June | 2007 | m759's Xanga Site

Month: June 2007

For Studio 60, a Bush Joke:

Encounter at Harvard--

Related material:

(Click to enlarge)

Dean Gross also appears in

The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras
Time's whirligig spins, and...

Taking Christ
to Studio 60

continues...

From NBC:

K&R PART III
06.21.07 10/9c TV-14

"The long day's journey into night
descends deeper into the past."
Found in translation:

Philos Website --

"Ich
aber, hier auf dem objektiven Wege, bin jetzt bemüht, das Positive der
Sache nachzuweisen, daß nämlich das Ding an sich von der Zeit und Dem,
was nur durch sie möglich ist, dem Entstehen und Vergehen, unberührt
bleibt, und daß die Erscheinungen in der Zeit sogar jenes rastlos
flüchtige, dem Nichts zunächst stehende Dasein nicht haben könnten,
wenn nicht in ihnen ein Kern aus der Ewigkeit*
wäre. Die Ewigkeit ist freilich ein Begriff, dem keine Anschauung zum
Grunde liegt: er ist auch deshalb bloß negativen Inhalts, besagt
nämlich ein zeitloses Dasein. Die Zeit ist demnach ein bloßes Bild der
Ewigkeit, ho chronos eikôn tou aiônos,**
wie es Plotinus*** hat: und ebenso ist unser zeitliches Dasein das bloße
Bild unsers Wesens an sich. Dieses muß in der Ewigkeit liegen, eben
weil die Zeit nur die Form unsers Erkennens ist: vermöge dieser allein
aber erkennen wir unser und aller Dinge Wesen als vergänglich, endlich
und der Vernichtung anheimgefallen."

* "a kernel of eternity"
** "Time is the image of eternity."
*** "wie es Plotinus hat"--
Actually, not Plotinus, but Plato,
according to Diogenes Laertius.

Related material:

Time Fold,

J. N. Darby,
"On the Greek Words for
Eternity and Eternal
(aion and aionios),"

Carl Gustav Jung, Aion,
which contains the following
four-diamond figure,

and Jung and the Imago Dei.

Structural Logic continued:

Let No Man
Write My Epigraph

"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello
illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner
spirituality."

--Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of
unutterable conviction.... the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

-- Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005

"... the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure
on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A₈ on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"

-- Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)

"... donc Dieu existe, réponse!"

-- Attributed, some say falsely,
to Leonhard Euler

"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

"Pauli as Mephistopheles

in a 1932 parody of

Goethe's Faust
at Niels Bohr's

institute in Copenhagen.

The drawing is one of

many by
George Gamow

illustrating the script."

-- Physics Today

"Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was
looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange
correspondences between them.

'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone
that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis
of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes
metamorphoses, Corso.'"

-- The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)

"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."

-- The Innermost Kernel
(previous entry)

And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the

International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have

The Epigraph--

Weyl on automorphisms
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")

Also from the
Cameron paper:

Local or global?

Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians
typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the
first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?
A structure M is homogeneous
if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended
to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global."

Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)--

Global and Local:
One Small Step

and mathematically--

Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic (4/30/07):

This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels--

Alice Devillers

"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which
are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is
which have
as many symmetries as possible."

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

-- Madeleine L'Engle

ART WARS continued:

Kernel

Mathematical Reviews citation:

MR2163497

(2006g:81002)

81-03
(81P05)

Gieser, Suzanne The innermost kernel. Depth psychology and quantum physics.
Wolfgang Pauli's dialogue with C. G. Jung.
Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. xiv+378 pp. ISBN: 3-540-20856-9

A quote from MR at Amazon.com:

"This revised translation of a Swedish Ph. D. thesis in philosophy
offers far more than a discussion of Wolfgang Pauli's encounters with
the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.... Here the book explains very well
how Pauli attempted to extend his understanding beyond superficial
esotericism and spiritism.... To understand Pauli one needs books like
this one, which... seems to open a path to a fuller understanding of
Pauli, who was seeking to solve a quest even deeper than quantum
physics." (Arne Schirrmacher, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2006g)

An excerpt:

I do not yet know what Gieser means by "the innermost
kernel." The following is my version of a "kernel" of sorts-- a diagram
well-known to students of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and art theorist Rosalind Krauss:

(Log24, June 9, 2005)

The four group is also known as the Vierergruppe or Klein group. It appears, notably, as the translation subgroup of A, the group of 24 automorphisms of the affine plane over the 2-element field, and therefore as the kernel of the homomorphism taking A to the group of 6 automorphisms of the projective line over the 2-element field. (See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.)

