by Charlie Huenemann

Some years back my musicologist friend introduced me to the charming world of gramophones. (A brief history may be in order: before there were iPods and YouTube, there were CDs; before that, there were vinyl records, still very much in vogue among hipsters today; and before that – from roughly 1895 to 1950 – there were thick and heavy shellac records that were to be played at 78 revolutions per minute. That's what I'm talking about. Wikipedia, of course offers a much longer history.) I became an enthusiast on the spot, and we formed the Logan Gramophone Society, which meets on secret dates set to the lunar calendar, and involves scones, tea, and fezzes. Our university's music department has a veritable treasure trove of old records which supplies us with an inexhaustible supply of the quirky, the charming, and the incredible.

The earliest recordings were made before there were any amplifiers, let alone mixers or equalizers. Recording artists played into a horn, and some mechanism translated their sound waves into a wavy line scratched into wax. (We should all devote a moment to marveling at the fact that the sound of a singer accompanied by strings and tuba can all get squashed into a single wavy line.) That wavy line was then wrapped into a spiral and stamped upon many shellac disks, which were sold through record stores. Consumers would then buy the discs, take them home, place them upon their turntables, and place a needle at one end of the spiral, and send the disc into motion. Then the whole process would reverse itself: the wavy lines would vibrate the needle, and those vibrations would be sent out the horn for all to enjoy.

The point is that the sound travels from producer to consumer without ever disappearing into some electronic circuit to be changed or shaped. Jascha Heifetz plays his violin into a horn, those vibrations become scratches, those scratches become vibrations, and I hear Heifetz play. Everything is on the surface; nothing ever goes into a black box. I am one step away from direct, physical connection to Heifetz, as I would be if I handled his bow or tried on his hat. It is a form of aural time travel.

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“The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two
basic words he can speak.” —Martin Buber, I and Thou

.
Conjugation

In a diner my elbows rest upon Formica. I hold a book.
Curlicues of vapor rise above the coffee you’ve just poured.
I lure Thou with my take on Buber
hoping to shift the poles of my twofold attitude
from I-I to a here beyond that incarceration
when Thou and I might disappear in conjugation
.

Jim Culleny
9/18/13

by Akim Reinhardt

I've made some deep runs in my time.

I once drove non-stop from central Wyoming to eastern Iowa before passing out at a highway rest stop for a couple of hours, waking up with a scrambled brain, driving the short distance to Illinois, then staring with confusion and regret at the chili cheese omelette I'd ordered at a pre-cell truck stop where drivers sat with piles of quarters in front of them at booths hard wired to pay phones.

Another time I went from the Nevada-Utah line to eastern Nebraska, staving off sleep during the last several hours by frequently leaning my head out the window at 80 miles per hour, the wind and rain whipping me in the face beneath the dark night sky.

My most recent super haul was from Windsor, Arizona to northeastern Kansas, where I'd finally pulled over to sleep in a rural parking lot. But that was fifteen years ago. I was in my early thirties back then.

In the months leading up to the trip I've chronicled here, I had wondered: What do I still have left in me? What would the road be like for me in my late forties?

I had no illusions. I knew I wouldn't be busting tail nonstop for 1,200 miles. Even in my prime that was at my outer limits. It was unthinkable now.

But beyond the issue of endurance, I was more intrigued, and even fretful, about how I would take to the road.

What would it be like to long haul now compared to back then? What would my state of mind be after 600 miles? Seven hundred? Eight hundred, if that was even feasible. Would I still find driving alone for vast stretches to be meditative? Would I still marvel at the expanse of this continent? Or would I simply be middle aged and grumpy? Would I be helpless to enjoy a solo, long distance drive as I once had? Would I just be petty and impatient to reach my destination?

Even since before I first left Maryland back in late August, I knew this would be the jaunt. From Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to Reno, Nevada. No other stretch of the trip is much more than 500 miles. This one's over 1,200.

