The Abacus and the Cross

I've recently received via a book club membership, "The Abacus and the Cross," a book about the life of Pope Sylvester II. He held that august title from 999 until his death in 1003: he was Pope, in other words, when the odometer of the Anno Domino calender first flipped over, back before anyone worried about a "Y1k" bug that would ruin the network of abacuses.

Before 999, the future Pope was known as Gerbert of Aurillac, and the author of this book, Nancy Marie Brown, makes a case for Gerbert as a note-worthy scholar and (to use an anachronistic term) a scientist. 

Brown has built her own reputation as a popularizer of science. Her best known book before this one was "Mendel in the Kitchen," a discussion of genetically modified foods, which she co-authored with geneticist Nina Fedoroff.

Here she seems to have an apologetic intent. She wants to be sure we know that the 10th century Europeans did not believe in a flat earth, were not terrified of the arrival of the year 1000, didn't argue over angels dancing on the heads of pins, and were quite interested in the advance of science. Indeed, among the achievements of Gerbert she chronicles is this: he became curious about how organ pipes behave acoustically, so he built and tested models and devised an equation to match the results. In a word, he experimented.

But sometimes her apologetic designs get in the way of her story.  She tells of us one debate between Gerbert and an ecclesiastical rival over whether physics should be taught in universities as a subdivision of mathematics, or as a separate field. She doesn't want us to think that this is a silly subject, since "Professors today hold the same debates: Twenty-first century academics are at odds over whether archeology is a type of history or should be taught as a science."

Well, yes, but it is rather silly when it happens in the 21st century too.  Those debates are mostly about turf. The history department is larger if the archeologists are included therein than if it isn't, and the head of the history department of that university will surely want to include them.  The rest of us should be uninterested in their turf wars except, perhaps, as a matter of ... well ... a specialized sort of anthropology.

As to Gerbert's debate with a fellow named Otric, it doesn't appear to have amounted to much pragmatically except amusement for some privileged observers.  You can of course treat physics under the heading of math if you want (Gerbert's experiments with organ pipes were aimed at finding the right equation, after all). You can treat them as separate though of course closely related disciplines if you want. Putting too much emphasis on which is the 'right' categorization is inane.

Not as inane as belief in a flat earth, but still inane.

Cosmological Heresy

Just a couple of quick links here for the heretical view, in which I persist, that some quasi-steady-state theory will be revived and will turn out to account for the evidence that is usually adduced for the Big Bang. The notion that the universe is expanding is itself a quite tentative hypothesis, drawn from the "red shift," which has other plausible explanations.

More broadly, big bang cosmology today relies on a growing number of hypothetical
entities, inflation, dark matter, dark energy, etc. Its as if the theory keeps developing holes that require a new such patch. Eventually, one ought to wonder whether the best patch of all is to junk the theory and adopt a better one.

I believe firmly in the scientific method. I also believe that professional scientists are subect to the same frailties as the rest of the human race, and that in the more abstract fields -- such as cosmology or subatomic physics -- they are subject to a sort of clubbishness that keeps regnant ideas regnant far too long and too easily.

The weekend FT

There's an intriguing story in the weekend Financial Times about Darwin and the Sistine chapel.

Well, okay. That isn't exactly what it's about. Religion and science, origin and destiny, polarities and reconciliation. That's what it's about.

The Natural History Museum in London wants to create a new ceiling for one of its galleries, and it has commissioned proposals for several prominent artists.

The NHM has told the artists that it wants the new ceiling to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin, for 2009 will mark both the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of its author's birth.

Comparisons to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are surely inevitable under those circumstances. "Hmmmm. There's that iconic image of God conveying life to Adam. But where's the analogous image for Darwinism? It oughta be on a ceiling!" Neville Hawcock's story in FT tells us there's "a whiff of the divine" in many of the proposals the artists have submitted. A whiff, at least, of an effort to turn natural selection itself into the sort of soaring Faith that might inspire a Michelangelo.

Here's the money quote: "Dorothy Cross suggests ... installing a floor-to-ceiling column of glass; within this would be engraved a skull, and engraved within that a skeletal foetus. This, she says in her accompanying statement [would represent] 'a collusion between birth and death, inheritance and thought, and particularly nature and art.'" My understanding is that the skeletal-foetus/skull would be inside a ball at the top of the column, and thus pressing against the ceiling. The ceiling itself would be gilt, and would simply serve as background for this icon.

At any rate, she's going for the sort of all-embracing reconciliation of polarities that religions have always offered.

So what? Well ... it gives one pause. As a philosophical pluralist,I don't want all the polarities to be reconciled, I don't want a block universe. I want the alpha to be the alpha and the omega to be the omega.

Still, good luck to Ms Cross. It sounds like this skeletal fetus on the top of a column would be a heck of a sight.

Lightning around Venus

Every once in awhile beautiful theories are destroyed by stubborn facts.

Planetary astronomers are marking such a tragedy this week, it seems, at a conference in Paris.

It has long been understood that Venus is surrounded by clouds. But for a long time, the dominant view has been that there wasn't much activity in this atmosphere regardless - the clouds are a haze, like what we call smog -- not really earth-like clouds, capable of generating lightning and thunder. That's the theory.

A new probe has detected lightning, though. That's the fact.

