In Louis Dumont’s Essays on Individualism he compares those days gone by when neighbors gathered to rebuild the barn destroyed by calamitTribe 4 stars
In Louis Dumont’s Essays on Individualism he compares those days gone by when neighbors gathered to rebuild the barn destroyed by calamity, with modernity, when insurance premiums are paid to strangers who contract strangers to rebuild the barn for a stranger. Likewise, Junger opens his book with a lamentation, “I’d grown up… where people’s homes were set behind deep hedges… and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn’t need to. Nothing happened that required a collective effort. Anything bad that happened was taken care of by police… fire department… or town maintenance crew.”
Junger’s book is about why for many, he writes, “war feels better than peace, and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing… Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Thus echoing Chantal Delsol in her Icarus Fallen: “Hardship makes a people. So does its absence.”
As Junger tells it, this started early. Benjamin Franklin puzzled over it, as did a Frenchmen in 1782 when he noted, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European. There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.” Yet, Steven Pinker would be pleased that Junger makes clear the fictions of a Nobel Savage are not the reason. Instead, while modernity advertises individualism in the latitude of every “free choice” it can invent, modernity is hostile to freedom. Modernity, Junger writes, “created exactly the opposite of [surplus leisure time]: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work.”
Junger claims the agricultural revolution, followed by Industrial Age (and now Information age), violated the kind of creature humans evolved to be. Rather than socially dependent creatures with feelings for our tribe, modernity made us asocial, isolated creatures often with hostility for others in a new imitation of tribe based on political ideology. While our political Right vilifies nonworking freeloaders, the Left promotes care for the needy. But according to Junger both coexisted in hominid social structure as part of a unified whole for hundreds of thousands of years. The former evolved from the reality of scarce resources with the threat to tribal survival a freeloader presents. The later evolved from a tribal mentality that values every member as a healthy defender of the tribe. Of America’s petty ideologies, this Afghanistan and Iraq war correspondent notes, “Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.” The social system we built is based on abnormal psychology, and yet we assume its normal through habit. The stress we feel and daily tensions we experience say otherwise. Could there be another species so odd?
For me this lecture series was a thrill, and changed what I assumed I knew about existentialism. According to this University of Texas professor, theFor me this lecture series was a thrill, and changed what I assumed I knew about existentialism. According to this University of Texas professor, the late Robert Solomon, existentialism is a movement not a school, made up of Christians, agnostics, and atheists. It addresses those post-antiquities questions that grow out of individualism: Who am I? What am I to do? Will my life matter? The emphasis is on an informed, responsible choice, accepting the consequences, living life to the fullest vs. killing time.
Solomon illuminates existentialist ideas commencing with Camus and his novel The Stranger. Through Camus, Solomon provides an answer to a puzzle I’ve encountered a hundred times: “People without thoughts are people without emotions, and people without emotions are people without thoughts.” Loaded with metaphors, Camus’ main character has no emotions and no self. In prison, reflecting on other’s judgement of him produces a newfound sense of meaning. Supporting my hypothesis that purpose is internal while meaning is external, I was suddenly enthusiastic for the series and read the The Stranger in a way I’d not have done without this intro.
On to Camus’ next work, The Myth of Sisyphus, we find Sisyphus commanded by the gods to push a boulder up hill, let it roll down, only to push it up again without end for eternity. Such absurdity—as all lives will eventually encounter—makes death welcomed. Solomon makes a comparison to Ecclesiastes’ (very Sumerian) assessment that life is pointless vanity. But Sisyphus rebels against the gods, not through refusal, but embrace (Buddhist-like). Committed to his task, immersed in his duty, with passion and zeal, Sisyphus invents meaning. Or is that purpose? This makes clear what religious believers already know, and have since a handful of them poisoned Socrates: philosophic thinking is a dangerous business. Rational truth can be not only a threat to societal rules, norms, and belonging, but dehumanizing. Humans invent “meaning,” they can just as easily uninvent it. Great preparation for Nietzsche, who shows up later.
Next up, Camus’ The Fall, where the main character helps a blind man, then doffs his hat to a man who can’t see. He wonders why he did this, only to conclude he’s a fake, performing for the favorable assessment of onlookers. Reflection for this man becomes, not honest, but a disease. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but can it be overdone, as a different kind of self-deception? I nearly let go the leash on my dogs when this one cracked like a high voltage discharge between my earbuds. Living in splendid isolation, too prone to pondering, the shock was a little too close for comfort, and I was glad for it. As Mark Twain said, “All men live lives of quiet desperation.” But maybe we shouldn’t. Which is of course the point of existentialism’s project: an informed, responsible choice, accepting the consequences, then from there, live to the fullest.
