by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

The rains visited on the 1^st of December, 2015. This monsoon in Chennai, we had already experienced deluge and mayhem, mid-November. The city's low-lying areas had flooded, and thousands of people had to be evacuated.

When the rains made a dramatic appearance again on the 1^st of December, I wasn't prepared for a repeat of the November events. One spate had already weakened the city, and it had tired me out. One only prepares for one natural disaster a year, though all evidence should have us scurrying otherwise. The waters seeped in through the walls of my ancient building, and I looked on, fervent in my belief that this too would pass. Neither the slowly forming pool in the dining room of my second floor walkup, nor the increasingly bleak weather reports prepared me for anything but a day's worth of indoor activity, and a night of sleeping to the sound of soothing, lashing rains.

Picture © Neetesh Kumar

From the evening of the 1^st of December to the evening of the 5^th of December, large parts of the city went under water and lost power. The rains came at us relentlessly as the sky dissolved into eddies of Mordor-like blackness.

I have experienced the phenomenon known as a natural disaster a few times before; first as a child, and then as an almost adult. Other floods and earthquakes had produced in me a vague sense of preparation. As if this is but another event out of a series of life possibilities, and one is bound to emerge unscathed. When the lights went out that 1^st of December, I retained this sense of possibility. Fumbling around with the help of a few forgotten birthday candles, I wolfed down some leftovers, and went to sleep in the darkness. Before going to bed, I gathered all the dust cloths, old towels, and washcloths in the house and lay them down like a patchy quilt next to the walls, hoping they'd absorb the waters. I slept in the living room, the daybed sticking up against the windows, hoping that I would hear the rains stop.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

It is practically a rite of passage for physics majors. We study Maxwells equations – the illuminating set of relationships that reveal the nature of light; we marvel at the power and grace of this compact quartet, and can't resist a chuckle when – inevitably – we come across the t-shirt that says “God said [Maxwell's Equations] And there was light.” Something about that sticks. We remember the t-shirt years later, even if we can't write down the equations anymore.

But, even though James Clerk Maxwell could boast several outstanding accomplishments – including taking the first ever color photograph, and unleashing a fictional demon that outwits entropy – for far too many of us, our association with this brilliant scientist begins and ends with the famous equations that govern electromagnetic radiation.

There is no cult of genius surrounding Maxwell. Unlike Einstein, Feynman or more recently, Hawking, Maxwell has no groupies; his quotes don't adorn bumper stickers, physics students don't own collections of his lectures or writing, and I don't know of anyone (save Einstein) who put up a poster of Maxwell in their workspace.

Like thousands of other physics students who went to college, studied Maxwell's equations, and bought the t-shirt, I felt no real bond with the man until some years ago, when a writing project (to which I shall forever remain indebted) led me to find out more about him.

I read Maxwell's writings as part of my research, and it was love at first letter. I was completely enchanted by the mind revealed in, and between, the lines; it was an investigative, creative, whimsical creature, with scintillating wit and lyrical expression. Over the months, as I read more, my initial intellectual infatuation developed into a deep fondness and a genuine respect. I found the flow of Maxwell's logic and the dance of his ideas simply beautiful. I read and re-read his words for the pleasure of having them stream through my mind, but also in the hope that if they performed his choreography enough times, my thoughts might learn to move that way on their own.

Casting around today for a piece of writing that might serve as an introduction to Maxwell, I settled upon his 1870 address to the members of the British Association (whom Maxwell teasingly referred to as the British ‘Asses') about scientific metaphor. This is not an idea that is articulated very often, especially not this clearly, but it is precisely the sort of overarching theme that I think should be emphasized in physics classrooms everywhere.

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You will not be punished for your anger,
you will be punished by your anger.

.

WWBS?

What Would Buddha Say, I thought,
of all that flows from lips of wealthy oafs
who claim to know the shortcuts
on the highway to nirvana?

I’d guess he’d sit in stillness, smile
un-perplexed, knowing discontent and bile
and the willingness by which
we all can be deluded

He’d see impostors on TV
as he sat beneath his favorite tree
counting discontents that lead to rage
and suffering in Saṃsāra

Sid studied long the hearts of oafs
and made his case for noble truths
long before this modern age
had put all beings in this cage
(himself included)
.

by Jim Culleny
12/12/15

by Leanne Ogasawara

Once upon a time, asymmetrical warfare was viewed as a last resort. Only when every other means possible had been exploited and defeat seemed inevitable, only then would people make a stand against an obviously far stronger enemy.

