Words

Sex and physics!

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I just like using these titles, little excuse is necessary. But I do have one: this article in Seed about philandering physicists. The point being that famous physicists of yore were often secret Casanovas, scribbling equations in their downtime between romantic trysts. I’m not sure this thesis would hold up to further scrutiny; it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with numerous counterexamples. It’s true that Einstein was more the raconteur than you might think, but I just can’t imagine, say, Julian Schwinger seducing young women with his patter about source theory. (Sir Isaac Newton reputedly died a virgin.) But there was an interesting question raised at the end of the article, about whether the apparent lack of dashing Don Juans on the current scene was emblematic of some change in the culture of modern physics. Or maybe we just haven’t heard about it yet. Besides, these days physicists are too busy blogging.

The article quoted science writer Jennifer Ouellette, and the enlightened folks at Seed were clever enough to link to her web page. From there I found that Jennifer has recently started a blog, Cocktail Party Physics, which is definitely worth checking out — it’s good to have people talking about science who really know how to write. An excerpt:

Surely there’s room for everyone at the physics table, provided everyone adheres to the rules of engagement (the scientific method) and, like Newton, doesn’t let their personal faith (or adherence to dogma) interfere with the data/evidence. I was always impressed with Richard Feynman’s take on the quantum revolution. Many early physicists, including Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Schroedinger himself, were deeply troubled by the implications of quantum physics. It seemed to defy not just common sense, but everything known thus far about how Nature worked at the macroscale. And yet the evidence kept mounting until they were forced to accept that Nature does indeed seem to work in such an irrational way at the subatomic level. Feynman said we didn’t have to like it, but as scientists (or, in my case, as a science writer), we must accept what the evidence tells us. Dogma — whether it comes in the form of organized religion, political correctness, or overly-zealous apoplectic physicists — has no place at the table, because by its very nature, it interferes with the process of scientific advancement. Ancora imparo: we are still learning. That’s part of the excitement of physics.

Jennifer’s blog reminds me a bit of inkycircus — having fun with the ideas of science, relating them to the wider world in which we all live. Room for everyone at the table.

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Crank up your word processors

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I’m sure we have a slew of budding Pynchons and Stoppards out there in the CV audience. Here’s your chance to break into the big time: the Second Annual Seed Magazine Fiction Supplement.

In the June/July issue Seed will publish its Second Annual Fiction Supplement. We are not looking for traditional Sci-Fi — we are looking for fiction that reflects the significant role science plays in our culture; fiction that uncovers the rich narratives in science; and fiction wherein scientists are fallible and human. We are looking for Science-In-Fiction, Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction — in the tradition of Andrea Barrett, Richard Powers, Margaret Atwood and Alan Lightman, writing that brings new meaning to our understanding of Science Fiction.

Scientists are fallible and human? Sorry, can’t help them there. Remember, if anyone who reads this post goes off and writes a story that gets into the magazine, we want to hear about it.

Update: Apparently we’re talking about an entire genre of fiction here — LabLit. (Via grrlscientist.)

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Word crisis

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Forget about Peak Oil, here’s the real looming crisis: we’re running out of new words. Do you realize how hard it is, in our hyperactive age, to come up with a word that hasn’t already been invented for some purpose or another? Surely we’ve all had the experience of mistyping a word into Google and nevertheless hitting a handful of results. So as a little experiment, I made up some strings of letters that sounded like they could be words, checked in the dictionary that none of them actually exists as a conventional English word, and asked Google to go look for them. Here’s how many hits I got.

  • antrith (865)
  • splicky (230)
  • queigh (43)
  • nurdle (885)
  • tobnet (53)

“Splicky” is a pretty sweet-sounding word, actually; I’ll have to start dropping it into conversation. Admittedly, most non-words appear on Google as abbreviations or computer terms or simple nonsense, and furthermore it’s not that hard to invent random strings that don’t get any hits. Still, I’m worried. If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m pretty sure he’d feel that Google was cramping his style, coinage-wise.

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Smith on Mozart

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Zadie Smith, in her novel On Beauty, describing Mozart’s Requiem:

Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. the pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have no meaning were it not for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman. This choir is the heavenly host and simultaneously the devil’s army. It is also every person who has changed you during your time on this earth: your many lovers; your family; your enemies, the nameless, faceless woman who slept with your husband; the man you thought you were going to marry; the man you did. The job of this choir is judgement. The men sing first, and their judgement is very severe. And when the women join in there is no respite, the debate only grows louder and sterner. For it is a debate — you realize that now. The judgement is not yet decided. It is surprising how dramatic the fight for your measly soul turns out to be.