After a good strong drink of Camus, Solomon offers a chaser made from a mix of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. After a few shots of these names I can’t spell or pronounce, I was tipsy with ideas to occupy me for years to come. What a delightful high....more
This book is about science and politics. Pinker took on the project this book represents after colleagues told him that little boys are aggressive becThis book is about science and politics. Pinker took on the project this book represents after colleagues told him that little boys are aggressive because they’re socialized to be, teenagers get the idea to compete for appearance thanks to spelling bee awards, and men think sex is desirable because society tells them it is. In other words, humans are born a blank slate, only nurture, not nature, will make them what they are. “This is the mentality of a cult,” writes Pinker, “in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety. This mentality cannot exist with an esteem for truth… [and is] responsible for unfortunate trends… [like] a stated contempt among many scholars for the concepts of truth, logic, and evidence, and the inevitable reaction [of] politically incorrect shock jocks who revel in anti-intellectualism and bigotry, emboldened by the knowledge that the intellectual establishment has forfeited claims of credibility…” Amen to that!
Pinker shows the cult fearful of findings from cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary physiology. Why? Because they make the errant assumption that pre-wired humans are incapable of being made moral and humane. Their interpretation of statistics was as certainty, not probability. Hence, what we’re now so familiar with from the Right were long before practiced by the Left. Scientific findings were not only denied and vilified, but scientists who dare desecrate the creed were attacked with smear campaigns, character assassination, and words put in their mouth only to pronounce how wrong they were. Even the likes of paleontologist Steven J. Gould (stunned me), geneticist Richard Lewontin (naturally), and the neuroscientist Steven Rose (daft) were dupes for the movement. This troika and the campus snowflakes they inspired labeled E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Trivers as genocidal bigots, racists, practitioners of eugenics, Nazis (yawn), and Right-wing prophets of patriarchy (more yawn). All because Wilson et. al. found biology responsible for much of human behavior. (Was this really a surprise?) While Pinker’s focus is social “science” doctrine, not the shock jocks he refers to (Rush Limbaugh etc.), as one reads this book it becomes apparent there’s no difference between the two, other than what they proclaim as sacrosanct and blasphemy.
After a history of the blank slate starting with John Locke, followed by the Great Schism and what the cult is trying to protect, Pinker dives into measurement, data, and reason. The identical twin studies were so pronounced and ironclad, I had to reread them, then check references to believe these clones (which is what these twins are) could be so identical in their behavior. That is, twins separated at birth, shipped off to different countries, class structures, learning environments, never to know the other or their common parents, found decades later to have the same behaviors in a myriad of the most nuanced and peculiar ways. Biology matters.
So it is, with the purifying flames of science separated from politically correct programs of pseudo-morality, Pinker burns just about every quasi-religious Postmodernist liberal dogma in the blank slate arena you can name—with the exception of gender-fluidity, not yet concocted. I hope one day he’ll do the same to Creationists and global warming deniers on the Right. What a thrill, and a shame to find even biologists themselves got caught up in the PC creed of our times. It also clarified for me what almost cannot be done in physics and chemistry (except for transparent liars like Ivar Giaever). Biology, several steps up from the closest thing we’ve got to certainty in the foundations of reality, allows for some fiddle-faddle and hoodwink, so long as the promoter has a notable name like Gould. Limbaugh and Creationists love this. Gould, the troika, and their followers deserve their share of credit for the monster they helped create on the Right as a response to this kind of nonsense....more
Wonderful, edifying, and irritating. This book is about manipulating the personality of molecules. Molecules are curious things, calm and agitated, etWonderful, edifying, and irritating. This book is about manipulating the personality of molecules. Molecules are curious things, calm and agitated, eternal and transient, dedicated to each other and more than happy to fool around. Assuming, that is, if you whisper to them just the right thing in just the right way. I’m reminded of those hours long ancient Egyptian incantations murmured during mummification of the Pharaoh. The slightest error in pronunciation or hand waving requires you start all over to do it again. No wonder it took months to pickle those guys.
Ditto molecules. With a first laser pulse you can couple the energy of light into one of a molecule’s many quantum steps up its ladder of excitement. These steps are usually very picky, but not always. Since everything in their world has a probability, it depends on how they feel at any given moment. They’re very moody these molecules. Capricious on the order of femtoseconds. That’s 10e-15 seconds, or a thousandth of a trillionth of a single second. Light at 186,000 miles per second (3e8m/s) travels just 1/100,000th of a centimeter in that time. Some mood swings happen in as small as attoseconds (10e-18s)! There are also many types of ladders to choose from: electrons that jump, vibrations that symmetric stretch, asymmetric stretch, or bend, and rotations that dance in circles. And they all communicate. They embrace, mix it up, collide, repel, and mutate into a countless array of states.
This book reveals what would have seemed like magic not long ago: the mastery of molecular behavior through tailoring of laser pulses. With the advent of femtosecond laser pulses—where just a few cycles of a light wave can be hooked into a molecule—those molecules can be directed. Pumped up over energy hills, then down the valley of choice for useful products. With properly tuned first and second pulses of specified length, shape, phase, polarization, and timing you can steer any couple of atoms that constitute a molecule into rewarding chemical reactants.
