Science

  • Books,  Science,  Uncategorized

    Star Maker – a review

    I recently/finally finished Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (Kindle Version)- a weird classic written in 1937. I found it strangely written, filled with novel ideas about a time and space traveler that wanders the cosmos, ultimately discovering everything there is to discover.

    Stapledon’s worlds resemble Arthur C. Clarke in scale and detail (think really, really big). Stapledon goes way weirder, and isn’t afraid to mix physics, math, metaphysics, religion and psychology in one giant bundle. Apparently Freeman Dyson conceived of the Dyson Sphere after reading this book.

    Now that I think of it is reminds me a little of Paul Wallace’s book Stars Beneath Us (a ramble on the book of Job as the really, really big picture.)

    The Good:

    1. The concept – explaining the whole universe – and doing it well
    2. The progression – starting with one guy taking a walk, and ending with “The supreme moment of the cosmos”
    3. The science – all pretty accurate as far as I can tell for the time.

    The Bad

    1. Transitions – they go by so fast you’ll think you missed them. The narrator goes from guy walking at night to space traveler very quickly, then off to other planets, then back to Earth. Stapledon underexplains how these things happen.
    2. Paragraph length – really, really long – an editor could have helped – sometimes they go for pages

    On the whole I really liked it. Very different than anything I’ve ever read before in many ways. Here are some of the choice quotes from the book:

    Quotes

    Further, the God whom they worshipped with the superb and heart-searching language of an earlier age was now conceived either as a just but jealous employer

    In Bvalltu’s view man had climbed approximately to the same height time after time, only to be undone by some hidden consequence of his own achievement.

    This slender hope the war had destroyed by setting the clock of scientific research back for a century just at the time when human nature itself was deteriorating and might never again be able to tackle so difficult a problem

    But even the most spiritual life has its temptations. The extravagant fever of industrialism and intellectualism had so subtly poisoned the plant-men that when at last they rebelled against it they swung too far, falling into the snare of a vegetal life as one-sided as the old animal life had been. Little by little they gave less and less energy and time to “animal” pursuits, until at last their nights as well as their days were spent wholly as trees, and the active, exploring, manipulating, animal intelligence died in them forever.

    But since the fluctuating progress of a world from bare animality to spiritual maturity takes, on the average, several thousands of millions of years, the maximum population of Utopian and fully awakened worlds occurred very late, when physically the galaxy was already somewhat past its prime.

    For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

    Meanwhile, since each rocky sphere that had once been a galaxy had been borne beyond every possible physical influence of its fellows, and there were no minds to maintain telepathic contact between them, each was in effect a wholly distinct universe. And since all change had ceased, the proper time of each barren universe had also ceased.

    Thus it was that, through the succession of his creatures, the Star Maker advanced from stage to stage in the progress from infantile to mature divinity. Thus it was that in the end he became what, in the eternal view, he already was in the beginning, the ground and crown of all things.

    And the Star Maker, that dark power and lucid intelligence, found in the concrete loveliness of his creature the fulfilment of desire. And in the mutual joy of the Star Maker and the ultimate cosmos was conceived, most strangely, the absolute spirit itself, in which all times are present and all being is comprised; for the spirit which was the issue of this union confronted my reeling intelligence as being at once the ground and the issue of all temporal and finite things.

    The above is the Holy Ghost

    But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit’s temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passions, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit’s temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation.

  • BigThink,  Blogging,  Science

    A telling point in the Boyd biography

    I’m currently reading Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War and I read a telling passage that stated (approximately) that autodidacts crave approval from conventionally educated academics and professionals. For those who don’t know fairly obscure word, it’s Google defines the word as

    Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person (also known as an automath), or someone who has an enthusiasm for self-education, and usually has a high degree of self-motivation.

    (tip, if you type in “Define:Word to be dined” into Google it defines the word for you.

    This seems to be a good explanation for a lot of the tensions in the blogsphere. It also seems to be a natural healthy thing. As I put it in a previous post, science advances funeral by funeral. It follows that if left to their own devices, any field of thought or industry will spend it’s time polishing the corpse of some grand new idea that is mutually agreeable to all (think of the US auto industry before the Japanese came along.

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  • Science,  Tech

    Science and truth

    Via this episode of BloggingHeads, I came across an interesting article about the philosophy of science, specifically that of Thomas Kuhn. Money Quotes:

    Scientists, as Kuhn describes them, are deeply conservative. Once indoctrinated into a paradigm, they generally devote themselves to solving “puzzles,” problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this “mopping up.” But there are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that directly contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored. But if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

    Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn asserts that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative event. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and then bashes them over the head.

    In other words, science advances funeral by funeral.

    On the first day of my Advanced Macroeconomics class in 1994 the professor (I forget his name, I think that was the last class he taught before he retired) said that we should think of the truth as “the consensus of informed opinion”.

    In other words, for practical purposes, the truth is the state of the art, as of right now, and we should expect it to change over time.

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