Day 25

Overbeck, C.J.

Time is that great gift of nature that stops everything from happening at once.

American Journal of Physics (1978) 46 323

Day 24

Happy Whatever

Please accept with no obligation, implied or expressed, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect to the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all; and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006 but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "America" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical or mental ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for him/herself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Have a Happy!

Day 23

Russell, B.

The British are distinguished among the nations of modern Europe, on the one hand by the excellence of their philosophers, and on the other by their contempt for philosophy. In both respects they show their wisdom.

‘Philosophy and Politics’ in Unpopular Essays (Unwin Paperbacks, London 1984) p. 13.

Day 22

Hawking, S.

God not only plays dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Attributed by J. Boslough in Beyond the Black Hole: Stephen Hawking’s Universe (Fontana/Collins, 1984) p. 38.

All the evidence indicates that God is an inveterate gambler and that he throws the dice on every possible occasion.

Einstein’s Dream in Black Holes and Baby Universes and other essays (Bantam Books, Toronto, 1993) p. 63.

Day 21

Einstein, A.

The quantum mechanics is very imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is still not the true Jacob. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us nearer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that he does not throw dice. I am toiling at deriving the equations of motion of material particles regarded as singularities from the differential equations of general relativity.

Letter to M. Born, 4 December, 1926, cited by M. Jammer in The Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (John Wiley, New York, 1974) p.155.

You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.

Letter to Max Born, September 7, 1944 in the Born Letters p. 149. Quoted by R. W. Clark Einstein: The Life and Times (World Publishing Company, New York, 1971) p. 346.

Day 20

Feynman, R.

Nature only uses the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

The Character of a Physical Law (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980) p. 34.

Day 19

Time flies likes an arrow. Fruit flies like an apple.

Day 18

Zeeman, E.C.

One evening Alexander the Great as a youth comes up to his tutor and says:

Alexander: ‘I have a problem.’

Aristotle (who happened to be his tutor): ‘Yes?’

Alexander: ‘In my plan to conquer the world it is obviously best to use a single well-organized army. But as I capture each country, and then move on to the next, how do I keep control of the previous country?’

Aristotle (after a pause with a far-seeing glint in his eye): ‘Aha! I think I have the solution. You want to found a government research establishment. You could even name it after yourself. Then the soci­ology department could manufacture suitable religions grafted onto the appropriate local beliefs that would keep the natives happy.’

‘As a matter of fact’, and at this juncture Aristotle’s tone of voice becomes noticeably casual, ‘as a matter of fact I have a very good student (Dinocrates) who could do the architecture for you - he’s eager to experiment with white marble - and another senior student (Demetrius Phalerus) who would make a splendid first director of the place.’

Arsitotle’s voice regains its normal timbre: ‘I suppose you’ll have to have an arts man as first librarian - and there is an early Homer scholar (Zenodotus) who would do - and he would have the advantage of being near retiring age so that as soon as he’d done the chore of setting up the catalogue system you could get rid of him and replace him by a proper scientist.’

Aristotle’s voice goes casual again: ‘And as a matter of fact I have just the man (Eratosthenes) for the job, a student who is a brilliant all-rounder, interested in astronomy, geography, literature, the lot, but he needs a few more years of research before he takes on administrative chores. Oh yes - and I have another young student (Sostratus) whose a bit of a crank, but marvellous with his hands. His ambition is to build a giant lighthouse, but he can’t get any funds. But in a government research establishment this would be well worth the cost, just from the prestige point of view alone, besides being actually quite a useful piece of equipment.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to have a philosophy department, although to tell the truth the subject is a bit played out after Plato and myself, and most of my current students are rather second rate. On the other hand biology, psychology and medicine are really up and coming new subjects, and I have a splendid young man (Erasistratus) who has done some fascinating work on the psychology of sex and nervous breakdowns, who would be ideal to head a research group.’