Shapiro and Brumer’s “Quantum Control of Molecular Processes,” give this text by Rice and Zhao the status of complement to their own. While Shapiro and Brumer may know what all those equation variables are, the reader doesn’t. The chronic failure to define variables, persistent equation reference errors, and plots with no labeled axes stole one star from this review. You can recover much from referenced publications, and I have. But unless you’ve got a university affiliation, that’s $40/paper, and you’ll need a bunch of them....more
Sometimes brilliant, sometimes too formal. A few chapters without relevance. Saving “The Insights of HistoryReflections after 70 years of scholarship
Sometimes brilliant, sometimes too formal. A few chapters without relevance. Saving “The Insights of History” for last. Periodically, Durant provides wisdom only an alert, observant 94 year old can. His stages of life chapters were delightful and provided some comfort. Regrets of my youth were little different from the standard adolescent. His summary chart of age by column, with rows of single word descriptions was fun to score where I reside intellectually / spiritually / characteristically between young and old (firmly in “middle age 2” at 2.02).
Durant highlights an evolution in morality that undid a onetime reference to it: “…the ethics of Christ have made it impossible for developed minds to believe that a ‘grim beard of a God’ freighted our forbearers into decency,” writes Durant. “It was Christ who killed Jehovah.” Though Durant maintains this is not the root of moral decay. That belongs to the Industrial Age, as he lists its toxins. He sees modernity as a perilous investigation, having departed ways fit for agricultural society, uncertain of just how far individualism can be pressed before chaos. Like Plato and Brooks Adams, he expects cycles of license and severity. Each movement a response to its progenitor and the dual nature of humans.
He takes a pleasant, sometimes humorous squat on Freud, modern art as “idolatry of the new becomes worship of the bazaar,” and Herbert Spencer’s crusade for “trade school” universities shelling out employable cogs (for Durant, a mere first order goal of education), not vital humans. The inverse of this treatment is saved for history, “as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments.” Where we see the initial conditions, gauge atmospherics of the people’s emotional temperature, their intellectual weight. Then watch the test run over pages unfolded in the petri dish of time....more
As a secular reader I found most of what this book offers as common sense: secular people have morals,Mostly common sense apologetics for the secular
As a secular reader I found most of what this book offers as common sense: secular people have morals, values, family, seek to do good, have no traditions, and no comfort in a promise of supernatural salvation (big problem). And, that religious believers tend to believe the first four on that list are not possible without religion, notably their own. After Trump, it’s no longer a surprise that the author’s many referenced studies show that American believers are not always but “more likely” to be bigots and racists (they scream at such associations, but it’s no longer deniable). However, 1), I’d like to examine those studies, their questions, and assumptions to check their methodology. (Social “science” is not science.) And 2), isn’t that how true communities (when we had any) assured cohesion, shunning others while promoting their own as the only true way? From that standpoint, no surprise that believers are hostile to non-believers, though the author notes, they do tend to give more to charity.
In the chapter “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the secular life starts to fray. Some interviewees responded to the question of death with, “What’s there to be afraid of?” And “I wasn’t here 100 years ago. That doesn’t bother me. Why should my absence 100 years from now be a problem?” Really? Pulease. Let’s ask this person when they’re 70 or 80 years old, close to doom, no longer invincible. Rational answers, be they science based, or logic have zero impact on that great non-rational problem: we’re alive and know we won’t be. That’s why non-rational religion works for those who can believe it. If it made sense like science it would lose its power. Whatever that mythical aspect of human nature is, the supernatural / mythical / magical addresses it. Secularism appears to have no good answer. I was hoping to find one in this book.
I particularly liked the author’s chapter, “Aweism,” concerning the “miraculous” nature of existence, much of it now understood through science. And his equating this to what believers probably experience. Though they attribute it to God, we attribute it to fundamental laws of nature, which we do not worship, but should. He also does well to show how America was not – as the Founders intended – created as a Christian nation. “Under God” was added to our Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the moto “In God we trust” added in ‘56, both in response to godless commies in the USSR. As President John Adams said, “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”...more
Tradition is the topic here: what it is, is not, how to keep it, how to lose it. Another of the many critics of post Enlightenment social / spiritualTradition is the topic here: what it is, is not, how to keep it, how to lose it. Another of the many critics of post Enlightenment social / spiritual modernity, Pieper writes, “A future without a past is null and void [i.e. our perpetual present]. And hope without a foundation is just another name for despair.” For Pieper the only traditions that can survive are those begun by something men cannot assail – God. Mere humans, like America’s Founders, aren’t distant enough, mysterious enough, inscrutable enough to have lasting power, and yet 242 years on, their system of governance stands up to a want-to-be dictator – so far.
Pieper does understand something the likes of Richard Dawkins don’t: “When what has been believed becomes verified and critically established,” Pieper writes, “at the same moment it loses its character as tradition.” That is, traditions – at least religious traditions that Pieper reveals are central to him – must not make sense in the way science makes sense of nature. The inscrutable nature of myth, art, religion are what give them power because they make sense to human nature, odd as it and they can be.
