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Thursday, April 2, 2009

Thursday April 2, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Transformative
Hermeneutics

In memory of
physics historian
Martin J. Klein,
(June 25, 1924-
March 28, 2009)

"… in physics itself, there was what appeared, briefly, to be an ending, which then very quickly gave way to a new beginning: The quest for the ultimate building-blocks of the universe had been taken down to the molecular level in nineteenth-century kinetic theory… and finally to the nuclear level in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a moment in the 1920s the quest appeared to have ended…. However… this paradise turned out to be, if not exactly a fool's paradise, then perhaps an Eden lost."

No Truth Except in the Details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein, introduction by A.J. Kox and Daniel Siegel, June 25, 1994

New York Times obituary dated April 1, 2009:

"Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics…. died Saturday, [March 28, 2009] in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill."

Klein edited, among other things, Paul Ehrenfest: Collected Scientific Papers (publ. by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1959).

"It seems, as one becomes older,
 That the past has another pattern,
 and ceases to be a mere sequence…."

 

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

A Walsh function and a corresponding finite-geometry hyperplane

"Note that at first, you can see
 the 'arrow of time.'
 After a long period, however,
 the direction of time
 is no longer evident."

— "The Ehrenfest Chains,"
     by Kyle Siegrist, ex. 16

Related material:

"Almost every famous chess game
is a well-wrought urn
in Cleanth Brooks’ sense."

— John Holbo,
Now We See
Wherein Lies the Pleasure

"The entire sequence of moves in these… chapters reminds one– or should remind one– of a certain type of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed 'retrograde analysis'…."

— Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to The Defense

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