Prospero's Books

Newton's sleep

To Thursday's meeting of my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I brought two poem fragments, the first by Alexander Pope and the second by William Blake:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
__________

Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep

Sir Isaac Newton has been called both the first modern scientist and, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, "the last magician." Both Pope and Blake were right about Newton. His discoveries of some of "Nature's laws" formed the basis for the light of modern science and technology. But they also led, in the popular view of his work, to a numbed conception of the universe as nothing more than particles impacting each other like so many billiard balls.

Alas, that popular view continues today, while true "post-Newtonian" science has joined Blake in transcending this "single vision" and conceiving a much more magical cosmos. It's a view of which Newton—as alchemist, magician, and theologian—would approve.

Unless we were poets or lovers

This week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we read Neil Gaiman's Sandman adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with, among other things, a chapter from Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos (near the end of the What I've Been Reading list in the right column of this blog).

My premises for the week were

3a. Connections among parts of systems are not always obvious.

3b. Connections within, and among, literary texts are not always obvious. In some of Shakespeare’s plays, magic works by making non-obvious connections among parts of natural and social systems.

Laszlo writes:

The emerging vision of reality is more than theory, and it is of interest to more than scientists. It gets us closer than ever before to rending apart the veils of sensory perception and apprehending the true nature of the world. Even in regard to our life and well-being, this is a happy re-discovery: it validates something we have always suspected but in modern times could not express (nor, unless we were poets or lovers, did we even try). This something is a sense of belonging, of oneness. We are part of each other and of nature; we are not strangers in the universe. We are a coherent part of a coherent world; no more and no less so than a particle, a star, and a galaxy (2).

Modern science doesn't tell us that fairies are real. It tells us much stranger things.

City and forest

Last weekend, I met for the first time a regular reader of this blog, Jay, who tactfully reminded me that I hadn't posted for two weeks. My excuse was that I had just finished the first two weeks of a very busy semester. But that's no excuse, especially since my students are giving me so much to write about.

In my "Conversations with Shakespeare" course, which I've subtitled "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality," we began last week reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with a couple of essays on the play and a couple of introductory chapters from books on systems theory. I offered two pairs of premises:

1a. The universe is composed of systems: physical, chemical, biological, cultural. Stars, starfish, star chambers, and starships are all systems.

1b. Artworks can be seen as systems: cultural systems that emerge from, and reflect, biological systems, social systems, and other cultural systems. As Hamlet says, art holds “a mirror up to nature.”

2a. Systems are integrated, indivisible.

2b. Successful literary texts, like other artworks, are integrated, indivisible. Aristotle called this integrity “unity of action.”

In his book General Systems Theory, Lars Skyttner writes:

Through the constant interaction between system and environment, environment affects systems and systems in turn affect the environment. When it comes to social systems, this interaction is especially pronounced. Its scope is suggested in the following pairs:

Living system

• Society
• We
• Self
• Ego
• Mind
• Consciousness

Environment

• Nature
• Them
• The other
• Id
• Body
• Subconsciousness (64)

Skyttner could have been talking about the two interrelated worlds of city and forest that provide the setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play reminds us that "civilization" exists within a larger system of which we're often unaware. In leaving the day world of the city and entering the night world of the forest, Shakespeare's lovers and amateur actors descend into the "uncivilized" dreamworld of their subconscious and discover deeper truths about themselves.

Transcendence beyond a known realm

During the last few days I've been reading both Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and the December 2006 issue of Seed magazine. In his Introduction to the Pelican edition of Dream, Russ McDonald writes:

During the performance of "Pyramus and Thisby" [the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and his fellow craftsmen], we may imagine the stage and the theater and the world as a series of concentric circles. At the very center are Bottom and Flute, playing tragic lovers. They are watched by actors playing the courtly lovers, characters whose experience might have paralleled that of the doomed Pyramus and Thisby but who fail to notice the similarity. They, in turn, are watched by the theater audience, spectators who laugh smugly at the smugness of the onstage audience. This set of symmetries implies that we may be mistaken in thinking of ourselves as the final audience. Isn't it possible that we, too, are performing for unseen spectators, that our delight in the foolishness of what we see may itself be a brand of folly, and that the world we take to be real may be nothing more than a stage set for a divine audience? (xlvi-xlvii)

In Seed, Dan Glass writes of the extraordinary power of viewing Earth from space:

For those who have already experienced it, the beauty of the planet has been an epiphany, eliciting deep concern for Earth's health, a visceral understanding of human "oneness," and clarity about the interconnectedness of things. Unlike those of us here among the trees, they have seen the forest.

And here's where Glass reminded me of McDonald's vision of Shakespeare's plays within plays within (perhaps) plays:

Twenty years ago in his seminal book on the philosophy and psychology of human space exploration, The Overview Effect, Frank White suggested that every transcendence beyond a known realm provides an overview of that realm, and deep insight how it fits into the greater picture. A child leaves the womb, his hometown, his country, each time gaining greater understanding, altering his actions to some degree based on these new experiences and insights, and perhaps becoming a transforming element of society around him (24).

We can't truly know a system from inside it. Only with the distance provided by a Shakespeare or spaceship can we see the bigger picture.

An aside: Glass's last sentence provides one example of Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" or monomyth.

 

Who gets into the lifeboat?

At Science Musings, Chet Raymo has posted a review of Antoine Danchin's book The Delphic Boat: What Genomes Tell Us. He begins with an intriguing question:

Which of the following works would you choose to be lost, if only three could be saved: Michelangelo's Pieta, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Mozart's Don Giovanni, or Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity.

French microbiologist Antoine Danchin asked this question in his book, The Delphic Boat: What Genomes Tell Us.

The answer is easy, he says.  Trash Einstein's paper.

Not because Einstein's theory of relativity is any less creative or any less important than the works of Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart. In the long run, relativity may have vastly more significance for human life than the work of any single artist.

However, if Einstein had not invented relativity, someone else would have done so. The idea was in the air in 1905. Sooner or later, every detail of Einstein's work would have been reproduced by someone else, or by a group of people. . . .

But if Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart had not lived, the works of their particular geniuses would be lost forever.

A system adapting to the constraints it finds itself under

Bill McDaniel, at The World beyond the Glass, has posted a lovely short essay on "Parking as Self Organizing Behaviour." He observes a pattern of parking violations in his Galway suburb, then analyzes it through the lens of system theory. He concludes:

A consensus emerges from the group dynamic in response to the conditions. Consequently, parking patterns emerge as self organizing behaviour, arrived at individually and commonly, organized to accommodate the needs of the parkers and the drivers alike, representing a system that is adapting to the constraints it finds itself under.

Proteins flop and twist

Carl Zimmer, one of the world's best science writers, has a particularly beautiful recent post, "Up and Down Life's Staircase," on his blog, The Loom. Here's its first paragraph:

One reason I love writing about biology is that it has so many levels. Down at the molecular scale, proteins flop and twist. Higher up, cells crawl and feed and divide. They organize into animals and plants and other big organisms, which must obey their own rules in order to survive. For some organisms, a day is a lifetime. Others must weather centuries. When millions of organisms get together, they form ecosystems that wax and wane in ways that could not be predicted from lower levels. And over the course of generations, genes take on a new personality, no longer passive bits of code, but units of selection that can sweep across the planet and leap from species to species.

I picked the accompanying image, from Wikipedia, in part because it made me think of New Year's confetti.