Enthusiasm

Having savored Freeman Dyson’s excellent science writing, I’m now reading a book by his fellow Englishman Ronald Knox. This isn’t about science, but about religion. “Enthusiasm” is Knox’s definitive study of what happens when religious people are convinced that God is talking to them personally and has a prophetic message to reveal. Many times in the history of Christianity, prophetic visionaries and ecstatic experiences have changed the course of the religion, and as many times, have given rise to schismatic sects and cults. How do you know the difference between visionary fervor and deluded craziness? Is there a difference? This is where the tradition of the longstanding Churches (such as Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) comes into play.

Ronald Knox is a fascinating figure I’d like to know more about. He flourished in the early to mid-20th century and was originally a well-known and prolific Anglican writer on Christian subjects. He was an Anglican priest who was a chaplain at Oxford. In 1917, he became a Roman Catholic, and a year later was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. He continued his writing career as well as his apologetic (promoting Roman Catholicism) work. He was a major character in what is known as the “Oxford Movement” in which many prominent Anglicans such as John Henry Newman (later a Cardinal) switched over to Roman Catholicism. Knox wrote in many different genres, from satire to history to criticism to personal memoir to spiritual inspiration. He also translated Jerome’s “Vulgate” Bible into English. Interestingly, he also wrote detective stories which sold well enough to make him a good living. Most of Knox’s books are still in print or easily found at online used-book sites.

I am only about 80 pages into this long book, which was written in 1950. It is in an elegant style (a bit flowery for our modern tastes) and incorporates many untranslated passages in French, quotes from earlier Church historians. There is plenty of material to interest an esoterically minded Christian, such as detailed descriptions of the early “charismatic” Montanists of the third century C.E., and the famous Cathars or Albigensians of medieval southern France. He will later write at length about the ultra-mystical movements of Jansenism and Quietism, controversies which changed how spirituality was cultivated in the Roman Catholic Church.

Here are some quotes from the beginning of Knox’s book, in which he lays out his definition of “enthusiasm.”

“For that is the real character of the enthusiast; he expects more evident results from the grace of God than we others...He will have no “almost-Christians,” no weaker brethren who plod and stumble...He has before his eyes a picture of the early Church, visibly penetrated with supernatural influences; and nothing less will serve him for a model....It involves a new approach to religion; hitherto this has been a matter of outward forms and ordinances, now it is an affair of the heart. Sacraments are not necessarily dispensed with; but the emphasis lies on a direct personal access to the Author of our salvation, with little of intellectual background or of liturgical expression....Especially, he decries the use of human reason as a guide to any sort of religious truth. A direct indication of the Divine will is communicated to him at every turn.”

You might recognize some of those themes in the current public religious scene here in the USA. There’s a lot of enthusiasm going around, and though Knox is always writing from a “Catholicism is the right way” perspective, he gives valuable background in this book about how devout, righteous people can go wrong even without political involvement.

My copy of Knox’s “Enthusiasm” is in poor shape, after almost thirty years in my library. At one point, I used this blocky book to prop up an air conditioner. I’m glad I saved it. It goes to show that in a library, every book should get its turn to be read. You also may be wondering why I am writing at length about a religious book on my science-oriented blog. Well, the phenomenon of “enthusiasm” and its related practices such as “channeling” or prophecy are now under the non-religious study of modern psychology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, which will yield quite a different view than the one provided by priestly Ronald Knox.

Freeman Dyson as Rebel

My science reading this month has been a collection of essays by Freeman Dyson, entitled "The Scientist as Rebel." This is published by the New York Review of Books, the highbrow publication that first featured these pieces. My friends gave me this book because they know I love to read not only about science but about scientists' lives, including the odd and rebellious types.

I've always liked and admired Freeman Dyson, and I also enjoy his writing, especially because his sentences are so clear and they don't run on. And he is mostly free of the arrogant attitude I find among many other scientist writers. He has been part of most of the great scientific enterprises of the twentieth century and knew just about every "famous scientist" in physics or astronomy.

I found his memoirs of the Manhattan Project and World War II to be some of the most interesting of the set of essays. Some rebel scientists, after the development and use of the atomic bomb, refused to work on any more government projects. But Dyson writes sympathetically of the ones who did, such as Robert Oppenheimer, and continued to do so after the war, such as Edward Teller. Dyson's review of the collected letters of Richard Feynman is even more sympathetic. Everyone who knows physics loves Feynman, because he was such a brilliant trickster and, as Dyson says, a "performer" who could play to the public. The world loves characters like that, although there are many scientists who do similarly great work but never become a Famous Figure.

