EARTHLY POWERS (ANTHONY BURGESS) AND INERTIA

We were all still standing up, but now Carlo sat down. The whisky in his glass tried to stay where it was and splashed his black jacket. He ignored this, looking, frowning, up at his brother.

I wrote inertia, but, which is the real cause of the whisky falling? Is it maybe because it´s a more complex particles system than the glass itself?If it´s actually the inertia, Burgess describes the phenomenon perfectly: the whisky tries to remain where it was or the way it was, we could also say

I took out this book from the library. It was at the middle of the novel that I realized that I was reading the second volume. I thought a novel starting about page four hundred was a excentric and modern thing that I tolerated

1984 (GEORGE ORWEL) AND A PESSIMISTIC PROPHECY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE

In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance— meaning, in effect, war and police espionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated.

Even darker texts than this one appear in the novel. There are always people who think that we are close to the commented situation, like Thomas Pynchon in tHe epilogue. From my point of view, there is something in which the book is right. It´s in an annex , a Newspeak treatise, which seems to inspire the literary style of thousands of pedagogues.

In the videoclip you can discover (time 1:20) that the elegance and glam that are attributed to David Bowie were indeed developed early in some discos from Spanish villages

THINKS… (DAVID LODGE) AND LAUGHTER AND CRY FROM AN EVOLUTIVE POINT OF VIEW

- It´s a passage from the 1838 notebook. Darwin is thirty. The voyage on the Beagle is two years behind him. He has the idea of evolution firmly by the tail. Hah, no pun intended...He´s convinced taht man is decended from apes, but he hasn´t gone public yet- he knows all too well what an uproar it will cause. He´s been thinking about laughter- that when humans laught they expose their canine teeth, just like baboons. He speculates that our laughter and smiling might be traced back to the way apes communicate the discovery of food to the rest of their tribe- Ralph underlines the quotation with his finger as he reads aloud: “This way of viewing the subject important, laughing modified barking, smilin modified laughing. Barking to tell other animals in associated kinds of good news, discovery of prey- no doubt arising from want of assistance”. The comes the afterthought. He can´t think what crying might be a modification of. “Crying is a puzzler”

- “Sunt lacrimae rerum”, says Helen

- My Latin´s a tad rusty- Ralph says

- “There are tears of things”. Virgil. It´s almost untranslatable, but one knows what he means. Somethin like, “Crying is a puzzler”

- Actually laughter is a puzzler too- says Ralph- Darwin´s explanation doesn´t really cut it

It´s a pity that animals lack A sense of humour, because it would be very useful for them to kill time. All the animals, from the wildest to the most domesticated , waste boring hours and hours which could be spent among laughter and jokes. I don´t know in which sense could crying be useful for animals, because Crying is a puzzler, as Darwin and Virgil said.

I remember in my neighborhood a dog died, the owners of this dog used to say that their dog, Ron, could smile. They buried it next to a wall in which they wrote: “Ron, the dog with an unforgettable smile” . Some creative scoundrel retouched the epitaph, which became :”Ron, the dog with an unforgettable smell”

ON BEAUTY (ZADIE SMITH) AND DISAGREETMENT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES

On his other side, a shy, plain girl visiting from M.I.T. was attempting to explain to him the kind of experimental physics she did. As he ate, Howard tried to listen. He made a point of asking her many interested questions; he hoped this would lessen the effect of Victoria’s frank disinterest. But after ten minutes he ran out of viable questions. Physicist and Art Historian met their match in technical terms that could not be translated, in two worlds that would not coalesce. Howard drank down his second glass of wine and excused himself to go to the toilet.

Howard´s good will is apreciated, but it seems not to be enough. I think there are annoying people in both fields, Sciece and Humanities; more or less like the Stones used tO sing: ‘it´s the singer, not the song’

What I think is true is that you are more likely to be annoyig when you talk about something that is not your field, something you have already discovered, not you job but your hobby.

For instance, a scientist who writes poetry or a humanities man who has read an article about clonation in a magazine. One should be sick of his own specialty.

