by Daniel Ranard

In the twentieth century, two important ideas arose with a nominal similarity: Einstein's theory of relativity on the one hand, and the idea of cultural or moral relativism on the other. It's probably fruitless to draw parallels between concepts that arose at distant ends of the intellectual spectrum—the hard sciences versus the humanistic disciplines—but sometimes you can't help yourself: "relativity" is right there in the name. In 1905, Einstein declared that certain facts about space and time are only true relative to a particular person or reference frame. In subsequent decades, philosophical "relativists" argued that questions of what is moral, what is true, or even what exists can only be answered relative to individuals or groups. Of course, Einstein's theory proved to be right, while the philosophical strand of relativism has evolved into a variety of contentious ideas.

First I will focus on Einstein's relativity, before touching on relativism in philosophy. To me, the story begins with two opposing accounts of what physics is. According to one account, physics provides an objective description of the world itself, like an encyclopedia entry on "The Universe." The encyclopedia tells you what stuff the world is made of and how that stuff behaves. This approach might be called the realist approach: physics presents objective facts about the real world.

Others prefer an "operationalist" account that focuses on the individual. By this account, physics is simply a collection of rules telling the individual what to expect in various circumstances. It's like a personal guidebook for experience: it predicts what you will observe when you follow various experimental procedures, like following a recipe in a laboratory. Unlike the realist's encyclopedia entry, the operationalist's guidebook does not attempt to describe the real world objectively. Instead, it prescribes how your experience should lead you to predict future experiences, using your own observations. Operationalists avoid referring to fundamental aspects of nature, like mass or length. To the operationalist, the length of an object is not some fundamental property – it's just a number you observe when you measure the object with a ruler, and any notion of length must be accompanied by well-specified procedure for how to measure it.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

There seems to be no end to biology’s explosive progress. Genomes can now be read, edited and rewritten with unprecedented scope, individual neurons can now be studied in both space and time, the dynamics of the spread of viruses and ecological populations can be studied using mathematical models, and vaccines for deadly diseases like HIV and Ebola seem to hold more promise than ever. They say that the twentieth century belonged to physics and the twenty first belongs to biology, and everything we see in biology seems to confirm this idea.

There have been roughly six revolutions in biology during the last five hundred years or so that brought us to this stage. The first one was the classification of organisms into binomial nomenclature by Linnaeus. The second was the invention of the microscope by Hooke, Leeuwenhoek and others. The third was the discovery of the composition of cells, in health and disease, by Schwann and Schleiden, a direct beneficiary of the use of the microscope. The fourth was the formulation of evolution by natural selection by Darwin. The fifth was the discovery of the laws of heredity by Mendel. And the sixth was the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson, Crick and others. The sixth, ongoing revolution could be said to be the mapping of genomes and its implications for disease and ecology. Two other minor revolutions should be added to this list; one was the weaving of statistics into modern genetics, and the second was the development of new imaging techniques like MRI and CT scans.

These six revolutions in biology resulted from a combination of new ideas and new tools. This picture is consistent with the general two-pronged picture of scientific revolutions that has emerged through the ages: a picture consisting in equal parts of revolutions of ideas and revolutions of technology. The first kind was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. The second was popularized by Peter Galison and Freeman Dyson; Galison in his book “Image and Logic”, and Dyson in his “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet”. Generally speaking, many people are aware of Kuhn but few people are aware of Galison or Dyson. That is because ideas are often considered loftier than tools; the scientist who gazes at the sky and divines formulas for the universe through armchair calculations is considered more brilliant than the one who gets down on her hands and knees and makes new discoveries by gazing into the innards of machines.

