singular truth. All of this is what made mathematics in the Soviet Union uniquely appealing to those whose minds demanded consistency and logic, unattainable in virtually any other area of study. It is also what made mathematics and mathematicians suspect. Explaining what makes mathematics as important and beautiful as mathematicians know it to be, the Russian algebraist Mihkal Tsfasman said, “Mathematics is uniquely suited to teaching one to distinguish between right and wrong, the proven from the unproven, the probable from the improbable. It also teaches us to distinguish that which is probable and probably true from the which, while apparently, probable, is an obvious lie…"

---from "Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century" by Masha Gesson.

The Amazing Doctor Wood and his Optical Cat

Posted Saturday morning, August 10, 2019.

For illustrative purposes only: Never mind the box, this is not Schroedinger’s cat. It’s not the Amazing Doctor Wood’s living dust mop either. It’s my brother Luke’s cat who just happens to like climbing into boxes and making a den of them and would, without doubt, volunteer to clean the spider webs out of Luke’s spectrograph, if Luke had one. The trick would be coaxing the cat out the other end.

Physicist Robert W. Wood was one of the first celebrity scientists that I know of. Einstein was news. Wood made the news. His hey-day was the first three decades of the 20th Century. He made a name for himself in the popular imagination as a debunker of junk science. He was an inventor as much as he was a scientist. A filter he invented for mercury lamps was used by the military for signaling during World War I but turned out to be useful for the theatrical stage. Florenz Ziegfeld used it for lighting effects in his "Follies". In “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II”, in which he figures prominently, author Jennet Conant says he was regarded as the “most brilliant American experimental physicist of his day.” She also describes him as handsome and charming and a bit of an eccentric. He wrote poetry and two sci-fi novels. He liked making kites. He was a cheerful and self-mocking self-promoter and titled his autobiography “The Amazing Doctor Wood”. If they ever make a TV miniseries out of “Tuxedo Park”---and somebody should---Wood would show up as a one-episode wonder, played by an aging but still dashing leading man---Clooney would be good, Daniel Day Lewis even better---who’d be the hero of that episode by virtue of his eccentric and attractive personality and his importance to the life of the main character. The Wall Street tycoon of “Tuxedo Park’s” subtitle is Alfred Lee Loomis. A lawyer turned inventor turned military engineer turned lawyer again turned investment banker turned scientist, Loomis had mustered out of the army after World War I, determined to make money, made a lot of it, grew bored making it, and made the switch to science. He used the money he made to convert a decaying estate in Tuxedo Park, New York into that secret palace of science---actually, it wasn’t that secret at the start. Loomis just didn’t make a big deal of what he was doing to his neighbors and the local press, just as a tinkerer of more modest means and ambition wouldn’t think it worth broadcasting that he’d set up a new workbench in his garage. The work that went on in Loomis’ palace of science during World War II, that was secret. At any rate, before Loom set up his workbench, he had to learn how to do science. He taught himself science---the theories, the formulas, the problems, what might be called textbook science---focusing on physics. Loomis was one of those polymaths who mastered everything he set his mind to. But he needed someone to teach him how to do the practical work of sciencing---turning the theoretical into the experimental. The teacher wound up being Wood. Wood was another one who was successful at whatever he put his hand to. His main interest and most significant work was in optics...

Wood had become interested in physical optics, especially spectral studies. In the barn [behind Wood’s house that he used as a laboratory], he was busy putting the finishing touches on a forty-foot grating spectrograph---then the largest and most powerful in existence and capable of giving better results than anyone had ever seen before. While it appeared crude, in Wood’s capable hands it performed superbly, and Loomis was transfixed. As unconventional as Wood’s methods were, the results were always near perfection. For example, his preferred method for cleaning the giant spectrograph---which when unused for any extended period became clogged with spiderwebs---was to simply drop the family cat in one end. In order to escape, the poor animal had to make its way through the whole length of tubing, effectively running a fur duster through the works.

---from “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” by Jennet Conant.

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Related Mannion re-run: "Edison sent back to the drawing board".

