The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: physics

  • String Theory

    For some time, I followed physics in the news. My casual observations started with Lisi’s “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” and gained momentum with a Robert B. Laughlin lecture I attended.

    String theory and physics in general no longer attract me like they did back in the early days of this blog. There’s a fundamental difference between asking questions you don’t know the answer to from asking questions there are no answers to, and it doesn’t seem to help to fabricate questions that can’t be measured and answered experimentally – questions considered non-empirical or unfalsifiable. And when we might be able to answer such questions, the answers are probably going to be, Laughlin still seems to suggest, far more far out than we have ever imagined. Though William Blake may have come close. Anyway, today, I’m more interested in guitar strings.

    CB was back and we broke a string. I had been playing a set of Chromes, flatwound electric guitar strings, experimentally on the acoustic Gitane Gypsy Jazz guitar, 11’s, so fat strings that boom like distant hollow wave tunnels rather than 9’s and 10’s that sprinkle rushing white water into your ears. Of course, Rock style players then experiment with pedals and amps to achieve a data sonification of a nova, regardless of string size – a universe of tinnitus.

    The Chromes were invented by D’Addario in collaboration with guitarist Pat Metheny, where Chrome suggests chromatic, using notes in and out of key. The string surface wrap is smooth rather than coiled. The Chromes sound on an acoustic is muted, and I had decided to go back to a set of Savarez Augustine Gypsy Jazz strings. But I didn’t have a set, so I went back to a D’Addario set, also 11’s, which I had on hand. And for the restringing, CB introduced me to a new, exceptionally simple method. You pull the string through the tuning peg, pull it back the same distance between pegs, wrap outside over and around the peg, bend up the excess end, and wind. Presto, job done.

    All strings stretch a bit, some more than others, when they are new, so tuning new strings can be problematic. You think they’re in tune, then they stretch and quickly need retuning. To counter this effect, I’ve always overtightened them a bit while stringing. So when CB took the restrung guitar and sat down to give it a final tuning, the G string snapped, unravelling at the ball end, probably the result of tuning an octave too high, as I had already wound it pretty tight, or maybe the string was faulty from the factory. In any case, we had no more strings on hand, so there the guitar sat, missing its 3rd string.

    That led me on a new string search, online and through the local universe of guitar shops. I found an interesting Martin string, silk and steel, with a total tension of only 122.2, in spite of a full size 6th string of 11.5. Very interesting. I got a set and put them on the 1970 Yamaha Red Label FG180, which has a crack in its headstock that makes me leery of using too heavy a gauge on it. The Martin silk and steel strings are soft and loose, easy on the fingers and guitar, but sound full, like old folk. For the Gitane, I settled on another set of D’Addario, but 10’s instead of the heavy 11’s.

    All that said, guitars restrung and ready to play, we must now remind ourselves of John Cage’s manifesto on music (1952): “}instantaneous and unpredictable nothing is accomplished by writing, hearing, playing a piece of music} our ears are now in excellent condition.”

    Theory of nothing, something, and everything in between

  • Happy Misfortune

    Why do some derive pleasure from some other’s misfortune, a strange joy often described as schadenfreude? The English version is epicaricacy. Now there’s a good word, suggesting epic caricature. A form of sadism, maybe. It’s not one of the seven deadly sins, though it could be related to wrath or envy. Or moral desert.

    Is it a weakness not to feel happy at a bad person’s misfortune? Is it impossible for a bad person to experience misfortune? Is misfortune a precursor to happiness? Can we even recognize true misfortune? What appears to be divine retribution may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Likewise, do we know luck when we find it? Trina wins a lottery in Frank Norris’s novel “McTeague.” She ends up sleeping on the coins, literally, a bed of coins.

    The blessing in disguise is of course impossible to know. We can’t know what does not happen, only imagine it. But we’re good at imagining things. And our predispositions and assumptions often make no sense. We don’t believe in God, but we think people get what they deserve. We stick to the belief that good deeds are rewarded while bad acts get punished even as the headlines are proof of an alternative reality. Pride, greed, and envy are well-dressed floats in our celebration parades.

    We scan the headlines for signs of redress: the writer whose best seller is found to be plagiarized; the preacher who kept a mistress; the scholar who misspells, mispronounces, misses tenure; the sports hero hooked on drugs; the politician prosecuted. But the schadenfreude feelings these misfortunes stir up are no substitute for kindness and humility. What we seem really to be looking for is vengeance. But our code of disbelief has already struck down any possibility of such a judge.

