A14.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.14.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
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In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
61.Zadie Smith on the Psychology of the Two Types of Writers by Maria Popova.
62.Beauty ? truth.
63.Thelytoky.
64.Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
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61.Zadie Smith on the Psychology of the Two Types of Writers by Maria Popova.
?It?s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.?
On March 24, 2008, two years before she penned her oft-cited ten rules of writing, the immeasurably brilliant Zadie Smith delivered a lecture at Columbia University?s Writing Program under the brief ?to speak about some aspect of your craft.? Appropriately titled ?That Crafty Feeling? and included in Smith?s altogether enchanting collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (public library), the lecture outlines the ten psychological stages of writing a novel.
While invariably subjective, as all advice is, and rooted in Smith?s own experience ? by that point, ?twelve years and three novels? ? her insights undoubtedly belong with history?s most enduring wisdom on writing.
Smith begins by proposing the two psychological profiles into which all writers fall ? a dichotomy reminiscent of Italo Calvino?s hedgehog-versus-fox classification system of writerly personalities. Smith writes:
I want to offer you a pair of ugly terms for two breeds of novelist: the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager.
You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure ? all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It?s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent ? for me, unthinkable ? radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title.
Noting her intolerance for that approach ? ?not because I disapprove, but because other people?s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying? ? Smith professes to being a Micro Manager herself:
I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven?t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal ? they?re forever moving the furniture. They?ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There?s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.
Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel?s tonal frequency line by line.
[?]
Opening other people?s novels, you recognize fellow Micro Managers: that opening pileup of too-careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed.
But this inherent open-endedness also leaves the Micro Manager vulnerable to what Smith calls obsessive perspective disorder, or OPD ? ?a kind of existential drama? that unfolds over the course of the novel?s first twenty pages, possessing the writer to compulsively attempt answering the question of what kind of novel is being written. And yet, Smith marvels, despite how disorienting OPD is, it isn?t paralyzing ? the writing continues throughout this straining state. In that regard, OPD appears to be, rather assuringly, mere garden-variety anxiety ? the same psychic malady that tormented Darwin as he was producing his most influential work, the very state Kierkegaard believed powers creative work rather than hindering it, which psychologists have also found to be the crux of the link between creativity and mental illness. Smith writes:
That?s the strange thing. It?s as if you?re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter? When you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months. Worrying over the first twenty pages is a way of working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its characters ? all of which, for a Micro Manager, are contained in the sensibility of a sentence. Once the tone is there, all else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.
She considers, with a lyrical personal testament, the key blessing of her type:
There is one great advantage to being a Micro Manager rather than a Macro Planner: The last day of your novel truly is the last day. If you edit as you go along, there are no first, second, third drafts. There is only one draft, and when it?s done, it?s done. Who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel? It?s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I?d been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.
Echoing Anna Deavere Smith on the confidence trick, Smith considers what transmutes that obsessive worrying into that final moment of absolute elation and relief:
It?s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself.
Smith goes on to sketch out another psychological dichotomy of writerly temperaments ? those who ?won?t read a word of any novel while they?re writing their own? and, if you err to recommend to them a good novel at that stage, ?give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife?; and those who read voraciously, perhaps aware that the myth of originality is a limiting illusion anyway and that all writers, as Pete Seeger memorably put it, are but links in a creative chain. Smith illustrates this with a beautiful metaphor:
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra ? they?ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even.
It seems, then, that what is true of the optimal physical environment for writing ? the finding that some writers are vitalized by background noise, while others woefully distracted by it ? also applies to the optimal intellectual and creative environment of the writer. Noting that it?s ?a matter of temperament,? Smith admits to being among the latter ? a writer whose desk is ?covered in open novels? and who finds enormous creative nourishment in the Kafkas and Nabokovs and Dostoyevskys, a writer who thrives on that peculiar ?feeling of apprenticeship? one experiences in absorbing the work of a master in one?s own craft, a product of what Oscar Wilde once described as ?the temperament of receptivity.? She writes:
To [the former] way of thinking, the sovereignty of one?s individuality is the vital thing, and it must be protected at any price, even if it means cutting oneself off from that literary echo chamber E. M. Forster described, in which writers speak so helpfully to one another, across time and space. Well, each to their own, I suppose.
For me, that echo chamber was essential. I was fourteen when I heard John Keats in there and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on class ? though how archaic that must sound, here in America. Keats was not working-class, exactly, nor black ? but in rough outline his situation seemed closer to mine than the other writers you came across. He felt none of the entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh or even P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Keats offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked ?Apprentices Welcome Here.?
'Flights of Mind' by Vita Wells from 'Art Made from Books.' Click image for more.
Smith dubs the fourth stage of novel-writing ?middle-of-the-novel magical thinking,? which she describes in a passage that tickled my affection for punctuation and its emotive power:
By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post ? I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she?s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind.
Smith is essentially describing a state of creative flow. But, more than anything else, the phenomenon she describes ? that immersive, elated intimacy with the work ? parallels what we experience when we?re in love, a resonance she doesn?t explicitly tease out but one her language very much implies.
Magical thinking makes you crazy ? and renders everything possible.
How similar this is to Stendhal?s notion of ?crystallization? from his 1822 meditation on the stages of love ? the transcendently delusional moment when the lover begins to ?overrate wildly? his beloved, to ?endow her with a thousand perfections.? Stendhal likens this mental trickery that ?draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one? to the covering of an ordinary twig with magical ice crystals that wholly obscure its true nature ? the same process Smith describes when a writer reaches that pivotal point of falling in love with her unfinished novel as a proxy for the fantasy of her finished novel.
This state, she observes, makes you marvel at ?how in tune the world is with your unfinished novel right now? as you begin to feel that every experience you have, everything you encounter in the world, has direct and almost fated relevance to your novel. Indeed, who, while in love, hasn?t had the experience of suddenly feeling like every poem, every song, every book has been written, as if by some grand act of cosmic blessing, for that particular love? Who hasn?t been stunned by the recognition of some mundane coincidence ? your lover?s aunt once visited the foreign city where you were born ? and taken it as confirmation of fatedness? We are remarkable machines for spiritual pattern-recognition, in love and in creative work. Both the peril and the promise of being human is that we can manufacture nonexistent patterns by the sheer force of our state of mind, so hungry for psychic alignment between our soul and that of the beloved, between our work and the needs of the world.
Smith proceeds to offer her ?only absolutely twenty-four-karat-gold-plated piece of advice,? a strategy that serves, in a way, as deliberate melting of the crystals so that one may prune the twig:
When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second ? put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal ? but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can?t tell you how many times I?ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them. It?s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it?s published, ten minutes before you go onstage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all the pieces of deadwood, stupidity, vanity and tedium are distressingly obvious to you. Two years earlier, when the proofs came, you looked at the same page and couldn?t see a comma out of place.
[?]
You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it?s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who?s read it in twelve different versions. It?s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.
Elsewhere in the lecture, Smith touches on this psychological distancing in observing the writer?s tendency to think, from book to book, ?My God, I was a different person!? But we are, in fact, profoundly different people throughout life ? such is the greatest perplexity of the human self and the reason why we so pathologically hinder the happiness of our future selves. Even more than being a ?professional observer? of the world, as Susan Sontag once described the project of the writer, she has no choice but to become a professional observer of her inner world ? something impossible without this very distancing that allows the writer to gasp with precisely such disbelief at her own otherness in hindsight. To edit one?s own work, Smith seems to suggest, is to not only reluctantly recognize but actively inhabit one?s own transmutation over time. She captures this wryly:
When people tell me they have just read that book, I do try to feel pleased, but it?s a distant, disconnected sensation, like when someone tells you they met your second cousin in a bar in Goa.
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62.Beauty ? truth.
Scientists prize elegant theories, but a taste for simplicity is a treacherous guide. And it doesn?t even look good.
by Philip Ball 3,000 words.
Philip Ball is a British science writer, whose work appears in Nature, New Scientist and Prospect, among others. His latest book is Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler (2013).
Albert Einstein?s theory of general relativity is a century old next year and, as far as the test of time is concerned, it seems to have done rather well. For many, indeed, it doesn?t merely hold up: it is the archetype for what a scientific theory should look like. Einstein?s achievement was to explain gravity as a geometric phenomenon: a force that results from the distortion of space-time by matter and energy, compelling objects ? and light itself ? to move along particular paths, very much as rivers are constrained by the topography of their landscape. General relativity departs from classical Newtonian mechanics and from ordinary intuition alike, but its predictions have been verified countless times. In short, it is the business.
Einstein himself seemed rather indifferent to the experimental tests, however. The first came in 1919, when the British physicist Arthur Eddington observed the Sun?s gravity bending starlight during a solar eclipse. What if those results hadn?t agreed with the theory? (Some accuse Eddington of cherry-picking the figures anyway, but that?s another story.) ?Then,? said Einstein, ?I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, for the theory is correct.?
That was Einstein all over. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr commented at the time, he was a little too fond of telling God what to do. But this wasn?t sheer arrogance, nor parental pride in his theory. The reason Einstein felt general relativity must be right is that it was too beautiful a theory to be wrong.
This sort of talk both delights today?s physicists and makes them a little nervous. After all, isn?t experiment ? nature itself ? supposed to determine truth in science? What does beauty have to do with it? ?Aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse,? the string theorist Brian Greene reassures his readers in The Elegant Universe (1999), the most prominent work of physics exposition in recent years. ?Ultimately, theories are judged by how they fare when faced with cold, hard, experimental facts.? Einstein, Greene insists, didn?t mean to imply otherwise ? he was just saying that beauty in a theory is a good guide, an indication that you are on the right track.