While this reader agrees with Pieper that a civilization without a tradition becomes rudderless, as America is a shining example, Pieper’s appeal to and requirement of a divine source will suite those who don’t need convincing. The rest of us, and modernity itself, has a much harder nut to crack than a leap of faith: a kind of convincing that has both power over that mystic-loving human nature, and rational weight. In the end, I found Pieper at times tedious and not convincing, though he does offer some food for thought....more
Rabbi Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, presents interesting ideas concerning the dual nature of humans and the status of this natRemarkable impressions
Rabbi Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, presents interesting ideas concerning the dual nature of humans and the status of this nature in modernity. That status, says the Rav, is bleak because the practical self, recognized and valued in today’s world, is alienated from its spiritual self with little apparent utility.
Where the Rav does best is a reinterpretation of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Their different order of creation separated by barely a page stymies the modern fact-checker like me. But the Rav’s view is richer. Ignoring details of creation sequence, he claims they’re both true. Referencing biblical text, the Adam of chapter 1 gets his marching orders to “harness and dominate the elemental natural forces and put them at his disposal,” writes Soloveitchik. Seeking how things work, Adam 1 strives “to vanquish disease, conquer space, forge political structures…” Adam 1 is victor over nature. (Recall, ancient Hebrews lived in a desert that will kill the unprepared. No wonder nature was a hostile).
But Adam of chapter 2 is instead overpowered to the point of unconscious, when he must sacrifice a part of his own body for something greater than himself and his achievements—Eve—the answer to his loneliness. Something Adam 1 is too busy to consider. Adam 2 asks not how the universe is the way it is, but why? Adam 2 “is aware of an endless past which rolled on without him,” writes the Rav. “He is aware also of an endless future which will rush on with no less force long after he will cease to exist. The link between the ‘before’ in which he was not involved and the ‘after’ from which he will be excluded is the present moment, which vanishes before it is experienced. In fact, the whole accidental character of his being is tied up with this frightening time-consciousness.” Beautiful. And so nice to know I’m not the only one seized by this realization.
For the Rav, this was the intension of God, to create this seemingly impossible gap, forcing humans to manage a way to live in both worlds. With a secular view, aware of how the Bible was collated, I wonder, did the ancients intend just what Soloveitchik claims? To enunciate our competing nature in the very first two pages? His argument is so convincing I’m inclined to think so.
This book raised another question as I read it. Was the Levantine’s full departure from nature religions—elements of them still part of surrounding cultures at the time—what created the seemingly impossible gap? Not the disconnect between Adam 1 and 2, but that 2 no longer had concrete access with a spiritual world as 1 had with his practical materialism. Once God was exiled from nature, God was no longer directly reachable in the outer world by Adam 2, but rather through the abstract inner world of prayer. By Louis Dumont’s Essays on Individualism this inward turn was part and parcel of all Axial Age movements, including Judaism.
Soloveitchik’s book left me with remarkable impressions: other ways to view human nature, our modern conundrum, and writings of the ancients....more
Author Peter Atkins wrote perhaps the most amazing science text ever written, a thriller from start to finish: Physical Chemistry 8thReason at a cost
Author Peter Atkins wrote perhaps the most amazing science text ever written, a thriller from start to finish: Physical Chemistry 8th Ed. (Which, by that electrified version of the Pony Express, I received pristine from Malaysia for a bargain price!) Writer of over 70 books, it was with great anticipation this little volume would shed some light on ontological questions of growing concern in the creeping sense of meaningless modernity. Atkins put the kibosh to that early: “…as we see no objective evidence for the non-physical, but appreciate that there is a great and forceful sentimental longing for it, we cannot in all intellectual honesty accept its existence…”
But is this intellectual honesty, honest? Could it be that “forceful sentimental longing” is a clue to another reality, of human nature? Quite non-rational as compared to the rational nature of nature and the capacity of science to understand it. As Marcel Gauchet writes in his Disenchantment of the World, “The illogical solution to our illogical condition.” While Atikins (and his pal Dawkins) seethe over religious beliefs, practice, corruption, Intelligent Design, terrorism, etc. as mind closing dogmas (territory I’ve tramped myself through run-ins with Creationists), his prologue also closes the door on that spiritual aspect of humanity. Evidenced from the first temple at 10,000 year old Çatalhöyük, the 24,000 year old Venus of Laussel, or cave paintings at Lascaux 30,000 BC. This is not to say the gods are real, but the human nature they reveal is.
