[{"id":311856,"date":"2026-09-20T07:06:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T11:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311856"},"modified":"2026-09-19T21:08:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T01:08:14","slug":"peter-max-1937-2026-psychedelic-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/peter-max-1937-2026-psychedelic-artist.html","title":{"rendered":"Peter Max (1937 &#8211; 2026) Psychedelic Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Peter Max discusses his art with Victor Zurbel\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/l2beVVy07Bs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311857,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311856\/revisions\/311857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311468,"date":"2026-09-20T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311468"},"modified":"2026-09-14T15:31:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:31:43","slug":"the-scientific-method-has-left-the-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-scientific-method-has-left-the-building.html","title":{"rendered":"The Scientific Method Has Left the Building"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_311469\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-311469\" style=\"width: 423px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-311469\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scientist_p.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"423\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scientist_p.png 1258w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scientist_p-360x255.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scientist_p-1024x726.png 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scientist_p-768x545.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scientist_p-300x213.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 423px) 100vw, 423px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-311469\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby (1768)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I recall reading a short piece of fiction as a high school student at the turn of the millenium called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/35014679\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Catching Crumbs from the Table<\/em><\/a>. It was written by Ted Chiang and later republished under the title <em>The Evolution of Human Science<\/em>. Chiang imagined a future in which genetically enhanced metahumans have superintelligence and all of science and inventing new things for the benefit of rest of humanity. However, ordinary human scientists can no longer participate meaningfully at the frontiers of research. Science continues to advance faster than ever but most of humanity can no easily understand what is going on. Howeverm Human scientists do not completely disappear. Instead, they become interpreters. Some try to understand simplified accounts of metahuman discoveries. Others test conclusions whose theoretical basis lies beyond their own abilities. Still others study the artifacts produced by metahuman science and work backward, hoping to infer the principles that made them possible. For all practical purposes science for ordinary humans has become less about discovering nature directly than about trying to understand discoveries made by minds more capable than most of humanity.<\/p>\n<p>After more than two decades, I was recently reminded of this story when I came across a couple of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10644-y\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">articles in Nature<\/a>. The paper described two systems that occupy a curious new territory between scientific instrument and scientific collaborator. The paper in question describes Google\u2019s Co-Scientist which uses multiple AI agents to generate hypotheses, criticize one another\u2019s proposals, rank them, and refine the more promising ones. Some of the hypotheses generated by the system were subsequently tested in biomedical settings. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10652-y\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Another system, Robin<\/a> searches the literature, proposes hypotheses, suggests experiments, analyzes experimental results. It then revises its ideas in light of what those experiments show. Human researchers still perform much of the physical work. It is important to note that it would be premature to describe either system as an autonomous scientist. That said, these systems are doing something qualitatively different from what we normally think scientific software is supposed to do.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>For most of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-021-00075-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">modern computing era<\/a>, machines occupied a fairly clear place within science. The original promise of computers was that they were able to calculate much faster than humans and store and access vastly more reservoirs of information. With simulation modeling, we were also able to simulate complicated systems and and detect patterns That are too complicated for humans to detect in the first place. With the widespread adoption of machine learning for predictive modeling in the sciences, one could still make the argument that human scientists are deciding what problems are worth solving and how the results should be interpreted. Systems that generate hypotheses Make things more complicated. Consider a computer system that calculates the consequences of a scientific idea is still recognizably an instrument. Let&#8217;s contrast it with the system that proposes the idea itself. At this point, it&#8217;s starting to look more like a scientist because, traditionally, hypothesis formation is the purview of the human scientist.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s something ironic in this arrangement if you think about it. Science fiction imagined that advancements in computing and AI will one day free humans from the drudgery of physical work. If these trends continue, then we may end up with an opposite arrangement. Imagine a world where there&#8217;s a machine, an AI model that searches the literature and generates a hypothesis. Based on the hypothesis, it recommends certain experiments be done. It would then gather the data from the experiments, interpret it, and suggest conclusions. The human scientists are then left to just do the experiments. As strange as that sounds, there are even more parts of this process which could be automated. The next step would be automated laboratories, many of which already exist, but in this imagined near future, they will be tightly coupled with the hypothesis generation and experimentation process. This is not to say that scientists will disappear. However, how science is done will greatly change.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s consider a scenario where there is an AI system whose task is to develop a vaccine. It searches the complete storehouse of human knowledge and all the relevant data available to it, and automates experimentation. When the additional data comes in, it generates new hypotheses and does additional experimentation. Eventually, it arrives at a candidate vaccine, which is then tested in animals. Afterwards, that is extended and tested in humans, and it seems to work. Now also imagine: what if the human scientists are not able to give a satisfactory explanation of how the system arrived at the vaccine? So now the question is: is this really science that we are doing anymore? This scenario is actually not as strange as it seems. Consider how big research is done even now. For many large projects, it&#8217;s safe to say that no individual person understands it in its entirety. Think about climate models and particle physics simulations. The complexity of these models far exceeds the grasp of any single scientist. Also, consider a physician that prescribes a drug. It would be safe to say that, in most cases, the physician does not really understand the manufacturing process, and the statistical analysis and molecular interactions That makes the drug feasible. .<\/p>\n<p>Modern science works because <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pdcnet.org\/pdc\/bvdb.nsf\/purchase26?openform&amp;fp=jphil&amp;id=jphil_1985_0082_0007_0335_0349\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">understanding <em>is<\/em> distributed<\/a>. One person understands the assay, another understands the statistical method, and another knows the instrumentation. Scientific institutions allow us to rely on this division of labor. Peer review, replication, professional specialization, and scientific reputation all help create trust between people who cannot independently verify everything they use. The potential risk that we may be seeing here is that there may be parts of this process which cease to be understandable to humans at all. Thus, a machine could arrive at a reliable result through an inferential path involving an enormous number of interacting variables, simulations, model calls, searches, and intermediate representations. We might be able to test the output without being able to reconstruct the route that produced it. It may be tempting. to treat this as a philosophical luxury. If a drug works, does it really matter whether anybody understands the route by which it was discovered? If a model predicts a hurricane accurately, the people in its path would presumably prefer a correct warning to an elegant explanation. Engineering has always tolerated a certain amount of pragmatism, and scientists themselves frequently use tools whose inner workings they do not fully understand.