Episteme

I have been struggling to understand physics, just slogging through my muddy understanding of relativity and time/space. I doubt I'll ever experience or see something moving at the speed of light - I can't even begin to conceptualize what an object moving at that speed even looks like much less how it manipulates the curvature, the nature of time/space. I didn't start with the easiest book to explore these ideas, but the one I have spent a good deal of time with (though moving too slowly through it) is Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Written by Werner Heisenberg (who I just found out explained the uncertainty principle), what has made the biggest impression on me isn't his explanation of modern physics, Einstein or Newton (most of which has gone beyond me because I never formally studied any of this stuff, but am simply curious about the nature of the universe), but his exploration of language.

Heisenberg goes to great lengths in the book to deal with the inadequacies of language, how so much of that language is described by Newtonian physics (the ball rolling off the table, the apple falling from the tree), which is altogether inappropriate for describing objects moving at the speed of light.

I think this is where my own mental shortcomings are found, in limited language and ability to see reality or something other than what it is (What the Bleep Do We Know? comes to mind) because consumer culture, the way we are taught to perceive ourselves in the world (born, work, die) is something concrete or certain. But none of it is! And it's hard to be faced with the prospect of imminent environmental destruction, the battles of modernism vs. fundamentalism, and consumer tendencies meant to conform and dull all original thinking, and not feel overwhelmed or confused.

But this isn't what Heisenberg deals with. He wants to look at the philosophical ramifications of Einstein's theories and the advances of modern physics but he arrives what I consider to be a startling conclusion (on a philosophical level): "...every word of concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability." What the general theory of relativity, he continues, tries to address is something that can't be fully observed but must somehow be explained even though we can't see it and don't know understand much of its fundamental nature.

"Every scientist who does research work feels that he is looking for something that is objectively true. His statements are not meant to depend upon the conditions under which they can be verified. Especially in physics the fact that we can explain nature by simply mathematical laws tells us that here we have met some genuine feature of reality, not something that we have - in any meaning of the word - invented ourselves."

Posted by Dawn at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just read this very exciting, very cheesy novel by Alice Hoffman, called Second Nature. The only problem is it's about a man who was raised by wolves, which I doubt could ever happen. Going back to the issue of fact versus fiction, don't you kind of like fiction that might be real, even if you know it's not? Isn't that kind of the point, so that the voluntary suspension of disbelief isn't quite so difficult?

Well, my best answer is that if there is sex, murder, and a psychiatric hospital involved, you make the effort to suspend whatever it is until you're done with the book. Hoffman is a good enough writer to make you think, who knows, maybe a man could be raised by wolves. Maybe if he was young enough when he fell from a plane in northern Michigan and was the only survivor, he could nurse from a female wolf with other pups and basically learn wolf language. Maybe he could learn to run really, really fast and kill things with a sharpened stone to make up for his lack of fangs. Maybe they would accept him even though he looked different, because his nature was able to change, in the sense that all his former human knowledge got suppressed and he gave himself over to this other set of knowledge, like how to track and kill.

Honestly, I liked the book, and I really like how Hoffman can write with such incredible detail about stuff she couldn't possibly have lived -- well, obviously wolf life in the north country, but also little details about how domestic animals relate to wild ones and then how a community would react to a a stranger, who they think is a killer, in their midst. You've got details from blood seeping into the ice of a frozen river from a corpse below, to how a car slips on the ice, to how a teenager prepares herself for sneaking out of the house. In many cases she's also writing what she knows, probably, but she's doing it really, really well.

This novel is a total guilty pleasure, and a lot of the blurbs in the paperback jacket admit as much. It was a New York Times best seller and it was reviewed favorably by the NYT Book Review, the New Yorker, and Glamour, among many others. And I have to admit I also feel kind of guilty because I stole it off the lobby shelf of a hotel I went to a couple of months ago, rationalizing it by saying that I'd pass it along to someone else, and that we all have a right to good, cheap, literary entertainment. Is there really anything wrong with that?

