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

LOGAN LUCKY (STEVEN SODERBERGH) AND THE EXPLOSION´S CHEMISTRY

Daniel Craig explains very well the chemical reaction, it´s clear that he has been James Bond. Because of scenes like this the pupils demand fireworks to the Chemical teachers when they go to the laboratory

NEAR TO THE WILD HEART (CLARICE LISPECTOR) AND TIMBRE OF SONIC WAVES

Joana remembered how once, a few months after she was married, she had tirned to her husband to ask him something. They were out. And before she´d even finished her sentence, to Octávio´s surprise, she had stopped- brow furrowed, gaze amused. Ah- she had realized- she´d just repeated one of the voices she´d heard so often when she was single, always vaguely perplexed. The voice of a young woman besides her man. As her own had rung out just then to Octávio: sharp, empty, soaring upwards, with identical, clear notes. Something unfinished, ecstatic, somewhat satiated. Trying to scream… Bright days, clear and dry, sexless day voice and days, choir boys in an outdoor mass. And something lost, heading for mild despair… That newlywed timbre had a history, a fragile history taht went unnoticed by the owner of the voice, but not by the owner of this one

Pitch, loudness and timbre are three characteristics of sonic waves that can be explained by physics magnitudes. Pitch is related with frecuency, high-pitched sounds with high frecuencies and deep voices (like if you are inside a clay pot) belong to the low frecuencies. Loudness, which is usually measured in decibels, corresponds with the intensity and the amplitude of the wave.

Lastly, the today physic concept is timbre, which is what makes you distinguish one sound from another, a violin from a piano, for instance. The timbre depends on the shape of the wave, each sound has a special shape that makes it unique. This peculiar shape never is the perfect armonic one that physicists draw. I didn´t know that, as the text suggests, the timbre is also influenced by the marital status of the focal point of the wave

MIDDLEMARCH (GEORGE ELIOT) AND AN OPTICAL PARABLE ABOUT SELFISHNESS

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person 

I would like to add somethiung but the last two sentences make the fuction that usually makes my comment. The experiment can be done at home even if you haven´t got a housemaid. I recommend this amazing novel

SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE (P.D. JAMES) AND THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF ASTRONOMY

- Are you interested in astronomy?

- Not particularly

She smiled.

- Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m´affraie?

- Discomforts rather than terrifies. It´s probably my vanity. I can´t interest myself in anything which I not only don´t understand but know that I have no prospect of ever understanding.

- That for me is the atraction. It´s a form of escapism, even of voyeurism, I suppose-this absortion in an impersonal universe which I canñt do anything to influence or control and, better still, which no one expects me to. It´s an abtidaction of responsibility. It restores personal problems to their proper proportion

I think the both arguments are quite reasonable. Pascal is the author of the quote. Pascal´s brother in law will appear here in the future because he had an important tole in the progress of Science in the Pyu de Dôme

MY ÁNTONIA (WILLA CARTHER) AND THE TELLURIC GOOD VIBES

There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

The comunion with Nature is a common poetic subject, likewise the admiration of the Universe. I am not insensitive about Nature but I think it is more a atrezzo to another thing to contemplate: a son concentrated drawing, for instance 

THE OPOSSING SELF (LIONEL TRILLING) AND THE PHYSICS´ARROGANCE

Readers of literary bent, who have as an clement of their pathos

the belief that they arc persecuted by science[1], will set special

store by those parts of the novel that have the effect of exposing

the arrogance as well as the contradictions and absurdities of the

physical science of the day. Everyone who has ever studied litera-

ture knows that physical science was the basis of the vulgar

materialism of the nineteenth century. In this regard it is well

to remember that Flaubert had no principled hostility to science

as such — quite to the contrary, indeed. He takes note of the ridic-

ulous statements that science can make, but much of the confu-

sion that Bouvard and Pccuchct experience is the result of their

own ineptitude or ignorance rather than of the inadequacy of

science itself. It is not the fault of botany— although it may be

the fault of a particular elementary textbook of botany — that

they believe that all flowers have a pericarp, but look in vain for

it when confronted by buttercups and wild strawberry.

---

[1] It is not sufficiently understood that men ..f science have an analogous-

homologous?— pathos to support them in their own troubles: they believe that they

are systematically persecuted by the humanities.

Let´s not consider the reciprocal ‘pathos’ between Science and Humanities, which  is  against to this blog´s spirit. We have already talked about the novel Bouvard and Pecuchet here. When you read it you can´t raech any negative conclusion about Science, rather that negativity goes against those ‘hicks’ who are the novel´s protagonists.