‘And let me see - you’ll need a mathematician of course - and although I don’t have any suitable students of my own available just at this moment, there is a young man (Euclid) in Plato’s academy. Not that he’s very good at research, in fact I doubt he’ll ever make his Ph.D., but he’s quite a good scholar, and quite good at editing things. And although he’s a bit humourless, he would make an excellent administrator, and so I’d recommend hiring him to set up the mathematics department.’

‘Oh - and another point - if I were you I would choose somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, with a nice climate and a sandy beach with good bathing facilities, and not too far from the main shipping lanes. As a matter of fact I had a vacation last year at just such a place, a little island called Ras-el-Tin. For that way you’ll not only be able to attract some decent academics onto the staff, but you’ll also guarantee a good flow of visitors each summer to keep the place academically alive. In fact it might even last a few centuries.’

And that’s exactly what Alexander did, in every detail, when he was 23.

‘Research Ancient and Modern’ I.M.A. Conference on Research in Mathematics, Reading, January 1974. Published in Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Checked

Day 17

Anonymous

The [Rio] summit, in fact, went according to plan: indeed the outcome was inevitable from the start. ... Its secretariat provided delegates with materials for a convention on bio-diversity but not on free trade; on forests but not on logging; on climate but not on automobiles; ... on enabling the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods but none on enabling the rich to do so; a section on women but none on men.

‘The earth summit debacle’ The Ecologist 22 (1992) 122 edited by E. Goldsmith, N. Hildyard, P. Bunyard and P. McCully

Day 16

Malthus, T. R. (1766—1834)

The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy, the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing, the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even the unlettered world, the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects which dazzle and astonish the understanding, and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon, the French revolution, which like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind.

‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ in On the Principle of Population (Penguin, 1970. First pub¬lished 1798) p. 67.

Day 15

Brandt, A.M.

Another well-known physician, Frederick Hollick, prescribed a measure, no less heroic, for the treatment of a complication of gonorrhoea known as chordee, a curvature of the penis which caused pain upon erection. Hollick recommended that the organ be placed “with the curve upward on a table and struck a violent blow with a book … and so flattening it”.

No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 with a New Chapter on AIDS (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987) p. 12. where he refers to Frederick Hollick A Popular Treatise on Venereal Disease (New York, 1852)

Day 14

Camus, A.

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Myth of Sisyphus (Hamish Hamilton, London 1965) p. 99. Translated by J. O’Brien.

Day 13

Einstein, A.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery-- even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds...it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.

‘The World as I See It’ Forum and Century 84 pp. 193-194. Included in Living Philosophies (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1931) pp. 3-7 and in Ideas and Opinions (Bonanza Books, New York, MCMLIV) p. 11.

Day 12

We have not succeeded in answering all your problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel that we are as confused as ever but we believe that we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.

Notice at the Cambridge University Computer Centre ‘Surgery’, 1970.

Day 11

Bush, G.W.

That’s part of—that’s part of the advice my New National Economic Council head will be giving me as whether or not we need to—here is the plan, or here is an idea for a plan, or why don’t you just fix it. I suspect given my nature I’ll want to be—the White House will be very much involved with—I have an obligation to lead on this issue—I think this will be an administrative-driven idea—to take it on. And therefore, that that be the case, I have the responsibility to provide the political cover necessary for members, I have the responsibility to make the case if there is a problem, and I have the responsibility to lay out potential solutions. Now to the specificity of which, we’ll find out—you’ll find out with time.

‘Talk of the Town’ The New Yorker January 24 and 31, 2005, p. 31.

Day 10

Kundera, M.

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (King Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1986) ISBN 0-14-006416-8 p. 8, translated by M. H. Heim.

Day 9

Barua, D. and Greenough, W.B. III

When cholera attacked St. Louis in 1849, over 10% of the population of that city died, as did over half of the individuals who developed acute diarrhoeal illness. When cholera attacked Peru in 1991, over 300,000 people, or 1% of the population, developed clinical manifestations of cholera, but less than 1% of affected individuals died.

