Practical Criticism

In my previous warblings I addressed the idea that some of us (although no one who's reading this blog, probably?) may be inundated by the easily-accessed opinion of the virtual crowd, and how this might be stifling the at-times exhilarating experience of interacting with some thing and one's own nervous system, and...evaluating for oneself?

I could let on that if I find out something is wildly popular and much "liked" by the crowd, I probably will not like it, but that's not true. I'm sure there are some very popular things that I "digg" too. Anyway...

Anyone heard of I.A. Richards? By the mid-1920s, as an English professor at Cambridge, he was tired of theorists writing about how poems were received by readers; he wanted to find out. He set out to make the apprehension of poetry as a scientific endeavor. It was the spirit of the times, and Richards was something of a mad man; in some ways he was England's version of Pound.

                                     I.A. Richards (1893-1979), a serious character

So, with some of England's brightest students on hand for field-work, he collected poems by Shakespeare, Ella Wheeler Cox (who?), John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and poets with names like Philip James Bailey, Wilfred Rowland Childe, J.D.C. Pellew, and even a person named "Woodbine Willie."

He handed the poems in groups of four to his students and asked them to read each poem as many times as they pleased, and to count how many times they had read each poem. And he asked his students to record their perceptions on a separate sheet of paper, which they handed in. Richards called the handed-in sheets "protocols."

Here's the catch: none of the poems had their author's name attached to it.

Caveat: with people like Donne and Shakespeare, Richards updated the language so that it wouldn't be a dead giveaway that these guys were from the 17th century.

Richards records his findings in his 1929 book Practical Criticism. You would think these students - majoring in English at one of the greatest universities in the world - would've seen Donne for how profound he was, and that Woodbine Willie fell short in a few ways. Or you might have guessed - because I'm the one bringing this up - that these bright people gave horrendously inane comments about the nameless poetry.

Richards actually wonders, if any of us were in the same situation, would we have done any better? Because his students seemed to not tell Shakespeare from Ella Wheeler Cox. Richards himself never gives an outright critique of any of the poems he selected, but his scattershot remarks based on the endlessly non-insightful comments the students made reveals a master of the close reading of poetry, and indeed Richards was one of the pioneers of "close reading."

(I recently read a delightfully candid and ultimately deeply lugubrious book that came out earlier this year or late last: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by "Professor X." He didn't want to tarnish the good name of the schools in which he functioned as an adjunct professor, teaching English 101 for maybe a tenth of what a tenured professor would get. And his college students often can't write a coherent English sentence; they shouldn't even be in college. I doubt things have gotten much better on campuses since Richards's time, but maybe I'm wrong...)

Now: here's my question, and I hope you enjoy pondering it as much as I do: when we read Richards, he's not taking on the tone of some jackoff NeoCon like Allan Bloom (he of the best-seller in the 1980s in Unistat, The Closing of the American Mind), or any academic scold of any sort. He truly does seem to conduct the material that ends up in Practical Criticism like a scientist would treat his data. Now the question: if the readers seemed to enjoy J.D.C. Pellew far more than John Donne, isn't that right for them? Just because Oxford dons and Yale professors have been telling everyone that Donne, Hopkins, and Shakespeare are far far FAR better than the other obscure names...who's to say what's great?

It's a funny and profound book of literary criticism, and I just thought some of you might want to look at it if you haven't already. Pound did some similar experiments, which I'll write about some day soon. Pound's virtuoso student Louis Zukofsky wrote A Test of Poetry, which seems in the same vein as Richards, albeit much later, and more playful and not so much the "science" experiment.

From blind taste tests of $50 glasses of wine versus $5 glasses (some very interesting findings there, by another intellectual prankster), to the the Can You Tell If This Painting Was Done By An Abstract Expressionist or an Elephant? tests, here are some situations in which we cannot fall back on the "wisdom of crowds" (the jury's still out on the ontology of that "wisdom") or "experts."

