JANUARY

 

God show me the way to live

--anonymous piece of graffiti from a study desk on the 2^nd floor of the Physics-Math-Astronomy Library at the University of Texas at Austin, in Robert Lee Moore Hall, at the corner of 26^th St (Dean Keeton St) and Speedway. The desks were permanently removed (or just moved) last year during a remodeling project. The other graffiti written on the desk were of the usual crude, rude, angry variety.

 

FEBRUARY

At the Kings School, one room, with strict puritan discipline, Henry Stokes, schoolmaster, taught eighty boys Latin, theology, and some Greek and Hebrew. In most English schools that would have been all, but Stokes added some practical arithmetic for his prospective farmers: mostly about measurement of areas and shapes, algorithms for surveying, marking fields by the chain, calculating acres (though the acre still varied from one county to the next, or according to the land’s richness). He offered a bit more than a farmer would need: how to inscribe regular polygons in a circle and compute the length of each side, as Archimedes had done to estimate pi. Isaac scratched Archimedes’ diagrams in the wall. He entered the lowest form at the age of twelve, lonely, anxious, and competitive. He fought with other boys in the churchyard; sometimes noses were bloodied. He filled a Latin exercise book with unselfconscious phrases, some copied, others invented, a grim stream of thought: A little fellow; My poore help; Hee is paile; There is no room for me to sit; In the top of the house—In the bottom of hell; What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for? He despaired. I will make an end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to doe.

Barely sixty lifetimes had passed since people began to record knowledge as symbols on stone or parchment. England’s first paper mill opened at the end of the sixteenth century, on the Deptford River. Paper was prized, and the written word played a small part in daily life. Most of what people thought remained unrecorded; most of what they recorded was hidden or lost. Yet to some it seemed a time of information surfeit. “I hear new news every day” wrote the vicar Robert Burton, attuned as he was—virtually living in the Bodleian Library at Oxford—to the transmission and storage of data:

those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions . . . and such like, which these tempestuous times afford . . . New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogs of volumes of all sorts, new paradigms, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c.

--James Gleick, Isaac Newton, pages 13-15, Pantheon Books, 2003.

 

March

... The equality of gravitational and inertial masses is, of course, responsible for the fact that the acceleration of a body in the Earth’s gravitational field is independent of its mass, and this has been familiar since the time of Galileo and Newton. ...

It seemed to Einstein that this precise equality demanded some explanation, and he was struck by the fact that inertial forces such as centrifugal and Coriolis forces are proportional to the inertial mass of the body on which they act. These inertial forces are often regarded as ‘fictitious’, in the sense that they arise from the use of accelerating (and therefore non-inertial) frames of reference. ...

Einstein’s idea is ... that the inertial and gravitational masses are necessarily identical.

--Ian D. Lawrie, A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics, 1990, pages 12-13.

... Mach’s principle teaches us that the laws of dynamics may hold in all frames of reference, even non-inertial ones. The inertial forces that arise in a non-inertial frame would be physical effects from the stars, which enable us to determine acceleration relative to the stars—an acceleration internal to the total system. In other words we have changed the significance of inertial forces. Instead of their existence implying a breakdown of Newton’s laws, they have become the means by which we can measure acceleration relative to the stars.

--D. W. Sciama, The Physical Foundations of General Relativity, 1969, page 21.

 

... It is for this reason that, by comparison with classical physics, modern relativity is simple, universal, and, one may even say, “absolute.” The cliché became, erroneously, “everything is relative”; whereas the point is that out of the vast flux one can distill the very opposite: “some things are invariant.”

The cost of terminological confusion has been so great that a brief elaboration on this point will be relevant. Partly because he saw himself as a continuist rather than as an iconoclast, Einstein was reluctant to present this new work as a new theory. The term “relativity theory,” which made the confusions in the long run more likely, was imposed on Einstein’s early work by Planck and Abraham in 1906. For a time Einstein referred to it in print as the “so-called relativity theory,” and until 1911 he avoided using the term altogether in the titles of his papers on the subject. In his correspondence Einstein seemed happier with the term Invariantentheorie, which is of course much more true to its method and aim.

