The last thing my wife said to me in person was, “You are not the person you think you are, and you are not the person that others take you to be.” At the time, I thought the only thing harder than having your partner of ten years call you a liar was suspecting that she might be right. I boarded a train in Seattle that afternoon and rode it straight for three days, back to New York City.

The divorce was a nasty and savage affair. We had been in graduate school at the same time and had incurred mutual debts. We had made homes in ten cities and five countries. I was godfather to her niece. Friends and family were forced to choose sides. She was not an American citizen, so there were green card issues to be dealt with. There had been infidelities. We had taken the gloves off long before and our knuckles were bruised by the time it was over. In our last written communication, haggling from opposite sides of the country over details in the divorce papers, I pointed out the unbearable irony of her claiming that particular item, when it was soiled with the very things that had destroyed us; and she notified me that my library had caught fire and that I should expect from her nothing more than the things I had carried with me when I left.

I spent a good deal of the next five years punishing myself, with her memory following me at times like a shadow and at others like an echo; but slowly, because one has no choice in these things, I began to rebuild my life. I finished my thesis. I found a job. I paid my bills on time. I made new friends and reinvested in relationships that had lost capital. My family welcomed me back; and most importantly, I had the City, where one can be or become anything one puts one’s mind to. I moved into a loft in Brooklyn and set myself up as an artist. Despair and self-loathing gave way, under the gentle pressure of passing time, to what I hoped might be the beginnings of wisdom and humility. I had learned something, which was good; but psychic healing, I knew, was in large part a matter of simple forgetting. I waited, and did my best along the way, to forget her.

Then one morning in a November past, after staying up all night helping a friend through a difficult break-up, having a conversation in which she was, for me, a touchstone of loss and letting go, I went into work, sat down at my desk, and listened to my phone messages. I recognized the voice immediately. It was her mother, and she was crying. “This is Y—, X—‘s mother. X—’s had an accident, and it was very bad, and we thought she was going to make it, but she didn’t, and she died. I know you loved her at one time and I know she loved you too and the service is at 4pm on Tuesday…” Her voice trailed off and the crying took over and she put down her end of the receiver.

I learned that day that my wife had been killed because she walked out of her apartment one morning to go for a run and there was a truck reversing up a one way street with a ladder hanging off the back of it. She had looked in the direction of the oncoming traffic but who would look to see if a truck with a ladder hanging off its rear was going in reverse the wrong way up a one-way street? She had stepped into the street and was struck in the head by the ladder, and she had fallen to the ground and struck her head again, and she had died.

She died neither for her beliefs, which were deeply held, nor for her work, which embodied them. She was not killed by a criminal and she did not take her own life. There was no will, no intent, nothing of any value or meaning or even maliciousness behind her death. It was profoundly, incomprehensibly stupid. If she had brushed her hair out for just a minute longer that morning, or decided to change her socks before she left her apartment, or heard her phone ring on the way out or gotten her key stuck in her door, the truck would have backed up that one way street and passed her by and come to a stop. Instead, it killed her. Her death was a manifestation of the pure negativity of existence.

Ten members of my family came to the service with me. We sat like lepers off to one side of the assembled but our status went unnoticed because there were over 400 people there. The ceremony was an excruciating thing. She was only thirty-five years old; she was beautiful and very much alive. The kind of person that people would describe as being “in control” of her destiny. My impression was that she had been happy.

It was not until halfway through the service that loss—the default setting for forgetting—took hold of me. There was a photomontage projected and everyone sat down to watch. Something cascaded in me then. I had taken most of the photographs there, and I had been excised from many of those I hadn’t taken. Our most private memories were on display, and I wasn’t embarrassed or jealous for that, but it was strange to think that I was the only person in the room—in fact the only person anywhere, in the entire cosmos—who recognized what we were looking at. She was, finally, gone.

Sometimes when I think about it I feel like I’m at a dinner where the guests become more ravenous the more you feed them, or at a poker table where the stakes go up with every hand you lose. First you lose the relationship, then you lose the time and experience invested in the relationship, then even the people playing the game are lost at the table. Life deals a wonderful hand, but existence—the dull phenomenon of being—absorbs your debts, extends your credit, keeps you on and then crushes you out, like a cigarette beneath its heel. Existence is deaf, dumb and blind. Existence never loses.

I held onto the pain for a while, poking and prodding and stirring it, because it was the last thing I had where she was concerned, and letting go of it seemed like just another loss. I didn’t care about forgetting her now; existential terror is a trump card, and to watch Being win everything and move on across the table makes one want to keep a small reserve of cash in one’s pocket. But I was at the table, and if you’re going to sit down you might as well play, so I bet what I had left of her, the pain and resentment, the exhaustion, the bad memories and the good, as well as my fury that existence could just squash another player and take her stake. This time, though, it would be a relief to lose.

It has never been fully clear to me why rocket science has become such a popular trope for intellectually challenging activity. Brain surgery makes more sense to me as a metaphor (as in, “It ain’t brain surgery, you know!”) since it is rather obviously very intricate, requires dexterity in addition to knowledge, decades of training, etc. On the other hand, at least on the surface, what could be simpler than a rocket? Take a cylinder, fill it with a flammable material, leave one end open, and set that end on fire. The expanding burning material will escape out the end, pushing the rocket in the opposite direction by Newton’s third law. That’s it. (A bullet could be considered a small rocket, I suppose.) Moreover, say you are going to the moon in your rocket: all you need to do to calculate the correct trajectories, orbits, etc., is Newtonian mechanics from a few hundred years ago. You needn’t worry about electro-magnetic or nuclear forces, just good old gravity. There are no quantum or relativistic effects to be taken into account, no superconductivity, nothing fancy. A bit of chemistry (for the fuel) and classical phycics will do just fine. Of course there’s a bit more to it, but it must be the irresistably romantic vision of our sailing starward into space that gives rockets their public fascination, however superficial. (Please, no phallo-Freudian explanations in the comments area.)

Quick, name a famous rocket scientist! Did you think of Robert Goddard? That’s good. Yes, Goddard has come to be known as the “father of modern rocketry.” Who else? Maybe Wernher von Braun? Yep, he’s the German guy responsible for the V1 and V2 rockets before eventually settling in the United States and developing many of America’s cold war-era ICBMs, so he has a bit of a mixed reputation here, at least morally speaking. (I suppose inspiring Thomas Pynchon to write Gravity’s Rainbow also counts as a sort of achievement!) If you can think of any others, you’re doing a lot better than most people. Rocket science hasn’t made too many individuals famous, the way, say, quantum physics has. There aren’t many popular books about it either. So, today, I’m going to give you a third name to remember: Arch Chilton Scurlock.

Full disclosure: for years, one of my dearest friends (and my wife’s maid-of-honor at our wedding) has been Margy Scurlock, Arch’s youngest daughter, and through her I also knew Arch and his charming wife Nancy. (My wife Margit and I spent our wedding night in Arch’s amazingly beautiful suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Thanks again, Margy!) True to the stereotype (despite my puzzlement over it) of rocket scientists, he was one of the brightest, most vivacious, and genuinely interesting men I have met. Not only was Dr. Scurlock personally responsible for some of the most astounding advances in rocketry in the 20th century, he was also a remarkably astute businessman, and has even been called the Bill Gates of his day. But let me try to tell his story chronologically.

Arch Scurlock was born in 1920 in Beaumont, Texas. His father served as the district attorney of Jefferson County. His maternal grandfather was senator Horace Chilton (Dem-Texas), whose own grandfather was Thomas Chilton, anti-Jacksonian congressman from Kentucky in the 1830s. Despite this distinguished political background, Arch found that his own passion was science, and he obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and physics from UT Austin. He excelled in college, and was even named “best all-around intramural athlete” in his senior year. (He is supposed to have had a “lightning squash game,” but I never had a chance to play him. Apparently he wasn’t too bad at boxing either.) He went on to MIT and received a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. I seem to remember that he once told me that he also held a master’s degree in meteorology from the University of Chicago. In any case, during WWII, Arch was a Navy meteorologist and also flew reconnaissance missions in the South Pacific.

After the war, Dr. Scurlock joined Engineering Research Associates in Arlington, Virginia. This was a company staffed mainly by cryptographers who had broken the “Purple Cypher,” the main Japanese code during the war. William C. Norris, who later founded Control Data Corporation, was also there at the time. The company had a contract from the Office of Naval Research to study ram jets, pulse jets, and solid and liquid propellents. After a short while there, on January 24, 1949, Dr. Scurlock founded the Atlantic Research Corporation (ARC–yes, the first three letters of his name) with $1,000 in capital, and a three-month research contract from Princeton University. ARC would soon become one of the fastest growing science and engineering companies in the world, eventually responsible for the production of dozens of types of rockets (including the Minuteman, the Tomohawk Cruise Missile, and the TOW, Maverick, and Stinger missiles). The company also diversified into very disparate fields, such as producing the inflators for automotive airbags. ARC’s main innovations and work, however, was in producing solid rocket fuels. Dr. Scurlock could be called the father of solid rocketry. (The space shuttle, for example, has one liquid fuel tank, and two solid rocket boosters.)

Some years ago, Dr. Scurlock invited a few of Margy’s friends to the 21 Club for her birthday. Over pre-prandial drinks, I asked him for an example of something interesting that he had discovered in rocketry. He thought about it for a bit, ordered another drink, then with characteristic modesty said, “Many discoveries in science are accidental. You are looking for one thing, and find another. Think of Alexander Fleming‘s discovery of Penicillin. I’ll give you a small example from my field.” He then went on to describe one of the ways in which he solved the problem of burn-rates in solid rocket fuel.

Let me now, in turn, try to explain to you what he told me: the total energy stored in the fuel of a rocket is known as its impulse, and is measured in pound-seconds. This means X pounds of thrust delivered for Y seconds. So, for a fuel formulation that delivers 10,000 pound-seconds of impulse, this could mean a thousand pounds of thrust for 10 seconds, or 100 pounds of thrust for 100 seconds, etc. The problem was that the fuel they were working with at the time, something called Arcite, does not burn fast enough to produce the required thrust. In other words, they needed to increase the thrust (pounds) and decrease the burning time (seconds) for Arcite. While thinking about the problem, Dr. Scurlock and others were doing some preliminary measurements of flame temperatures of various propellent formulations in the laboratory. They were using thermocouples (bi-metallic filaments) embedded in the fuel grains to do this. Now, the way that a rocket fuel grain burns is this: once ignited, the flame at the end melts the solid fuel just behind it, which then ignites in turn, melting the fuel behind it, etc. What Dr. Scurlock noticed was, that the fuel was burning faster with the thermocouple wires embedded in it. He immediately realized that if he inserted a wire made of a material which conducts heat well, like copper or silver, say, into the middle of the rocket grain, then this wire will conduct heat from the flame to the material behind it much faster, melting and igniting it. What results is a cone shape, with the point of the cone pointing inwards along the wire toward the unburned fuel. It would look something like this:

Notice that while normally the area of the fuel which is burning is a circle at the end with an area of ΠR², with the embedded wire it is a cone shaped area with a much larger surface. Suppose the cone extends inwards into the fuel to a length twice the diameter of the rocket. Then, in terms of the radius, R, of the rocket cylinder, the surface area of the burning cone shaped area of the fuel would be:

Surface Area = ΠR sqrt (R² + (2D)²) = ΠR sqrt (R² + (4R)²) = ΠR sqrt (17R²) = ΠR² sqrt (17)

Since the square root of 17 is between 4 and 5, the surface area of the fuel that is burning at a given time in this way is 4 to 5 times greater than without the embedded wire. And indeed, after experimenting with various materials and configurations, Dr. Scurlock was able to achieve burn rates five times faster than before, which is what they needed for the Arcite fuel. By the way, the cone is just molded into the fuel grain at the beginning, allowing high thrust right from …3, 2, 1, ignition. Such are the little breakthroughs and increments with which even rocket science is normally done.

The December 5, 1960 issue of U.S. News and World Report reported the upcoming inauguration of JFK, remarking that he “moves into the White House at 43 to replace a president aged 70,” and then moved on to note that the young are replacing the old in business as well, like Arch Scurlock, age 40, who “heads the fast-growing Atlantic Research Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia, a major producer of solid fuels for space vehicles.” In 1968, Dr. Scurlock went on to form Research Industries, a venture capital firm which invested in small startup companies in the aerospace, defense, and textile industries, including Halifax Corporation, an engineering firm in Virginia. Dr. Scurclock’s obituary in the Washington Post notes that “At his death, he was chairman and chief executive of Research Industries and board chairman of Halifax. He had seen Halifax through rough moments, including a scandal in the late 1990s involving a former controller who pleaded guilty to embezzling millions from the company.” Arch Chilton Scurlock died on December 9, 2002, aged 82. Knowing how much I admired him, Margy passed along various personal items of his to me as mementos, including the hand-tailored blue suit he is wearing in the profile picture above (by a weird coincidence, we happened to be the exact same size), and this globe which he kept on his desk. He is missed.

I think I’ll give Elton John’s old lyricist Bernie Taupin the last word:

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Have a good week!

[Note: I got much information about Arch and ARC from Philip Key Reily’s book The Rocket Scientists.]

