Prospero's Books

A little part of myself will survive

Yesterday Ingmar Bergman died, at the age of 89. I remember as a boy finding a whole new world in his films: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, and others. Yesterday's New York Times quoted Bergman on his life's work:

I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain. I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!

(Thanks to M. Allen Cunningham for the quotation.)

Would they want to?

At Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger has posted an interesting article that begins with a question from Christine Kenneally's book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language:

If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands—assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive—would they produce language in any form when they grew up? And if it did, how many individuals would you need for it to take off, what form might it take, and how would it change over the generations?

After discussing how others have answered that question, Munger asks one of his own:

I've often wondered how long it would take a small group (say, 50) of humans to recreate modern society. Would 50 average individuals have enough knowledge to rebuild modern technology in a generation? Would they want to?

A life-shape reconfigured

Last week, I was pleased to find in Philip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking (see What I've Been Reading, in the right column) the juxtaposition of two of the major themes of this blog--Shakespeare's work, and theories of complex, nonlinear systems:

Shakespeare seems intuitively to love what these days we would call a Mandelbrot fractal: a generated self-symmetry working through varied recursion, like the two sets of twins in A Comedy of Errors or the two sets of lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream; a life-shape reconfigured within ever smaller sub-divisions of itself; a part thus containing within itself almost to bursting-point the fundamental pattern of its larger whole (17).

Other yous and other mes will celebrate a Sox victory

At Science Musings, Chet Raymo offers perhaps the clearest--and certainly the wittiest--explanation I've heard of the theory of parallel universes. He ends:

Now if all of this sounds wildly farfetched and almost impossible to understand, well, it's because it is wildly farfetched and almost impossible to understand (which is not to say that some wildly imaginative physicists don't take it seriously). I only mention it because it's baseball season. And -- well, once again, the Boston Red Sox are out in front of the league, but you know what's going to happen.

In this universe (the one we inhabit) they'll win the pennant and lose the Series in the bottom of the last inning of the seventh game. Two men out, a man on base, the Sox leading by one run. A grounder to short. The throw to first. A bounce -- to the left, or to the right -- a bounce so finely tuned that it all depends on a quantum event occurring somewhere back along the line of endlessly-fissioning parallel universes.

The bounce is to the left. The catch is missed. The next man up knocks the ball out of the park. The Sox, not unexpectedly, lose.

But here, dear friends, is a source of solace. In any number of parallel universes the bounce is to the right and the catch is made. In those other universes, other yous and other mes will celebrate a Sox victory. And in some greater heaven that overlooks all of these parallel universes, Schrodinger's cat smiles.

With exclamation points but no question marks

"A religious body or faith community that speaks only with exclamation points but no question marks misses the complexity of creation and the beauty of evolution."

--Rabbi Jonathan Kendall, Temple Beit HaYam, Stuart, Florida

(Thanks to Evolving Thoughts for the link.)

Small world

At the intersection of science and art are the stunning microphotographs in the Nikon International Small World Competition. You can become part of the event by voting on the top entries.

One of my favorites (and one that more or less matches the color scheme of this blog) is the image I've included in this posting: a photograph, by polarized light, of part of a crosscut cedar leaf, magnified 200 times. The image was created by Christian Gautier of the BIOS/PHONE Photo Agency in Le Mans, Sarthe, France.

(Thanks to Developing Intelligence for the link.)

Shapes and spaces and niches

I'm enjoying my slow reading of Shakespeare Thinking, by Philip Davis (see What I've Been Reading). Here's a juicy quote that captures both the matter and the spirit of the book so far:

Putting these lines together [a pair of lines from Hamlet]--or rather letting these things resonate across space and time, moving their thought in and out of separate persons and different bodies--is what it means to find the underlying code or language of the play. Here, 'language' is no longer of course merely the words used . . . but means the working out of the impulsive laws of the whole underlying matrix, the very shapes and spaces and niches out of which all things come into being in the drama. . . .

In Shakespeare it is not character that speaks, originally or finally, but a life-force, as anterior to character as it is prior to explicit theme or conceptualized agenda, which is entrusted to work itself out (8-9).