AdamSmith

One would have thought that would not have required explicit elucidation.

Paul Dirac: The man who conjured laws of nature from pure thought A fellow quantum physicist has said his discoveries were like 'exquisitely carved statues falling out of the sky, one after another'. In The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo gets under the skin of one of the most baffling geniuses the world has seen The Strangest Man has won the 2009 Costa Biography Award Tim Radford Friday 3 April 2009 03.21 EDT First published on Friday 3 April 2009 03.21 EDT Here's a puzzle. Bristol boy – slightly older contemporary of Bristol's other boy Cary Grant – has an unhappy childhood, but doesn't mention it for 50 years; learns to speak French, German and Russian, but becomes famous for his long silences; embarks on the wrong career; gets interested in mathematics and ends up at Cambridge, where he becomes famous for his even longer silences; hears about Einstein and gets into advanced physics; and then goes to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, who grumbles to Ernest Rutherford, "This Dirac, he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything." Somehow this silent, solemn, young beanpole earns the enthusiastic friendship and admiration of vibrant and merrymaking geniuses such as Bohr himself, Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, George Gamow, Peter Kapitza and so on, without, apparently, initiating reciprocal entertainment or conversation. His discoveries are in quantum mechanics, a subject that remains opaque even after 80 years of continuous exposition. Sign up for Lab notes - the Guardian's weekly science update Read more These discoveries involve no experiment, no apparatus and no observation that ever spontaneously troubled a layman. When quizzed about his achievements and their significance, he declines to explain, saying that quantum theories are built up "from physical concepts which cannot be explained in words at all". His responses to the most ordinary pleasures have a semi-detached air. He relaxes by climbing trees in a three-piece suit. Dirac once asked Heisenberg why he danced and got the unsurprising answer that it was a pleasure to dance with nice girls. Farmelo reports: "After about five minutes of silence, he said: 'Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'" Dirac sounds like an unlikely candidate for a biography, let alone a "hidden life". And yet this book races along. In the foreground, a lonely boy who becomes a lonely man driven by the concept of mathematical beauty (not an obsession you tend to volunteer in the pub). In the middle distance, there is university snobbery and economic privation, a difficult father, a smothering mother and a suicidal brother, along with the rise of the Nazi party in Europe, the repressions of Stalinist Russia, the second world war, the devastation of a continent, the atomic bomb, the McCarthy era, and the cold war. Embracing both foreground and background is the intellectual ferment of physical theory that begins with puzzles about the electron, and comes to a climax with the debate about the nature of matter and the commencement of space and time. The story is dizzying: the unlikely hero is widely declared the second greatest scientist of the 20th century, and most people have still never heard of him. He proposes anti-matter not on the basis of physical observation, but because his own mathematical logic tells him that it must exist. He shares a Nobel Prize and writes a textbook that becomes an instant and peerless classic (you can read a similar but differently accented response to the man, the discovery and the textbook in Frank Close's highly readable Antimatter, Oxford, £9.99, coincidentally published within a few weeks of The Strangest Man). And then the mystery deepens. This apparently unfeeling, probably autistic man somehow learns to become politically opinionated, and even warmly responsive, at least to a few friends. He marries, becomes a good husband and father, takes up gardening, learns to tell jokes, develops lecturing skills that make him part of the landscape of scientific show business, and emigrates to America, all without becoming a whit less taciturn to most of his associates. When I introduced this book club, I wondered if a biography counted as a science book. That is because life is what we make of it; but science goes its own sweet way. Farmelo makes the same point in chapter 31: "If Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming had never been born, radium and penicillin would have been discovered soon after the dates now in the textbooks." The science would have happened anyway: the story of the people who made the science tells us more about history than science. Dirac might, however, be an exception. He addressed mysteries, and solved them mysteriously. "His discoveries were like exquisitely carved statues falling out of the sky, one after another," says Freeman Dyson in the same chapter. "He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought." Books such as these tell us as much about the why, as about the how of science. Farmelo has already had enthusiastic reviews and quite rightly, too. This is a rich book: it pinpoints the moment, the milieu, the excitement of discovery and the mystery of matter, and it provides an alternative social history of the 20th century as well. And all of this is held together by a figure simultaneously touching and mysterious, capable of leaps of the imagination on the scale of Einstein and Newton and Darwin, but also capable, when his wife exploded "What would you do if I left you?" of thinking for a while and then answering "I'd say, 'Goodbye, dear.'"