Filed under That's SCIENCE!

A law of life in the Magic City

Posted Saturday night, August 3, 2019.

The hero of [“The Magic City”] is an orphan called Philip who is left alone in a big house and builds a toy city out of the ambient Victorian bric-a-brac. One night he suddenly finds his city grown to full size, inhabited by full-size mythical people and animals, and himself obliged to live in it. After escaping from the city, Philip wanders through the surrounding country, where every toy house or castle that he ever built is faithfully enlarged and preserved. The book records his adventures as he stumbles through this world of blown-up products of his own imaginings…

...It is a law of life in the Magic City that if you wish for something you can have it but with this law comes a special rule about machines. If anyone wishes for a piece of machinery, he is compelled to keep it and go on using it for the rest of his life. Philip fortunately escapes from the operation of this rule when he has the choice of wishing for a horse or bicycle and chooses the horse…

---from “Disturbing the Universe” by Freeman Dyson.

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E. Nesbit achieves the philosophic calm necessary to writing about our crazy universe

Posted Saturday morning, August 3, 2019.

Edith Nesbit at her desk, circa 1903. McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.

In his autobiography “Disturbing the Universe”, the eminent physicist and public intellectual Freeman Dyson says his favorite book when he was a kid growing up in England was “The Magic City” by Edith Nesbit---E. Nesbit to her stickler fans. He remembers it as a “not just a story about some crazy kids. It’s story about a crazy universe,” adding, “What I see now, and did not see as an eight year old, is that Nesbit’s crazy universe bears a strong resemblance to the one we live on.” According to Dyson, Nesbit wrote “The Magic City” when her own life had finally grown less crazy. Maybe that’s why she was able to write it:

Edith Nesbit was from every point of view a remarkable woman. Born in 1858, she was intimate with the family of Karl Marx and became a revolutionary socialist long before this was fashionable. She supported herself by writing and brought up a large family of children of mixed parentage. She soon discovered that her survival depended on her ability to write splendidly bourgeois stories for the children of the rich. Her books sold well, and she survived. She made some compromises with Victorian respectability, but did not lose her inner fire. She wrote The Magic City in 1910, when she was fifty-two. By that time her personal struggles were over and she could view the world with a certain philosophic calm…

---from “Disturbing the Universe” by Freeman Dyson.

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A scientist confesses to an individualistic bias

Posted Saturday morning, August 3, 2019.

A young physicist among the diapers. Freeman Dyson in Ithaca, New York. 1952. Verena Huber-Dyson via the New York Review of Books.

A substantial part of this book is autobiographical. I make no apology for that. It is not that I consider my own life particularly significant or interesting to anybody besides myself. I write about my own experiences because I do not know so much about anyone else’s…The important thing, to my mind, is that the great human problems are problems of the individual and not of the mass. To understand the nature of science and of its interaction with society, one must examine the individual scientist  and how he confronts the world around him. The best way to approach the ethical problems associated with science is to study real dilemmas faced by real scientists. Since firsthand evidence is most reliable, I begin by writing about things that happened to me personally. This is another effect of the same individualistic bias that leads me to listen to poets more than to economists.

---Freeman Dyson, from “Disturbing the Universe”, his memoir of his life as a scientist, ethicist, and public intellectual.

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Edison sent back to the drawing board

Thursday morning, June 20, 2019.

Thomas Edison experimenting in his lab, circa 1921. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

The war is World War I. Loomis is the scientist-businessman-philanthropist Alfred Lee Loomis who founded and funded  a secret civilian laboratory that helped develop the atom bomb during World War II but who was an officer in the Army during the first world war supervising the development and testing of new weapons technology for the Army Ordnance Board. Aberdeen is the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where Loomis was stationed and where that technology was tested. Edison is, well, Edison:

On January 1, 1918...Loomis was sent to Aberdeen. His “inventiveness,” along with a constant stream of ingenious ideas for new armaments and new solutions to old tactical problems, had earned him one of the most important jobs: chief of the development and experimental department. At Aberdeen, he joined some of the most distinguished physicists and astronomers in the country, who had been mobilized to help adapt the army to the needs of modern warfare. One of Loomis’ responsibilities was to test ideas for new weapons submitted to the Army Ordnance Board. Among the luminaries whose novel recommendations Loomis had to take into account and duly try out were those of Thomas Edison, who was by this time a genuine folk hero, his life story and list of major inventions...known to every schoolchild. Although he was already seventy years old and crustier than ever, he was still hard at work in his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, and throughout World War I contributed technical advice and suggestions.