Atkins does provide new perspectives on old things. Creation can be seen as creation of nothing from nothing, given pairs of opposite charge yield a zero net charged universe. Easy. (Really?) Entropy’s disorderly decay is responsible for all that order we see – temporary as it is. He does a nice job with analogies of lifting weights to make things run, like DNA, ultimately with the sun as the heavy lifter. His description of cellular replication is a mind bender that makes a Newton and Einstein guy like me shake my head in wonder. And his description of rigor mortis (I’ve long puzzled over how that happens) made my skin crawl. I salute Atkins for communicating the joy of understanding, even though his comes with the required cost of denying another aspect of human nature....more
Lipovetsky is one of those French philosophers who’ve rebuilt their intellectual tradition after the wreckage of FLipovetsky’s mixed bag of modernity
Lipovetsky is one of those French philosophers who’ve rebuilt their intellectual tradition after the wreckage of Foucault, Derrida, and the postmodernist gang. This slim book packs a punch, dismissing catastrophe claims of others in “trajectory of civilization” circles. Lipovetsky sees ills of Western civilization more as transitional. Ancients saw history as cyclical. “Decline written into the spokes of the wheel of fortune…its arrival as necessary,” notes the author. In the Christian world, Fall and Judgement are two beacons connected by a transitory present which really doesn’t matter much. Promise comes when it’s over. But the “first modernity,” meaning 17th – 18th century Enlightenment, was a break. Happy times of a mythic past were now promised for the future as aspiration, and the present was one of endless progress. “Reason would rule the world…with peace, equality, and justice.” Two world wars put an end to that. Reason was demoted to calculations and bureaucratic domination. The second modernity, or hypermodernity, commenced around 1950, says Lipovetsky, when advances in production met post war and Depression cravings for gratification. Both past and future were dismissed, making our perpetual present of positive experience the priority. Consumption was no longer the private purview of the privileged class in a society imbued with “the logic of seduction,” providing “a sense of eternity in a world in thrall to the transience of things.” For Lipovetsky, that’s not so bad, a turn of the wheel, which may not be round, as we figure out the future as we go. The old rules are lost, but new ways evolve. “People are no longer forbidden to smoke by legislative decree: instead, they’re made aware…of health consequences and life expectancy.”
Lipovetsky has much to say about fashion as a perspective (not of clothing alone), representative of individual autonomy. Not just from parents, hence traditions; not just as a way to renew the thrill of desire and satisfaction through consumerism, repeating our exercise of “choice;” but with consequent rejection of “regulative social principles…emptied of transcendent substance.” Lipovetsky doesn’t acknowledge that fashion also represents tribal affiliation. Not so autonomous as he claims.
The double edged sword is Lipovetsky’s frequent refrain. Hypermodernity is a paradox, “Every increase in autonomy occurs at the expense of a new dependency…The great socializing structures have lost their authority, the great ideologies are no longer productive,…the age of emptiness has dawned, but without tragedy or apocalypse.” “Hypermodern individuals are better informed and more destructured, more adult and more unstable,...more open and more easy to influence, more critical and more superficial, more skeptical and less profound.” And yet, “Anxieties about the future are replacing the mystique of progress…the present increasingly lived out in a sense of insecurity. Abandoned to himself, deprived of any frameworks, the individual finds himself deprived of the social structures that endowed him with an inner strength that enabled him to live up to life’s trials and tribulations…Everything worries and alarms him…However frenzied he consumes spirituality [and all things are now merely consumed] he appears not the least more serene… We have embarked on an interminable process of desacralization and desubstantiation of meaning…this is how the gods die: not in a [much predicted] nihilist demoralization of the West and anguish over the loss of values, but in small jolts of meaning.”
Doesn’t sound so good to me. Despite Lipovetsky’s repeated attempt to polish that silver lining in a dark cloud, one can’t help but come away with a sense that modern man is just killing time....more
Comparisons between historical tyrannies and America’s brewing
I found this very short book mildly informative (about 14,000 words, 30 pages of regularComparisons between historical tyrannies and America’s brewing
I found this very short book mildly informative (about 14,000 words, 30 pages of regular text, stretched to 126 pages in its pocket format). The author draws parallels between tyrannies of the past and the one Trump and his cult seek to create in the US today. That flavor is established on the first page when the authors writes, the Founders “contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire. As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.” Given the title, parallels are drawn from Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. Occasionally I first assumed the author was listing acts of these men, only to find it was Trump. External validation proves him right. Some sections are more penetrating than others: “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so.” Clearly what the tyrants did, and Trump hopes to do. Compared with, “Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.” Such common sense might be a healthy prescription for the reality TV crowd, but the Amazon / Goodreads crowd won’t be that impressed....more
Letokhov (1939 – 2009) the author of this book was a pioneer in the field of laser chemistry and provides a good statement of the science of multi-phoLetokhov (1939 – 2009) the author of this book was a pioneer in the field of laser chemistry and provides a good statement of the science of multi-photon excitation as it was in 1982. Much has been learned, but much was also already in place. His is the only text I’ve found that tells me why my SciLab model fails to find a single “magic” photon all the way a molecular vibration ladder to the quasi-continuum. Common sense had me searching from the bottom up. On page 206 Letokhov says the method will only work if we start in the middle, part way up the ladder, not from the first step. “[Only] if the [laser] frequency is tuned in resonance to the Q-branch of the transition v = 1 to v = 2.” Once found, take that energy to the bottom and search for matches up the vibration-rotation ladder from there. I could have saved a sizable portion of hair on my head had any one of countless other books and papers made this short remark. #$@&*%! Letokhov even provides numeric examples so common in engineering, virtually unheard of in physics texts. Though he can leave their details, units, and missing terms to the paper referenced – an annoyance. With all the odd ball ways that molecules can do things, his Figure 5.13 is a nice survey. And chapter 5 is where things really come together for multi-photon operations. Good book. Forgotten by time and foreign territory to most. Bought for a song....more
Books like this get forgotten only because their copywrite ages. But fundamentals of the most bizarre extremes of reality haven't changed since 1980 wBooks like this get forgotten only because their copywrite ages. But fundamentals of the most bizarre extremes of reality haven't changed since 1980 when this one was published (hence, bought for a song). In this text Weidner (1921-2000) and Sells (1925-2000) provide a thoroughly engaging series of revelations thanks to their talent in making nonsense sensible, and both Relativity and quantum can easily seem nonsensical. They make wonderful analogies with the classical world we live in, and show by quite simple mathematics (de Broglie's relation) that, no, Deepak Chopra's Quantum Healing and his other wild quantum claims really are farce. As an undergraduate text all one needs is high school to grasp what Weidner and Sells teach. They often do a much better job than graduate texts, and so serve as welcomed reference for those moments when deep in the weeds one wonders, "Just what am I doing here anyway?" Flip a few pages in this book and it all comes back. Read this, sit back, and imagine that what you just discovered is taking place all around you in an unseen world. A hearty salute to Weidner and Sells. ...more
Shermer is highly informative, makes solid points, usually with good historical reference for comparison between options for stable society, and proviShermer is highly informative, makes solid points, usually with good historical reference for comparison between options for stable society, and provides good data to substantiate (from the standpoint of rigor, very good, from the standpoint of readability, too much - a data appendix might have been warranted).