    We are given then to randoms. We don’t know why things happen the way they do. And no event seems final. The so-called extinction of the dinosaurs is belied by the hummingbird and crocodile. I’ve been thinking of the dinosaurs recently, the ones we once thought now fill the gas tanks of our cars, but that’s a myth. Life doesn’t pass so much as alter – allegro non troppo: fast, but not so fast we can’t see or feel it go; and for the most part happy, though not permeating or permanently so. In any case, and as Slavoj Zizek points out in his segment of the Astra Taylor film “Examined Life,” the catastrophe of one species may be the good fortune of another.

    Is happy misfortune a universal truth, like the constant speed of light or theories of relativity? In the absence of proof of life elsewhere in the universe, is life on Earth a happy misfortune? Or is life elsewhere already over, ended, and not so happily? And would we feel a sense of schadenfreude to find out?

  • Alternate Endings

    No end will suffice, not fire nor ice. In the beginning, things started off with a bang, a big one at that, after a night of fitful sleep, though how one measures big in the face of nothing surrounding seems insolvable. In any event, life, what is (the distinction between organic and disparate proven fallacious), now looks to have been without beginning, so a world without end seems fitting. Nevertheless, we begin anew, if not afresh, at the diurnal clarion call. To awake is irreversible, at least for a few hours. Always some remains. And while the Big Pop was the most considerable in several hours, having sunk deeper than one can remember, nothing but whimpering since, awake with the bends. But it won’t finish with a whimper. No end and no exit and no exit and no end: how’s that for the unknotting?

    Up and about, wandering now bottom of bole (trunkus, luggage compartment, the part of a tree above the roots and below the branches). Think Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” evening in the future, looking backward. Distribution. Retail branches, manufacturing roots.

    All brick and mortar retail closed, malls emptied – or might as well be, old habits dropped. The only jobs are those deemed essential. Who deems? The Great Deemer. People waiting in long lines to enter the one remaining store where the shelves are empty, just to look around, shopping it’s called, nothing much needed. Staples delivered. The only rigs on the roads these days those doing deliveries. Still, going shopping, something to do. But the shops are all closed, boarded up, a wilderness for the pigeons, cats, possums, racoons, peacocks, squirrels. Even the meek seem to have abdicated.

    The cafes closed, bars banned or pubs perished (though one suspects the Speakeasy may be making a comeback), theatres imploded, churches clapped shut. Schools closed forever. Tested and corporations bid accordingly and draft as needed according to five year plans and instead of schooling what one gets is on the job training: slated for a professional sport, a career in medicine, or a space program. But no one is forced to work. Work is not even considered work, but a fulfillment of a combination of want and need. Consider, if you like, the lilies of the field. There are of course those dirty jobs few look forward to, plumbing and such – but still, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” What’s to be done? Nothing to be done. But that we do it well, or at least try to.

  • 2 + 2 = 5

    That two plus two equals four
    used to be true, but no more,
    not necessarily, and out the door
    our core of being washed ashore.

    Dostoevsky came close to avoid
    the obvious and said to make five
    you need at least four things,
    the fifth the wit of leadership.

    For the true leader takes 2 fish
    and 2 loaves of bread and convinces
    the constituency they’ve been fed
    the truth, the whole truth, nothing but,

    for what is right might be wrong,
    we hear from the physicists,
    who wander far afield from logic,
    language, and Mother Earth.

    So, if you happen to have two
    apples and two hammers, you
    are missing six of something.
    You are a long ways from home.

    “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but, if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing, too.”

    “Notes from Underground,” Dostoevsky, 1864.

  • Salsa Party on the Moon

    In the news, water discovered on Earth’s moon: Not so much water apparently though that NASA will start shaping surfboards for its astronauts; nor is discovered quite right – confirmed or proven more precise. Meantime, of course, what with someone always turning up the global warming thermostat in the house, we’ll soon be wanting to bring some of that moon water down to Earth. And where there’s water, there could be also be tomatoes. And where there’s tomatoes, there could also be salsa. Now, a salsa party on the moon – countdown! And where there’s water, there’s sound, so the previously assumed to be silent moon, if you put your ear to the crater, just might produce some good vibes after all; and what’s a salsa party without music?