Einstein isn?t around to argue, of course, but I think he would have done. It was Einstein, after all, who said that ?the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones?. And if he was simply defending theory against too hasty a deference to experiment, there would be plenty of reason to side with him ? for who is to say that, in case of a discrepancy, it must be the theory and not the measurement that is in error? But that?s not really his point. Einstein seems to be asserting that beauty trumps experience come what may.
He wasn?t alone. Here?s the great German mathematician Hermann Weyl, who fled Nazi Germany to become a colleague of Einstein?s at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton: ?My work always tries to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.? So much for John Keats????s ?Beauty is truth, truth beauty.? And so much, you might be tempted to conclude, for scientists? devotion to truth: here were some of its greatest luminaries, pledging obedience to a different calling altogether.
Was this kind of talk perhaps just the spirit of the age, a product of fin de siècle romanticism? It would be nice to think so. In fact, the discourse about aesthetics in scientific ideas has never gone away. Even Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, in their seminal but pitilessly austere midcentury Course of Theoretical Physics, were prepared to call general relativity ?probably the most beautiful of all existing theories?. Today, popularisers such as Greene are keen to make beauty a selling point of physics. Writing in this magazine last year, the quantum theorist Adrian Kent speculated that the very ugliness of certain modifications of quantum mechanics might count against their credibility. After all, he wrote, here was a field in which ?elegance seems to be a surprisingly strong indicator of physical relevance?.
We have to ask: what is this beauty they keep talking about?
Some scientists are a little coy about that. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac agreed with Einstein, saying in 1963 that ?it is more important to have beauty in one?s equations than to have them fit experiment? (how might Greene explain that away?). Yet faced with the question of what this all-important beauty is, Dirac threw up his hands. Mathematical beauty, he said, ?cannot be defined any more than beauty in art can be defined? ? though he added that it was something ?people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating?. That sounds rather close to the ?good taste? of his contemporaneous art critics; we might fear that it amounts to the same mixture of prejudice and paternalism.
Given this history of evasion, it was refreshing last November to hear the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed spell out what ?beauty? really means for him and his colleagues. He was talking to the novelist Ian McEwan at the Science Museum in London, during the opening of the museum?s exhibition on the Large Hadron Collider. ?Ideas that we find beautiful,? Arkani-Hamed explained, ?are not a capricious aesthetic judgment?:
It?s not fashion, it?s not sociology. It?s not something that you might find beautiful today but won?t find beautiful 10 years from now. The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there?s no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that?s what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful.
Does this bear any relation to what beauty means in the arts? Arkani-Hamed had a shot at that. Take Ludwig van Beethoven, he said, who strove to develop his Fifth Symphony in ?perfect accordance to its internal logical structure?.
t is precisely this that delights mathematicians in a great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a tangibly human genius.
Beethoven is indeed renowned for the way he tried out endless variations and directions in his music, turning his manuscripts into inky thickets in his search for the ?right? path. Novelists and poets, too, can be obsessive in their pursuit of the mot juste. Reading the novels of Patrick White or the late works of Penelope Fitzgerald, you get the same feeling of almost logical necessity, word by perfect word.
But you notice this quality precisely because it is so rare. What generally brings a work of art alive is not its inevitability so much as the decisions that the artist made. We gasp not because the words, the notes, the brushstrokes are ?right?, but because they are revelatory: they show us not a deterministic process but a sensitive mind making surprising and delightful choices. In fact, pure mathematicians often say that it is precisely this quality that delights them in a great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a personal, tangibly human genius taking steps in a direction we?d never have guessed.
?The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity?: here is where Arkani-Hamed really scuppers the notion that the kind of beauty sought by science has anything to do with the major currents of artistic culture. After all, if there?s one thing you can say about beauty, it is that the beholder has a lot to do with it. We can still find beauty in the Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux and the music of William Byrd, while admitting that a heck of a lot of beauty really is fashion and sociology. Why shouldn?t it be? How couldn?t it be? We still swoon at Jan van Eyck. Would van Eyck?s audience swoon at Mark Rothko?
The gravest offenders in this attempted redefinition of beauty are, of course, the physicists. This is partly because their field has always been heir to Platonism ? the mystical conviction of an orderly cosmos. Such a belief is almost a precondition for doing physics in the first place: what?s the point in looking for rules unless you believe they exist? The MIT physicist Max Tegmark now goes so far as to say that mathematics constitutes the basic fabric of reality, a claim redolent of Plato?s most extreme assertions in Timaeus.
But Platonism will not connect you with the mainstream of aesthetic thought ? not least because Plato himself was so distrustful of art (he banned the lying poets from his Republic, after all). Better that we turn to Immanuel Kant. Kant expended considerable energies in his Critique of Judgment (1790) trying to disentangle the aesthetic aspects of beauty from the satisfaction one feels in grasping an idea or recognising a form, and it does us little good to jumble them up again. All that conceptual understanding gives us, he concluded, is ?the solution that satisfies the problem? not a free and indeterminately final entertainment of the mental powers with what is called beautiful?. Beauty, in other words, is not a resolution: it opens the imagination.
Physicists might be the furthest gone along Plato?s trail, but they are not alone. Consider the many chemists whose idea of beauty seems to be dictated primarily by the molecules they find pleasing ? usually because of some inherent mathematical symmetry, such as in the football-shaped carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene (strictly speaking, a truncated icosahedron). Of course, this is just another instance of mathematics-worship, yoking beauty to qualities of regularity that were not deemed artistically beautiful even in antiquity. Brian Greene claims: ?In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics.? Yet for Plato it was precisely art?s lack of symmetry (and thus intelligibility) that denied it access to real beauty. Art was just too messy to be beautiful.
In seeing matters the other way around, Kant speaks for the mainstream of artistic aesthetics: ?All stiff regularity (such as approximates to mathematical regularity) has something in it repugnant to taste.? We weary of it, as we do a nursery rhyme. Or as the art historian Ernst Gombrich put it in 1988, too much symmetry ensures that ?once we have grasped the principle of order? it holds no more surprise?. Artistic beauty, Gombrich believed, relies on a tension between symmetry and asymmetry: ?a struggle between two opponents of equal power, the formless chaos, on which we impose our ideas, and the all-too-formed monotony, which we brighten up by new accents?. Even Francis Bacon (the 17th-century proto-scientist, not the 20th-century artist) understood this much: ?There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.?
Perhaps I have been a little harsh on the chemists ? those cube- and prism-shaped molecules are fun in their own way. But Bacon, Kant and Gombrich are surely right to question their aesthetic merit. As the philosopher of chemistry Joachim Schummer pointed out in 2003, it is simply parochial to redefine beauty as symmetry: doing so cuts one off from the dominant tradition in artistic theory. There?s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres.
Why shouldn?t scientists be allowed their own definition of beauty? Perhaps they should. Yet isn?t there a narrowness to the standard that they have chosen? Even that might not be so bad, if their cult of ?beauty? didn?t seem to undermine the credibility of what they otherwise so strenuously assert: the sanctity of evidence. It doesn?t matter who you are, they say, how famous or erudite or well-published: if your theory doesn?t match up to nature, it?s history. But if that?s the name of the game, why on earth should some vague notion of beauty be brought into play as an additional arbiter?
Because of experience, they might reply: true theories are beautiful. Well, general relativity might have turned out OK, but plenty of others have not. Take the four-colour theorem: the proposal that it is possible to colour any arbitrary patchwork in just four colours without any patches of the same colour touching one another. In 1879 it seemed as though the British mathematician Alfred Kempe had found a proof ? and it was widely accepted for a decade, because it was thought beautiful. It was wrong. The current proof is ugly as heck ? it relies on a brute-force exhaustive computer search, which some mathematicians refuse to accept as a valid form of demonstration ? but it might turn out to be all there is. The same goes for Andrew Wiles?s proof of Fermat?s Last Theorem, first announced in 1993. The basic theorem is wonderfully simple and elegant, the proof anything but: 100 pages long and more complex than the Pompidou Centre. There?s no sign of anything simpler.
It?s not hard to mine science history for theories and proofs that were beautiful and wrong, or complicated and right. No one has ever shown a correlation between beauty and ?truth?. But it is worse than that, for sometimes ?beauty? in the sense that many scientists prefer ? an elegant simplicity, to put it in crude terms ? can act as a fake trump card that deflects inquiry. In one little corner of science that I can claim to know reasonably well, an explanation from 1959 for why water-repelling particles attract when immersed in water (that it?s an effect of entropy, there being more disordered water molecules when the particles stick together) was so neat and satisfying that it continues to be peddled today, even though the experimental data show that it is untenable and that the real explanation probably lies in a lot of devilish detail.
....would be thrilled if the artist were to say to the scientist: ?No, we?re not even on the same page?
Might it even be that the marvellous simplicity and power of natural selection strikes some biologists as so beautiful an idea ? an island of order in a field otherwise beset with caveats and contradictions ? that it must be defended at any cost? Why else would attempts to expose its limitations, exceptions and compromises still ignite disputes pursued with near-religious fervour?
The idea that simplicity, as distinct from beauty, is a guide to truth ? the idea, in other words, that Occam?s Razor is a useful tool ? seems like something of a shibboleth in itself. As these examples show, it is not reliably correct. Perhaps it is a logical assumption, all else being equal. But it is rare in science that all else is equal. More often, some experiments support one theory and others another, with no yardstick of parsimony to act as referee.
We can be sure, however, that simplicity is not the ultimate desideratum of aesthetic merit. Indeed, in music and visual art, there appears to be an optimal level of complexity below which preference declines. A graph of enjoyment versus complexity has the shape of an inverted U: there is a general preference for, say, ?Eleanor Rigby? over both ?Baa Baa Black Sheep? and Pierre Boulez?s Structures Ia, just as there is for lush landscapes over monochromes. For most of us, our tastes eschew the extremes.