Going in, I knew that South Dakota to the Nevada-California border in late September would sort it all out.

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by Bill Benzon

During the course of my adult life I have witnessed the collapse of the political culture of my nation, the United States of America. To be sure, there have been some good things – the Civil Rights movement, for example – but the framework that served from the nation’s founding through the end of World War II no longer functions well.

Over the last three or four decades the prison population has increased enormously, as has economic inequality, and during this century we’ve become mired down in an enormously destructive, expensive and militarily ineffective series of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As far as I can see there is no near-term prospect of ending either the internal problems or the hopeless and ill-founded war on terrorism.

How did this happen?

Cultural Psychodynamics

The problem, I believe, is rooted in the cultural psychodynamics of the nation-state. The sociologist Talcott Parsons diagnosed it in his classic 1947 article, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (full text online HERE). At some length and with great sophistication Parsons argued that citizens of Western nations project many of their aggressive impulses onto other peoples so that, in attempting to dominate those peoples, they are, in a psychological sense, attempting to attain mastery over themselves. I fear this problem is not only a Western one, but that’s a side issue in this context. It’s not merely that I’m writing about America, but that America remains the most powerful nation in the world, with by far the largest military establishment. Through that establishment America has tethered the rest of the world to its internal psychodynamics.

That’s crazy.

If by chance Parsons’ argument strikes you as improbable, well, I urge you to read his essay in full. Pending that, I offer as a bit of supporting evidence an extraordinary statement made by Mario Cuomo, ex-governor of New York, in interview published in The New York Times Magazine on March 19, 1995:

The Second World War as the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let’s all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.

That’s what Parsons was talking about.

I have no idea whether or not Cuomo is familiar with Parsons but, while he is certainly an intelligent and sophisticated man, he is not an academic. When he spoke those words he was speaking as a practical politician skilled at the complex and messy business of governance. The socio-cultural milieu that Parsons analyzed is the arena in which Cuomo lived his professional life. Judging by his political success, he had a good intuitive grasp of those dynamics.

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by Josh Yarden

Rembrandt, Abraham`s Sacrifice, 1635

On the verge of sacrificing
his own son on an alter
the one he loves

bound for glory
pausing to consider
which he loves more

Abraham says: “Abraham!”
and he says, “Here I am.”
in an inglorious bind

. . .

He caught himself this time
at the line or just beyond
the point of no return

Unbinding Isaac
he averts his glance
they will never meet again

When he raises his eyes
he sees another ram caught
horns locked in the thicket

. . .

Fruit of the tree of knowledge
bursting with ambiguity
hangs on a metaphor

Always ripe
for interpretation
yet often out of reach

At times we gain a good grasp
after matters unravel badly
the lines are not fixed

by Leanne Ogasawara

His boss was known for his mad pranks. Yes, in the good old days, people valued playfulness, remember? Kings and dukes were known to play around, and this means that an artist working for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy say, might be asked to lend a hand in the fun once in a while. Or maybe job titles were more flexible back then; for in addition to spying missions made on behalf of his liege, Jan van Eyck also almost certainly had a part in creating decorative items for the Duke's fabulous parties and as part of his unending practical jokes. From rainmaking devices that squirted water on ladies from below, to books that sprayed soot on whoever tried to read them, the Duke of Burgundy was even known to have used magical mirrors.

Mirror, mirror on the wall….The history of the late Renaissance has been called by some as the history of optics-– and mirrors show up all over the place. We see this both in science and in art. And yet where art is concerned, most books used in college survey courses in this country at least do not feature the word “lens in their pages,” I have read.

Last month, I wrote the rise of optics in late Renaissance science and the 2012 book, Baroque Science. The book is highly recommended as an absolutely fascinating account of Europe's “estrangement of the senses” vis-à-vis the rise of optical science in the 17th century. While the book was about scientific innovations (microscopes and telescopes), art history loomed large– and so I ended the piece mentioning the famous quote by art historian Erwin Panofsky which suggested that van Eyck's eye functioned “as a microscope and a telescope at the same time.” It was an interesting quote, and this all eventually led me to re-visit the infamous the Hockney-Falco Thesis, where van Eyck also plays a pivotal role.