Smith’s title, by the way, is derived from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, a thought-provoking if not always transparent little book.

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Rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace

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Close to the EdgeSome holiday frivolity for you. I’m a big fan of Yes‘s progressive-rock masterpiece Close to the Edge, but I’ll admit that I always presumed the lyrics were mostly nonsense. Not true! It turns out that every line is imbued with subtle and hermeneutically challenging messages, worthy of the closest of readings. Happily, such a reading has been provided by the Church of Yahweh (don’t ask). Here are the lyrics by Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, and Chris Squire; have a crack at interpreting them yourselves before peeking at the answers.

I. The Solid Time Of Change

A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace,
And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace,
And achieve it all with music that came quickly from afar,
Then taste the fruit of man recorded losing all against the hour.
And assessing points to nowhere, leading ev’ry single one.
A dewdrop can exalt us like the music of the sun,
And take away the plain in which we move,
And choose the course you’re running.
Down at the edge, round by the corner, not right away, not right away.

Crossed the line around the changes of the summer,
Reaching to call the color of the sky.
Passed around a moment clothed in mornings faster than we see.
Getting over all the time I had to worry,
Leaving all the changes far from far behind.
We relieve the tension only to find out the master’s name.

Down at the end, round by the corner.
Close to the edge, just by a river.
Seasons will pass you by.
I get up, I get down.
Now that it’s all over and done,
Now that you find, now that you’re whole.

II. Total Mass Retain

My eyes convinced, eclipsed with the younger moon attained with love.
It changed as almost strained amidst clear manna from above.
I crucified my hate and held the word within my hand.
There’s you, the time, the logic, or the reasons we don’t understand.

Sad courage claimed the victims standing still for all to see,
As armoured movers took approach to overlook the sea.
There since the cord, the license, or the reasons we understood will be.

Down at the edge, close by a river, close to the edge, round by the corner.

Sudden call shouldn’t take away the startled memory.
All in all, the journey takes you all the way.
As apart from any reality that you’ve ever seen and known.
Guessing problems only to deceive the mention,
Passing paths that climb halfway into the void.

As we cross from side to side, we hear the total mass retain.

Down at the edge, round by the corner, close to the end, down by a river.
Seasons will pass you by.
I get up, I get down.

III. I Get Up, I Get Down

In her white lace
You can clearly see the lady sadly looking.
Saying that she’d take the blame
For the crucifixion of her own domain.

I get up, I get down, I get up, I get down.
Two million people barely satisfy.
Two hundred women watch one woman cry, too late.
The eyes of honesty can achieve.
How many millions do we deceive each day?

Through the duty she would coil their said
amusement of her story asking only interest
could be laid upon the children of her domain

I get up, I get down, I get up, I get down.

In charge of who is there in charge of me.
Do I look on blindly and say I see the way?
The truth is written all along the page.
How old will I be before I come of age for you?
I get up, I get down.

IV. Seasons Of Man

The time between the notes relates the color to the scenes.
A constant vogue of triumphs dislocate man, so it seems.
And space between the focus shape ascend knowledge of love.
As song and chance develop time, lost social temp’rance rules above.

Then according to the man who showed his outstretched arm to space,
He turned around and pointed, revealing all the human race.
I shook my head and smiled a whisper, knowing all about the place.
On the hill we viewed the silence of the valley,
Called to witness cycles only of the past.
And we reach all this with movements in between the said remark.

Close to the edge, down by the river.
Down at the end, round by the corner.
Seasons will pass you by,
Now that it’s all over and done,
Called to the seed, right to the sun.
Now that you find, now that you’re whole.
Seasons will pass you by,
I get up, I get down.

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Bibliophilia

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I was never a big Bill Clinton fan — so much ability squandered on just keeping himself afloat, no willingness to take a tough stand on principle alone. But he did have his charms. Here’s Gabriel García Márquez, describing a dinner with William Styron, Carlos Fuentes, and Clinton:

When we asked him what he was reading, he sighed and mentioned a book on the economic wars of the future, author and title unknown to me.