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Having Coffee

i’m having coffee
i’m dreaming I’m having coffee with Whistler’s mother
i’m scratching a knuckle with my nose
i’m not listening to my wife while gazing out a window
i’m imagining our small distant sun rising over the horizon of Neptune
i’m having coffee, paper cup with a heat sleeve
i’m playing with two small stones, twiddling them in my palm like Queeg
i’m remembering throwing stones through a neighbor’s bias
i’m sitting, but you don’t want to know where
i’m wondering if death is simply the mirror parenthesis of birth
i’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling slightly chilled. I need another blanket
i’m fooled again
i’m not fooled again
i’m having coffee, dark roast, the only kind
i’m wrong about a lot of things, too many
i’m dumber than a stump but smarter than a breadbox
i’m still wondering what it’s all about Alfie
i don’t care what it’s all about, I’m picking asparagus
i’m inside a cosmic question bouncing off its walls
i’m having coffee, Colombian this time, but dark, as I said…
i’m puffed as a peacock but simultaneously beside the point
i’m over the hill but still climbing
i’m loose as a goose and tight as a fundamentalist’s ass
i’m unknown, thank god, remembering Elvis
i’m anonymous as a red leaf in the Berkshires in Fall
i’m having coffee gazing over the rim of a mountain watching a small cloud glide
i’m as unbelievable as your average Mohammed or Mike
i’m at least as believable as your average Mohammed or Mike
i’m beating my head against the wall again painlessly
i’m taking an aspirin just in case
i’m having tea , green, trying to take coffee’s edge off
i’m under the gun, but still over the clover
i’m not sure
i’m cock sure
i’m as fraught with anticipation as I was when I was twenty, just not as often
i’m remembering something, but quickly change channels
i’m thinking again of a Dylan line, so many good ones blowin in the wind

time out of mind

I am having coffee
I am not having
I am not not

yet
.

Jim Culleny
May 2009

by Elise Hempel

Sometime during college, back home in the Chicago area for the summer, I found a job as a secretary for a successful real estate agent who kept two offices in his condo – his own out of sight in a bedroom, and the other, for his secretary, right there as you walked in, the large, dark wrap-around desk commanding a good portion of the living room. I don't recall my exact secretarial duties, except for answering the phone, but I remember my boss's name and his face, as well as my overall discomfort with having no fellow employees, with being in an office that was also someone's home – just the two of us there together all day long.

And I remember what he asked me to do for him on my last day of work before I returned to school for the fall semester: Would I let him take my picture? Would I get down on the shag carpet on all fours and stick my butt up in the air while he sat on the sofa with his camera and snapped a permanent image of his favorite part of me?…

What did I say at that moment, and how long did I pause before I complied? Why didn't I shout no or spit in his face? Why didn't I grab my purse and my final paycheck and storm out of that condo, resolutely slamming the door behind me? How many more suggestive comments had there been before then, inappropriate remarks I'd tried to ignore, laughed off because I had no idea what to say?

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by Max Sirak

Would you soar through the skies flying as most our feathered friends do?

Would you lord over light, bending beams this way and that, going invisible, and launching lasers?

Would you opt for elemental mastery? Controlling fire, air, wind, or water could definitely have its perks.

Would you wish to wrangle the weather? No more rained-out picnics, bike rides, rounds of golf, beach days, etc. doesn't sound bad. Ideal conditions for all outdoor outings would be swell.

Wielding weather was always my choice when I was kid. I remember lying in bed at night and thinking how much better it'd be if I could just make it snow instead of hoping the meteorologists on TV were right. Then school would be canceled whenever I felt like it, whether the flakes fell or not.

Now, my answer is a bit different. If I could choose to have any superpower it would be the ability to travel by teleportation. No more airfare. No more gas stations. No more traffic. No more delays. Just close my eyes and pop.

Italy for grocery shopping (and morning espresso with Abbas). Back to the States for a late breakfast with Tim. Over to San Francisco to see nieces and nephews. Happy hour in DC with Jonah and Rachel. Bounce back to Europe for a bottle of Bordeaux or to pick up a port from Portugal, depending on my mood. Then on to Ohio for home-cooked dinner before calling it a night under the Colorado sky.

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For My Nephew Omar On His Engagement to Nadia

This small box hides a porcelain elephant
rigged up in howdah and trimmings,
a Kashmir-style sapphire
on the forehead­­ — an inner eye;

conch shell ears fan out,
supple raised trunk
cradles a bird’s nest
without breaking the eggs.

“A matriarch of her herd,”
said the woman who sold it,
“175 years old, maybe more.
One-of-a-kind.”