The British artist David Hockney began his notorious crusade in pure disbelief. How was it possible that the Old Master painters had been able to draw so realistically? In his book Secret Knowledge, he has several examples, which are so perfectly drawn that he suggests it would be absolutely impossible to draw like that today. Look at the chandelier above for example, the arms, Hockney and Falco suggest are simply too perfectly proportioned for having been done by the human eye alone.

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by Eric Byrd

Like Ségur's account of the retreat from Moscow and Grant's mostly martial memoirs, Pushkin's History of the Pugachev Revolt narrates a welter of suffering – axe-armed mobs, corpulent gentry flayed alive, a total civic breakdown in which “the simple people did not know whom to obey” – in an coolly “classical” style; that is, a style terse, spare, unemphatic, and above all swift. Pushkin moves the story along, notes, but does not dwell on the bizarre, and merely hints at the picturesque. Suvorov's cavalry, pursuing Pugachev's nucleus of mutinous Cossacks across the steppe, stops to interrogate the hermits. Steppe hermits! What an occasion for Byronic pathos, for Delacroix's palette! Pushkin tells us in what direction the hermits pointed the horsemen – and that is all. The narrative rides on. The hermits recede in the dust of the cavalcade. Pushkin could have colored them – he knew the Imperial archives, and did months of fieldwork in the formerly rebellious regions – but his style would not indulge him. “Classical” styles ache with the suggested; they trace around mysteries. D. S. Mirsky said that Pushkin straddles European definitions of “Classic” and “Romantic” – and his prose shows it.

Mirsky also said that Pushkin was, at heart, too much an eighteenth century classicist narrator to analyze the grievances behind the revolt to the twentieth century's satisfaction. Certainly – but the book contains plenty to trouble the chauvinist. Nicholas I, Pushkin's personal censor, demanded the original title, The History of Pugachev, be changed to The History of the Pugachev Revolt — because “a rebel,” said the Czar, “could not have a history.” Nicholas like all autocrats plugs one leak merely to open another. To reduce Pugachev to an opportunistic bandit is the raise the question of his opportunity. And Pushkin is very clear that his opportunity was the fundamental discontent of the landless:

Pugachev was fleeing, but his flight seemed like an invasion. Never had his victories been more horrifying; never had the rebellion raged with greater force. The insurrection spread from village to village, from province to province. Only two or three villains had to appear on the scene, and the whole region revolted. Various bands of plunderers and rioters were formed, each having its own Pugachev…

Pushkin's novella The Captain's Daughter elevates the revolt onto the even more ambiguous plane of romance. The background of the revolt falls away. The novella only fleetingly mentions the series of mutinies, going back decades, of the Cossack and other steppe horse tribes that had entered the Czar's service as guards of empire's fluid frontiers with the Ottoman sultan and the Shah of Persia, only to be robbed and oppressed by local officialdom. It says nothing about a significant portion of the Pugachev hordes, the “factory peasants,” serfs uprooted and sent to toil in the mines, foundries and arsenals of the military-industrial base Peter the Great had established to equip the armies and fleets of this newly modern, European state. On the other hand, the Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter is attractive, honorable and merciful at key moments, and thereby spellbinding – the very stuff of Nicholas' censorial nightmares. “It was my first encounter with evil,” Marina Tsvetaeva wrote – The Captain's Daughter was a children's book when she was a child – “and evil proved to be good. After that I always suspected it of good.”

