science, magic, madness

[alice wellintown]

There’s never been a better time to be a quantum physicist. The foundations
of quantum theory were laid a century ago, but the subject is currently
enjoying a renaissance. Modern experimental techniques make it possible to
probe fundamental questions that were left hanging by the subject’s
originators, such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and
Werner Heisenberg. Now, we are not only grappling with the supposed
weirdness of the quantum world, but also putting its paradoxical principles
to practical use.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/quantum-optics-physics-nobel/


On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:56 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> This twelve-minute record is a montage of sound effects—mostly breaking
> glass, pouring rain, and thunder. Goldstein had all the right ingredients
> for myth: brilliant, cool, mysterious. He was hugely influential but ended
> up living in a trailer in East L.A., selling ice cream from a truck; the
> ice cream once melted completely when he had to wait in line for methadone,
> but he refroze it and sold it anyway. He died in 2003, and so his body of
> work is now, sadly, a bounded set.
>
> The first image I pinned up to spark inspiration for what would eventually
> be my novel_The Flamethrowers_ was of a woman with tape over her mouth. She
> floated above my desk with a grave, almost murderous look, war paint on her
> cheeks, blonde braids framing her face, the braids a frolicsome countertone
> to her intensity. The paint on her cheeks, not frolicsome. The streaks of
> it, dripping down, were cold, white shards, as if her face were faceted in
> icicles. I didn’t think much about the tape over her mouth (which is
> actually Band-Aids over the photograph, and not over her lips themselves).
> This image ended up on the jacket of *The Flamethrowers*, whose
> first-person narrator, introduced in this issue, in the story "Blanks" ,
>  is a young blonde woman. A creature of language, silenced.
>
>
> http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:51 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual
>> history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European
>> mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his
>> story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking
>> back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the
>> process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and
>> philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world,
>> with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage.
>> Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened
>> European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical
>> rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the
>> Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the
>> Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for
>> Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged
>> a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism.
>> Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas,
>> excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of
>> description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.
>> *The Crisis of the European Mind* is the NYRB Classics Book Club
>> selection for April 2013.
>>
>>
>> http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-crisis-of-the-european-mind/
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:48 AM, alice wellintown <
>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
>>> subject is the *Book of British Birds*, and you have a rough idea of
>>> what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
>>> rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
>>> atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
>>> well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe
>>> there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth
>>> understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures
>>> of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The
>>> more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it
>>> tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the
>>> geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as
>>> assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy
>>> old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the
>>> sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval
>>> heyday.
>>>
>>> Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed
>>> eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida
>>> for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than
>>> a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively
>>> charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an
>>> essay on Hume from a student who had not read his *Treatise of Human
>>> Nature*.
>>>
>>> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <
>>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> "...* applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science,
>>>> playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other.
>>>> The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom
>>>> of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.*"
>>>>
>>>> http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <
>>>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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