the book club: December 2007 Archives

I added the italics. Fascinating, huh? Way out there on the edge of "hard" scientific knowledge is acknowledgment of the edge of social scientific knowledge. "We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced" (James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" p. 16).

I love His Dark Materials, the trilogy by Philip Pullman. I extracted quotes galore from Book I, The Golden Compass, and Book II (The Subtle Knife) “You must play the serpent.” Seems I didn't get around to posting selected quotes from Book III - ah, still on the "to do" list! :-)

Should I watch the movie? In another life, perhaps I only see the film and never read the novels! "Your alter ego is simply a prediction of the so-called concordance model of cosmology," says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts (in the "stranger" article linked above). A critique of "the simplest known model that is in general agreement with observed phenomena" notes that more is still unknown, or unconfirmed, than is known. Most of the physicists who will engage me in conversation long enough will acknowledge that, as much as seems to be known, we still do not know that something else won't turn up and change everything. :-) Nonetheless, they (like the rest of us humans) work with what we have.

"Let me ask you a question back," I told him.

"Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?
After a moment of stunned silence, he said, "Good Lord, Jason. I hope you're joking."
"Why?"
"Surely that's manifest."
"It isn't to me."
"You've been there, Jason. We were there together. It's all lies and bullshit till graduate school. Why else have graduate school?"
"That's very cynical."
"Is it?"
"Suppose I were to tell you that the lies don't stop in graduate school?"

"The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow, and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequences with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them."

A quarter of a century behind the curve, but right on time for me: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Also online at h2g2.com)

"Ah," said Arther. "This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of" (1979, republished 2005, Del Rey, p. 49).

Zaphod says quietly:

"I only know as much about myself as my mind can make out under its current conditions." (p. 144)

Don't Panic!

"Perhaps I'm old and tired," [Slartibartfast continues], "but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied . . . . What does it matter? . . . I'd far rather be happy than right."

"And are you?" [asks Dentarthurdent].

"No, that's where it all falls down, of course" (p. 193).