Loomis followed up on one recommendation and recalled that the “perilous experiment” not only blew up Edison’s scheme, it also almost annihilated a number of Aberdeen personnel as well. As the story was later recounted in Fortune magazine, “Edison’s idea was to work up a terrific spin on a large TNT-filled drum, and then suddenly drop it from a height. The theory was that the drum---trailing wires attached to a detonator---would bounce along of its own momentum until it reached the enemy lines, when it could be exploded. Put to the test, the drum dug a deep ole in the ground where it fell, bounced out, traveled about 200 feet, dug another hole, and then let go.

---from “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” by Jennet Conant.

"You live by political motivations, you die by political motivations...”

Posted Sunday morning, June 2, 2019.

NASA charged them room and board?

[Jack Burns, the director of Network for Exploration and Space Science], who is sixty-six years old, remembers the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions—the Cold War-era efforts, beginning in the late fifties, that put men in space and finally landed them on the moon. He teaches a course on the history of space policy. “The U.S. had already lost the start of the space race,” he said, of the origins of Apollo. “The Soviet Union was first with a satellite in space. They were first with an astronaut in space.” Yuri Gagarin’s journey into outer space took place in April, 1961. President John F. Kennedy delivered his moon-shot speech the following month, and Congress eventually allocated 4.4 per cent of the national budget to nasa. “But, if you live by political motivations, you die by political motivations,” Burns said. “Apollo died. Nixon killed the program.” Only twelve people have walked on the moon, all of them between the summer of 1969 and Christmas, 1972. All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon; they earned eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed on the spacecraft. Since the last moonwalk, humans have launched crafts that have orbited the moon, crashed probes into it, and taken increasingly detailed photos of it. But no one has been back.

---from “The Eighth Continent” by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker.

Image up top is a detail from a photograph of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, in the Sea of Tranquility, July 1969. The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, can be seen reflected in Aldrin’s visor, taking the picture. Courtesy of NASA via Wikipedia.

To read Galchen’s article about the race to develop the moon follow the link.

Filed under Your Morning Paper and That's SCIENCE!

Alpher, Bethe, Gamow: A Greek alphabet of famous physics professors I have known...of

Mined from the notebooks Tuesday, April 23, 2019. Posted Wednesday morning, April 24. Revised and corrected below, Thursday morning, April 25.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe at the blackboard at Cornell in 1967, around, I’d guess, fifteen years after the young RPI physics major Pop Mannion attended one of Bethe’s seminars. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physics at Cornell University.

“Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoe. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organizer as well.” ---from a letter by Freeman Dyson dated September 25, 1947, collected in Dyson’s autobiography in letters, “Maker of Patterns”.

I wonder if Pop Mannion would have recognized Freeman Dyson’s description of the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe. It’s from a letter Dyson wrote in 1947, when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was his professor. That was at least around five but maybe ten or even fifteen years before Pop himself met Bethe.

