April 2, 2009
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Time and Chance, continued:
Transformative
HermeneuticsIn memory of
physics historian
Martin J. Klein,
(June 25, 1924-
March 28, 2009)“… in physics itself, there was what appeared, briefly, to be an ending, which then very quickly gave way to a new beginning: The quest for the ultimate building-blocks of the universe had been taken down to the molecular level in nineteenth-century kinetic theory… and finally to the nuclear level in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a moment in the 1920s the quest appeared to have ended…. However… this paradise turned out to be, if not exactly a fool’s paradise, then perhaps an Eden lost.”– No Truth Except in the Details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein, introduction by A.J. Kox and Daniel Siegel, June 25, 1994
New York Times obituary dated April 1, 2009:
“Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics…. died Saturday [March 28, 2009] in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill.”
Klein edited, among other things, Paul Ehrenfest: Collected Scientific Papers (publ. by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1959).
“It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be a mere sequence….”— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
“Note that at first, you can see
the ‘arrow of time.’
After a long period, however,
the direction of time
is no longer evident.”— “The Ehrenfest Chains,”
by Kyle Siegrist, ex. 16Related material:“Almost every famous chess game
is a well-wrought urn
in Cleanth Brooks’ sense.”— John Holbo,
Now We See
Wherein Lies the Pleasure“The entire sequence of moves in these… chapters reminds one– or should remind one– of a certain type of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed ‘retrograde analysis‘….”
– Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to The Defense