I say: the hell with it. So it turns out I liked the $5 wine more than the $50 stuff. Big effing deal if I actually prefer the elephant's work to Jackson Pollack (or someone closer to an elephant's style). And why should you care if you you're not supposed to like Ravel's Bolero more than Schubert's Trout Quintet? 


Quoting Robert Anton Wilson, "Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anyone!"

Do You Like This Blog?

I recently read this article in Wired, about how we're inundated with Diggs, Likes, Thumb's Ups, etc, etc, etc. Yea, why think about why you're even reading/watching/doing/whatever...let's see what others have already said about what I'm doing! Then I might know where I stand!

I'm sure you don't operate like that, but others surely do. Or that stuff wouldn't be there, would it?

In the Wired article, the quote from Erik Davis about "knowingness"? Big "like" from me. It reminded me of a moment in an old Simpsons episode that really blew me away; I saw the joke as not only funny but profound: Homer goes on tour with a rock 'n roll circus, a take-off on the Jim Rose stuff that was (is still?) big around 1996 or so. Homer's so fat he can take having a cannonball shot at his stomach every night. As they are introducing his act, there's a cut to the audience of hipster twentysomethings. One guy comments to his friend about Homer's act by putting up air quote marks and saying, "Oh yea: Groovy," in a bored way. His friend says, "Hey man. I never know if you're serious or being ironic. Which is it?" And his friend breaks down and starts crying, "I don't even know anymore."

Knowingness. We may have a crapload of technology but I don't care if you're 40: you have NOT seen everything. Our media saturation has created the illusion that you've seen everything. When twenty year olds act as if they've seen it all, it's just embarrassing, speaking for myself. They seem to not even know they're horrified because they have no idea who they are. So: on with the relentless knowingness.

Not every person under 40 has fallen prey to knowingness. I still witness some genuine openness to naivete and enthusiasm or relatively unmediated experience. But Erik Davis makes a point. A good one, I think. Of course I'd think it: I've just told you this knowingness stuff has had me concerned for at least 15 years.

Are we becoming more and more afraid of thinking and evaluating for ourselves? It seems so, what with the plethora of crowd-response data we can easily fall back on. However, I'm not sure what all that really means, in any substantive sense. It's easy to guess, but I really don't know. That it looks like consumerism masquerading as a faux democracy is just too easy.

I can tell you that I've pushed the Google +1 on my own blogposts, here. I read that it helps your blog's standing, and that it doesn't matter if you +1 your own articles. So I did it about five times. Then I quit, because it felt silly. No one else is plus-one-ing me; what does it all really mean? I don't know.

I also must confess: I still don't really "get" social media. Oh, I listen to intelligent friends who use it like mad, and they tell me in very articulate ways why they use it, what they get out of it, the benefits they've gotten from it. And it all makes sense. I believe social media is enhancing their lives. It just doesn't make sense that I would get all that much out of Facebooking, Tweeting, Digging, Liking, etc. Except to steer more people to the site of my writing/opinions/inane "observations" and readings that I admire? I understand why that should actuate me into doing the social media stuff, but it feels like I'm pitching a product. And I probably am. I probably should. But I don't like the idea of pitching myself. I'm not kidding when I say I find myself completely out of step with All This, and I think the most appropriate response you ought to have towards me is pity.

So yea, if you like this blogpost, don't say anything. No Google +1. No comment. No Tweeting. No response of any kind, ok?

Universal Basic Income (UBI) vs. the Negative Income Tax (NIT)

As I see it, as of today, trying to figure this jit out...

After looking at some advocates of the NIT, most of them are similar in that they would assess a personal tax liability of a household, then subtract the sum of the basic incomes of every member of the household. If a positive number comes up, the household pays some taxes. If the number is negative, the government pays some benefit money to the household. From what I've seen so far, there are slight differences in how this benefit is assessed.

