Day 86

Einstein, A.

I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: ‘If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight’. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.

Kyoto Lecture reported by J. Ishiwara in Einstein Koen-Roku, (Tokyo-Tosho, Tokyo, 1977) cited by A. Pais in Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (OUP, 1982) p. 179.

Day 85

Fisher, R.A.

Each generation, perhaps, found in Mendel’s paper only what it expected to find; in the first period a repetition of the hybridization results commonly reported, in the second a discovery in inheritance supposedly difficult to reconcile with continuous evolution. Each generation, therefore, ignored what did not confirm its own expectations. Only a succession of publications, the progressive building up of a corpus of scientific work, and the continuous iteration of all new opinions seem sufficient to bring a new discovery into general recognition.

‘Has Mendel’s work been rediscovered?’ reprinted from Annals of Science 1 (1936) 115—137 in Experiments in Plant Hybridization by G. Mendel, English translation of Mendel’s original paper, edited by J.H. Bennett (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1965) p. 86.

Day 84

Mendeleev, D.I. (1834—1907)

One can regard the law of conservation of weight as a special case of the law of conservation of force or of movement. Surely weight depends on a special kind of movement of matter, and there is no reason to deny the possibility of a transmutation of these movements into chemical energy or some other form of movement during the formation of elementary atoms. ... Thus in case a known element would be decomposed or a new one would be formed, these phenomena could well be accompanied by a decrease or increase in weight.

Die periodische Gesetzmässigkeit der chemischen Elemente (1869) Ostwalds Klassiker der exakten Wissenschaften No. 68 translated by Y. Elkana and cited by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 451.

Day 83

Carpenter, E. (1844–)

I used to go and sit on the beach at Brighton and dream, and now I sit on the shore of human life and dream practically the same dreams. I remember about the time that I mention—or it may have been a trifle later—coming to the distinct conclusion that there were only two things worth living for—the glory and beauty of Nature, and the glory and beauty of human love and friendship. And to-day I still feel the same. What else is there? All the nonsense about riches, fame, distinction, ease, luxury and so forth—how little does it amount to! It really is not worth wasting time over. These things are so obviously second-hand affairs, useful only in so far as they may lead us to the first two, and short of their doing that liable to become odious and harmful. To become united and in line with the beauty and vitality of Nature (but, Lord help us! we are far enough off from that at present), and to become united with those we love—what other ultimate object in life is there? Surely all these other things, these games and examinations, these churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these top-hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one’s living—if they are not ultimately for that, what are they for?

My Days and Dreams (George Allen and Unwin, 1916). Quoted in Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage, London, 1988) p. 308.

Day 82

Feynman, R.

Yes, you told us what happens, but what is gravity? Where does it come from? Do you mean to tell me that a planet looks at the sun, sees how far it is, calculates the inverse square of the distance and then decides to move in accordance with that law?

The Character of a Physical Law (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980) p. 33.

Day 81

Copernicus, N. (1473—1543)

And as a matter of fact, I found first in Cicero that Hicetas thought that the Earth moved. And afterwards I found in Plutarch that there were some others of the same opinion ... Therefore I also, having found occasion, began to meditate upon the mobility of the Earth. And although the opinion seemed absurd ... I knew that others before me had been granted the liberty of constructing whatever circles they pleased in order to demonstrate astral phenomena. And so ... I finally discovered ... that if the movements of the other wandering stars are correlated with the circular movement of the Earth, and if the movements are computed in accordance with the revolution of each planet, not only do all their phenomena follow from that but also this correlation binds together so closely the order and magnitudes of all the planets and of their spheres ... and the heavens themselves that nothing can be shifted around in any part of them without disrupting the remaining parts and the universe as a whole.

Introduction to De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) translated by C. G. Wallis in Great Books of the Western World edited by R. M. Hutchins and cited in Encyclopedia Britannica 16 (Chicago,1939) and then by S. Sambursky in Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Hutchinson, London, 1974) p. 178. Parts cited by E.A. Burtt in The Metaphysical Founda¬tions of Modern Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1932, reprinted 1980) p. 49.

Day 80

Desowitz, R. S.

The British make no apology for their imperial period. They speak with pride of their high purpose as colonial custodians in freeing the peasantry from the excesses of despotic native rulers; in endowing their colonies with a judiciary, a sense of fair play, cricket, and a democratic government. The French, on the other hand, endowed their colonies with the ability to bake wonderful loaves of bread. Making a current comparison between the former colonies of those two powers it would often seem that good bread has proved to be more sustaining and enduring than hand-me-down parliaments. Less often mentioned, and of equal importance to the ultimate character of these colonies-become-nations, was the fervour with which the British built the avenues of communication-roads, railways, and waterways. This was particularly true in India where, in the first half of the nineteenth century, they built the Bombay-Agra Road, the Bombay--Calcutta Road, and the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar. Three thousand miles of new roads--all paved. They also built a canal-irrigation system for the Ganges and its tributaries that when finished was the most extensive in the world. ... Unfortunately, what was good for the business of colonial rule was also good for the pathogens. The new corridors that brought cloth and cooking pots, were also passageways for the dissemination of infectious disease.