I would have liked to.

If I had pushed it a little bit, I probably could have slept with him.

You could not name two places on earth that I for one hate more. Let's hold it in Jersey City! Or, actually, Orient Point.

http://radioopensource.org/whose-words-these-are-15-blooms-hart-crane/#

Actually I think what I meant was: I felt guiltiest about abandoning, and disappointing, my best friends with my escape into substance. But then what you say is absolutely what saved me: They kept giving me the unearned grace of just their loving presence, until that love finally melted through my problems, and gave me the first few feet of lifeline back into the real world.

I agree entirely.

One more try. Canto III: Per me si va ne la città dolente 28 February 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Dante, Divine Comedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Inferno, Macbeth, Our Town, Patty Griffin, personal, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Winston Churchill The entrance to Hell is about as welcoming as you’d expect: Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore: fecemi la divina podestate, la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. “THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE, THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST. JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH. DIVINE POWER MADE ME, WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS ETERNAL, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.” There’s a lot to unpack here, and most all of it is troubling. The first stanza isn’t the problem; it’s a fairly straightforward catalog of what you’d expect Hell to be like: woe, pain, and the lost. As a modern reader, I have an issue that speaks more to my inability to deal with the metaphorical than it necessarily highlights anything questionable in the poem itself. I don’t understand why Evil has to look so…evil. I guess the sense is that evil simply corrupts everything, so that while you may have had the best of intentions in building a city of marble and white, you end up with that Skull Castle on the hill that drips blood. I’ve written elsewhere that Shakespeare gets it the rightest of all when, in Macbeth, he has the doomed Duncan say of Macbeth’s home: “This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air/Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself/Unto our gentle senses.” Duncan is dumb about a lot of things (“There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust,” he says of the traitor Cawdor, who aligned himself against Duncan and the Scots with Sweno of Norway. However, Duncan doesn’t appear to learn that things-aren’t-what-they-seem lesson, and decides to stay the night at Macbeth’s house. But then, why shouldn’t he? Macbeth is a kinsman. Duncan has no reason to be wary of Macbeth; he didn’t see the way Macbeth “start, and seem to fear/ Things that do sound so fair” when Macbeth is told that he’ll be king while the current king still lives) and it’s easy to knock Duncan for trusting his heart about Macbeth; but we have the benefit of not being a character in a play. We know the ending. Duncan does not — nor can he. And I’m now really not writing about The Inferno. Let’s get back to it. The first stanza tells us that we’re absolutely not going to find a good time through these gates. The second stanza gives us even more reason to be terrified: God made Hell. This is Bad News Bears, guys. If Hell were a construct of Evil, there’s hope that it can be vanquished by Good at some point. There’s a sense that Good’s entire raison d’etre would be to eradicate Evil wherever it can (while knowing that, algebraically, it can never entirely wipe out Evil, because Evil needs Good and vice versa; we’ve all seen the opening credits to that Tom Cruise/Mia Sara masterpiece, Legend). But if Hell — this place of eternal woe, pain, and loss — is created by the Guy whose supposed to be on our side? If, as Dante suggests, Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore (“Justice–” i.e., God “–moved my maker”) — then…what? And what are we to make of the phrase e ‘l primo amore — “and primal love”? Primo can also be translated as “first” — which, for me anyway, takes away only about 0.0000001% of the creepiness factor. “Primal” sounds…well, primal. Like it can’t be reckoned with (and that about sounds like the God I know from the Old Testament). “First” sounds like there might be some sort of softening later; a reasoning that happens. (That…doesn’t sound so much like the God I know from any of the Testaments.) That there can be any amount of love contained in eternal punishment smacks of the very worst of parenting. My mom made terrible parenting decisions on a regular basis, backed by her mistaken idea of what I needed as a human being (punishment) and what her motivation was as a parent (love). Instead, though, she was simply a bitter, angry, hurting (in both senses: as in, she was in pain, and she caused pain) human being whom circumstance unfortunately put in charge of children, of sons, of not-yet-men and her entire experience of men had left her so bruised and broken (sometimes literally) that she was dead-set on allowing either my brother or me to turn out that way. We were not going to be like the men she knew, even if she had to beat it out of us. Of course, I love being here; and if there was a mechanism for pre-knowing — if, somehow, I existed before I existed and was told, “You can have a shitty and painful childhood filled with equal parts terror and wonder, or you can…not,” I’m