The sea mysteries

Like an oyster hides its pearl,

The sea hides its wonder world.

Like a mermaid flicks her tail,
The sea is real and surreal.

Like the heart of the angler fish,
The sea's heart beats in the dead of night,

The sonar's echo of lovers dead and lost,
All the lonely people - lost at sea.

the haunting music of the deep dark sea.

***

All around the wide world,
the sea speaks in many tongues.

In many skins, the sea repeats its lines.
With wide, tide arms, the sea keeps time.

In the great treasure chest below
Are the sea special gifts:

Lantern fish, bristlemouths, hatchetfish,
Plankton, krill, shrimps, copepods, squid.

Pink eggs, razor sharp teeth, transparent shells.
Triple wart sea devil, common black devil fish.

As if the sea imagined its creatures,
dragging the ocean for inspiration,

As if the sea drew a rough sketch,
Then coloured them in:

Black and red creatures of the dark zone.
Fish that flash, fish that turn themselves inside out.

Out of the vivid imagination of the sea,
Crawled the wild and the wonderful,

The gulper eel, the vampire squid from hell,
the kind and the savage, the beautiful and the ugly,

The saints and the martyrs,
The myths and the workers.

Nothing could ever surprise the sea.
The sea is you. The sea is me.

***

Like an oyster hides its pearl,
The sea hides its wonder world.

Like the heart of the angler fish,
The sea's heart beats in the dead of night,

The sonar's echo of lovers dead and lost:

the haunting music of the deep dark sea.

-- Jackie Kay

“You ain’t never seen trouble till you lose a youngun.”

Of the seven children the Tingles have lost, one lived to be four, and pulled a kettle of scalding water over on him. One lived to be five and ate some bad bologna sausage one night and was dead before morning. The rest died within their first year.

-- from Cotton Tenants

The Patent Tempest Prognosticator

The Patent Tempest Prognosticator [demonstrated by Dr George Merryweather in 1851] was based on the well known response of leeches to sudden changes in barometric pressure. Their soft, gelatinous bodies were squeezed and made drowsy and inactive by normal air pressure, but low pressure refreshed and awoke them...

The Prognosticator...was an ingenious form of multiple leech barometer. It consisted of a circular display of twelve glass flasks, each containing a leech partially immersed in rainwater. The flasks were enclosed at the top with a system of whalebone springs, and these in turn were linked to a set of counterweights that connected to metal hammers arranged to strike against an impressive brass bell at the centre of the apparatus. 

From Falling Upwards by Richard Holmes

Beneath the ice

Bedmap 2 shows Antarctica beneath the ice. Animation, report.

See also Barely Imagined Beings posts on Antarctica

From the annals of improbable tethered objects

Feuerwerkbuch 1420

Soviet stamp 1965

The nothing that is

Recent measurements... suggest that the universe as a whole has zero energy, zero charge, and zero angular momentum. How is this possible? All energy due to matter (which is positive) is canceled by an equal amount of gravitational energy (which is negative). There are equal amounts of positive and negative charge, and we cannot create one without creating the other. Zero angular momentum means that the universe has no net spin. The universe, then, is a whole lot of nothing: yin and yang that cancel each other out. Locally, in our own neighborhood, we seem to have lots of stuff: matter, charges, motion, entropy, and uncertainty. But globally, none of these exist, never have and never will.

-- from The Rise of the Uncertain by Vlatko Vedral at Nautilus

Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft

...that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar...

from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad quoted by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Genius Rewarded

On every sea are floating the Singer Machines; along every road pressed by the foot of civilized man this tireless ally of the world’s great sisterhood is going upon its errand of helpfulness. Its cheering tune is understood no less by the sturdy German matron than by the slender Japanese maiden; it sings as intelligibly to the flaxen-haired Russian peasant girl as to the dark-eyed Mexican Señorita. It needs no interpreter, whether it sings amidst the snows of Canada or upon the pampas of Paraguay; the Hindoo mother and the Chicago maiden are to-night making the self-same stitch; the untiring feet of Ireland’s fair-skinned Nora are driving the same treadle with the tiny understandings of China’s tawny daughter; and thus American machines, American brains, and American money are bringing the women of the whole world into one universal kinship and sisterhood.

 -- from “Genius Rewarded: or, the Story of the Sewing Machine”, The Singer company, 1880, and quoted by Evgeny Mozorv in his review of  The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

Planetary writing

“Submergence” is an attempt at what I would call planetary writing, which is not the same as nature writing, it’s more political, more discarnate. Somalia here is scorched and hard, but it is also mutable and passing, and the same is true for the pain and the beliefs in the novel. So there is on the surface a narrative where human lives are played out and they matter so very much and are insignificant all at once. Whereas the ocean is confounding in another way, you have no breath in it, no light, and consequently no imaginable human life, yet it is immutable, and when you stack it up you find it is nearly all of the living space on the planet. What I wanted to do was to alter the reader’s perspective of Earth, to show that dirt is precious but seawater dominates, to step out on a field is rare while to float and scintillate with bioluminescence is common.