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by Matt McKenna

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar may have been advertised as a science fiction blockbuster set in the vast nothingness of outer space, but the message of the film is clearly directed at more terrestrial concerns. While Interstellar attempts to distract its audience with riddles about space, time, and the nature of reality, the movie simultaneously drives home a critique of American politics and in particular the 2014-midterm elections. In fact, it's been rumored that the film's release was pushed back to November 5th–the day after the midterm elections–just so the movie wouldn't be viewed as a brazen attempt to influence voters.

How can a movie about saving the world via space travel be so political? Well, consider that the primary conflict in Interstellar involves the principal characters considering how long humanity can struggle on a dying Earth before being forced to colonize a new planet and ensure the survival of the human species. As you can imagine, most members of the audience will find the parallels to the recent midterm elections a bit obvious in that these characters are clearly meant to represent American voters who were asked to consider how long their government can struggle in a dying political environment before being forced to break up the toxic two-party system and ensure the survival of democracy in the United States. Well, the good news is the film is pretty optimistic, but the bad news is that maybe it shouldn't be.

Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is Interstellar's quiet-talking protagonist and renaissance man: he is a fabulous engineer, an incredible spaceship pilot, and by the time the film's plot begins, also an excellent agriculturist. This battery of skills comes in handy for Cooper as he is respected by both farmers and scientists for his breadth of knowledge which includes the intricate details of growing corn during the ongoing global blight and the incredibly specific skill of how to reprogram a wayward Indian military drone. It is therefore by fortunate happenstance (or is it?!) that Cooper ends up following a spookily transmitted message to a secret NORAD facility where he learns that Earth will soon become uninhabitable. Cooper is told he must fly a spaceship through a wormhole and locate a new planet to either 1) send the people of Earth or 2) grow a bunch of test-tube babies and reboot the human species.

At this point, you're probably rolling your eyes over the overt political parallels. And yes, even from the very beginning of the film, Nolan drops hints of the politicized nature of the story.

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by Misha Lepetic

“All this – all the meanness and agony without end
I sitting look out upon
See, hear and am silent.”

~ Walt Whitman

On a recent Facebook thread – about what, heaven help me remember – someone posted a comment along the lines of “This is what happens when we live in a post-truth society.” I honestly cannot recall what the original topic was about – politics? GamerGate? Climate change? Who knows – you can take your pick, and in the end it's not really that important. The comment struck me as misguided, though, and led me to contemplate not so much the state of ‘truth' as a category, which has always been precarious (see: 2,500 years of philosophy), but of the conditions that may or may not lead to the delineation and bounding of what we may consider to be sufficiently, acceptably truthful, and how technology has both helped and hindered this understanding today.

I responded to the commenter by suggesting that we live not so much in a ‘post-truth' society as a ‘post-accountability' society. It is not so much that truth is disrespected, distorted or ignored more than ever before, but rather that the consequences for doing so have (seemingly) dwindled to nearly zero. One could argue that this is vastly more damaging, because the degree of our accountability to one another profoundly influences how and if we can arrive at any sort of truth, period. Prior to the onset of information technology, there were well-established (and of course, deeply flawed) mechanisms for generating and enforcing accountability. Now, this mechanism of information technology that has relieved us of accountability is already so deeply enwoven into our society that not only will we never put the genie back in the bottle, we are at a loss to imagine how to ever get this genie to play nice. Except the problem is that this kind of righteous outrage is, in fact, entirely an illusion.

Instead of arguing about truth as an objective, abstract and hopefully attainable category, let's assume that truth (or whatever you want to call it) is a sort of consensus, and that consensus is reached through processes of trust (we respect each other's right to have a say) and accountability (we take some responsibility for what we say to each other). These are all fundamentally social processes, and as such haven't really changed very much over time. What interests me is how the insertion of technology into this discourse has changed our perceptions of the burdens that these concepts –truth, consensus, trust and accountability – are expected to bear.

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by Brooks Riley

The first time I passed through the Berlin Wall into the German Democratic Republic, it was two days after Hitler’s master builder Albert Speer was released from Spandau prison.

