Related storytelling —
A use by the Blue candidate on Sunday of the word "momentum"
and that word in this journal.
Monday, October 28, 2024
For All Saints’ Day — Oblivion with Copilot
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Tuesday, December 28, 2021
The Redgrave Pill
"Redgrave proceeded to focus on the end of Blue Nights ,
and Didion’s determination to maintain momentum after
the death of Quintana, when she and Redgrave mounted
their production of The Year of Magical Thinking . Here,
St John the Divine became a setting in the narrative of
Blue Nights yet again – this time, as Quintana’s final resting
place in St Ansgar’s Chapel within the cathedral."
The feast of St. Ansgar is Feb. 3. See that date this year.
Related song lyric from "Finian's Rainbow" —
Necessity,
That's the maximum that a minimum thing could be,
There's nothing lower than less unless it's Necessity.
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Friday, May 1, 2020
Bullshit Studies
The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn (Bantam Books, 2014).
| “You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”
I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.” I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary. “If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.” That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing. |
My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (Cornell, 1970) —
“There is a point at which
‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’ “
The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”
Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:
See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.
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Monday, February 6, 2017
Impetus
Some notes related to recent posts —
"Rilke's insistent quest for a purity associated with primitive origins
took a Russian turning, but could also be seen as an extension of
traditions developed in Europe in the modern era. When Balzac
takes a metaphysical look at modern life, he exclaims: 'There is a
primitive principle! . . . .' "
— The late Dore Ashton,
"Art Critic Who Embraced and Inhabited Modernism"
Sixteenth-century alchemist in a novel by Balzac —
"If we eliminate God from this world, sire,
what remains? Man! Let us examine our domain.
The material world is made up of elements;
thos elements are resolved into a single one
which is endowed with motion.
The number THREE is the formula of creation:
matter, motion, product!" *
. . . .
"There is a primitive principle!
Let us grasp it at the point where it acts upon itself,
where it is a unit, where it is really a principle,
not a creature, a cause, not an effect —
we shall see it by itself, formless, ready to assume
all the forms which we see it assume in life.
When we are face to face with this atom,
when we have surprised motion at its
starting-point, we shall know its laws . . . ."
* "… la Matière, le Mouvement, le Produit!"
Twenty-first century writer on physics —
"Besides the concept of Newtonian force,
the concept of momentum, as defined by
the multiplication of mass m and velocity v,
i.e., mv, is also one of the key concepts in
Newtonian mechanics. Historically, the
concept of momentum can be regarded as
an outgrowth of the impetus concept of the
Middle Ages. But momentum is in fact quite
different from impetus which has no
quantitative definition. In comparison,
momentum is a quantitatively precise and
well-defined mechanical concept."
— http://www.thecatalyst.org/physics/chapter-two.html.
No author is named, but a "curriculum vitae" link at
the bottom of the webpage leads to Kai X. Miao.
"C’était la création elle-même,
qui se servait de la forme de Balzac
pour faire son apparition . . . ."
— Auguste Rodin , by Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated from the German by Catherine Caron,
Editions La Part Commune , 2001
See also a version in English, and Rilke's original German —
|
Aber langsam wuchs Rodin's Vision von Form zu Form. Und endlich sah er ihn. Er sah eine breite, ausschreitende Gestalt, die an des Mantels Fall alle ihre Schwere verlor. Auf den starken Nacken stemmte sich das Haar, und in das Haar zurückgelehnt lag ein Gesicht, schauend, im Rausche des Schauens, schäumend von Schaffen: das Gesicht eines Elementes. Das war Balzac in der Fruchtbarkeit seines Überflusses, der Gründer von Generationen, der Verschwender von Schicksalen. Das war der Mann, dessen Augen keiner Dinge bedurften; wäre die Welt leer gewesen: seine Blicke hätten sie eingerichtet. Das war der, der durch sagenhafte Silberminen reich werden wollte und glücklich durch eine Fremde. Das war das Schaffen selbst, das sich der Form Balzac's bediente, um zu erscheinen; des Schaffens Überhebung, Hochmut, Taumel und Trunkenheit. Der Kopf, der zurückgeworfen war, lebte auf dem Gipfel dieser Gestalt wie jene Kugeln, die auf den Strahlen von Fontänen tanzen. Alle Schwere war leicht geworden, stieg und fiel. So hatte Rodin in einem Augenblick ungeheuerer Zusammenfassung und tragischer Übertreibung seinen Balzac gesehen, und so machte er ihn. Die Vision verging nicht; sie verwandelte sich. . . . . |
Related material: Momentum in this journal.
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Thursday, April 26, 2012
Rainbow Bridge for Thor’s Day
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011
ART WARS continued
See the signature link in last night's post for a representation of Madison Avenue.
For a representation by Madison Avenue, see today's New York Times—
"As a movement Pop Art came and went in a flash, but it was the kind of flash that left everything changed. The art public was now a different public— larger, to be sure, but less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum. Moreover, everything connected with the life of art— everything, anyway, that might have been expected to offer some resistance to this wholesale vulgarization and demoralization— was now cheapened and corrupted. The museums began their rapid descent into show biz and the retail trade. Their exhibitions were now mounted like Broadway shows, complete with set designers and lighting consultants, and their directors pressed into service as hucksters, promoting their wares in radio and television spots and selling their facilities for cocktail parties and other entertainments, while their so-called education programs likewise degenerated into sundry forms of entertainment and promotion. The critics were co-opted, the art magazines commercialized, and the academy, which had once taken a certain pride in remaining aloof from the blandishments of the cultural marketplace, now proved eager to join the crowd— for there was no longer any standard in the name of which a sellout could be rejected. When the boundary separating art and fashion was breached, so was the dividing line between high art and popular culture, and upon all those institutions and professions which had been painstakingly created to preserve high art from the corruptions of popular culture. The effect was devastating. Some surrendered their standards with greater alacrity than others, but the drift was unmistakable and all in the same direction— and the momentum has only accelerated with the passage of time."
— Hilton Kramer, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005 , publ. by Ivan R. Dee on Oct. 26, 2006, pp. 146-147
Related material— Rubik in this journal, Exorcist in this journal, and For the Class of '11.
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