<\/p>\n<p>Modern Science has historically offered not only successful prediction but its great achievements have often been acts of compression. This has often involved turning a bewildering variety of observations into ideas that human beings could carry around in their heads. Think about Newton connected the falling of an apple with the motion of the Moon. Darwin provided a mechanism by which the apparent design of living things could arise Through the trial-and-error process of evolution . Germ theory reorganized an enormous range of diseases around the idea of microorganisms. That kind of understanding has practical value as well. Explanations travel. They allow scientists to notice analogies between fields, to see when an idea might apply somewhere unexpected. One way to think about it is that a prediction might tell us what will happen given certain data. An explanation, on the other hand, gives us something to think with. I think this is where Chiang\u2019s story seems especially perceptive. He did not imagine that ordinary scientists would simply become useless Rather, the task of the human scientist now becomes to make things intelligible again.<\/p>\n<p>The scientist in such a world would not merely be a diminished version of the scientist we know today. The role might become, in part, one of epistemic custodianship: preserving the connection between discovery and understanding. There is also an additional task that scientific automation does not make disappear, which is deciding what is worth knowing. Nature contains an effectively unlimited number of true facts. Science has never been the indiscriminate collection of all of them. We investigate certain questions because people have diseases, because particular phenomena puzzle us, because some problems appear beautiful etc. A sufficiently powerful machine could be extraordinarily productive while pursuing questions that human beings find utterly uninteresting. Scientific importance is not a property that can always be read directly from the natural world. It reflects human priorities, needs, aesthetics, and values. Even a system vastly better than us at solving scientific problems would still require some account of which problems ought to matter.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s another way to think about this scenario: For most of the history of science, obtaining knowledge from nature was the difficult part. Ted Chiang imagined a world in which knowledge had become plentiful and understanding had become the bottleneck. There is still a great distance between current <a href=\"https:\/\/collimateur.uqam.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2025\/03\/2502.18864v1.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AI co-scientist systems<\/a> and Chiang\u2019s metahumans. Today\u2019s AI agents are brittle, error-prone, dependent on human knowledge, and nowhere close to constituting a parallel civilization of scientific intellects. It would be easy to mistake an interesting early development for something resembling what <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/35014679\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ted Chiang describes<\/a>. That said, Chiang\u2019s story feels newly useful because it directs our attention away from the usual question of whether machines will replace scientists. A stranger possibility is that science continues as it is, the human scientists will remain employed. However, an increasing fraction of discovery takes place somewhere beyond the frontier of ordinary human comprehension. Suppose if that happens then the task of the scientists will not simply be to keep making discoveries but it will be to keep discovery connected to understanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad I recall reading a short piece of fiction as a high school student at the turn of the millenium called Catching Crumbs from the Table. It was written by Ted Chiang and later republished under the title The Evolution of Human Science. Chiang imagined a future in which genetically enhanced metahumans&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[7271,214,6095,3472,7270,7272,7273],"class_list":["post-311468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","tag-ai-scientists","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-automation","tag-philosophy-of-science","tag-scientific-discovery","tag-scientific-understanding","tag-ted-chiang","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311468"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311476,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311468\/revisions\/311476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311326,"date":"2026-09-20T05:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T09:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311326"},"modified":"2026-09-14T04:08:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T08:08:43","slug":"where-the-lost-cause-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/where-the-lost-cause-won.html","title":{"rendered":"Where the Lost Cause Won"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Pawe\u0142 Ska\u0142a-Pi\u0119ko\u015b<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-311329\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4-360x203.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"203\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4-360x203.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4-1536x864.png 1536w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/esej4.png 1672w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>The Polish noble republic as a laboratory for anyone who wants to imagine America under the Confederacy; and why a liberal owes no apology to those who call privilege freedom<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In 1770, Pitt the Elder warned the House of Lords that England&#8217;s freeholders risked being <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/The_case_of_John_Wilkes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland&#8221;<\/a>. Two years later, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.english-heritage.org.uk\/visit\/places\/kenwood\/history-stories-kenwood\/somerset-case\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Somerset&#8217;s case<\/a>, the Court of King&#8217;s Bench ruled that an enslaved man brought to England could not be carried out of it by force.<\/p>\n<p>In America in 1770 soldiers fired into a crowd in Boston, and in Virginia two fifths of the population lived in slavery. In Poland, peasants on private estates had long lacked dependable royal protection in disputes with their own lords. Their state had two years left before the first cut: in 1772 Russia, Prussia and Austria took nearly a third of its territory; further partitions in 1793 and 1795 erased the state for a hundred and twenty-three years. Polish memory calls this the partitions, and they are to it what the Civil War is to Americans: the date from which everything is counted. That story hides an older division.<\/p>\n<p>Who freed Poland&#8217;s peasants, the majority of its population? Three foreign monarchies, each in its own time; their own state tried at the very end and ran out of time. I am not defending the partitions. I am defending a question to which Polish memory has had a ready answer for two hundred years, and the readiness is the problem.<\/p>\n<p>The familiar national story fits in three words: greatness, fall, return. Poland was once one of the largest states in Europe, then absent from the map for a hundred and twenty-three years, and is today a mid-sized member of the European Union whose material problems are slowly becoming ordinary European ones. The cultural problems do not appear in that story, and they have stayed; they are the same age as the greatness, and they have the same cause.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the republic of the nobility, is the closest record that exists of what the South would have looked like had it never needed to leave the Union, because it had already won. For three centuries one group, the szlachta, a broad hereditary noble class rather than just a titled aristocracy, enjoyed a liberty that was enormous, jealously guarded and resting in large part on the forced labour of the peasantry; there was no North to arrive with an army; and we know how it ended. What a victorious Confederacy would have looked like, nobody knows; what a ruling class that has won and no longer has to listen to anyone does to a country, we know.<\/p>\n<p>Politically, I am a child of 1989, a liberal and a defender of Poland&#8217;s transformation; from that position I will tell my country&#8217;s history in the wrong order, because it has been told in the right one long enough. The question that leads me through it: what happens to a community when the liberation of part of its members cannot be told as that community&#8217;s own victory?<\/p>\n<p><strong>The manor gate<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At the turn of the sixteenth century, Poland&#8217;s nobility was tightening its control over the peasantry. <a href=\"https:\/\/wilanow-palac.pl\/pasaz-wiedzy\/ustroj-sadow-prawo-wiejskie\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Restrictions on leaving the village and the growth of the lord&#8217;s judicial authority<\/a> deepened that dependence. On private estates, disputes between peasants and their lords generally fell under seigneurial jurisdiction: courts controlled by the landowner. <a href=\"https:\/\/rl-ihpan.edu.pl\/images\/2025-Tom11\/03_Golaszewski.pdf#page=29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Peasants retained legal rights and could sometimes reach other courts<\/a>. But there was no general, dependable route to protection against their own lord. For much of the rural population, the state&#8217;s protection too often ended at the manor gate.