Pop counted Bethe as one of his teachers. It was a minor point of pride with him. Minor as in he kept it in perspective. Bethe taught at Cornell. Pop earned all three of his degrees---Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D.---at RPI. But at some point in his career as a student, Pop took a week-long seminar with Bethe. I can’t remember exactly when. My impression has always been it was when he was an undergrad. That would put it in the early 1950s. But it might have been while he was working on his masters. At that point, Pop was running the computer department at GE’s atomic power lab (and, incidentally, managing the department’s softball team to the company championship.) That would put it in the late 50s or early 60s and Pop would have been around thirty years old. I like thinking it was when he was a degreeless student, no more than twenty. It’s hard for me to imagine Pop as a college student. Not because he was “born older” like George Bailey. He was. But that’s not the point. It’s simply that he didn’t tell us many stories about that part of his life that didn’t include the girl he was dating at the time, and Mom Mannion wasn’t in college with him, or the United States Air Force, which had him in its ranks as an ROTC cadet. His post grad career I remember because he worked on his Masters and Ph.D. at night and on weekends when I was a little kid and that meant he often wasn’t at home when we Mannion kids wanted to play with him, he was at class or in the library or lab at RPI, and when he wasn’t there he was working and studying at his desk in his “den”, not to be disturbed. The other thing about his seminar with Bethe I can’t recall is where it was held. Bethe might have visited RPI. He might have visited GE. But I like to imagine Pop went down to Cornell when he was an undergrad because Pop lived at home when as an undergrad and I like picturing him making his first long trip away from home. Like I said, having taken that seminar with Bethe was a minor point of pride for him, and he didn’t crow about it. What he was prouder of---well, vainer about, as much as Pop allowed himself a vanity---was the joke he got of it.

Pop also counted George Gamow as one of his teachers, along with Ralph Alpher, who was a friend and a colleague at GE. Gamow he knew through Alpher. It’s more accurate to describe both as mentors. But it was better for the joke to call them his teachers. Here’s the joke:

Pop liked to tell people the list of his physics teachers was so long it ran the whole twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpher, Bethe, Gamow.

His jokes were usually funnier than that.

He was proud of the joke, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. It bothered him that he didn’t have any famous professors whose names could be used for a pun on Omega.

Think about it.

I took my copy of “Maker of Patterns”, Freeman Dyson’s “autobiography through letters” with us on our trip up to the Old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with Mom Mannion and various friends and relations. I’d have taken it up to show him if he was still with us, expecting of course that he already owned it himself. “Maker of Patterns” would have been a perfect gift for his birthday, which is coming up on Saturday. That’s why I’m convinced he’d have owned it already. Pop had a habit of buying himself books that would have been perfect birthday, Christmas, or Father’s Day presents for him. It was frustrating. But he didn’t do it to be perverse. He bought books for himself regularly---too regularly in the opinion of Mom Mannion, who had to find a place for them all. If it was left to Pop they’d have piled up in the living room to the point that eventually they have walled him in in his favorite reading chair and eventually one of the towers would have toppled and crushed him where he sat reading his newest acquisition. It was one of his indulgences, of which, like his vanities, he allowed himself few. But if, wonder of wonders, on the off-chance he didn’t already own it, I’d have gotten a kick out of showing him the series of letters Dyson wrote to his family in the late 1940s when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was not only his teacher but the head of his dissertation committee. And I’m sure Pop would have especially enjoyed this story, because it includes as a character another physicist he greatly admired:

Dyson writes:

The event of last week has been a visit from [Rudolf Peierls, an old physicist friend of Bethe’s who’d, at about the same time as Bethe, escaped Hitler’s Germany to England where he’d become one of the leaders of the British nuclear bomb project] who has been over here on government business and stayed two nights with the Bethes before flying home. He gave a formal lecture on Monday about his own work, and has been spending the rest of the time in long discussions with Bethe and the rest of us, at which I learn a great deal. On Monday night the Bethes gave a party in his honour, to which most of the young theoreticians were invited. When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming, and finally he had to be sent to bed, since Dick...did not materialise. About half an hour later [Dick] burst into the room just had time to say “so sorry I’m late. Had a brilliant idea just as I was coming over,” and then dashed upstairs to console Henry. Conversation then ceased while the company listened to the joyful sounds above, sometimes taking the form of a duet and sometimes of a one-man percussion band.

The one-man percussion band was---you guessed it---Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman with students at a coffee hour at Caltech’s Winnett Center, June, 1964. Photo by Kent McCaulley, courtesy of Caltech Magazine.