So the scientist is bothersome and ridiculous when he talks about Humanities and The man of letters becomes delirious when he is talking about Science

Anyway, before you give it up with your table partner it is convenient to use up all the plausible questions

DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT (ANNE TYLER) AND EINSTEIN´S CONCEPT OF TIME

Time is my obsession: not to waste it, not to lose it. It’s like … I don’t know, an object, to me; something you can almost take hold of. If I could just collect enough of it in one clump, I always think. If I could pass it back and forth and sideways, you know? If only Einstein were right and time were a kind of river you could choose to step into at any place along the shore.”

He clicked his pen point in and out, frowning into space. “If they had a time machine, I’d go on it,” he said. “It wouldn’t much matter to me where. Past or future: just out of my time. Just someplace else.

I never heard Einstein had told this about time, but even if he didn´t it´s a good and beautiful image. The capacity of rivers as spring and flow (such an amazing record!) of metaphores is almost neverending. My favourite text about rivers is this one by Monterroso:

HERACLITAN: When the river flows slow and you have a good bicycle or horse it is possible to bath twice ( and even three, according to your necessities)in the same river

SYLVIA´S LOVERS (ELIZABETH GASKELL) AND GROUND IVY BEER

This beer was, so Sir Simon ordained, to be made after a certain receipt which he left, in which ground ivy took the place of hops. But the receipt, as well as the masses, was modernized according to the progress of time.

The ancient Celts got widly plasterd thanks to the ground ivy beer, which was also very toxic. This tradition has been inherited by the Irish who emigrated to USA, like detective McNulty, from The Wire.

Ground ivy is not my cup of tea. I am more into hop

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (THOMAS PYNCHON) AND TIME DERIVATIVE

This text connects in a weird way delirium tremens (DT) and time differential or time derivative (dt). The acronyms remain the same in other languages because of the prevalence of Latin and English in Sciences. Thomas Pynchon is knwon to be a very scientific writer, I think he studied Engineering. In this book he also speaks about Maxwell´s Demon, a mytohological creature as important in Physics as Scrödinger´s cat. The best thing of the text is, from my point of view, the way in which it describes the time derivative concept, a very important one in the development of Maths and Physics

Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among "uhs" and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; "dt," God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright

THE GEOMETRY OF LOVE (JOHN CHEEVER) AND THE APLICATION OF GEOMETRY TO LOVE BUSSINES

He watched below him as a station wagon passed, then a convertible. a moving van. and a small truck advertising EUCLID'S D RY CLEANING AND D YEING. The great name reminded him of the right-angled triangle, the principles of gecmetric analysis. and the doctrine of proportion for both commensurables and incommensurables. \Vhathe needed was a new form of ratiocination, and Euclid might do. If he could make a geometric analysis of his problems. mightn't he solve them. or at least create an atmosphere of solution? He get a slide rule and took the simple theorem that if two sides of a triangle are equal. the angles opposite these sides are equal; and the converse theorem that if two angles of a triangle are equal. the sides opposite them will be equal. He drew a line to represent iVlalhilda and what he knew alxlut her to be relevant. The base of the triangle would be his two children. Randr and Priscilla. He, of course, would make up the third side

How is it possible that this blog has been going on for seven years without knowing about this short story? It is a very good example to show the different ways to use science in literature. The text itself includes almost every wise choice and every typical mistake that we have been talking about in this blog

In the prologue, Rodrigo Fresán writes that William Maxwell didn´t like this short story at all and that Chever wrote in his Diaries how he sold it to anhoter magazine for 3000 dollars

WASHINGTON SQUARE (HENRY JAMES) AND GEOMETRY PRINCIPLES

"And shall you not relent?"

"Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial."

"Doesn't geometry treat of surfaces?" asked Mrs. Almond, who, as we know, was clever, smiling.

"Yes, but it treats of them profoundly. Catherine and her young man are my surfaces; I have taken their measure."

Well done Henry James! It´s no a novelty that he is a terrific genius, and in this text he proves it by inserting scientific contents in Literature in a charming and smart way. He achieves with this that the intelligence of some character shines although what really shines is, of course, his own intelligence.

We are going to clarify, however, that in the text we are told about Plane Geometry not Space or Three-dimensional one, because in Space Geometry does exists depth.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (G.K. CHESTERTON), ELEMENTARY PARTICLES, PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT AND SPIRITUALISM

From my point of view this text is not so much about scientists in the old times being less accurate as about the fact that the things they studied were as mysterious as ectoplasms. It´s also remarkable that physicists dealt with spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century when Physics was such an amazing field, from the point of view of a late-20th-century student.