<\/p>\n<p>The contrast is clearest on royal estates. Their peasants could <a href=\"https:\/\/agad.gov.pl\/inwentarze\/r6.xml\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bring complaints against royal estate administrators before the referendary court<\/a>. The Commonwealth therefore had a way to hear a peasant&#8217;s case against someone stronger. What it failed to provide was comparable, dependable protection against a private lord. The state was too weak to impose it on its own nobility, or did not wish to be strong; from the peasant&#8217;s point of view, the difference scarcely mattered.<\/p>\n<p>The Constitution of 1787 began with &#8220;We the People&#8221;, yet its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/founding-docs\/constitution-transcript\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fugitive slave clause<\/a> required people who escaped slavery into another state to be returned on their enslaver&#8217;s claim. The law did not simply stop at the plantation gate. It reached beyond it to enforce the master&#8217;s power.<\/p>\n<p>The peasant was not the only one left outside the gate. The nobility closed the towns as well: townsmen&#8217;s right to buy landed estates was restricted, merchants&#8217; foreign trade was curtailed, and a nobleman who took up a town trade risked losing his nobility. The Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791 finally extended the rights of townsmen, four years before the end of the state. In the name of liberty it was overthrown by <a href=\"https:\/\/zpe.gov.pl\/watek\/LPiODs834k\/4\/a\/reakcja-na-reformy-sejmu-wielkiego-targowica-i-ii-rozbior-polski\/DsEiiR8nL\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Confederation of Targowica<\/a>, a league of magnates whose founding act was drafted in St Petersburg and which brought in the Russian army to help.<\/p>\n<p>South Carolina&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/avalon.law.yale.edu\/19th_century\/csa_scarsec.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1860 declaration of secession<\/a> offered a comparable argument: Northern states were violating Southern rights by obstructing the return of people who had escaped slavery. Targowica&#8217;s leaders defended noble power against constitutional reform; South Carolina&#8217;s secessionists defended slaveholders&#8217; power against interference. In both cases, a ruling group presented limits on its power over others as an assault on its own liberty.<\/p>\n<p>I will call this the internal partition: the division of the country into those who had a state and those for whom the state was the manor. It was older than the three partitions the world knows, and it lasted longer. I think it was this partition, more than those, that decided what kind of nation would come out of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Three uniforms<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Since the Commonwealth did not lift the yoke from the peasant, someone else did, in stages and in foreign uniforms: Austrian, Russian, Prussian. Poland&#8217;s own attempts came late. In 1794 Ko\u015bciuszko cut the peasant&#8217;s labour dues and <a href=\"https:\/\/polishfreedom.pl\/uniwersal-polaniecki\/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">appointed overseers to whom a peasant could complain<\/a>, but gave him no land, and his state had a year left. In <a href=\"https:\/\/founders.archives.gov\/documents\/Jefferson\/01-30-02-0230\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">his American will<\/a> he left his estate in the United States to buy and free enslaved people; Jefferson declined to execute it, the litigation dragged on into the 1850s, and the will freed no one.<\/p>\n<p>The underground government of the 1863 uprising against Russia abolished labour dues by decree and granted the peasants land; in 1864 the tsar introduced his own land reform, competing with the insurgents&#8217; promise and outbidding it, so that the peasant would remember who had given him the land. In Galicia in 1848 Polish circles were preparing to abolish serfdom; the Austrian governor pre-empted them. Polish reforms came late and had no time to take hold, and the partitioning powers carried them out in the Poles&#8217; stead, in Galicia and in Russian Poland with an explicit calculation: that liberation should not bear a Polish name.<\/p>\n<p>The partitioning power gave the peasant something more than land. The imperial administration, to which a Galician peasant could bring a complaint against the manor, offered protection beyond the private lord&#8217;s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n<p>That is why 1846 is not a riddle. When the Galician nobility rose for Poland, the peasants killed more than a thousand people from the manors, and they did it out of loyalty to the emperor. Not out of blindness; out of a calculation the imperial administration had helped them make: Austrian officials took their complaints, and Poland was the name of the owner.<\/p>\n<p>Jan S\u0142omka, a peasant village headman, recalled in <a href=\"https:\/\/wolnelektury.pl\/katalog\/lektura\/slomka-pamietniki-wloscianina-od-panszczyzny-do-dni-dzisiejszych.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">his memoirs<\/a> that in his youth the peasants around him used the local name Mazurs rather than calling themselves Poles, and that he came to feel Polish only when he began reading books and newspapers. In his village the word Pole meant a gentleman. But S\u0142omka did not only write this down; his generation used Austrian schools and Austrian elections to found a party of its own and send its own deputies to Vienna.<\/p>\n<p>Under the partitions it stopped being certain what Poland was, who counted as a Pole and what the word meant. A slow levelling of the concept began, and it was completed only in post-war Poland, where peasant children filled the cities and the offices and the word &#8220;Pole&#8221; no longer belonged to a single social class. That same Poland did not abolish the manor&#8217;s social logic; it carried out a forcible <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/when-liberalism-meets-a-person-what-freedom-alone-fails-to-see.html\">redistribution of narcissism<\/a>: new groups gained the privilege of looking down on someone else. The nation that voted in <a href=\"https:\/\/biblioteka.sejm.gov.pl\/file\/czas_przelomu\/m_pl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">its first post-independence parliamentary election in 1919<\/a> and in 1989 is the child of that uncertainty, not of the noble republic; it was born when the nobility lost its monopoly on the word &#8220;Pole&#8221;, and the monopoly was taken from it by the partitioning powers and by the peasants themselves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Virginia, second act<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Edmund Morgan described a Virginia where the freedom of the free stood on the labour of the enslaved, and where the planter elite bought the peace of poor whites by giving them something cheaper than bread: somebody lower.<\/p>\n<p>An American hears in the word bondage the trade in human beings and a caste marked by skin, and rightly: serfdom was not the same system. Peasants were traded too, even without land, but their children carried no mark on their faces; the nobility had to invent its own distinctness, and it did, deriving itself from the Sarmatians and the peasant from Ham, the same Ham the Southern pulpit would later put to work. So the comparison does not carry the slave ship or the racial caste. It carries three things: a private jurisdiction in which the owner decides whether a complaint leaves the gate at all; the freedom of some resting on the forced labour of others; and the refusal of protection in a polity that knew what protection was.<\/p>\n<p>In America the enslaved were freed by an army the South still calls an invader on its monuments; from the planter&#8217;s point of view it was an occupation, and he called it one. And when, as part of a political compromise, the troops were withdrawn, the South did what the Polish nobility would have done had it regained its state: it restored the internal partition under a new name and kept it for nearly a century. A Black American received his freedom from Washington the way a Polish peasant received it from Vienna: from outside, from someone his master called a stranger; and like the Polish peasant he did not wait: within a few years of the war he sat in state legislatures and in Congress, until that was taken from him.<\/p>\n<p>The myth of the Lost Cause did in the South the same work that the martyrology of the partitions did in Poland: it commemorated an elite&#8217;s loss of power as everyone&#8217;s loss of a homeland and pushed the internal partition beyond the horizon of memory. The partitions were a wrong done to the peasant as well, differently in each partition: foreign conscription, a foreign language in court. But the dominant voice in telling that wrong was taken by one group, and in that sense, not in 1795 but later, in memory, the Lost Cause won in Poland.<\/p>\n<p>The Polish myth admitted the peasant most readily as a scythe-bearer: a peasant with a scythe blade remounted upright as a pike, in 1794, marching behind Ko\u015bciuszko for the gentleman&#8217;s Poland. In Fort Mill, South Carolina, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.si.edu\/object\/faithful-slaves-sculpture:siris_ari_321136\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a monument to &#8220;faithful slaves&#8221;<\/a> shows a Black man resting with a harvesting tool in his hand: a tool of labour, not a weapon. In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, the enslaved rebels Nat Turner and Gabriel <a href=\"https:\/\/mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov\/lincoln\/monument.