All in all, so far the NIT and the UBI look almost the same. The NIT in one way looks simpler, in that it avoids what the UBI does: people doing very well are given their UBI, then it's taxed back. The NIT avoids some paperwork (or an extra step of bureaucratic falderal), it seems to me. But the UBI still seems like a better idea to me, and here's why:

1.) The NIT could in theory be individualized for each household member, but that seems messy, and puts back the paperwork that was saved earlier. Under the NIT, the aspect of taxing the household means that the highest wage earner would receive most of the NIT money; one of the strengths as far as Van Parijs's "real freedom" is that women would be able to extricate themselves from an abusive vassalage via marriage and concomitant unpaid work of being a wife and mother. The UBI operates at the individual level rather than the household level and gives everyone (of say, 16 or so...in Alaska every citizen of any age receives money!) money. The UBI would be, shall we say, less unequal.

2.) There is a time lag between paying the household tax and receiving the NIT money returned. Under a given social system, if there is no other "safety net" this time lag may lead to desperation. The UBI avoids this, and it seems therefore better at fighting poverty than the NIT in this regard.

                            Paul Newman, kickin' it in Beverly Hills, early 1960s.

3.) When trying a new job, or just after losing one, unemployment benefits are interrupted (depending on the current system and country and other factors). If someone is unemployed and receiving benefits they think of going back to work, but wonder if it would be worth it by taking a low-wage job. Economists do not often factor this social aspect into their equations, but social workers certainly know this as the "unemployment trap." The UBI would greatly alleviate this quandary.

I was fascinated to find that the NIT is alive for the liberals in Australia right now; I was more surprised to find that it had been tried as a sort of experiment in the US in selected poverty-stricken areas in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And that during the time of Nixon a national NIT almost went through, but narrowly missed out on votes.

Lady Rhys-Williams is often cited as first proposing the idea in the 1940s, as part of UK's Liberal Party; she later switched to the Conservatives. Ludwig von Mises acolyte Henry Hazlitt, an American conservative and impressive intellectual (to me, reading about him recently) proposed the idea in Unistat before Milton Friedman's 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom.

So far, I've found that, in general, conservative types like the NIT, while more liberal and Green and left-libertarians like the UBI. Aun aprendo...still learning...

Previous and Subsequent Blogspews From the OG on this Topic

Weirdness Around Thomas Kuhn

One of the big revelations for me in reading David Kaiser's How The Hippies Saved Physics was the stories about Ira Einhorn's chummy relationship with Thomas Kuhn, which, in hindsight seems totally bizarre to me. And therefore wonderful. All I had known about Einhorn came after he was charged with the grisly murder of his girlfriend, how he fled to France, how it eventually played out. I knew Einhorn ("The Unicorn") was a big player in the first Earth Day, and was a Allen Ginsberg-ish ambassador between the worlds of New Age ideas and the Establishment. Einhorn was seen as legit by hippies and Bell Telephone executives alike. I followed the story of Einhorn being suspected of murder, and traced some of his story backwards. I had no idea he had as much influence as he apparently did getting the wild New Physics books of the 1970s published. I certainly had no idea he was close pals with Kuhn, who in my readings by and about him outside his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, seemed to me the kind of tweedy academic who would not have anything to do an intelligent hippie like Einhorn, but Kaiser shows me I was wrong, and I love that bit in the book. It's like finding out Darwin was pals with Bakunin or something. (As far as I know Chuck and Mike never met, just for the contingent record.)

I consider Kuhn's book the most influential High Culture book of the second half of the roaring 20th century, and if you haven't read it, think about doing so. It's readable and totally fascinating, and gives you a strong purchase on the philosophy of science, and it will always speak to your readings of Michael Polanyi, Sir Karl Raimund Popper, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Imre Lakatos, and my favorite, the anarchist Paul Feyerabend.

You'll also be able to see why his Strong Poetry of "paradigm" became such a powerful meme in non-high culture books and discourse.

