The Milky Way, is destined someday to collide with the next-nearest spiral galaxy,
in the direction of the constellation Andromeda. When they collide, our sun will
likely be flung into a new region of galactic space. But when is that someday?
……………………………………………………………….. —EarthSky.org
.

When Andromeda and the Milky Way Collide
.

the night sky now is both
a starry spray of mother’s milk
and points of light as bright
as your last kiss

in its spray certain densities exist
think of them as knots in space
or mind

in them space (or mind) insists
that nebulae twist and pulses race

in them you may perceive
articulations of another’s face
or of one concealed behind
a veil of starry lace

attitude is key
and so is grace

but when Andromeda
and the Milky way collide things will change
any status quo will not abide
(you can never count on it to stay in place)
so on that day, in terms of hearts,
there could be tears

but you needn’t be concerned for us
since astrophysicists who’ve counted well
tell us this collision will not happen for
four billion years, and that, my love,
is quite a spell
.

Jim Culleny
12/8/14

.

by Paul Braterman

What is now proved was once only imagin’d – William Blake

Really important ideas in science are not the work of a single individual or even a single generation. The idea of an atom, for instance, was developed by ancient Greek philosophers, revived by eighteenth century chemists to make sense of their discoveries about the composition of matter, and used by nineteenth century physicists to explain the effect of temperature and pressure on gases. Our modern idea of molecules, formed with definite shapes by joining atoms together according to definite rules, was developed by chemists studying naturally occurring substances in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the structure of the atom itself was explained in terms of more fundamental particles, while the last half century has seen advances that make it possible for us to directly sense, and even move around, individual atoms.

Roman fresco, illustrating front cover of R.E. Latham's excellent translation

Atomic theory dates back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Leucippus and Democritus, who wrote and taught more than four hundred years BCE. The works of the pre-Socratics survive only in fragments, and in quotations by later authors. For example, Epicurus, some 130 years later, built this theory into his unified view of the world and morality. The views of Epicurus were beautifully expressed by the Roman poet Lucretius, who lived at the same time as Julius Caesar, in his great work De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe). According to this ancient atomic theory, atoms are eternal and indestructible. All forms of matter are built up from a relatively small number of kinds of atoms.

What led the early atomists to theories so remote from simple appearances? Greek philosophers were greatly puzzled by the phenomena of change and motion. If something is real, how can it be transformed into something that it is not? If something is in one place, how can it move, since that would imply that it was no longer in that place? Besides, how can anything move without displacing something (if only the air) that is already there, in which case which one moves first? There are serious problems here, that were not properly solved until the mathematics of fluid flow and the theory of limits were developed in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries.

One radical approach to the problems posed by change is to say that change itself is an illusion, and that the world of experience, in which we live and act, grow and die, is in some important sense unreal. Plato was influenced by this approach when he compared knowledge gained through the senses to a mere shadow-play on the walls of a cave. Such a view is deeply hostile to science, which relies on observation, and the influence of Plato and his followers was to greatly hinder the development of scientific thinking.

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by Yohan J. John

I. “You realize fun is a new thing, right?”

A few months ago I watched Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari's new show, Master of None. During the Parents episode, I found myself confronted by a feeling that struck me as rare. I couldn't even tell if it was a good feeling or a bad feeling. It wound its way into me and tickled my soul. It felt vaguely embarrassing. Eventually I realized that it was the feeling of relating.

I imagine many young people felt this way at some point or the other during Master of None. The show manages to nail millennial anxiety and indecision on the head. And yet it's not nearly as dour and bitter as other shows that are praised for their apparent realism — think of Louie, or Mad Men, or The Wire. It's actually optimistic and good-natured; the word 'chipper' comes to mind.

Not every millennial can relate equally to all the situations portrayed in the show. I recall reading that at least one white fan of the show said she enjoyed every episode except the Parents one — that one she didn't quite 'get'. But it was the Parents episode that really grabbed me. It managed to capture the particular sort of generation gap that emerges between first generation immigrants and their kids. Even though my family is very different from the ones portrayed in the show, as an Indian whose parents moved to America I could appreciate the situation: the older generation has clearly gone through much harder times than their kids, and has struggled quite a bit to create opportunities for their kids to live comfortable and vaguely hedonistic lives. (To obsess over finding the best tacos in New York, for instance.) At one point Ansari's character Dev's father says ” You realize fun is a new thing right?” This is only a slight exaggeration of how many of our parents seem to feel. Fun is secondary, and not something they talked about much with their parents.

The kids — my fellow post-immigration, post-colonial millennials (whew!) — are vaguely aware that they ought to be more appreciative of their parents' sacrifices, but don't quite know how to go about it. This is partly because we have no idea how to go about anything, really: careers, relationships… everything about adulthood all seem impossibly hard to navigate. Master of None explores many of these sources of anxiety, but it was only during the Parents episode that I found myself getting choked up, and wishing I could be a better offspring. I suspect that the friends I was watching the show with — a Pakistani-American and a Chinese-American — were also tearing up a bit, but I was too engrossed (and embarrassed) to check.