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">were given a place on a pedestal only in 2021<\/a>, two weeks after Lee came down from Monument Avenue.<\/p>\n<p>The larger difference: America had a North. The liberator came from the same country; the internal partition was rebuilt openly, in law, and later openly dismantled, and the Lost Cause had to fight for memory against a rival. Poland had no North: the liberator was foreign, serfdom ceased to be law, but the manor survived in property and in custom, in the habit of measuring one&#8217;s own dignity by the distance to somebody lower. That is why in Poland memory won. The memory of the nobility became the memory of the nation: the canon was written by authors from the nobility, the uprisings were led by the nobility, and in the dominant story the question of who had actually possessed that independence was pushed to the margin.<\/p>\n<p>This inheritance may also explain why the nationalist right can so readily cast domestic critics as serving foreign interests. Once defending the nation means defending its inherited image, naming a wrong committed at home can be made to sound like an attack from abroad. The critic has to prove that they belong before anyone needs to answer what they have said.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Who hears the appeal<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>These histories share a constitutional pattern. A state that knows what protection is stops it at the threshold of a private jurisdiction: the manor&#8217;s, the plantation&#8217;s. The questions are four, the same ones I put to every institution in my previous essay: can you contest the category you have been assigned; must the institution give reasons; does a path of correction exist; can you actually use it? Neither the manor nor the plantation offered <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nps.gov\/jeff\/learn\/historyculture\/freedom-suits.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a general, dependable right to challenge the owner&#8217;s power<\/a>. The contemporary platform, which sets the rule itself, measures the deviation itself and hears the appeal itself, looks like their heir; <a href=\"https:\/\/eur-lex.europa.eu\/eli\/reg\/2022\/2065\/oj\/eng\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">European regulation<\/a> is opening routes to independent review; the danger is real.<\/p>\n<p>A polity that knows what independent recourse is and refuses it inside private property always ends the same way: people go looking among strangers for an authority that will hear them. The Galician peasant sought protection from Austrian officials; the freedman from the federal army. After 2015, Polish citizens looked for it to <a href=\"https:\/\/eur-lex.europa.eu\/case\/EN\/C_791_19\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the EU&#8217;s Court of Justice in Luxembourg<\/a>, as a right-wing government brought the Constitutional Tribunal and the National Council of the Judiciary, which nominates judges, under political control. <a href=\"https:\/\/trybunal.gov.pl\/postepowanie-i-orzeczenia\/wyroki\/art\/11662-ocena-zgodnosci-z-konstytucja-rp-wybranych-przepisow-traktatu-o-unii-europejskiej\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The captured tribunal replied<\/a> that in this matter European law must yield to the Polish constitution.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the Polish right speaks of Brussels in the vocabulary of the partitions, and there is more truth in that language than its authors suspect: the EU court is to the Polish citizen what the Austrian administration was to the Galician peasant, an authority outside the arrangement in which the lord rules; not foreign, though, in the sense that the partitioning powers were foreign, because Poland entered it of its own will and helps to make it.<\/p>\n<p>The emperor, however, was not an accountable authority; he was a protector. He had offices and rules, but he heard the peasant because he wanted to weaken the lord. Washington heard the freedman for similar reasons and after 1877 stopped hearing him; the freedman had rights on paper but was losing the tools to enforce them.<\/p>\n<p>A protector protects as long as it suits him. An accountable institution protects through rules I can invoke against it too, and qualifies as such only when those rules work in practice.<\/p>\n<p>The European Union qualifies as an accountable institution only as long as its decisions can actually be challenged. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbos.pl\/PL\/publikacje\/fokusy\/pliki\/2025\/fk_009_2025.pdf#page=7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a 2025 qualitative study by CBOS<\/a>, a Polish public opinion research centre, farmers described growing bureaucracy and controls as a loss of autonomy. That is a warning. Where the people affected have no usable way to challenge a decision, the EU acts as a protector rather than an accountable institution, and my criterion makes no exception for it. An authority that can be challenged is better than a lord who cannot; and Polish liberalism has a reflex of treating its own footing in Europe as an embarrassing prosthesis rather than as an independent authority above its own manor.<\/p>\n<p><strong>No apology<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I return to Targowica. The privileged, when a privilege is being taken from them, usually experience it as an assault on liberty. Calhoun defended slavery as a condition of liberty. Poland&#8217;s new right speaks today in the language of free markets and personal freedom, and in that language it offers a project whose effect would be to curtail the full personhood of women, minorities and nonbelievers.<\/p>\n<p>A liberal who faces that language in a country like mine has a reflex of apologising, and it comes from conditions, not from character. Where liberal norms are not the norm, where an independent judiciary, a secular school and equality before the law are the achievement of a single generation rather than the air one breathes, the liberal speaks a language most people did not learn at home. Every sentence of his requires a justification, while the sentences of the right require none. Out of that asymmetry the apologising is born: for reforms made in his language, and for being right about things the majority sees differently.<\/p>\n<p>A familiar American episode is instructive for the opposite reason. In September 2016, Hillary Clinton used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/politics\/clinton-deplorables-comment-generalistic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;basket of deplorables&#8221;<\/a> for &#8220;half&#8221; of Donald Trump&#8217;s supporters, citing racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry. She <a href=\"https:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/documents\/statement-from-hillary-clinton-18\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">regretted saying &#8220;half&#8221; the next day<\/a> but stood by her criticism of racist rhetoric. That is the right distinction: correct an overgeneralisation without apologising for opposing prejudice.<\/p>\n<p>The wrongs done in the name of reforms are another matter. There, apology alone is cheap: it is the manor&#8217;s guilt without the loss of the manor. The voice of the losers is preserved in an archive and in a paragraph about social costs, and the rule does not move by a millimetre. An apology does not replace the repair of the rules that produced the harm.<\/p>\n<p>To defend liberal principles you have to be able to get angry. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.debates.org\/voter-education\/debate-transcripts\/october-13-1988-debate-transcript\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Dukakis, asked in 1988<\/a> whether he would support the death penalty for a man who raped and murdered his wife, calmly said no and moved on to the statistics. He lost that scene not because he opposed the death penalty but because he could not show how reason passes through anger, love and the reflex of defence without losing its rationality. A liberalism that has extinguished in itself the reflex that something is unacceptable looks, to the heirs of the manor and the heirs of the plantation, like the manor: educated, and somebody else&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>The anger I want has two sides, tenderness and vigilance; in Polish the two words, czu\u0142o\u015b\u0107 and czujno\u015b\u0107, are nearly one, and the kinship is not only in the sound. Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish Nobel laureate in literature, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/literature\/2018\/tokarczuk\/lecture\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">called tenderness the most modest form of love in her Nobel lecture<\/a>; Constant, two centuries earlier, called vigilance the price the moderns pay for their liberty. Tenderness without vigilance can be walked around; vigilance without tenderness hardens into a shell.<\/p>\n<p>And one must be able not to apologise when fighting a privilege, and to be ashamed when defending one&#8217;s own. Privilege in this essay means what the Latin privilegium meant: a special law for one person or one social class, an exemption from the rule that binds everyone else. The Commonwealth&#8217;s unequal access to legal protection shows privilege at work: the law supplied a check on the king&#8217;s administrators without giving peasants comparable protection against private lords.<\/p>\n<p>A difference between people is not yet an injustice, and a hierarchy that serves a function and carries responsibility is not an evil. An advantage is admissible as long as it can be justified by a function, as long as it can be lost and as long as it can be challenged; it becomes a privilege on the day it stops transmitting anything but itself and buys itself an exemption from those conditions.