Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing paradigm do you keep, which do you discard, and why make those choices? Among today’s theorists, Lee Smolin is unusually reflective about what principles should guide us in the construction of new theories. And he is happy to suggest radical revisions to well-established ideas, in areas from the nature of time to the workings of quantum mechanics. We talk about time, the universe, the role of philosophy, a new picture of spacetime, and the future of physics.

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Here’s to my lovely, incandescent relationship with alcohol

Anandi Mishra in Psyche:

The first time I drank alcohol, it was red rum straight from a quarter bottle – riding pillion as my boyfriend took us around a secluded part of the city of Lucknow, in provincial northern India. It was spring 2010, I was in the third year of law school, and 80 kilometres away from my hometown. I’d told him that I wanted to ‘enjoy a drink’ with him, and he’d obliged – though, at 20, I was still far from the contours of knowing how to enjoy drinking. I wanted to experience the high that came with it, but my boyfriend wanted me to learn the lesson of my life.

As he rode his Yamaha around, I took big swigs of the dark liquid. He’d given me a Cadbury bar to wipe away the bitter aftertaste of the rum. I finished almost the entire quarter like that: one swig rum, one bite of chocolate. What ensued were hours of blackout. I remember waking up at around dinnertime in my hostel room, flanked by friends and stuck in vomit-caked bedding.

I hadn’t realised what my boyfriend intended to accomplish that evening. Two days later, still arising out of the fog, I remember him laughing at my face. I felt small and cheated, and vowed never to drink again. But moving to Delhi a few years later, where I worked a tedious job as a junior associate at the High Court of Delhi, I discovered a different side to alcohol.

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Europas & Bulls

The Editors at The European Review of Books:

Does anything in this sprawling catalog of rewritten myth redeem the figure of Europa, for our purposes? Will these contradictory lineages be summoned, however dimly, in our readers’ minds? Stuart Hall acknowledged that the myth could be read in emancipatory or pluralistic ways, but was anyone really doing it? “The figure is certainly not being used,” he concluded, “to remind contemporaries that much of what we now think of as Europe’s achievements were originally external to Europe and had non-European, Asian, African and Islamic roots.” Yet Hall’s critique is itself canonical now, at least in some circles, and the myth can be activated accordingly. In Citizens of Nowhere: How Europe Can Be Saved from Itself (2018), Lorenzo Marsili and Niccolo Milanese can invoke a postcolonial, postnational Europa as a matter of course.

more here.

Yi Yi Through Time and Space

Bryan Washington at The Current:

I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston and you weren’t throwing a football or running cross-country, then you could hardly call yourself busy. So I’d taken to scanning the collection of foreign films in the back of the rental store. Sometimes I’d bring a few home. And one day, at the end of my pursuit of something I’ve long since forgotten (Police Story, maybe, or Shogun Assassin, if I was feeling brave), Edward Yang’s portrait of a family navigating an increasingly globalized Taipei is what I ended up with.

It took me a minute to actually watch it. I kept putting it off. The running time seemed entirely too long. But one weekend, well past midnight, I stumbled into the family game room, under a too-large blanket, and my American suburban evening melded with the muted pastels of Yang’s Taiwan.

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Serious Thoughts About Science in an Entertaining Package

Dwight Garner in The New York Times:

By the time Edward St. Aubyn completed the last of his Patrick Melrose novels in 2012, it was clear that a new animal had approached the watering hole of fiction in England. This animal was of a species thought to have largely gone extinct: the anatomist of the remote upper classes. The subject of these novels put St. Aubyn in an invidious position. His arrival was resisted. To a certain kind of reader, the notion of consuming five novels about extreme privilege — heavy manners, long bones — seemed about as enjoyable as expressing a dog’s anal glands. But St. Aubyn could write: He could really write. He blended woe with wit; his ironies were fierce and finely tuned. The details were precise because St. Aubyn actually had the British upper-class background that, as Clive James noted, the snobbier Evelyn Waugh longed for. St. Aubyn’s new book, “Double Blind,” is an entertainment on scientific themes: brain-mapping, biochemistry, botany, immunotherapy, schizophrenia and the ethics of placebos (hence the book’s title), among other topics.

…Here he is on neuroscience and my day job: “What part of the brain lights up when the reader first encounters Mr. Darcy and his odious pride? Can literary criticism afford to ignore what is happening to the reader’s amygdala when Elizabeth Bennet rejects his first proposal? It is a truth universally acknowledged that any topic in search of a reputation for seriousness must be in want of neuroimaging.”

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Duetting songbirds ‘mute’ the musical mind of their partner to stay in sync

From Phys.Org:

Art Garfunkel once described his legendary musical chemistry with Paul Simon, “We meet somewhere in the air through the vocal cords … .” But a new study of duetting songbirds from Ecuador, the plain-tail wren (Pheugopedius euophrys), has offered another tune explaining the mysterious connection between successful performing duos. It’s a link of their minds, and it happens, in fact, as each singer mutes the brain of the other as they coordinate their duets. In a study published May 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers studying  of singing male and female plain-tailed wrens has discovered that the species synchronizes their frenetically paced duets, surprisingly, by inhibiting the song-making regions of their partner’s brain as they exchange phrases.

Researchers say that the auditory feedback exchanged between wrens during their opera-like duets momentarily inhibits motor circuits used for singing in the listening partner, which helps link the pair’s brains and coordinate turn-taking for a seemingly telepathic performance. The study also offers fresh insight into how humans and other cooperative animals use sensory cues to act in concert with one another. “You could say that timing is everything,” said Eric Fortune, co-author of the study and neurobiologist at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Department of Biological Sciences. “What these wrens have shown us is that for any good collaboration, partners need to become ‘one’ through sensory linkages. The take-home message is that when we are cooperating well… we become a single entity with our partners.”

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Tuesday Poem

Question

Body my house
my home my hound
what will I do
when you have fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

by May Swenson
from
A Book of Luminous Things
Houghton Mifflin, 1996