My other recent Monday Musings:
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

For me, blogosphere triumphalism is usually just a minor irritant. Don’t get me wrong; I was impressed with the speed and thoroughness with which the blog realm raised questions about the authenticity of the Killian (George W. Bush’s National Guard performance) memo that cost Dan Rather his anchor. (Though, as I recall, it was The Washington Post and USA Today that really disproved the authenticity of the documents.) The sadly non-terminal case of self-love and occasional megalomania you find (“the blogosphere will punish”!) seemed more embarrassing than anything else; it also seemed harmless. But the whole Dilpazier Aslam affair has made me rethink this virtual mob.

For those of you who haven’t been following the story, Dilpazier Aslam, a 27-year old Muslim and journalist from Yorkshire, was a trainee for The Guardian. He had been recruited for a year-long apprenticeship under one of its diversity programs.

The Guardian wound up casting its net wider than it had intended. Following the June 7th bombings in London, Aslam wrote a comment on its editorial pages entitled “We rock the boat: Today’s Muslims aren’t prepared to ignore injustices“. In it, he offered some disturbing lines, but, it should be sadly noted (and with litotes, at that), not wholly uncommon ones.

“If, as police announced yesterday, four men (at least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked. Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own. . . . Shocked would be to say that we don’t understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this. . .Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.”

Needless to say, the implication that the suicide bombing of civilians is a “sassy” way of expressing opinions was not received well.

And in an era with declining search costs for information, it really didn’t take much time to discover that Aslam belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical but legal Islamist group whose chief and predictably tragic-comic-scary objective appears to the reestablishment of the caliphate. (The UK Home Office considers it a “radical, but to date non-violent Islamist group”.) While waiting to undo what Attaturk wrought, Hizb, like many millenarian movements before it, occupies itself by producing conspiracy theories and aiming to be a major player in the growing world market for anti-Semitism.

The story of Aslam’s membership in Hizb was broken by Scott Burgess, a libertarian blogger who lives in London and who oddly had been beaten out for the traineeship by Aslam. (This fact is regularly mentioned in narratives of the whole affair; for my part, I’d like to say that I don’t want to imply that resentment was a factor. Aslam may have been simply brought to Burgess’ attention as a result of the consideration.) Posts from Burgess’ blog (The Daily Ablution) about Aslam, Hizb, the bombings made their way across the Internet and the media. Blogs on the left and right—Harry’s Place, Norman Geras, Andrew Sullivan, and the terrible Michelle Malkin—chimed in and called for his dismissal. And he was dismissed.

For the megalomaniacal wing of the blog realm, the dismissal “has resounded across the blogging universe like a shockwave from a supernova”. And again the blogosphere had triumphed, correcting a crime and a sin. Ablution indeed.

I recall a post, though I don’t recall exactly where, that urged the blogosphere to move into action on Aslam, which it did. And I was suddenly reminded of a mob. Not an SPQR populusque mob; but an Ox-Bow Incident mob. I had read Aslam’s piece and pieces at Hizb’s site and also thought that The Guardian should remove him (unless of course they wanted a radical Islamist journalist, in which case they should’ve come out and said it). But the blogosphere was over the top and was beginning to resemble a drunken bar fight or, rather, frenzy. Its peak (or is it trough?) may have been Dreadpundit’s following statement.

“That’s why I’m issuing a secular fatwah and asking for some loyal Briton to saw off your head and ship it to me (use Fed-Ex, please, so I can get a morning delivery, and do remember the dry ice, also, a videotape of the ‘execution’).”

Though, in fairness, he included a disclaimer in small font, consoling that he was “not really interested in receiving the head of Dilpazier Aslam, nor do I advocate any act of violence against him.”

I raise this whole affair because Richard Posner’s review (as well as my own obsession with cognitive ghettoes, the media, and segmented markets in information) in The New York Times Book Review raised some interesting, if not novel, points, related to it.

“The public’s interest in factual accuracy is less an interest in truth than a delight in the unmasking of the opposition’s errors. Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat veterans, while taking gleeful satisfaction in the exposure of the forgeries on which Dan Rather had apparently relied, and in his resulting fall from grace. They reveled in Newsweek’s retracting its story about flushing the Koran down a toilet yet would prefer that American abuse of prisoners be concealed. Still, because there is a market demand for correcting the errors and ferreting out the misdeeds of one’s enemies, the media exercise an important oversight function, creating accountability and deterring wrongdoing. That, rather than educating the public about the deep issues, is their great social mission. It shows how a market produces a social good as an unintended byproduct of self-interested behavior.”

I’m usually wary of willy-nilly extensions of the market to questions of information—Ken Arrow pointed out a long time ago, you’d have to know the value of information already to assess whether it’s worth the cost of acquiring it, and in some cases you won’t know that until, well, you know the information. And I’m exceptionally wary of Richard Posner’s extensions of the market metaphor and market solution, mostly as a matter of taste, like when he suggested auctioning orphans. But this one, like most of what Posner writes, raises interesting questions and it worth following because he extends it (and then something else to) blogging.

“What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public.”

That is, the blogosphere, like the market, acts as an information aggregation mechanism.

“The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise – not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs.”

The comparison of the blogosphere with the market raises an issue that Posner didn’t fully consider, the question of norms in the market. However imperfect they may be, organizations in the market, in addition to being governed by regulations, also adhere to norms that they have developed over the long haul. There are occasional violators such as Enron, but facets like transparency and accuracy are seen as necessary for its well functioning. These norms have developed partly in response to state regulation or the threat of state regulation, but also in Hayekian fashion—a spontaneous order generated by interactions, which in turn require shared norms to effectively coordinate and execute action. Here, the “contracts” are implicit, not spelled out. And the blogopshere remains in need of them, though the only thing to be done is wait while adhering to deceny and point out when others aren’t

(I was reminded of this problem when I came across this story about the terrible John Lott on Tim Lambert’s blog, and thought that were it not for the decency of the students at the Federalist Society, it would’ve been simply two different accounts.)

Things like a Blogger’s Code of Ethics are not what I’m talking about.  Rather the norms will have to emerge out of actually practices. I hope that self-congratulation is proscribed by these norms, and if so, their emergence can’t be quick enough.  (Fafblog—my nominee for first mover/signaler of the blogoshpere’s self-disciplining mechanism—should make every instance of self-congratulation an object of ridicule.)  But more importantly, calls to gang up on someone should be seen as a “no-no”, even if it did produce the desired results in this instance.

In the meantime, I was struck in the wake of whole Aslam Affair by the feeling that here (the blogosphere) is a thing that I like in the whole but not really so much in its parts—a sort of fallacy of division. (I should clarify, that Brad de Long, Crooked Timber, Majikthise, Three-Toed Sloth and the rest of those on our links page are excluded from “parts”.) But still, blogs, and not just the blogosphere, remain an obsession.

Happy Monday.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Naipaul is brilliant. Indeed, he is one of the finest writers the 20th century has produced. His book covers are often embellished with the following blandishment: “For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Naipaul.” We agree. His early comedies – Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, and The Suffrage of Elvira – are perceptive, compassionate, even Narayanesque, evoking, reifying a distant, eccentric island – a world populated by real, colorful characters. The culmination of the early period of his career is in A House for Biswas, which, according to James Wood, issued the most enduring literary character in post-WWII fiction. Subsequently, his superb, dark, Conradian novels that include Mimic Men, Guerillas, and A Bend in the River depict seismic shifts in the short history of the “Third World” like few others before him.

But Naipaul’s prose is not the issue. It’s his politics and persona. In a way, Naipaul has not published a book worth the page it’s printed on since 1979, since A Bend in the River, when he almost exclusively pursued “travel writing,” an ill-defined genre, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither journalism not sociology. In a review of Among the Believers, for instance, Fouad Ajami avers,

“…one gets the distinct feeling of superficiality in this book. Of the holy city of Qom, Naipaul writes: ‘Qom’s life remained hidden.’ It is probably fair to say that much of the territory he covered remained hidden to him. The places he went to confused and eluded him, denied him entry. He was in a hurry; he wanted to see ‘Islam in action.’ But the people he wanted to comprehend were ambiguous and guarded, and under no obligation to reveal themselves to a traveler. Inside the large international hotels, visitors came to talk with him, but his questions frequently seem rigged and their answers canned.”

As Naipaul once said, “We read to find out what we already know.”

In fact, over the years Naipaul has fancied and fashioned himself into what can be best described as a “post-national,” a native so progressive that he can scrutinize himself, his society, and context without prejudice. It seems that Naipaul believes that he has progressed, evolved, by stepping on to an airplane. It’s as if he is awed by order: light-switches that function; taps that pour water; well-stocked grocery stores that carry eight varieties of jam; and clean streets that lead to well-lit avenues and those to broad highways. He’s become civilized by moving from here to there, by severing ties with his past, and consequently, he can claim citizenship of the world.

Yet he is a bigot. Of the bindi that adorns the forehead of married Indian women, Naipaul once said, “The dot means: My head is empty.” Naipaul vitriol for Africa and Africans is spectacular. “This place is full of buggers”; “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?” Mel Gussow notes, “About the influx of Jamaicans into England, he suggested in an article that one way to decrease immigration would be to increase the importation of bananas. His much quoted line was: ‘a Banana a day will keep the Jamaican away.’” Naipaul has managed to package condescension as objectivity.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s pathology intrigues us endlessly. Both post-national and bigot, his persona remains entirely parochial. In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his one time friend Paul Theroux comments,

“…[Naipaul] behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority. It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to the core – caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about the body being ‘tainted.’ Because he was an Indian from the West Indies – defensive, feeling his culture was under siege – his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.”

Recently, old man Naipaul has come full circle, officially reclaiming his heritage by associating himself with the BJP, the Hindu chauvinist party in Indian politics. None other than Rushdie castigated him for being a “cheerleader for the [BJP].” He added, “When Naipaul writes articles that the BJP can use as recruiting material, it’s a problem.”

Naipaul is, in a way, a bastard, spawned of disparate narratives, a byproduct of the postcolonial world. He’s uncomfortable here and there, in his native Trinidad and his adopted country, Great Britain: “Indian by descent, Trinidadian by birth, a Briton by citizenship…He has lived in all three societies, and…has bitter feelings about them all: India is unwashed, Trinidad is unlearned, England is intellectually and culturally bankrupt.” Indeed he has become a sort of archetype, a variety of insider who has adopted the outsider’s methodology and worldview and consequently can corroborate the outsider’s perception of the inside. Strangely and sadly, Fouad Ajami, the brilliant author of the Vanished Imam and one time friend of Edward Saeed, typifies this variety. (It should be noted there are many insiders who are not Naipaulian: Walcott, Mahfouz, Marquez, Coetzee.)

More recently, a character named Hussain Haqqani has joined the Naipaulian ranks. Haqqani, though, is no Naipaul; he’s neither bigoted nor brilliant. Known in Pakistan as a charming, slippery, has-been politician, Haqqani – since he stepped on an airplane – has reinvented himself as pundit in the DC think-tank community. Indeed, amongst the multitude of politicians that populate the political landscape, Haqqani has the singular distinction of having served every major political party: he began his career as student leader of the Jama’at – the fundamentalist party – then served both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, before being dispatched as ambassador to Sri Lanka. Arguably, he possesses the requisite insider’s perspective. He also possesses an eagerness to please. Consequently, Haqqani has been championed not only by Thomas Friedman but by the unsavory Daniel Pipes, as a man who “speaks the truth” (a questionable blandishment, especially as Friedman suggests that “Every quarter, the State Department should identify the Top 10…truth tellers in the world”). Accolades by one are rare and by both, rarer.

Haqqani’s first book, the alliteratively titled, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, has recently been published. To be fair, the book is more substantive than another dissident’s, Hassan Abbas’ horribly written, anecdotal (and alliteratively titled), Allah, The Army and American War on Terror (which apparently is on “the bestseller list in India, where newspapers have carried some of its juiciest tales, but it’s harder to find in Cambridge, where Abbas is a visiting scholar”), but it reads something like Stephen Cohen’s mostly facile, alarmist, (and ambitiously titled), The Idea of Pakistan.

(It’s important to note here that are some intelligent commentators on Pakistan’s politics and history on the inside and outside including the late sociologist Hamza Alvi, Aeysha Jalal, the MacArthur award-winning professor at Tufts; Shahid Javed Burki, an economist; Washington Post correspondent Kamran Khan; BBC’s Pakistan correspondents, Owen Bennett Jones, Zafar Abbas, and Paul Anderson; ex-CIA station chief to Pakistan, Milt Beardon; and possibly, ex-US ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Milam.)

Haqqani’s analysis is reductive and binary as he largely absolves the political establishment of the mismanagement of Pakistan. As Fareed Zakaria points out, democracy and liberalism (or progress, for that matter) are not the same thing. Furthermore, Haqqani uses such constructions as, “if Pakistan had proceeded along the path of normal political and economic development,” which makes us wonder what country is normal, what his comparables are (Argentina? Turkey? South Korea? Malaysia? China? Nigeria? America?), and why his book is hinged on the claim that Pakistan is in some way abnormal. This is the stuff of poor analysis.