<\/p>\n<p>A judge&#8217;s authority can protect someone weaker. The royal courts offered such protection to peasants on the king&#8217;s estates, but not on equal terms to those whose lord was a nobleman. Jim Crow drew a different barrier, through race, between people and the protection the law promised them. In each case, legal barriers made the power of one group harder for another to challenge. Whoever dismantles independent courts or other avenues of redress to preserve that privilege should meet resistance within the law.<\/p>\n<p>So I am not arguing for identical roles or outcomes; I am arguing for equal standing as persons in the face of unequal competence. I am arguing for an advantage that is fair: one that has to go on being earned, that a function justifies and that can be challenged. And I owe no apology to anyone who calls his own privilege freedom.<\/p>\n<p>The Commonwealth had a tribunal for peasants on royal estates, while those under private lords had no equivalent general right to that protection. America, after the Reconstruction amendments, had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/milestone-documents\/14th-amendment\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a promise of equal protection written into its Constitution<\/a>, yet across the South discriminatory laws and violence stood between Black citizens and its fulfilment.<\/p>\n<p>In Columbia, North Carolina, a 1902 monument to a Confederate soldier stands today in front of the county courthouse, with the inscription &#8220;In appreciation of our faithful slaves&#8221;. Four Black plaintiffs from a local citizens&#8217; group brought a lawsuit in 2024, <a href=\"https:\/\/emancipatenc.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/CCTC-v.-Tyrrell-Co.-Bd.-of-Commrs-File-Stamped-Copy.pdf#page=26\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">initially seeking the monument&#8217;s removal<\/a>. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.carolinajournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/tyrell-monument-050725-courtorder.pdf#page=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Their amended complaint narrowed the demand<\/a> to removing or covering the six-word inscription. They used the court against what stands in front of the court, and in July 2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/albemarleobserver.news\/2026\/07\/16\/tyrrell-countys-statues-offending-phrase-covered-with-steel-plate\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the county covered the words with a metal plate<\/a>. They had made the county change how it publicly remembered slavery.<\/p>\n<p>Liberal democracy wins here in its most infuriating form. The inscription is covered; the soldier still stands. There is something here for everyone to resent, and the compromise takes a perversely stable shape.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>On method<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I developed this essay in Polish with support from Anthropic&#8217;s Claude Fable 5.1 and OpenAI&#8217;s ChatGPT (GPT-6 Astra), the latter configured for my personalized project architecture. I used them to challenge the argument, explore counterarguments, support fact-checking and source comparison. They also helped transcreate the text into English and refine its structure and phrasing. I selected, rejected and revised the suggestions; the final argument, editorial decisions and responsibility for publication are mine.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Pawe\u0142 Ska\u0142a-Pi\u0119ko\u015b The Polish noble republic as a laboratory for anyone who wants to imagine America under the Confederacy; and why a liberal owes no apology to those who call privilege freedom In 1770, Pitt the Elder warned the House of Lords that England&#8217;s freeholders risked being &#8220;reduced to a condition baser than the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1975,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1975"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311326"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311430,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311326\/revisions\/311430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311362,"date":"2026-09-20T04:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T08:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311362"},"modified":"2026-09-14T04:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T08:05:11","slug":"the-underground-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-underground-scene.html","title":{"rendered":"The Underground Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Mike O&#8217;Brien<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-311366\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/de-re-metallica-illustration.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" height=\"589\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/de-re-metallica-illustration.jpg 864w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/de-re-metallica-illustration-214x360.jpg 214w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/de-re-metallica-illustration-608x1024.jpg 608w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/de-re-metallica-illustration-768x1292.jpg 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/de-re-metallica-illustration-178x300.jpg 178w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It takes me a long time to finish books. The last one I finished was published about a century ago, or four and a half centuries ago, depending on how you figure it. In my defence, it was very dense, and very long, and packed with voluminous footnotes in such small font that I was obliged, for the first time in my life, to wield reading glasses to decipher the tiny spacklings of ink (known colloquially as \u201cfly shit\u201d). But, as a rabbit-hole-diving lay reader of technical arcana, it was worth the effort.<\/p>\n<p><i>De Re Metallica<\/i> is a treatise that attempts to collect and systematically arrange all surviving information on mining and metallurgical industry available in its time, that time being the early to middle sixteenth century. Published in 1556, it was written over the course of 30 years by Georg Agricola, a scholar and physician. His works were published in Latin, as was usual at the time, so I read the 1912 English translation by Herbert Hoover (yes, that Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States and namesake of the Hoover Dam. He wasn\u2019t president yet, so I guess he had some free time). Hoover was at the time a very successful and esteemed mining engineer, whose lectures at Columbia and Stanford had already been published as a standard textbook.<\/p>\n<p>(Before going any further, I would like to share a mining joke. A man walks into an employment office and says \u201cI\u2019d like to get a job in the mining industry\u201d. The clerk says, \u201cAlright, we currently have openings in a copper mine and in an iron mine, which would you prefer?\u201d. \u201cEither ore\u201d, the man replies.)<\/p>\n<p>(You\u2019re welcome.)<\/p>\n<p>Agricola\u2019s book is a real soup-to-nuts overview of everything involved in the extraction and processing of mined materials, from choosing where to dig all the way to separating and purifying metals for sale. The accompanying woodcut illustrations are indispensable, at least to this reader, for elucidating long passages describing three-dimensional objects in classical measurement units (e.g. \u201cto this lower beam is affixed a second beam, transverse to the first, measuring six feet and two hands length and two hands and two digits height and breadth, at such distance from the main wall that a man may pass between them without great difficulty\u201d. I just made that up, but it gives a fair impression.) They also feature the occasional dog, which is nice. <!--more-->I\u2019ve done enough reading and watching of similar old technology (Eric Sloane\u2019s books on early American colonial tools and building, and many articles and videos on steel making) to scaffold the information in Agricola\u2019s writing somewhat, though a reader with zero prior knowledge would probably do alright with the occasional Wikipedia search.<\/p>\n<p>I do admit to skimming some of the more exhausting sections, like Book XI which is almost entirely devoted to describing all the minutely different ways in which people from this or that locality go about melting silver and copper apart. Agricola\u2019s dedication to completeness often leads to long enumerations that a more lay-oriented text would summarize. However, a \u201cgood enough\u201d summation of technical details, employed to actually build mining and refining works, could have resulted in many (more) dead workers and a few (more) incinerated towns, so let\u2019s not begrudge Agricola\u2019s attention to detail.<\/p>\n<p>The work is divided thus (I am giving you an index that does not exist in the front matter, so you\u2019re welcome again.) Book I defends the honour of mining as reputable and skilled work. Book II describes the qualities of a good miner, and how to choose good locations for mining operations. Book III describes the shape and three-dimensional orientation of underground deposits (\u201cveins\u201d etc.) relative to the surrounding terrain. Book IV describes the operational, territorial and legal-political administration of mining. Book V describes the digging and reinforcement of mine shafts. Book VI describes the implements and machines used by miners. Book VII describes the tools and methods used by assayers to assess the nature and quality of the material produced by the mines. Book VIII describes the methods and equipment used to mechanically separate and refine precious material (crushing, roasting, washing, etc.). Book IX describes the smelting of metals from ores. Book X describes the refinement and separation of smelted metals (e.g. separating gold-silver alloys). Book XI further describes the separation of smelted metals, specifically copper-silver alloys. Book XII describes the collection and preparation of mineral \u201cjuices\u201d such as alum, vitriol, and bitumen.