  • A Modest Halloween Proposal

    A Modest Halloween Proposal

    It sometimes seems clear if there is an afterlife it does not interfere with present life. But what is present? The light from our sun is already a little over eight seconds old. We sunbathe in the past, confident in a present we never quite seem to fully inhabit (physics explains it’s perfectly possible to split infinitives). Where then do we go? Maybe time is a question of physics, maybe of metaphysics – the things that may come after the physics.

    The dead seem an extremely polite bunch. They do not intrude. Looking for them is like searching for aliens. We may feel their presence, approach them with the telescope of faith, but if they exist, somewhere-somehow, that life lies far far beyond the present five senses. To prove an afterlife, if we want to believe in ghosts and such, we must create a sense beyond our given five.

    William Blake noticed angels out and about. Rilke claimed to have seen one. What is it about poets that make them easy prey for such notions? Wouldn’t it be a bit frightful if the first aliens the astronomers discover turn out to be previous earthlings? The problem with communicating with the dead may simply be the length of time their message takes to reach us. By the time the first message from the first dead reaches Earth, we may all be gone. What would the message say? Trick or Treat?

    I take no issue with the dead. Nor am I looking forward to meeting any aliens. Let them keep their distance. My problem seems to be sugar: to wit, candy – the Halloween tradition (in these parts).

    This year, instead of passing out candy, I propose to hand out poems. Short poems printed on three by five cards, maybe with a cartoon or drawing on one side of the card. I’ll drop a poem card into every little critter’s Halloween basket. No candy. No sugar.

    But when I mentioned the idea to Susan, she said, “We’ll get our house egged for sure.”

    “You think? With the cost of dairy these days?”

    “And the parents will accuse you of poisoning their kids with poetry. Besides, Halloween cards are nothing new. And poetry, while sugar free, is still very high in carbs and calories, not to mention saturated and trans fats.”

    So much for my proposal. I guess we’re sticking with candy.

  • Immigrants from Earth

    The astrophysicists are in the ascendancy again. That’s our takeaway from a 03.2019 National Geographic article. The key is light. The scientific industry is working to build something that will travel close to the speed of light. Laser beams, solar winds, and microscopic kites. Another key is funding. They’re working on a go fund me tsunami. Government dough is drying up, but there appears to be enough interest in the private sector to fuel ever more comic book fantasy.

    Surprisingly, for all our technological advancements and discoveries, not much is known about the universe. Part of what’s driving the current science buzz is a new generation of telescopes that will provide pics of the light reflecting directly off of exoplanets. That light will contain information about what’s happening on the planet. Information like who lives there, their address, what they do for a living, and other census like questions.

    Meantime, back on earth, in that same 03.2019 National Geographic issue, an article on El Salvador violence, titled “No Way Out,” helps explain the immigration crisis on the US southwest border. A map of El Salvador, titled “State of Fear,” using dots to show “Homicides by municipality, 2017,” could from a distance be confused with the Milky Way pic used on the cover of the issue.

    One wonders what makes scientists think there might be intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe when evidence of intelligent life here on Earth seems close to non-existent. And why would other life forms, presumably far more technologically advanced or in other ways superior to ours, be interested in us? One scientist interviewed remarks the question is similar to asking why would humans be interested in reaching out to a colony of ants.

    Ah, but there’s the rub. Maybe the ants are the aliens.

  • Involving “Involution,” a book by Philippa Rees

    For years, science was an argument that believed nothing on faith. These days, anything might be believed, as long as adequate funding materializes. Matthew Arnold’s receding “Sea of Faith” may be replenished with research dollars. What the sea might be replenished with is up in the air, and anyone’s guess.

    In “Spooked: What do we learn about science from a controversy in physics?,” Adam Gopnik (30 Nov New Yorker) explains: “The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.” The subject is non-locality, or locality, depending on your point of view: the idea that we might eschew working at home and go into the office but without a commute. Gopnik is reviewing George Musser’s “Spooky Action at a Distance.” “One of Musser’s themes,” Gopnik says, “is that the boundary between inexplicable-seeming magical actions and explicable physical phenomena is a fuzzy one.” Gopnik looks at two other books, David Wootton’s “The Invention of Science,” and Thomas Levenson’s “The Hunt for Vulcan,” and concludes that scientists who suggest nature is wilder than we ever imagined “widen our respect for what we might be capable of imagining.”