Ironically, the quest for a ?final theory? of nature?s deepest physical laws has meant that the inevitability and simplicity that Arkani-Hamed prizes so highly now look more remote than ever. For we are now forced to contemplate no fewer than 10500 permissible variants of string theory. It?s always possible that 10500 minus one of them might vanish at a stroke, thanks to the insight of some future genius. Right now, though, the dream of elegant fundamental laws lies in bewildering disarray.
An insistence that the ?beautiful? must be true all too easily elides into an empty circularity: what is true must therefore be beautiful. I see this in the conviction of many chemists that the periodic table, with all its backtracking sequences of electron shells, its positional ambiguities for elements such as hydrogen and unsightly bulges that the flat page can?t constrain, is a thing of loveliness. There, surely, speaks the voice of duty, not genuine feeling. The search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation.
Despite all this, I don?t want scientists to abandon their talk of beauty. Anything that inspires scientific thinking is valuable, and if a quest for beauty ? a notion of beauty peculiar to science, removed from art ? does that, then bring it on. And if it gives them a language in which to converse with artists, rather than standing on soapboxes and trading magisterial insults like C P Snow and F R Leavis, all the better. I just wish they could be a bit more upfront about the fact that they are (as is their wont) torturing a poor, fuzzy, everyday word to make it fit their own requirements. I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ?No, we?re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.?
If, on the other hand, we want beauty in science to make contact with aesthetics in art, I believe we should seek it precisely in the human aspect: in ingenious experimental design, elegance of theoretical logic, gentle clarity of exposition, imaginative leaps of reasoning. These things are not vital for a theory that works, an experiment that succeeds, an explanation that enchants and enlightens. But they are rather lovely. Beauty, unlike truth or nature, is something we make ourselves.
19 May 2014.
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63.Thelytoky.
Thelytoky (from the Greek th?lys "female" and tokos "birth") is a type of parthenogenesis in which females are produced from unfertilized eggs. Thelytokous parthenogenesis is rare in the animal kingdom and reported in about 1,500 species, about 1% of described animal species, according to a 1984 study. It is more common in invertebrates, like arthropods, but it can occur in vertebrates, including salamanders, fish, and reptiles such as some whiptail lizards.
Thelytoky can occur by a number of different mechanisms each of which has a different impact on the level of homozygosity. It can be induced in Hymenoptera by the bacteria Wolbachia and Cardinium, and has also been described in several groups of Hymenoptera, including Cynipidae, Tenthredinidae, Aphelinidae, Ichneumonidae, Apidae and Formicidae.
Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) have a haplodiploid sex-determination system. They produce haploid males from unfertilized eggs through arrhenotokous parthenogenesis. However in a few social hymenopterans, queens or workers are capable of producing diploid female offspring by thelytoky. The daughters produced may or may not be complete clones of their mother depending on the type of parthenogenesis that takes place.
The offspring can develop into either queens or workers. Examples of such species include the Cape bee, Apis mellifera capensis, Mycocepurus smithii and clonal raider ant, Cerapachys biroi.
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64.Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, and remains in operation. With a 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) mirror, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. The telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble.
Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely high-resolution images with negligible background light. Hubble has recorded some of the most detailed visible-light images ever, allowing a deep view into space and time. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.
Although not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST was built by the United States space agency NASA, with contributions from the European Space Agency, and is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. The HST is one of NASA's Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Space telescopes were proposed as early as 1923. Hubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. When finally launched in 1990, Hubble's main mirror was found to have been ground incorrectly, compromising the telescope's capabilities. The optics were corrected to their intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993.
Hubble is the only telescope designed to be serviced in space by astronauts. After launch by Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990, four subsequent Space Shuttle missions repaired, upgraded, and replaced systems on the telescope. A fifth mission was canceled on safety grounds following the Columbia disaster. However, after spirited public discussion, NASA administrator Mike Griffin approved one final servicing mission, completed in 2009. The telescope is still operating as of 2015, and may last until 2020. Its scientific successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is scheduled for launch in 2018.
Proposals and precursors.
In 1923, Hermann Oberth?considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky?published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("The Rocket into Planetary Space"), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.
The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced back as far as 1946, to the astronomer Lyman Spitzer's paper "Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory". In it, he discussed the two main advantages that a space-based observatory would have over ground-based telescopes. First, the angular resolution (the smallest separation at which objects can be clearly distinguished) would be limited only by diffraction, rather than by the turbulence in the atmosphere, which causes stars to twinkle, known to astronomers as seeing. At that time ground-based telescopes were limited to resolutions of 0.5?1.0 arcseconds, compared to a theoretical diffraction-limited resolution of about 0.05 arcsec for a telescope with a mirror 2.5 m in diameter. Second, a space-based telescope could observe infrared and ultraviolet light, which are strongly absorbed by the atmosphere.
Spitzer devoted much of his career to pushing for the development of a space telescope. In 1962, a report by the US National Academy of Sciences recommended the development of a space telescope as part of the space program, and in 1965 Spitzer was appointed as head of a committee given the task of defining scientific objectives for a large space telescope.
Space-based astronomy had begun on a very small scale following World War II, as scientists made use of developments that had taken place in rocket technology. The first ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun was obtained in 1946, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) to obtain UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray spectra in 1962.[12] An orbiting solar telescope was launched in 1962 by the United Kingdom as part of the Ariel space program, and in 1966 NASA launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) mission. OAO-1's battery failed after three days, terminating the mission. It was followed by OAO-2, which carried out ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies from its launch in 1968 until 1972, well beyond its original planned lifetime of one year.
The OSO and OAO missions demonstrated the important role space-based observations could play in astronomy, and in 1968, NASA developed firm plans for a space-based reflecting telescope with a mirror 3 m in diameter, known provisionally as the Large Orbiting Telescope or Large Space Telescope (LST), with a launch slated for 1979. These plans emphasized the need for manned maintenance missions to the telescope to ensure such a costly program had a lengthy working life, and the concurrent development of plans for the reusable space shuttle indicated that the technology to allow this was soon to become available.
Quest for funding.
The continuing success of the OAO program encouraged increasingly strong consensus within the astronomical community that the LST should be a major goal. In 1970, NASA established two committees, one to plan the engineering side of the space telescope project, and the other to determine the scientific goals of the mission. Once these had been established, the next hurdle for NASA was to obtain funding for the instrument, which would be far more costly than any Earth-based telescope. The U.S. Congress questioned many aspects of the proposed budget for the telescope and forced cuts in the budget for the planning stages, which at the time consisted of very detailed studies of potential instruments and hardware for the telescope. In 1974, public spending cuts led to Congress deleting all funding for the telescope project.
In response to this, a nationwide lobbying effort was coordinated among astronomers. Many astronomers met congressmen and senators in person, and large scale letter-writing campaigns were organized. The National Academy of Sciences published a report emphasizing the need for a space telescope, and eventually the Senate agreed to half of the budget that had originally been approved by Congress.
Grinding of Hubble's primary mirror at Perkin-Elmer, March 1979.
The funding issues led to something of a reduction in the scale of the project, with the proposed mirror diameter reduced from 3 m to 2.4 m, both to cut costs and to allow a more compact and effective configuration for the telescope hardware. A proposed precursor 1.5 m space telescope to test the systems to be used on the main satellite was dropped, and budgetary concerns also prompted collaboration with the European Space Agency. ESA agreed to provide funding and supply one of the first generation instruments for the telescope, as well as the solar cells that would power it, and staff to work on the telescope in the United States, in return for European astronomers being guaranteed at least 15% of the observing time on the telescope. Congress eventually approved funding of US$36 million for 1978, and the design of the LST began in earnest, aiming for a launch date of 1983. In 1983 the telescope was named after Edwin Hubble, who made one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he discovered that the universe is expanding.
Construction and engineering.
Once the Space Telescope project had been given the go-ahead, work on the program was divided among many institutions. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) was given responsibility for the design, development, and construction of the telescope, while Goddard Space Flight Center was given overall control of the scientific instruments and ground-control center for the mission. MSFC commissioned the optics company Perkin-Elmer to design and build the Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA) and Fine Guidance Sensors for the space telescope. Lockheed was commissioned to construct and integrate the spacecraft in which the telescope would be housed.
Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA)
Optically, the HST is a Cassegrain reflector of Ritchey?Chrétien design, as are most large professional telescopes. This design, with two hyperbolic mirrors, is known for good imaging performance over a wide field of view, with the disadvantage that the mirrors have shapes that are hard to fabricate and test. The mirror and optical systems of the telescope determine the final performance, and they were designed to exacting specifications. Optical telescopes typically have mirrors polished to an accuracy of about a tenth of the wavelength of visible light, but the Space Telescope was to be used for observations from the visible through the ultraviolet (shorter wavelengths) and was specified to be diffraction limited to take full advantage of the space environment. Therefore its mirror needed to be polished to an accuracy of 10 nanometers, or about 1/65 of the wavelength of red light. On the long wavelength end, the OTA was not designed with optimum IR performance in mind?for example, the mirrors are kept at stable (and warm, about 15 °C) temperatures by heaters. This limits Hubble's performance as an infrared telescope.
The backup mirror, by Kodak; its inner support structure can be seen because it is not coated with a reflective surface.
Perkin-Elmer intended to use custom-built and extremely sophisticated computer-controlled polishing machines to grind the mirror to the required shape. However, in case their cutting-edge technology ran into difficulties, NASA demanded that PE sub-contract to Kodak to construct a back-up mirror using traditional mirror-polishing techniques. (The team of Kodak and Itek also bid on the original mirror polishing work. Their bid called for the two companies to double-check each other's work, which would have almost certainly caught the polishing error that later caused such problems.) The Kodak mirror is now on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum. An Itek mirror built as part of the effort is now used in the 2.4 m telescope at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory.