Related material:

The "chessboard" of
Nov. 7, 2006 --

I Ching chessboard

None of this material really has much to do with
the history of physics, except for its relation to the life and thought of physicist
Wolfgang Pauli-- the "Mephistopheles" of the new book Faust in Copenhagen. (See previous entry.)

"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
Meta Physics continued:

Faustus is gone:

regard his hellish fall

-- Marlowe

I have just read, in the New York Times Book Review that arrived in yesterday's mail, a review of Segre's Faust in Copenhagen. The review, on news stands next Sunday, was titled by the Times "Meta Physicists."

On Faust-- today's noon entry and yesterday's "Nightmare Lessons."

On "Meta Physicists"-- an entry of June 6, on Cullinane College, has a section titled "Meta Physics."

On Copenhagen-- an entry of Bloomsday Eve, 2004 on a native of that city.

Another Dane:

"Words, words, words."
-- Hamlet

Another metaphysics:

"317 is a prime,
not because we think so,
or because our minds
are shaped in one way
rather than another,
but because it is so,
because mathematical
reality is built that way."

-- G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology
Timing, Part III:

Quine's Shema:

0! = 1.

Hickory Dickory Dock...

A Good Year
Timing, Part II:

Let Noon Be Fair

-- Title of a novel
by Willard Motley

A review of Helene Cixous's Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing:

"Cixous explores three distinct 'schools' that produce what she
envisions as great writing-- the Schools of the Dead, of Dreams, and of
Roots. Cixous invests much weight in the purposefully ambiguous nature
of the word 'school'; she seems to refer to a motivation, conscious or
unconscious, that directs, influences, and shapes writing; at other
times she seems to want to speak of actual places from whence we get
instruction (again, consciously or unconsciously)."

From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:

Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall --

"Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table... he reached to the
floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He
picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it
over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read."

From The Shining, Chapter 18:

"In 1961 four writers, two of them Pulitzer Prize winners, had leased
the Overlook and reopened it as a writers' school. That had lasted one
year.... Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go.... (In the room the women come and go)" --Quoted in Shining Forth

Photo: jewishbookweek.com

Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous

Time of this entry:

Noon.
Timing, Part I:

Let No Man Write
My Epitaph

-- Title of a novel
by Willard Motley

"Recall the passage in the Odyssey when he [Ulysses] encounters the Cyclops
Polyphemos. Trying to disguise himself, to hide himself, Ulysses calls
himself Outis-- nobody, no man, personne. Here, in a strategy of simple
erasure, the Subject masks his singularity behind no one, das Man (here
in a sense that does not depend on the Heidggerian distinction between
the authentic Dasein and the inauthentic das Man). In French, Outis is
translated as personne, meaning no one, no particular subject."

-- Jacques Derrida, "Summary of Impromptu Remarks," pp. 39-45 in Anyone, ed. by Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli International, 1991)

"In A GOOD YEAR, more than one reference is made to
the secret of comedy. It's all in the timing, two characters explain." --Review at epinions.com

Time of this entry:

11:49:59
Annals of Education:

Nightmare Lessons

"We are going to keep doing this

until we get it right."
--Log24 on June 15

Obituaries in the News

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: Monday, June 18, 2007
in The New York Times

Filed at 6:13 a.m. ET

Norman Hackerman

"AUSTIN,
Texas (AP) -- Norman Hackerman, a chemist ... died Saturday [June 16]
.... He was 95. ... He taught chemistry ... before joining the
Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II."

The date of Hackerman's death is celebrated in Ireland as Bloomsday-- the day on which, in 1904, the events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses came to pass.

From Log24 on Bloomsday 2007:

Scene from
"Behind the Lid" --

Photo by Richard Termine

"Behind the Lid" is an avant-garde production featuring scenes from the author's life presented in the form of dreams.

Those who like such scenes may consult past Log24 entries. They
will find, for instance, the following, commemorating a death which,
like Hackerman's, occurred on a Bloomsday:

Click on the picture for details.

"History, Stephen said,
is a nightmare
from which I am
trying to awake."

-- Ulysses