--Gerald Holton, Einstein, History and Other Passions, 1996, pages 129-130.

 

(Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany.)

 

April

 

MR. SHAWN AND MR. CAPOTE

 

In his review of the film “Capote,” David Denby indicates that the filmmakers used the character of William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker during the period depicted in the film, as “an aggressive force who moves the plot along” (The Current Cinema, October 10^th). As William Shawn’s sons, we would like to amplify Denby’s comment by noting, for the record, that in surface detail and in substance the William Shawn depicted in “Capote” is invented out of whole cloth by the filmmakers. In the film, Shawn speaks of “building interest” in Capote’s piece, organizes a book reading for the writer at which he introduces him personally, arranges to have Richard Avedon go out to Kansas to photograph the author and the two murderers, and flies out to Kansas himself to visit with Capote. The real-life William Shawn did not believe that articles or their authors should be publicized. He resisted even putting a table of contents in the magazine itself to trumpet what each issue contained. He never organized a reading for Capote or any other writer, and never addressed one, as he never spoke in public on any occasion. He didn’t arrange Richard Avedon’s photographic trips or publish any photographs by Avedon, as he didn’t think there should be photographs in The New Yorker. The film’s Shawn expresses rapt interest in the details of the crime Capote wrote about, whereas the actual Shawn found even the mention of blood disturbing, and, much as he revered Capote’s writing, found editing “In Cold Blood” upsetting. Quiveringly empathic by nature, the real William Shawn was literally the last man on earth who would make a joke about the killer Perry’s impending death, as the character Shawn in the film does. The real Shawn never went to Kansas to visit with Capote, and in fact he never had the experience of flying on an airplane.

 

Allen and Wallace Shawn

Bennington, Vt. and New York City

 

(This letter appears in the April 3, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, p. 5.  William Shawn was editor of the magazine from 1952 to 1987.  The magazine did not have a letters section (no letters to the editor, such as this one from Allen and Wallace Shawn, were published) until the mid-1990s.

 

May

 

The glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome were built on the backs of slaves; it is our conceit to remember the temples of the Acropolis and forget the silver mines of Laurium. ...

When Europeans first made their way down the coast of Africa towards the east, and discovered the New World to the west, they still believed in slavery as an institution. Some men were free, some were slaves; God had made it that way. When the Spanish therefore enslaved the Indians, it was not to them a reprehensible act; the Church put limitations on what could be done, and attempted to prevent abuses in a social situation that was not itself regarded as an abuse. The first Negro slaves were actually imported for humanitarian reasons. Bishop Las Casas in the West Indies realized that the Indians made poor slaves and soon died off, so he recommended they be replaced by Negroes, who seemed to be more adaptable. His suggestion was taken up with such alacrity that he was soon appalled by it, and died regretting his actions. ...

... The British Colonies that would become the United States were a hundred years old before the slave trade really got going. The 18^th century and the early part of the 19^th would be its heyday.

... By that time Liverpool was the world’s slaving capital, and fortunes made on the banks of the Niger were spent on cotton mills in the English Midlands. When the famous actor George Cooke appeared drunk in Liverpool and was hooted on the stage, he roared back, “I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches every brick of whose infernal town is cemented with an African’s blood!”

By the late 18^th century the winds of abolition were beginning to gather strength, but it was not until 1807 that Britain outlawed the trade, and not until 1832 that she abolished slavery in the Empire. Even then it was an uphill fight to get other states to agree, and the trans-Atlantic trade lasted right up until the American Civil War.

Liverpool may have been the world’s capital of slavery, but it was by no means the only center. It had pre-empted the primacy of Bristol, an early leader; there was still, however, plenty of competition.

In British North America, if the Southern colonies were the center of slavery, New England and New York were the leaders in the trade. Southerners would later take great delight in pointing out to abolitionists from the North that it was Northerners, after all, who had generally brought the slaves to America.