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by Carl Pierer

Fig. 1

Part II of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, also known as Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, contains a lengthy treatment of perception. He begins by drawing a distinction:

Two uses of the word “see”.

The one: “What do you see there?” – “I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness between these two faces” – let the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself.

The importance is the categorical difference between the two ‘objects' of sight. (PI, p. 193)

The first ‘object' of perception is a something, an entity that is being perceived. It can be reproduced by drawing a picture of it. The second ‘object' is more puzzling. Where is it to be located? What does it mean to see the likeness? It cannot be located within the object of perception (what is seen in the first sense), for it is a different way of seeing. Indeed, it is not something that can be externalised. I cannot show the likeness I see to the interlocutor. Wittgenstein continues:

I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect”. (Ibid.)

This process, where one perception falls into an entirely different one, is not simply a distortion happening in rare scenarios but ubiquitous. For example, when the airplane takes off and I am looking out the window, I can see how the cars and houses get smaller and smaller. At first, they have their normal significance, they look just like cars, like houses. But suddenly, a change happens, and this picture falls into a different one, where cars and houses look unreal. They now look more like toys than the life-sized objects they are. My perspective has changed somehow and I can no longer see the house as one I could enter.

Wittgenstein's own example is that of the “duck-rabbit” (Fig. 1), the familiar picture from Gestalt psychology. We notice distinctly how we move from seeing a duck to seeing a rabbit. This is only part of its paradoxical air, for at the same time we are under no illusion that the picture itself has changed. What changes, when we see the shift from duck to rabbit, is nothing in the picture.The visual input we receive from the picture remains constant, yet the figure is altogether different. We might even exclaim ‘now it's a rabbit', which only furthers the paradox. For we employ such sentences to denote a true, observable perceptual change (for instance, when the picture of a duck is replaced by a picture of a rabbit in a film). Nonetheless, we are also inclined to utter it in this context, where the visual input remains constant. What, if anything, is it then that changes? And why does the change occur?

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Sweet lanky Ethan, have I told you that I love your surfer boy hair? But then there is also that serious academic slouch, and your easy, dimpled smile. I know this might seem a little sudden. I know you are wondering what this is about. But, listen. I thought about this for a few weeks, and I think I'm onto something. My friends think so too. And they usually tell me that I'm imagining things. Not this time around. They told me to wait a few hours before saying something. Listen, I think we have a connection. I know I should be shy, and slow and guarded about this stuff, but my heart skips a beat and a quarter every time it thinks about bumping into you.

So, are you bumping into me tonight? What I mean is, did you get my email? About Joy James' talk on the racialization that constitutes practices of incarceration in the US? I think you'll find it interesting. It's anthropology and critical theory I know, but it's also a philosophical question, you know. We could sit together, and then we could talk about it. Like we talked on the bus last week, when I bumped into you. It's a wonder how much can be implied in a five minute conversation. You dug your elbow into my arm and said something funny. I think you were making fun of me, but I couldn't quite tell; I haven't quite gotten the hang of your accent yet. So I laughed that big laugh of mine meant to indicate that I am a fun girl, and that I get exactly what you mean, but really, I didn't hear a word. Anyway, like I said, we could talk about it.

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by Paul Braterman

Is this book worthy of your time and attention? Yes. But this is not a book review, so much as a conversation with myself, triggered by reading it, and what follows is as much mine as his, especially as I have focused on those chapters that overlap my own concerns. There is no shortage of writings debunking creationism, or homoeopathy, or others covered here, beliefs that fly in the face of massive evidence, and yet this evidence has no effect at all on their believers. Why is this, Storr asks. What is going on? And what makes us think that we ourselves are so different?

Storr starts by telling us of his meeting with John Mackay, a Young Earth creationist, who was talking to an appreciative audience in a small town in Queensland. This seems to have been his first encounter with the full-blooded version of modern creationism, according to which evolution science and old Earth geology are fundamentally unsound, and the Bible is the infallible word of God. At the end of Genesis 1, God speaks of His work as being “very good”. “Very good” must mean no pain, and no death. It follows that tigers and tyrannosaurs coexisted happily with Adam and Eve in Eden, all of them adhering to strictly vegetarian diets, until the Fall went and spoiled everything. And “Tonight, the choice you have to face up to is this – do you put your faith in Darwin, who wasn't there? Or in God, who was?”

Mackay claims to be able to feel the presence of God. What turned him against evolution, he says, was a biology textbook he was reading as an adolescent, which followed its exposition of evolution with a chapter advocating atheism. Unfortunately, he does not tell us which textbook he was referring to, giving me no way of checking his perspective, although such a chapter would of course be completely out of place in a biology textbook.

Mackay's audience were universally sympathetic, a fact that Storr observed with bemusement that turned to dismay when, the following Sunday, Mackay mounted the pulpit to deliver a scathing attack on the wickedness of homosexuals and the compromising Churches who countenance their activities.

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.

