We are a curious bunch of animals, are we not ?
We believe that the world we live in is the best
world that ever existed and that, as it is now, will continue to exist
with, in the near future, minor modifications such as : no
more war, poverty and famine and the eventual cures for all ailments.
We think we know or have the capacity to know
everything and that we are, or close to be, in full control of
whatever the future will throw at us, which, in itself, is ridiculous
as we, the common folks, know less and less about more and more while
scientists seem to know more and more about less and less. Ask a
botanist, for example, what he knows about nuclear fusion and then ask
a physicist what he knows about the Liliaceae family. You'll
see what I mean. - And do you honestly know how your
refrigerator works ? Or even your coffee machine ? -
Personally, I have problems with my pencil sharpener. You can imagine
the rest.
We drum up all sorts of reasons to prove that we are
right about all of the above. To do so, we compare our global
awareness - should I say "shortcomings" ? -
to that of people who lived in a distant and, sometimes, not too
distant, past.
We say to ourselves :
"What a chump must have been Louis XIV :
he didn't even know what an aspirin was !"
or
"How moron could people have been to
believe, up to the Renaissance, that the sun revolved around the
earth ?"
or even
"What about the members of the House of
Commons, in London, in 1900, who wanted to stop the incoming
population in Greater London and who tried to convince every other
members of their clan that, by 1910, London would be in ankle-deep
horse manure ?."
And then we think about our grandmothers and
great-grandmothers with their antiquated washing machines and wood
stoves ; and about our forefathers with their horses and
carriages, their pens made out of feathers and their candles.
The worst is that we don't have to go that far :
Take my car, for example (please, take my car !).
It is seven years old and compared to the ones being sold today, is
totally out of date. It doesn't have a GPS system, nor a back up
screen, nor a Bluetooth phone connection. Its CD reader won't even
accept MP3's ! Same goes with my computers, my toaster, my tv
set, my electric razor and just about every appliance in my house,
including a vacuum that overheats and stops after ten minutes. And, as
I'm writing this, I can't help but notice that I have, on my desk, 50
or so leftover read-write CD-R's which, I guess, I'll have to use as
coasters since everybody is now into memory sticks. - Thought
that buying them in bulk would save me money...
Memory sticks ! I found a not-so-old bill in one my
father's books, recently (used as a marker). It concerned the purchase
of a 64K memory chip (not gigabytes : kilobytes) which he paid
$29.95. - That would be have been, at the time, ±$500 for a megabyte
or half a million dollars for a gigabyte. Multiply that by 32 and
compared the result (16 million dollars - $15,702,425.60, to be
precise) to the price I paid last week for a 32 gigabyte chip for my
phone : $39.95. - My phone, for God's sake ! -
Terabytes? Five hundred million dollars versus $125 I saw last week
for a two terabytes external hard disk...
That phone of mine : a Samsun Galaxy S4 has more
computing power that a PC I bought less then five, maybe three, years
ago which had a zillionth more power than the one on board the first
moonlander.
It's to the point that I now use the oldest computer
I have as a jukebox and watch documentaries on my phone. Dick
Tracy, here I come !
I keep wondering what the cost will be, five, ten
years from now, for a petabyte memory chip (a thousand terabytes). Do
you know what you can do with a petabyte of memory ? I recently
read this in Scientific America : copy in or on it every
book you will read in your life time ; same with every WEB page you
will visit, every film and tv programs you will watch, every music you
will listen to, leaving enough room to write several twenty volume
encyclopedias, that is if you limit the photos you will take to under
100,000 or so. - And they're already talking about exabyte (1,000
terabytes), zettabyte (1000 exabites) and yottabyte (1,000
zettabytes). - Just learned, while I'm at it, that, at this very
moment, researchers at IBM are building the largest data
drive ever : a 120 petabyte beast comprised of some 200,000
normal HDDs working in concert, significantly, of course, more
spacious than the 15 petabyte capacity found in the biggest arrays
currently in use.
That's for the future. What about the past ?
No need for petabytes. I'm convinced that, with a
time machine and a simple 8 digit calculator, I could impress the
pants of the likes of Euclid, Archimedes,
Ptolemy and even Leibnitz (1646
-1716), the Leibnitz, the one who invented,
independent of Newton (1642 – 1727),
infinitesimal calculus., using a pen and several sheets (I hope !)
of paper.
Two other guys I'd like to have a chat with would be
Copernicus and Galileo. I wonder
what they would say if I told them, amongst other things, that Jupiter
does not have four satellites but 49 official (named) and 14 more,
waiting to be named or, at the very least, given a number.
I'd also like to discuss, with the both of them,
what they might think about the Big Bang, time-space continuum, speed
of light, black holes, exoplanets and so on, but... as far as I could
from to the Church Police because, what I would say, might get me in
deep doodoo and probably very seriously arrested, if not killed, like
being driven to the edge of the earth and pushed off.
You Think I'm joking ? Believe it or not, 18 %
of the adult population of the United States still believe that Copernicus
AND Galileo were and are still wrong and 28% are
convinced that the world WAS created in seven days.
But, speaking of beings from a not too long time
ago, allow me to go from one subject to another :
Some of you, out there, occasionally - very
occasionally, I know -, buy lottery tickets, play penny poker or
spend a few quarters in so-called one arm bandits, recalling, I am
sure, every time you do, the content of the correspondence Blaise
Pascal (1623-1662) and Pierre de Fermat
(1601 or 1607-1665)
exchanged in the middle half of the seventeenth century and in which
they discussed what is said to be the basic rules of probability. You
may also recall Chistiaan Huygens (1629-1695) who
actually wrote the first book on the subject but they all had a
predecessor in a fourth brainbox, or double dome, whose name was Gerolamo
Cardano, a.k.a Girolamo or Jérôme Cardan and even Hieronymus
Cardanus (1501-1576), a first-class noodler and another one of
the obscure writers I love to read or talk about (see P.-S., at the
end).