The Cold War was in full swing in the fall of 1966. I was travelling with a friend whose father was US ambassador to West Germany. An embassy driver took us two naïve young things on a tour of various landmarks in West Berlin, including the Wall and Spandau, where only a few hours earlier, Rudolf Hess had become the one remaining prisoner incarcerated there. Guarding Spandau, which now amounted to guarding Hess, was a joint venture of the Allies on a monthly rotational basis. Speer’s release had occurred in the dark of the previous night and U.S. embassy staff had been forbidden to attend the event. By the time our driver parked in front of the fearsome edifice, the French were in charge and no visitors were allowed–not that we were avid to peer inside those walls. Meeting the mentally unstable Hess might have been a kick, but only my friend’s father was given that dubious privilege.

Because of the GDR’s fluctuating policy toward diplomatic passports, my friend had to be issued a temporary non-diplomatic passport in order for us to visit East Berlin on a tourist bus. It was cold and rainy that day, gloomy on both sides of the wall. The bus would be taking a special route to the Pergamon Museum, one that insured that the shabbier vistas of East Berlin would be shielded from prying eyes–or so we were told. I remember glancing down side streets, looking for signs of decay or worse. What I saw were the ordinary streets of any big city in bad weather. So much for propaganda.

At the end of the day, we were taken to a café near the wall and told to be back at the bus by 6 p.m. for our return to West Berlin. At 6:15, the bus was nearly full, but one passenger was missing. As the minutes ticked by, the East German tour guide became increasingly nervous. A hint of ‘international incident’ hung in the air. The idea that someone would defect to East Germany was preposterous, but where was the guy? Was he a spy from the West infiltrating as a tourist? And if he didn’t show up, what would happen when the East Germans found out the American ambassador’s daughter was in their midst? ‘Terribly exciting,‘ we would later agree. At 6:20, the missing passenger boarded the bus with a lame excuse. So much for our le Carré moment out in the cold.

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by Jon Kujawa

On October twenty-first was Martin Gardner's 100th birthday. In celebration nearly one hundred Celebration of Mind (CoM) events are being held around the world. There are a few still yet to come: check their events listing to find one near you [1]. The CoM is an annual affair in which people celebrate all the things Martin loved: magic, art, music, mathematics, science, and the sheer joy of curiosity and discovery.

You're the sort of person who should go to a CoM if you think a computer constructed from 10,000 dominoes is really, really cool. Or a paper cutout dragon which appears to turn its head as you move. Or if you can't help but be intrigued by a question like “If you heat up a metal washer, does the hole in the center get larger or smaller?”

Martin Gardner (from Wikipedia)

Who was this Martin Gardner fellow who inspired so many people? Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he is right up there with Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie in the pantheon of influential Okies. Gardner earned a degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and thereafter became a writer.

In 1956 he wrote an article for Scientific American about hexaflexagons: flat shapes you can construct from single sheet of paper which can flexed to reveal more than the two sides you expect. There's a nice video by James Grime in honor of Martin Gardner which shows how to construct the six sided version.

The article was so popular that Martin Gardner was invited to write a monthly column for Scientific American on “recreational mathematics”. He did so for twenty-five years and forever set the bar on writing mathematics for a general audience. His columns introduced the world to Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata, Penrose's infinite tiling of the plane with a pattern which never repeats despite using only two different tiles, the now-widely-used RSA encryption scheme, and the Mandelbrot set we ran into last month.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