Finally and most importantly, Haqqani, like his peers, ignores certain defining characteristics of contemporary Pakistan: the robust economic growth of 8.3% – the third fastest in Asia – has empowered the urban middle class, a class most susceptible to religious recruitment; Musharraf’s startlingly open media policy – not only the freest in the Muslim world but also among countries like Russia or India – which, over a period of three years, has produced a seismic shift in public discourse on matters as varied and previously taboo as the ’71 War or sex; the inability of radical or Deobandi Islam to change the accommodative Barelvi personality of rural Pakistan. Of course, these powerful “counter-mosque” dynamics in contemporary Pakistan do not concern Haqqani as his book’s trajectory is historic. There’s nothing new in it. In that case, his take on history is about as valid as ours. As Naipaul said, “We read to find out what we already know.”

Critics generally praised Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds for its cinematic virtuosity, citing the panache of his staging of fearful chases, narrow escapes, and random annihilation. This may be true, but the movie still struck me as reheated. Spielberg has done these things much more effectively in other movies – a scene in which a serpentine alien probe searches for the protagonists was lifted from Jurassic Park. From Duel through Jaws through Catch Me if You Can, Spielberg has turned nearly all of his films into feature-length chase sequences, with the heroes chasing a Macguffin as well as being chased by the authorities. This lets him indulge himself in his favorite pastime: the creation of suspense as a species of formal game-playing. To which he usually appends his other favorite pastime: wallowing in nostalgic depictions of the innocence and wonder of childhood and family. Both of these thematics saturate War of the Worlds, which jettisons most of the cynicism of Wells’ novel in favor of its director’s obsessions. His films have done this since the 1970s; nothing new there.

What did seem new about the movie, and reflective of current moods, though, was the scale of destruction it rather casually visits on the world. Asking us to feel remain engaged by the story of a working-class dad’s struggles to become a better parent and get over his divorce while around him the great cities of the world are destroyed and millions die seemed a little odd to me. When unthinkable horror is used as the backdrop for domestic drama, one feels a certain sense of proportion has gone missing. Spielberg’s defenders might argue that this is a response to the Age of Terror, an exploration of the effects of fear on ordinary people. Yet, thinking about it, this apocalyptic conceit had already become extremely common in Hollywood before 2001, with the approach of the millennium. Whether it’s done crudely and jingoistically (as with the repulsive Armageddon), cleverly and presciently (as with the gripping 28 Days Later), quietly (the intelligent Last Night), the disaster movie is perhaps the predominant mainstream genre of our time. I use the word genre very specifically to denote the way the destruction of human civilization has become a cinematic trope, one which barely affects anymore except as a generic form. (The Tristam Shandy of the genre, the work that predates it yet brilliantly satirizes all its features, is of course Dr. Strangelove.)

I think disaster movies have less to do with September 11th than with the status of moviemaking in contemporary culture. If the movies were, as James Agee wrote, the privileged aesthetic form of the twentieth century, then many competing media have disturbed that rank. The crown that the movies wore from silent era through the great studio period (detailed in The Genius of the System) through the nouvelle vague now lies uneasily, challenged by TV, video games, and, most importantly, the web. What’s more, these other, more virtual forms of information are difficult to visualize, making the job of representing modern reality onscreen much harder (there’s nothing less filmic than shots of a computer screen). What disaster movies do, then, is simplify the world, return it to a pre-technological state. By doing so they restore the potency of film narrative and reinstall the primacy of human-scale and embodied physical action: the world before computing. The disaster movie as a generic choice erases the changes that have made the movies themselves less capable of summing up human experience. The desire to annihilate the world is, maybe, really the desire to repress modernity instead of face it: thus, the common combination of disaster with nostalgic sentiment.

A final note: the other major genre that has emerged recently is the fantasy epic. The multi-part sagas of superheroes, of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter are the most successful studio productions of today. Poaching talented directors from outside Hollywood (Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi) and giving them vast technical resources, these films have revitalized the box office and in many cases produced superior popular entertainment. Examples include Alfonso Cuaron’s perfectly judged Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Alejandro Amenabar’s superb The Others, or Christopher Nolan’s enjoyable Batman Begins. These movies are intelligently directed but popularly accessible precisely because they rely on generic narratives: heroic quests, etc. They also replace modernity with a fantasy world in which magic, martial arts, or super powers replace technology.  Like disaster movies, then, they seek refuge in the generic in order to abolish the contemporary world.

Previous Dispatches:
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermanence

Babel. Whenever I say the word it’s electric. My fingers tingle. Babel goes to the very heart of things. Babel is at the center of the human experience. As Aristotle once mentioned, perceptively, human beings are the social animal. Humans, therefore, go together with cities in a rather essential way. For cities are ‘socialness’ mapped out, put into play, thrown down on a grid. And they are things you have to build. Humankind: the social animal, the builder.

And in every act of building there is a glimmer of hubris built in too. To build is to take up a little cry against the given, against conditions handed down, meted out, fated. Every act of building is a small fist raised up in defiance of the Gods, or Nature, or the immutable Laws.

Babel: a monument to Hubris.

That’s precisely how the Hebrews saw it and it’s why we have that remarkable passage from the Old Testament.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel [c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

What an amazing, utterly stupendous passage. What a terrifying and beautiful idea. And in turns out, in fact, that the story is based in historical fact. There really was a Tower of Babel. It was probably Etemenanki that the Hebrews were referring to, and Etemenanki was the product of the amazing Babylonian/Assyrian empire which, itself, birthed what are almost surely the first urban landscapes human hands and minds devised. We’re talking the Cradle of Civilization here. The Tigris and Euphrates. The great ur-cities like, well, Ur, Nippur, Sippar, and Babylon. The more the archeologists and historians work the more it is clear that the Near East is where it’s at. Greece, Rome, Istanbul, Paris, New York. It all starts at Babel.

In order to manage things with their complex empire and international trade, the Assyrians started playing around with symbols and a few centuries later they had definitively invented writing. It all came out of cities; managing them, trading stuff with other people, fighting within and between them.

Cosmopolitanism is nothing new. It’s a product of the dumb daily shit of cities. The scholar Gwendolyn Leick writes that: “The most remarkable innovation in Mesoppotamian civilization is urbanism. The idea of the city as heterogeneous, complex, messy, constantly changing but ultimately viable concept for human society was a Mesopotamian invention.” Complexity emerges from cities like viral infections. Weird things, idiotic religions, Byzantine political arrangements, the polymorphous perversity of social interaction. The messy stink of the city is like a festering laboratory of human possibility.

Babel.

The ancient Hebrews were enslaved at Babylon and in no great mood to sing the praises of Babel. ‘Wickedness’, they said, and who can blame them? But that’s not the point. The point is that they got the essence of it right. To be able to make a thing like Babel was to announce a kind of arrival. It was to put the Gods on notice, even if unintentionally. It’s the same thing captured so wonderfully by the Greeks in the Prometheus myth. Oh shit, realizes Zeus, give them fire and we’re screwed. They won’t need us anymore. We’ll be written out of the cosmic loop. We’re only a step or two away from the oblivion of the intermundi, complete irrelevance.

Historically, of course, the Babylonians had no such intentions. They built the tower in honor of their own gods. They were thinking of Marduk and their religious pantheon. But the Hebrews, from the outside, saw the problem more clearly, even in their disdain. They saw that the Babylonians were reaching out for something a little more than they bargained for. They were trying to achieve a sort of cosmic autonomy. As punishment, the Hebrews imagined an enormous diaspora, and profusion and multiplying of languages. A Great Babeling. And in a way, they were right about that too. A vast network of cities and civilizational overlaps and urban places with their own languages and customs and cultures now covers the earth. But its founding moment, insofar as every activity is also an idea, has a name. Babel.

Coming soon . . . an explanation of how Babel is related to my obsession with Earth and Land art. This leads to what I see as Flux Factory’s (the art collective of which I’m a founding member) great future project, which will both destroy and redeem us. It will be called Babel: A Monument to Hubris.

One of the most shortsighted commonsense expressions in use today must be ‘ethnic food,’ as in ‘What are you in the mood for tonight?’  ‘Something ethnic?’  As a shorthand for classifying cuisines, it’s pretty incoherent, lumping together the foods of whichever nations or cultures are considered to be non-standard.  This consensus is, of course, temporary: as so many histories of American culture point out, today’s natives are yesterday’s immigrants (you could see Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America for an informative account).  As the most significant recent immigration to this country has been from Asia, ethnic food today might include Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian.

But this is poor thinking and dangerous ideology.  The Italian and Irish arrivants of a century ago have not only had their cuisines domesticated (and, in the process, modified).  Ironically, they also reintroduced to U.S. diets foods that originated here: potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, and corn are all native to the Americas and did not reach Europe until their conquest.  The us-and-them belief structure underlying ‘ethnic food,’ known as nativism, conceals the truly global nature of food culture underneath a phantom authenticity, as though lasagna should be regarded as more American than pho in any but the most momentary sense.

The British have been particularly good at transforming the foreign into the (as they say) homely, as in the case of tea (even the opium trade with China was begun to offset the massive trade deficit incurred by tea imports).  A more complex example is Worcestershire sauce, which two hundred years ago incorporated the unfamiliar fruits of colonial expansion, among them tamarind, cloves, and chili peppers.  These far-fetched tastes were sweetened using a colonial by-product, molasses, and then combined and fermented, thereby domesticating them for the timid palate: it’s a kind of Orientalism in a bottle.  Even the availability of that most common staple, white sugar, was ensured by a global system of slave labor and plantation colonies, as Sidney Mintz points out in the excellent Sweetness and Power. 

I mention this culinary false consciousness as a benign but persistent example of a frightening tendency: the projection of the false and pernicious image of a pure, unsullied ‘homeland’ threatened by foreign infiltrators, which infects fundamentalisms worldwide.  Clearly, the contemporary right traffics in this kind of thinking constantly.  Even on the academic left, however, the appellation ‘people of color’ conflates groups whose experience is radically different (the racism experienced by African-Americans in the U.S., for instance, is of a completely different kind and degree than that of other minority groups).  I don’t question the honorable intention of the term–to generate solidarity among people who suffer oppression–but in practice it prolongs the ideological falsehood that the ur-citizen is a white male Protestant, even while attempting to critique just that.

‘People of color’ also depends on and reinforces the illusion that there is one group of white men really in control of what is American.  If the mistake of ‘ethnic food’ is the unstated assumption that the ‘normal’ food has no ethnicity, then the mistake of ‘people of color’ is the sense that white is not a color.  This has no doubt been assumed all too often in American culture, but to define resistance purely in oppostion to it presumes that the U.S. notion of who is white and who isn’t is universal, when in fact it is occasional and subject to change.  That’s way too much power to ascribe to the opposition.  We should never be afraid to emphasize the basis of liberty: that our differences have nothing to do with our belonging.

Last Dispatch: Aesthetics of Impermanence

Many scientists don’t know what they are doing. That is, they are so immersed in science, that they often do not step outside it for a wider philosophical perspective on what it is they do, while remaining convinced that science is somehow more correct than other ways of doing things. For example, a scientist might argue that she can treat malaria better than a witch doctor can. The witch doctor, of course, will say the opposite. If you ask the scientist why she thinks she is right, she will say that she can demonstrate her efficacy with an experiment: a large sample of cases of malaria which are treated by her method as well as with the witch doctor’s method (and maybe even a control group), after which she will perform a sophisticated statistical analysis on the data that she collects on all these cases, thus showing that her method is better. Now, if you object that her reasoning is circular, after all, she has just used the scientific method to show that the scientific method is correct (thereby only really showing that the scientific method is self-consistent), and don’t allow her to use science to prove science right (if the scientific method of proving something right were already acceptable to you, you wouldn’t be questioning her in the first place), she will tend to start getting desperate and try to make appeals to common sense, or even question your sanity (“Are you crazy? It’s obvious that witch doctor is a thieving fraud, taking people’s money and pretending to help them with his wacky chants,” etc.) And she will have a lingering suspicion that you have somehow tricked her with some sneaky rhetorical sophistry; she will continue to think that of course science is right, just look at what it can do!

So what’s going on here? I am not claiming that witch doctors (or astrologists, or parapsychologists, or faith-healers, or Uri Gellar, or Deepak Chopra, or other charlatans) are just as good as scientists, or even that they are right about anything at all (they are not); what I am saying is that there is no neutral ground on which to stand, and from the outside, as it were, proclaim the supremacy of science as the best avenue to truth. One must learn to live without such an absolute grounding. Even as clear-headed and careful a thinker as Richard Dawkins can sometimes get confused about this. At the end of an otherwise fascinating and inventive essay entitled “Viruses of the Mind” (Dawkins’s contribution to the volume Dennett and His Critics) in which he uses viruses as a metaphor for the various bad ideas (or memes) that “infect” brains in a culture (particularly the “virus” of religion), and also makes a parallel analogy with computer viruses, Dawkins asks if science itself might be a kind of virus in this sense. He then answers his own question:

No. Not unless all computer programs are viruses. Good, useful programs spread because people evaluate them, recommend them and pass them on. Computer viruses spread solely because they embody the coded instructions: ‘Spread me.’ Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and . . . they favour the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, . . . and so on.

Daniel Dennett spares me the need to respond to this very uncharacteristic bit of wishful silliness from Dawkins by doing so himself (and far better than I could):

When you examine the reasons for the spread of scientific memes, Dawkins assures us, “you find they are good ones.” This, the standard, official position of science, is undeniable in its own terms, but question-begging to the mullah and the nun–and to [Richard] Rorty, who would quite appropriately ask Dawkins: “Where is your demonstration that these ‘virtues’ are good virtues? You note that people evaluate these memes and pass them on–but if Dennett is right, people (persons with fully-fledged selves) are themselves in large measure the creation of memes–something implied by the passage from Dennett you use as your epigram. How clever of some memes to team together to create meme-evaluators that favor them! Where, then, is the Archimedean point from which you can deliver your benediction on science?”

