For those less than charmed by the Baudelaires of
A Series of Unfortunate Events . . .
"Modern society, once it is somewhat more settled . . .
will also have its calm, its corners of cool mystery . . . ."
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
The title is a line spoken by an independent film maker
in “The Big Bang” . . . which opened in limited theaters
on May 13, 2011.
Also on May 13, 2011 —
Peter Woit in his weblog today —
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"Keating’s book is very much in the tradition of Watson’s The Double Helix, giving a portrayal of himself and others that doesn’t leave out the very human aspects of ambition, competitiveness and jealousy. Unlike the Watson book, which is about a great scientific achievement, the unusual aspect of Keating’s story is that what he was involved in was not a success, but the biggest fiasco in the history of his field. On March 17th, 2014, the New York Times reported on its front page that Space Ripples Reveal Inflation’s Smoking Gun, and this same story was reported by most media outlets." |
This weblog on that date, St. Patrick's Day 2014 —
The New York Times front page story linked to above —
"Modern society, once it is somewhat more settled . . .
will also have its calm, its corners of cool mystery . . . ."
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
See also Ted Cruz last Saturday in Idaho …
Cool Mystery:
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
The above images are from a Log24 post of October 5, 2011.
Related material for fans of recreational math and Manil Suri —
A book that Amazon.com says was published on that same date —
October 5, 2011 —
by Ashay Dharwadker (Author), Vinay Dharwadker (Author)
Product Details
See as well …
Con Vocation (Log24, Sept. 2, 2014).
Continued from earlier posts.
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The Washington Post online yesterday: "Val Logsdon Fitch, the Nebraska rancher’s son who shared the Nobel Prize for detecting a breakdown in the overarching symmetry of physical laws, thus helping explain how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, died Feb. 5 in Princeton, N.J. He was 91. His death was confirmed by Princeton University, where he had been a longtime faculty member and led the physics department for several years. Dr. Fitch and his Princeton colleague James Cronin received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1980 for high-energy experiments conducted in 1964 that overturned fundamental assumptions about symmetries and invariances that are characteristic of the laws of physics." — By Martin Weil |
Fans of synchronicity may prefer some rather
ig -Nobel remarks quoted here on the date
of Fitch's death:
"The Harvard College Events Board presents
Harvard Thinks Big VI, a night of big ideas
and thinking beyond traditional boundaries.
On Thursday February 5th at 8 pm in
Sanders Theatre …."
— Log24 post The Big Spielraum
For a White House daughter…
From this evening's Capitol Fourth—
She goes off with a great big bang
Boys I tell ya it's a beautiful thing
Related material— Big Bang in this journal—
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."
This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .
Today's New York Lottery—
A quote suggested by the UD post—
"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."
— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut
Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—
(Click images to enlarge.)
Cool Mystery:
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
As for the midday numbers—
For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).
For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.
Related material — The Big Bang and Definitive.
Background — The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Space link in Asterisk.
* See yesterday's "Life's Persistent Questions."
24 Frames
MOVIES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE (LA Times )
"But what feels like standard movie exposition quickly takes
a sharp turn when we're feted with about 20 minutes of the
elemental and cosmic footage that's been making all the
headlines. At first it looks like it could be a depiction of heaven
or hell, but it soon becomes clear that it's a story of creation—
or of Creation, as some iteration of the Big Bang unfolds
before our eyes."
— "Cannes 2011: What Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life'
Is Actually About," by Steven Zeitchik of the LA Times
Hannibal Pictures
THE BIG BANG (Click for Cannes details.)
See Peter Woit's review from Sunday.
The generic 3×3 HannibalPictures.com
favicon has an apt connotation—
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January 06, 2007 Picture of Nothing
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself….” Related material: The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.” — Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word “Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son’s procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12″ — Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J., Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162
“So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil’s Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: ‘In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, from Slate‘s “High Concept” department  “Bang.” “…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….” For properties of the “nothing” represented by the 3×3 grid, see The Field of Reason. For religious material related to the above and to Epiphany, a holy day observed by some, see Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star and Shining Forth.