The basis for this remarkable development .... is the development of oral rehydration therapy, .... [which] requires only ingredients (sugar and salt) that are available to almost all individuals throughout the world.

Cholera (Plenum; New York, 1992) p. ix.

Day 8

This new display can recognize speech. This nudist play can wreck a nice beach.

Problems in computer recognition of speech. Radio 4 October 1984

Day 7

Empedocles (c. 482—422 B.C)

It was Empedocles who said that light, being a body, is an effluent substance emitted from the lumi­nous body ... but that this movement of light is such that we fail to notice it because of its speed.

Cited by H. Diels in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 6th edition Berlin 1951, 31 A 57 and cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 52.

Day 6

One plus one equals three, for large values of one.

Day 5

Huxley, A. (1894-1963)

… the English Fabians, Beatrice and Sydney Webb … made an historical study of the average time it took for an idea which at its first enunciation seemed revolutionary and revolting to be taken for granted and to be acted upon by the whole population. They concluded that the average time is twenty-eight years--roughly the length of a generation. It is very difficult to persuade adults to change their points of view; they have to die off before a new generation can accept new ideas.

‘The Population Explosion’ in The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (Cox and Wyman, Reading, 1977) p. 58.

Day 4

Hume, D. (1711—1776)

Those who have an interest in the fidelity of women, naturally disapprove of their infidelity, and all approaches to it. Those who have no interest are carried along with the stream. Education takes pos­session of the ductile minds of the fair sex in their infancy. And when a general rule of this kind is once established, men are apt to extend it beyond those principles from which it first arose. Thus bachelors, however debauched, cannot choose but be shocked with any instance of lewdness or impu­dence in woman. And though all these maxims have a plain reference to generation, yet women past child-bearing age have no more privilege in this respect than those who are in the flower of their youth and beauty. Men have undoubtedly an implicit notion, that all those ideas of modesty and decency have a regard to generation; since they impose not the same laws, with the same force, on the male sex, where that reason does not take place. The exception is there obvious and extensive, and founded on a remarkable difference, which produces a clear separation and disjunction of ideas. But as the case is not the same with regard to the different ages of women, for this reason, though men know that these notions are founded on the public interest, yet the general rule carries us beyond the original principle, and makes us extend the notions of modesty over the whole sex, from their earliest infancy to their extremest old age and infirmity. ...

As to the obligations which the male sex lie under with regard to chastity, we may observe that, according to the general notions of the world, they bear nearly the same proportion to the obligations of women as the obligations of the law of nations do to those of the law of nature. It is contrary to the interest of civil society, that men should have an entire liberty of indulging their appetites in venereal enjoyment; but as this interest is weaker than in the case of the female sex, the moral obligation aris­ing from it must be proportionably weaker. And to prove this we need only appeal to the practice and sentiments of all nations and ages.

A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739, 2. Everyman’s Library (J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1940) p. 270.

Day 3

Darwin , C.

It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the belief in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported by hardly any direct evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction; not withstanding that Leibniz formerly accused Newton of introducing ‘occult qualities and miracles into philosophy’.

Origin of Species (6th Edition, John Murray, London, 1906) p. 657.

Day 2

Einstein, A.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.

In Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by B. Hoffmann p.24 (Viking, New York, 1972; Hart-Davis, McGibbon, London, 1973; Paladin, London, 1977).

Day 1

Research on transmission of HIV should have been a top priority for the past decade. Instead it has become a sideline. The truth is that too many scientists are spending their energies on esoteric aspects of AIDS research, such as snipping up the genome of the virus into tiny bits to see what happens when you substitute one bit with another. This sort of laboratory “tinkertoying”, as one researcher put it, is a lot more elegant than the messy business of looking at genital secretions. It’s also a lot easier to do than complex studies of transmission which include prying into people’s sexual habits and maintaining their co-operation over months and years. But that does not make molecular biology more important.

‘Comment’ New Scientist 5 June 1993 p. 3.