“Better to read ‘Don Quixote,'” I said to him. “Everything’s in there.” Now, the ‘Quixote’ is a book that is not read nearly as much as is claimed, although very few will admit to not having read it. With two or three quotes, Clinton showed that he knew it very well indeed. Responding, he asked us what our favorite books were. Styron said his was “Huckleberry Finn.”

I would have said “Oedipus Rex,” which has been my bed table book for the last 20 years, but I named “The Count of Monte Cristo,” mainly for reasons of technique, which I had some trouble explaining.

Clinton said his was the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to “Absalom, Absalom,” Faulkner’s stellar novel, no question, although others would choose “Light in August” for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji’s monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from “The Sound and the Fury.”

The resemblance to GW Bush is uncanny! He’s an avid reader too. Really!

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Mind

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By Jorie Graham. (More here and here.)

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. The city
draws the mind in streets,
and streets compel it
from their intersections
where a little
belongs to no one. It is
what is driven through
all stationary portions
of the world, gravity’s
stake in things, the leaves,
pressed against the dank
window of November
soil, remain unwelcome
till transformed, parts
of a puzzle unsolvable
till the edges give a bit
and soften. See how
then the picture becomes clear,
the mind entering the ground
more easily in pieces,
and all the richer for it.

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From Experience to Metaphor

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I know that, despite your love for physics and baseball and the Supreme Court, most people really come to Cosmic Variance for one thing: literary theorizing. Well, it’s been a little thin on the ground here, so let’s redress the balance.

As oldtime Preposterous readers know, in March I attended a conference at the KITP in Santa Barbara on Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative (duly blogged about here and here). I participated in a panel discussion, chatting about how modern science provided an excellent source of raw materials for literary metaphors — much in the spirit of Clifford’s last post. The idea was straightforward, and doubtless not original: science is a product of the human imagination, but not a free product; it’s forced to some up with startling and counter-intuitive ideas by the need to conform to the data. And as experiments have probed into realms that are increasingly distant from everyday experience, these ideas have become increasingly bizarre and counterintuitive. The kinds of ideas — dark energy, curved spacetime, collapse of the wavefunction — that you probably wouldn’t invent by just sitting in a favorite cafe chatting with friends. And because these ideas are so unfamliliar, they suggest provocative and illuminating perspectives on ordinary human interactions. (Black holes as personality types, entropy as a metaphor for social decay — you know the idea.)

The respondent on the panel was Arkady Plotnitsky, a charming expatriate Russian who studied mathematics and physics in Leningrad (back when it was Leningrad) before moving to the States and becoming a literature professor. He encouraged me to write up my talk for publication in a special issue of Poetics Today, which I have finally done. So here it is: From Experience to Metaphor, by Way of Imagination (pdf file). Feel free to comment away, keeping in mind that this is not in any sense my area of expertise. (So, does this mean that writing articles for Poetics Today is a good way to advance one’s physics career? No, not really. Let’s say it’s a higher good.)

Now I want to see Michael Bérubé start publishing in Physical Review Letters.

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The Oval Portrait

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A busy Halloween for me, so I’ll shamelessly offer up an excerpt from the master — a bit from The Oval Portrait, by Edgar Allen Poe.

She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to pourtray even his young bride. But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead.

But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And be was a passionate, and wild, and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him. Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak.

And in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from canvas merely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him. And when many weeks bad passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp. And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:- She was dead!

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Blackbird

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By Adam Zagajewski.

A blackbird sat on the TV antenna
and sang a gentle, jazzy tune.
Whom have you lost, I asked, what do you mourn?
I’m taking leave of those who’ve gone, the blackbird said,
I’m parting with the day (its eyes and lashes),
I mourn a girl who lived in Thrace,
you wouldn’t know her.
I’m sorry for the willow, killed by frost.
I weep, since all things pass and alter
and return, but always in a different form.
My narrow throat can barely hold
the grief, despair, delight, and pride
occasioned by such sweeping transformations.
A funeral cortege passes up ahead,
the same each evening, there, on the horizon’s thread.
Everyone’s there, I see them all and bid farewell.
I see the swords, hats, kerchiefs, and bare feet,
guns, blood, and ink. They walk slowly
and vanish in the river mist, on the right bank.
I say goodbye to them and you and the light,
and then I greet the night, since I serve her–
and black silks, black powers.

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