Currently, Ebola hysteria in the United States is at a low simmer compared to the fever pitch of a few weeks prior. In the lull following the peak of the hysteria as Americans in Dallas and New York City tested positive for the virus, a number of activists, physicians, and journalists have reflected on the similarities between the Ebola epidemic and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s. There are important differences, as a trending internet meme explains, more Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died of Ebola. Yet, Ebola has captured thousands of headlines and is a constant source of discussion, speculation and fear. In stark comparison, it took until May 1983, when 558 AIDS deaths had been reported to the Center for Disease Control, for the New York Times to make AIDS front page news. In today's internet/ social media age, a fascination with the dramatically contagious, fast-acting, and horrific virus ensured that Ebola immediately became a significant news item in a sensationalist media culture where “if it bleeds it leads”. Americans were able to keep their fears of Ebola purely theoretical over the spring and summer even as the death toll rose in West Africa, but on September 29 when Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed in Dallas, panic erupted across the U.S. and the accompanying flawed reporting, political overreaction, and public health nightmare made Ebola a reality rather than a curiosity from a distant continent.

Here, some of the similarities to AIDS began to emerge. In mid-October, a Haitian woman vomited at the Massachusetts Avenue MBTA station in the middle of Boston. The MBTA immediately suspended service from the station after a 911 call reported “a Liberian woman” may have Ebola. Based solely on the color of her skin, the woman was covered in a white sheath from head to toe by emergency responders and transported to Boston Medical Center where medical professionals deemed her unlikely to be suffering from Ebola. Of course, many will remember how less than thirty years ago the woman's Haitian lineage, rather than mistaken West African origin, would have been cause for discrimination. In the '80s Haitians, homosexuals, heroin users, and hemophiliacs were the 4 “Hs” Americans feared because of their presumed proclivity for contracting HIV. The episode in Boston betrays the precise issues with maintaining order in the midst of a public health scare— it is always deemed prudent by public officials to be safe rather than sorry when it comes to containing a lethal and contagious disease, even at the risk of violating the rights and dignity of citizens.

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The Impossible Glamour of Istanbul

the narrow streets on the hill
leading from the mooring of our ship
were stepped and cobbled, or bricked.
from overhead they must have looked like laces
knitting together masonry walls
which lined those ancient spaces

greenhorn that I was (and am,
in cosmic time at least) under the luck
of many graces I walked, naive
unafraid/unbrave and innocently unstuck,
full of ignorance and contradiction
as any boy who'd not yet had to grieve

with young others like myself I went learning,
laughing up our hill with no prescriptions
caroming off the inner walls of skulls but
singed instead by bonfire embers
scattered in fresh imagination's thrilling burning

we turned and faced the Bosphorus
caught in an opening between close parapets
the air was clear and undefiled for us
the sun as bright as white phosphorus
for us the place was indecipherable and new
impossible and glamorous

a muezzin called his faith from roofs
but no one really knew if god was there
a woman paused to stare at three
unconscious boys in sailor suits

the muezzin's song echoing in the canyons
of those streets was not consonant
but to our fifties four-part
doo-wop ears was clamorous—
like half an argument too resolute,
too apt to drown out other ways of love,
the opposite of amorous avalanching
down the slope of years
to bury new counter-thoughts
that children of the present world
hiking up their hills will
always be advancing
.

by Jim Culleny
11/01/14

—Thanks to Azra Raza for the poem's title and the article
that provoked this recollection

by Yohan J. John

I.

Before the scientific age, boundaries between disciplines were not that sharply defined. Many cultures around the world saw art, music, mathematics and theology as reflections of each other. Perhaps the most poetic expression of this idea was the Pythagorean notion of the musica universalis: the harmony of the spheres. According to this conception, there was a deep link between music and celestial motion: the sun, the moon and the planets danced around the Earth to the tune of an inaudible symphony. The heavenly bodies that could be seen with the naked eye were divided into two categories. There were the fixed stars, which were attached to a spherical cosmic canopy that whirled around the Earth, and the wanderers, the sun, the moon and the visible planets, which changed their position with respect to the fixed stars. Each of these wanderers was assigned its own sphere, so the cosmos was a kind of spherical onion, each layer inhabited by a celestial body that contributed its own note to the universal symphony. The tenor for life on Earth was guided by these cosmic vibrations.