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Some Context:
See also Nativity.
"L’unité jointe à l’infini ne l’augmente de rien, non plus qu’un pied à une mesure infinie. Le fini s’anéantit en présence de l’infini, et devient un pur néant….
Nous connaissons qu’il y a un infini, et ignorons sa nature. Comme nous savons qu’il est faux que les nombres soient finis, donc il est vrai qu’il y a un infini en nombre. Mais nous ne savons ce qu’il est: il est faux qu’il soit pair, il est faux qu’il soit impair; car, en ajoutant 1 unité, il ne change point de nature; cependant c’est un nombre, et tout nombre est pair ou impair (il est vrai que cela s’entend de tout nombre fini). Ainsi…."
"Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing….
We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd; for the addition of a unit can make no change in its nature. Yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this is certainly true of every finite number). So…."
— Pensées (trans. W. F. Trotter), Courier Dover Publications, 2003
Un Pur Néant:
"So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil's Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
'In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
'Let there be light!'
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'"
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate's "High Concept" department
Ainsi….
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd"
— E. L. Doctorow
The White Itself
David Ellerman has written that
"The notion of a concrete universal occurred in Plato's Theory of Forms [Malcolm 1991]."
A check shows that Malcolm indeed discussed this notion ("the Form as an Ideal Individual"), but not under the name "concrete universal."
See Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms, by John Malcolm, Oxford U. Press, 1991.
From the publisher's summary:
"Malcolm…. shows that the middle dialogues do indeed take Forms to be both universals and paradigms…. He shows that Plato's concern to explain how the truths of mathematics can indeed be true played an important role in his postulation of the Form as an Ideal Individual."
Ellerman also cites another discussion of Plato published by Oxford:
For a literary context, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "The Structure of the Concrete Universal," Ch. 6 in Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Other uses of the phrase "concrete universal"– Hegelian and/or theological– seem rather distant from the concerns of Plato and Wimsatt, and are best left to debates between Marxists and Catholics. (My own sympathies are with the Catholics.)
Two views of "the white itself" —
"So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: 'In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'" -- Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, Slate's "High Concept" department"The world was warm and white when I was born: Beyond the windowpane the world was white, A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame, Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light." -- Delmore Schwartz
“It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be
a mere sequence….”
— T. S. Eliot, Harvard ’10
Quoted in Log24 on
November 11, 2003
A search at the New York Times
for the subject of the previous entry
reveals another aspect of that date:
What Happened Before the Big Bang?
“…trying to imagine how the universe made its ‘quantum leap from eternity into time,’ as the physicist Dr. Sidney Coleman of Harvard once put it. Some physicists speculate that on the other side of the looking glass of Time Zero is another…”
– By DENNIS OVERBYE
– Technology – 819 words
Related material:
Peter Woit in his weblog
on Nov. 12, 2007:
Or to T.S. Eliot,
Annie Dillard, and
William Shakespeare?
For more on the date
11/11, see
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star.
Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
“Pictures of Nothing“–
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately
about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction,
and abstraction as a kind of
anti-religious faith in itself….”
Related material:
The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato’s cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″
— Index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162
“So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil’s Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
‘In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department
“Bang.”
“…Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite or
any other form of matter.
They are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal….”
For properties of the
“nothing” represented
by the 3×3 grid, see
The Field of Reason.
For religious material related
to the above and to Epiphany,
a holy day observed by some,
see Plato, Pegasus, and the
Evening Star and Shining Forth.
High Concept*
"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son's procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12"
— index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162
"So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: 'In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'"
Related material:
Nothing Ventured,
The God-Shaped Hole, and
Is Nothing Sacred?
* See also John O'Callaghan, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Joshua P. Hochschild, "Does Mental Language Imply Mental Representationalism? The Case of Aquinas’s Verbum Mentis," Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Volume 4, 2004 (pdf), pp. 12-17.
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