Freeman Dyson is 88 years old as of this writing, and still active. At his age, he comes from a scientific and academic world that is gone, the imperial Anglo-American all-male system that produced the great particle accelerators and the laboratories of the 20th century. Nowadays being a physicist means working in a collaboration which resembles a huge corporation with thousands of diverse employees. I wonder whether it is now harder, or even impossible, to be a scientist rebel.

Randall to Graphic Feynman

I finally finished reading Lisa Randall's WARPED PASSAGES. She and her fellow string and brane theorists can make up all the fantastic ideas they want, but I consider it all science fiction until some experiment confirms it. They're all hoping that the LHC at CERN delivers some world-shaking particle event, but so far no one is saying anything. Either the CERN machine has indeed cranked out something and they are keeping it a BIG SECRET, or the machine has not yet delivered a credible result. It would be hard to keep a really significant result secret, but not impossible, so they may be hiding something multi-dimensional until they can get confirmation and repeated proof events. Meanwhile we physics fans are still hoping for something...anything? Higgs? Extra dimensions? Kaluza-Klein particles? The LHC acronym, by the way, reminds me of a famous and shocking for its day effort by the great Dadaist Marcel Duchamp where he puts a mustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa and adds the initials "L.H.O.O.Q" which when read in French give you the words "Elle a chaud au cul" which roughly translated into English means either, "She's got a hot ass" or more accurately, "She's hot for it. (horny)" This is not dignified Lisa Randall territory. It is more Richard Feynman territory which brings me to my next physics + graphics encounter.

Jim Ottaviani has been writing graphic novels about scientists for years now. I got an earlier one of his about Niels Bohr, "Suspended in Language," and enjoyed it. He can make an un-comic-book-like subject like theoretical physics work in a sequential art context, with no nude babes, explosions, bloodbaths, or monsters. When I saw the new Ottaviani book on Richard Feynman, I had to have it. The artist is Leland Myrick, who does the whole book in a conservative, three-level panel per page structure, with a bouncy, cartoonish but realistic clear-line style. Clear line means just what it says, no smudgy ink blots or action brushstrokes, just pen work colored with flat and rather modest colors. What a relief after decades of ugly, distorted and exaggerated manga-influenced comic art!

Feynman embodied the archetype of the "Trickster," and despite that, he managed to make world-changing physics discoveries as well as defense and engineering work, winning a Nobel Prize along the way. It's a journey through Feynman's life and career, with material from both Feynman's well-documented lectures on physics as well as his many autobiographical stories. You can tell that the artist did a load of research on everything from what Los Alamos Laboratories looked like when the Manhattan Project was going, to what physicists wore in class at MIT. (Men wore ties on many more occasions than they do today!) A graphic novel is also the perfect place to show the famous "Feynman Diagrams" which he invented to describe subatomic processes.

I liked this book so much that I parceled it out into chapters and read only one at a time so I could make it last longer. I don't think I would have gotten along with Feynman had I met him personally, as I am very un-Tricksterish and solemn, but being in the presence of the graphic Feynman brought back the challenge that I took on back in Year 2000. Namely, if physicists can do art and music, can an artist do physics? In the book, Feynman makes a deal with an artist friend. Feynman will teach the artist physics and the artist will teach F. to draw. The outcome was, that the artist learned no physics but Feynman did quite well at drawing. Hurrumph! This artist will learn physics. That means back to math, more math, and more more math. Back to calculus! I'm currently reviewing things with a math textbook I rescued from a recycling bin. Will I lose track again? Can I put aside even a few minutes for math work? We will see. The winter nights are long.

Frustrated Brane

I'm still reading Lisa Randall's WARPED PASSAGES and I must say this is a job. It's a lot like work, but none of the work is really done by me. A select group of people, theoretical physicists, know what this book is really about and actually do work on it, while I read this account and ask questions I am not supposed to ask.

I'm reading patiently through this tale of strings and multiple dimensions and branes and braneworlds and broken symmetries and particle interactions. I encounter passages like this one from page 331:

"...This is another example of duality. In this case, an eleven-dimensional theory with two branes bounding the eleventh dimension (the tenth dimension of space) is dual to the ten-dimensional heterotic string. That is to say, when the interactions of the heterotic string are very strong, the theory is best described as an eleven-dimensional theory with two boundary branes and nine spatial dimensions. This is not unlike the duality between ten-dimensional superstring theory and eleven-dimensional supergravity that was discussed in the previous chapter."