[The epigram Dawkins uses and Dennett mentions above is this:

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages — with some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure. . .

Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Below, Dennett continues his response to Dawkins…]

There is none. About this, I agree wholeheartedly with Rorty. But that does not mean (nor should Rorty be held to imply) that we may not judge the virtue of memes. We certainly may. And who are we? The people created by the memes of Western rationalism. It does mean, as Dawkins would insist, that certain memes go together well in families. The family of memes that compose Western rationalism (including natural science) is incompatible with the memes of all but the most pastel versions of religious faith. This is commonly denied, but Dawkins has the courage to insist upon it, and I stand beside him. It is seldom pointed out that the homilies of religious tolerance are tacitly but firmly limited: we are under no moral obligation to tolerate faiths that permit slavery or infanticide or that advocate the killing of the unfaithful, for instance. Such faiths are out of bounds. Out of whose bounds? Out of the bounds of Western rationalism that are presupposed, I am sure, by every author in this volume. But Rorty wants to move beyond such parochial platforms of judgment, and urges me to follow. I won’t, not because there isn’t good work for a philosopher in that rarefied atmosphere, but because there is still so much good philosophical work to be done closer to the ground.

Now I happen to agree more with Rorty on this, but that is not the point. What is important is that Rorty, Dennett and I, all agree that there is no neutral place (for Archimedes to stand with his lever) from where we can make absolute judgments about science (the way Dawkins is doing), or anything else. We must jump into the nitty gritty of things and be pragmatists, and give up the hope of knowing with logical certainty that we are right.

So how do scientists go about their business then? How do they know when they are onto something? These are questions that many sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers of science, and scientists themselves have tried to answer, and the answers have filled many books. One thing comes up again and again, however, and especially when scientists themselves talk about what they do and how they do it: the importance of beauty. Scientists don’t just sit there dreaming up random hypotheses and then testing them to see if they are true. There are too many possible hypotheses to work this way. Instead, they try to think of beautiful things. This intrusion of the aesthetic into the hard, cold, austere realm of science is unexpected to many people, but it is surprisingly consistent. When Albert Einstein was asked what he would do if the measurements of bending starlight at the 1919 eclipse contradicted his general theory of relativity, he famously replied, “Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.” What he meant was that the theory is far too beautiful to be wrong. How do you tell when something is beautiful? That, I’m afraid, is a question too big for me. (Though if that kind of thing interests you, you may wish to have a look at this recent Monday Musing essay by Morgan Meis and the ensuing discussion in the comments area.) For now, we’ll have to make do with some you-know-it-when-you-see-it notion of beauty. (Kurt Vonnegut once said that to know if a painting is good, all you have to do is look at a million paintings. I can only mimic him and say that if you want to know what is beautiful in science, all you have to do is look at a lot of science.)

Yes, yes, I am slowly coming to my subject. (Hey, it’s my Monday Musing and I’m allowed to ramble on a bit!) We are now approaching the first anniversary of 3 Quarks Daily. The very first day that 3QD went online, July 31, 2004, I posted the sad news of Francis Crick’s death. Crick, of course, along with James Watson (and Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins), was the co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA. (In possibly the most coy understatement ever published in the history of science, at the end of the momentous paper in which Watson and Crick detailed their discovery of the double helix–which can be unwound, each strand then re-pairing with other bases to form a new double helix identical to the original–thereby solving the problem of DNA replication, they wrote: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”) Crick won a Nobel for this work, but this is not all he did. He spent the latter part of his life as a distinguished neuroscientist, publishing much in this new field, including the book The Astonishing Hypothesis.

The years following the discovery of the structure of DNA were busy ones, not just for molecular biologists, but also for physicists and mathematicians (Crick himself had come to biology after obtaining a degree in physics), and specialists in codes, because the code instantiated in the double helix took some time to understand. George Gamow made significant contributions, and other physicists also took a crack at the problem, including a young Richard Feynman, and even Edward Teller proposed a wacky scheme.

Let me now, finally, attempt to deliver on the promise of my title. At some point in time, this much was clear: the molecular code consisted of four bases, A, T, C, and G. These form the alphabet of the code. Somehow, they encode the sequences of amino acids which specify each protein. There are twenty amino acids, but only four bases, so you need more than one base to specify each amino acid. Two bases will still not be enough, because there are only 4², or 16 possible combinations. A sequence of three bases, however, has 4³, or 64 possible combinations, enough to encode the twenty amino acids and still have 44 combinations left over. Such a triplet of three bases which specify an amino acid is known as a codon. So how exactly is it done? What combinations stand for which amino acid? Nature is seldom wasteful, so people wondered why a combinatorial scheme which allows 64 possibilities would be used to specify a set of only 20 amino acids. Francis Crick had a beautiful answer. As we will see, it was also wrong.

What Crick thought was something like this: suppose you have a sequence of 15 bases (or 5 codons) which specifies some protein (remember, each codon specifies an amino acid), like GAATCGAACTAGAGT. This means the codon GAA (or physically, whatever amino acid that stands for), followed by the codon TCG, followed by AAC, and so on. But there are no commas or spaces to mark the boundaries of codons, so if you started reading this sequence after the first letter, you might think that it is the codon AAT, followed by CGA, followed by ACT, and so on. It is as if in English, if we had no spaces and only three letter words, you might read the first word in the string PATENT as PAT, or if by mistake (this would be easy to do if you had whole books filled with 3 letter words without spaces in between) you started reading at the second letter, as ATE, or starting at the third letter, as TEN, etc. Do you see the difficulty? This is known as the frame-shift problem. Now Crick thought, what if only a subset of the 64 possible codons is valid, and the rest are non-sense. Then, it would be possible that the code works in such a way that if you shift the reading frame in the sequence over by one or two places, what results are nonsense codons, which are not translated into protein or anything else. Again, let me try to explain by example: in the earlier English case, suppose you banned the words ATE and TEN (but allowed ENT to mean something), then PATENT could be deciphered easily because if you start reading at the wrong place you just end up with meaningless words, and you can just adjust your frame to the right or left. In other words, it would work like this: if ATG and GCA are meaningful codons, then TGG and GGC cannot be valid codons because we could frame shift ATGGCA and get those. Similarly if we combine the two valid codons above in the other order, we get GCAATG, which if shifted gives CAA and AAT, which also must be eliminated as nonsense. This kind of scheme is known as a comma-free code, as it allows sense to be made of strings without the use of delimiters such as commas.

Now, Crick worked out the combinatorial math (I won’t bore you with the details, Josh) and found that with triplets of 4 possible bases, one has to eliminate 44 of the 64 possiblilities as nonsense codons, to make a comma-free code. Voila! That leaves 20 valid codes for the 20 amino acids, saving parsimonious Nature from any sinful profligacy! This is what beauty in science is all about. Now, Crick had no evidence that this is indeed how the genetic code works, but the beauty of the idea convinced him that it must be true. In fact, the exact elegance of this scheme was such that all attempts at actually figuring out the genetic coding scheme for the next many years attempted to be compatible with the idea. Alas, it turned out to be wrong.

In the 60s, when the actual genetic coding schemes were finally figured out in labs where people managed to perform protein synthesis outside the cell using strings of RNA, it turned out that there are real codons which the comma-free code theory would have eliminated, and this nailed the coffin of Crick’s lovely idea shut forever. In fact, more than one codon sometimes codes for the same amino acid, while other codons are start and stop markers, acting as punctuation in the sentences of genetic sequences. It is now understood that nature is not prodigal, and uses this redundancy as an error correction measure. Computer simulations show that the actual code is nearly optimal when this error correction is taken into account. So it is quite beautiful, after all. Still, why did so many scientists think for so long that Crick must be right? Because in science, as in life, beauty is hard to resist.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

The dirty little suspicion in the heart of every aesthete is that he is no better than a tourist. The appreciation of art and the activity of sightseeing are as old as culture, and their relationship is a lot closer than any of us would like to admit. There have been “art tours” to Florence since the Renaissance; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water is all at once a sight to see, an art experience, and a tourist destination; art museums increasingly become sights one visits for their intrinsic artistic merit, whatever objects they might contain (Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao comes to mind); and then there is Land Art, wherein the artist chooses a remote area or deserted suburb (a “site”), “works” it in some way or another, and returns it to us (or invites us to come see it) as a sight which is itself, after the artist’s intervention, a work of art.

Distinctions between the tourist and the traveler notwithstanding, the trajectory I have traced above, from art tourism to tours as art, recapitulates the trajectory of art in the 20th century from its Representational to its Conceptual phase. One of the pieces of baggage that art was supposed to have lost along the way was the “aura” that objects carried. They went from being singular, authentic objects that were invested with the individual artist’s genius, which was itself invested with and an expression of Nature, or Truth, or the Sublime, to becoming everyday objects or representations of the same that were at times indistinguishable from objects we see every day: a snow shovel, a brillo box, graffiti scrawled across a broken wall, an inflatable flower. If you want to experience one of the last, great examples of Auratic Art, stand in front of one of Jackson Pollack’s giant canvases. The paint on those things is still wet, still dripping and pooling; they shimmer and shiver; they pulse; they emanate aura. When asked if he painted nature, Pollack famously replied, “I am nature.” He was the apogee and, in a certain sense, the end of the auratic in art.

The Robert Smithson retrospective currently at the Whitney, which is a “must-see” for the art tourist, turns this history on its head. One of the earliest practitioners of Land Art, Smithson began by transforming sightseeing into site-seeing, which then became blind-spot-seeing (Patterson, New Jersey) and in turn, finally, seeing sight. His early work is about making you “see” your sight. Mirrors are framed as sculptural objects in such a way that, looking at them, you can’t tell whether you are looking at the thing itself or at the reflection of the thing. These are uncanny, mind-bending works. In a single move, Smithson makes material the assault that Duchamp led, conceptually, upon the retina. Smithson gets behind the lines and forces the collapse of the eye. The entire structure of art as something-one-sees falls in a frenzy of reflections, and one is catapulted into the realm of the conceptual. Language not being up to experience, the only thing one can say at this point is, “Aaaah… now I see!”

After working you over with these mirrors that reflect the frames in which they are placed, thereby creating things that do not exist(!), Smithson introduces an organic element. Now he incorporates seashells, earth, rock salt and stone, so that there is a crossover and a junction between absolute nothingness (the mirror, the surface that only reflects) and elemental matter. I grew giddy at this point. I suddenly realized that I was standing in a room of Robert Smithson’s works, but he hadn’t made a single one of the pieces at which I was looking. They had been assembled not by Smithson (who died in 1973), but by the artslaves of the Whitney. The idea (Pour ten bags of basalt crystals on the floor. Bury a mirror in each one.) was of course Smithson’s, but the objects I was studying had been “made” in that space by someone else. Smithson had not placed each one of those tens of thousands of pebbles there and he had not left diagrams for where each one of them were to be placed in the pile. These were purely conceptual works; and since ideas are immaterial, they prohibit the auratic. Ideas are not wet and nothing sticks to them, neither genius nor nature nor intent—therefore, no aura. Ideas are atemporal. They neither accumulate experience nor decay in time. They escape entropy: hence, the third stage in Smithson’s oeuvre.

At a certain point in his career, Smithson was sponsored (by Yale, I think) to go to Mexico and look at some of the Mayan and Aztec monuments and do something down there. Make some art. What he returned with (and here the difference between the tourist and the traveler makes all the difference) was a series of slides of an old hotel, still functioning but in an advanced state of decay. Smithson had discovered entropy as an idea worthy of aesthetic exploitation. The most famous of the works he would create from this conceptual field, before his tragic death, was Spiral Jetty.

With Spiral Jetty, Smithson does something that I haven’t seen any other artist, anywhere, at any time, do: he renders a concept material, without loss or compromise either to the concept or to the materiality of his art. (The piece that comes closest would have to be van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which are like—but not yet—material sunlight.) I don’t know how Smithson is able to achieve this. It might be because he is not dealing with just a concept but with a universal law; but Spiral Jetty—the object itself—is not just a representation of entropy. It is entropy. It is the very thing it points to. Spiral Jetty is one of those sites (and artists are creating more and more of them) where one can go as witness to and celebrant of a universal sacrament: in this case, the second law of thermodynamics. And in these secular-sacred places, to which all and sundry tourists are invited, the aura, undeniably, returns and abides.

Not a postscript: Some of us have been having a very interesting little discussion as a result of Morgan Meis’s delightful, compelling post on Jeff Koons last Monday. Check it out; leave a note. We’re at over 9,000 words already (scroll down to the comments).

It’s been a while since I’ve indulged my fascination with how the Internet allows us to glean some insights about ourselves.  In the past I’ve posted about the research of Edward Castranova, who has done studies of trade and norms in the worlds of massive multiplayer online role playing games. I was then taken by the work of the linguist who used “Hot or Not” to test if names added to whether we find someone attractive or not.

I was reminded of these uses of the net recently when reading an article about Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary Clinton.  The book, by all accounts, is a shrill screed about the deviousness and radicalism of Hillary Clinton, and takes as one of its main charges that she’s either a lesbian or infused with the culture of lesbianism (whatever that may mean). “To Arkansans, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian, and looked like a lesbian.”The book itself sounds uninteresting, and may be so over the top that prominent conservatives have distanced themselves from it.

