metaspective

One cannot board a ship without imagining ship-wreck. Daniel envisions it as being like an opera, lasting several hours and proceeding through a series of Acts.

Act I: The hero rises to clear skies and smooth sailing. The sun is following a smooth and well-understood celestial curve, the sea is a plane, sailors are strumming guitars and carving objets d'art, while erudite passengers take the air and muse about grand philosophical schemes.

Act II: A change in the weather is predicted based on readings in the captain's barometer. Hours later it appears in the distance, a formation of clouds that is observed, sketched, analyzed, and analyzed. Sailors cheerfully prepare for the weather.

Act III: The storm hits. Changes are noted on the barometer, thermometer, clinometer, compass, and other instruments--celestial bodies are, however, no longer visible--the sky is a boiling chaos torn unpredictably by bolts--the sea is rough, the ship heaves, the cargo remains tied safely down, but most passengers are too ill or worried to think. The sailors are all working without rest--some of them sacrifice chickens in the hopes of appeasing their gods. The rigging glows with St. Elmo's fire--this is attributed to supernatural forces.

Act IV: The masts snap and the rudder goes missing. There is panic. Lives are already being lost, but it is not known how many. Cannons and casks are careering randomly about, making it impossible to guess who'll be alive and who dead ten seconds from now. The compass, barometer, et cetera, are all destroyed and the record of their readings swept overboard--maps dissolve--sailors are helpless--those who are still alive and sentient can think of nothing to do but pray.

Act V: The ship is no more. Survivors cling to casks and planks, fighting off the less fortunate and leaving them to drown. Everyone has reverted to a feral state of terror and misery. Huge waves shove them around without any pattern, carnivorous fish use living persons as food. There is no relief in sight, or even imaginable.

Men of his generation* were born during Act V and raised in act IV. As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of its history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered planks afloat a stormy sea ito a saling-ship and then, having climbed onboard it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.

But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true--that the world had once been a splendid orderly place--that humans had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

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* In England, the Civil War that brought Cromwell to power, and on the Continent, the Thiry Years' War.

...Simon Keegan, the trading standards inspector employed by the Northern Ireland Trading Standards Service, told me that "there is no conclusive scientific evidence stating that chiropractic does not offer effective treatment for infantile colic."

As it happens, to the best of my knowledge, there is no conclusive scientific evidence that chewing my toe-nail clippings is not an effective cure for Aids, but I would rather hope that trading standards services would take some action against me should I ever decide to set up a business based upon this claim.

Sometimes I wonder if even 10% of the people who proclaim their belief in God actually do believe in God. I am particularly unimpressed by those who proclaim the loudest; they demonstrate by their very activism that they fear the effect of any erosion of religion, and they must think that erosion is likely if they don't put their shoulders to the wheel. If they were more confident and secure in their religious convictions, they probably wouldn't waste their time trying to discredit a few atheists.

It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.

...

At what point should those who just believe in belief throw in the towel and stop trying to get their children and neighbours to cling to what they themselves no longer need?

We may be, as I have said before on this blog, storytellers by nature; but nature itself is not story-like. And because the stories that we weave can so often be limiting, can so often trap us, or can so often simply go over the same old ground, again and again, this attention to the world can loosen the bonds a little, can give us over to a kind of thinking that can help us find new paths and tracks through the world.

Self- interactions involving a solitary phase are generally difficult to observe, although examples have been documented that involve short-lived but highly-excited states accompanied by various forms of stimulated emission, although the resulting fluxes are generally not well measured. This form of interaction also appears to be the current preoccupation of string theorists.

Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to a schoolboy cutting up a live frog to see what makes it jump. It is an example of the domination of the left-brained rational scientific approach over the intuitive.