Shermer's point is this: "I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason... Further, I demonstrate that the arc of the moral universe bends not merely toward justice, but also toward truth and freedom, and that these positive outcomes have largely been the product of societies moving toward more secular forms of governance and politics, law and jurisprudence, moral reasoning and ethical analysis."
Here, here! However, there are times when Shermer's modernity bias comes through. He writes, "For tens of millennia moral regress best described our species..." But laws that sought greater justice go all the way back to Sumer's Ur-nammu ca. 2150 BC, and likely to innovation of the city ca. 3500 BC when living in numbers contained by close quarters demanded it. Morality evolved. It seems to have been accelerated by Enlightenment, not born there. Shermer says, "It is the individual who is the primary moral agent—not the group, tribe, race, gender, state, nation, empire, society, or any other collective—because it is the individual who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies...Historically, immoral abuses have been most rampant, and body counts have run the highest, when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group." The Amish remain my favored example of a true community that fights death by individualism, where it is that very community that provides its members meaning, purpose, and reference, not autonomy. Shermer contradicts himself by condemning all collectives because of the egregious errors of some, while he notes earlier that we can't write off science for what he sees as the error of Nagasaki. And was Hitler the outcome of community or individual fanaticism gone mad?
For me, this book will remain a rich source of analysis for comparing Shermer's full embrace of modernity with Chantal Delsol's indictment of Enlightenment's spiritual carnage in her Icarus Fallen. Somewhere there must be a sustainable middle ground....more
Taylor seeks to counter pronouncements of the death of Man by the likes of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the AmeriBalanced perspective on an uphill battle
Taylor seeks to counter pronouncements of the death of Man by the likes of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. He seeks to do this with practical reality and a genealogy of “authenticity” at the root of individualism’s latest quest for identity. Taylor argues that origins of authenticity have moral foundations in Enlightenment that all moderns, including Bloom, would see as indispensable. However, Taylor agrees with Bloom that the current state of this authenticity is a narrowed and flattened individual. Individuals self-defined, without community, by the exercise of free choice alone. Where choice trumps substance based on the hollowness of “moral subjectivity,” mere difference, and the predictable disconnection from others and a higher calling (the very conditions for significance) that individualism is bound to foster. All “deviant products of the ideal of authenticity,” he writes.
But excess individualism is only half the problem. Maximized efficiency, what Taylor calls “instrumental reason” is seen as the other half. Together these form Max Weber’s disenchantment of the world where sacred structure is dead, relations with men and nature are lost to utility, and “creatures that surround us lose significance in the chain of being, open to treatment as raw materials,” writes Taylor. His goal is to show while our social structure tilts strongly in these directions (dehumanization of over population, mega cities, capitalistic urge, etc.), we can fight uphill against them. But to do that we’ll have to reject moral subjectivity, realizing some ways are superior, built on values substantiated by reason.
Taylor submits that “authenticity” was born around 1800 based on Descartes earlier individualist ideal of “dispassionate rationality.” A kind of self-responsible thought for oneself, and the root of scientific investigation. Locke’s political individualism prior to social obligations, authorities, and creeds also played a role. It was around this time that authenticity was part of an evolution in morality. That humans come with an internal moral sense as opposed to calculating the consequences of divine reward and punishment. Modernity takes us from St. Augustine to Rousseau. It says our moral sensibility is in us, not external (inklings of humanism, secularity, and agnosticism). But at the same time, authenticity gets mixed in with the passions of Rousseau’s Romanticism, critical of disengaged rationality, atomized community, and death of awe.