-- J.M.Ledgard talking to Philip Gourevitch

Real time

The idea that nature consists fundamentally of atoms with immutable properties moving through unchanging space, guided by timeless laws, underlies a metaphysical view in which time is absent or diminished. This view has been the basis for centuries of progress in science, but its usefulness for fundamental physics and cosmology has come to an end due to its inability to answer key questions such as what chose the laws of nature or why the universe is so asymmetric in time. Some people have confused the reliance on timeless laws with science itself, but this is wrong.

A new scientific world view is emerging based on the principles that time is real, laws evolve and irreversibility is fundamental. It is already clear this view has the capacity to explain – in ways that are testable by experiment – basic facts about our universe that otherwise appear to be inexplicable.

-- Lee Smolin

"a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel..."

...[Rousseau] has, as he writes in the "Fifth Walk", deliberately forsworn the burden of work, and his greatest joy has been to leave his books safely shut away and to have neither ink nor paper to hand. However, since the leisure time thus freed up must be put to some use, Rousseau devotes himself to the study of botany, whose basic principles he had acquired in Môtiers on excursions with Jean Antoine d'Ivernois. "I set out to compose," writes Rousseau in the "Fifth Walk", "a Flora Petrinsularis and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks – and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description. In accordance with this noble plan, every morning after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema Naturae under my arm to study one particular section of the island, which I had divided for this purpose into small squares, intending to visit them all one after another in every season." The central motif of this passage is not so much the impartial insight into the indigenous plants of the island as that of ordering, classification and the creation of a perfect system. Thus this apparently innocent occupation – the deliberate resolve no longer to think and merely to look at nature – becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic project involving the compiling of lists, indices and catalogues, along with the precise description of, for example, the long stamens of self-heal, the springiness of those of nettle and of wall-pellitory, and the sudden bursting of the seed capsules of balsam and of beech...

from A Place in My Country by W.G.Sebald

Read, think, do

I recently selected Five Books on the theme Growing up in the Anthropocene. I was wondering what to read next and a few days later came across this interview with Jeremy Grantham. Prompted by Grantham, I read Immoderate Greatness by William Ophuls. It's a short, polemical read which, for all its conservative sensibility, is worth a look. Ophuls quotes Why Most Things Fail by Paul Ormerod:

Species, people, firms, governments are all complex entities that must survive in dynamic environments that evolve over time. Their ability to understand such environments is inherently limited...These limits are a fundamental feature of [all complex] systems [and] can no more be overcome by smarter analysis that we are able to break binding physical constrains, such as our inability to travel faster than the speed of light. That is why things fail. 

Ophuls's concludes"

the proper (or only) way to 'manage' civilization is by not allowing it to become to complex – in fact, deliberately designing in restraints, redundancy, and resiliency, even if the price is less power, freedom, efficiency or profit than we might otherwise gain through greater complexity...Wisdom consists in renouncing 'immoderate greatness.'

Some hope. Next up, when time allows, I'll read Dirt by David Montgomery. I may also look at The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (presumably summarised as follows: “a second Dark Age [fell] on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on 'free' markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.”)

But beyond that, what? If you are reading this and have any suggestions please let me know.

(Also, what shall I do with myself?!)

Eden, Elysium, Arcadia, Utopia

In 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew the first detailed map of Mars, he imagined the planet as an earthly paradise. He labelled one region Eden, another Elysium, others, on later maps, Arcadia and Utopia. Peering through his telescope on the roof of the Palazzo di Brera, in Milan, Schiaparelli had seen what looked like oceans, continents, and water channels swim into view. “The planet is not a desert of arid rocks,” he wrote. “It lives.” 

-- via Burkhard Bilger. Image NASA/JPL via this 

'tis glory to arrive at probability

If anyone shall gravely tell me that I have spent my time in a vain and fruitless inquiry after what I can never be sure of, the answer is that at this rate he would put down all natural philosophy, as far as it concerns itself in searching into the nature of things. In such noble and sublime studies as these, 'tis glory to arrive at probability, and the search itself rewards the pains.

-- Christiaan Huygens. Cosmotheros, 1698

Monday morning

I was concerned that my five year old and I were late for school this cold, grey morning Monday. She kept stopping to pick up pieces of ice and half-melted snow. I kept saying come on, come on -- and with diminishing patience.

I turned and saw her running towards me with two large snowballs that she intended to throw at me.  There was joy and light in her eyes, and I felt it totally. That moment - just a second or two - was as beautiful as a moment can be. It was almost enough to give credit to something Richard Jefferies wrote in The Story of My Heart (and quoted in a forthcoming book by Philip Hoare):

Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and it always will be.