Thermopylae comes to mind.

Between cliffs and the sea, it was here that Leonidas made his legendary last stand.

Μολών λαβέ (molon labe).

It is so famous, I hesitate to bother describing the armies they faced– the myriad of tribes and peoples comprising the Persian army went on for pages and pages in Herodotus. Here is William Golding's depiction:

The numbers alone are exhilarating– the Persian army being said to have been comprised of a million men! Impossible, of course, but Herodotus' famous anecdote about the great Spartan warrior Dienekes is unforgettable when told that the Persian archers were so numerous that, their arrows would block out the sun for undaunted by this prospect, he remarked with a laugh, 'Good. Then we will fight in the shade.'

Every time I read it, it makes me breathless.

It leaves me breathless because they knew they would lose–but in knowing that, they acknowledged that there are some things worth dying for.

Fast forward to today, where asymetrical warfare seems increasingly to be a tactic of choice.

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by Bill Benzon

The idea has been around since 1793 when Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote an essay “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States.” Rush was a Philadelphia physician, the founder of Dickinson College, the father of American psychiatry, an abolitionist, he served in the Continental Congress, and he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Banneker published the essay in the 1793 edition of his well-known almanac and then later in a collection of Rush’s essays. It is an interesting and curious document, which I reproduce in full below.

“Benjamin Rush Painting by Peale” by Charles Willson Peale – Unknown. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Rush imagines that the department would be able to transact its business in a single large room “adjoining the federal hall”. The world was much smaller then than it is now and so a larger portion of that world’s business could be encompassed within a single room. Rush is quite particular about the appointments of this room, suggesting that it house “a collection of ploughshares and pruning-hooks made out of swords and spears”.

The allusion is Biblical of course (Isaiah 2:3-4). Rush also directed that each family in the country be provided with a Bible at government expense. We are still in dire need of moral guidance, though it is by no means obvious that the Bible is the best source of it. What would Rush think of the Dalai Lama or of Pope Francis?

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by Sarah Firisen

The world seems a very depressing, scary place these days. Maybe it always was. I remember being 12 years old and driving with my father and expressing to him how terrified I was by the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He talked to me about mutual assured destruction and the deterrent this was going to provide. Those fears seem almost quaint now; our current enemies don’t seem to play by the same rational rules of self-interest. Another thing that has changed is our exposure to just how much other people in our lives don’t share our values and opinions on these, and other issues. I always knew that I was somewhat at odds with elements of my family about Judaism and Israel’s relationship the Palestinian people. But for the most part, as we probably all do, I lived in a bubble where most of the people around me pretty much shared my political and social views. I’ve always had friends who vote Republican, but they’re all on the fiscal rather than social conservative spectrum; lower taxes but prochoice. I have no problem with people whose views differ from mine in these ways. Yes, we can debate the merits of trickledown economics, but as long as we all are in favor of gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, and the normal laundry list of social items that US liberals care about, the friendship won’t be tarnished by the things we don’t agree on.

But social media has changed all this. The views that our acquaintances hold are often now fully in our faces, good, bad and sometimes very ugly. Reconnecting with your best friend from kindergarten now often brings with it the horrible realization that she’s grown into a narrow minded bigot. Yes, you can unfriend and unfollow, and we often do or have it done to us. But what about when that’s not viable option? And should it be our first reaction?

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by Eric Byrd

John Keegan and Geoffrey Perret have repackaged the essential arguments of The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, first published in 1929, in more politically palatable prose. But I was interested by the book's datedness, the view it offers of the odd personality and ominous historical situation from which the reevaluation of Grant was launched. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller (1878 – 1966) is a somewhat sinister and repellent figure – a disciple of Aleister Crowley; a mystic whose Futurism graded into Fascism; the maverick mastermind of British tank operations in the Great War (and his skill at drawing elaborate occult symbols came in handy when the Tank Corps needed an insignia) whose theories of mobile armored warfare were ignored in interwar Britain but eagerly studied in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the rival tyrannies destined to build thousand-tank armies and smash them together on the burning steppes of the East. Fuller attended Hitler's fiftieth birthday party, in April, 1939, a celebration capped by a three-hour parade of tanks and motorized infantry. Afterwards Hitler asked Fuller if he was pleased with his “children.” “Your excellency,” Fuller replied, “they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognize them.”