<\/p>\n<p>Of these, I was most struck by Books VI and VIII, the former featuring surprisingly (to me) refined and elaborate machines for circulating air and removing water from the mines, as well as for bringing miners and materials in and out of the mines via vertical shafts. It should be obvious, I suppose, that such devices would be necessary to avoid killing too many miners (by the standards of the day), or to reach any but the most readily accessible deposits in well-exploited areas. Just as striking as the mechanical ingenuity of these devices is the degree of automation by which some of them were operated, turned by beasts and men where necessary but often too by continuous water and wind power. Once you have a machine that runs continuously by a spinning shaft, you can adapt it to be spun by steam power, electric motor, harnessed unicorns, etc., and the future rolls out before you in iterative steps (As the torque, speed and running time increases, you of course must also iterate better bearing and linkage technologies to keep pace.) The scale, in terms many identical machines running in parallel, also surprised me. Book VIII describes ore-crushing machines (nine-foot-long vertical posts with iron \u201cshoes\u201d at the bottom, lifted and dropped by cams on a wheel-driven shaft) arranged fifteen in number in some operations. This cam-driven water-powered arrangement was also used to operate bellows, some seemingly the size of a small car, feeding rows of charcoal smelting furnaces. One can imagine how much of this machinery could fit within the foundations of ruined Roman works, and understand where all that steel and bronze came from.<\/p>\n<p>The scale of operations described also made me think of the scale of their environmental impact. The extensive use of mercury (the fumes of which, Agricola notes, \u201cloosens the teeth\u201d) and lead is one matter (especially given how much was lost in smoke and vapour with imperfectly sealed furnaces). Another matter is the use of charcoal as fuel. You can do a lot with charcoal (it can exceed 1200 degrees Celsius with a forced air supply), including melting iron ore into brittle cast iron, and then decarburizing it (removing the excess carbon by combining it with oxygen) into workable wrought iron, which brings you pretty close to nineteenth century steel manufacture. But it\u2019s an incredibly energy-inefficient and weigh-inefficient fuel, and you need to use a lot of it. It weighs about a quarter as much as the wood from which it was made, and gases off relatively huge quantities of hydrocarbon gases as you kinda-but-not-quite burn the wood to produce charcoal. Ideally you roast the wood with an external heat source in a low-oxygen environment, but practically it\u2019s much easier to cook it slowly in a pretty-well-closed vessel using the burning wood itself as the heat source. Copicing (growing trees which are periodically limbed and allowed to grow back) was a means of off-setting the deforestation caused by growing charcoal demand in Europe, but trees grow slower than economic demand and eventually fossil coal supplanted charcoal as a fuel source (though charcoal was still used for metallurgical purposes, as fossil coal contains too many impurities). It makes me wonder if the Industrial Revolution really started millennia earlier with charcoal, and what is commonly called the Industrial Revolution was really the Fossil Fuel Revolution, draped in valour stolen from earlier times.<\/p>\n<p>(Book XII, on mineral \u201cjuices\u201d, discusses bitumen, i.e. petroleum, only briefly, but Hoover adds a lengthy footnote on its occurrence and uses in the ancient world, noting among other things that the Egyptians used it for embalming and that \u201cmummy\u201d is derived from the Persian world for bitumen, <i>mumiai<\/i>. He adds dryly, \u201cThe plentiful occurrence of bitumen throughout Asia Minor, and particularly in the Valley of the Euphrates and in Persia, is the subject of innumerable references by writers from Herodotus <span style=\"font-family: Liberation Serif, serif;\">[<\/span>&#8230;<span style=\"font-family: Liberation Serif, serif;\">]<\/span> down to the author of the company prospectus of recent months\u201d.)<\/p>\n<p>Agricola was preceded by many ancient, Medieval and near contemporary authors. His principal classical sources were Aristotle and his disciple Theophrastus, who lived some eighteen centuries prior. Theophrastus was particularly important for his description of minerals, and of the touchstone and its use for estimating gold and silver content. (Touchstones were often garnet-containing coticule rocks, which I have mentioned in previous articles for their use as sharpening stones since pre-Roman times. Needles of gold-silver alloys with known ratios are rubbed against them, leaving a residual mark, which is compared to the residue left by rubbing gold and\/or silver of unknown content against the stone. Hence the metaphorical use of \u201ctouchstone\u201d for a standard of comparison.)<\/p>\n<p>Some two centuries or so later came Diodorus of Sicily, whose work Hoover describes as \u201ctraveller\u2019s notes\u201d (as so many ancient histories and compendia are), most useful for his accounts of Egyptian mining and British tin. (He deplored the misery and abuse under which the Egyptian miners were worked to death. Had modern country music existed then, one wonders if there would have been songs celebrating the rugged dignity of serving the pharaohs, performed between columns inscribed with the hieroglyphic symbols for \u201cMake Egypt Great Again, Again\u201d. Egypt is very, very old.)<\/p>\n<p>In the first century AD came the geographer Strabo, from whom Agricola drew descriptions of Spanish mining works, and the physician Dioscorides, who described the making of various medical preparation from mineral sources. Contemporaneously, the Roman author Pliny wrote his Natural History (which Hoover praises as encyclopedic, and not so bad accuracy-wise compared to other \u201ctravellers\u2019 tales\u201d accounts), drawing mostly on Greek writers, and from this work Agricola took most of his Latin terminology. (Hoover notes that Agricola\u2019s insistence on using Latin without resort to his native German made for rather unwieldy descriptions, which needed to be reverse-engineered in translation, since no Latin terms were readily available for more recent inventions and discoveries). Another first century Roman, the architect Vitruvius, provides some references to mining-related machinery and the chemical preparation of pigments.<\/p>\n<p>Among Medieval writers, from the tenth century Agricola drew on the Islamic Aristotelian Avicenna, mostly known for his monumental works on medicine, and Theophilus, a monk who wrote about the preparation of metal and glass-work (according to Hoover, mostly for ecclesiastical decoration). Also mention is Geber, apparently of disputed identity and origin (the literature at Hoover\u2019s time placed him somewhere between the seventh and thirteenth centuries) to whom are attributed detailed works on metallurgy and alchemy, including the preparation of various acids and salts, as well as methods to amalgamate and separate precious metals by melting. Hoover states that these works dominated alchemical studies for centuries.<\/p>\n<p>Hoover also mentions three important books contemporaneous to Agricola, written in vulgate, that were already circulating when the writing of <i>De Re Metallica<\/i> had begun. The first, <i>Eyn Nutzlich Bergbuchlin<\/i>, was written anonymously and is credited by Hoover as being the first work on mining geology. Agricola was apparently not a fan and would bring it up to denounce its errors. The second, <i>Probierbuchen,<\/i> was a sort of recipe book for mining and refining operations, more a reference for professionals than a treatise to educate laypeople, and was amended and republished many times. The third, Biringuccio\u2019s <i>De La Pirotechnia,<\/i> is for the most part dismissed by Hoover as an inferior fore-runner to Agricola\u2019s work on metallurgy.<\/p>\n<p>As for Agricola himself, he was born Georg Bauer in Saxony in 1494 (a year after the birth of Martin Luther, and forty years after Gutenberg\u2019s first pressing), with the Italian Renaissance underway but the German Renaissance (and the Reformation) still to come. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree around 1518 at Leipzig, then worked administering a municipal school (assisted by Johannes Forster, who was Luther\u2019s collaborator in translating the Bible into German), returning eight years later to Leipzig as a lecturer, and then two years later departing to Italy to study medicine, philosophy and natural sciences. He met Erasmus during these travels, who later became his friend and patron. In 1526 he returned to Germany and was later appointed town physician in a small city in Bohemia, surrounded by some of the most active mining areas in central Europe at that time. Agricola claimed that, when not attending to his medical duties, he spent his time visiting mining and smelting operations and talking to the most learned workers there, while also absorbing all he could from classical texts on related matters. From this experience he first produced <i>Bermanus <\/i>(published in 1530), a dialogue on mining and minerals whose titular interlocutor was based on one of the miners that Agricola had befriended, Lorenz Berman. After the publication of <i>Bermanus<\/i>, he left his physician job and spent three years travelling and studying mining, before taking up another physician job in Saxony in 1533 (the same year he published a book on weights and measures, no doubt an invaluable resource for readers of classical texts replete with pants-on-head-crazy measurement systems). He lived in Saxony for the rest of his days (dying in 1555, a year before the publication of <i>De Re Metallica<\/i>), during which time he wrote another eight published works related to mining, as well as several lost or unpublished works, including some on medicine and theology. (This all comes from Hoover\u2019s biography of Agricola in the introduction of the 1912 translation).