Nowadays it seems this conception of the cosmos is only of interest to hippies, mystics and other fringe folk. Compared to the dizzying scale of modern cosmology, the spherical cosmos seems insular, childish, and unacceptably human-centric. The solar system is now viewed with the sun at the center, and the cosmos is recognized as having no center at all. Or rather, the center of the cosmos is everywhere.

Without in any way questioning the importance, power or beauty of the modern scientific worldview, I think it is possible to dust off the discarded image and learn something from it. Not necessarily something about the true nature of the cosmos, but about how we impose notions of beauty and perfection upon reality, and how reality often overturns these notions, leading us to wider and deeper understanding.

Before we get to the idea of perfection, we can pause in order to just look at the geocentric model. Let's just focus on the example of Venus. How many educated people know what the orbit of Venus looks like from an Earth-centric perspective? There is a popular narrative in science that claims that the geocentric model is just plain wrong, and that it is the Earth that moves, not the sun. But if, as Galileo and Einstein established, all motion must be relative to some frame of reference, then you can pick any position as a stable center and see what the motion looks like from there. Now that the heliocentric model has pride of place, we can look back at the geocentric model purely out of curiosity, and see if there is anything of interest to be found.

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by Paul Braterman

I have recently visited two very different sites where time is turned to stone, where just looking at the rocks shows the passage of enormous lengths of time, dwarfing all of recorded human history. At the first site, the rocks I was looking at were ancient sediments, with the clearest possible evidence of prolonged interruption. In the second, they were comparatively (!) recent volcanic outpourings showing the traces of slow continuous change. In the first case I was looking at an

80,000,000 year gap in the record, in the second, at the signs of a hundred thousand years of continuous weathering. The first site is indicated by nothing more than a small information board behind a farm
gate off a minor track, although it occupies a special position in the history of geology as a science. The second is visited by over 750,000 tourists annually, has its own well-appointed visitors centre, and was the occasion of a recent shameful episode of science denial. The first records events connected with the closing of an ancient ocean; the second with its reopening.

The first of these sites was Siccar Point, on the Scottish coast between Edinburgh and Berwick-upon-Tweed. Despite its significance, it has remarkably few visitors; in fact my family and I had it all to ourselves on a lovely summer's afternoon. It is hidden away of a minor road, and access is on foot, culminating in a steep descent across grassland. When the pioneering geologist James Hutton visited it in 1788, he came by boat, and was delighted (but not surprised) by what he saw – a spectacular example of an unconformity, a mismatch between one set of rocks, and those above them. The lower rocks are a sediment (greywacke) rather like a very coarse sandstone with lots of embedded small pebbles, of the type formed on continental shelves. As is common with sediments, different strata are clearly visible, but what is much less usual is that the strata are standing almost on edge. Immediately above these are another accumulation of rock, a reddish sandstone, with the strata lying almost horizontally. The boundary between the two sediments is also roughly horizontal, but with minor ups and downs, all filled in by the upper sandstone. Down on the beach to the immediate Southeast, the upper layer has been stripped away, and one can see dark lines corresponding to the upended strata, gently curving parallel to the coastline.

As Hutton realised, we are looking at a complex sequence of events, which we would now describe as follows:

• The initial coarse sediments were laid down in moderately turbulent offshore conditions. Turbulent enough to mix up debris of different sizes, but not so turbulent as to erase the boundary between different sedimentary layers.
• Enough time passed for them to form solid rock.
• Then came at least one, and possibly two (remember the curve in the strata exposed on the beach) episodes of mountain building, folding the sediments so dramatically that here they are standing on end.
• Next a lengthy interval, how lengthy Hutton had no way of knowing, in which these mountains were worn flat, apart from irregularities caused by local streams,
• The deposition, and eventual consolidation, of the upper sandstones
• And finally, the erosion of later deposits, exposing the sandstone and, down on the beach, the ner-vertical strata of greywacke.

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