The article mentioned that an amazon.com search reveals that those who purchased the book also purchased Unfit for Command and How to Talk to a Liberal, and books with titles like Treachery and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which, by the way managed to revolt The Weekly Standard. My first reaction to the list was to echo Wilde and think, “Wow, patriotism really is the virtue of the vicious.”

But my second reaction was curiosity.

About a year ago, I posted about an APSA [American Political Science Association] panel on blogs and mentioned the concern that Cass Sunstein raised in Republic.com.

“See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Tomorrow, our power to filter promises to increase exponentially. With the advent of the Daily Me, you see only the sports highlights that concern your teams, read about only the issues that interest you, encounter in the op-ed pages only the opinions with which you agree. . . . Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech?”

A dystopic future, resulting from personalization?  Maybe.

I did a similar search on Michael Oakeshott, to see what people who’d purchased Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, specifically, had also purchased. While there was a lot of Leo Strauss, there was also Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty, John Rawls, Sheldon Wolin, and Alasdair McInstyre (though I’m never clear where to put McIntyre on the political spectrum, save far away from me, that’s for sure).

Trying Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom produced an even wider spectrum of thinkers—from Marx, to Sen, to Heilbroner, to Keynes, Schumpeter, Bhagwati, Smith and Ricardo, before hitting Thomas Sowell and von Hayek on the right. (Incidentally, people who purchased The Communist Manifesto also purchased Freidman, Keynes, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Darwin and Hobbes.)

Now, while I didn’t think it, I did have to see whether it was possible that people on the Left—using as a proxy popular books on the Left rather than things like A General Theory of Exploitation and Class—read more broadly than those on the right, as long as the books weren’t a screed. So I decided to see what people who were reading Arundhati Roy’s Power Politics were reading. Unsurprisingly, lots of Chomsky, lots and lots of Chomsky.

I decided to try Michael Moore—I was one anti-war, lefty who really, really didn’t like Fahrenheit 9/11. Amazon returned a lot of Al Franken, as well as Molly Ivins, Craig Unger. My first reaction to this was, “well, but these aren’t screeds,” before I decided that my own ideological dispositions made me more tolerant of them. I still think they’re more reasonable than their equivalents on the other side, but I’ll also acknowledge that the fact that they validate and echo more of my beliefs may color my judgment.

One thing was for sure, below some threshold of intellectual “seriousness”, people weren’t exposing themselves to a diversity of opinion.  This was clear. In so much as they were exposing themselves to information from the other side, it was filtered.

Not too long ago, Eszter Hargittai posted the findings of some of her research on Crooked Timber. She and her collaborators were testing Sunstein’s hypothesis, at least as he laid it out in Republic.com.

“Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.”

Their preliminary conclusion:

“Overall, it would be incorrect to conclude that liberal bloggers are ignoring conservative bloggers or vice versa. Certainly, liberal bloggers are more likely to address liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers are more likely to link to conservative bloggers. But people from both groups are certainly reading across the ideological divide to some extent.”

But whether liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers, or liberal writers and conservative writers for that matter, are ignoring each other is not the question.  It’s clear that they’re not. Chomsky’s read a lot of Kissinger, and Al Franken has read a lot of Rush Limbaugh, just as Nozick thoroughly read Rawls. Rather the issue is whether, as readers, we get our information about what the other side thinks filtered through those who we agree with and look up to. Arguing with someone does require that we have an open enough mind to change our positions in the face of goods reasons.  You don’t have to sign on to whole of the Habermasian project to recognize that.

The very sad thing is that discussions have become almost entirely strategic and less communicative, as it were.  That strategy may solidify one’s base and insulate it from being convinced of anything else. But these reading habits point to increasingly entrenched ideas and outlooks (though there are exceptions), and sadly to a world in which people argue less and less, in that real way where we can hope to change each other’s minds.

This short essay is inspired by a comment made by our own Timothy Don in his wonderful Negotiation of June 13th. As I wrote in the comments, Timothy is one of the few people writing on art at the moment I truly enjoy and profit from reading (Arthur Danto being another).

And let’s be honest, friends, art criticism is a foul business. Most people engaging in it would get a punch in the nose if they tried to write that way somewhere else. For the most part, it’s pretentious, jargon-obsessed junk. As Clement Greenberg once mentioned, “The fact is that most art writers are cold; they’re usually people who wouldn’t be able to survive writing about anything else.” And I’m glad I brought up Clement Greenberg here. The man could write very clearly about what are often difficult ideas. I love the guy. Love to read him, love to think about what he had to say. But it ought to be mentioned here that he was wrong, completely wrong. And Timothy Don is a wonderful writer on art, and he has many Greenbergian impulses and he’s sometimes wrong too.

He’s not wrong in his impressions and much of his analysis. He’s generally hitting the nail on the head with that. But he’s wrong in his aesthetic judgments. He’s wrong, as Greenberg might have put it, in his taste. Now that’s not to say that Timothy Don has bad taste. I know the man and I can tell you that his taste is impeccable. The more important point is that he thinks there is taste at all, which is why, after a great reflection on why he began to appreciate Basquiat despite himself, he still feels he has to draw the line at Jeff Koons. But there is no such line. The Greenbergian moment is over. It’s over. The Kantian argument lost. All there are now are many things and the struggle is to figure out what they are and why they are interesting. And because of that fact there is no reason to be so hard on our little friends like Mr. Koons. Mr. Koons was trying to liberate us from our Greenbergian fetors.

We must learn to love Jeff Koons.

Indeed, I would say that the thing that was first being called postmodernism a couple of decades ago is only really coming into its own now. Partly that’s because it isn’t so ‘post’ anymore, its just the way we apprehend the world. More and more, it is simply natural. You could call this a new naturalism, though it’s a naturalism so thoroughly interfused with the artificial that the distinction just isn’t interesting anymore. And this allows for a new immediacy, a new sincerity.

In an elegant little essay by Douglas Coupland of Generation X fame, something of this same point is made about Jeff Koons. One of the things that probably infuriated people so much about Koons was the way that he came off as such the glib ironist. It seemed like he was sneering at everyone and everything even as he made a killing off the 80s art boom.

But Coupland suggests that that really wasn’t Koons’ attitude at all.

To watch Koons speak in interviews, he is always maddeningly espousing warm, gooey, puppy love for his creations – and he answers every pointed question with the same beatific smile, like the Pope playing poker. While the work can sometimes appear dazzlingly, shamelessly shallow, he himself tells us that it possesses untold hidden depths – the polar opposite of Warhol. Koons’ work is detached yet also sentimental. Or… is it? He has never, as far as one can tell, presented any evidence of ironic detachment from his source material and its spawn. Which means that he is either a very cool cucumber – cooler than Warhol – or he’s the Rain Man of the art scene. Is his work deep? Is it shallow? Is he for real? Is he a shaman? Is he an idiot savant?

When he made his stupid giant puppies and his annoying little porcelains he loved them, he thought they were important and meaningful. And he was confused by the rancor directed his way. “My puppy is so beautiful,” he was saying. “Why don’t you love my puppy?” But we didn’t listen. We were so smart. There was no way we were going to fall in love with his dumb fucking puppy.

The fact is he was right. He was teaching us how to live aesthetically in this world, sort of like Warhol tried to do before him but one step further along. If you can love the puppy you’ve achieved a certain kind of freedom. You’ve achieved a new level of sensibility adequate to a situation of absolute aesthetic pluralism (Arthur Danto). Now that makes certain kinds of distinctions impossible, it ruins the capacity for taste in the way Greenberg meant it, but it’s immensely liberating as well because it puts you right back squarely in this world, the one we’re actually inhabiting now. It allows a hell of a lot of the things that are out there to become beautiful again. Beautiful not as the authentic object with its aura from times past. Beautiful in a new way. Beautiful like a porcelain figurine of Michael Jackson and his frickin monkey. If you can love that little figurine, really love it, no pretending, than you’re going to be OK. You’re going to be better than OK. You’re going to be in love with the world again because an almost infinite array of potential aesthetic pleasure is going to open up to you.

Now those of you out there committed to criticism in its more robust sense, to Greenbergian attitudes or others, are having a hard time here. You’re disgusted maybe. But I don’t think you should be. Because the most liberating aspect of Koons’ work is that it just doesn’t impose an aesthetic criterion beyond itself. One can still like abstract expressionism and the fact is such things are still being produced. In a way, Gerhard Richter is a version of Jeff Koons. He also realized that there is little reason in the aesthetic world of the present to confine yourself to any one trajectory of taste or to this or that aesthetic criterion. Richter was just a lot more uptight about than Koons. And hey, that’s OK if you still want to be uptight about art. There’s lots of uptight art out there for you.

But if you’re willing to give it a go, Koons can be interesting therapy. Clement Greenberg was talking about Donald Judd one day and he said, roughly, ‘these boxes are OK, but they just don’t have the right proportions. If they were more interesting as boxes they would be better’. Now that’s a man, God love him, who is unwilling or unable (or both) to allow the possibility of another criterion. Judd wasn’t thinking about his boxes that way. And Jeff Koons’ Puppies are not meant to be looked at as Judd’s boxes are. According to Koons, his puppies are meant to be a symbol of ‘love, warmth, and happiness’. I don’t know, I think that I’m prepared to believe that they are symbols of exactly that. In a funny way, it took a lot of balls to make cuddly art. You have to tip your hat to the man, the little bear has a button in its hand that says ‘I Love You’. Damn.

Here’s a last shot. Coupland puts it this way and I find the comment persuasive. Enjoy.

Most older artists have chosen to opt out of the ironic/post-ironic discourse (‘Let the damn kids figure it out’), but for the young, the irony/post-irony discourse is as common as oxygen, and to ignore it is to will irrelevance onto oneself. But the consensus seems to be mounting in both the art and literary worlds that, in order to jump dimensions, one has to play with all polarities of irony: heartfelt confession morphing into old sitcom punchlines morphing into Serzone blankness. In other words, being Jeff Koons.

In a recent article in The New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein argues that those who find formal aesthetic appeal in ‘postmodern art’ are ‘comically’ mistaken, since they are mistakenly looking for beauty in objects whose intent is solely conceptual. Therefore, she writes, an art dealer who admires a smudged Warhol silkscreen for its aesthetic qualities is giving in to the ‘obdurate yearning for beauty.’ He doesn’t get the joke. This argument, derived and oversimplified from the magisterial philosopher of art Arthur Danto, wrongly treats all contemporary art as though it belonged to a specific historical category, that of conceptual art. More significantly, it freezes the category of the aesthetic, as though the associations between it, beauty, and taste made by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater were still operational. But the aesthetic (and with it, what counts as beautiful) is defined contingently, not transhistorically: today, Warholian silkscreens are used as visual shorthand to advertise fifteen-minute train service to Heathrow airport. The aesthetic field is a recursive phenomenon, one that incorporates its own critiques; the story of culture is one of endless reappropriation and transformation.

To me, the latest such transformation is being made by street art, if I can loosely apply that term to envelop the work of many artists in many mediums in many parts of the world (thanks to Antlered Girl for introducing me to some of these artists, and for the photo at left of a piece by Os Gemeos). From the subway canvases of the graffiti artists memorably chronicled by Martha Cooper to the paintings and drawings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to Barry McGee’s pieces and installations to the folkloric beauty of Os Gemeos, artwork that begins outside the framing of galleries and museums has begun to refine our sense of where to look for aesthetic objects. Simply walking around New York City, with your eyes open and the right guides, reveals a diverse array of works, painted and drawn, on walls and paper. Not that New York is the only place where such things are happening: check out the London Police. Much of this, like much art since modernism, challenges traditional realist perspectives, substituting for it a more elastic, hieroglyphic, totemic geometry. But it doesn’t stay inside. That these artworks ask no price and sit unprotected by archival storage, reminds one of Pierre Bourdieu’s dictum that the modern aesthetic field refuses or reverses the economic logic that pervades social life.

One of the recognized functions of art is to visualize new possibilities, not only in the aesthetic arena, but for our social arrangements themselves. Perhaps the predominant movement of the last hundred years of art history has been the importation of objects from worlds beyond the salons of high culture: African masks and Duchamp’s urinal being the exemplars. Street art, if I may attempt a spontaneous philosophy of it, does the reverse: what joins together the artists I am grouping is their exportation of the artwork outside the sanctioned space of the gallery. In their embrace of the transience of city life, these artists also challenge an accepted order: our acceptance of the state’s right to sell off our daily visual field, our public space, to advertisers, while expunging the markings of its citizens from view (except for the often patronizing efforts of ‘public art’ initiatives). Thankfully, in all vital cities, the impulse to write back remains healthy, as the dialogues scribbled on any subway platform billboard will tell you. An infinitely more accomplished example would be the artist Swoon, who makes paper cut-outs and detailed, expressionistic drawings. While they make conceptual points about enlarging the sphere of art, the importance of everyday reality, and the dignity of urban life, they are also, to put it simply, radically beautiful.

A few years ago, a space in the Times Square subway station was cleared for the installation of a mural by Roy Lichenstein, the sanctified Pop artist. What his work replaced was an ancient surface, stratified with layers of grime and thousands of scraps of bygone wheatpaste. Though lacking aesthetic intent, perhaps that doomed surface, in its complexity, more faithfully rendered New York experience than the official art that succeeded it. This lingering sense, combined with the drive to mark one’s landscape with signs of individuality, of subjective uniqueness as opposed to the productions of the culture industry, is what drives street art.