Another passing strange story involving Kuhn only came into my ambit in the last two months: one of my two or three favorite living film documentarians - indeed, one of my favorite living artists - Errol Morris, was once a student of Kuhn's, and asked him so many questions that aggravated Kuhn that eventually Kuhn threw an ashtray at Morris's head. And missed. Morris calls this rhetoric "Argument by Ashtray." I loved how Morris relates this time with Kuhn in a recent series in the NYT. The ashtray missed him, and he thought, suddenly, "Einstein's office is just around the corner. I'm at Princeton!" (I paraphrase, probably.) He says the Ashtray Incident changed his life, and eventually will probably do something on film about it. (Maybe?)

(Note: Herbert Butterfield's "The Whig Interpretation of History" that influenced Kuhn seems related at least tangentially to the thrust of my blogpost here.)

Again: my preconceived notions about Kuhn the man were wonderfully violated. Here's a guy who went from Harvard to Berkeley (where he wrote Structure), to Princeton, and finally to M.I.T., where his office was not far from Noam Chomsky's. (Noam disagreed with his esteemed colleague about the philosophy of science; Chomsky thinks there was one revolution, and it was Galileo's and it's still being played out.)

Kuhn interviewed Niels Bohr the day before Bohr died. I am still working on integrating Kuhn's model of the sociology of science with Bohr's model agnosticism. If anyone wants to recommend a book here, please do...

Two items of interest before I let you go: Kuhn took classes given by the great sociologist of knowledge and science, Michael Polanyi. Polanyi emphasized the subjective nature of the scientist's experience, and how that meant that there must be a relativism built into the search for scientific knowledge. When Kuhn's first version of Structure came out, he used that idea but did not credit Polanyi, which raised cries of plagiarism. In his second edition, Polanyi received credit.

Finally, a basic take-away vis a vis Popper's notion of "falsifiability" and Kuhn: Popper seemed to want to argue that when a scientist (or a series of them) falsified some aspect of what Kuhn considered within the current purview of "normal science," that it made a significant impact on that discipline. Kuhn thought that was mostly wrong: when an idea within the reigning paradigm is subjected to test and it seems to have been "falsified," the community usually attributes this as a mistake by the scientists! I think, given my outsider's readings in the history of science, that Kuhn should be heeded more by Popperians.

Here's an interview former Scientific American editor John Horgan did with Kuhn.

Trying My Hand at Some Bulwer-Lytton Sentences

The latest winner of this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest was announced recently. A friend relayed the information. A link announcing the winner is here. The link to all of this year's winners is here. I really liked the winner for Crime. See if you agree. Anyway...

So the winner is this: —"Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories."

                  Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), of questionable politics, novelist, 
                         actually began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night."             
                

This set me to wondering if I could stack up against this wonderfully horrid prose. A few I came up with:

--"Despite a whiff of fog on a partly-to-mostly cloudy day near the coast, highs in the mid-70s mid-town district, he longed for the warm embrace of his childhood doll, Mr. Snew-Poo."


--"Erin eyed the bodice ripper, and he eyed her back: 'Who knows what danger lurks in the minds of steadfast men such as me,?' he seemed to be saying, her medication obviously wearing off."


--"Like a woodpecker's steady peck, thoughts of his brief time in the abandoned Foto-Mat booth out near Route 7 drilled into his every pore, with an agonizing metronomic regularity."

--"Ms.Stone was livid and reviled and she saw the steaming fetid puddle of ooze blurp and burp and she came to the spinning, wondrous realization that the cough syrup she guzzled with her special friend was finally kicking in."


--"There must be a couple of hundred good stories out there in the naked city, and Bob, his heart filled with love for his fellow man, his love jammed up under his rib like a Super Ball, knew he could release that love, and it would find its way back to him like a bat uses echolocation, and he hoped his story would be one of those few hundred in the city that was naked."


--"Marcia, her favorite color being fauve, stared curare-tipped darts at the man entertaining her children, and he was clad mostly in a phlegmatic yellow, and he called himself Ronald McDonald."