As a practical matter, Taylor says we don’t want to lose the benefits of individualism or efficiencies that make life easier to tolerate. Marxism demonstrated what happens when trying to force modern individuals back into the commune. Which is not to say we shouldn’t file off modernity’s sharp edges, and if we don’t the West will continue its path to big trouble of another sort. But free societies will never be monolithic unless we fancy tyranny again. Rational argument can revive authenticity by what it was based on, but not everyone’s going to come along. What’s needed is what’s in shortest supply: leaders with a clue of what’s going on. With echoes of Toynbee, Taylor writes, “Governing a contemporary society is continually recreating a balance between requirements that tend to undercut each other, constantly finding new solutions as the old equilibria become stultifying. There can never be…a definitive solution.” ...more
Important insight for America’s current trajectory
Pakistani physicist and historian, Pervez Hoodbhoy is massively informative, funny, and fearless. HImportant insight for America’s current trajectory
Pakistani physicist and historian, Pervez Hoodbhoy is massively informative, funny, and fearless. Hoodbhoy reviews Islam’s embrace of science, the civilization’s meteoric rise, opposition to science, and final defeat of rationalism along with Islam’s Golden Age as a package deal by about 1200-1300. Islamic extremists “proclaimed a holy war against Rationalism,” writes Hoodbhoy, “against the upholders of reason and advocates of philosophy and science.”
Fast forward 500 years and we hear America’s Rush Limbaugh broadcast that science and scientists are “One of the four corners of evil and deceit.” Done so over radio waves discovered, and electronics built, by science. Portentous as the radicals of Islam.
The book closes with an entertaining review of modern “Islamic Science,” little different from “Proletariat Science” of Stalin and Mao that starved 40,000,000 of their own people, Hitler’s “non-Jewish Science,” or UCLA’s Sandra Harding’s “Feminists Science,” none of which are science. One Islamic scholar claimed “That jinns [a magic spirit], who God made out of fire, should be used as a source of energy.” Hoodbhoy publicly unveiled the man and happily responded to his ire, as “my article successfully hit a nerve-center of obscurantist nonsense.” A good intro to what America could look like as our anti-science movements march on.
Incidentally, “Islam and Science” and “Muslims & Science” are the same book, same author, same year, by different publishers.
Important insight for America’s current trajectory
Pakistani physicist and historian, Pervez Hoodbhoy is massively informative, funny, and fearless. HImportant insight for America’s current trajectory
Pakistani physicist and historian, Pervez Hoodbhoy is massively informative, funny, and fearless. Hoodbhoy reviews Islam’s embrace of science, the civilization’s meteoric rise, opposition to science, and final defeat of rationalism along with Islam’s Golden Age as a package deal by about 1200-1300. Islamic extremists “proclaimed a holy war against Rationalism,” writes Hoodbhoy, “against the upholders of reason and advocates of philosophy and science.”
Fast forward 500 years and we hear America’s Rush Limbaugh broadcast science and scientists as “One of the four corners of evil and deceit.” Done so over radio waves discovered, and electronics built, by science. Portentous as the radicals of Islam.
The book closes with an entertaining review of modern “Islamic Science,” little different from “Proletariat Science” of Stalin and Mao that starved 40,000,000 of their own people, Hitler’s “non-Jewish Science,” or UCLA’s Sandra Harding’s “Feminists Science,” none of which are science. One Islamic scholar claimed “That jinns [a magic spirit], who God made out of fire, should be used as a source of energy.” Hoodbhoy publicly unveiled the man and happily responded to his ire, as “my article successfully hit a nerve-center of obscurantist nonsense.” A good intro to what America could like as our anti-science movements march on.
Incidentally, “Islam and Science” and “Muslims & Science” are the same book, same author, same year, by different publishers. ...more
This is a book of selected papers on the interaction of molecules in the gas phase with those on metal surfaces or aggregates. I found half of them veThis is a book of selected papers on the interaction of molecules in the gas phase with those on metal surfaces or aggregates. I found half of them very useful – one is in French. An intuitive, non-mathematical description of the physics at surfaces is given in one paper well suited for the novice (like me). Interaction boils down to matching the right orbitals between gas and surface. Another paper does provide a variety of different math models to characterize each, though they could use some elaboration. Have your Atkins Physical Chemistry text handy, as he’ll come to the rescue for many undefined terms and procedures. ...more
This book begins with a history of the topic, proceeds into industrial uses and processes, then dives into details with substantial reaction rate modeThis book begins with a history of the topic, proceeds into industrial uses and processes, then dives into details with substantial reaction rate modeling of chemical kinetics where molecules absorb on a surface, get help from that surface to carry out some useful reaction, then desorb as the product, including temperature and pressure dependence, often in a multi-step manner. You'll need a number of physical constants from elsewhere, but you can build reaction math models on your PC with what's given. For me, the most fun came in extensive treatment of orbital bonding / anti-bonding established between the various molecules (remember those s, p, d orbitals from school?). Particularly useful are how those orbitals look in various molecules with electron pairing, spin, and energy of each individual reactant and the combined result included in diagrams. It's a kooky place down there at the quantum level, but this 560 page books goes a long way to making sense of it. Sadly, it's hard to find this book on the cheap. ...more
This graduate level volume (second of three) picks up where Atkins’ undergraduate Physical Chemistry leaves ofMarvelous legacy to this Nobel Laureate
This graduate level volume (second of three) picks up where Atkins’ undergraduate Physical Chemistry leaves off. While Atkins’ introduction is delightful, if you want to build working devices, you can’t stop at his approximations. Herzberg (1904-1999) carries on with higher order perturbations allowing your computer model to match measured results. Volume 2 falls short in vibrational anharmonic constants for Fermi-Dennison (multiplication) resonance and summation resonance that occurs between different vibration energy states. Turns out - queer as quantum is - different molecular vibration states produce the same or near same energy. Hence, they repel. (Weird.) Based on the initial vibration-rotation model, you’ll get what I got: euphoric agreement for simple states, disaster for complex combinations. Very sad.