This sounds like theology, not physics. Yes, I know it's physics of a sort. It is supposed to have some connection with the reality that is discovered in the particle accelerators, but so far nothing from string theory has had any experimental confirmation. The author herself admits it. But the string and brane theorists go on anyway, building more and more cycles and epicycles into their theories, hoping that maybe a pattern will emerge which somehow matches something that an experiment revealed. These people know what they're doing. But I don't. Is this science? Maybe it is really a fantastic art form.

I must admit I am frustrated, reading this book. This type of knowledge and mathematical inquiry is something I would like to be able to do, but I never will, any more than I will become an Olympic athlete. But at least Olympic athletes have understandable events and outcomes. String theory is celestial arcana that no one can win. But they can make whole careers out of it. I really admire people who can master something like this and who can share it with others, but after more than three hundred pages I am less and less able to appreciate what all this theorizing has to do with reality. I realize that this type of question is disrespectful to Ms. Randall and her colleagues but even more insulting is comparing it to theology. These are all good scientific atheists! There is no theology! But there is string theory and I would like to see any type of proof that this is not a big piece of vaporware floating in the eleven-dimensional sky.

Reading Randall

It takes me a long time to read a book, especially one with such dense content as Lisa Randall's WARPED PASSAGES. This book describes itself, on a brilliant orange cover (always a plus for me) as "Unraveling the mysteries of the Universe's hidden dimensions." That way, it seems to belong to the same type of book as Brian Greene's THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE or THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS. But Lisa Randall chooses to incorporate more than just string theory or trendy new stuff. After a chapter or two on what "dimensions" are, she switches into a heavy-hauling track of describing quantum physics as developed through the whole twentieth century. And then she works on quantum field theory, and a lot of stuff which she says we readers could skip over but you know that this reader won't be a wuss and wants to read the whole thing.

Basically all this high-end material from the 20th century is necessary for understanding string theory and the physics esoterica of the 21st century but it is, as I said, a heavy haul for about half of the entire book and this is why I have spent months reading it, one or two pages at a time, while I ponder things like "polarization in two directions" and "spontaneous symmetry breaking" and "fundamental fermionic particles." For Lisa Randall, this stuff is as familiar as her breakfast cereal (or croissant, or whatever she eats for breakfast) but as a physics fan and consumer of books, it is kind of difficult for me. But I hope that someday I'll be able to understand this material. Somehow. When I learn more time management and less pointless web surfing.

When I started my physics and mathematics quest in 2000-2001, now 10 years ago, I was hoping that I'd be working on quantum mechanics in the real way, that is mathematically, by now. Instead, I'm painting pictures of grapevines. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but do grapevines have anything to do with quantum physics? I haven't forgotten that I heard the call of the Beam there in Fermilab 11 years ago this September. And as Randall and all the physics book authors repeat, the LHC at CERN in Switzerland will give us answers to those supersymmetry and string questions, if it works, if we have enough patience, if we have enough billions of dollars, if we have enough energy. That's a big basket to put all your quantum eggs in. I hope it hatches something someday, if not soon.

Meanwhile I keep reading Lisa's book, page by page, and sooner or later she'll get to string theory, which for all I know resembles a grapevine in its multidimensional branching tendrils and leafy stems.

Quantum Life

My favorite magazine, NEW SCIENTIST, never stops making fun of the New Age or pseudoscientific use of the word "quantum." Sure, the word has entered into pop culture and popular parlance in a false and unscientific way, which the righteous scientists are not going to be able to stop. But there is a way to use "quantum" that actually describes reality as we know it.

I am currently reading WARPED PASSAGES by the admirable Lisa Randall. Instead of making fun of us readers for our lack of true scientific knowledge and misuse of the word "quantum," she patiently explains to us exactly what and why physicists talk about quanta in their descriptions of subatomic phenomena. It was a revolution in ideas, as she says, when it was discovered that energy states are not continuous, but jump from one discrete level to another depending on their level of excitation. I haven't even gotten to the part about the uncertainty principle.

Quantum-ness reminds me of another current philosophical question which extends into physics. Is the world of "reality" made of discrete tiny bytes or pixels, like a computer screen, or is there a seamless, partless continuity behind it all that can't be divided into smaller segments? So far, the evidence, from atoms on down, is that the world is made of smaller pieces, which can still be called "things," which build up the edifice that we see and live in. Yet the scientists have not yet found the "things" or the divisions which make up time, space, and gravity, although the practitioners of the "loop quantum gravity" sect say they are on track to find them.