When I was quite a boy, practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm exactly as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write, the thing has grown into a considerable religious movement, by the activity of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, much less of a scientist, but much more of a journalist.

GENERATION A (DOUGLAS COUPLAND) AND THE CLARITY WHICH PEOPLE EXPRESS THEIR POSITION ABOUT MATHS

I said to Zack: “So your story was about numbers?”

“Yes. And faith and hope, too. Nothing like lots of faith and hope to make a story a timeless classic. Dollops of faith; countless extra servings of hope.”

“Brother. So, are you number smart or something?”

“Number smart? Actually, I hate the fucking things. But when I look at them, they don’t make noises in my head the way words and letters do. It’s kind of peaceful, actually. In math class I’d just stare at equations and visit my happy place until the bell rang.”

“I hated math.”

We all nodded our heads, while Serge shook his in dismay.

People has a very clear position about Math: they like it or hate it. It´s also a very early decision in life, from childhood you have no doubt about it. And it´s a fact without half-measures, very few people say: I don´t mind about Maths, it is not my favourite subject but I don´t hate it.

Something similar happens with the father role in memories or autobiographies: they are excellent persons, even genius, or the are evil people who destroyed the author´s childhood. It´s vey infrecuent to find something like ‘ mi father was a regular man’, or like the Manuel Alcántarás verses:

“He was good or bad, the same than anyone…”

I, like Serge in the tex, also shook my head in dismay

HOUSE OF MEETINGS (MARTIN AMIS) AND THE KIND OF TRIANGLES

The love story is triangular in shape, and the triangle is not eqilateral. I sometimes like to think that the triangle is isosceles: it certainly comes to a very sharp point. Let´s be honest, though, and admit that the triangle remains brutally scalene. I trust, my dear, that you have a dictionary near by? You never needed much encouragement in your respect for dictionaries. Scalene, from the Greek, skalenos: unequal

Let´s deal with a simple mathematic question: kind of triangles. As a teacher I know you can´t despreciate a theme by taking it for granted. Not only scalene, like Martin Amis writes (I have read only a few books by Amis and I wonder why, because I really liked it) but also equilateral and isosceles have a Greek ethimology. Three or four scientific comparision like this one appear in the novel, all of them with grace and basis

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (THOMAS PYNCHON) AND MAXWELL´S DEMON

James Clerk Maxwell, explained Koteks, a famous Scotch scientist who had once postulated a tiny intelligence, known as Maxwell's Demon. The Demon could sit in a box among air moleculesthat were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region ofthe box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn't have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual , motion. "Sorting isn't work?" Oedipa said. "Tell them down at the post office, you'll find yourself in a mailbag headed forFairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you." "It's mental work," Koteks said, "But not work in the thermodynamic sense."

Everyone who has studied Science knows that Maxwell´s demon is a mithological creature as important as Schödinguer cat. In my opinión, it´s also an interesting mental experiment, similar to Einstein´s best ones.

We can see in the picture how the demon separates arbitrarily the hot molecules, the red ones, from the cold ones, which are blue. And this generates a temperatura diferential that, as we are told in the text, could do thermodynamic work.

So, by doing this, the demon would be violating the second law of Thermodynamics, because he would have created energy from nothing.

THE SIGN OF THE FOUR (SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE) AND LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. But do I see a handkerchief? Surely there is a white flutter over yonder.”

We can say the topic of this text is the application of Law of Large Numbers to human behaviour. And this is precisely the aim that many Social Sciences are dreaming of, in order to achieve prestige.

You cannot foretell what you will get when you flip a coin once, but thanks to this law, you can indeed delimit the number of heads or tails if you throw it 5000 times.

INCENDIES (DENIS VILLENEUVE) AND PURE MATHEMATICS

We haven´t posted a film on this blog for long time. So, here it is Incendies, a Canadian film that everyone who has watched it, is looking forward to discussing about with someone.

I recommended it to my sister and she hasn´t forgiven me yet, because she didn´t like it at all. This scene shows why mathematicians are so weird and besides, we´re told about Siracusa conjecture, although very few mathematicians know it by this name.

GENERATION A (DOUGLAS COUPLAND) AND SCIENTISTS´ WORK

The first thing I want to say is that I don´t share the main idea of the following text. And I´m not even willing to admit that it may be an exageration. In spite of that, and for being refutated, I post it here.