To be a bit more precise, the probe detected bursts of radio waves, called "whistlers," which are only associated with lightning. On earth, anyway.

This leaves scientists with three choices. Either smog can in some unexplained way generate lightning on Venus. Or the clouds aren't smog -- they're real clouds. Or something else besides lightning can generate these radio waves.

However that debate comes out, things will be a little more complicated than they would have been had the data confirmed the pre-existing theories.

Party on, European Space Agency dudes.

Math notation

I'm not accustomed to thinking of mathematical notation as having a history. After all, the equals sign, "=," just is what it is. When did I first encounter that sign? First grade? I can't remember, and this "time out of mind" quality is what protects it from historical inquiry.

But of course such notation does have a history. The number zero has a history that supports a legion of scholars, as does the history of pi. How we write a number is connected with the way we think about numbers, so that writing "0" is something very different from writing "zero."

Still, let's not drift away into number theory. Let's stick with a sample of what one might call "pure notation," the equal sign. This = was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde, of Wales, in what was actually the first book on algebra printed in the British isles.

Here's the URL for an image of the page in which the equal sign first appears.

http://members.aol.com/jeff94100/witte.jpg

You'll notice if you go to that page that Mr. Recorde used two rather longish parallel lines.

The old-fashioned fonts can make comprehension difficult. So I'll reproduce the final paragraph for you, just before his list of seven equations.

"Howbeit, for each alteration of equations, I will propound a few examples, because the extraction of their roots, may the more aptly be wrought. And to avoid the tedious repetition of these words, 'is equal to,' I will set as I do often in working, a pair of parallels, or remote lines of one length, thus: ===========, because no two things can be more equal. And now mark these numbers."

We should all have as solid a claim to immortality as Mr. Recorde and his scheme for the avoidance of tedious repetition.

Our Times

As promised, my guess at the ten most important world-historical events since 1993.

First, let's treat of the military/diplomatic matters.

1. January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement goes into effect.

2. May 1998, the first "euro" coins are minted.

3. September 11, 2001, enough said.

4. February 1, 2002, a kidnapped Wall Street Journal Reporter, Daniel Pearl, is murdered by his kidnappers in Pakistan.

5. October 16, 2002, George W. Bush signs the Iraq War Resolution.

Next, let's discuss politics, in a narrow sense, in some of the leading powers of the day.

6. March 1996, the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) holds its first-ever direct election for President.

7. December 5, 1996, The chairman of the Federal Reserve in the U.S., Alan Greenspan, gives a speech warning that stock values in the US may have become inflated due to "irrational exuberance."

8. June 2007, In the U.K., Tony Blair steps down, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, becomes both the new leader of the Labour Party and the new Prime Minister.

Finally, there are a couple other events that I can't bring myself to leave off any such list.

9. March 1995, Nick Leeson is arrested for his role in the collapse of one of the world's oldest banks, Barings. This became known as the "rogue trader" case.

10. February 1997, Scientists in Scotland announced that they've cloned a sheep, which they call Dolly.

Poincare Conjecture

For those who, like me, have heard talk of the recently proven Poincare conjecture, but who have no grasp of higher mathematics, this is a neat story which conveys, at least, some sense of why people who DO have such a grasp are fascinated by the subject.

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-5CcC9sQlcqhUDN1P5SbXoWa5x.0-?cq=1&p=4

A Conversational Opening

I've often wondered about "small talk." Since I've never had the gift of gab myself, the whole idea of complete strangers conversing strikes me as full of mystery and complexity.

Not to say that this is a bad thing.

Of course, by writing these words I'm engaging in a conversation of sorts with anyone in the world inclined to read it. And sometimes it amounts just to small talk. Perhaps this will be one of those times.

But I'm thinking of such matters now because of the odd opening of a certain book review in the latest issue of The New Republic. Sherwin Nuland is reviewing a book by Katherine Park about the origins of human/medical dissection.

Nuland starts by telling a story intended to illustrate the conventional wisdom on the subject. He was recently at a "luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered ... one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis ... regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out as emphatically as if he were addressing a jury, had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement, he added in his summation, but such opposition necessitated the well-known horros of grave robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century."

Nuland goes on to say that his table-mate was quite wrong, and credits Katherine Park with getting the history of dissection right, as against a venerable tradition of such misconceptions.

But I have to wonder about that conversation at the table. My thoughts linger there. This was, I imagine, an alumi association of a medical school, or of a university with a strong medical school as an important component. Even so, I find it hard to think of Renaissance-era dissection as a natural topic for post-prandial discussion.

Suppose you were brimming with thoughts, erroneous or otherwise, about the history of dissection, and its connection with grave-robbing. Would you just dive into action, to share them with a table full of strangers (or people you hadn't seen in the 20 years since you and they graduated, perhaps?). Or would you have to wait for an appropriate opening in the conversation?

And what might that be? If I complain about my aching muscles, "oh, I did too much walking today, my leg muscles are still sore," would that suffice? "Oh, the science of anatomy developed only rather slowly to the point at which such things can be understood, Christopher. Why, did you know that this is how the horrors of grave robbing came about?" -- and off, in my Nuland-stoked imagination, my imaginary table mate is launched.

As you see, I still have a lot to learn about small talk.