Man! It's difficult to write such jaw-droppingly putrid prose. My hat's off to this year's winner, with her wind-turbine and chopped sparrow pieces of memories. 


Please feel free to try your hand in the comments!

Missing Public Discussions: Universal Basic Income

Jeez, I just spent the better part of my "free" time over the last 13 days trying to get a line on the world economy, with an effort to shed light on the Unistat economy. I'm tempted to say to others who might want to wade in these deeps: hic sunt dracones (supposedly found on old maps of the uncharted world, especially the oceans: "there be dragons"), or a simple caveat lector. It's not a pretty sight. It's a bit much, for me at least. But once my first immersion was over and I made it to dry land, I felt I'd learned a lot.

Number one: I am appallingly ignorant. No matter how much time I put into this inchoate project, I'm going to be overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the data. And well a topic of this sort should be: too complex. We must sketch out better and better maps for ourselves.

Well, in the so-called "first world," a lot of us look screwed. Maybe. Suffice: Things Look Sorta Bleak.
----------------------------
So anyway, one area I delved into was the perennial idea of providing all citizens with a basic income. This is a very old idea, and the history I'm connecting has "conservative" economists being "for" various versions of it. We'd think they would be the ones who hated the idea, but not so. I hope to get to them in some future blog-gush.

I've had my sights on a Belgian philosopher and political economist named Phillipe Van Parijs ever since I saw him talk while surfing around You Tube one night. He's probably the Main Man right now as far as UBI, or Universal Basic Income.

                                 Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs, b.1952

Van Parijs comes from a left-libertarian political stance, and his main argument for UBI is based on freedom, what he calls "real freedom." In the articles and interviews and sections of books I've culled so far, he welcomes a robust public discussion on the topic, and one gets the feeling he could "win" if enough people were able to hear him answer the numerous objections to such an idea.

The particulars of the UBI idea had my head swimming, especially how it might be funded. Because the old saw that "the devil is in the details" has never seemed so apt.

Van Parijs says that if we guarantee everyone a basic income, an individual can refuse grueling work, pursue their creative aspirations (and who knows what wealth that might spin out?), and extricate themselves from abusive relationships. From an economics viewpoint, he has persuasive arguments that UBI would ease labor market problems (in which in the US a problem is low-wage work and increasing unemployment, but in Europe high unemployment).

A very basic difference between continental Western Europe and the US, was that Marx was never taken seriously in the US. I am not a Marxist, and I think there are very many problems with the various Marxisms, but as a mode of critique of capitalism, the Unistatians have missed out, in my opinion. And therefore, when I say that, yes, the jobs have all gone to India, China, Latin America...and Lenin said they would, I often get a weird sideways glance. But he did say that. He said it a long time ago. With State Capitalism, the jobs eventually will leave. And in order to break out of this all-too-deterministic nightmare, you need good ideas and a way to talk about them. It seems to me there are plenty of good ideas, but we are Missing Public Discussions about them...

I do not see the UBI popping up with any sort of regularity on Unistat corporate TV or radio "news" in the near future. (More truthfully, I'd probably jump out of my shoes if I hear it brought up once, in a serious way. And I hope I'm not driving when it happens.) So we can still talk about it on this Internet dealio, until they pry my cold, dead, etc...

Anyone out there have any takes on UBI and related ideas? This is but one of many Missing Public Discussions I will be yammering about periodically...

Here's an interview with Van Parijs from 1986. He's been at it for awhile, aye. I think most of the ideas still hold.

A fairly pithy article from a 2000 issue of Boston Review discusses the UBI idea w/o overt emphasis on Van Parijs.

A progressive blogger named Ben Wallace picks out quotes from PVP's 2000 book on UBI here.

I wanted to make sure you had enough to read; I care about you. I hope you know that!

A Periodic Problem in the History of Science

I think this problem can be properly placed within Thomas Kuhn's overall conceptual scheme about revolutions in science. I will attempt to discuss two recent instances that seem isomorphic, but the details of each story are more interesting. To add: I will try to make this brief.