This link to Allen’s free 1990 paper helps halfway, opaque for the other half. While this not free link to Dennison’s 1951 paper (Eq. VI 4) will finish off “most” of the rest. Of course all use different symbols and notation, so have fun with that, per usual. Overall, a really fine, fine text on the physics of molecules. ...more
I learned a great deal from this book, not without pain
This version of Copleston’s classic is three volumes in one, Greece to Suarez. While I enjoyedI learned a great deal from this book, not without pain
This version of Copleston’s classic is three volumes in one, Greece to Suarez. While I enjoyed it and learned a great deal, Copleston gets so deep in the weeds to wrestle every nuance, it was sometimes like hitting myself in the head with a hammer - it felt so good when I stopped. I will read the other two tomes in this series. Well suited for professional philosophers, and lovers of navel gazing. ...more
Believer is insightful if not always well written. The disjointed nature of some one or two line sections leaves support for their conclusions vacant,Believer is insightful if not always well written. The disjointed nature of some one or two line sections leaves support for their conclusions vacant, making them sound pushy. Hoffer does not allow devotion and dedication sourced in conviction and confidence. For Hoffer the holy cause is always a substitute for a loss of faith in oneself. The theme is that all mass movements – good, bad, Left, Right, social, religious, national – share a family likeness. Mass movements generate a proclivity for united action (challenge not welcome), fanaticism, fervent hope, hatred, intolerance, and release powerful human energy demanding blind faith and single-hearted allegiance. “For though ours is a godless age,” writes Hoffer, “it is the very opposite of irreligious.” Sure to raise hackles, Hoffer writes, “The hammer and sickle or swastika are in a class with the cross.” But he does not mean they are equivalent movements, only that they have equivalent features. In a nutshell, this is human behavior with reason removed, a tool of the passions. Which is not to imply movements have no good rewards. As Hoffer notes, some have organized, and others helped shake the West out of Dark Ages. Interestingly, movements have stages of development from initial radicalism to eventual conservatism in which those attracted seek careers in the new order, not to mold a new world, but to preserve the present. From zeal to orthodoxy. Good book. ...more
A pleasant book, having little to do with its title.
This book is a confusion of definitions, a dismissal of beliefs held by the masses Wilson hopes wA pleasant book, having little to do with its title.
This book is a confusion of definitions, a dismissal of beliefs held by the masses Wilson hopes will save the planet, and a good read when he sticks to science. Wilson opens by conflating meaning with function, purpose, or cause. “A spider spinning its web intends…to catch a fly,” he writes. “That is the meaning of the web.” No, that is the purpose of the web. Nor is evolution as the cause of the human species the meaning of human existence. Meaning comes from outside us as a measure of worth. So strong this need, we’ll invent gods to care for us. This irrationality irritates Wilson early and late in this volume. “There is no way around the soul-satisfying but cruel discrimination that organized religions by definition must practice,” writes Wilson. But are true communities with exclusionary factors like religion always cruel? The Amish? Orthodox Jews? Can we let these people have traditional communities without modernity’s blanket assault on tradition? Wilson seems to say, we know the human condition results from evolutionary development, so be something else and forget that silly need for belonging written in your genes.
With his lauding of the humanities throughout, he appears unaware of Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the World, noting our myths as the “the illogical solution to our illogical condition” of being alive and having to die. From the standpoint of scientific logic - which Wilson understandably reveres - our death and that of loved ones makes complete sense. Which is no sense at all. Per Gauchet, humans hold dear the myth’s Wilson assails, not because they are true in a scientific sense, but because they are not. When Wilson and we rationalists read scriptures literally, they appear notoriously immoral, fabulously self-contradictory, and occasionally an excuse on which to murder. As were the guarantee of social utopias responsible for sixty-million slaughtered outside of war by atheists Stalin and Mao. Religion has no corner on crime, and when Wilson urges his utopian vision as, “the greatest goal of our time, the unity of the human race,” I begin to worry.
There are serious threats to reason and science in America, and Wilson feels it. From teaching religion in science class, to science deniers as chairman heads of House and Senate science and technology committees, America sounds like 12th century Islam that fought the same battle. Science lost. But believers won’t read this book to get their conversion, so it will resonant only among Wilson’s tribe. For those of us in his group, you’ll find individual and group selection in tandem responsible for vice and virtue, among other interesting gems in this book....more
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