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

At the fourth Republican Presidential Debate, Senator Marco Rubio asserted that the country “needs more welders and less philosophers.” The small corner of the internet where professional philosophers reside promptly was awash with repudiation, criticism, and outrage (for example, here and here). We were, we have to admit, puzzled by it all – both by Rubio's statement and by the philosophers' outrage.

Senator Rubio's remarks were patently silly. First, the rationale Rubio offered, that “welders make more money than philosophers” is false. Moreover, the proposed reason, even were it true, is irrelevant – the social value of a profession is not a matter of the income paid to those who practice it. Surely no one would argue that hedge fund managers and reality TV stars are more socially valuable than nurses and carpenters simply on the basis of the difference between their respective paychecks. Finally, Rubio's reasoning is self-defeating, as there is no better way to decrease the earning power of a welder than by flooding the labor market with more competitors. For sure, Rubio's case was more rhetorical flourish than serious reasoning; he intended to draw a line in the sand between two perspectives on the role of education in society. His welders-versus-philosophers line was just window dressing for his view that education should aim to produce serviceable labor, not people who think.

Now, given these easy criticisms of Rubio's remarks, one might think that we were outraged by his claims. Many of our colleagues certainly were, and our inboxes and social media feeds quickly filled with missives of all shapes and sorts. But, we admit again, we found this phenomenon even more curious than Rubio's statement.

Here is why. There is nary a day that goes by without someone making a joke or remark to us about philosophy's alleged uselessness. Philosophy's oldest story highlights this. Thales of Miletus, who Aristotle counts as the first of the philosophers, apparently was walking one night and gazing up at the stars, contemplating their eternal motion. And then he fell in a well. A Thracian serving woman witnessed the fall, and laughed at him, urging that he should think about where he was putting his feet. Philosophy starts with a pratfall, and everyone, even those who have never taken a philosophy course or read any of the great books, gets the joke: It's not just that somebody fell in a well, it's that it was a philosopher.

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by Jalees Rehman

Habib University via Wikimedia Commons (by Samarhashmi)

Universities and the scientific infrastructures in Muslim-majority countries need to undergo radical reforms if they want to avoid falling by the wayside in a world characterized by major scientific and technological innovations. This is the conclusion reached by Nidhal Guessoum and Athar Osama in their recent commentary “Institutions: Revive universities of the Muslim world“, published in the scientific journal Nature. The physics and astronomy professor Guessoum (American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates) and Osama, who is the founder of the Muslim World Science Initiative, use the commentary to summarize the key findings of the report “Science at Universities of the Muslim World” (PDF), which was released in October 2015 by a task force of policymakers, academic vice-chancellors, deans, professors and science communicators. This report is one of the most comprehensive analyses of the state of scientific education and research in the 57 countries with a Muslim-majority population, which are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Here are some of the key findings:

1. Lower scientific productivity in the Muslim world: The 57 Muslim-majority countries constitute 25% of the world's population, yet they only generate 6% of the world's scientific publications and 1.6% of the world's patents.

2. Lower scientific impact of papers published in the OIC countries: Not only are Muslim-majority countries severely under-represented in terms of the numbers of publications, the papers which do get published are cited far less than the papers stemming from non-Muslim countries. One illustrative example is that of Iran and Switzerland. In the 2014 SCImago ranking of publications by country, Iran was the highest-ranked Muslim-majority country with nearly 40,000 publications, just slightly ahead of Switzerland with 38,000 publications – even though Iran's population of 77 million is nearly ten times larger than that of Switzerland. However, the average Swiss publication was more than twice as likely to garner a citation by scientific colleagues than an Iranian publication, thus indicating that the actual scientific impact of research in Switzerland was far greater than that of Iran.

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by Tamuira Reid

Recently I was interviewed for a college podcast on the craft of writing. I dread this type of thing, mostly because no matter how hard I try to not sound like a complete asshole, I end-up sounding like one. Write about what you know? I guess. Write everyday? I sure don't, but okay. The truth is this: most writers I know are just trying to survive. Financially, yes. But mentally even more so.

Then there's always that question – when did you know you were a writer?

I was a weird fucking kid. I know everyone says that but it's very true in my case. In every class picture, my hairstyle is a couple years behind. The gap between my front teeth a little wider than it should be. Eyes kind of glazed over. I tap danced in my spare time, made wedding gowns out of paper towels that I'd put on spoons for their weddings to forks, played ice hockey down our long marble-floored hallway with a toilet plunger and a severed doll head. It was all just a tad off: my timing, my style, my eye-hand coordination.