How the New Englanders and New Yorkers got involved in the trade, when it had little direct relevance to their own local conditions, is a peculiar story.

 

--James L. Stokesbury, “The Triangle Trade,” published in the May 1973 issue of American History Illustrated. Excerpt from pages 6 and 7.

 

 

June

When the mask of conviviality and administrative confidence grew too heavy for Oppenheimer, he had a place to go for even deeper quiet than Kitty could provide. Near the Mesa’s southeast fence was a building which he had officially named Omega. He had designed it for experiments that most physicists watched with a cold flip of the heart and a face drained of emotion.

Omega housed critical assembly tests loosely and collectively referred to by cleared personnel as the Dragon. Here, for example, a neat mechanism dropped a uranium-hydride cube through a hollow structure of the same material. Heating 2º C a millisecond, the cube set off a burst of 10¹² prompt neutrons. It fell too fast to proliferate the delayed neutrons which would have made the whole assembly a sort of weak, fizzling bomb. Once it overheated, paused slightly, and set off a burst of 10¹⁵ neutrons. Observers in the room sensed a fleeting blue ionization in the air and in themselves a mental discomfort afterward hard to talk about.

… The true Dragon in the Mesa’s mind was embodied in the work of Louis Slotin. Serber had, long before, predicted the critical masses of the two kinds of bombs. A thousand practical developments had since made him seem alternately wrong and right. Now sitting between a Geiger counter and a neutron monitor, Slotin made the next-to-last verification. His materials were glittering curved segments of the actual bomb metal. He poked them together on top of his desk with a screwdriver.

Slotin resembled Oppenheimer’s first graduate student at Berkeley but needed a more difficult deliverance than from night and kleptomania. Next to Oppenheimer the physicist who studied Slotin’s character most attentively was Fermi. Omega was split in two by a beaverboard partition. On one side was the cold silence of the Dragon; on the other a crew of Fermi’s bustled in warm, noisy friendship about a beautiful moderated reactor called the Water Boiler. This too was a critical assembly, but it was as cheerful as a teakettle and, aside from its contribution to fission mathematics, as peaceful. Here Fermi came to relax from theoretical physics and the administrative burdens Oppenheimer had managed to saddle him with (for example, Teller). Fermi’s one discomfort was the thought of Slotin beyond the partition.

--Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, pages 225-26. Simon and Schuster, 1968.

July

... Fermi had a hard clear mind which liked to wrestle with only limited questions, such as the behavior of slow and fast neutrons and high-energy particles. Slotin’s behavior angered him by raising a question of a different order. ...

One of humanity’s most ungrateful instincts is to dread not only the frontier but also the frontier guard. Around his desk in addition to the faces of his crew, Slotin could see other faces, at first German, then Japanese, then merely human. Whether one of them was his own or Fermi’s was for him an insignificant detail. True knowledge is in the emotions. In its frustration at having become the physicists’ test animal, the human race should find a certain comfort in the thought that Slotin knew what he was doing. He could not have passed the most elementary personality-profile test of the kind now routinely used in government and industry. By giving Slotin responsibility and by going to relax in spiritual rapport with him in Omega, Oppenheimer too outraged present-day administrative standards. His reason, of course, was that he wanted to build the bomb. If he had employed only sound, wholesome organization men for his project, Los Alamos would still be designing impressive remote-control machines with which to check its first implosion assembly.

...

Slotin sat at his desk amid a clutter of radiation counters. He laid the bomb-metal pieces on his desk top far enough apart to be out of range of each other’s neutrons. Then with a screwdriver he slowly pushed them together. As he did so each piece responded to neutrons from the other by emitting more neutrons. The effect was a progressive multiplication of neutrons that if charted would appear as an ascending curve. Slotin did not push the pieces all the way together. He stopped as soon as in his mind’s eye he could extrapolate the ascending curve into the vertical straight line that would stand for neutron multiplication in a detonating bomb.

--Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, pages 226 and 229.

 

August

 

With Truman's consent, Stimson and Groves on May 9 called together a mixed bag of eight government and science people, mostly bewildered about what was wanted of them. Stimson told them they were an Interim Committee to advise generally on many atomic matters, one of which was the use of the bombs. He said he would be chairman. Groves, who like Stimson sat with them, seemed to take the cruder position that the use of bombs had already been decided and that they should rather concern themselves with such matters as news releases and future legislation.

"The whole thing was engineered by Stimson and Groves," says one of the members, Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard. "We didn't know a damned thing about this business. For quite a while, I couldn't tell what the hell was going on."

...

“We decided on dropping the bomb without warning," says Bard. “Stimson and Groves pushed it through. Afterward, I got to thinking.”

"The Pacific war was a Navy war. The Army didn't know what the hell was going on there. The Navy had sewed up those islands so that nothing was coming in or going out. The Navy knew the Japanese were licked. The Army wanted to be in on the kill.

"The Japanese approached Russia and Switzerland for peace. The elements of peace were there. I thought we should give them a warning and approach them on terms of peace."

Bard wrote Stimson's subchairman Harrison a beautiful, lonely, unavailing protest, then demanded a White House appointment. Fearing Russia, Truman had begun to view Japan in terms of Cold War strategy. But in so far as his ruder language resources permitted, he echoed Stimson. "The question," he later summed up, "was whether we wanted to save many American lives and Japanese lives or whether we wanted to take a chance on whether we wanted to win the war by killing all our young men."

"For God's sake," Bard told Truman, “don't organize an army to go into Japan. Kill a million people? It's ridiculous."

Truman did not change. Bard resigned, the first nonscientist (Slotin was the first scientist) to understand that blind mass hysteria would not do in the new Nuclear Age.

...

... On October 16, to a crowd watching the presentation of an Army certificate of commendation to the laboratory, Oppenheimer summed up the mood that had developed during the last two months. “If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”

The men in Omega showed they knew they were cursed already. Early in August, one low-grade Omega technician died in a chemical explosion and two were blinded. No further uranium bombs could be made for months, but a third plutonium bomb had been readied for the Dragon check. Slotin, sulking because Oppenheimer would not let him go see Japanese casualties at first hand, took a holiday, leaving his chief assistant, Harry Daghlian, to undertake it. Daghlian, also thin, dark, and morose, got an overdose of radiation and died on September 15. Slotin performed the check and several others, then next spring on May 21 gained what he seemed to long for. Poking the segments of the Bikini test bomb a little too close together, he set up a blue ionization glow in the room. Lunging from his chair, he covered the segments with his body until a half dozen observers could file out.

By that time it was too late for Slotin, but the most talented woman physicist on the Mesa, Elizabeth Graves, was asked by telephone to compute the chances of a man who had watched with his hand on Slotin’s shoulder. Like McKibben, Elizabeth Graves was a no-nonsense type—Hiroshima, she used to say, was no worse than napalm. Methodically she began punching a calculator, then learned from another telephone call that the subject was her husband. “My mind went blank,” she said. “I couldn’t do the simplest sums in arithmetic.” Graves survived with cataracts. Something like superstitious terror halted further necessary Dragon checks until entirely different methods could be devised from those Oppenheimer had kept going with complete safety during the war.

-- Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, pages 245,247, 250 and 251.

(The Air Force was not a separate branch of the military until after World War II. During the war it was a part of the Army and was called the Army Air Force. And the Bomb Project was under control of the Army, through the Army Corps of Engineers Manhattan District. Information can be found on the Internet about Elizabeth Graves, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. For a very different and more recent assessment of Japan’s interest in surrendering, see this Atomic Heritage Foundation website posting of an August 2005 article that appeared in the Weekly Standard.)

 

September

"What do you think?" shouted Razumikhin, louder than ever, "you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its own way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's."

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment; Part Three, Chapter One. First published in 1866. Razumikhin, by the way, is not the criminal in Crime and Punishment.

