Lance Mannion

From the Illinois prairie to Washington, D.C. by way of outer space

Posted Wednesday night, April 14, 2021.

Color photograph of Saturn taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA and the European Space Agency, via the Hubble Newsletter.

This is how Carl Niebur, a program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., began his career as a space traveler:

Niebur knew long journeys, having taken one of his own to the nation’s capital from Breese, Illinois (Pop. 3,000), all cow pastures and corn fields. It was as idyllic a place as you might find on the Earth planet, and Breese was the big town in his part of the windy prairie state. On birthday as a boy, he received a little three-inch refracting telescope. To the extent that it had a brand, it was “the white one,” and that very first night, he hauled it to the backyard and aimed it expectantly at a pristine pitch of rural American sky. Curt got his celestial bearings, pressed expectant eye to eyepiece, and suddenly those points of distant light inflated into worlds as real as Breese. And each was so different! Mars, the color of rust and capped with white. Jupiter and its watchful red eye and tan and brown bands of clouds---and moons! It had moons! Four of them! AND YOU COULD SEE THEM! There was Saturn, rings and all, just as the textbooks promised! You’re in sixth grade learning about all this stuff and it’s just a few photos in science class…, but then you strap on that telescope for the first time and all at once you’re not dealing in the theoretical. You’re a space traveler. Science suddenly isn’t a class you take in school, something that begins and ends with fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice questions---it is a thing that is absolutely, metaphysically happening and I have seen it and there’s no going back from that.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The power of tiny, undirected changes

Posted Sunday morning, April 11, 2021.

The flowers of most common Magnolia trees are pale and without scent for an evolutionary reason. Magnolias evolved millions of years before bees and butterflies and had to rely on beetles for pollination, and beetles aren’t interested in color or scent. Magnolia tree in blossom, via Wikipedia.

Today’s Sunday sermon is by the late and lamented Oliver Sacks, physician, neurologist, writer, and, he wouldn’t have thought incidentally, atheist who, when dying of liver cancer, in terrible pain but still joyfully at work as a writer, didn’t have to resist a deathbed conversion because he didn’t feel the temptation. It strikes me that the sentence at the end of this passage, “we are made of cells, and cells go back to the beginning of life” is a biologist’s version of Carl Sagan’s “We are star stuff”...

Linus Pauling has said that he read [The Origin of the Species] when he was nine. I was not that precocious and could not have followed its “one long argument” at that age. But I had an intimation of Darwin’s vision of the world in our own garden---a garden which, on summer days, was full of flowers and bees buzzing from one flower to another. It was my mother, botanically inclined, who explained to me what the bees were doing, their legs yellow with pollen, and how they and flowers depended on each other.

While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, was among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when “modern” insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings---and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe.

The notion of such vast eons of time---and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety---was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided...a sense of deep meaning that belief in a divine plan had never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. The idea that it could have worked out differently, that dinosaurs might still be roaming the earth or that human beings might never have evolved, was a dizzying one. It made life seem all the more precious and a wonderful ongoing adventure (“a glorious accident,” as Stephen Jay Gould called it)---not fixed or predetermined, but always susceptible to change and new experience.

Life on our planet is several billion years old, and we literally embody this deep history in our structures, our behaviors, our instincts, our genes. We humans retain, for example, the remnants of gill arches, much modified from our fishy ancestors and even the neural systems that once controlled gill movement. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” We bear, too, an even older past; we are made of cells, and cells go back to the very origin of life.

---from “Darwin and the Meaning of Plants”, one of the essays collected in “The River of Consciousness” by Oliver Sacks.

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Contingently related blogging: "THAT Carl Sagan".

That Carl Sagan

Posted March 4, 2021.

An iconic Carl Sagan Moment: Sagan juggling with the solar system in an episode of "Cosmos"

First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued:

...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy, but problem the first: there was no astronomy major proper at Cornell; the field was taught under physics. Problem the second: physics. Bob therefore switched studies, his base camp now the university’s new geology building. Myriad mineralogy labs lined the hallways, and to study the stuff of the Earth was to spend long days and late nights in them, over big, binocular-type microscopes adorning tall black lab tables. Pappalardo was seated in one such lab on one such night behind one such microscope when another student, first name John, last name Berner, and so of course they called him Bunsen, walked in.

Hey, Bob, asked Bunsen, you know about this course Sagan is offering? This course on icy moons?

Bob did not know about this course Carl Sagan was offering, this course on icy moons, but he went home that night, pulled out the course catalog, and looked it up. ICES AND OCEANS IN THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM. Instructor: SAGAN, CARL.

