DENNIS OVERBYE

"From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.

A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as 'pretty childish' and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a 'chosen people,' sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate."

Einstein did not, at least in the place alleged, call the Bible "childish." Proof:

The image of the letter is
from the Sept./Oct. 2008
Search Magazine.

By the way, today is
the birthday of G. H. Hardy.

Here is an excerpt from his
thoughts on childish things:

"What 'purely aesthetic' qualities can we distinguish in such theorems as Euclid's or Pythagoras's?.... In both theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy. The arguments take so odd and surprising a form; the weapons used seem so childishly simple when compared with the far-reaching results; but there is no escape from the conclusions."

"Space: what you
damn well have to see."

-- James Joyce, Ulysses  

Today's New York Times:

"Olga Raggio was born in Rome on Feb. 5, 1926, to a Russian mother and an Italian father. She earned a diploma from the Vatican library school in 1947 and a Ph.D. from the University of Rome in 1949."

"... Raggio, an internationally known scholar and curator who in almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized some of its best-known exhibitions, scoured the world for treasure and coaxed rarely seen artworks from places as far flung as the Vatican and as close at hand as a New Jersey abbey, died on Jan. 24 in the Bronx. She was 82 and lived in Manhattan."

Quoted here on the date of Raggio's death:

"Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death."

-- Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

Related material:

  February 2, 3, and 4 as well as
  February 5 (Raggio's birthday).

From the new president's inaugural address:

"... in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things."

The words of Scripture:

9	For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10	But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11	When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12	For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. -- First Corinthians 13

"through a glass"--

[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron].

Childish things:

© 2005 The Institute for Figuring

Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)

Not-so-childish:

Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:

Through a glass, darkly:

A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
 that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations--
a 180-degree rotation:

(Click on image
for further details.)

But then face to face:

A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections-- not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.

Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.

These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.

For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.

Related material:

The central aim of Western religion-- "Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy-- Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle:   Limited Unlimited   Odd Even   Male Female   Light Dark   Straight Curved   ... and so on .... "Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is... the central aim of all Western philosophy." -- Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) "In the garden of Adding live Even and Odd... And the song of love's recision is the music of the spheres." -- The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino's website, slightly expanded: "Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history." -- Octavio Paz,"Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship," in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52  From Brian O'Doherty's 1976 Artforum essays-- not on museums, but rather on gallery space: "Inside the White Cube" "We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first.... An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art." "Space: what you damn well have to see." -- James Joyce, Ulysses

Everything and Nothing

"I know what 'nothing' means...."

-- Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 paperback, page 214

"In 1935, near the end of a long affectionate letter to his son George in America, James Joyce wrote: 'Here I conclude. My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity, where they have found a lovely nothing.'"

-- Lionel Trilling, "James Joyce in His Letters," Commentary, 45, no. 2 (Feb. 1968), abstract

"The quotation is from The Letters of James Joyce, Volume III, ed. Richard Ellman (New York, 1966), p. 359. The original Italian reads 'Adesso termino. Ho gli occhi stanchi. Da più di mezzo secolo scrutano nel nulla dove hanno trovato un bellissimo niente.'"

-- Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics, by William M. Chace, Stanford U. Press, 1980, page 198, Note 4 to Chapter 9

"Space: what you damn well have to see."

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

"What happens to the concepts of space and direction if all the matter in the universe is removed save a small finite number of particles?"

-- "On the Origins of Twistor Theory," by Roger Penrose

"... we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything..."

-- Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon (See previous entry.)

"A strange thing then happened."

-- L. Frank Baum