 

OCTOBER

In science, a truth that cannot be proved is called a law. When Isaac Newton despaired of deriving the equation governing gravitation from more plausible premises (“I have not yet disclosed the cause of gravity . . . since I could not understand it”) he installed it as a law that reigned supreme for a quarter of a millennium: “the universal law of gravitation,” or “the law of universal gravitation,” which schoolchildren learn by heart. (It remained unexplained until Einstein derived it from his general theory of relativity in 1915.)

-- Hans Christian von Baeyer, Maxwell’s Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, page 51. Random House, New York, 1998.

 

Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen, arrayed in white trousers and blue blazers, were sitting in the garden after dinner. It was one of those much-lauded October days: bright without being heavy, hot and yet with a tang in the air. The sky above the valley was a deep southern blue and the pastures beneath, with the cattle tracks running across and across them, still a lively green. From the rugged slopes came the sound of cowbells; the peaceful, simple, melodious tintinnabulation came floating unbroken through the quiet, thin, empty air, enhancing the mood of solemnity that broods over the valley heights.

--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, originally published in German as Der Zauberberg (S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin, 1924). Translation by Helen T. Lowe-Porter (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927). Excerpt from First Vintage International Edition, March 1992, p. 251.

 

November

We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible; because man has become wholly submerged in History; because he can no longer tap that part of his nature, as real as the historical part, which he recaptures in contemplating the beauty of nature and of human faces; because we live in a world of abstractions, of bureaus and machines, of absolute ideas and crude messianism.  We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right, whether in their machines or in their ideas.  And for all who can live only in an atmosphere of human dialogue and sociability, this silence is the end of the world. ...

...

... little is to be expected from present-day governments, since these live and act according to a murderous code. Hope remains only in the most difficult task of all: to reconsider everything from the ground up, so as to shape a living society inside a dying society. Men must therefore, as individuals, draw up among themselves, within frontiers and across them, a new social contract which will unite them according to more reasonable principles.

The peace movement I speak of could base itself, inside nations, on work-communities and, internationally, on intellectual communities; the former, organized cooperatively, would help as many individuals as possible to solve their material problems, while the latter would try to define the values by which this international community would live, and would also plead its cause on every occasion.

More precisely, the latter's task would be to speak out clearly against the confusions of the Terror and at the same time to define the values by which a peaceful world may live. The first objectives might be the drawing up of an international code of justice whose Article No. 1 would be abolition of the death penalty, and an exposition of the basic principles of a sociable culture (“civilisation du dialogue"). Such an undertaking would answer the needs of an era which has found no philosophical justification for that thirst for fraternity which today burns in Western man. There is no idea, naturally, of constructing a new ideology, but rather of discovering a style of life.

 

--Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners, first published in the Fall 1946 issues of Combat, the underground newspaper of the French resistance during WWII.  The essay was translated by Dwight MacDonald and published in English in the July-August 1947 issue of Politics. Camus was born on November 7, 1913 and died in a car crash on January 4, 1960.

 

It was not a question of our good intentions. Countries that achieve great power have long had a tendency to identify themselves with the deity or with high standards of virtue, and, on the basis of this identification, to develop a form of messianism, a conviction that it is their duty to take their message to other people. ...

If we could understand the forces and factors that shape our beliefs, we might learn how to alter our conduct. If we could focus on the passions engendered by our belief in abstractions associated with our nation-state, we might better understand the limits of our own ideological view of the world, and learn the necessity for understanding how much we need to view others through their perceptions, assumptions, beliefs.

--J. Willliam Fulbright, The Price of Empire, pages 195-196, Pantheon Books New York, 1989.

 

... For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. Children aren't born lawyers, corporate executives, engineers and doctors. Their achievements bear the imprint of their teachers. There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis. Is there anyone here whose path was not marked by the inspiration of some teacher?

--Bill Moyers, America 101, published November 1, 2006 on TomPaine.com.

 

(I either lost or never chose a quote for December.)

 

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