That Carl Sagan, yes. He of Cornell, yes, of course. The prominent professor was for Bob part of the university’s initial allure. But Sagan didn’t always teach, had a lot going on. Carl Sagan, recently of Cosmos (book and television series) and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (television series). Carl Sagan, of the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, the robotic explorers that in 1979 transformed the four telescopic dots of Jupiter’s moons into jaw-dropping globes of fire and ice,and later, around Saturn, revealed worlds diverse, living, geologically active, almost fully-fledged and practically planets (further study needed). Carl Sagan of the spacecraft Viking 1 and 2, which in 1976 revealed the Martian surface to be barren, though certainly in possession of everything necessary for life to exist (further study needed). Carl Sagan, a superstar in a profession bereft even of minor celebrities, who brought astrophysics into blue-collar living rooms, who in turtlenecks and with windswept hair spoke like a philosopher, practically in verse and presented the the pursuit of knowledge as something intrinsic and vital to the soul of every human being, who used his platform and lilting baritone to advance social causes, who planned protests against nuclear weapons test sites, arms linked with fellow activists, who crossed police lines and was placed gladly under arrest---Armageddon’s Thoreau---in order to advance his cause. Page one the next day: a rebel astronomer in handcuffs! Carl Sagan with a Ph.D. behind his name and a childlike imagination in his head, who had, for example, lobbied for light to be added to the Viking lander so that at night martian animals might be attracted to it and scurry up to investigate. Well, why not? Nobody knew what waited on the surface of the Red Planet.

That Carl Sagan.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The Vulcan really drove the point home

Posted Thursday, March 4, 2021.

The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa:

When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when they closed their eyes. Scientists on Earth solved these puzzles: the former formed by fire mountains in Luna’s primordial past; the latter, cosmic rays colliding with rentinas. Astronauts drove cars up there. They played golf. They brought mice with them. Pets! In space!

Bob was never going to be an astronaut---that just wasn’t in the cards---but he was a child of Star Trek, and across five-year missions, Spock pointed the way in first run, and then in syndication, and then in animation (the Vulcan really drove the point home): science…

---from “The Mission: or, how a disciple of Carl Sagan, an ex-motocross racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world's worst typewriter saleswoman, California mountain people, and an anonymous NASA functionary went to war with Mars, survived an insurgency at Saturn, traded blows with Washington, and stole a ride on an Alabama moon rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second Garden of Eden at the bottom of an alien ocean inside of an ice world called Europa (a true story)” by David W. Brown.

That Carl Sagan

Posted Thursday evening, March 4, 2021.

First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued:

...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy, but problem the first: there was no astronomy major proper at Cornell; the field was taught under physics. Problem the second: physics. Bob therefore switched studies, his base camp now the university’s new geology building. Myriad mineralogy labs lined the hallways, and to study the stuff of the Earth was to spend long days and late nights in them, over big, binocular-type microscopes adorning tall black lab tables. Pappalardo was seated in one such lab on one such night behind one such microscope when another student, first name John, last name Berner, and so of course they called him Bunsen, walked in.

Hey, Bob, asked Bunsen, you know about this course Sagan is offering? This course on icy moons?

Bob did not know about this course Carl Sagan was offering, this course on icy moons, but he went home that night, pulled out the course catalog, and looked it up. ICES AND OCEANS IN THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM. Instructor: SAGAN, CARL.

That Carl Sagan, yes. He of Cornell, yes, of course. The prominent professor was for Bob part of the university’s initial allure. But Sagan didn’t always teach, had a lot going on. Carl Sagan, recently of Cosmos (book and television series) and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (television series). Carl Sagan, of the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, the robotic explorers that in 1979 transformed the four telescopic dots of Jupiter’s moons into jaw-dropping globes of fire and ice,and later, around Saturn, revealed worlds diverse, living, geologically active, almost fully-fledged and practically planets (further study needed). Carl Sagan of the spacecraft Viking 1 and 2, which in 1976 revealed the Martian surface to be barren, though certainly in possession of everything necessary for life to exist (further study needed). Carl Sagan, a superstar in a profession bereft even of minor celebrities, who brought astrophysics into blue-collar living rooms, who in turtlenecks and with windswept hair spoke like a philosopher, practically in verse and presented the the pursuit of knowledge as something intrinsic and vital to the soul of every human being, who used his platform and lilting baritone to advance social causes, who planned protests against nuclear weapons test sites, arms linked with fellow activists, who crossed police lines and was placed gladly under arrest---Armageddon’s Thoreau---in order to advance his cause. Page one the next day: a rebel astronomer in handcuffs! Carl Sagan with a Ph.D. behind his name and a childlike imagination in his head, who had, for example, lobbied for light to be added to the Viking lander so that at night martian animals might be attracted to it and scurry up to investigate. Well, why not? Nobody knew what waited on the surface of the Red Planet.

That Carl Sagan.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The Vulcan really drove the point home

Posted Thursday morning, March 4, 2021.