Like Frogs
.
we congregate
like frogs before a video of food
piling on— poking, jabbing, jumping
at the mysterious fabric of reality
.

Jim Culleny
2/3/16
.
.

by Leanne Ogasawara

“When I was an undergraduate, on my way to first day of quantum mechanics class, I was riding up in the elevator with the professor and several (male) students. The professor kindly informed us that this would be the class that “separated the men from the boys.”

Astronomy is really making the news these days. Except it's not for the reasons one would hope or expect; for the headlines keep rolling in one after the other about “astronomy's snowballing cases of sexual harassment.”

Yikes!

As a woman, obviously, I think matters like this should never be covered up and that process must be put in place in universities to deal with transgressions. In fact, I go a step further and believe that as “exemplars,” anyone who is in a teaching profession should be held up to the very highest moral standards.

Like most women, this is also not something that I am unfamiliar with either.

As an undergraduate at Berkeley in philosophy, I was one of the few women in the program, and I think philosophy has similar kinds of issues as we are seeing in astronomy. Even as an undergraduate it often felt like a kind of “boys club.” In Japan, too, in my twenties, I worked at Hitachi, ostensibly as a translator and interpreter; but in fact, as the only “girl” in the department, I spent all my time answering the phones and serving tea and stapling papers and tidying up.

I didn't stay long…

In many ways, “not staying long” is what has characterized my life.

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by Bill Benzon

In Playing in the Dark, a set of essays on race in American literature, Toni Morrison is led “to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature . . . are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. . . . Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence–one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presense was crucial to their sense of Americanness.” That is to say, the sense of American identity embodied in our literature is at least partially achieved through reference to African Americans.

Let’s consider three imaginative works where race is an issue. First we have Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is not American, of course, but English. The character of Caliban, who may not even be human, marks the imaginative space the English used for understanding Africans. The play was written and performed at about the same time as Jamestown, Virginia, as first settled.

Then we move forward two and a half centuries to late 19th Century. America has established itself as an independent nation and fought its bloodiest war, the Civil War, over the status of the American sons and daughters of Caliban. We find Huck Finn fleeing his abusive father by rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway slave. Jim sure isn’t Shakespeare’s Caliban nor is Huck a Prospero. I conclude with a counter narrative from the early 20th Century, an African-American “toast”, as they’re called, about the sinking of the Titanic. Think of such oral narratives as antecedents of rap and hip-hop.

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by Sarah Firisen

Anyone can be in charge. Being in charge isn’t the same as being a leader.

We've all known great leaders. People that we’d walk through fire for, but what makes them such great leaders? As the Presidential primary season gets under way, perhaps it’s worth considering what leadership really is. Because despite the inevitable primary bickering over whether a businessman, senator or a governor makes a more effective President, what we’re really looking for is leadership.

Are great leaders born or can these traits be developed? Or is it a combination of the two? People are born with certain natural abilities , but per Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers hour rule, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery (this of course probably goes for most things). So does this mean that with enough conscious effort, anyone can be a great leader? I do think that motivation has a part to play. The key word here is “great”. Someone who wants to lead for reasons outside of personal aggrandizement, outside of pure power for power’s sake. Maybe, a person with those core attributes can work towards achieving mastery.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

My first encounter with the ghazal had to have happened at home where my parents played ghazal LPs on their Phillips record player, along with Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Harry Belafonte and Edith Piaf. The ghazal entered my consciousness first as music, accessible only to the extent that Edith Piaf was accessible; through melody, beat, rhyme, refrain. Later, listening to ghazals on the radio and television, I developed the sense of awe that surrounds the Urdu ghazal in Pakistan. It is distinguished as the most elevated of poetic forms and considered to be the litmus test of a true poet. When I began to write poetry, this awe for the ghazal turned into intimidation and I experienced a paralyzing fear of writing a miserable flop. I tried my hand at villanelles, sonnets, and pantoums, but it took me a long time to attempt my first ghazal. When I did write my first ghazal, at Warren Wilson, I was exhilarated. What followed was an exploration of the form as adapted in English poetry, an even more exhilarating experience, one that continues to pose more questions than provide answers. The thoughts in this essay are a distillation of my experiences of hearing and reading Urdu ghazals, reading contemporary American ghazals, and writing ghazals in English.

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by Matt McKenna

The worst part about seeing a kids’ movie in theatres–even a decent one like Kung Fu Panda 3–is sitting through the trailers that play before the feature. For every trailer decent enough to respectably fill its two minutes of running time, there are slew of others starring flatulent anthropomorphic animals who defecate or urinate at inappropriate times, ostensibly because it’s funny (e.g. see the trailers for current and upcoming films such as The Road Chip, The Secret Life of Pets, and The Angry Birds Movie). You can’t blame the kids in the theatre for laughing at these jokes because they may not be aware that they’ll be subjected to the same fart joke in nearly every film they see between now and the time they grow out of children’s movies. And if they ever become parents, they’ll have to suffer these jokes all over again. Fortunately, Kung Fu Panda 3 is not only fart joke free but also educates our nation’s children on the presidential primary election process.

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