Not all public artistic incursions need be imposed by an artist whose power to do so was delegated by a foundation, a state, or a corporate body. The wheat-pasted urban collage recalls Walter Benjamin’s studies of modernist urbanity, in which he focused on the ephemera, the flotsam, of a culture in order to interpret the many ways in which a society’s past, present, and emergent future can be glimpsed in candy wrappers and discarded fliers, street swindles and Parisian arcades.  Today’s street artists have absorbed and expressed Benjamin’s insights by making works that both refer to and are part of the jumbled proscenium of urban modernity. Wheatpasted surfaces like the one I remember have been brilliantly recalled by the artist Jose Parla (also known as Ease), whose recent works recreate the visual density of subway walls and other marked territories. I can think of no better contemporary visualization of ‘porosity,’ the image Benjamin and Asja Lacis developed to name the colliding complexity of urban semiotics, than these works. In its autonomy, in its generosity, in its authentic aesthetic complexity, street art reminds us that we are the social, and we must continue to impinge upon its representations of itself. In this world, in multiple ways, we must remember the utopic truth that: we make it up.

Eastern Kentucky is one of the most accidentally beautiful places I have ever been. Being there, one feels as though God knocked over his cereal box one morning and Kentucky spilled out. The place is a jumble and a tangle, off-kilter and slightly askew: a world whose axis is tilted a few degrees further than that of the one to which we are accustomed. The land is ravaged by gorges and pock-marked with hollers; mountains make their way across it with jagged, sideways movements, like crabs. The sky seems to be warped in reflection of the terrain, and while I was there I had the distinct sense that one of my legs was longer than the other, which meant that I spent a lot of time leaning against crooked timbers to gain my equilibrium. If I were a Creationist, I would have to argue that eastern Kentucky is evidence not for Intelligent but Cockeyed Design. God had a hangover when He made this place.

The human element expresses a dialectic between this spilled and crushed landscape and the crushing poverty of its inhabitants. (The county I visited has the highest child poverty rate in the nation—40 percent—which means the 5,000 inhabitants of said county are consigned to a nightmare Thoreau never imagined: here men live their lives not in quiet desperation but amidst a desperate quiet.) Still, these are hard men whose families have been on the land for five and six generations; they will not submit to fate, and they keep their land tidy and well-ordered, pulling corn in neat rows from the soil with the same commitment it would take you or I to quarry granite from a mountainside with a pick and a shovel.

This dialectic between land and human life achieved its material synthesis, in my eyes, in a series of barns I passed on Route 191, between Grassy Creek and Campton. Still functioning, they had become torqued and twisted with age and environmental punishment, their metal roofs sliding off into the dirt like ice cream slipping from a cone in the sun. Their walls had shifted without giving way, and structures that had once been square had gone feral, turning rhomboid and parallelogram. Most were engaged in an agon with a riotous vine that held them in a death grip while waiting for a nearby tree to drop a limb and deliver the coup-de-grace.

My curiosity was piqued at first, but by the sixth of these barns my aesthetic sensibility was fully aroused and I began naming them as I passed: “Entropy: 1, 2 and 3.” “Time’s Arrow.” Squaring the Circle.” “Elvis Has Left the Building.” “A Practical Application of Non-Euclidean Geometry.” “In Advance of a Broken Neck.” “Waiting for Damocles.” “Unintentional Consequence.”

It was as though I had tumbled down a rabbit-hole to find myself in a world that was the result of a collaboration between Marcel Duchamp and Robert Smithson. These barns were Found Installations, pure and simple. In reality, of course, they were the result of a collaboration between an extreme environment and extreme poverty; but if one makes the effort to shear off one’s social conscience and experience them as accidental art objects, they are beautiful, haunting and tragic.

When Duchamp went to an International Industrial Exposition in the early part of the 20th century, he is said to have declared to his companions while standing before an airplane propeller that painting was dead. Pointing at it, he asked them, “Could anyone make a thing so perfect by hand?” Looking at these barns in Kentucky, I found myself asking a similar question: Could any intent produce these objects? A dainty little work in a precious Chelsea gallery is like a bit of Art Kitsch in comparison, dry and dessicated and dreadfully weak. Duchamp would have loved these barns; but as he knew, being an artist has less to do with what one manufactures than with how one sees.

Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is the father of one of my closest friends, Samad Khan. He is also probably the most remarkable man I have ever met. All Pakistanis know who he is, as do many others, especially world leaders and diplomats, but to those of you for whom his name is new, I would like to take this Monday Musing as an opportunity to introduce him.

The first time that I met Sahabzada Yaqub Khan about six years ago, he was in Washington and New York as part of a tour of four or five countries (America, Russia, China, Japan, etc.) relations with which are especially important to Pakistan. He had come as President Musharraf‘s special envoy to reassure these governments in the wake of the fall of the kleptocratic shambles that was Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif‘s so-called democratic government. Samad Khan, or Sammy K as he is affectionately known to friends, invited me over to his apartment to meet his Dad. I had heard and read much about Sahabzada Yaqub and knew his reputation for fierce intellect and even more intimidating, had heard reports of his impatience with and inability to suffer fools, so I was nervous when I walked in. Over the next couple of hours I was blown away: Sahabzada Yaqub was not much interested in talking about politics, and instead, asked about my doctoral studies in philosophy. It was soon apparent that he had read widely and deeply in the subject, and knew quite a bit about the Anglo-American analytic philosophy I had spent the previous five years reading. He even asked some pointed questions about aspects of philosophy which even some graduate students in the field might not know about, much less laymen. Though we were interrupted by a series of phone calls from the likes of Henry Kissinger wanting to pay their respects while Sahabzada Yaqub was in town, we managed to talk not just about philosophy, but also physics (he wanted to know more about string theory), Goethe (SYK explained some of his little-known scientific work, in addition to quoting and then explicating some difficult passages from Faust), the implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Urdu literature, of which Sahabzada Yaqub has been a lifelong devotee.

I left late that night dazzled by his brilliance, and elated by his warmth and generosity. Sahabzada Yaqub listens more than he speaks, but when he does speak, he is a raconteur extraordinaire. Since then, I have been fortunate enough to get to know him well, and have spent many a rapt hour in his company. On my last trip to Islamabad, he and his wife and Sammy K had me and my wife Margit over for dinner, where upon learning that Margit is from Italy, Sahabzada Yaqub spoke with her in Italian. Then, realizing that she is from the South Tyrol (the German-speaking part of Italy near the Austrian border), he spoke to her in German, giving us a fascinating mini-lecture on German translations of Shakespeare. I can picture him now, emphatically declaiming “Sein oder nicht sein. Das ist hier die frage.” (The picture on the right with Sammy K and me is from that night.)

Sahabzada Yaqub Khan has done and been so many things, that it is hard to know where to begin describing his career in the short space that I have. An aristocrat from the royal family of Rampur, he has served as a soldier, statesman, diplomat, and chairman of the board of trustees of Pakistan’s finest university, among other things, and has excelled in each of these roles. In 1970, he was a Lieutenant General in the Pakistan army, and governor of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) when he was ordered by the military dictator of Pakistan at the time, General Yahya Khan, to have troops forcibly put down the mutiny there, which had spilled out into the streets. It is a testament to Sahabzada Yaqub’s moral courage that he refused, and resigned instead. Yahya, of course, found less-conscientious generals to do his dirty work, and the result was a massacre of Bengali civilians before a humiliating defeat in war when India stepped in on the side of the insurgents, and ultimately the dismemberment of Pakistan. This is a dark chapter in Pakistani history for which the government has yet to apologize to the Bangladeshi people. Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is, however, still celebrated as a hero in Bangladesh. (His moral convictions haven’t changed, either. The last time Sahabzada Yaqub visited New York in July, 2004 he came over for drinks and pizza–he is a man of sophisticated tastes who still enjoys simple things–and more than anything else, that day he repeatedly expressed his shock and dismay at the behavior of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib. What particularly galled and appalled him was that the troops took such delight and pride in their torturous abuse that they felt compelled to record it on film–as if they wanted to be able to relive it. The lack of shame was what disturbed him the most.)

Soon after the debacle of 1971, when a properly-elected civilian government had taken power in Pakistan, Sahabzada Yaqub was offered, and accepted, several diplomatic appointments, serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Let me illustrate his reputation as a cold-war strategist with a quick anecdote: one day Sammy K and I were searching through some old packed boxes of Sammy K’s for a 70s punk rock record, when I came upon an official looking document, with the seal of the President of the United States on it. On examination, it turned out to be a letter from Nixon to Sahabzada Yaqub, written while Nixon was president, and (I am quoting from memory) this is roughly what Nixon had to say: “It was a pleasure meeting you and spending some time talking to you. Alexander Haig had told me that you are probably the most astute geopolitical thinker alive today. Having met you, I believe this was an understatement. Call me anytime.” Or words to that effect.

From 1982 onwards, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan served as Pakistan’s foreign minister in various governments. He was a central figure in the UN negotiations to end Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. From 1992 to 1994, Sahabzada Yaqub was also the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Western Sahara. And in November 1999, as I have already mentioned, Sahabzada Yaqub traveled to various countries as President Musharraf’s special envoy. While Sahabzada Yaqub was in America as part of that tour, William Safire wrote an editorial in the New York Times in which, amongst much else, he said that for clarification about the situation in Pakistan he turned to “the most skillful diplomat in the world today: Sahabzada Yaqub Khan.”

Though he has always been fiercely protective of his privacy, politely refusing to write his memoirs despite great public demand (including entreaties over the last few years from me), Sahabzada Yaqub Khan has recently allowed some of his writings to be collected into book form: Strategy, Diplomacy, Humanity, compiled and edited by Dr. Anwar Dil, had its launch earlier this month at a ceremony at the Agha Khan University in Karachi. Here is a description of the book from the AKU website:

…the book Strategy, Diplomacy, Humanity contains Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan’s selected writings, with photos spanning his entire life, culled from his lectures, articles and speeches between 1980s and the present day. They describe his thoughts on national strategy, diplomacy, world affairs, education and his vision of a world of dialogue and peace for all of humanity. In the foreword, Shaharyar M. Khan, former foreign secretary of Pakistan, describes the book as “essential reading for the student of modern history, diplomatic strategy, and the art and craft of negotiations. They reflect the outpourings of a brilliant analyst whose immense talent was applied towards achieving pragmatic objectives in Pakistan’s national interest.”

I have been unable to obtain the book, but even without having seen it yet, I can safely urge you to get a copy and read it if you can. I also hope that Sahabzada Yaqub overcomes his reticence soon and writes the detailed memoirs that history demands of him.

Among other things, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is a true polyglot: he can speak, read and write somewhere between 6 and 10 languages. While he was governor of East Pakistan, he learned Bengali and delivered public addresses in it, which went a long way toward assuaging their concerns of cultural dominance by West Pakistan. He is also a stylishly impeccable dresser (he was voted best-dressed several years in a row by the Washington diplomatic corps). My greatest joy in his company, however, remains his inimitable explications of the deeper philosophical implications buried in Ghalib‘s couplets, of which he has been a longtime and enthusiastic student. In short, he is a man with many and diverse qualities.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

Not to feed this blog’s obsession with Hitchens, but the article that Abbas posted on and Josh responded to brought to mind the Soviet Union, in general, and Soviet literature, in particular. It wasn’t simply (or even primarily) the image and use of the word “gulag” by Amnesty International, or even the discussion of and apologia for Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, which seems like a descendant of Stalinist show-trials. It was rather the remarkable contortions of language which seem to increasingly accompany the discussions of the war, from all corners.

Much has been said of the current war as a new kind of war on a new kind of enemy under new conditions, and with different stakes and different psychologies. Yet, for all its newness and difference, the partisans of this war have “anxiously conjure[d] up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new [or at least this] scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.” This is no less true of their opponents.

It was precisely the “borrowed language” aspect of the war that reminded me of 20th century Russian literature. Nearly 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we can think of many things that happily came to an end with it. The prominence of Russian and East European literature is not one of them. Since the 1950s, there was always some Russian writer—Bebel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Sinavsky, Solzhenitsyn, to take the most prominent witnesses of that experiment/nightmare—whose moral and political insights made him a justified teacher of the human condition. That fascination ended with the Soviet Union.

Perhaps it was a cultural disposition, but what came through in their writings was the use and abuse of language as part and parcel of the project, and the creative use of language as both a defense against the pretensions of the system as well as a tool for exposing it.  (I have learned this far better from the Russians than from Orwell.)

I regularly reread the books of my earlier education—I was a Russian language and literature student for years—but I was pleased to recently find a post on Andrei Platonov (over at normblog), whose The Foundation Pit happens to be one of my favorite short stories, though I hadn’t read it years. (Here’s a excerpt from “Dzhan”.) The post made me pick it up off of my shelf.