Both instances - or scientific narratives - were ones I encountered recently in my reading; it seems there are numerous similar examples. But I want to address two of my favorite ideas - ideas any Generalist probably finds of exceeding interest: 1.) the evolution of language, and 2.) the philosophical meanings of the quantum theory.

I was re-reading a tremendously well-done work in the popularization of recent linguistics, Christine Kenneally's The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (2007), and I can't recommend it highly enough if you have even a passing interest in the subject. There were many "theories" (loosest sense of the term) about the origin of human language, but things began to heat up in European universities around the 1770s, especially with philosophers like Rousseau. When Darwin enters the scene, the biologists get white-hot about language. Of course, in 1870, one can only speculate enough on the topic before one has concocted something of a Just-So story. As Keanneally writes:

"Biological evolution proved to be an excellent analogy for language change, and linguists took up the evolutionary analogy with such enthusiasm that they began to treat natural selection as a literal account of language change rather than a helpful analogy, applying the idea of survival of the fittest  to such phenomena as the way speech sounds change over long periods of time (how, for example, a distinct sound like f might become s). Ironically, linguists still regarded speculating on the origins of language to be an unscientific problem, and it remained controversial to adopt Darwin's theory for that purpose. So while Darwin himself freely considered the origins of language, linguists did anything but."

Indeed, the Societe de Linguistique of Paris banned talking about the subject in the nineteenth century. I guess it seemed too distracting. Their official statement read:"The Society will accept no communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language." What a bunch of killjoys! In 1872, Kenneally tells us, the London Philological Society also closed off the Question.

                          Christine Kenneally, Linguistics PhD from Cambridge,
                            author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins 
                          of Language

For 100 years, linguists who were interested in the question were marginalized. It was a disreputable thing to let on that it was one of your bailiwicks. If you wanted to discuss the topic, you'd better do it in secret, or the guardians of the discipline might hear about it and prevent you from getting a decent job. Nevertheless there were always little groundswells of interest.

For about 45 years of Noam Chomsky's career as a linguist he pretty much dodged questions of language evolution. One can find him saying we can't know such things, so why even try. It left many of us to ponder, "Does Chomsky think his Cartesian perfect system of syntax just appeared suddenly one day, like fundamentalist Christians think God made the world in seven days, then rested? Human language is a miracle!" (<---I said something like this to a friend not long ago, when we were talking about Chomsky.) Chomsky went on and on about the innateness of language, which would seem to suggest an inquiry into genetics and evolution, but Noam apparently had his reasons? (Some other blogpost...or have I already covered this? I write too much, too quickly and haphazardly, and forget!)

Quick side-trip regarding Chomsky: when he first began teaching linguistics at M.I.T.  (around 1959 or so, I'm too lazy to look it up, frankly), he had an Engineering student named Philip Lieberman in his class. Lieberman loved Chomsky's ideas and decided to pursue linguistics himself. But in a recurring story with Chomsky and brilliant ex-students, Kenneally writes, "There is no interaction between them now. Both men are famously combative, and they have taken opposite positions on the subject of the evolution of language." Lieberman went on to do fantastic work on Parkinson's patients, which strongly suggested that syntax was intimately related to the basal ganglia and motor cortex. He examined skulls, listened to apes, tested brains, did all sorts of creative lab research. (The idea of doing linguistics in this way seems to literally disgust Chomsky.) In 1984, Lieberman produced The Biology and Evolution of Language, a Darwinian view. He thought Chomsky had the wrong metaphor: a computer. Rather, it's evolution, which has a logic all its own, a logic we don't really understand. For Lieberman, it seems we must start with this knowledge. For Noam Chomsky, it's absurd: we already have the innate capacity for Cartesian common sense, endowed by...uhh...never mind.

