About
These are some of my own scribbles, written long ago. I hope to expand this page with more scribbles as time goes on.
The scribbles
Elephants' Wings, redux (written May 14, 2009)
Professor Myers,
I was forwarded your satirical diatribe on the history of the discovery of elephant wings by an opponent of the Eagletosh University of Proboscidoptera (at which I am a professor myself), and I was greatly disturbed that you had not taken the time to research the subject matter at greater detail before writing your screed. While the historicity of your account is accurate enough, one cannot help but feel there's a disrespecting tone underlying it. You would be wise to familiarize yourself with the subject, preferably by reading the great tomes of roboscidopterology by the maestro himself, such as The Voyage in the Jungle, On the Origin of Wings, and The Descent of Elephants. (If they did not have wings, how would they avoid crashing into the Earth when they descended from Heaven? Elephants are heavy.)
That first seminal work of his, The Voyage in the Jungle, lays out in great detail what happened in those pivotal years. What your own account of it conveniently fails to mention (and which you would have known had you read Eagletosh's first great work) is that while Eagletosh admittedly did little field work, what he lacked in physical examination he made up for a thousand-fold in spiritual understanding. He had a deep inner connection with elephantkind, something his three colleagues — those crass materialists Moe, Larry, and Curly — utterly lacked. Reading Eagletosh, you immediately get the warm, cozy feeling of being in the presence of a poetic, romantic, loving mind. His books are filled with siren poems and colorful illustrations. Open any of Moe, Larry, or Curly's books, and you will find graphs, equations, and other debasements of the loftiness of the great and noble elephant. Does the elephant know what axes and functions are? No. Does it need to? No. Why do we?
I implore you, please focus your attention away from Moe et. al. and instead muse on the luminescence of the elephants' feathered wings.
Attached to this E-mail is a wonderful illustration from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Elephants, drawn by Miriam Grinspoon, on request from Eagletosh, who described the scene he had seen in one of his dreams (which were sent from the Great Elephant in the Sky). If that is not photographic evidence enough, nothing will convince the skeptics.
Best regards and with prayers for your conversion,
Prof. Håvard Skjæveland
Eagletosh University of Proboscidoptera, Historical Faculty
Language Inexpressible (written Mar 25, 2009)
It has often been observed that certain things are very hard, if not impossible, to capture in ordinary language. I suppose the classic example of this is that of understanding (and explaining) the Big Bang. Let me start at the beginning.
There's a phenomenon called redshift (and its opposite, blueshift) which happens when a source of light is travelling towards you or away from you, and it's caused by the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect is what happens when sound is emitted from a moving source, as when the pitch of an ambulance's sirens changes as the ambulance whips past you. In fact, the principle is generalizable to any wave (of which sound is an example). You can try this for yourself. Fill up a sink (or your tub) with water and move an object along the surface (a rubber duck works wonders) while you bob it up and down. You should observe that in front of the object, the waves it makes are shorter, while the waves in back of it are longer. This works for sound, and, indeed, for light. Of course, ripples in water move slower than sound waves, and light moves even faster.
Back to redshift. Astronomical observations have revealed that galaxies are moving away from us, and the further away from us they are, the faster they recede (this recession proportional to distance is often called Hubble's Law, or the Redshift Distance Law). Now, it's called redshifting because when light is moving away from you, the waves from the light hitting your eye (or our telescopes) are longer, less energetic, and therefore more "red", and the farther the galaxy is from us, the "redder" it is. (The opposite, blueshifting, happens, as you might guess, when the light source is coming right for you. The waves in front of it are shorter, more energetic, and more "blue".)
From all this, astronomers have gathered that if galaxies are moving away from us now, they must have been closer in the past, and closer still in the distant past, all the way back to a point where all matter must have been contained in a point of zero dimension (called a singularity), from which all creation sprang. The late astronomer Fred Hoyle, in a radio interview, called this the "Big Bang", not to satirize the idea (as many people think), but to make the idea clearer to his listeners. The idea itself was in fact first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest and astronomer, and he called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom". (He has described it as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation".)
What happened before the Big Bang? Physicists tell us that that's a meaningless question, comparable to asking, "What's north of the North Pole?" (an analogy from Stephen Hawking). In fact, physicists seem hell-bent on making us mere mortals accept the ludicrous notion that time began when the universe sprang into existence from a singularity. How can that be? How does a universe arise from a point of no dimensions, and jump-start time, to boot? How can there be such a phenomenon as time starting to exist? Isn't time the resource you need to make anything come into existence (which surely requires time)? And so on, through heaps of questions whose answers, we hope, will jam this weird idea into our heads. But I think it's impossible , because this notion is so far removed from our ordinary dealings with time and space that it simply won't fit, in the same way a triangle block won't fit a square slot.
How many other exotic facts, whose nature will elude us, does the universe hold in store for us? How many will forever (or perhaps not) be inexpressible in languages we can understand?
A Story of Modesty and Vanity (written Mar 12, 2009)
Earth, the (oblately, more or less) spheroid planet of rock and metal and water upon (and slightly above and slighty under) which we all live, revolves around our Sun, a blazing nuclear power plant in the sky, the diameter of which equals a hundred Earths, the surface area of which equals twelve thousand Earths, and the volume of which equals a whopping one million three-hundred thousand Earths. Upon it, for billions of years, a majestic dance of molecules and fundamental forces has formed life. One of these life forms — which that life form's scientists classify Homo sapiens, in the language they call Latin — developed cultures. One of those cultures, the one, incidentally, in which this specimen — the Author — happens, by merest accident, to live, has a habit, once every Solar Revolution of their planet, to celebrate and acknowledge the date on which each individual was born (they also celebrate and acknowledge, once every revolution, their planet itself, for having achieved the incredible feat of yet another revolution about its star). The particular date on which the Author writes these words, by no coincidence, is also the date on which, twenty-four Solar Revolutions ago, the Author's body had completed — by no conscious choice or deliberate action on the part of the Author — the vastly complicated origami folding and differentiation of cells (that we call embryology) inside the womb of his maternal guardian. For all the vastness of space and time and chance, the Author's peers finds this momentous occasion — the birth of the Author — an event to be celebrated.
So let me not be accused of vanity when I say, "Happy Birthday to me!"