Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Top 50 Books of Poetry

The older I get, the more I realize that there is something elegant about a completed book of poetry.  I am not talking about a collection of poetry, but rather a series of poems that come together to form a completed series.  I once saw a complete exhibit of Kirchner at the Museum of Modern Art. The individual mural was nothing compared to the complete series standing in one room. The glorious streets of Berlin in the 1910s cannot be expressed in one scene. A woman's life cannot be expressed in one scene. The same is with poetry.

Once again this is solely based on what I have read and what mood I am in today.

Here's the list:


1.         The Sonnets/ William Shakespeare
           
            Could it be anything else. Sure, but it was written in the ear wedged between the epic and the metaphysical poets.The era of long driving narratives and sort separate poems devoid of any larger narrative. Shakespeare puts together a series of individual poems, which can stand alone, yet come together to form a much greater narrative.  The poems themselves are rarely stilted and flow well. The are perhaps one of the first examples of literature in the middle and modern era to be common not noble. They also at times are humorous such as sonnet 135:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;
More than enough am I, that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus. 
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine? 
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

Keep in mind that in Elizabethan English Will meant: William, desire, penis, sex, vagina, and the reach-around. He uses the word Will 13 times in 14 lines. Haha. Genitals are funny.

2.         Paterson/ William Carlos Williams

            A new era and a new mode of poetry.  Modernism in all of its glory.  It's the tale of city; more than that really; perhaps it is the city itself. At the very least, it is WCW at his best.

3.         The Prose and Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein

            Forgotten but Brilliant. While it is not purely poetry, it goes into a lost era of history.  One of bohemianism, pessiv/optimism. Alfred Lichtenstein creates unforgettable characters and weaves sound with grace atypical of German. The Archetype of a Lost Genre and Generation.

4.         Meditations in an Emergency/ Frank O’Hara

            While it does not contain the poem Having a Coke with You, it is still powerful and moving all the same.

5.         Geography III/ Elizabeth Bishop

            All those volcanoes must mean something.

6.         Kora in Hell/ William Carlos Williams
8.         The Carminaof Catullus
9.         The Sands from Urns/ Paul Celan
10.       Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions/ Maurice Manning
11.       Lunch Poems/ Frank O’Hara
12.       What Work is/ Philip Levine
15.       Howl/ Allen Ginsburg
16.       Collected Poems/ W.B. Yeats
17.       The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza/ Eugene Ostashevsky
18.       Leaves of Grass/ Walt Whitman
19.       Pierrort Lunaire/ Albert Girard
20.       Collected Poem/ John Keats
21.       Collected Poems/ Czeslaw Milosz
22.       Sonnets to Orpheus/ Rainer Maria Rilke
23.       Chicago Poems/ Carl Sandburg
24.       Collected Poems/ Nelly Sachs
25.       Dream Songs/ John Berryman
26.       Collected Poems/ Goethe
27.       Eternal Enemies/ Adam Zagajewski
28.       The Gold Cell/Sharon Olds
29.       Collected Poems/ Langston Hughes
30.       Des Knaben Wunderhorn/ Clemens Brentano
31.       The Rubaiyat/ Omar Khayyam
32.       Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trial/ Arielle Greenberg
33.       The Nibelungenlied/ Anonymous
34.       Collected Poems/ Mayakovsky
35.       From the Devotions/ Carl Phillips
36.       Kaddish/ Allen Ginsburg
37.       Gallows Songs/ Christian Morgenstern
38.       Collected Poems/ Donald Justice
39.       Poems/ Alan Dugan
40.       Collected Poems/ Philip Levine
41.       Pictures from Breughel and other Poems/ William Carlos Williams
42.       Ariel/ Sylvia Plath
43.       Hesperides/ Robert Herrick
44.       Collected Poems/ Edgar Allan Poe
45.       Joke, Cunning, and Revenge/ Friedrich Nietzsche
46.       Bucolics/ Maurice Manning
47.       Insomnia Diaries/ Bob Hicok
48.       The Prophet/ Khalil Gibran
49.       Collected Poems/ Bertolt Brecht
50.       Hotel Nirvana/ Harold Norse


Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Douchebag of the Day

Today the douche-o-meter goes bust on John Sununu.

Recently Mr. Sununu said:
I'm a giant weiner. Wah wah wah. The president's black and that makes me want to support Hitler. White Power. I John Sununu am definately saying this. Wah.
Sorry I was going to copy and paste the actual quote, but hey I'm drunk and pissed at his actual bullshit comments. It's funny how a communist born in the People's Republic of Cuba can lecture a red blooded American on what it means to be a "real" American. Fuck off! But seriously John Sununu was born in Havana, Cuba, I'm guessing only a crib away from Castro. Why does John Sununu hate America so much that he was born in the terrorist state of Cuba? Because he hates America.