Posted by Kim at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First I am going to apologize for being completely behind on American culture. But hey, I don't even live in America and I'm lucky enough to have a Blockbuster nearby so I can contribute to the Corporate Machine as I enrich myself with a mixture of trash and treasures.

Let's be clear: I didn't choose to rent the Blair Witch Project. I am, like, sophisticated, and watch French movies with annoying, inconclusive endings. But I was glued to my tv for the entire movie, which I watched with the principal renter, and I was totally convinced that it was real. I mean convinced to the point that I became appalled at the film industry for exploiting the deaths of these poor students who went out into the woods to film a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch and got killed by some crazy woods assassin. I felt horrible for the student producer who organized that whole thing, which actually led to her and her friends' deaths, to the point of asking, what should you do to get the story, to get the image? What's worth sacrificing for success? And why was she so obsessed with getting everything on camera? Was it really, as her friend suggested, just a way of living in a more controlled version of reality?

The first American I asked about it told me, gently, that no, the whole thing was fake. I read more about it online and it turns out it took $35,000 to make and eight months to edit, and that it grossed more that $248 million.

For me, it would have been a better story if it had been all fact, or all fiction. I'm used to going into a film or book or article knowing what I'm dealing with, and I had this feeling of betrayal when I found out that all my emotions were based on a big trick. But how is that different from your basic, run of the mill fiction? I mean, I never really thought that Farragut in Cheever's Falconer was real (watch it be one of those autobiographical fiction thingies), and I enjoyed it while knowing that it was made up, looking at the artistry as well as the world it was based on. We give ourselves over to a work of fiction, but we do it voluntarily, and this sort of true-false mix left me with a bad taste in my mouth. If it was a really good story, then why did it have to be real? I think the problem here is that it actually wasn't a good enough story to be fiction, but as reality it was almost, well, a blockbuster.

Posted by Kim at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am officially reading again, which makes me wonder -- does it make you dumb not to read, or when you don't do it are you just more in the present, for better or worse, more involved in the day-to-day problems of work, getting from here to there, cooking and cleaning, and the like?

Whatever brought me to it and whatever it brought me, I enjoyed the time I spent reading Falconer, by John Cheever. Even though I am technically supposed to be educated, I often don't enjoy reading. I have trouble getting absorbed in it, even long enough to finish a news or magazine article, but I was done with this in just a few days. I was kind of avoiding it because it feels like a guy book that I wouldn't be able to get into, but the characters are fascinating, mainly I think because Cheever is able to span the range between the syntax and experiences of the elite just as well as that of the guy who murdered his wife in cold blood because she looked at him the wrong way. Farragut is a mixture of the two - just as in the Call of the Wild, where the dog goes from pampered and proud to a being of instinct, he finds himself able to blend in with the prison crowd, even if he's always thinking about skiing and fancy dinners.

This whole dichotomy honestly gets a little gimicky and tiring after a while, but I was amazed at the fact that Cheever can really do it all, both linguistically and culturally. I don't know if it's life experience or research or what, but he can write a big chunk of the range of American culture without seeming fake. Farragut himself bothered me at times, but I think it's more of an issue of plot structure than writing style.

If I think about what I liked about this book, not as a smartypants critic but as a reader who really gets into it, I enjoyed learning about prison culture and I liked the whole psychological aspect of it. I wouldn't say I identify with it, or that you have to in order to like a book, but there are always familiar elements you can find in a story that make it understandable to you. I meanb obviously the situation has changed since the 1970s, but I found it interesting to know how prisoners feel, what their relationships are like, how the guards relate to them, what they eat, etc. I wanted to know how a guy from the upper strata of American society like Farragut ends up in prison, and how he manages to blend in and survive once he's there. It drives home both the inequality of our society and the sameness of our more basic qualities, like the human capacity for violence and cruelty. Farragut, like Cheever as a writer, certainly runs the gamut.

Posted by Kim at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)