October 23, 2006
Engraving from "Selenografia sive Lunae Descriptio" by Johannes Hevelius, 1647
From the many things that I've learned on this weekend's astronomy class- from equinoxes and the earth's orbit to parsecs and how to determine the latitude based on the North star, I know the ones that will last longer is the fact that I need to go to the southern hemisphere again since I've failed to notice Magellan's clouds before, the very poetic and intriguing thought that one is looking at the past when one looks at the sky and how Camões' Lusiads is filled with pieces of geocentric astronomy theory.
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Por este largo mar enfim me alongo Do conhecido pólo de Calisto, Tendo o término ardente já passado, Onde o meio do mundo é limitado. Já descoberto tínhamos diante, Assim passando aquelas regiões | From this open sea I looked my last At the constellations of the North. For we had by now crossed the burning line Which marks division in the earth's design. Our sailors had discovered long since By now we had left behind both tropics |
Os Lusíadas, Canto V
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January 08, 2006
Let's get Physic-al
I'm reading Lawrence M. Krauss' "Hiding in the Mirror - The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String theory and Beyond".
What's interesting about this book is the way the author links the developments in physics to art & literature. The quest - even if unintentional - for extra dimensions brings together Einstein, Bohr, Kaluza, Dirac and Picasso, Wells, Faulkner, Duchamp, Lewis Carroll.
Like in many other things in my life, I'm not that interested in the practical side of physics. I'm interested in the concepts and how they interact with or inspired other fields of study. Pure intellectual masturbation.
And also, Krass has a sense of humour (he was born in NY but grew up in Canada):
"Quantum mechanics is, as I like to say, just like the White House: As long as no one can measure what's going on, anything goes!"
"In cooking, the proof is in the tasting. In physics, it is in the testing."
"As any European high school student could tell you, the sum of the angles inside this triangle is 180º."
Although it's an easy read, I realized how much I need to brush up some basic physics concepts and my geometry.
I've always felt like physics was a low priority subject for me. Somehow, I must have had this mystical notion of nature and had no interest in understanding how the world works, risking stopping being marveled at things with a child-like innocence. And physics concepts were not as intuitive to me as other more abstract ones. I can understand the maths behind it but to say that I fully apprehend the meaning of it in practical terms takes me a lot of work.
So, it'll be like going back to school, only this time I have a purpose and no examinations. Which will be much more fun.
Not to mention being motivated by my private interest in space & time.
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One example of these literature/science links I had run into before:
-"Are you saying I'm superficial?"
-"No...what others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube."
in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Although I know now what a tesseract is - especially after being enlightened by Banubula's post on Hinton's cubes and after checking an applet featuring a tesseract visualizer sent by István - I still have no idea what Eco meant.
Salman Rushdie mocked this same excerpt on "Imaginary Homelands" as intellectual pretentiousness/gibberish.
I kinda like it. I'm having fun coming up with alternative interpretations.
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November 03, 2005
The Center
"This illustration from William Cuningham's The Cosmographical Glasse (1559) represents Ptolemy's conception of the universe. Atlas, dressed like an ancient king, bears on his shoulders an armillary sphere representing the universe. In the center of the sphere is earth, made up of the elements of earth and water. Surrounding the earth are two more elemental spheres, for air and for fire. Other bands represent the spheres of the planets, the firmament of fixed stars, the crystalline sphere, the primum mobile, and the signs of the zodiac. Below Atlas are lines on cosmological themes from Virgil's Aeneid." ----taken from world treasures of the Library of Congress
I've always been so much fond of the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe. And it is accurate in conceptual terms if not scientific: the Earth is currently the center of my Universe! :-)
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October 31, 2005
Memoraphilia
"Simonides was engaged to recite a poem at a banquet, given by one of his patrons, and after doing so the room fell in, burying all in its debris, and disfiguring the bodies so as to render identification impossible. Simonides, however, had noted the position each guest had occupied, and was thus able to point out the remains of each. Cicero and Quintilian both refer to his system and advocate its use; and we may add that it is the basis of most modern methods. Simonides found that to fix a number of places in the mind in a certain order was a great help to the natural faculty. His plan was to form in the mind a building which was divided and subdivided into distinct parts arranged in a certain order. The order of these parts were to be thoroughly learnt. As many words as there were parts were then symbolised by the images of living creatures, and when a number of things were to be committed to memory in certain order, mental images representing them were to be placed regularly in the several parts of the building.."
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"The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci went to China in 1582 and spent the remaining 32 years of his life there.
In 1596, Ricci wrote A Treatise on Mnemonics, in Chinese, for the governor of Jiangxi Province. In it he recreated the medieval European idea of a memory palace - an edifice you build in your mind and furnish with mnemonic devices. Recollection is a process of walking through the rooms and associating information with their contents. Those contents must be distinct and dramatic."
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Johannes Romberch, Congestorium artificiosae memeoriae, 1533
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Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 1619
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Giulio Camillo, the Theatre of Memory
"Various accounts describe the structure as a building which would allow one or two individuals at a time within its interior. The insides were inscribed with a variety of images, figures, and ornaments. It was full of little boxes arranged in various orders and grades. Upon entering the Theater, the spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero as he stands on a stage looking out towards the auditorium where the images are placed among seven pillars or grades. Each grade representing the expanding history of divine thought. In the first grade there were the 'seven essential measures' depicted by the 'seven known planets' which were the First Causes of creation and from which all things depended. The highest grade of the Theatre was the seventh level, which was assigned to all the arts, 'both noble and vile,' and is represented by Prometheus who stole the technology of fire from the gods."
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"Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious
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"Memory is, therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember."
-- Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence
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"One of the things for which I am still grateful is the way in which we were taught to memorize. Most Tibetans have good memories, but we who were training to be medical monks had to know the names and exact descriptions of a very large number of herbs, as well as knowing how they could be combined and used. We had to know much about astrology, and be able to recite the whole of our sacred books. A method of memory training had been evolved throughout the centuries. We imagined that we were in a room lined with thousands and thousands of drawers. Each drawer was clearly labelled, and the writing on all the labels could be read with ease from where we stood. Every fact we were told had to be classified, and we were instructed to imagine that we opened the appropriate drawer and put the fact inside. We had to visualize it very clearly as we did it, visualize the "fact" and the exact location of the "drawer". With little practice it was amazingly easy to - in imagination - enter the room, open the correct drawer, and extract the fact required as well as all related facts."
-- Lobsang Rampa, The third eye
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"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."
-- Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
"Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth."
-- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
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