Listening to the Radio

I was listening to the Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor this morning and he read this poem.

From Out the Cave by Joyce Sutphen

When you have been

at war with yourself

for so many years that

you have forgotten why,

when you have been driving

for hours and only

gradually begin to realize

that you have lost the way,

when you have cut

hastily into the fabric,

when you have signed

papers in distraction,

when it has been centuries

since you watched the sun set

or the rain fall, and the clouds,

drifting overhead, pass as flat

as anything on a postcard;

when in the midst of these

everyday nightmares, you

understand that you could

wake up,

you could turn

and go back

to the last thing you

remember doing

with your whole heart:

that passionate kiss,

the brilliant drop of love

rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,

then you wake,

you stumble from your cave,

blinking in the sun,

naming every shadow

as it slips.

I don't know the whole legality of this so here is some sort of citation: "From Out the Cave" by Joyce Sutphen, from Straight Out of View. Beacon Press, 1995.

Dramatic shifts in knowledge

To be honest I have not been able to get farther into this book. But I will try to contribute something meaningful so that I am not simply dead weight. Though after Dustin's discussion it became more appealing than it was before.

In class Dustin talked about how at some point something that was previously true is no longer true. While I think the discussion was based more off of social and cultural stuff, there definitely examples in science. The obvious example is that of quantum mechanics. In the later half of the 19th century people were being somewhat dissuaded from going into the field of physics because it was believed that for the most part that we understood how things worked, and that some loose ends would need to be mopped up. Well, turns out that while we knew a lot, we didn't know nearly as much as we thought we did. Before quantum mechanics light was viewed strictly as an electromagnetic wave and that particles were strictly particles (overlooking Newton's guess that light was a particle). However, after Einsteins work on the photoelectric effect, showing that light could behave like a particle, and de Broglie extending this to particles behaving like waves, we realize that matter does not behave strictly in one way. This would all be useless hypothesizing without observable evidence. The photoelectric effect was first observed before Einstein explained it, but de Broglie suggested that particles would have a wave length before it was observed. But this has been observed since with molecules as massive as Buckey-balls producing a diffraction pattern after passing through two slits. This all eventually led to the realization that molecules do not have a continuous spectrum of energy, but rather it is quantized in discrete packets. All of this would have been disregarded as untrue by the previous generation of physicists. Even a lot of the scientists dealing with quantum mechanics suffered through depression because a lot of it didn't make sense to them. Einstein was never really won over by the Copenhagen interpretation, saying that he didn't think that God would determine things by probability. Niels Bohr said "Einstein, don't tell God what to do". Another quote highlighting the difficulty of conceptualizing these developments was "Shut up and calculate". In other words, don't think classically, rather let the math tell you what is true.

Quantum mechanics is a field of science that is ripe with philosophical implications, so it gets a lot of press. It doesn't hurt that the personalities of the important figures make them interesting to people who are not scientists. However, these shifts of knowledge are in all science. For synthetic chemists it was once believed that the only molecules that could by made were simple molecules, and that the complex natural products would be impossible to make. Now however, any natural product can be realistically made, though it might have low yields and be unrealistic for manufacturing. We have come a long way from synthesizing urea in the early 19th century to potentially synthesizing this bad boy with enough graduate students. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincristine.svg

I kind of wanted to talk about sense perception, the Herman Melville quote about the whale, the order at key west poem and some other relevant things, but I think that will have to wait for a bit. I think this post would just get to exhaustive and people who happen to read it would get bored.

Hasty Conclusions

I should start this by saying the only part of Foucault that I have been able to get through is the intro. But Holy Hell, for only being 16 pages that took a really long time, and I understood nothing. It instantly reminded me of this quote by Paul Dirac - "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible" Maybe the book becomes less convoluted past the intro, I will know better tomorrow morning. But if it doesn't, I guess Foucault didn't get the message.