The OTA, metering truss, and secondary baffle are visible in this image of Hubble during early construction.
Construction of the Perkin-Elmer mirror began in 1979, starting with a blank manufactured by Corning from their ultra-low expansion glass. To keep the mirror's weight to a minimum it consisted of inch-thick top and bottom plates sandwiching a honeycomb lattice. Perkin-Elmer simulated microgravity by supporting the mirror from the back with 130 rods that exerted varying amounts of force. This ensured that the mirror's final shape would be correct and to specification when finally deployed. Mirror polishing continued until May 1981. NASA reports at the time questioned Perkin-Elmer's managerial structure, and the polishing began to slip behind schedule and over budget. To save money, NASA halted work on the back-up mirror and put the launch date of the telescope back to October 1984. The mirror was completed by the end of 1981; it was washed using 2,400 gallons (9,100 L) of hot, deionized water and then received a reflective coating of 65 nm-thick aluminum and a protective coating of 25 nm-thick magnesium fluoride.
Doubts continued to be expressed about Perkin-Elmer's competence on a project of this importance, as their budget and timescale for producing the rest of the OTA continued to inflate. In response to a schedule described as "unsettled and changing daily", NASA postponed the launch date of the telescope until April 1985. Perkin-Elmer's schedules continued to slip at a rate of about one month per quarter, and at times delays reached one day for each day of work. NASA was forced to postpone the launch date until March and then September 1986. By this time, the total project budget had risen to US$1.175 billion.
Spacecraft systems.
The spacecraft in which the telescope and instruments were to be housed was another major engineering challenge. It would have to withstand frequent passages from direct sunlight into the darkness of Earth's shadow, which would cause major changes in temperature, while being stable enough to allow extremely accurate pointing of the telescope. A shroud of multi-layer insulation keeps the temperature within the telescope stable, and surrounds a light aluminum shell in which the telescope and instruments sit. Within the shell, a graphite-epoxy frame keeps the working parts of the telescope firmly aligned. Because graphite composites are hygroscopic, there was a risk that water vapor absorbed by the truss while in Lockheed's clean room would later be expressed in the vacuum of space; the telescope's instruments would be covered in ice. To reduce that risk, a nitrogen gas purge was performed before launching the telescope into space.
While construction of the spacecraft in which the telescope and instruments would be housed proceeded somewhat more smoothly than the construction of the OTA, Lockheed still experienced some budget and schedule slippage, and by the summer of 1985, construction of the spacecraft was 30% over budget and three months behind schedule. An MSFC report said that Lockheed tended to rely on NASA directions rather than take their own initiative in the construction.
Initial instruments.
Main articles: Wide Field and Planetary Camera, Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, High Speed Photometer, Faint Object Camera and Faint Object Spectrograph.
Exploded view of the Hubble Telescope
When launched, the HST carried five scientific instruments: the Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WF/PC), Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS), High Speed Photometer (HSP), Faint Object Camera (FOC) and the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS). WF/PC was a high-resolution imaging device primarily intended for optical observations. It was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and incorporated a set of 48 filters isolating spectral lines of particular astrophysical interest. The instrument contained eight charge-coupled device (CCD) chips divided between two cameras, each using four CCDs. Each CCD has a resolution of 0.64 megapixels. The "wide field camera" (WFC) covered a large angular field at the expense of resolution, while the "planetary camera" (PC) took images at a longer effective focal length than the WF chips, giving it a greater magnification.
The GHRS was a spectrograph designed to operate in the ultraviolet. It was built by the Goddard Space Flight Center and could achieve a spectral resolution of 90,000. Also optimized for ultraviolet observations were the FOC and FOS, which were capable of the highest spatial resolution of any instruments on Hubble. Rather than CCDs these three instruments used photon-counting digicons as their detectors. The FOC was constructed by ESA, while the University of California, San Diego, and Martin Marietta Corporation built the FOS.
The final instrument was the HSP, designed and built at the University of Wisconsin?Madison. It was optimized for visible and ultraviolet light observations of variable stars and other astronomical objects varying in brightness. It could take up to 100,000 measurements per second with a photometric accuracy of about 2% or better.
HST's guidance system can also be used as a scientific instrument. Its three Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) are primarily used to keep the telescope accurately pointed during an observation, but can also be used to carry out extremely accurate astrometry; measurements accurate to within 0.0003 arcseconds have been achieved.
Ground support.
Hubble Control Center at Goddard Space Flight Center, 1999.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is responsible for the scientific operation of the telescope and the delivery of data products to astronomers. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and is physically located in Baltimore, Maryland on the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, one of the 39 US universities and seven international affiliates that make up the AURA consortium. STScI was established in 1981 after something of a power struggle between NASA and the scientific community at large. NASA had wanted to keep this function in-house, but scientists wanted it to be based in an academic establishment. The Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF), established at Garching bei München near Munich in 1984, provides similar support for European astronomers.
Hubble's low orbit means many targets are visible for somewhat less than half of elapsed time, since they are blocked from view by the Earth for one-half of each orbit.
One rather complex task that falls to STScI is scheduling observations for the telescope. Hubble is in a low-Earth orbit to enable servicing missions, but this means that most astronomical targets are occulted by the Earth for slightly less than half of each orbit. Observations cannot take place when the telescope passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly due to elevated radiation levels, and there are also sizable exclusion zones around the Sun (precluding observations of Mercury), Moon and Earth. The solar avoidance angle is about 50°, to keep sunlight from illuminating any part of the OTA. Earth and Moon avoidance keeps bright light out of the FGSs, and keeps scattered light from entering the instruments. If the FGSs are turned off, however, the Moon and Earth can be observed. Earth observations were used very early in the program to generate flat-fields for the WFPC1 instrument. There is a so-called continuous viewing zone (CVZ), at roughly 90° to the plane of Hubble's orbit, in which targets are not occulted for long periods. Due to the precession of the orbit, the location of the CVZ moves slowly over a period of eight weeks. Because the limb of the Earth is always within about 30° of regions within the CVZ, the brightness of scattered earthshine may be elevated for long periods during CVZ observations.
Hubble orbits in the upper atmosphere at an altitude of approximately 569 kilometres (354 mi) and an inclination of 28.5°. The position along its orbit changes over time in a way that is not accurately predictable. The density of the upper atmosphere varies according to many factors, and this means that Hubble's predicted position for six weeks' time could be in error by up to 4,000 km (2,500 mi). Observation schedules are typically finalized only a few days in advance, as a longer lead time would mean there was a chance that the target would be unobservable by the time it was due to be observed.
Engineering support for HST is provided by NASA and contractor personnel at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, 48 km (30 mi) south of the STScI. Hubble's operation is monitored 24 hours per day by four teams of flight controllers who make up Hubble's Flight Operations Team.
Challenger disaster, delays, and eventual launch.
STS-31 lifts off, carrying Hubble into orbit.
By early 1986, the planned launch date of October that year looked feasible, but the Challenger accident brought the U.S. space program to a halt, grounding the Space Shuttle fleet and forcing the launch of Hubble to be postponed for several years. The telescope had to be kept in a clean room, powered up and purged with nitrogen, until a launch could be rescheduled. This costly situation (about $6 million per month) pushed the overall costs of the project even higher. This delay did allow time for engineers to perform extensive tests, swap out a possibly failure-prone battery, and make other improvements. Furthermore, the ground software needed to control Hubble was not ready in 1986, and in fact was barely ready by the 1990 launch.
Eventually, following the resumption of shuttle flights in 1988, the launch of the telescope was scheduled for 1990. On April 24, 1990, shuttle mission STS-31 saw Discovery launch the telescope successfully into its planned orbit.
From its original total cost estimate of about US$400 million, the telescope had by now cost over $2.5 billion to construct. Hubble's cumulative costs up to this day are estimated to be several times higher still, roughly US$10 billion as of 2010.
Since the start of the program, a number of research projects have been carried out, some of them almost solely with Hubble, others coordinated facilities such as Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESO's Very Large Telescope. Although the Hubble observatory is nearing the end of its life, there are still major projects scheduled for it. One example is the upcoming Frontier Fields program, inspired by the results of Hubble's deep observation of the galaxy cluster Abell 1689.
Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey
In an August 2013 press release, CANDELS was referred to as "the largest project in the history of Hubble". The survey "aims to explore galactic evolution in the early Universe, and the very first seeds of cosmic structure at less than one billion years after the Big Bang." The CANDELS project site describes the survey's goals as the following:
The Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey is designed to document the ?rst third of galactic evolution from z = 8 to 1.5 via deep imaging of more than 250,000 galaxies with WFC3/IR and ACS. It will also find the first Type Ia SNe beyond z > 1.5 and establish their accuracy as standard candles for cosmology. Five premier multi-wavelength sky regions are selected; each has multi-wavelength data from Spitzer and other facilities, and has extensive spectroscopy of the brighter galaxies. The use of ?ve widely separated ?elds mitigates cosmic variance and yields statistically robust and complete samples of galaxies down to 109 solar masses out to z ~ 8.
Frontier Fields program.
The Frontier Fields program studied MACS0416.1-2403
The program, officially named "Hubble Deep Fields Initiative 2012", is aimed to advance the knowledge of early galaxy formation by studying high-redshift galaxies in blank fields with the help of gravitational lensing to see the "faintest galaxies in the distant universe." The Frontier Fields web page describes the goals of the program being:
to reveal hitherto inaccessible populations of z = 5 - 10 galaxies that are 10 to 50 times fainter intrinsically than any presently known
to solidify our understanding of the stellar masses and star formation histories of sub-L* galaxies at the earliest times
to provide the first statistically meaningful morphological characterization of star forming galaxies at z > 5
to find z > 8 galaxies stretched out enough by cluster lensing to discern internal structure and/or magnified enough by cluster lensing for spectroscopic follow-up.