Platonov often wrote in inverted grammar and his surrealism was a counter-surrealism of language—the natural reaction to a system whose stranglehold on its subjects was mimicked in its stranglehold on their language. I would like to think that this literature, not simply Platonov, but writers like Daniil Kharms, Yvegeny Shwartz, and Joseph Brodsky, in addition to those I mentioned above, taught me something about the corruptions of language that accompany utopian projects that begin to feel like dead-ends. And it is when I think of this lesson that I become convinced that the loss of prominence of this literature and all that it taught us–about the dangers of clichéd promises of better worlds, the complexities of human psychology and madness, and about how to salvage decency in the face of easy and easing stories about ourselves and our enemies–has been tragic.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We have touched down in Karachi and are reacquainting ourselves with the city through rituals that we religiously repeat every six months: in the afternoon, we get into our ‘97 Corolla, turn up the AC, turn on FM 89 (that plays Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” and “Taste of Summer” back to back with Nazia Hassan and our new generations of rockers, Noori, EP and Jal), pick up a copy of the Friday Times from our man at PIDC (who asks us how we’ve been and inquires about the political climate in the US), drop our dry-cleaning at the Pearl, get a shave and olive oil massage at Clippers (where we are informed of the reflexology treatment that they have recently introduced), get a beer for the road at the Korean restaurant (which nestles between our legs), and then by the evening, meander through Saddar, passed paan–wallahs, underwear-wallahs, open-air gyms, tea houses, Empress Market, the Karachi Goan Association building, to get a shirt altered, buy some DVDs (Carlito’s Way, Aurat Raj and Disco Dancer), and have fresh falsa juice as the sun warms our back and the sea breeze wafts through the city, portending the monsoon. On Thursday nights we will attend qawwalis at moonlit tombs of saints, on Friday nights we will attend the rollicking Fez disco at the Sind Club, on Saturdays, head to Burns Road for a plate of killer nihari (a hot, soupy dish prepared with calves’ calves), and on Sunday, chat with old friends over Famous Grouse and Dunhills about the way things are and will be. Here, we are ourselves and we are alive.

William Dalrymple, however, an insightful commentator on India, writes, “Karachi is the saddest of cities…a South Asian Beirut.” The analogy, of course, is incorrect. Looking at a map of Karachi he writes, “The pink zone in the east is dominated by the Karachi drug mafia; the red zone to the west indicates the area noted for the sophistication of its kidnapping and extortion rackets; the green zone to the south is the preserve of those specializing in sectarian violence.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have lived in Karachi and can tell you with great certainty that this take on Karachi is facile. It is as if we were passing through New York in the early ’90s and were to comment: New York is today’s Sodom. Down Atlantic Avenue, across Brooklyn, in areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Brownsville, gang warfare and the crack epidemic have transformed traditionally middle-class cantons into a no-man’s land. Bullet holes and crushed needles mark and mar desolate facades and streets. But urban decay is not simply a peripheral phenomenon. In Manhattan, whether north or south, Harlem and Manhattan Alley or Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery, ethnic warfare plays out on the streets: Blacks, Hispanics, Irishmen, Italians, Chinese pitted against each other, daggers drawn.

Dalrymple has written a number of brilliant books on India (and lives there) but neither his view on Karachi nor ours of New York is complete and consequently, is inaccurate. There is more to New York than bullets and needles. But Karachi gets short shrift: outside observers are able to reduce Karachi to a few facts and artifacts. Since we don’t control our own discourse, others are able define, in fact, redefine the city, see what they want to see. Take Tim McGirk’s ludicrous article in Time in which he perceived Karachi through the eyes of a “hit-man.” That’s like perceiving Los Angeles through the eyes of a 7th Street Crip! This variety of analysis is not only poor but wrong. Karachi’s murder rate, in fact, is at par with Delhi’s (and DC’s). And in Bombay, mobsters not only run the movie industry but become politicians and politicians stir murder and champion rape! Of course, Bombay is not merely the sum of squalid facts. Neither are other megacities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos and Jakarta (even Lahore), although they share many similar problems.

The problem with reportage is not simply one of dominant discourse but of the news infrastructure in this part of the world. Unlike other cities, Karachi (and indeed all of Pakistan), is typically covered from another country: the South Asian bureaus of major newspapers are based in Delhi. Naturally, then, the worldview of reporters like Barry Bearak, Celia Dugger, David Rhode and Amy Waldman (all of whom, incidentally, can’t hold a candle to the knoweldgeable Dalrymple) are colored by local prejudice. On the other hand, former US Consul General John Bauman, an insider – somebody who has lived in Karachi for many years, not just passing through on a ten day junket – says “there are so many good things being done in this city. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.”

Take our word for it: Karachi is wonderfully vibrant. There are dimensions of Karachi not often appreciated by outside observers (foreign reporters and disgruntled expatriates alike): Karachi’s vibrant cultural life comprises open-air pop concerts, classical dance shows, art exhibits, independent film festivals and coffee houses; there is great dining, street-side or indoors, and a throbbing nightlife. Karachi is very similar to New York; the same frenetic rhythms beat under our feet.

‘Literary critic James Wood called him the “demented magus of the sentence”; John Walsh suspected him of genius, writing: “He can outgun virtually any writer in England.”‘

Why then, if this Guardian profile/interview rings true, don’t more Americans know who Iain Sinclair is? His new novel, Dining on Stones, isn’t yet available in the States, although some of his previous titles can be found here and there. The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries describes Sinclair’s style:

‘…Hemingwayesque, sometimes sinuously poetic sentences, verb-free zones, clipped gags. On the first page of the new novel, for example, we read: “Pass sixty, sixty-five, and you can’t sustain an erection beyond eight and a half minutes. So I read. Is that a promise? Eight and half minutes, of the right intensity, sounds good. Novelists have managed books on less.”‘

I don’t think I have read better contemporary nonfiction than Sinclair’s books Rodinsky’s Room and Lights Out for the Territory, both about the topographical ghosts of London. One of the reasons for Sinclair’s American obscurity is his London mania: shorthand references to minor celebrities and thumbnail sketches of East End gangland history which probably require (and deserve) a whole apparatus of annotations.

I have a few more notes on Sinclair here. Here’s a Fortean Times interview in which Sinclair expounds on his theories of “psychogeography,” plus his entry in the Literary Encyclopedia, and a list of his titles from Granta Books.

I arrived at the Basquiat exhibit in a suspicious and haughty frame of mind, like an obstinate mule towing my stupidity along behind me. The first thing I noticed about his paintings is that they were made with the express purpose of being noticed. Basquiat embedded in his canvases little tricks and riddles and hints in order to keep the viewer’s gaze on them for as long as possible. He designed them with his viewer in mind. This added to my annoyance; though, to his credit, Basquiat was forthright about it. He admitted that he would write words into his canvases and then scratch them out, not to hide them but to draw attention to them. He knew that the eye enjoys lingering over what appears to be hidden or erased rather than what is right there in front of it in plain view. This meant that I was obliged to look at his paintings and think to myself, “Now I am looking at this painting and I am noticing it further because the painter has performed a little magic show here that is not the painting itself or its subject matter but the tricks that draw me into it and keep me lingering over it.”

My companion laughed at me. “What did you expect?” he said. “Basquiat was a graffiti artist. If it doesn’t gain your attention, according to its own criteria, it is a failure.” I am nothing, but the criteria of graffiti art are not my criteria.

I found this “need-to be-noticed” in Basquiat very vexing at first, because I tend to art that doesn’t seek attention for itself. Why sign your work? I like art that erases the ego of the artist; I like the stuff that points me in certain oblique angles or reorients my gaze so that it searches for things beyond the canvas or beneath it. Unless I happen to own the work and can therefore live with it, mining its secrets and limning its meanings, my experience of it can only be temporary anyway—so why build in these little tricks to gain notice and hold my attention when my attention can only ever be a fleeting thing? Yeccch.

I tend to abhor cleverness in art. It’s a dead-end. A Jeff Koons. An ego trip. An act of self-promotion. Even those paintings that claim to be about nothing more than their own materiality (their “flatness,” in a word) succeed because they avoid the pitfalls of cleverness, because they end up pointing to something beyond themselves. I went in expecting to despise what I was about to see, and I was disappointed. Basquiat, I realized, is the last of the New York painters; and his work knocked my little world on its ass.

New York is a beachhead that one must (if one lives here) attempt to gain every-fucking-day. The opportunities for humiliation, abasement and defeat are endless. Just yesterday morning I had to slap a punk on the subway because he was up in my jock and talking smack. He was right: I was hung-over and I looked like piss, but who needs the obvious pointed out to them? The ego exists here in a state of siege. The city is an enormous grinding machine, and it chews up and digests nothing so quickly as ego, which means that memory doesn’t stand a chance. If you linger too long in the past you will disappear, because every day erases the previous one, which has erased all the days before it. New York doesn’t care about you.

This is of course one of the reasons that those of us who love the city love the city: it forgets everything. It isn’t catty. It doesn’t hold grudges. It moves on. But it is precisely this quality of the urban experience that is New York that also lends our existence within it a deep and abiding poignancy. We move through it but we are nothing to it. We recognize things, we welcome certain changes and deplore others, but it is already ahead of and beyond us. It has no memory. It exists only in the present and forces us to straddle the fault line between what was—once upon a time–and is now gone, and what is here today, at the edge of the future. In other words, it is nothing so grand as Death that one is forced to confront here; it is rather the possibility of non-existence, the nothingness that haunts our consciousness. The city does not notice us.

Against my will, I have felt raw and exposed since having seen the Basquiat exhibit. His genius (if I may be so bold as to claim to recognize it) lay in his ability simultaneously to make manifest his present and to bury it like a secret, preserving it within his paintings. That is the direction to which all his hints and riddles and scratched-out words and “Notice me! Stay with me!” signposts point: not to the paintings themselves but to the maelstrom of experience that animated them. They point to New York. If I could lick one of his paintings it would taste like the day upon which he made it. Entering his work involves stepping into a moment that is eternally and irretrievably lost to us. His paintings are time machines. Looking at one of them, noticing it, lending oneself to its artifice, is to gain access to a New York City that will never again exist: the New York of 1980, when being bohemian was (incredibly!) a life choice rather than a style, when Madonna was a performance artist you could pick up in a bar, when you had to take your life in your hands after dark in the East Village, and when the precondition for transcendence was commitment to the holiness of the present.

One hundred years ago this month, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein published a paper entitled “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper“ or “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. As we all know by now, 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the miraculous year in which he published four papers in the Annalen der Physik. The first was a paper on the photoelectric effect; the second on Brownian motion; and the third, which we have already mentioned, spelled out the ideas which would come to be known as special relativity. In case you are less than sure why Einstein’s name has become a metonym for extreme intelligence, consider that there is broad consensus among physicists that any one of these three papers by itself would have been more than enough to win Einstein a Nobel Prize. The fourth paper, by the way, used the axioms of the third to derive a nice little result equating energy and mass: E = mc², probably the most famous equation of all time. Not only that, he would certainly have won another Nobel for general relativity, which he published a decade later. In other words, you can safely think of Einstein as someone who, in a fairer world, would have been at least a four-time Nobel winner. As it is, the Nobel committee cited only the photoelectric effect when they awarded him the prize in 1921.

Einstein’s results were disseminated and understood so slowly (especially in the English-speaking world) that when Sir Arthur Eddington lead an expedition to prove general relativity correct by showing that the light from stars near the Sun in the sky would be bent by its gravity (during a solar eclipse in 1919 when you could actually see stars close to the Sun), and a journalist asked him: “Is it true that only three people in the world understand relativity?” Eddington reportedly responded, “Who’s the third?”

This year has been declared the World Year of Physics in commemoration of the centennial of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, and in that same spirit, I would like today to attempt to give you a sense of what the theory of special relativity (SR) is, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this month. Most of you have at least some vague idea of what SR implies: you have heard that time slows down when you start traveling very fast (near the speed of light); that lengths contract; and almost everyone knows the Twin Paradox, where one twin travels out into space at high speed, then returns, say 6 years later to find that her twin on earth has aged 39 years while she was gone. You have probably also heard that Einstein is responsible for inextricably entwining space and time into spacetime. I will explicate all these aspects of SR, and I will not do it by using crude analogies, which tend to confuse more than they illuminate; instead, I will use the actual math so that you fully understand the beauty of this theory. Wait! Don’t stop reading just yet. The math required is no more than simple high school algebra, so if you remember how to do that, stay with me. If the sight of even the simplest equation makes you tremulous, then I can only say: learn some math! Einstein himself famously stated that “The presentation of science to the public must be made as simple as possible, but not more so,” and we cannot but follow his dictum here, where our very aim is to celebrate his science. (The beauty of SR lies in the incredible conceptual leap which Einstein made. The mathematics is relatively (!) straightforward, and this is what makes my elucidation of it possible. The mathematics of general relativity is much more advanced, indeed far beyond the abilities of most people who, like me, are neither mathematicians nor physicists. Even Einstein needed some help from mathematicians to work it all out.)

THE BACKGROUND

A century ago, this was the situation: Galilean and Newtonian physics said that any descriptions of motion by any two inertial observers (for such observers, bodies acted on by no forces move in straight lines) in uniform (not accelerating) relative motion are equally valid, and the laws of physics must be exactly the same for both of them. Bear with me here: what this means is, for example, if you see me coming toward you at a speed of 100 mph, then we could both be moving toward each other at 50 mph, or I could be still and you could be moving toward me at 100 mph, or I could be moving toward you at 30 mph while you are coming at me at 70 mph, and so on. All these descriptions are equivalent, and it is always impossible to tell whether one of us is “really” moving or not; all we can speak about is our motion relative to each other. In other words, all motion is relative to something else (which is then the inertial frame of reference). So for convenience, we can always just insist that any one observer is still (she is then the “frame of reference”) and all others are in motion relative to her. This is known as the Principle of Relativity. Another way to think about this is to imagine that there are only two objects in the universe, and they are moving relative to one another: in this situation it is more clearly impossible to say which object is moving. (Think about this paragraph, reread it, until you are pretty sure you get it. Just stay with me, it gets easier from here.)