Kala azar was a stowaway traveller to Assam, carried there in 1895 by the British steamers that began to ply the upper Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. When the infection broke out in Assam, the inhabitants recognized it as something new to their experience and somehow associated the disease with the activities of their new masters, the British. With remarkable epidemiological insight, they called their new affliction sakari bemari, the ‘government disease’. Now Assam was ignited, and during the next twenty-five years kala azar in some districts killed 25 percent of the population. Some villages lost two thirds, or more, of their people. From Assam to Tamil Nadu, kala azar had established a permanent residency in India.

The Malaria Capers: More Tales of Parasites and People, Research and Reality (W. W. Norton, New York, 1991) p. 38.

Day 79

Broca, P. (1824—1880)

We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively on the small size of her body. ... But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men, a difference which is, nonetheless real. We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority.

‘Sur le volume et la forme du cerveau suivant les individus et suivant les races’ Bulletin Société d’Anthropologie Paris 2 (1861) p. 153. Cited by S.J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican Books 1984) p. 104.

Day 78

Marriott, E.

In 1971, as a young psychologist at California’s Stanford University [Professor Philip Zimbardo] had conducted an experiment into the psychology of imprisonment, dividing a group of undergraduate students into ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. That August he witnessed levels of cruelty that he would never have predicted or imagined. Within no time, liberal undergraduates became sadists, tormenting prisoners, even forcing them, in an uncanny premonition of George W. Bush’s Iraq, to simulate sodomy with one another….After six days Zimbardo called a halt to the experiment….
…
The story of Abu Ghraib, the focus of this book, is told with precision, in detail and with narrative skill. After the publication of the photographs, seven guards were charged with ‘maltreating detainees’. Among them was Ivan ‘Chip’ Frederic, 37, at whose trial Zimbardo appeared as an expert witness. Frederick was the archetypal ordinary American Joe: god-fearing, basket-ball playing, a disciplined soldier, super-patriotic. At Abu Ghraib he became ground down and dehumanized. He worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 40 days without rest, and slept in a prison cell when off duty. In his words: “shit was backed up in the porta-potties. There were human body parts in the facility…there was a pack of wild dogs running around.’ Prisoners regularly attacked guards; on one occasion a gun was smuggled in and a shoot-out with guards followed.

Such an environment, Zimbardo writes, “was as extreme a setting for creating deindividuation as I can imagine’. Cruelty became sexualized: one guard sodomised a prisoner with a chemical light; another raped a female detainee. Bush vowed that “wrong-doers will be brought to justice”. But to date only the lowly guards have been tried. Frederick, who pleaded guilty, was given eight years.

‘Evil at the centre of the human heart’. Review of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by P. Zimbardo, Rider Books. In The Guardian Weekly 11.05.07 p.36.

Day 77

Borger, J.

During last years election campaign a senior aide to President Bush… explained “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, if you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

‘Bush wages war on the enemy within’ Guardian Weekly, March 18-24, 2005, p. 6.

Day 76

Anonymous

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them we’d be so simple we couldn’t.

Day 75

Feyerabend, P.

My criticism of modern science is that it inhibits freedom of thought. If the reason is that it has found the truth and now follows it then I would say that there are better things than first finding, and then following, such a monster.

‘How To Defend Society Against Science’ in The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions edited by I. Hacking (OUP, Oxford) p. 158. Reprinted from Radical Philosophy, 2, Summer 175 p. 4—8.

Day 74

Hardin, G.

It is arguable whether being a king in the old days was preferable to being a commoner, most of the time; but when it came to dying there is no doubt that the king had the worst of it. Consider what Charles II was subjected to, as he lay dying in 1685. ‘A pint of blood was extracted from his right arm; then eight ounces from his left shoulder; next an emetic, two physics, and an enema consisting of fifteen substances. Then his head was shaved and a blister raised on his scalp. To purge the brain a sneezing powder was given, then cowslip powder to strengthen it. Meanwhile more emetics, soothing drinks, and more bleeding; also a plaster of pitch and pigeon dung applied to the royal feet. Not to leave anything undone the following substances were taken internally: melon seeds, manna, slippery elm, black cherry water, extract of lily of the valley, peony, lavender, pearls dissolved in vinegar, gentian root, nutmeg and finally 40 drops of extract of human skull. As a last resort bezoar stone was employed. But the Royal Patient died.’

Died of what?

In Are Science and Technology Neutral (Butterworths, London 1979) Appendix 2, p. 54.

Day 73

Frazier, I.

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrant’s dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and the natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and the springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land that so much treasure came from - weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused, forever.

‘A reporter at large: Great Plains III’ in The New Yorker March 6, 1989, p. 41.

Day 72

Blair, D.

[Alemzuriash’s] tragedy drove home what I found to be Africa’s most haunting quality: the contrast between the dignity, stoicism and goodness of its people and the venal, selfish brutality of those who lead them. … Wherever I travelled, I found good people struggling to lead decent lives in the face of their governments’ egregious cruelty, vindictiveness and paranoia.

‘Brave citizens endure brutal leaders’ Sunday Dispatches in the Sunday Independent. December 31 2006, p. 13.

Day 71

Mandela, N.

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact upon the way people live or die.

Speech at the International AIDS conference, Durban, July 2000.