So, because of his near-crippling jealousy, our young scientist found it hard to concentrate on his specific laboratory task, which was this: he aimed laser pulses through a micromisted protein broth. This allowed him to isolate and separate specific proteins within. It was a job that needed much skill and decades of education but was about as fun as stocking cardboard boxes at a Body Shop. The scientist wondered if his entire youth had been wasted in attaining what was essentially an ultra-high-tech McJob

THE LITTLE PRINCE ( ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY) AND THE MOVEMENT OF PLANETS

“I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset now.”

“But we must wait,” I said.

“Wait? For what?” “For the sunset. We must wait until it is time.”

At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me: “I am always thinking that I am at home!”

Just so. Everybody knows that when it is noon in the United States the sun is setting over France. If you could fly to France in one minute, you could go straight into the sunset, right from noon. Unfortunately, France is too far away for that. But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like...

“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

I first heard of The Little Prince in the Spanish TV series Blue Summer. There, a child asked his father what he was able to see in the famous drawing: a hat or a snake. Of course, the father saw a hat and that made the child huff.

Both this book and that series transmit the idea that adult people are a bit stupid, just for being adults. I myself admit and recognize the superiority of childhood, but I think you can show it in a more elegant way.

With regards to the scientific comment, apart from whether the median density of the planet could generate a gravity field for the little prince, I can see another problem. The relative distances and perspectives in such a small planet make us wonder whether it is possible that this planet (named asteroid B612) could create sunsets. But these words come from an unpleasant adult, with no fantasy and no imagination.

MILO MURPHY´S LAW, THE THREE STATES OF MATTER AND THE DIFFICULTIES INHERENT TO SCIENCES TEACHING

The teacher does her best trying to explain a classic example, the chemical reaction between vinegar (dilute acetic acid) and soda (sodium bicarbonate) to generate carbon dioxide gas. It´s an endotermic reaction indeed, but with Milo is always a disaster.

NaHCO₃(s) + CH₃COOH(l) → CO₂(g) + H₂O(l) + Na+(aq) + CH₃COO-(aq)

with s = solid, l = liquid, g = gas, aq = aqueous or in water solution

She overcomes several mishaps but ends up having the leading role in a pretty cool video with the David Bowie style

ARROW IN THE BLUE (ARTHUR KOESTLER) AND SPEED IN INERTIAL FRAMES OF REFERENCE

The content of the chapter I was reading is as follows: As the cannon-ball carrying the explorers towards the moon travel through the space, one of the animals aboard, a little fox-terrier, dies. After some hesitasion the explorers decide to throw the corpse out through the air-tighy hatch. This is don; and then the passengers, looking through the thick glass window, realise to their horror that the body of the dog is flying on a course parallel to their own through the space. They thought it would drop away, but the carcass share the momentum of the cannon-ball, just as an object thrown from the window of a moving railway carriage, shares the momentum of the train; and outside teh aerth´s atmosphere there is no friction to act as a brake. Gradually the carcass increases its distance from the window, impelled by the persistence of the gentle thrust which had sent it through the hatch; but though slowy receding, it maintains its parallel speed and keeps abreast of the window. The dead fox-terrier has become a planet or a meteor which will continue to travel in its dark elliptic orbit round the earth through eternity

In this text, Koestler himself makes my job on this post, since he comments a play by Verne from a scientific point of view. Koestler´s autobiography is highly recommendable as a very good way to approach XXth century thanks to his presence in every important fact of the century.
I read these memoirs when I was younger and I used to tell my brother about his adventures in our shared bedroom, even a mystical experience happened in Seville´s prison. My brother used to call him a show-off, as he thought it was impossible that kind of things to be true. But don´t worry, I´m not going to spoil the end of the book and neither the end of Koestler´s life

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (JOHN IRVING) AND PETER TREATMENTS BEFORE PENICILLIN

Most peter treatment Jenny saw was done to soldiers. The U. S. Army would not begin to benefit from the discovery of penicillin until 1943, and there were many soldiers who didn't get penicillin until 1945. At Boston Mercy, in the early days of 1942, peters were usually treated with sulfa and arsenic. Sulfathiazole was for the clap--with lots of water recommended. For syphilis, in the days before penicillin, they used neoarsphenamine; Jenny Fields thought that this was the epitome of all that sex could lead to--to introduce arsenic into the human chemistry, to try to clean the chemistry up.