*
Inglish Site.14.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
61.Zadie Smith on the Psychology of the Two Types of Writers by Maria Popova.
62.Beauty ? truth.
63.Thelytoky.
64.Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
*
61.Zadie Smith on the Psychology of the Two Types of Writers by Maria Popova.
?It?s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.?
On March 24, 2008, two years before she penned her oft-cited ten rules of writing, the immeasurably brilliant Zadie Smith delivered a lecture at Columbia University?s Writing Program under the brief ?to speak about some aspect of your craft.? Appropriately titled ?That Crafty Feeling? and included in Smith?s altogether enchanting collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (public library), the lecture outlines the ten psychological stages of writing a novel.
While invariably subjective, as all advice is, and rooted in Smith?s own experience ? by that point, ?twelve years and three novels? ? her insights undoubtedly belong with history?s most enduring wisdom on writing.
Smith begins by proposing the two psychological profiles into which all writers fall ? a dichotomy reminiscent of Italo Calvino?s hedgehog-versus-fox classification system of writerly personalities. Smith writes:
I want to offer you a pair of ugly terms for two breeds of novelist: the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager.
You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure ? all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It?s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent ? for me, unthinkable ? radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title.
Noting her intolerance for that approach ? ?not because I disapprove, but because other people?s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying? ? Smith professes to being a Micro Manager herself:
I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven?t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal ? they?re forever moving the furniture. They?ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There?s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.
Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel?s tonal frequency line by line.
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Opening other people?s novels, you recognize fellow Micro Managers: that opening pileup of too-careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed.
But this inherent open-endedness also leaves the Micro Manager vulnerable to what Smith calls obsessive perspective disorder, or OPD ? ?a kind of existential drama? that unfolds over the course of the novel?s first twenty pages, possessing the writer to compulsively attempt answering the question of what kind of novel is being written. And yet, Smith marvels, despite how disorienting OPD is, it isn?t paralyzing ? the writing continues throughout this straining state. In that regard, OPD appears to be, rather assuringly, mere garden-variety anxiety ? the same psychic malady that tormented Darwin as he was producing his most influential work, the very state Kierkegaard believed powers creative work rather than hindering it, which psychologists have also found to be the crux of the link between creativity and mental illness. Smith writes:
That?s the strange thing. It?s as if you?re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter? When you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months. Worrying over the first twenty pages is a way of working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its characters ? all of which, for a Micro Manager, are contained in the sensibility of a sentence. Once the tone is there, all else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.
She considers, with a lyrical personal testament, the key blessing of her type:
There is one great advantage to being a Micro Manager rather than a Macro Planner: The last day of your novel truly is the last day. If you edit as you go along, there are no first, second, third drafts. There is only one draft, and when it?s done, it?s done. Who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel? It?s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I?d been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.
Echoing Anna Deavere Smith on the confidence trick, Smith considers what transmutes that obsessive worrying into that final moment of absolute elation and relief:
It?s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself.
Smith goes on to sketch out another psychological dichotomy of writerly temperaments ? those who ?won?t read a word of any novel while they?re writing their own? and, if you err to recommend to them a good novel at that stage, ?give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife?; and those who read voraciously, perhaps aware that the myth of originality is a limiting illusion anyway and that all writers, as Pete Seeger memorably put it, are but links in a creative chain. Smith illustrates this with a beautiful metaphor:
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra ? they?ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even.
It seems, then, that what is true of the optimal physical environment for writing ? the finding that some writers are vitalized by background noise, while others woefully distracted by it ? also applies to the optimal intellectual and creative environment of the writer. Noting that it?s ?a matter of temperament,? Smith admits to being among the latter ? a writer whose desk is ?covered in open novels? and who finds enormous creative nourishment in the Kafkas and Nabokovs and Dostoyevskys, a writer who thrives on that peculiar ?feeling of apprenticeship? one experiences in absorbing the work of a master in one?s own craft, a product of what Oscar Wilde once described as ?the temperament of receptivity.? She writes:
To [the former] way of thinking, the sovereignty of one?s individuality is the vital thing, and it must be protected at any price, even if it means cutting oneself off from that literary echo chamber E. M. Forster described, in which writers speak so helpfully to one another, across time and space. Well, each to their own, I suppose.
For me, that echo chamber was essential. I was fourteen when I heard John Keats in there and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on class ? though how archaic that must sound, here in America. Keats was not working-class, exactly, nor black ? but in rough outline his situation seemed closer to mine than the other writers you came across. He felt none of the entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh or even P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Keats offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked ?Apprentices Welcome Here.?
'Flights of Mind' by Vita Wells from 'Art Made from Books.' Click image for more.
Smith dubs the fourth stage of novel-writing ?middle-of-the-novel magical thinking,? which she describes in a passage that tickled my affection for punctuation and its emotive power:
By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post ? I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she?s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind.
Smith is essentially describing a state of creative flow. But, more than anything else, the phenomenon she describes ? that immersive, elated intimacy with the work ? parallels what we experience when we?re in love, a resonance she doesn?t explicitly tease out but one her language very much implies.
Magical thinking makes you crazy ? and renders everything possible.
How similar this is to Stendhal?s notion of ?crystallization? from his 1822 meditation on the stages of love ? the transcendently delusional moment when the lover begins to ?overrate wildly? his beloved, to ?endow her with a thousand perfections.? Stendhal likens this mental trickery that ?draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one? to the covering of an ordinary twig with magical ice crystals that wholly obscure its true nature ? the same process Smith describes when a writer reaches that pivotal point of falling in love with her unfinished novel as a proxy for the fantasy of her finished novel.
This state, she observes, makes you marvel at ?how in tune the world is with your unfinished novel right now? as you begin to feel that every experience you have, everything you encounter in the world, has direct and almost fated relevance to your novel. Indeed, who, while in love, hasn?t had the experience of suddenly feeling like every poem, every song, every book has been written, as if by some grand act of cosmic blessing, for that particular love? Who hasn?t been stunned by the recognition of some mundane coincidence ? your lover?s aunt once visited the foreign city where you were born ? and taken it as confirmation of fatedness? We are remarkable machines for spiritual pattern-recognition, in love and in creative work. Both the peril and the promise of being human is that we can manufacture nonexistent patterns by the sheer force of our state of mind, so hungry for psychic alignment between our soul and that of the beloved, between our work and the needs of the world.
Smith proceeds to offer her ?only absolutely twenty-four-karat-gold-plated piece of advice,? a strategy that serves, in a way, as deliberate melting of the crystals so that one may prune the twig:
When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second ? put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal ? but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can?t tell you how many times I?ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them. It?s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it?s published, ten minutes before you go onstage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all the pieces of deadwood, stupidity, vanity and tedium are distressingly obvious to you. Two years earlier, when the proofs came, you looked at the same page and couldn?t see a comma out of place.
[?]
You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it?s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who?s read it in twelve different versions. It?s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.
Elsewhere in the lecture, Smith touches on this psychological distancing in observing the writer?s tendency to think, from book to book, ?My God, I was a different person!? But we are, in fact, profoundly different people throughout life ? such is the greatest perplexity of the human self and the reason why we so pathologically hinder the happiness of our future selves. Even more than being a ?professional observer? of the world, as Susan Sontag once described the project of the writer, she has no choice but to become a professional observer of her inner world ? something impossible without this very distancing that allows the writer to gasp with precisely such disbelief at her own otherness in hindsight. To edit one?s own work, Smith seems to suggest, is to not only reluctantly recognize but actively inhabit one?s own transmutation over time. She captures this wryly:
When people tell me they have just read that book, I do try to feel pleased, but it?s a distant, disconnected sensation, like when someone tells you they met your second cousin in a bar in Goa.
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62.Beauty ? truth.
Scientists prize elegant theories, but a taste for simplicity is a treacherous guide. And it doesn?t even look good.
by Philip Ball 3,000 words.
Philip Ball is a British science writer, whose work appears in Nature, New Scientist and Prospect, among others. His latest book is Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler (2013).
Albert Einstein?s theory of general relativity is a century old next year and, as far as the test of time is concerned, it seems to have done rather well. For many, indeed, it doesn?t merely hold up: it is the archetype for what a scientific theory should look like. Einstein?s achievement was to explain gravity as a geometric phenomenon: a force that results from the distortion of space-time by matter and energy, compelling objects ? and light itself ? to move along particular paths, very much as rivers are constrained by the topography of their landscape. General relativity departs from classical Newtonian mechanics and from ordinary intuition alike, but its predictions have been verified countless times. In short, it is the business.
Einstein himself seemed rather indifferent to the experimental tests, however. The first came in 1919, when the British physicist Arthur Eddington observed the Sun?s gravity bending starlight during a solar eclipse. What if those results hadn?t agreed with the theory? (Some accuse Eddington of cherry-picking the figures anyway, but that?s another story.) ?Then,? said Einstein, ?I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, for the theory is correct.?
That was Einstein all over. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr commented at the time, he was a little too fond of telling God what to do. But this wasn?t sheer arrogance, nor parental pride in his theory. The reason Einstein felt general relativity must be right is that it was too beautiful a theory to be wrong.
This sort of talk both delights today?s physicists and makes them a little nervous. After all, isn?t experiment ? nature itself ? supposed to determine truth in science? What does beauty have to do with it? ?Aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse,? the string theorist Brian Greene reassures his readers in The Elegant Universe (1999), the most prominent work of physics exposition in recent years. ?Ultimately, theories are judged by how they fare when faced with cold, hard, experimental facts.? Einstein, Greene insists, didn?t mean to imply otherwise ? he was just saying that beauty in a theory is a good guide, an indication that you are on the right track.