Parting with this thing,
(Raj kitsch or art?)
I have long held dear
with my childhood’s faith

I have this dream
you will one day walk
like an elephant
joyously on water.

by Rafiq Kathwari, Beaver Dam, 29 October 2005
rafiqkathwari.com/@brownpundit

by Christopher Bacas

Catering hall loading docks smell of cleaning fluids, grease and rotting food. They rise from the shores of milky lakes continuously replenished by mop buckets. There's a dumpster nearby, mouth drooling effluents and green frame askew. Up concrete steps, through swinging doors, across a slippery red tile floor, PISO MOJADO! sign tossed aside, a stale hall leads to the kitchen; vast rain forest of garlic and meat odors suspended in a Hobart's steam cloud.

Public side of the building is hushed activity. Sidewinder vacuums exhaust stale air. Tuxedoed staff deal place settings from sprung stacks on casters. Musicians arrive solo, duo or trio. Bulky gear packed tight and wheeled in. Cases and bags pile as they set up. The PA forms a protective front; subwoofers root below suspended mains. The keyboards, light rack, sound board and mic stands mark the perimeter. Then, to the bathrooms, changing into work clothes: white ruffled shirt and bow tie or black on black or Joseph's Inflatable Vest of Many Colors; best worn with bedazzled cummerbund.

Every band has a leader. They might not even play anything, just make sure the musicians do what's expected. There might be two leaders: one for the music and one for the client and venue. No matter their number, division of labor or size of the cocktail-hour shrimp, sidemen will suspend treasured ideals for a (somewhat) steady paycheck.

The first leader I worked for out of college, ended each wedding singing "Embraceable You".

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by Paul Braterman

The now Vice-President of the United States stands accused of having said that evolution is "just a theory"; see here and here. No he did not say that. What he did say (full text below, with notes) was far, far worse. Much more detailed and much more dangerous.

After reminding us that he was trained in law and history, he mangles the historical facts and legal significance of a key court case (the Scopes trial).

L: Pence being sworn in as a member of the House Education and Workforce Committee (CNN)

By quotemining a secondary source, which he treats as if primary, he twists the then-recent discovery of Sahelanthropus into an argument against the underlying science. It is changeable, he argues, therefore it is uncertain.

He justifies this manoeuvre by harping on the ambiguous word "theory", and making a falsely rigid distinction between theory and fact.

R: Sahelanthropus tchadensis, photo from Smithsonian Human Origins website

And worst of all, he asks his colleagues to "demand [emphasis added] that educators around America teach evolution not as fact, but as theory". The proponent, when it suits him, of small Government wants Washington to tell teachers how to teach.

Pence has been accused of stupidity because of the factual and logical errors contained in his speech. On the contrary, the speech is a well-constructed piece of rhetoric directed at a specific intended audience. It skilfully deploys techniques of distortion, disinformation, and distraction to accomplish its goals; goals now crowned with personal success, and with the possibility of even greater personal success once Trump goes. To fail to recognise this is to remain in ignorance of some of the most powerful forces that have helped make the US what it is today.

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by Richard King

"How we gonna make this shit okay to be a Nazi out here?" demands a guy in a red beanie, his bearded face filling half the shot. "That's bullshit, bro, it's not okay! He will not divide us!" He paces the street like a lion in a cage, circling back to the camera, angry. "He will not divide us!" he shouts and the small crowd responds, "He will not divide us!" A young woman steps into shot and takes up the chant to a different rhythm: "He will not divide us he will not divide us he will not divide us he will not divide us." She holds up her palm: it has a love-heart on it. Meanwhile, in the background, the red beanie guy is quietly arrested by a team of cops. "Fuck you, you Nazis!" shouts a member of the crowd, as a stocky man walks forward, arms spread: "What the fuck just happened here?" Now it's two young women in the frame – Love-Heart and another one – repeating the line with a studied lack of affect, like cult members waiting in line for the Kool-Aid: "He will not divide us. He will not divide us. He will not divide us. He will not divide us."