Such a great discovery, the penicillin, indeed. According to Fleming, it was discovered the 28^th of September, although it is not that clear that its discovery was by chance, as we are usually told. The World According to Garp is an extraordinary novel, but it won´t appeal to parents who tend to worry too much. In the prologue, John Irving tries to answer the two most hated questions by writers: What is the novel about? Is this novel autobiographical?

LIFE (KEITH RICHARDS) AND THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE TEACHERS ON 20th CENTURY MUSIC

With that weight off my mind, my work improved at Dartford Tech. I was even getting praise. Doris kept some of my reports: Geography 59%, a good exam result. History 63%, quite good work. But against the science subjects on the report sheet the form master put a single bracket that enclosed them all- there was no daylight between them for abjectness- and he wrote them all off with no improvement in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Engineering drawing was still rather beyond him. That report on science subjects contained the story of the big betrayal and of how I was turned from a reasonably compliant student into a school terrorist and a criminal, with a lively and lasting rage against authority. 

Imagine that this teacher would have been too good and he would have motivated him, making Keith believe that he had a future in Science or that the teacher would have been compassionate and passed Keith the exam. Thanks to the famous scholar failure, the big enemy of education, acording to politicians, Keith could become a great musician.

Keith was expelled from this school to an Art school, where he started playing guitar. Some day justice will be done with all the bad teachers that helped to decide vocations

EMPIRE FALLS (RICHARD RUSSO) AND THE PROBABILITY OF INDEPENDENT EVENTS

 “It could be a baby sister.”

His father chuckled, probably at Peanuts. “Mostly boys in our family.”

“Then we’re due for a girl,” Miles said.

“That’s not how it works. It’s not like flipping a coin.”

“What’s it like, then?” It seemed to Miles that it was exactly like flipping a coin, and he didn’t see any reason to let his father skate on such dubious logic just because he was a grown-up.

Max studied him, grinning again, though Miles wished he wouldn’t. “It’s more like rolling dice,” he explained. “Except they don’t have numbers. There’s six sides to a cube, right? In our family ‘boy’ is written on about five sides of the cube. ‘Girl’ is only written on one. So, if you had to bet with your own money, which would you bet on?”

Miles did some calculations. After a minute he said, “How many kids does Uncle Pete have?” His father’s older brother had moved out west—to Phoenix, Arizona—two decades earlier.

“Four,” said his father. “All boys.”

Miles nodded. “And you’ve got me.”

“You’re a boy too, last time I looked.”

“That’s five in a row,” Miles pointed out.

Outside, footsteps sounded on the back porch: Grace, returning from church. Both Miles and his father glanced up at the kitchen window when she passed. This week her bouts of morning sickness had been less severe, and while she wasn’t looking as radiantly beautiful as she had on Martha’s Vineyard, neither did she appear as frightened and despairing as when they’d first returned.

“Girl was on the sixth side, right?”

Yes, that´s not how it works. The likelihood of having a boy or a girl is 50% and it doesn´t depend on neither the number of boys you had before nor the amount of them that your uncle has.

According to the law of large numbers, the number of sons will be very close to the number of daughters only if you had a considerable amount of children. But it has to be a huge figure so that the law works.

We all know examples of families with lots of boys since their parents were looking for having a daughter, and they ended up giving up.

Therefore, the chance for the family in the text to have a boy or a girl is 50%. Just like flipping a coin at random.

GROWING PAINS AND THE GALILEO´S EXPERIMENT IN PISA

Mike Seaver explains very well to Di Caprio. Probably the history of Pisa Tower it is false, but it is such a beautiful experiment that it would deserve to be truth. With a simple and charm experiment you can show that Aristotelian Physics was wrong

THE ASTRONOMER (WALT WHITMAN) AND LEGITIMACY PREDILECTIONS OF POETS

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

To start the new year without being tired let´s do the comment to Aldous Huxley, who in Science and Literature wrote abput this poem:

For some people the contempaltion of scientific theories is an experience hardly less golden than the experience of being in love or looking at a sunset. Whitman wasn´t one of them. As a human being who enjoys and suffers, facts and Astronomic hypothesis kept him cool; he preferred silence and stars. In the case of a poet, this is a compeltely legitimacy predilection