Einstein isn?t around to argue, of course, but I think he would have done. It was Einstein, after all, who said that ?the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones?. And if he was simply defending theory against too hasty a deference to experiment, there would be plenty of reason to side with him ? for who is to say that, in case of a discrepancy, it must be the theory and not the measurement that is in error? But that?s not really his point. Einstein seems to be asserting that beauty trumps experience come what may.
He wasn?t alone. Here?s the great German mathematician Hermann Weyl, who fled Nazi Germany to become a colleague of Einstein?s at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton: ?My work always tries to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.? So much for John Keats????s ?Beauty is truth, truth beauty.? And so much, you might be tempted to conclude, for scientists? devotion to truth: here were some of its greatest luminaries, pledging obedience to a different calling altogether.
Was this kind of talk perhaps just the spirit of the age, a product of fin de siècle romanticism? It would be nice to think so. In fact, the discourse about aesthetics in scientific ideas has never gone away. Even Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, in their seminal but pitilessly austere midcentury Course of Theoretical Physics, were prepared to call general relativity ?probably the most beautiful of all existing theories?. Today, popularisers such as Greene are keen to make beauty a selling point of physics. Writing in this magazine last year, the quantum theorist Adrian Kent speculated that the very ugliness of certain modifications of quantum mechanics might count against their credibility. After all, he wrote, here was a field in which ?elegance seems to be a surprisingly strong indicator of physical relevance?.
We have to ask: what is this beauty they keep talking about?
Some scientists are a little coy about that. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac agreed with Einstein, saying in 1963 that ?it is more important to have beauty in one?s equations than to have them fit experiment? (how might Greene explain that away?). Yet faced with the question of what this all-important beauty is, Dirac threw up his hands. Mathematical beauty, he said, ?cannot be defined any more than beauty in art can be defined? ? though he added that it was something ?people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating?. That sounds rather close to the ?good taste? of his contemporaneous art critics; we might fear that it amounts to the same mixture of prejudice and paternalism.
Given this history of evasion, it was refreshing last November to hear the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed spell out what ?beauty? really means for him and his colleagues. He was talking to the novelist Ian McEwan at the Science Museum in London, during the opening of the museum?s exhibition on the Large Hadron Collider. ?Ideas that we find beautiful,? Arkani-Hamed explained, ?are not a capricious aesthetic judgment?:
It?s not fashion, it?s not sociology. It?s not something that you might find beautiful today but won?t find beautiful 10 years from now. The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there?s no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that?s what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful.
Does this bear any relation to what beauty means in the arts? Arkani-Hamed had a shot at that. Take Ludwig van Beethoven, he said, who strove to develop his Fifth Symphony in ?perfect accordance to its internal logical structure?.
t is precisely this that delights mathematicians in a great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a tangibly human genius.
Beethoven is indeed renowned for the way he tried out endless variations and directions in his music, turning his manuscripts into inky thickets in his search for the ?right? path. Novelists and poets, too, can be obsessive in their pursuit of the mot juste. Reading the novels of Patrick White or the late works of Penelope Fitzgerald, you get the same feeling of almost logical necessity, word by perfect word.
But you notice this quality precisely because it is so rare. What generally brings a work of art alive is not its inevitability so much as the decisions that the artist made. We gasp not because the words, the notes, the brushstrokes are ?right?, but because they are revelatory: they show us not a deterministic process but a sensitive mind making surprising and delightful choices. In fact, pure mathematicians often say that it is precisely this quality that delights them in a great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a personal, tangibly human genius taking steps in a direction we?d never have guessed.
?The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity?: here is where Arkani-Hamed really scuppers the notion that the kind of beauty sought by science has anything to do with the major currents of artistic culture. After all, if there?s one thing you can say about beauty, it is that the beholder has a lot to do with it. We can still find beauty in the Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux and the music of William Byrd, while admitting that a heck of a lot of beauty really is fashion and sociology. Why shouldn?t it be? How couldn?t it be? We still swoon at Jan van Eyck. Would van Eyck?s audience swoon at Mark Rothko?
The gravest offenders in this attempted redefinition of beauty are, of course, the physicists. This is partly because their field has always been heir to Platonism ? the mystical conviction of an orderly cosmos. Such a belief is almost a precondition for doing physics in the first place: what?s the point in looking for rules unless you believe they exist? The MIT physicist Max Tegmark now goes so far as to say that mathematics constitutes the basic fabric of reality, a claim redolent of Plato?s most extreme assertions in Timaeus.
But Platonism will not connect you with the mainstream of aesthetic thought ? not least because Plato himself was so distrustful of art (he banned the lying poets from his Republic, after all). Better that we turn to Immanuel Kant. Kant expended considerable energies in his Critique of Judgment (1790) trying to disentangle the aesthetic aspects of beauty from the satisfaction one feels in grasping an idea or recognising a form, and it does us little good to jumble them up again. All that conceptual understanding gives us, he concluded, is ?the solution that satisfies the problem? not a free and indeterminately final entertainment of the mental powers with what is called beautiful?. Beauty, in other words, is not a resolution: it opens the imagination.
Physicists might be the furthest gone along Plato?s trail, but they are not alone. Consider the many chemists whose idea of beauty seems to be dictated primarily by the molecules they find pleasing ? usually because of some inherent mathematical symmetry, such as in the football-shaped carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene (strictly speaking, a truncated icosahedron). Of course, this is just another instance of mathematics-worship, yoking beauty to qualities of regularity that were not deemed artistically beautiful even in antiquity. Brian Greene claims: ?In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics.? Yet for Plato it was precisely art?s lack of symmetry (and thus intelligibility) that denied it access to real beauty. Art was just too messy to be beautiful.
In seeing matters the other way around, Kant speaks for the mainstream of artistic aesthetics: ?All stiff regularity (such as approximates to mathematical regularity) has something in it repugnant to taste.? We weary of it, as we do a nursery rhyme. Or as the art historian Ernst Gombrich put it in 1988, too much symmetry ensures that ?once we have grasped the principle of order? it holds no more surprise?. Artistic beauty, Gombrich believed, relies on a tension between symmetry and asymmetry: ?a struggle between two opponents of equal power, the formless chaos, on which we impose our ideas, and the all-too-formed monotony, which we brighten up by new accents?. Even Francis Bacon (the 17th-century proto-scientist, not the 20th-century artist) understood this much: ?There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.?
Perhaps I have been a little harsh on the chemists ? those cube- and prism-shaped molecules are fun in their own way. But Bacon, Kant and Gombrich are surely right to question their aesthetic merit. As the philosopher of chemistry Joachim Schummer pointed out in 2003, it is simply parochial to redefine beauty as symmetry: doing so cuts one off from the dominant tradition in artistic theory. There?s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres.
Why shouldn?t scientists be allowed their own definition of beauty? Perhaps they should. Yet isn?t there a narrowness to the standard that they have chosen? Even that might not be so bad, if their cult of ?beauty? didn?t seem to undermine the credibility of what they otherwise so strenuously assert: the sanctity of evidence. It doesn?t matter who you are, they say, how famous or erudite or well-published: if your theory doesn?t match up to nature, it?s history. But if that?s the name of the game, why on earth should some vague notion of beauty be brought into play as an additional arbiter?
Because of experience, they might reply: true theories are beautiful. Well, general relativity might have turned out OK, but plenty of others have not. Take the four-colour theorem: the proposal that it is possible to colour any arbitrary patchwork in just four colours without any patches of the same colour touching one another. In 1879 it seemed as though the British mathematician Alfred Kempe had found a proof ? and it was widely accepted for a decade, because it was thought beautiful. It was wrong. The current proof is ugly as heck ? it relies on a brute-force exhaustive computer search, which some mathematicians refuse to accept as a valid form of demonstration ? but it might turn out to be all there is. The same goes for Andrew Wiles?s proof of Fermat?s Last Theorem, first announced in 1993. The basic theorem is wonderfully simple and elegant, the proof anything but: 100 pages long and more complex than the Pompidou Centre. There?s no sign of anything simpler.
It?s not hard to mine science history for theories and proofs that were beautiful and wrong, or complicated and right. No one has ever shown a correlation between beauty and ?truth?. But it is worse than that, for sometimes ?beauty? in the sense that many scientists prefer ? an elegant simplicity, to put it in crude terms ? can act as a fake trump card that deflects inquiry. In one little corner of science that I can claim to know reasonably well, an explanation from 1959 for why water-repelling particles attract when immersed in water (that it?s an effect of entropy, there being more disordered water molecules when the particles stick together) was so neat and satisfying that it continues to be peddled today, even though the experimental data show that it is untenable and that the real explanation probably lies in a lot of devilish detail.
....would be thrilled if the artist were to say to the scientist: ?No, we?re not even on the same page?
Might it even be that the marvellous simplicity and power of natural selection strikes some biologists as so beautiful an idea ? an island of order in a field otherwise beset with caveats and contradictions ? that it must be defended at any cost? Why else would attempts to expose its limitations, exceptions and compromises still ignite disputes pursued with near-religious fervour?
The idea that simplicity, as distinct from beauty, is a guide to truth ? the idea, in other words, that Occam?s Razor is a useful tool ? seems like something of a shibboleth in itself. As these examples show, it is not reliably correct. Perhaps it is a logical assumption, all else being equal. But it is rare in science that all else is equal. More often, some experiments support one theory and others another, with no yardstick of parsimony to act as referee.
We can be sure, however, that simplicity is not the ultimate desideratum of aesthetic merit. Indeed, in music and visual art, there appears to be an optimal level of complexity below which preference declines. A graph of enjoyment versus complexity has the shape of an inverted U: there is a general preference for, say, ?Eleanor Rigby? over both ?Baa Baa Black Sheep? and Pierre Boulez?s Structures Ia, just as there is for lush landscapes over monochromes. For most of us, our tastes eschew the extremes.