Powerful stuff. Or, indeed, not. For whatever else "He Will Not Divide Us" has done, it's certainly divided opinion. For some it is merely a glorified selfie, a tedious bit of virtue signalling combining millennial narcissism and dull groupthink. For others, it is a message of hope and solidarity, of resistance in a time of defeat. Some have called it a work of genius. Writing in The Week, Jeva Lange described it as "the first great artwork of the Trump era".

Notwithstanding that "the Trump era" is only two months old, this strikes me as an extraordinary claim. I mean to say, what about Hipster in Chief or Sean Spicer's surreal installation, White House Press Secretary in the Era of Fake News – a searing indictment of post-truth politics? (Watch this guy Spicer: he's going to be huge.) But the problem I have with this protest artwork is not its lack of artistic merit. No, the problem I have with it is the kind of protest it seeks to channel, and of which it is itself an example. My problem with it is political.

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by Carl Pierer

It is often the case in mathematics that by noticing some kind of symmetry, a problem can be simplified substantially. This makes them very useful. But, much like in art, mathematical symmetries also have an air of beauty and harmony. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why their study is a particularly satisfying branch of mathematics. A symmetry in mathematics is considered as an invariance under certain transformations. Consider, for instance, a square. There are the four rotational symmetries and four symmetries of reflection. While the vertices get permuted under these transformations, the configuration of the triangle is invariant. What this means is that if vertex 1 is joined to the vertices 2 and 4, then no matter what transformation we apply, these vertices will be joined afterwards as well. A transformation that does not keep these joints fixed will not be a symmetry. All these transformations taken together form a mathematical group. These can be, for a lack of a better word, considered as discrete symmetries and belong to the theory of finite groups. A different approach is to consider symmetries of continuous transformations. These are somewhat harder to visualise. Consider a circle. A rotation of the circle by any degree, no matter how small, will preserve the configuration of the circle. This is an example of a continuous transformation. The groups of these kinds of transformation find a natural place in Lie theory.

The person responsible for launching the early investigation of groups of continuous symmetries was Sophus Lie (1842-1899). In the 1860ies, the study of finite groups became a solid part of mathematics; by this time, tools had been developed and mathematicians started using them for various problems. In 1870, Camille Jordan published his Traité des substitutions et des équations algébriques. This was the first detailed study and clarification of Galois Theory. Evariste Galois (1811-1832) had studied algebraic equations and solutions to them. By finding symmetries in the roots of a polynomial and associating a group, he launched a wholly new and fruitful field of mathematical research. His work, possibly due to the highly tumultuous circumstances of his life and his early death, remained in sketches and it was not until others cleared up the ideas that the full impact of the theory was appreciated. Jordan's Traité was an effort to showcase and elaborate on the earlier work on groups by, amongst others Galois and Cauchy. But it also included substantially new contributions, introducing the concept of solvable groups, composition series and proving part of what is today known as the Jordan-Hölder theorem. The work has been credited with being an inspiration for many mathematicians and bringing group theory into the focus of late 19^th century and 20^th century mathematics.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I've traveled across the city from M.A. Jinnah Road and the Pioneer Book House in the neighborhood of Meriwether Tower to an art gallery off 26h street Block 4 Clifton in Karachi now in the shadow of another occupying towering tower. Same story. Of ground breaking points of references reaching back 1200 years. This route that encompasses galleys which brought Sidis and slaves and the Empires' soldiers, of alleys, and gullies and godowns and corridors, and mandirs and mazars and mosques, and synagogues. This route of the gods, part men-part women, and their many guest houses, whore houses, book houses, teahouses, sharab houses and more. I've crossed them all.

I have two hours before I call in to work—thousands of miles away–in the world where I am not quite like this. But still I hope the same. I'm here, this evening to meet my friend Hani. But instead in the moment I've walked into the opening reception in the courtyard for Taqseem the art exhibition. While I wait for Hani to arrive I go in to see the exhibit.