The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa:

When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when they closed their eyes. Scientists on Earth solved these puzzles: the former formed by fire mountains in Luna’s primordial past; the latter, cosmic rays colliding with rentinas. Astronauts drove cars up there. They played golf. They brought mice with them. Pets! In space!

Bob was never going to be an astronaut---that just wasn’t in the cards---but he was a child of Star Trek, and across five-year missions, Spock pointed the way in first run, and then in syndication, and then in animation (the Vulcan really drove the point home): science…

---from “The Mission: or, how a disciple of Carl Sagan, an ex-motocross racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world's worst typewriter saleswoman, California mountain people, and an anonymous NASA functionary went to war with Mars, survived an insurgency at Saturn, traded blows with Washington, and stole a ride on an Alabama moon rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second Garden of Eden at the bottom of an alien ocean inside of an ice world called Europa (a true story)” by David W. Brown.

With Doctor Blackwell in Geneva

Posted Monday morning, February 1, 2021.

Portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman doctor in the United States, uncredited and undated but likely depicting Blackwell as she'd have appeared in the late 19th Century. Courtesy of Hobart and William Smith Colleges via the Finger Lakes Times.

Wednesday is the 200th birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the United States. Blackwell studied medicine at Geneva Medical College, a department of Geneva College in Geneva, New York, starting in 1847 and graduating in 1849. Geneva College renamed itself Hobart College in 1852. In 1908, William Smith College for Women opened on the Hobart campus. For administrative and business reasons, William Smith was treated as a department of Hobart, but in 1943 it was formally recognized as an independent school, although it still shared facilities and faculty with Hobart. Technically, that’s still the case, but they call themselves by the collective name of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the plural deliberate but quietly elided, which is how they were known when I arrived there to teach in the mid-1990s. Blackwell was then and I think still is Hobart’s most famous and distinguished alum. William Smith claims her too. When I was there her memory was well-honored by both colleges, separately and together. Her name was invoked with reverence and pride. Her story featured prominently in the lore of both schools. In 1994, a statue of her as a student was installed on campus. But I don’t recall hearing this part of the story, although it probably circulated. I wish it had circulated around to me. I’d have enjoyed sharing it with my students. They’d have gotten a kick out of it. Especially the William Smith students, and especially the science majors and pre-meds among them:

Elizabeth Blackwell was admitted to Geneva Medical College as a joke. She was twenty-six years old and had already apprenticed herself to two physicians, but she was rejected by more than a dozen schools. The only acceptance letter came from the students of Geneva Medical College, an Episcopal school in upstate New York. Dated October 20, 1847, it contained the following resolutions: “That one of the radical principles of a Republican Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every branch of scientific education the door should be open equally to all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our class, meets our entire approbation; and in extending our unanimous invitation, we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.”

Although this promising letter purported to reflect the deliberations “of the entire Medical Class of Geneva Medical College,” it failed to explain why Blackwell’s admission had been relegated to the student body. The answer was that the faculty had opposed it but did not wish to offend one of her recommenders, and so punted the issue to the students. Nor did the letter explain how those students had come to unanimously support her application: aware of the faculty’s opposition, delighted by the prospect of pranking them, and knowing that their decision had to be unanimous, they menaced the only dissenter until he relented. In the end, the motives of Blackwell’s fellow-students did not matter; she set off right away, starting the fall term a few weeks behind the men in her class.

---Casey Cep, “The Blackwell Sisters and the Harrowing History of Modern Medicine”, in the February 1, 2021 issue of the New Yorker.

Like I said, I think all my students, Hobart and William Smith alike, would have enjoyed the idea of their predecessors of a hundred and fifty years back putting one over on the faculty. But I think the William Smith students’ laughter would have been slyer, more knowing, and more tinged with irony. At the time, William Smith was the tougher school. It had higher admission standards and more rigorous degree requirements. William Smith students as a whole had a higher GPA. You went to Hobart because you didn’t get into Colgate. You went to William Smith because who needs Colgate? But you wouldn’t find many Hobart students who’d admit this out loud.

______________________________________________________________________________

One day after class, I was walking out the door with a William Smith student. She was a science major, biology, I think. Very good student, one of the smartest in the class, and one of the best writers. She had something weighing on her mind and had stuck around to ask me a question: Who did I think were smarter, science majors or humanity majors. Being the son of a physicist and the smartest human being I knew, I was quick with my answer, but I was also talking from experience as a teacher: “Science majors, no question.”

I assumed she was bothered by the attitudes of some Hobart students, who as a group had a problem facing the fact that any woman with any major could be smarter than they were. It turned out that her argument was with other William Smith students whom she felt looked down on science majors as mere technicians, laboratory drudges who might know how to light a bunsen burner or prepare a microscope slide weren’t intellectually up to a real liberal arts education. I'd like to imagine things have changed a lot by now. Among women, at any rate.

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.

<----Previous/Next----->

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.

<---Previous/Next ---->

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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