Posts Tagged ‘astronomy’
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently”*…
As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend David Graeber, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people have the power to change the world…
David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with. Every time we met – from New Haven in the early 00s to London a few years before his death in 2020 – he was essentially the same: beaming, rumpled, with a restless energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing. But he was also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his radical egalitarianism was borne out in how he related to the people around him.
He was always an anthropologist. After doing fieldwork among traditional peoples in Madagascar, he just never stopped, but he turned his focus to his own society. Essays such as Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and ‘Interpretive Labor’ and his book Bullshit Jobs came from using the equipment of an anthropologist on stuff usually regarded as boring, or not regarded at all – the function and impact of bureaucracy. His 2011 bestseller on debt reminded us that money and finance are among the social arrangements that could be rearranged for the better.
He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way.
As Marcus Rediker wrote in his review of David’s posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, “Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.” He was concerned about inequality of all kinds, including gender inequality in this society and others, and the violence that enforces inequality and unfreedom, as well as how they might be delegitimised and where and when societies might have escaped them. He focused, in short, on freedom and its impediments…
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… The way that, as he wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” If you truly believe that, if you perceive a world that is constructed according to certain assumptions and values, then you see that it can be changed, not least by changing those assumptions and values.
We have to recognise that ideas are tools that we wield – and with them, some power. David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there. Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that wasn’t always simple but was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. Our mutual friend the writer, film-maker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.” He texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so – I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’ which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”
In order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people, and David did. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: “To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.”…
An edited extract from Solnit’s foreword to The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: “‘It does not have to be this way’- the radical optimism of David Graeber,” from @RebeccaSolnit in @guardian.
* David Graeber
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As we promote possibility (and remember that on this date in 1973 then-President Richard Nixon averred in a speech that “I am not a crook”), we might send never-ending birthday greetings to August Möbius; he was born on this date in 1790. An astronomer and mathematician, he studied under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory. From there, he went on to study with Carl Gauss’s instructor, Johann Pfaff, at the University of Halle, where he completed his doctoral thesis The occultation of fixed stars in 1815. In 1816, he became Extraordinary Professor in the “chair of astronomy and higher mechanics” at the University of Leipzig, where he remained for the rest of his career.
While he was an influential professor, he is best remembered for his creation of the “Möbius strip.”
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”*…
In the face of cosmologists who are trying to combine string theory with the theory of cosmic inflation to understand the universe-as-we-find-it, Neil Turok suggests a much simpler explanation. Frank Landymore reports…
Our understanding of the universe, as advanced as it is, remains riddled with paradoxes and huge question marks. Physicists have come up with some pretty heady ideas to explain them — we’ll get to those later — but there just might be a far “simpler” solution to all those holes in cosmology.
As Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh Neil Turok explains in an essay for The Conversation, there could be a “mirror” universe that existed before the Big Bang and is a reflection of our own, moving backward in time.
It’s a trippy concept to wrap your head around, but simpler on the physics side of things. It would neatly balance out some of the asymmetries we observe in the universe, provide an answer to dark matter, and supplant some of what Turok would characterize as clumsier leading theories in cosmology, like cosmic inflation and string theory.
“Picturing the big bang as a mirror neatly explains many features of the universe which might otherwise appear to conflict with the most basic laws of physics,” wrote Turok, who published his team’s findings in the journal Annals of Physics. “The progress we have already made convinces me that, in all likelihood, there are alternatives to the standard orthodoxy — which has become a straitjacket we need to break out of.”
The physical laws of the universe should exhibit charge, parity, and time reversal — collectively known as CPT — symmetry, which essentially means every physical interaction can be mirrored. So to break down its implications: every particle should have an anti-particle of the opposite charge, every space has its inversion, and time can be reversed.
Except that’s not what we actually observe. Time only goes forward, and there are more particles than anti-matter particles. As far as we can tell, our universe is not symmetrical.
But: “Our mirror hypothesis restores the symmetry of the universe,” Turok argued. He compared it to looking at your reflection: “The combination of you and your mirror image are more symmetrical than you are alone.”
Extrapolating our universe backward in time through the Big Bang, “we found its mirror image, a pre-bang universe in which (relative to us) time runs backward and antiparticles outnumber particles,” Turok wrote.
This could also solve the mystery of dark matter, an invisible substance thought to make up 85 percent of all matter in the universe. Under the mirror hypothesis, weak, subatomic particles called neutrinos would be the ideal candidate to explain it.
Since we’ve only observed left-handed neutrinos, perhaps yet-unseen right-handed could even exist in the mirror universe.
What’s more, this could also tidily explain why the universe appears to be so uniform and flat. The prevailing theory is that a period of accelerated, faster-than-light expansion called cosmic inflation was responsible for shaping how the universe is today — but we’re yet to observe the large gravitational waves this would have produced.