I stare at a photo shopped gigantic portrait of Jinnah by the artist Imran Channa—Jinnah in all his different iterations—perhaps seven different poses, now European now Indian, now Pakistani, so cool, so well dressed, debonair, effete, sophisticated, immaculate. And I'm there—gazing at him, this beautifully dressed man—and I'm dressed in my 20 year old khadi kurta—regretting not having washed my hands or feet or having taken a shower before I came here—And would it have killed me to have dragged a comb through my hair? But there wasn't enough time to fix things. For him. I mean. And I could've scrubbed my face. The one in the shades I'm picking that as the one I'm feeling…

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by Paul North

What do movies tell us? They tell stories; they tell about exotic places, wealth beyond our imagining, weapons beyond what would ever be necessary; they tell us about the idiosyncrasies of our celebrities. Besides all this, they almost always tell us something about ourselves. Imagine a screenwriter. What is her material? She works with plot and character yes, but her real material is us, our expectations. A screenwriter has to know, or think she knows, what the widest possible variety of viewers expects to see, so she can decide how to satisfy that in some respects and frustrate it in others. Before they type a word, screenwriters are psychic map makers, walking our internal landscapes, plotting the distant peaks and hidden valleys. They are the original mythographers. They tap into the unspoken myths that we keep secret—even from ourselves. Movies tell out loud secret beliefs we hide. Here is a test: next time you turn on a movie, if it captivates you, ask yourself which of your secrets is being revealed, what dark part of you is being torn out and lit up on the screen.

Fate is one of these secrets. We may talk about freedom, we may think of our future as full of possibilities, we may choose our president, choose our deodorant, choose when to choose and when not to—but in the direst moments, when it becomes too frightening or too difficult to see a way forward, we indulge in our secret belief in the fateful nexus that makes us unable to act. I have heard the most radical intellectuals, whose freedom of thought and imagination dwarfs anyone else's, say that gender differences must be "hard-wired."

Obviously "hardwired" is a way we talk. Like movies though, the way we talk tells us the secrets we keep. Newspaper headlines are also "talk"—they can be equally revealing. Even when the answer is no, we are not hard-wired to do this or that, just raising the question points right at our worry: are we hard-wired for this or that? (Look at "Are We Hard-Wired for War?" (NYT 9/28/13)). It's funny: "hard-wired" or as it's sometimes written—as if it were a technical term—"hardwired," is most often used in the press these days to talk about human psychology. It is, though, a metaphor. To date, no psychologist has discovered any "wires" in us.

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by Michael Liss

My 40th college reunion is coming up. Yes, it's a jolt to the system to realize that I've gone from a skinny young nerd to a skinny vintage nerd in what seems roughly the amount of time it takes to play an Orioles-Yankees game. I'm making the calls and sending the emails to my far-flung (but "curated") group of friends, trying to decide whether Baltimore in Springtime is all that appealing…or should we just wait for 50?

It can get a little hot in April in Charm City. In fact, it can stay a little hot well into September. Along with hot, Baltimore has a well-deserved reputation for humid. It excels at humid. This, along with Chemistry, and, of all things, German, caused me briefly to wonder just what the heck I was doing when my guidance counselor suggested Johns Hopkins and I thought "Hopkins, wow, great idea, Cushing, Halsted, Osler, I'm going to be a doctor!"

Reality can be a cruel mistress. Yet there was something besides an absurd Heat-Index reading that was different about my first few days in college—there was also the sound of ROTC candidates training in the practice field behind my dorm. A reminder of Vietnam and a fate—perhaps my fate—rather narrowly escaped.

If you didn't live through it, it might be hard to grasp the turmoil, anger, and anxiety of the late 60s and early 70s. Turmoil, because no one knew when or how the war was going to end; anger, at politicians who seemed unable to find satisfactory answers; and anxiety—deep fear—that you, or a family member would somehow find himself in a place that few wanted to be for a cause in which many did not believe.

Richard Nixon had called for an all-volunteer army during the 1968 Campaign. Whether he actually believed in the concept or was merely using it as a tactic is hard to say. But he was also looking for a way to defuse the constant anti-war demonstrations. These, he thought, were led by middle and upper-middle class families who were concerned that once their boys completed their college deferments, they would be shipped off to die. Take away their risk, and they would no longer care, allowing him to pursue his strategic aims unencumbered by organized opposition.

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