Ironically, the quest for a ?final theory? of nature?s deepest physical laws has meant that the inevitability and simplicity that Arkani-Hamed prizes so highly now look more remote than ever. For we are now forced to contemplate no fewer than 10500 permissible variants of string theory. It?s always possible that 10500 minus one of them might vanish at a stroke, thanks to the insight of some future genius. Right now, though, the dream of elegant fundamental laws lies in bewildering disarray.
An insistence that the ?beautiful? must be true all too easily elides into an empty circularity: what is true must therefore be beautiful. I see this in the conviction of many chemists that the periodic table, with all its backtracking sequences of electron shells, its positional ambiguities for elements such as hydrogen and unsightly bulges that the flat page can?t constrain, is a thing of loveliness. There, surely, speaks the voice of duty, not genuine feeling. The search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation.
Despite all this, I don?t want scientists to abandon their talk of beauty. Anything that inspires scientific thinking is valuable, and if a quest for beauty ? a notion of beauty peculiar to science, removed from art ? does that, then bring it on. And if it gives them a language in which to converse with artists, rather than standing on soapboxes and trading magisterial insults like C P Snow and F R Leavis, all the better. I just wish they could be a bit more upfront about the fact that they are (as is their wont) torturing a poor, fuzzy, everyday word to make it fit their own requirements. I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ?No, we?re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.?
If, on the other hand, we want beauty in science to make contact with aesthetics in art, I believe we should seek it precisely in the human aspect: in ingenious experimental design, elegance of theoretical logic, gentle clarity of exposition, imaginative leaps of reasoning. These things are not vital for a theory that works, an experiment that succeeds, an explanation that enchants and enlightens. But they are rather lovely. Beauty, unlike truth or nature, is something we make ourselves.
19 May 2014.
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63.Thelytoky.
Thelytoky (from the Greek th?lys "female" and tokos "birth") is a type of parthenogenesis in which females are produced from unfertilized eggs. Thelytokous parthenogenesis is rare in the animal kingdom and reported in about 1,500 species, about 1% of described animal species, according to a 1984 study. It is more common in invertebrates, like arthropods, but it can occur in vertebrates, including salamanders, fish, and reptiles such as some whiptail lizards.
Thelytoky can occur by a number of different mechanisms each of which has a different impact on the level of homozygosity. It can be induced in Hymenoptera by the bacteria Wolbachia and Cardinium, and has also been described in several groups of Hymenoptera, including Cynipidae, Tenthredinidae, Aphelinidae, Ichneumonidae, Apidae and Formicidae.
Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) have a haplodiploid sex-determination system. They produce haploid males from unfertilized eggs through arrhenotokous parthenogenesis. However in a few social hymenopterans, queens or workers are capable of producing diploid female offspring by thelytoky. The daughters produced may or may not be complete clones of their mother depending on the type of parthenogenesis that takes place.
The offspring can develop into either queens or workers. Examples of such species include the Cape bee, Apis mellifera capensis, Mycocepurus smithii and clonal raider ant, Cerapachys biroi.
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64.Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, and remains in operation. With a 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) mirror, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. The telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble.
Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely high-resolution images with negligible background light. Hubble has recorded some of the most detailed visible-light images ever, allowing a deep view into space and time. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.
Although not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST was built by the United States space agency NASA, with contributions from the European Space Agency, and is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. The HST is one of NASA's Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Space telescopes were proposed as early as 1923. Hubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. When finally launched in 1990, Hubble's main mirror was found to have been ground incorrectly, compromising the telescope's capabilities. The optics were corrected to their intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993.
Hubble is the only telescope designed to be serviced in space by astronauts. After launch by Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990, four subsequent Space Shuttle missions repaired, upgraded, and replaced systems on the telescope. A fifth mission was canceled on safety grounds following the Columbia disaster. However, after spirited public discussion, NASA administrator Mike Griffin approved one final servicing mission, completed in 2009. The telescope is still operating as of 2015, and may last until 2020. Its scientific successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is scheduled for launch in 2018.
Proposals and precursors.
In 1923, Hermann Oberth?considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky?published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("The Rocket into Planetary Space"), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.
The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced back as far as 1946, to the astronomer Lyman Spitzer's paper "Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory". In it, he discussed the two main advantages that a space-based observatory would have over ground-based telescopes. First, the angular resolution (the smallest separation at which objects can be clearly distinguished) would be limited only by diffraction, rather than by the turbulence in the atmosphere, which causes stars to twinkle, known to astronomers as seeing. At that time ground-based telescopes were limited to resolutions of 0.5?1.0 arcseconds, compared to a theoretical diffraction-limited resolution of about 0.05 arcsec for a telescope with a mirror 2.5 m in diameter. Second, a space-based telescope could observe infrared and ultraviolet light, which are strongly absorbed by the atmosphere.
Spitzer devoted much of his career to pushing for the development of a space telescope. In 1962, a report by the US National Academy of Sciences recommended the development of a space telescope as part of the space program, and in 1965 Spitzer was appointed as head of a committee given the task of defining scientific objectives for a large space telescope.
Space-based astronomy had begun on a very small scale following World War II, as scientists made use of developments that had taken place in rocket technology. The first ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun was obtained in 1946, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) to obtain UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray spectra in 1962.[12] An orbiting solar telescope was launched in 1962 by the United Kingdom as part of the Ariel space program, and in 1966 NASA launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) mission. OAO-1's battery failed after three days, terminating the mission. It was followed by OAO-2, which carried out ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies from its launch in 1968 until 1972, well beyond its original planned lifetime of one year.
The OSO and OAO missions demonstrated the important role space-based observations could play in astronomy, and in 1968, NASA developed firm plans for a space-based reflecting telescope with a mirror 3 m in diameter, known provisionally as the Large Orbiting Telescope or Large Space Telescope (LST), with a launch slated for 1979. These plans emphasized the need for manned maintenance missions to the telescope to ensure such a costly program had a lengthy working life, and the concurrent development of plans for the reusable space shuttle indicated that the technology to allow this was soon to become available.
Quest for funding.
The continuing success of the OAO program encouraged increasingly strong consensus within the astronomical community that the LST should be a major goal. In 1970, NASA established two committees, one to plan the engineering side of the space telescope project, and the other to determine the scientific goals of the mission. Once these had been established, the next hurdle for NASA was to obtain funding for the instrument, which would be far more costly than any Earth-based telescope. The U.S. Congress questioned many aspects of the proposed budget for the telescope and forced cuts in the budget for the planning stages, which at the time consisted of very detailed studies of potential instruments and hardware for the telescope. In 1974, public spending cuts led to Congress deleting all funding for the telescope project.
In response to this, a nationwide lobbying effort was coordinated among astronomers. Many astronomers met congressmen and senators in person, and large scale letter-writing campaigns were organized. The National Academy of Sciences published a report emphasizing the need for a space telescope, and eventually the Senate agreed to half of the budget that had originally been approved by Congress.
Grinding of Hubble's primary mirror at Perkin-Elmer, March 1979.
The funding issues led to something of a reduction in the scale of the project, with the proposed mirror diameter reduced from 3 m to 2.4 m, both to cut costs and to allow a more compact and effective configuration for the telescope hardware. A proposed precursor 1.5 m space telescope to test the systems to be used on the main satellite was dropped, and budgetary concerns also prompted collaboration with the European Space Agency. ESA agreed to provide funding and supply one of the first generation instruments for the telescope, as well as the solar cells that would power it, and staff to work on the telescope in the United States, in return for European astronomers being guaranteed at least 15% of the observing time on the telescope. Congress eventually approved funding of US$36 million for 1978, and the design of the LST began in earnest, aiming for a launch date of 1983. In 1983 the telescope was named after Edwin Hubble, who made one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he discovered that the universe is expanding.
Construction and engineering.
Once the Space Telescope project had been given the go-ahead, work on the program was divided among many institutions. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) was given responsibility for the design, development, and construction of the telescope, while Goddard Space Flight Center was given overall control of the scientific instruments and ground-control center for the mission. MSFC commissioned the optics company Perkin-Elmer to design and build the Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA) and Fine Guidance Sensors for the space telescope. Lockheed was commissioned to construct and integrate the spacecraft in which the telescope would be housed.
Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA)
Optically, the HST is a Cassegrain reflector of Ritchey?Chrétien design, as are most large professional telescopes. This design, with two hyperbolic mirrors, is known for good imaging performance over a wide field of view, with the disadvantage that the mirrors have shapes that are hard to fabricate and test. The mirror and optical systems of the telescope determine the final performance, and they were designed to exacting specifications. Optical telescopes typically have mirrors polished to an accuracy of about a tenth of the wavelength of visible light, but the Space Telescope was to be used for observations from the visible through the ultraviolet (shorter wavelengths) and was specified to be diffraction limited to take full advantage of the space environment. Therefore its mirror needed to be polished to an accuracy of 10 nanometers, or about 1/65 of the wavelength of red light. On the long wavelength end, the OTA was not designed with optimum IR performance in mind?for example, the mirrors are kept at stable (and warm, about 15 °C) temperatures by heaters. This limits Hubble's performance as an infrared telescope.
The backup mirror, by Kodak; its inner support structure can be seen because it is not coated with a reflective surface.
Perkin-Elmer intended to use custom-built and extremely sophisticated computer-controlled polishing machines to grind the mirror to the required shape. However, in case their cutting-edge technology ran into difficulties, NASA demanded that PE sub-contract to Kodak to construct a back-up mirror using traditional mirror-polishing techniques. (The team of Kodak and Itek also bid on the original mirror polishing work. Their bid called for the two companies to double-check each other's work, which would have almost certainly caught the polishing error that later caused such problems.) The Kodak mirror is now on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum. An Itek mirror built as part of the effort is now used in the 2.4 m telescope at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory.