With a handy mirror universe, however, “statistical arguments explain why the universe is flat and smooth and has a small positive accelerated expansion, with no need for cosmic inflation,” Turok wrote.
Of course, there’s a lot more needed to bear out this intriguing hypothesis. But Turok argues that, even if disproven, it demonstrates that there could be more straightforward explanations than what the Standard Model offers…
A mirror of our own, going backwards in time: “Physicist Says There’s Another Universe Hiding Behind the Big Bang,” from @futurism.
Turok’s full essay– longer and more detailed, but very accessible– is here.
* Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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As we size up symmetry, we might send lofty birthday greetings to another ponderer of the cosmos, Carl Edward Sagan; he was born on this date in 1934. An astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist (his contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of Venus), he is best remembered as a popularizer of science– via books like The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (which he narrated and co-wrote), the most widely-watched series in the history of American public television (seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries).
He is also remembered for his contributions to the scientific research of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation.
(Readers can enjoy a loving riff on Cosmos here.)
“Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang.”*…
… and like infinity, zero can be a cognitive challenge. Yasemin Saplakoglu explains…
Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born.
Hundreds of years later, in seventh-century India, zero took on a new identity. No longer a placeholder, the digit acquired a value and found its place on the number line, before 1. Its invention went on to spark historic advances in science and technology. From zero sprang the laws of the universe, number theory and modern mathematics.
“Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder, who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”
Perhaps that’s no surprise given that the concept can be difficult for the brain to grasp. It takes children longer to understand and use zero than other numbers, and it takes adults longer to read it than other small numbers. That’s because to understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing. It must recognize absence as a mathematical object.
“It’s like an extra level of abstraction away from the world around you,” said Benjy Barnett, who is completing graduate work on consciousness at University College London. Nonzero numbers map onto countable objects in the environment: three chairs, each with four legs, at one table. With zero, he said, “we have to go one step further and say, ‘OK, there wasn’t anything there. Therefore, there must be zero of them.’”
In recent years, research started to uncover how the human brain represents numbers, but no one examined how it handles zero. Now two independent studies, led by Nieder and Barnett, respectively, have shown that the brain codes for zero much as it does for other numbers, on a mental number line. But, one of the studies found, zero also holds a special status in the brain…
Read on to find out the ways in which new studies are uncovering how the mind creates something out of nothing: “How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero,” from @QuantaMagazine.
Pair with Percival Everett’s provocative (and gloriously entertaining) Dr. No.
* Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Scheduling note: your correspondent is sailing again into uncommonly busy waters. So, with apologies for the hiatus, (R)D will resume on Friday the 25th…
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As we noodle on noodling on nothing, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Erasmus Reinhold; he was born on this date in 1511. A professor of Higher Mathematics (at the University of Wittenberg, where he was ultimately Rector), Reinhold worked at a time when “mathematics” included applied mathematics, especially astronomy– to which he made many contributions and of which he was considered the most influential pedagogue of his generation.
Reinhold’s Prutenicae Tabulae (1551, 1562, 1571, and 1585) or Prussian Tables were astronomical tables that helped to disseminate calculation methods of Copernicus throughout the Empire. That said, Reinhold (like other astronomers before Kepler and Galileo) translated Copernicus’ mathematical methods back into a geocentric system, rejecting heliocentric cosmology on physical and theological grounds. Both Reinhold’s Prutenic Tables and Copernicus’ studies were the foundation for the Calendar Reform by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582… and both made copious use of zeros.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex”*…
The world is a turbulent and sometimes dangerous place. No one knew that better than Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and later served as President…
As President of the United States for two terms, Eisenhower had slowed the push for increased defense spending despite pressure to build more military equipment during the Cold War’s arms race. Nonetheless, the American military services and the defense industry had expanded a great deal in the 1950s. Eisenhower thought this growth was needed to counter the Soviet Union, but it confounded him. Though he did not say so explicitly, his standing as a military leader helped give him the credibility to stand up to the pressures of this new, powerful interest group. He eventually described it as a necessary evil.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
As Samuel Geddes argues, the dilemma has only ripened. Western defense giants tout cutting-edge tech, but their “state-of-the-art” systems often fall short in asymmetrical warfare. From faulty missile defense systems to overpriced carriers, the only thing that consistently works is the profit machine…
The ineffectiveness of “cutting-edge” military technology shown in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the spillover conflicts undermines the notion that the military-industrial complex aims to win wars. Instead, it reveals its true objective: profiting from ongoing conflicts.