At the same time, James Clerk Maxwell‘s equations of electricity and magnetism implied that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is absolute. The only way that this could be true is if Maxwell’s equations refer to a special frame (see previous paragraph) of reference (that in which the speed of light is c) which can truly be said to be at rest. If this is the case, then an observer moving relative to that special frame would measure a different value for c. But in 1887, Michelson and Morley proved that there is no such special frame. Another way of saying this (and this is the way Einstein put it in 1905) is that the speed of light is fixed, and is independent of the speed of the body emitting it. (The details of the Michelson-Morley experiment are beyond the scope of this essay, so you’ll have to take my word for this.)

Now we have a problem. We have two irreconcilable laws: 1) The Principle of Relativity, and 2) The absoluteness of the speed of light for all observers. They cannot both be true. It would be another eighteen years before a young clerk in the Swiss patent office would pose and then resolve this problem. Here’s how he did it: he asked what would happen if they were both true.

Next, I will show how the various aspects of SR fall straight out of the assumption that both of these laws are true. I will focus in greater detail on the slowing down (dilation) of time, and then speak more briefly about length contraction, and the intertwining of space and time.

TIME DILATION

As I have mentioned, Einstein began by assuming that the following two postulates always hold true:

1) The Principle of Relativity, and

2) The speed of light will always be measured as c by all observers

Now, keeping these in mind, let us consider a simple mechanism that we will call a light clock (shown in Fig. 1). The way it works is this: the top and bottom surfaces are perfect mirrors. The distance between the top and bottom mirror is known exactly. The light clock’s period is the time that it takes light to go from the bottom to the top, and then to come reflected back. Since the mirrors are perfect, light will keep on bouncing back and forth like this forever. All observers can build identical clocks with exactly the same distance between the two mirrors, ensuring the same period. And since the speed of light is always c, and the distance between the two mirrors can be measured precisely, we know exactly how long one “tick” or period of the clock is in seconds.

Let us now say that there are two observers, each of whom has such a clock. If one of them is moving past the other at a velocity v, something close to the speed of light, then the first observer, F, will see the second observer S’s clock as something like what is shown in Fig. 2. Of course, by symmetry, and the principle of relativity, S will see F’s clock the same way. Take a little time to look at Fig. 2 and convince yourself of this. (This is basically like thinking about a man moving a flashlight vertically up and down on board a train; if the train is stationary relative to you, you will see what is shown in Fig. 1; if the train is moving by you, you will see what is shown in Fig. 2. It should be quite obvious once you try to imagine it.)

Since S’s clock seems to be moving to F, it will seem to F that the light travels a longer path than just the vertical distance between the two mirrors, because after the light leaves the bottom mirror, the top mirror keeps moving to the right, and the light beam travels a diagonal path up to where the top mirror has moved to. (Imagine the whole apparatus moving to the right as the light beam goes up from the bottom mirror, or look at Fig. 2.) Since the speed of the light must still be measured as c by both observers, and according to F, the light beam is traveling a greater distance, it must be taking longer to make the trip to the top mirror and back. Therefore, according to F, S’s clock is ticking more slowly, and vice versa!

Someone might object that this is a special kind of clock, and maybe we could construct a different type of clock that would not slow down when seen speeding along relative to some other observer. This cannot be true. The reason is that if we were able to construct such a clock, it would violate our first postulate, the Principle of Relativity. Remember that in saying that only relative motion is physically significant, we are insisting that nothing done by S can tell her whether it is she who is moving past F, or vice versa. Suppose that two different types of clock were synchronized (one of them a light clock of the type we have been describing), then both of them are sent off with S at high speed,  if they do not behave exactly the same way and were to fall out of synchronization, this would tell S that it is she who is really moving, and this contradicts the first postulate. All clocks must therefore slow down in the same way when they are observed in relative motion close to the speed of light. In other words, this time dilation is not a property of any particular type of clock, but of time itself.

So how much exactly is S’s time seen to be slowing down by F? To answer this question, consider the situation in Fig. 3. As shown, the light clock is moving to the right at a velocity v. At rest, the light clock has a period T. In half that time, when stationary, the light beam travels the distance A, but when moving, it has a slower period T’ because it travels the distance C at the same speed. This means that the ratio of the distances A/C is the same as the ratio of the times taken to traverse them, T/T’. (At the same speed, if you travel twice the distance, it will take you twice as long.) So,

(1) A/C = T/T’

Now while the light beam travels the distance C, the mirrors have moved a distance B to the right. The ratio of these two distances B/C, traveled in the same amount of time, is the same as the ratio of the speeds with which the distances are covered. (Moving for a given time at double the speed just doubles the distance covered.) So,

(2) B/C = v/c

Look at Fig. 3 again, and notice that the sides A, B, and C form a right triangle, so by the Pythagorean Theorem:

(3) A² + B² = C²

Dividing both sides by C² we get:

(A/C)² + (B/C)² = 1

Subtracting (B/C)² from both sides we get:

(A/C)² = 1 – (B/C)²

Taking the square root of each side we get:

A/C = sqrt ( 1 – (B/C)² )

Now if we substitute for A/C and B/C from equations (1) and (2) above, we get:

T/T’ = sqrt ( 1 – (v/c)² )

And finally, inverting both sides, we get:

(4) T’/T = 1 / sqrt ( 1 – (v/c)² ) = γ (gamma — the relativistic time dilation factor)

Since the speed of light is so high (186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second), gamma is not significant at speeds that are common to our experience. For example, even at the speed which the space shuttles must attain to escape Earth’s gravity (11 km/sec), gamma is 1.000000001. At fifty percent of the speed of light (0.5 c), gamma is 1.155. You can confirm these values by plugging in the speeds into the time dilation equation above. One way in which we know that Einstein was correct about time dilation is that particles with known half-lives decay much more slowly when they are accelerated to near the speed of light in particle accelerators. For example, muons, which have a half-life of 1.5 microseconds, are observed to decay in 44 microseconds on average in a CERN experiment which accelerated them to 0.9994 c, at which speed gamma can be calculated using the equation above to be 28.87. In perfect agreement with the theory, 1.5 microseconds multiplied by 28.87 comes out to 44 microseconds, exactly what is seen in the experiment. There are countless other very exact confirmations of relativistic time dilation effects.

LENGTH CONTRACTION

This time, imagine the light clock lying on its side (in other words, Fig. 1 rotated by 90 degrees counter-clockwise). Now the motion of the light pulse is back and forth in the same direction that the whole clock is moving. What happens this time? Well, as the light pulse leaves one mirror and heads toward the other, that mirror advances forward to meet it. This trip is shorter than when the clock is stationary. On the way back, though, the light pulse is chasing a retreating mirror, and the trip takes longer than it would in a stationary situation. This round trip period, T”, is longer than T’ by the factor 1/γ. (This is similar to the case where an airplane traveling across the Atlantic with a steady headwind against it, and then returning with the same wind at its back, will take a longer time for the round trip than if there were no wind at all. I leave the simple math here as an exercise for the reader.)

Now if this were all there is to the story, the amount of time dilation would depend on the orientation of the clock relative to the direction of motion, but then this would violate the Principle of Relativity. What prevents this violation is a shortening of lengths along the direction of motion. The distance between the two mirrors would thus contract by the factor 1/γ, reducing T” to the correct value T’ as it should be. So, lengths are observed to contract along the direction of motion by a factor of 1/γ. Again, this only becomes noticeable at very high speeds, approaching c.

SPACETIME

Newton’s notion of absolute space and absolute time are no longer valid for us. We have seen that measures of time are relative to the observer, as are measures of space. The good news is that different observers of the same reality can agree on something. And this is what it is: we know that

T/T’ = 1/γ

Substituting for 1/γ from equation (4) and squaring both sides we get:

(T/T’)² = 1 – (v/c)²

Multiplying both sides by (cT’)² we get:

(cT)² = (cT’)² – (vT’)²

Here, vT’ is just the distance L’ that the moving clock travels in time T’. Meanwhile the stationary clock doesn’t go anywhere in time T, so L = 0, and by substituting that L² = 0 and L’² = (vT’)² into the equation above, we get:

(cT)² – L² = (cT’)² – L’²

Here, finally, is a quantity that is the same for both observers. It is not a measure of time or a measure of space; instead, it is a spacetime measure. So we find that in the end, though observers cannot agree about measures of space or time by themselves, it is possible to weave them together into a spacetime measure that everyone does agree on. This is what is meant when it is said that space and time have become interwoven after Einstein.

The account I have followed in explaining special relativity is essentially that used by Richard Feynman (who invented light clocks as a way of explaining SR) and Julian Schwinger. The two of them shared the 1965 Nobel in physics with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

Thanks to Margit Oberrauch for all the light clock illustrations.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, in an art space in Queens, New York City, three novelists were enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architects/artists. For the past twenty-one days, this has been their reality. They are not allowed to leave the building and they are granted ninety minutes of free time each day, for which they must punch a time clock to gain. In seven days time, they are to emerge from their habitats having completed a novel. The name of this conceptual art project, created and hosted by Flux Factory, is Novel: A Living Installation.

This work emanates from the Flux Factory collective. In case you haven’t heard, Flux has taken some heat in the press for their work, most notably from the editorial page of the New York Times. The Times’ criticism amounted to a claim that this project trivializes the act of writing, because it takes writing out of the hands of the writers and spatiates it, mechanizes it, and tethers it to time: “part of the meaning of making a novel is commanding the time to do so and owning the workings of imagination, however they pace themselves.” So says the Times. The criticism is unfair, in my opinion but not because it is inaccurate.

The Flux oeuvre (and—full confession— I say this as a frequent collaborator on their projects) rests to some degree on exploiting the trivial, the absurd, and the happenstance. Flux makes you look at exactly what is in front of your face. (The Dadaists did the same thing.) As a result, their projects often run the risk of becoming gimmicky acts of self-promotion; but when they succeed they succeed either because they manage to transform the trivial and the everyday into something meaningful or because they manage to mine the trivial and the banal for the potential profundities they occlude. Many of their projects function as almost artistic analogues for Socratic irony. They are like gadflies on the ass of the art world.

In this regard, the criticism is unfair because it misses the point. Novel’s aim was never to re-enthrone writing as the queen of the arts and to produce three masterpieces of contemporary American fiction. The point was to remove the crown that writing wears and peer into its brain, to resituate writing as an obsessively mechanical process alongside the other obsessively mechanical processes that comprise the manufacturing of art objects.

Embedded in the criticism, then, is a notion that we may or may not agree with: that writing is most emphatically not an art form. The intention of the curators at Flux was to interrogate that very notion. There are three forces at play in this installation, three intentionalities. This first one is a conceptual force.

The second force at play in this installation, the second intentionality at work, is that of the architects who designed the writers’ habitats. Where space is empty, it is not space—it is nothingness. What I have always found fascinating about architecture is that it seems to have a unique ability to sculpt somethingness out of the nothingness of empty space. In that regard, the work of the architects has been the most under-discussed element of this project. For them, the installation was an exploration of space with the aim of creating new space; and the spaces they have carved (really, out of thin air) are not merely holding pens or empty frames for the work of the writers within them. They were made to give rise to new spaces of the imagination; they are the material politics that make possible the very work that transcends them.

The third force at play is the actual writing that the novelists are doing. They have asserted that their writing is paramount and has superseded the restrictions under which they are laboring. (An interesting discussion remains to be had about the point—or points—at which the formal restraints they have to deal with, restraints of space and time, have actually become opportunities for the liberation of the imagination…) As one of the three groups of artists involved in this project, the novelists (fed and housed for a month, with nothing to do other than write) have had perhaps the easiest task—if one thinks that being oneself is an easy task. But if what one is, is a writer, theirs has also been the most difficult task because, unlike much of what passes for art, you cannot fake writing. As a writer you can’t hide under bells and whistles and wisecracks; you can’t call it in; and you are obliged to work with the knowledge that you have been assigned a Sisyphean fate: Sisyphean not because it is futile, but because it will always remain, to some extent, unfinished and unfinish-able.

So what we are dealing with, in toto, are three forces at play, three intentionalities: the intentionality of the curators (conceptual), the intentionality of the architects (spatial), and the intentionality of the novelists (literary).

What puts the “aaargh” in “art”? My pet theory, which I am testing out when I look at Novel, is that art is the stuff that’s left over. It’s the thing that occurs when intentionalities collide, like flint and steel, when the intent of the artist meets the (often hidden) intent of the material with which she is to work. Art is not the material object that artists produce, it is not the concept or the space or the words we create as artists. It is the stuff that remains; the stuff we are left with after we have said or made or thought or written what we have to say or make or think or write. It is—to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek—the “indivisible remainder” of the interaction between our intentions and our materials. If Novel succeeds as an artwork, then, it does so not because it creates a closed universe of meaning, but because it creates aporias in art, because it throws something up that escapes the intentions of any of the artists working within it.