Regarding the Physics´arrogance, there is a famous sentence by Lord Kelvin that says: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement." It was said on 1900,when the classic Physics was about to break down

BLOODY MIAMI (TOM WOLFE) AND THE DETRITIVIS

The maggots! . . . Once, when she was six or seven, Magdalena had come upon a little dead dog, a mutt, on a sidewalk in Hialeah. A regular hive of bugs was burrowing into a big gash in the dog’s haunch—only these weren’t exactly bugs. They looked more like worms, short, soft, deathly pale worms; and they were not in anything so orderly as a hive. They were a wriggling, slithering, writhing, squiggling, raveling, wrestling swarm of maggots rooting over and under one another in a heedless, literally headless, frenzy to get at the dead meat. She learned later that they were decephalized larvae. They had no heads. The frenzy was all they had. They didn’t have five senses, they had one, the urge, and the urge was all they felt. They were utterly blind.

Let´s deal today with a nasty topic. Science sometimes stains and it is disgusting. Even the ugliest creature  with a nasty job is important for the ecosystems. Detritivis ( named in this way because they eat detritus) are fundamental to the food chain.

Every child has some time found a earthworm digging the soil. This moment is very important for the later man, because  he can react in two different ways to this discovery. The boy with Animal Fisiology Aptitudes gazes with attention and even tries to touch the earthworm with a little stick. The boy without Animal Fisiology Aptitudes doesn’t play again with the sand for a long time.

Earthworms are able to concentrate the snake´s revulsion but without their majesty

LIBRA (DON DELILLO) AND AN EXCESIVE CASE OF CONSERVATION OF LINEAR MOMENTUM

The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man’s head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you’ve seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured

We are in favour of a thorough compliance  of all kinds of laws, including the scientific ones, because  otherwise everybody knows that chaos overcomes. But the opposite can also have drawbacks, just like that Spanish student who, in doubt , writes more tildes than necessary. We also know from science that there are errors by defect and excess. The  Principle of Conservation of Linear Momentum explains curious phenomena, but we believe the incident that is narrated in the text is impossible from a scientific point of view 

THE INFINITE JEST (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND THE NORMAL SCIENCIE OF KUHN AS A PLATEAU

'... that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’

The one who speaks is a teacher from the famous Enfield Tennis Academy and he establishes the analogy for the tennis training, how one must insist and keep training even when you think you aren´t progressing. I think the analogy also works for the language learning and for our topic today:  the change of paradigm in the progress of science and the normal science concept.

It´s necessary to cross over all the plateau to get to climb to the next one. In Kuhn´s words: it´s necessary that normal science advances mechanically until a crisis appears. Then, there is a change of paradigm followed by another period of normal science

AMERICAN PASTORAL (PHILIP ROTH) AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND MONKEYS

Monkeys, gorillas, they have brains and we have a brain, but they don’t have this thing, the thumb. They can’t move it opposite the way we do. The inner digit on the hand of man, that might be the distinguishing physical feature between ourselves and the rest of the animals. And the glove protects that inner digit. The ladies glove, the welder’s glove, the baseball glove, et cetera. This is the root of humanity, this opposable thumb. It enables us to make tools and build cities and everything else. Maybe more than the brain. Maybe some other animals have bigger brains in proportion to their bodies than we have. I don’t know. But the hand itself is an intricate thing. 

The genetic similarities between humans and primates are very clear when you see Mick Jagger. Regarding the differences, we have the thumb, as the text explains, but we also have the fact that primates don´t have a white sclerotic, so you can´t see where they are looking at. This has plenty of evolutionary implications, as José Cervera has explained in this conference very well.

From a literary point of view, American Pastoral is a great book, so is The World Accoding to Garp, by John Irving. However, neither books should be read by parents that are inclined to suffering about their children too much. 

Aspectos de la evolución humana en los que no solemos pensar from CRFP CLM on Vimeo.

A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (KURT VONNEGUT) AND THE SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT APPLIED TO LITERATURE

As an undergraduate at Cornell I was a chemistry major because my brother was a big-shot chemist. Critics feel that a person cannot be a serious artist and also have had a technical education, which I had. I know that customarily English departments in universities, without knowing what they’re doing, teach dread of the engineering department, the physics department, and the chemistry department. And this fear, I think, is carried over into criticism. Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. So, anyway, I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

Kurt says he studied Chemistry because his brother was already a big-shot chemist. This is a big deal. I don´t know whether eldest brothers are aware of their responsibility when they choose a degree. I am not sure if they know how they can influence on their siblings. How many soft, but genuine vocations have been destroyed by the big brothers influence?

Regarding the fear mentioned in the text, we have said several times that this dread is reciprocal between scientists and men of letters and that we try to make this dread as soft as possible. It is been accepted that the man of letters thinks all scientists are brutes and, on the other hand, scientists think men of letters are damsels. This is unbearable.

With thi­s text we want to express our gratitude to Kurt Vonnegut for the incorporation of the scientific thought to literature, even if we don´t believe in this thought or scientific method so much.

(looking at Vonnegut’s picture, he looks like Fogwill, the way that Cortazar believed that Baudelaire and Poe were actually the same person)