I am very lazy most of the time, unless I've consumed coffee, at which point I become amazingly diligent for about an hour or two. During most of my life I can only accomplish something if I break the task into bits, mini accomplishments. Wash one glass. Fold all the blue T-shirts. Pick up three books from the floor. Same with art, and with Lisa Randall's book. I can only do so much at one time, unlike those heroes of science, engineering, and industry working their 80-hour weeks. I cut a board to size tonight for a painting: that's one pixel of work. Or perhaps, a "quantum." My little life is composed of quanta of work. Coffee, like an incoming photon stream, can put me into a higher state of energy for a little while, but not for a long time, since hours later I have dropped back into my baseline state of being lazy and cranky. I can only read Randall's book for a few pages, because there are so many quanta of ideas on each page. Ideas and information are said to have their own energy, and I never give up hope that someday, energized by ideas and mathematics, I will attain a higher state of quantum consciousness, so that "New Scientist" or someone with an attitude like it can ridicule me.

Wake up, Electron

Eight months ago, my inspiration for posting here sort of evaporated. There were a lot of reasons, most of which had to do with the time eaten up by my day job. I just couldn't maintain any level of mathematical or scientific activity when I was busy running the cash register and lettering signs at Trader Joe's. I'm still doing that day job but for the summer months my schedule has changed, I'm working fewer hours due to the usual seasonal lowering of business there. That means that I can respond to the inner voice that has been regularly reminding me to return to ELECTRON BLUE 2 and to math and science in some way.

I haven't been completely inactive. During the months of the hiatus I read NEW SCIENTIST enthusiastically, as I could read at the kitchen table and even take the magazine to restaurants. I also read books on cosmology. During the long dreary winter (even in Virginia, winter is dreary), I read two books by the excellent science writer Michael Lemonick, about cosmology and the information about the cosmic microwave background returned by two satellites, COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) and WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe). These satellites were decisive in the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the remains of the original fireball of the "Big Bang." The first one, "The Light at the Edge of the Universe," (one of the best book titles ever, in my opinion) was about COBE and the first evidence of a pattern of temperature differences in this radiation over the whole area of the sky. The second one, a sequel as it were, is called "Echo of the Big Bang" and is about not only the WMAP satellite and measuring the background radiation, but the whole intense process of how scientists create a plan, a design, and a way to get that satellite into space. Their dedication is almost unbelievable from the standpoint of a hobbyist like me.

WMAP changed cosmology and now there are other satellites and projects working on new discoveries. The AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) which the Endeavor astronauts installed just a month or so ago will look for antimatter from its place at the International Space Station. Meanwhile, the vast round behemoth of the LHC is churning out particle collisions, in the hope that something will reveal new physics or confirm strange old physics.

Having read Lemonick's books, I went on to start "Warped Passages" by Harvard theoretical physicist and stringmaster Lisa Randall. This is my current reading. In order for Randall to explain string theory and other esoteric modern physics, she has to take us readers through helpful though non-mathematical explanations of classical and relativistic physics. The section I am on right now deals with non-Euclidean geometry, in which familiar geometric axioms get twisted when the figures are inscribed on curved or convex surfaces.

OK, but the important thing is, when am I gonna get back to learning math, reading math books, and doing problems? This is the big one which I haven't solved yet. I have plenty of math books, but haven't had the, uh, initiative to open it up and calculate. I still must place making visual art ahead of working on math, because I haven't given up the (possibly forlorn) hope that I could return to making some money with my art. I am working on revising my portfolio for showing to publishers or art directors or galleries. I now have digital art skills I didn't have years ago when I halted my independent math study. I do lots of different kinds of artworks which fit into "lines" (strings?) of similar work. I make old-fashioned landscapes and architecture, fantasy and science fiction illustration, and lately, art done at wineries and on wine-related subject matter. But relevant to this Electron, I also have that geometric abstraction line which includes mathematical lines, curves, and motifs. To my amazement, these pictures are quite popular. I recently showed them to a renowned science fiction artist pro who said that with a few space, science fiction, or fantasy elements I could market them as a non-traditional illustration style. That's what I'm working on currently.

Well, that's enough for now. The Electron is active again, but due to the Uncertainty Principle, one cannot know for sure when I will post or what length the posting will be. I will be interested if anyone, in this universe or any other, will read this, or whether they will return data comments from space that acknowledge that blog particles have been detected.