When I discovered in grade school that I hated people, myself included, I decided to become a writer. I needed to leave something concrete for the aliens who would eventually come to take over Earth. If I was dead by then, how would they know the truth about humans? How would they know how much empathy and intellect our species truly lacked?

So it was with an altruistic spirit that I began to write. About my family. About my slutty, teenaged dance teacher with all the hickies on her neck. About the boy across the street who had two fathers and no mom. About the voices in my head that only seemed to go away when I wrote about them.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Except for a wig of algorithms, and tears and automation.”
~Noah Raford, Silicon Howl

Last month I attempted to set up two conflicting frames. On the one hand, there is the advance of technology in its myriad forms, eg: social media, artificial intelligence, robotics. This may seem like an arbitrary selection. For example, why exclude fields of medicine, or energy production, or infrastructure? Of course, all technologies are intrinsically social, especially given the complexities required to design, develop, disseminate and maintain them on a global scale. But my concern here are those technologies that are explicitly social in nature: those inventions, whether hardware or software, that intervene in our lives to enable or enhance communications, experiences, or that provide services along such lines.

On the other hand, these technologies are laid over a long-established matrix of social differentiations. Categories that have traditionally motivated the investigations of social scientists, such as class, race, culture, religion, education, gender and age, form the inescapable substrate upon which technology is seeded and elaborates itself, or withers and dies. As I showed, and contrary to most writing about technology in the mainstream media, these boundaries are not magically dissolved by technology, and in many cases they may be further exacerbated. They are certainly not elided, which seems to be the most common attitude. Instead, those occupying the more privileged ends of these spectra of difference benefit more greatly from each advance, and the underprivileged are further shunted to the side. It is the technological equivalent of income inequality, except it is subtler, since we lack the pithiness of a single number, such as the Gini coefficient, to use as a signpost. (Incidentally, even this metric has of late become increasingly less useful as global inequality ascends to hyperbolic levels.)

Thus the object of our scrutiny should really be the ways in which technology further complicates a landscape that is already extremely difficult to parse. In this sense, these two frames are not really in conflict, but at least from a critical point of view, are rather insufficiently engaged with one another. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, the inquiry should not have as its final destination any hope that technology will ultimately dissolve these differences. This is where efforts to bridge the so-called “digital divide” fall short for me: the idea of a level playing field has always been a fiction. Why should we aspire to it? Isn't it more compelling to understand what difference a difference makes? Conversely, if technology really does succeed in eroding all these categories of difference, we will have to scramble for another definition of what it means to be human. Given the difficulty we have with the current state of the definition, I somehow doubt that a tabula rasa approach would be at all helpful.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

This spring I had the pleasure of spending several months as a visitor at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden. Hanging on the wall above my desk was a copy of this print:

The Mittag-Leffler Institute has two patron saints: Gösta Mittag-Leffler and Sofia Kovalevskaya. The Institute is located in Mittag-Leffler's home just outside Stockholm. He donated his home and its extensive library in 1916 with the goal of establishing a place for mathematicians to visit and collaborate. Both were built using Mittag-Leffler's personal wealth (which he obtained the old fashioned way: he married into it). Nowadays there are a number of such institutes, but at the time it was the first of its kind.

Over my desk, however, was the watchful eye of Kovalevskaya. She was a truly remarkable woman who obtained significant results on differential equations during the second half the nineteenth century. Those being the times, she struggled to find opportunities to study mathematics. When she finally earned her PhD in 1874 she was the first woman in Europe to do so. And even then it was only thanks to rule-bending by the famous Weierstrauss. In 1883 Mittag-Leffler used his considerable influence to procure Kovalevskaya a position at the University of Stockholm. In addition to mathematics, Kovalevskaya wrote several books. Sadly, she died in 1891 at the young age of 41. For a taste of her life, I recommend Alice Munro's short story “Too Much Happiness”.

Whenever I had a bad math day [1], Kovalevskaya's portrait gently and kindly reproached me. At my age she had done all of the remarkable things mentioned above. Almost to the day, when I arrived at the Institute I was the age she was when she passed away. Every day when I arrived it was yet another day more than she had, and as a white, middle-class, American male I couldn't hardly claim any disadvantages to Kovalevskaya! As I'd leave for the day, she would tsk, tsk over all my dead ends and miscalculations.