<\/p>\n<p>Quite the life. Agricola lived at a time when the goal of being an expert in all available knowledge had just recently become unattainable (or rather, the pretense of such expertise became untenable). The movable-type printing press and the Renaissance expanded the wealth of knowledge to be mastered faster than any one person could digest it, and the time was approaching when the methods of commentary and interpretation of classical texts would be supplanted by the Scientific Revolution\u2019s methods of hypothesis-testing by means of physical experiments. Hoover the translator lay on the other side of that revolution, and of the Industrial\/Fossil Fuel Revolution, and would go on to witness the dawn of the Atomic, Computer and Space Ages before his death at ninety years old in 1964.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond its contents, <i>De Re Metallica<\/i> is fascinating (to me) as a cultural object. Containing references from ancient Egypt and the Old Testament, owing much of its Latin and Greek sources to Islamic scholars who preserved and interpreted classical texts, these texts being later recirculated by European printing houses mere decades before <i>De Re Metallica<\/i> was written, all historically re-framed by Hoover\u2019s modern scientific perspective, and finally made available to me by a publisher of public domain texts from the Internet (Andesite Press, in their \u201cScholar Select\u201d series). I remember, from my liberal arts studies in college, a series of philosophy textbooks entitled \u201cThe Great Conversation\u201d. Agricola\u2019s (and Hoover\u2019s) work here is very much part of its own great conversation, entwined with and older than Western-defined \u201cphilosophy\u201d, and in reading it I was made quite aware of the long continuity shared though millennia of common pursuit, from the earliest river-bed sifters up to modern advances in low-gravity magnetically-levitated induction smelting (i.e. metals suspended and internally heated into molten blobs by invisible electromagnetic fields, in space. Real Weyland-Yutani stuff. Thanks, YouTube algorithm. I was fairly sure the video was fake, but then I found an article about it in Nature.)<\/p>\n<p>This continuity through changing eras and media was even more poignantly evident when I goofed off from writing for a couple of hours to watch a YouTube channel entitled \u201cPrimitive Technology\u201d. This channel, started eleven years ago, features a man (unnamed, as far as I know) trying to create various tools and devices using only the materials around him (somewhere in northern Australia). If he wants to cut wood, he needs to make a stone axe. If he wants to haft that axe into a shaft, he needs to make rope out of plant fibres. You get the idea. In a few years he has gone from thatching grass huts to building iron-smelting charcoal furnaces super-charged by water-wheel-driven air blowers (the iron comes from reddish bacterial slime in a nearby stream, which concentrates trace iron present in the soil and water). He accomplishes this with clay, sticks, leaves, and a 21<sup>st<\/sup> century awareness of basic engineering and chemistry. So it is more \u201crecreational archaeology\u201d than \u201cexperimental archaeology\u201d in the technical sense, since he is not trying to determine how earlier generations of people did what they did, but rather trying to see what he can do within his freely chosen limitations. Nonetheless his accomplishments are impressive and quite strikingly illustrate the expansive space of technological possibility that humans (and other species with cumulative material cultures) have always inhabited. It\u2019s a shame he goes through so much charcoal though.<\/p>\n<p>A digital version of <i>De Re Metallica<\/i> can be found at Project Gutenberg:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/ebooks\/38015\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.gutenberg.org\/ebooks\/38015<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Nature article on levitating induction melting witchcraft can be found here:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41526-023-00281-4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.nature.com\/articles\/s41526-023-00281-4<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Primitive Technology YouTube channel can be found here:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@primitivetechnology9550\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.youtube.com\/@primitivetechnology9550<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Mike O&#8217;Brien It takes me a long time to finish books. The last one I finished was published about a century ago, or four and a half centuries ago, depending on how you figure it. In my defence, it was very dense, and very long, and packed with voluminous footnotes in such small font&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311362"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311428,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311362\/revisions\/311428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311617,"date":"2026-09-18T14:45:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T18:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311617"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:09:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:09:58","slug":"against-convenience-embracing-friction-in-an-age-of-endless-ease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/against-convenience-embracing-friction-in-an-age-of-endless-ease.html","title":{"rendered":"Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cheri Lucas Rowlands at <em>Longreads<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-311618\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-360x235.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"235\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-360x235.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-1024x670.png 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-768x502.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-1536x1005.png 1536w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-2048x1340.png 2048w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longreads-300x196.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>\u201cAccepting modern conveniences too often means accepting lower standards,\u201d writes Gabe Bullard in Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease. Lower standards for material goods, for labor conditions, for socializing, for art and entertainment. \u201cExperiences become transactions.\u201d Bullard isn\u2019t anti-technology. His argument, he writes, \u201cis an argument against how we use and are pushed to use technology.\u201d In his new book, he examines the conveniences that have crept into his life\u2014and likely yours\u2014and offers ideas for living with them more sustainably and equitably.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">In this excerpt from chapter seven, Bullard sets this scene: a physical world, the one we\u2019ve moved through for centuries, slowly reshaped by the virtual one we increasingly live in. Cars drive from one dot on a map to another, ferrying takeout to people at home on sofas. Food deliverers make some extra money. Businesses take orders both online and off. It appears easier, efficient. But Bullard examines the costs\u2014to the customer, to the driver, and to the restaurant owner, who still has to make sure the fries are crispy once they reach your door.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/longreads.com\/2026\/09\/15\/convenience-friction-eating-alone\/?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=midweek&amp;utm_campaign=55dbfdf182-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_09_09_03_45&amp;utm_source=Longreads+Newsletters&amp;utm_term=0_-55dbfdf182-711089871&amp;mc_cid=55dbfdf182&amp;mc_eid=52800c71ba\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cheri Lucas Rowlands at Longreads: \u201cAccepting modern conveniences too often means accepting lower standards,\u201d writes Gabe Bullard in Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease. Lower standards for material goods, for labor conditions, for socializing, for art and entertainment. \u201cExperiences become transactions.\u201d Bullard isn\u2019t anti-technology. His argument, he writes, \u201cis an argument&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311617"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311620,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311617\/revisions\/311620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311613,"date":"2026-09-18T13:45:41","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T17:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311613"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:00:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:00:20","slug":"beautiful-new-cat-species-is-first-to-be-named-in-a-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/beautiful-new-cat-species-is-first-to-be-named-in-a-century.html","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Simms at <em>New Scientist<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-311614\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/SEI_312819149-360x240.