The OTA, metering truss, and secondary baffle are visible in this image of Hubble during early construction.
Construction of the Perkin-Elmer mirror began in 1979, starting with a blank manufactured by Corning from their ultra-low expansion glass. To keep the mirror's weight to a minimum it consisted of inch-thick top and bottom plates sandwiching a honeycomb lattice. Perkin-Elmer simulated microgravity by supporting the mirror from the back with 130 rods that exerted varying amounts of force. This ensured that the mirror's final shape would be correct and to specification when finally deployed. Mirror polishing continued until May 1981. NASA reports at the time questioned Perkin-Elmer's managerial structure, and the polishing began to slip behind schedule and over budget. To save money, NASA halted work on the back-up mirror and put the launch date of the telescope back to October 1984. The mirror was completed by the end of 1981; it was washed using 2,400 gallons (9,100 L) of hot, deionized water and then received a reflective coating of 65 nm-thick aluminum and a protective coating of 25 nm-thick magnesium fluoride.
Doubts continued to be expressed about Perkin-Elmer's competence on a project of this importance, as their budget and timescale for producing the rest of the OTA continued to inflate. In response to a schedule described as "unsettled and changing daily", NASA postponed the launch date of the telescope until April 1985. Perkin-Elmer's schedules continued to slip at a rate of about one month per quarter, and at times delays reached one day for each day of work. NASA was forced to postpone the launch date until March and then September 1986. By this time, the total project budget had risen to US$1.175 billion.
Spacecraft systems.
The spacecraft in which the telescope and instruments were to be housed was another major engineering challenge. It would have to withstand frequent passages from direct sunlight into the darkness of Earth's shadow, which would cause major changes in temperature, while being stable enough to allow extremely accurate pointing of the telescope. A shroud of multi-layer insulation keeps the temperature within the telescope stable, and surrounds a light aluminum shell in which the telescope and instruments sit. Within the shell, a graphite-epoxy frame keeps the working parts of the telescope firmly aligned. Because graphite composites are hygroscopic, there was a risk that water vapor absorbed by the truss while in Lockheed's clean room would later be expressed in the vacuum of space; the telescope's instruments would be covered in ice. To reduce that risk, a nitrogen gas purge was performed before launching the telescope into space.
While construction of the spacecraft in which the telescope and instruments would be housed proceeded somewhat more smoothly than the construction of the OTA, Lockheed still experienced some budget and schedule slippage, and by the summer of 1985, construction of the spacecraft was 30% over budget and three months behind schedule. An MSFC report said that Lockheed tended to rely on NASA directions rather than take their own initiative in the construction.
Initial instruments.
Main articles: Wide Field and Planetary Camera, Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, High Speed Photometer, Faint Object Camera and Faint Object Spectrograph.
Exploded view of the Hubble Telescope
When launched, the HST carried five scientific instruments: the Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WF/PC), Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS), High Speed Photometer (HSP), Faint Object Camera (FOC) and the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS). WF/PC was a high-resolution imaging device primarily intended for optical observations. It was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and incorporated a set of 48 filters isolating spectral lines of particular astrophysical interest. The instrument contained eight charge-coupled device (CCD) chips divided between two cameras, each using four CCDs. Each CCD has a resolution of 0.64 megapixels. The "wide field camera" (WFC) covered a large angular field at the expense of resolution, while the "planetary camera" (PC) took images at a longer effective focal length than the WF chips, giving it a greater magnification.
The GHRS was a spectrograph designed to operate in the ultraviolet. It was built by the Goddard Space Flight Center and could achieve a spectral resolution of 90,000. Also optimized for ultraviolet observations were the FOC and FOS, which were capable of the highest spatial resolution of any instruments on Hubble. Rather than CCDs these three instruments used photon-counting digicons as their detectors. The FOC was constructed by ESA, while the University of California, San Diego, and Martin Marietta Corporation built the FOS.
The final instrument was the HSP, designed and built at the University of Wisconsin?Madison. It was optimized for visible and ultraviolet light observations of variable stars and other astronomical objects varying in brightness. It could take up to 100,000 measurements per second with a photometric accuracy of about 2% or better.
HST's guidance system can also be used as a scientific instrument. Its three Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) are primarily used to keep the telescope accurately pointed during an observation, but can also be used to carry out extremely accurate astrometry; measurements accurate to within 0.0003 arcseconds have been achieved.
Ground support.
Hubble Control Center at Goddard Space Flight Center, 1999.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is responsible for the scientific operation of the telescope and the delivery of data products to astronomers. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and is physically located in Baltimore, Maryland on the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, one of the 39 US universities and seven international affiliates that make up the AURA consortium. STScI was established in 1981 after something of a power struggle between NASA and the scientific community at large. NASA had wanted to keep this function in-house, but scientists wanted it to be based in an academic establishment. The Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF), established at Garching bei München near Munich in 1984, provides similar support for European astronomers.
Hubble's low orbit means many targets are visible for somewhat less than half of elapsed time, since they are blocked from view by the Earth for one-half of each orbit.
One rather complex task that falls to STScI is scheduling observations for the telescope. Hubble is in a low-Earth orbit to enable servicing missions, but this means that most astronomical targets are occulted by the Earth for slightly less than half of each orbit. Observations cannot take place when the telescope passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly due to elevated radiation levels, and there are also sizable exclusion zones around the Sun (precluding observations of Mercury), Moon and Earth. The solar avoidance angle is about 50°, to keep sunlight from illuminating any part of the OTA. Earth and Moon avoidance keeps bright light out of the FGSs, and keeps scattered light from entering the instruments. If the FGSs are turned off, however, the Moon and Earth can be observed. Earth observations were used very early in the program to generate flat-fields for the WFPC1 instrument. There is a so-called continuous viewing zone (CVZ), at roughly 90° to the plane of Hubble's orbit, in which targets are not occulted for long periods. Due to the precession of the orbit, the location of the CVZ moves slowly over a period of eight weeks. Because the limb of the Earth is always within about 30° of regions within the CVZ, the brightness of scattered earthshine may be elevated for long periods during CVZ observations.
Hubble orbits in the upper atmosphere at an altitude of approximately 569 kilometres (354 mi) and an inclination of 28.5°. The position along its orbit changes over time in a way that is not accurately predictable. The density of the upper atmosphere varies according to many factors, and this means that Hubble's predicted position for six weeks' time could be in error by up to 4,000 km (2,500 mi). Observation schedules are typically finalized only a few days in advance, as a longer lead time would mean there was a chance that the target would be unobservable by the time it was due to be observed.
Engineering support for HST is provided by NASA and contractor personnel at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, 48 km (30 mi) south of the STScI. Hubble's operation is monitored 24 hours per day by four teams of flight controllers who make up Hubble's Flight Operations Team.
Challenger disaster, delays, and eventual launch.
STS-31 lifts off, carrying Hubble into orbit.
By early 1986, the planned launch date of October that year looked feasible, but the Challenger accident brought the U.S. space program to a halt, grounding the Space Shuttle fleet and forcing the launch of Hubble to be postponed for several years. The telescope had to be kept in a clean room, powered up and purged with nitrogen, until a launch could be rescheduled. This costly situation (about $6 million per month) pushed the overall costs of the project even higher. This delay did allow time for engineers to perform extensive tests, swap out a possibly failure-prone battery, and make other improvements. Furthermore, the ground software needed to control Hubble was not ready in 1986, and in fact was barely ready by the 1990 launch.
Eventually, following the resumption of shuttle flights in 1988, the launch of the telescope was scheduled for 1990. On April 24, 1990, shuttle mission STS-31 saw Discovery launch the telescope successfully into its planned orbit.
From its original total cost estimate of about US$400 million, the telescope had by now cost over $2.5 billion to construct. Hubble's cumulative costs up to this day are estimated to be several times higher still, roughly US$10 billion as of 2010.
Since the start of the program, a number of research projects have been carried out, some of them almost solely with Hubble, others coordinated facilities such as Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESO's Very Large Telescope. Although the Hubble observatory is nearing the end of its life, there are still major projects scheduled for it. One example is the upcoming Frontier Fields program, inspired by the results of Hubble's deep observation of the galaxy cluster Abell 1689.
Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey
In an August 2013 press release, CANDELS was referred to as "the largest project in the history of Hubble". The survey "aims to explore galactic evolution in the early Universe, and the very first seeds of cosmic structure at less than one billion years after the Big Bang." The CANDELS project site describes the survey's goals as the following:
The Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey is designed to document the ?rst third of galactic evolution from z = 8 to 1.5 via deep imaging of more than 250,000 galaxies with WFC3/IR and ACS. It will also find the first Type Ia SNe beyond z > 1.5 and establish their accuracy as standard candles for cosmology. Five premier multi-wavelength sky regions are selected; each has multi-wavelength data from Spitzer and other facilities, and has extensive spectroscopy of the brighter galaxies. The use of ?ve widely separated ?elds mitigates cosmic variance and yields statistically robust and complete samples of galaxies down to 109 solar masses out to z ~ 8.
Frontier Fields program.
The Frontier Fields program studied MACS0416.1-2403
The program, officially named "Hubble Deep Fields Initiative 2012", is aimed to advance the knowledge of early galaxy formation by studying high-redshift galaxies in blank fields with the help of gravitational lensing to see the "faintest galaxies in the distant universe." The Frontier Fields web page describes the goals of the program being:
to reveal hitherto inaccessible populations of z = 5 - 10 galaxies that are 10 to 50 times fainter intrinsically than any presently known
to solidify our understanding of the stellar masses and star formation histories of sub-L* galaxies at the earliest times
to provide the first statistically meaningful morphological characterization of star forming galaxies at z > 5
to find z > 8 galaxies stretched out enough by cluster lensing to discern internal structure and/or magnified enough by cluster lensing for spectroscopic follow-up.
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