picking the shitty and painful for those brief pockets of wonder. But I resent that those appear to be my only options. And finally — why must I, or you, or Dante abandon any hope, let alone all? Why would God create a place absent any sense of grace at all? That Dante makes it through Hell (oh, spoiler alert) at all means that he must have kept some sense of hope about him. Is Dante saying that hope is bad? That there is a chance that one can find oneself beyond saving? And that, once stuck, hope is not hopeful, but cruel? Maybe I make sense of it this way: I have a friend going through something paralyzingly painful. Her trust in herself and her own sense of truth has been undermined. (While on one hand Eleanor Roosevelt may be right, that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” it’s also true that you wouldn’t even be in the position of having to give or not give consent in the first place if there wasn’t some asshole trying to make you feel inferior. It’s a two-way street sometimes, Eleanor; accidents happen.) These are terrible things to lose — or, in her case, have taken from you. Because they were. “So what do I do?” she asks. And then, because it’s an email, and because I can’t interrupt her, she eventually reaches a place of hope: “Maybe the situation will change back. Maybe he’ll change his mind.” And that’s a toxic hope right there. That only leads to stasis: I won’t move at all, and maybe no further damage will happen, and maybe the situation will rectify itself. But that is rarely true; and when it is true, it’s the exception, and not helpful. Maybe not all hope needs to be abandoned. But maybe useless hope needs to be abandoned. (“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, old friend, I can’t make you stay. I can’t spend another ten years wishing you would anyway.” — Patty Griffin) For Dante — and, I guess, for any of us — the best way out of Hell is through (tm Robert Frost). (I also enjoy Winston Churchill’s “If you’re going through Hell, keep going.”) Regardless of the warning above the gate, Dante and Virgil enter Hell. And it’s loud: Quivi sospiri, pianti e alti guai risonavan per l’aere sanza stelle, per ch’io al cominciar ne lagrimai. “Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentations resounded through the starless air, so that I, too, began to weep.” Later, Dante describes the sounds as il qual s’aggira/sempre in quell’aura sanza tempo tinta (“whirling on forever in that air forever black”). I think Dante, the poet, thinks that Dante, the Lost, has been given an opportunity: to experience Hell, to witness all the punishment he is susceptible to, if he continues on his wayward path. I think, also, as we’ll discover later, Dante wants to work out a lot of frustrations against people he doesn’t like very much, too. The circles of Hell — and by the way, we haven’t even entered the First Circle yet; we’re still in Hell’s antechamber — allow Dante to catalog his grievances. It’s rare that someone gets off easy in Hell; it’s rare that someone is punished more than what Dante perceives the sin to be. Dante introduces the reader to the concept of the Neutral Angels. These are angels who took no side in the War in Heaven, the one where Lucifer challenged and lost against God. These neutral are forever punished as Eternal Footmen; they guide the damned to the boat that will take the damned across the river, and to the start of their journey to whichever circle of hell is appropriate to their transgression. However, there are those in Hell who never even get to go to a circle. They’re doomed to forever wait in the ante-chamber. In Dante’s theology, there’s a belief that there are those souls who aren’t even worthy of Hell: Questo misero modo/tegnon l’anime triste di coloro/che visser sanza ‘nfamia e sanza lodo (“This miserable state is born by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace yet without praise.”). And of those wretched Neutral Angels, Virgil tells Dante Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli,/né lo profondo inferno li riceve (“Loath to impair its beauty, Heaven casts them out, and the depth of Hell does not receive them.”). What I find even more horrifying about these Antechamber Damned is this description (and we haven’t even reached circles Eight or Nine yet, where the real hardcore shit goes down): Questi non hanno speranza di morte e la lor cieca vita è tanto bassa, che ‘nvidiosi son d’ogne altra sorte. “They have no hope of death, and their blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other lot.” These people are envious of both the blessed and the damned. All the damned. Stupidly they believe that anything else is better than where they are. I think deep pain can cloud our judgment that way. I should be kinder to those in Hell’s antechamber. I think often my thoughts in these rambles about this poem trivialize what Dante is hoping to achieve. I lower the quality of discourse by trying to make it about my puny life, rather than about Dante’s elevated expectations about salvation and grace. But here, too: I have been in places that I thought were as low as I could get, and I’ve wished for some sort of resolution, whether it be awful or merciful. Not death so much. I was never suicidal. (There is too much about life that I love; “clocks ticking….and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths….and sleeping and waking up” — it’s the “waking up” part that always kills me in Emily’s monologue. Lewis Carroll also writes about death as a kind of sleep in the prologue poem of Through the Looking Glass: “We are but