Gerolamo Cardano - or whatever his
name was - was one of those percipients who found interesting
clarifying obscure matters regarding some more obscure subjects,
writing, in the process, two hundred or so books dealing with :
medicine, mathematics (algebra), physics, natural science,
hydrodynamics, religion, music, transcendental philosophy... you name
it : he dealt with anything that might be something, publishing
amongst other riveting subjects, a detailed horoscope of Jesus
Christ (as if I could make this up) most likely to pay his
gambling debts because he loved gambling as a whole : dice, cards,
chess, anything with which he thought he could make money. - Even
wrote an entire chapter on cheating in his book dealing with games of
chance (Liber de ludo aleae). - And while you may not
know this, you probably use two of his inventions on a daily basis
(because he was an inventor in his spare time) : 1) a combination
lock, the one you use at the gym because it has numbers and doesn't
need a key (well somebody had to think about that), and 2) a drive
shaft, a.k.a "the Cardan shaft", which is what
connects the motor of your car to its wheels. - (And yes, he did
spend a few months in jail for that horoscope...)
Anyway, he and Copernicus
(1473-1543) had one friend in common : Georg Joachin Rheticus,
a man we would call, today, a press agent. He's the one that oversaw
the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus
orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial
Spheres) in 1543 ; you know : the book that said the
earth rotated unto itself once a day (which the Chuch said it didn't),
that it, and all the the known planets, revolved around the sun (which
the Chuch said they didn't) and that the moon revolved around the
earth (which the Chuch said it did). And this is where Andreas
Osiander (1498-1552) came into the picture.
Another all-around winner who believed that he lived
in a perfect world.
Who was he ? A German Lutheran theologian. Well he
may have been but he wasn't that brave facing the Roman Catholic Chuch
and his own constituants, particularly when it came to the, then, pope
who, as you know, wasn't at that point in time interested in seeing
his power being challenged, including that of the thumbscrew. Copernicus
wouldn't have cared less as he was dying but not Osiander.
Thing is that, just before the former's great work was about to be
published, Georg Joachin Rheticus, had to go away and
left the matter in the later's hands. Being a shrinking violet, Osiander
thought that Copernicus was too "revolutionary"
(sorry for the pun), so he substituted his preface for his own in
which he said that whatever was in Copernicus' book
was not necessarily true, or even probable, but could be used for
computational purposes.
By the time Rheticus got back, he
went ballistic but it was too late. Took years before readers finally
heard that the preface wasn't at all what Copernicus
had thought.
How many years ?
Think of Galileo who was placed
under house arrest for his views more or less confirming Copernicus'
so-called "false theory", in 1633 (that's 120 years
later).
More than that : it wasn't until 1835 (172 years
later) that the Catholic Church's ban on his De revolutionibus
orbium coelestium was finally lifted.
Talk about instant fame.
(For more information : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Controversy).
See how much fun you can have looking into these
things ?
Now on with my P.-S.
Following my last column, I got a message from a
woman who claimed that she didn't give a hoot about good and bad
books, that she read for sheer pleasure ; that there was a lot of
joy and gratification in discovering interesting things to read on
one's own ; that my method of selecting books, largely based on
criticisims, permanency or continued existence, was no guarantee that
I would wind up with reading only "good"
books.
I totally agree. It's a question of hypothesis,
really, or, to put it in context, palatableness (agreeable to the mind or
feelings)
as well as how much time one is willing to spend on research,
exploration and even experimentation, just like continuously looking
for new restaurants as opposed to sticking, like I do, to two or three
on the basis that, when one is known in an establishment, one is more
or less assured to have service entirely compatible with one's taste
or habits.
But to come back to books, thousands are being
published every week - if not days - and you must grant me that
readers should, one way or the other, rely on certain guidelines
instead of practically choosing at random what they will want to read. -
In his "The Knowledge Web" (Simon &
Schuster 2001), James Burke tried to demonstrate that with all
the information on every known subjects now available on line,
anytime, anywhere, people will eventually have to rely on some form of
organisation in order to decipher or simply find what is compatible
with their brain otherwise all that information will be overbearing
and totally chaotic, which, when you think about it, makes sense. -
My method in choosing what I'd like to read is certainly not sure
proof and definitely not for everyone. It has something to do with my
brain patterns.
Let me say this another way : I hate reading stuff
that doesn't bring me new ideas, new ways of thinking and I'd rather
rely on 400 years of criticism tellling me that Shakespeare was a
great writer than on 400 comments by, I wouldn't say "uninformed"
but "unexperienced" readers whose knowledge of
reading is limited to best sellers and the latest novels, telling me
that this or this book is a "masterpiece", hence my
going back to 50 years or so.
I have a feeling, that way, that I'm not wasting
all of my time. Not that I object to anybody that tells me
that James Paterson, Ken Follett or whoever seems to have everybody's
current attention brings them pleasure, just like I like to watch
action movies once in a while... for sheer pleasure. - Hey : you
think I don't know who Ian Flemming was ? (He wrote the James
Bond books. People tend to forget that....)
And you know the old saying : locking up a thousand
individuals in a large library doesn't guarantee that any one of them
will come out as a bookworm.