It’s possible Pop met Feynman at Cornell. Barely possible. But only if Pop took that seminar with Bethe at Cornell and when he was a freshman at RPI. Feynman left Cornell in 1951. Fact is, however, I’m pretty sure he never met Feynman. He’d have never stopped talking about it if he had. It would have been more than a minor point of pride for him and he wouldn’t have cared if he got a good joke out of it. Feynman was one of his heroes.

So he’d have enjoyed this from Dyson’s letter home, dated November 19, 1947:

“Just a brief letter before we go off to Rochester [New York, about a two-hour drive from Ithaca]. We have every Wednesday a seminar at which somebody talks about some item of research, and from time to time this is made a joint seminar with Rochester University. I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive. Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist. He has developed a private version of the quantum theory, which is generally agreed to be a good piece of work and may be more helpful than the orthodox version for some problems. He is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.”

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Updated and corrected Thursday morning, April 25, 2019 because DAMMIT! there are holes in my memory that need to be plugged: The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow joke wasn't Pop's. He appropriated it---from Gamow. Gamow wrote a seminal paper on the Big Bang with Alpher, who was his doctoral student at George Washington University, and he added his friend Bethe's name so that it would always be cited as Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. The paper was published in 1948, when Pop was in high school. But Pop read it, although probably not when it was published, and of course understood it and appreciated its ramifications, as well as getting a big kick out of the joke, which he told me about and explained to me when I was just out of grad school and reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", one of my and Pop's favorite books. I'd asked him in he'd met any of the physicists mentioned in the book. That's when he told me about taking the seminar with Bethe and about the paper and the joke and his connections to Alpher and Gamow and how he liked to tell people about the paper, the joke, and how the joke could be applied to his own resume. Pop never took credit for somebody else's work or their jokes.

As it happens, Pop's connection to the Manhattan Project and the making of the atomic bomb and probably initially to Bethe was through his boss as GE, Richard Ehrlich, known to Pop and Mom Mannion as their good friend Dick but to us Mannion kids as Dr Ehrlich and someone we had to be on our best behavior around when he visited our house, although I remember him as a kindly, avuncular, and always broadly smiling man. Dr Ehrlich had worked under Bethe at Los Alamos, amd since Dr Ehrlich and Mrs Ehrlich were regular dinner guests at the Mannion Homestead, I can claim one degree of separation form the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and isn't that special? But it makes it likely that Pop took that seminar from Bethe when he was working at GE and not when he was a student and that it was held in Schenectady. One other thing about Dr Ehrlich. His influence on Pop was political as much as professional. He was the chair of the local Democratic committee when we moved to Niskayuna and he recruited Pop to run for town board. Pop got skunked that time out. But he learned valuable lessons that he put to work when he ran for supervisor a few years later.

All this came back in a rush last night when Mannionville stalwarts Joel Hanes and Kaleburg reminded me in the comments here and Facebook pal Neil Calkin reminded me over there about Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. Thanks, old chums, for calling attention to the paper and to my incipient senility.

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“Maker of Patterns: An Autobiograhy Through Letters” by Freeman Dyson is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

Another of Pop Mannion's favorite books by about science was Gamow's "One Two Three...Infinity". He cherished his first edition copy all his adult life. It was published when Pop was in high school so it may have been the first adult science book he owned. His affection for it wasn't just nostalgic either. He thought it was a classic of its kind and recommended to everyone as the best introduction to scientific and mathematical thinking about how the world works. He might have known this, but if he didn't it would have done is heart good to find out it's still in print. "One Two Three...Infinity" is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Pop would also recommend Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

God's in his heaven---all's right with the world's climate change

Posted late Tuesday afternoon, January 29, 2019.

Just catching up with this one. The quote’s from an article by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist by way of Salon:

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s urgent calls to action on climate change: “Look, I don’t think we’re going to listen to her on much of anything, particularly not on matters we’re gonna leave in the hands of a much, much higher authority, and certainly not listen to the freshman congresswoman on when the world may end.”