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/SEI_312819149-360x240.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/SEI_312819149-768x512.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/SEI_312819149-300x200.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/SEI_312819149.png 837w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>A new cat species has been scientifically described \u2013 the diminutive, spotted tilcayo from Bolivia.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Several species of small cat in the\u00a0<em>Leopardus<\/em>\u00a0genus live in South America, including the ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy\u2019s cat and the tiger cat or oncilla. The similar appearance of these nocturnal and hard-to-spot cats has made separating them into distinct species difficult.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">This is particularly true of tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat, and are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species,\u00a0<em>Leopardus<\/em>\u00a0<em>tigrinus<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2589847-beautiful-new-cat-species-is-first-to-be-named-in-a-century\/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&amp;utm_content=home&amp;utm_medium=RSS&amp;utm_source=NSNS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Simms at New Scientist: A new cat species has been scientifically described \u2013 the diminutive, spotted tilcayo from Bolivia. Several species of small cat in the\u00a0Leopardus\u00a0genus live in South America, including the ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy\u2019s cat and the tiger cat or oncilla. The similar appearance of these nocturnal and hard-to-spot cats has made&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311613"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311616,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311613\/revisions\/311616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311610,"date":"2026-09-18T12:45:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T16:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311610"},"modified":"2026-09-18T06:52:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T10:52:54","slug":"why-navier-stokes-pushes-math-and-physics-to-the-edge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/why-navier-stokes-pushes-math-and-physics-to-the-edge.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Navier-Stokes Pushes Math and Physics to the Edge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PsWR1rQEWYo?si=QM1kJranjRPVx0AX\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeff Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311610"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311612,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311610\/revisions\/311612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311647,"date":"2026-09-18T12:08:49","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T16:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311647"},"modified":"2026-09-18T10:10:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:10:04","slug":"leslie-a-fielder-v-william-f-buckley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/leslie-a-fielder-v-william-f-buckley.html","title":{"rendered":"Leslie A. Fielder V. William F. Buckley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Democratic Culture\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cDoGLBBC0BQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311648,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311647\/revisions\/311648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311607,"date":"2026-09-18T11:45:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T15:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311607"},"modified":"2026-09-18T06:51:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T10:51:21","slug":"rising-wealth-inequality-is-a-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/rising-wealth-inequality-is-a-problem.html","title":{"rendered":"Rising wealth inequality is a problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Editorial in <em>Nature<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-311608\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/d41586-026-02885-8_53713112-360x230.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"230\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/d41586-026-02885-8_53713112-360x230.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/d41586-026-02885-8_53713112-300x192.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/d41586-026-02885-8_53713112.png 767w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>Although income inequality has been falling, rising wealth inequality is a problem because it slows social mobility, feeds political polarization and erodes trust in institutions, say the article\u2019s authors, who include Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prizewinning economist at Columbia University in New York, and Winnie Byanyima, the head of the United Nations\u2019 agency to combat AIDS, in Geneva, Switzerland.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">It\u2019s concerning that so much is known about the causes and damaging consequences of severe inequality but that this knowledge has failed to prompt meaningful action from politicians. The authors\u2019 solution is for researchers to step up and be heard: they propose a body called the International Panel on Inequality (IPI). This would involve a group of around 40 specialists reviewing the research on inequality and putting the knowledge before policymakers.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The proposal for the panel has the backing of the UN and the African Union \u2014 along with more than 700 economists and other scholars of inequality.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-026-02885-8?utm_source=Live+Audience&amp;utm_campaign=bf54830c85-nature-briefing-daily-20260917&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_-33f35e09ea-51328812\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editorial in Nature: Although income inequality has been falling, rising wealth inequality is a problem because it slows social mobility, feeds political polarization and erodes trust in institutions, say the article\u2019s authors, who include Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prizewinning economist at Columbia University in New York, and Winnie Byanyima, the head of the United Nations\u2019 agency&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311609,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311607\/revisions\/311609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311643,"date":"2026-09-18T11:05:58","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T15:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311643"},"modified":"2026-09-18T10:08:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:08:14","slug":"love-and-literature-in-leslie-fiedlers-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/love-and-literature-in-leslie-fiedlers-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Love And Literature In Leslie Fiedler\u2019s America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Vivian Gornick at <em>The Nation<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-311644 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-229x360.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"229\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-229x360.webp 229w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-652x1024.webp 652w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-768x1207.webp 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-977x1536.webp 977w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-1303x2048.webp 1303w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final-191x300.webp 191w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Love_and_Death_cvr_final.webp 1575w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 229px) 100vw, 229px\" \/>We are living not only in the age of america but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.\u201d So begins <em>Love and Death in the American Novel<\/em>, Leslie Fiedler\u2019s 1960 work of literary criticism\u2014now being republished by New York Review Books\u2014in which he sets out to explain a few home truths about American culture through his Freudian analysis of the American novel. From that perspective, Fiedler begins, \u201cour novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent\u2026almost juvenile.\u201d \u201cWhy?\u201d the reader might ask, and the answer is not long in coming: because \u201cour great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\">Throughout much of the Western world, at least since the 18th century, Fiedler elaborates, love has remained the novel\u2019s central theme, much like \u201cbattle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama.\u201d In American fiction, however, for the female protagonist, love means getting married, while for the male protagonist, it means flight.<\/p>\n<p>more <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/culture\/leslie-fiedler-love-death-american-novel-gornick\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vivian Gornick at The Nation: We are living not only in the age of america but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.\u201d So begins Love and Death&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311643"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311646,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311643\/revisions\/311646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]