    Imagining extreme life made possible by large doses of alien DNA, for example, such as the recent genome sequencing of the tardigrade makes apparent. Or of imagining a thinking both qualitatively and quantitatively different than Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind’s facts based knowledge. In a delightful essay test-like answer, Mary Midgley said, “The Enlightenment has done a magnificent job of increasing our knowledge. The further job – which its original prophets glimpsed very clearly – of putting that knowledge in its wider context hasn’t been done so well. It is not a job for science but for wisdom. It needs more work” (“You may now turn over your papers,” 24 Sep 2010, Guardian). If you doubt that it needs more work or that funding must be involved, consider this, from Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Does the Scientific Method Need Revision?”: “I cringe every time a string theorist starts talking about beauty and elegance. Whatever made them think that the human sense for beauty has any relevance for the fundamental laws of nature?” Not that I’m a fan of string theory. As I said in a prior post, if Christo were a physicist, he would have enough string theory to wrap the universe. Beauty and elegance point to metaphor; what does physics point to? Without some extra-dose of alien DNA, it seems we’re trapped in the human.

    Imagining more work for the imagination is the lure of Philippa Rees’s erudite tome, “Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God.” “Creation has paid a high price for science’s limited certainties,” Rees says in her Introduction. Like Mary Midgley, Rees challenges Dawkins, who, Rees surmises, would call her work “bad poetry,” where metaphor is the culprit. And the Gradgrind school of physicists like Hossenfelder might also ask metaphor to leave the room. Can metaphor be tested? Is beauty falsifiable?

    The electronic copy of “Involution” is 947 pages, cover to cover, including copious notes, scholarly references, introduction, appendix, and afterword that bookend nine long cantos of free verse. If you’re looking for the gift that keeps on giving for someone who likes to read, consider P. A. Rees’s “Involution.” The paperback copy is only 444 pages (CollaborArt Books, 4 Jul 2013), but with the many references and notes, the e-copy might be a better choice because it’s efficient and effective to navigate.

    A synopsis of “Involution,” or a paraphrase of its argument, for purposes of this blog post, might best be substituted with Rees’s opening quote: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience” (attributed to Père Teilhard de Chardin). The stylistic treatment of such themes often results in alternatives to standard forms of non-fiction. This is true of McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”; of Norman O. Brown’s “Love’s Body”; and of much of Joseph Campbell’s work; and of Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space.” These are works replete with references, written in a mosaic form, non-lineal. Their form challenges the status quo as much as their content. The poetry is not what makes “Involution” difficult. Involution’s poetry is not a post-modern puzzle. In many places we find a piece of the mosaic that alone is worth the price of entry:

    “It was all I had to bring
    For words must pull against the grain
    Shackled to their past
    Employed in other houses, poorly trained…
    Blacking scuttles, shining brass…
    All marred like aprons with old stains
    Or rigid in a tail and bow.
    Unable to use a common tongue…”

    But “Involution” is not an easy read. The seemingly protean nature of its narrator, moving in and out of italics; the mosaic history of science where each new discovery does little to complete the mosaic; the ambiguity of both protagonist and antagonist; the encyclopedic setting; the essential mystical nature of poetry; the science specialties – these all point to a work that is not meant simply to be read but to be lived with. At the same time, the book is carefully constructed, the layout accessible, the erudition softened in accessible notes and explanations. I remain perplexed by most of the figures, but they are helpful in the sense of being contributions to a new language form. I was initially a bit put off by the title, feeling no particular need or want for any kind of reconciliation, too cynical, I guess, but the title is true to the content; still, it gives little clue to the enjoyment of the reading experience.

    Sometimes, books are discovered by an unintended audience. How we say something is every bit as important as what we say, maybe more important. And it takes a staunch realist to speak to every audience in the same voice. Likewise, we should read difficult books. I’ve been working on Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” forever, and he cunningly made it a circle, so I’ll never be able to finish it. The occasion of reading is also important, as important as the occasion of writing. The occasion of “Involution” may be now for both Philippa Rees and her reader: “From whence comes this recognition of beauty, economy, and elegance if not from our internal experience of being part of it?” (“Involution,” e-copy, p. 492).