older children, dear/Who fret to find our bedtime near.”) I was as trapped as these damned by the expectation that there was some resolution due me, and looking enviously at others who had achieved some sort of closure. I think closure is just a false way of marking time. Dante also shows a brief bit of dark humor, directing our attention to another group of damned waiting in the antechamber: Dante sees a banner racing in the sky above the crowd, carried by no one, with nothing written on it. Damned to follow this banner for eternity, in the cramped crowded Babel that is the antechamber is a line of people — sì lunga tratta/di gente, ch’i’ non averei creduto/che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta (“so long a file of people that I could not believe that death had undone so many”) — racing after the banner. These people, believing in nothing; passionate about nothing; nihilist and atheists; are forced to forever chase after an empty banner through a crowded room of wailing and gnashing souls. But Dante isn’t done yet with these unbelievers: he has them eternally stung by bees and wasps. Since they were determined to feel nothing in life, they are condemned to feel pain in death. And since their passion (or, if you will, blood) fed nothing in their life, their blood (or, if you will, passion) feeds the writhing worms that cover the floor of the antechamber of Hell. That’s what passes for a joke in Dante. It’s going to happen a lot, the deeper we get. Dante considered himself driven by Divine Passion — his love for Beatrice being one aspect of that; his need to get down his vision of Hell being another. He can’t bear the listless. Virgil and Dante make their way to the banks of the River Acheron, where those damned who have somewhere else in Hell to be are waiting for Charon to ferry them across. When Charon does arrive, he’s not pleased to see Dante. E tu che se’ costì, anima viva,/pàrtiti da cotesti che son morti (“And you there, living soul, move aside from these now dead.”). Charon tells Dante he’ll have to find another way across the river; più lieve legno convien che ti porti; “a lighter vessel must carry thee.” But Virgil commands Charon, compelling him to carry him and Dante across the river. vuolsi così colà dove si puote/ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare (“It is so willed, where Will and Power are One. Ask no more.”) Dante then meditates for a bit about the seemingly neverending rush of souls who wait on the banks of the river to be carried further to damnation: Così sen vanno su per l’onda bruna, e avanti che sien di là discese, anche di qua nuova schiera s’auna. “Thus they depart over dark water, and before they have landed on the other side another crowd has gathered on the shore.” Virgil explains, chillingly, that pronti sono a trapassar lo rio,/ché la divina giustizia li sprona,/sì che la tema si volve in disio: “They are eager to cross the river, for the justice of God so spurns them on their very fear is turned to longing.” Their fear of being in Hell, of knowing that they’re about to be relegated to eternal and horrifying punishment, is turned to longing. I don’t even know what to do with that sort of theology. I’ve certainly been in a position where I was eager to be punished; but those were situations where I hoped that, by enduring the punishment, I could move on past it, and to something better. There’s no hope for these souls in Hell. Even Virgil, doing a solid for the Virgin Mary and Beatrice, can’t escape the fact that once he and Dante reach Purgatory, Virgil has to head back to Hell, and Dante gets to go on through. It’s a curious poem, this. And in some ways ultimately I think it’s not meant for me. Or us. It’s written when the world was a different place, and we were different people. Its message is bleak and bitter — which somehow also carries with it some comfort. I try to make as much of the poem cleave to my own understanding as I can; however, ultimately, I think at best the poem and I can only walk parallel to each other. Dante finds himself overcome by all he has seen and experienced. Canto III ends with the line e caddi come l’uom cui sonno piglia. “and I dropped like a man pulled down by sleep.”The concept that Hell is actually God’s creation is one that we really can’t handle (“we” basically includes most modern readers regardless of faith). We’d much rather think of it as some Castle Grayskull built by Lucifer in opposition to everything good in the universe. Simpler, yeah? But that Hell and all its tortures came from the Good Guy? And that’s a point where the poem’s ideas first became totally alien to me: its idea of divine justice. Dante weeps, even faints. Virgil says knock it off: to bear sympathy toward the damned is to show moral weakness. What the hell? It’s lacking faith in God’s idea of justice, to think that sinners ever suffer more than they deserve (even if one of them is being whirled around in a tempest *forever* just for being kind of a slut). It follows logically, I just never liked it. And that longing to be punished? Those damned really do think father knows best (“Boy, I was a real prick, please hurt me *forever*). That Poet Dante finds this to be pretty crazy at first, too, helps me cope as I read it–I’m not supposed to accept that morality, at least initially. With this in mind, you’re right, God in Dante is very much like He is in the Old Testament–The Alcoholic Father God, to quote Lewis Black. https://classicsincontext.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/canto-iii-per-me-si-va-ne-la-citta-dolente/