Since its crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, one of Israel’s primary functions as a US-European client state has been that of a weapons laboratory. Throughout eight decades of repressing, invading, and annexing the territory of regional countries, it has served as a proving ground for arms manufacturers.
This continuous opportunity for such demonstration has enabled Israel, starting in the 1980s, to develop its own highly globalized military-industrial complex. From tanks to drones, “Israel” became a byword for the technical superiority and unbeatable effectiveness of western hard power over those on its receiving end.
Since the turn of the millennium, however, and especially since the Hamas-led Palestinian offensive against Israel on October 7, the region has become a weapons lab of a very different kind. It now showcases the armaments of its enemies and their ability, for a fraction of the cost and technical complexity, to render its space-age technology uneconomical and, by extension, obsolete.
The spread of cheap, cost-effective arms among asymmetric opponents of the West has significantly blunted the power of conventional weapons systems. The rational thing to do is accept this and redirect these hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to social programs and infrastructure. Almost anything would be more defensible than the status quo…
[Geddes unpacks the history of the last several decades and examines a number of troubled defense programs…]
… The most notorious example of wastefulness in military spending is undoubtedly the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet. From the program’s inception in 2006 to the present, the F-35 was projected to cost over $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Persistent cost overruns and development woes have angered even the Pentagon itself, which opened the program up to competitive bidding in 2012. More than a decade later, the rapid spread of drone technology has made it possible for unmanned craft, sometimes referred to as “loitering munitions,” to perform many of the tasks traditionally handled by fighter jets — with little overengineering and none of the risk to an actual pilot. That the total budget of this program could eradicate all American student loan debt or cover half the cost of a national health system only adds to the obscenity of it all.
It is well-known that the military-industrial economy is dependent on public subsidy. The technology in mobile phones, computers, and the internet — essential to modern life —was not “invented” by figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but was instead developed by public investment. The initial funding came from decades of American taxpayer dollars.
Capitalism is not designed to be ethically consistent, but if it were, companies whose business model depends on state supports would be paying out dividends to every single American as a return on their initial investment.
In 2024, the US military budget reached an incredible $841 billion. If even a fraction of these funds were to be spent on restoring the education system to a level befitting the richest country on earth, canceling university tuition debt, or creating a national health system, it would achieve far greater benefits. While $1 trillion might not result in effective missile shields, it is very likely capable of creating a functioning health or educational system…
“The Incompetence of Masters of War,” from @SamuelGeddes in @jacobin.
Further to his point on the effectiveness of U.S. defense spending, see “America is not ready for a major war, says a bipartisan commission” and “The US might lose a war with China.”
And for more on the arguments for alternatives, see “The military-industrial complex as a variety of capitalism and threat to democracy: rethinking the political economy of guns versus butter.”
* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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As we contemplate conflict, we might pause to contrast the rigorously serious with the frivolously venal: it was on this date in 1835 that the New York Sun began a series of six articles detailing the discovery of civilized life on the moon; circulation soared. Now known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles attributed the “discovery” to Sir John Herschel (who figured in last Monday’s post), the greatest living astronomer of the day. Herschel was initially amused, wryly noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting. But ultimately he tired of having to answer questioners who believed the story. The series was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication and, even then, while the paper did admit (on September 16, 1835) that the whole thing was a “satire,” it never issued a retraction (and didn’t suffer a drop in sales).
“What a piece of work is a man”*…
The estimable Samuel Arbesman on the path dependency of our fundamental ideas about ourselves…
Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.
But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?
In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic! [your correspondent heartily agrees]), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:
In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.
In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.
This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.
This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:
And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States.
In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are…
From his marvelous newsletter, Cabinet of Wonders: “Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures,” @arbesman.
Pair with his earlier piece: “Archaeology of Biology and Software.”
And for a(nother) taste of Brian Klaas (@brianklaas), see “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
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As we ruminate on the roots of our (received) realities, we might recall that it was on this date in 3 BCE that a planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Venus was visible… and may have been the Star of Bethlehem mentioned in the New Testament.
In this pre-dawn, “morning star” conjunction, the two planets appeared very close to each other in the sky (a mere 0.07° apart as viewed from Earth). It occurred when the planets were in the last degrees of the zodiacal sign of Cancer which was the concluding sign for interpreting that astrological year. The same two planets met again just ten months later (June 17, 2 BCE), even more closely, almost touching (0.01°), in an “evening star” conjunction in the first degrees of Leo, the beginning sign of the new astrological year. These two unions of Jupiter and Venus might well have been interpreted as the close of one age in history and the beginning of another age in 2 BCE.
For more on these conjunctions and other potential candidates for “historical Star of Bethlehem” (and an explanation of how/why the astronomers/astrologers who sighted the star became Magi/Wise Men in Church teaching) see here.
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