Kenneally: "According to Lieberman, the analogy between the computer and the brain prevents a true understanding of language. Even though formulas can describe a set of sentences, they don't have much to do with how language is produced by the brain or how the brain and language evolved. 'Syntax is not the touchstone of human language, and evolution is not logical,' declared Lieberman. 'Evolution doesn't give a damn about formal elegance.'"

I guess Chomsky saw his version was ridiculous, so in 2002 his name appeared on a paper with Marc Hauser (recently resigned from Harvard for faking research), and Tecumseh Fitch, called "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" But I will leave it to readers of linguistics or of Kenneally's book just how much we think Chomsky was interested in the question.

Anyway, the topic is hot again, and there are all kinds of research projects that are leading us towards an understanding, not only of the origin of language in humans, but animal communication systems, the relation of music to language, and the deep levels of our mathematical faculty.

**********************************************************************************

In a deliriously spellbinding recent book (for my nervous system, at least), How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, by M.I.T. professor David Kaiser, he tells the story of Einstein, Schrodinger, Born, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, et.al and their development of the quantum theory between 1900 and 1926...and then how Einstein thought the theory must be wrong, because it suggested a philosophically messy picture of Nature, and that God didn't play dice with the universe, etc. (Niels Bohr didn't have a problem with the oddities of the theory.) Einstein's and Bohr's colleagues were all deeply fascinated or appalled or in some way philosophically fixated on what this very successful theory meant about how nature works. They discussed it for days on end with each other. Then the second half of the Hot War between the years 1914-1945 flared again, and then most of them fled to the US.

In the Manhattan Project and after the war, the US government hothoused enormous numbers of physics students in order to "win" the physics war with the USSR. Kaiser is very engaging as he describes the radical shift to "just shut up and calculate" from "what do the equations mean?" Any physics student in the US (and most of Europe, although it wasn't nearly as pronounced there) were considered flaky if they asked their professor what the equations meant about how strange nature seems at subatomic levels. Like the origin of language question for 100 years, here was a fascinating question that had been deemed as frivolous by the leaders of physics, from roughly 1941 to around 1975-80, when suddenly, the US government became somewhat paranoid that the USSR might be ahead of the US in telepathy, or other outre ideas.

Funding for physicists had been cut drastically by the early 1970s, so many PhDs had no jobs. But all along there were physicists who had been fascinated by Einstein's thought experiments that might show that the quantum theory was flawed, and there was a Deeper Reality. In 1964, one of those physicists, John S. Bell, devised a theorem that, if it were to be tested - and it seemed more testable than the Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky thought experiment - it might show that Einstein was right: there were hidden variables, or...something that could show the quantum theory was incomplete.

      Left to right: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag*, Nick Herbert, and in the right corner, Fred Alan Wolf, all PhDs in physics, all fascinated by the implications of Bell's Theorem, all stoners and scientific revolutionaries.


I don't want to ruin a good read, but the Berkeley-based hippie physicists played a huge role in getting physics back to its philosophical roots. And it led to a revolution in quantum information science, quantum computing, and quantum encryption techniques. One of the developers of quantum encryption, Stephen Wiesner, is quoted by Kaiser as saying this in 2009: "We need some periods of anarchy when new or irreverent thoughts and changes can come forward."

Whether we're discussing the ban on openly talking about the origin of language or of the philosophical roots of the quantum theory, in both historical stories we see very intricate reasons why perennial questions get dampened, and also institutional reasons why they come back. The foremost "experts" during the times of the bans thought they were "correct:" that such questions were frivolous; we've moved beyond that; these are not the kinds of questions "serious scientists" ask. And how utterly wrong they were!

Hoo-kay! Sorry I was so brief!

*- I have awarded Saul-Paul Sirag the PhD but he doesn't have one; he has been published on quantum theory in the world-leading journal Nature twice. As David Kaiser writes, "Most PhD physicists who pursue ordinary academic careers never manage to get even one of their research articles through the rigorous peer-review at Nature."-p.243