As I told you before: I have been through this Valley of Death myself, through alcohol. As an addict, you feel your deepest friends are your worst enemies. Because they know you the best. As an attempting helper, you must be very careful, and not forceful, and look as deep as you can into their minds, to see when -- if ever, which may be never -- they can accept that first, least, insertion of your help. Do not get your hopes up. Addicts want total destruction. The two years I was on a death-drinking crusade in Manhattan, the only thing I wanted, at the end, was death.

Be his friend, in any honest way you can, given the tragic conditions. Hold his hand, in whatever way he will let you. But don''t bring up this subject. He has to solve this on his own.

You move among a much higher breed of people than I typically do!

Because, being locked into (physical brain-electrochemistry-driven, obviously; and then destructive learned behaviors on top of that) love for his SUBSTANCE, the only thing he will feel from your sincere expression of concern and care is PRESSURE and DISAPPROVAL. And those will drive him only further down into his habit, to escape the Bad Trip you have laid on him. That's the way it always goes. He will just have to find a point so low in life, caused by his fix, that he himself realizes -- somehow seeing through the fog and pull and so on of the drug -- that it's either return to real life, or else just this shit from here on until I end up in the long narrow pine box.

walk away. run away! only he can save himself. DO NOT throw yourself into his mess.

One of the great privileges of a lifetime was knowing him, very slightly, through dinner parties together at the home of a common friend in Cambridge. Lehrer was (like me) somewhat hard of hearing. And aging and cynical to boot, at that time. So instead of any praise of his songs, which he detested speaking of, I went into some indirect 'source criticism.' Speaking of the comic and social-critical satiric achievements of Mencken, and Ring Lardner, and S.J Perelman, and Peter de Vries, &tc &tc. That opened him up! He began speaking, guardedly and carefully, but honestly, of those and others among his intellectual & stylistic sources for his songs. I had won his trust. We continued that dialogue across several more dinner parties by that same hostess. He was a joy. A curmudgeon by that time in his life, but a joy if you could find how to speak with him, and listen to him, and give him some things back that he found interesting and not stupid.

...and of course!