“Higher authority.” That would be the Right Wing Christian version of God, a capricious demon with an allegedly benevolent plan for humankind which requires millions of innocent people to suffer and die every year but which ends with Christians being rewarded in the next life while rich Republicans get richer in this one. This notion that God is in charge, he knows what’s best for us, and we should leave things up to him isn’t really an article of faith. It’s an excuse not to care about other people’s unhappiness and misfortune.

“I’d like to help you friend, but God know what he’s doing, and who am I to question God?”

At any rate, coming across the article this morning reminded me I wrote a post on the subject back in November. I think it’s worth reposting, so here it is…

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“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.

Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

Ernst missed her chance.

“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.

(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.

“Climate is what we expect,” said Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)

I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”

One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.

The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.

They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.

It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out  The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.

The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.

This is the way God wants it!

Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.

Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.

Iowa? An oil state, Lance?

Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?

Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.

“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”

Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.

The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.

Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.

The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.

Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.

To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.

Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel

under the name Evangelicals.

(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)

These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.

Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.

Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment,  all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.

In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.

Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.

Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best  because God only wants the best for us.

The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.

Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.

And amen to that, say the rich greedy bastards in the choir.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Back to today…

Ocasio-Cortez responded the way you’d think would shut a Christian like Sanders up. She quoted the bible at her. Trouble is AOC’s Catholic. Catholics think the bible means what the words in it mean. Right Wing Christians think it means whatever they need it to mean to serve their self-interest at the moment. Right Wing Christians are convinced they’re the only ones who know what God wants, which always turns out to be what they want. Convenient, huh?

_________________________________________________________________________________________

To read Thompson’s whole article, follow the link to “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets biblical on Sarah Huckabee Sanders” at Grist.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Photo up top is by yours truly. I took it back in the fall. October 24, 2018, to be precise. It's the marquee in front of one of the loneliest looking chruches I've ever seen. Seems like there's never more than five or six cars in the parking lot even on Sundays.

God's in his heaven---all's right with the world's climate change

Posted Thursday evening, November 29, 2018.

Marquee outside a local church. Shwangunk, New York. Photo taken back in October, 2018.

“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.

Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

Ernst missed her chance.

“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.

(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.

“Climate is what we expect,” siad Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)

I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”

One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.

The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.

They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.

It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out  The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.

The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.

This is the way God wants it!

Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.

Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.

Iowa? An oil state, Lance?

Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?

Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.

“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”

Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.

The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.

Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.

The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.

Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.

To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.

Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel

under the name Evangelicals.

(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)

These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.

Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.

Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment,  all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.

In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.

Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.

Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best  because God only wants the best for us.

The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.

Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.

And amen to that, say the rich rich greedy bastards and their choir.

Then it started adding up to real money

Posted Friday, May 18, 2018.

Acid rain, still a thing. Photo via worldatlas.

Once upon a time, even conservative Republicans could be environmentalists. But they noticed that it was costing them real money:

Soon, though, business interests realized that these rules were just the beginning. Dirty air was succeeded by new alarms about the atmosphere, one after another. The ozone hole. Nuclear winter. Acid rain. Each was more abstract than its predecessor, but larger in its immediate economic impact. Industry, sensing a trend, became wary. What had begun as a feel-good movement against a limited tally of palpable local harms seemed to have become an endless crusade against ever-larger and ever-remoter targets. A stream of “capitalism vs. ecology” manifestos led many in the business world to conclude that destroying the corporate world from the beginning. Ranchers, farmers, loggers, and miners, touched by environmental laws, came to the same conclusion: a cabal of urban snobs was bent on destroying their livelihoods…

---from The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

Flying our tribal flags

Posted Friday morning, May 18, 2018.

Spotted Owl: Symbol of the movement or Public Enemy Number One, depending on how your tribe ranks its totems. Photo copyright Max Leibowitz, courtesy of the Macauley Library, via All About Birds, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Yeah, I know. One party elects many more tribalists than the other, but the point holds:

Environmental issues became ways for politicians to flag their identity to supporters---less statements about practical problems with solutions that people could debate than symbols of identity. They signaled membership in a cause: taking back the country, either from tyrannical liberal elitism or right-wing greed.

---from The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.