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by Omar Ali

On December 2, 2015 Syed Farooq Malik, a young American of Pakistani origin (born in Illinois) was attending his workplace holiday party in San Bernadino. He left the party early (it is not clear if there was an argument of some sort before he left) and then returned with his wife, Pakistani-American Tashfeen Malik, and the couple opened fire on his coworkers and left after 4 minutes. Fourteen people were killed, 21 injured. It has since emerged that the couple had 2 assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammo and several pipe bombs. They had also rented a Ford Expedition SUV a few days before the attack and used it for the attack as well as in the subsequent chase and confrontation with the police. Though they managed to escape the scene of the crime, they were eventually shot dead after an exchange of fire with the police. They had left their 6 month old baby girl with her grandmother on the morning of the attack. Sometime after the shooting, Tashfeen Malik also reportedly posted a “pledge of allegiance to ISIS” on her facebook page.

It has since emerged that Farooq Malik had a normally religious upbringing but had become “more religious” in the last two years. According to his (estranged) dad, he was obsessed with Israel and “shared the ideology of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi”. And it seems that his wife was brought up in far more Islamist fashion than he was. Her father is a Pakistani who works in Saudi Arabia and supposedly became “more religious” there. She lived in both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and was a full-time niqabi when she attended Bahauddin Zakariya University’s pharmacy department. She also attended classes at Al-Huda, an Islamist organization that runs schools to teach “pure Islam” in many countries. After marriage, she did not show her face even to her father-in-law and her brother-in-law and stayed in seclusion in her California apartment. She did not attend the baby shower thrown by her husband’s coworkers (the same people the couple later went to shoot) and it is very likely that she was more “radical” than her husband. It seems likely that the two of them decided to kill people because they wanted to strike a blow for their version of Islam, but the actual choice of target (i.e. where a group of people would be murdered) may still have involved some “workplace grievance” (though no convincing grievance has yet been revealed).

Post-Script: it is now clear that perpetrators were jihadists, had been turned down by some jihadist organizations, may have thought of bigger targets, and that one friend may have had some prior knowledge of their intentions.

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How could something so beautiful not be right

—Margaret Wertheim, on Einstein’s equations
……………….. for his General Theory of Relativity

The elegance of the simplest things
makes them right. The shape of a smooth stone
cannot be argued against —one touch
is testimony of its rightness. Its small heft
says, I'm here. Its mass, snapped by a spinning tire
shattering a windshield is evidence
of the absoluteness of its being.
Its adherence to universal laws says, I belong.
Its pleasing roundness
rolling in the cup of your palm
proves its truth. The way it rests in light,
glowing amber in harmony
with the color of the rising sun
is as much a claim to rightness
as the perfection of equations
or the presence of love.
Its contours, quanta, its silence,
strange and familiar as they are,
are as correct and beautiful
as this fleeting breath.
How in truth could anything
so beautiful not be right?
.

by Jim Culleny
11/28/15

by Paul Braterman

If Isaac Newton is the father of modern physics, then Antoine Lavoisier is the father of modern chemistry. Newton was knighted, and died in his bed at age 84. Lavoisier died at age 50, on the guillotine.

A civil servant scientist

Lavoisier originally trained as a lawyer, but studied science at the same time, and set about earning admission to the Academy of Sciences. This he achieved at the remarkably young age of 25, with a combination of pure science (composition of gypsum), and applications (problems of street lighting and water supply). He invested his inherited fortune in membership of a curious body called the Company of Tax Farmers. This was involved in the collection of indirect taxes throughout the whole of France, while its members individually lent money to the Crown, thus simultaneously taking on the roles of bankers, administrative civil servants, and investors in government securities.

Lavoisier's administrative responsibilities included supervising the Gunpowder Administration. Gunpowder is a mixture of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre (potassium nitrate). At the time, this last was obtained from fermenting organic matter with human and animal manure. French production had become haphazard, and lack of gunpowder was one reason for France's defeat in the Seven Years War/French and Indian War of 1754 – 1763. The Dutch had developed a system using beds of manure mixed with rotting vegetation, which Lavoisier copied, to such good effect that within a few years France was able to supply the material to its allies. French exports of saltpetre played an essential role in the American Revolution, and Lavoisier was able to write “One can truly say that North America owes its independence to French gunpowder”.

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