Review of "The Silence of Animals"

My review of John Gray's new book is in The Sunday Telegraph today.  I found things to like. Gray recalls, for instance, how gloriously sardonic Freud could be. When obliged, upon emigration, to sign a document stating that he had had every opportunity in the new Germany “to live and work in full freedom,” Freud appended an uncalled-for compliment: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to anyone.”

But I also found things not to like so much. Gray is unjust to leading thinkers of the Enlightenment.  Before Freud “reformulated one of the central insights of religion: [that] humans are cracked vessels,” Kant said that out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made. Hume was subtle and wise, both on reason and science:

Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher, who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe. ... These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry. ... The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

...and on human nature:

[It] cannot be disputed that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous. 

In a review published in the FT on 22 Feb, which I hadn't read when I wrote my review, Julian Baggini writes:

...[The Silence of Animals] reads like Straw Dogs rewritten from scratch, this time drawing on more extended literary and historical examples, his punchy aphorisms punctuating rather than dominating the text...

...The arguments have lost their urgency but retain their weaknesses. As in Straw Dogs, there is too much black and white and too few shades of Gray. Most obviously, he talks of “faith in progress” and the idea that “the future can still be better” interchangeably, as though they amounted to the same thing. But, of course, they are not. You do not have to believe tomorrow must be better than today to try to make it so. Sartre recognised this half a century ago, when he argued that “one need not hope in order to undertake one’s work”. Abandoning the comforting delusion that good will inevitably prevail is a condition for honest work towards progress, not an obstacle to it...

Spring is not elsewhere

Although we imagine springtime coming from elsewhere, a warm breeze blowing birds and warmth from the tropics, in reality most of the year’s new life rises from the musty earth, surging through layers of decay.

-- David George Haskell

"No thought can perish"

There is (or was), supposedly, a Navajo Wind Chant: "Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds." To this compare:

To Charles Babbage, all nature suddenly resembled a vast calculating engine, a grand vision of is own deterministic machine: "In turning our views from these simple consequences of the juxtaposition of a few wheels, it is impossible not to perceive the parallel reasoning, as applied to the mighty and farm more complex phenomena of nature." each atom, once disturbed, must communicate its motion to others, and they in turn influence waves of air, and no impulse is ever entirely lost. The track of every canoe remains somewhere in the oceans. Babbage, whose railroad pen recorder traced on a roll of paper of the history of a journey, saw information, formerly evanescent, as a series of physical impressions that were, or could be preserved. The phonograph, impressing sound into foil or wax, had yet to be invented, but Babbage could view the atmosphere as an engine of motion with meaning: "every atom impressed with good and with ill.. in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base." every word ever said, whether heard by a hundred listeners or none, the complete record of human utterance being encrypted by the laws of motion and capable, in theory, of being reconverted -- given enough computing power.

-- from After The Flood (The Great Album of Babel), Chapter 14 of The Information by Peter Gleick)

Totally cosmic

• There are more stars in the visible universe than all the are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
• The number of synapses in a single human cerebral cortex, about 125 trillion, is the amount of stars that would fill 1,500 Milky Way-type galaxies.

-- Amazing facts to blow your mind

Plato's universe

 John Wheeler said that the "basis of all mathematics is 0 = 0". All mathematical structures can be derived from something called "the empty set", the set that contains no elements. Say this set corresponds to zero; you can then define the number 1 as the set that contains only the empty set, 2 as the set containing the sets corresponding to 0 and 1, and so on. Keep nesting the nothingness like invisible Russian dolls and eventually all of mathematics appears...

...Reality may come down to mathematics, but mathematics comes down to nothing at all.

That may be the ultimate clue to existence - after all, a universe made of nothing doesn't require an explanation. Indeed, mathematical structures don't seem to require a physical origin at all. "A dodecahedron was never created," says Max Tegmark.

"To be created, something first has to not exist in space or time and then exist." A dodecahedron doesn't exist in space or time at all, he says - it exists independently of them. "Space and time themselves are contained within larger mathematical structures," he adds. These structures just exist; they can't be created or destroyed.

That raises a big question: why is the universe only made of some of the available mathematics? "There's a lot of math out there,"  says Brian Greene. "Today only a tiny sliver of it has a realisation in the physical world...

..."I believe that physical existence and mathematical existence are the same, so any structure that exists mathematically is also real," says Tegmark.

So what about the mathematics our universe doesn't use? "Other mathematical structures correspond to other universes," Tegmark says. He calls this the "level 4 multiverse", and it is far stranger than the multiverses that cosmologists often discuss. Their common-or-garden multiverses are governed by the same basic mathematical rules as our universe, but Tegmark's level 4 multiverse operates with completely different mathematics.

-- from Reality: Is Everything Made of Numbers? by Amanda Gefter