But any way John Sununu definately knows how to be a real American. Listen to his sage like advice:
I'm a giant weiner. Wah wah wah. The president's black and that makes me want to support Hitler. White Power. I John Sununu am definately saying this.Wah.
 Shit. I'm sorry, I did it again. Ok Sununununu nunu nu said:
"I wish this president would learn how to be an American" 
Are you going to teach him how to be a real 'm'rican, eh comrade?


Anyone living in the United States is a real American. They cannot be taught how to be an American. A racist douchebag like John Sununu is just as American as is the president, as is the homelessman begging on the street, as is the banker, as are my grandparents who got off the boat from Latveria or anyone else living in the US. New York, Illinois, California, and Hawaii are just as much a part of America as is Wisconsin, Oklahoma, or Mississippi. So stop it with this shit. We have a vast range of ideas; many horrible, a few great, and we try to wrestle them out through debate and the political process. We get nowhere by trying to disqualify competing ideas by labeling them as anti-American.

Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me

Top 50 Novels

While working on the list I realized several telling things about life, literature, and myself.  Perhaps most telling about this list is it is almost all men, all western hemisphere, mostly hetero.  It's my belief that this list will look vastly different in 200 years, if people still write that is. Society has been dominated by men, more men have been writers, and men have dominated literary criticism, ensuring that male writers would gain fame and prestige.

So much of the literature that I have read over the years has been in the form of poetry, short stories, or drama.  The novel as a western form is new. Poetry has been around since writing (the bible, the Odyssey, and practically everything pre-antiquity), and Drama has existed since the Classical Greece. The novel as we know it, has been around only for about 400 years. The Mahabharata, the bible, the Volsunga saga, the Avesta, the Bacchae, Antigone, the Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, etc are all disqualified from this list.  So that pushes my list to being mostly (straight) white men in the last 400 years from Western Europe.


Here is the list of top 50 Novels that I have read: 
1.         The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum/ Heinrich Boll

This is one of my favorite Novels. Well actually, according to this list it is my favorite novel.  It has every thing: Action, adventure, terrorism, social political strife, and awesome puns. Here is how Wikipedia  describes the book:
The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be wanted by the police because of a bank robbery. Later it turns out that he is not a bank robber: he is a deserter from the Army who had stolen money from his camp before deserting. Ultimately she shoots the reporter, after he arrives at her house for an interview that she requested. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die Zeitung (The Newspaper), is modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.
Awesome.

2.         Night/ Elie Wiesel

Night is perhaps the most awful novel in history. No other novel have I ever read that goes into stronger details of human suffering. If there is only one novel every person should read, I would say it has to Night.

With the events of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, the message is still one that needs to be learned.
3.          Candide/ Voltaire

A brutal satire that could have been written in a more contemporary era.  It preserved the atrocities of its day from the auto-da-fe (in 1755 Portugal burnt the heretics because apparently the all loving all merciful all powerful god sent a tsunami (after a quick bit of research there may not have been an actual auto da fe after the Lisbon Quake, but they still were using the auto da fe during this time) to the horrors of colonialism/imperialism/slavery.

Voltaire even refutes Leibniz (Pangloss von Thunder-ten-Tronckh). Yay.

4.         The Metamorphosis/ Franz Kafka

While it is technically a novella I have included it on the list because it surpasses the form of a short story and is more similar in style to the fragment novels Kafka left.What other novel opens with a brief description of Venus in Furs only to spin deeper into an Existential Crisis. I also like to think whether or not it was intended, Kafka's Metamorphosis is a corruption of Nietzsche's 3 metamorphoses. Instead of the Camel (Altruism), Lion (Nihilism), and Child (Positivism) Kafka's are Altruist (Masochism), Cockroach (Nihilism), and Dead Cockroach (umm dead?).

5.         Slaughterhouse-Five/ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The only American to round out the top 5. Slaughterhouse-Five has one devastating quote in it. I will not reveal which one.  Here is how wikipedia describes it:

Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier. He does not like wars and he is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse (although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter) in Dresden. Their building is known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". The POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.
Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a nonlinear narrative. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories.
As Billy travels—or believes he travels—forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, real and fantasy. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s and early 1960s, and in the moment of his murder by a petty thief named Paul Lazzaro.
A+ Mr Vonnegut.

6.         The Great Gatsby/ F. Scott Fitzgerald
7.         Steppenwolf/ Hermann Hesse
8.         The Stranger/ Albert Camus
9.         Huckleberry Finn/ Mark Twain
10.       The Lord of the Flies/ William Golding
11.       The Invisible Man/ Ralph Ellison
12.       Tess D’Urbervilles/ Thomas Hardy
13.       The Trial/ Franz Kafka
14.       The Portrait of Dorian Gray/ Oscar Wilde
15.       Catcher in the Rye/ J.D. Salinger
16.       Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/ Lewis Carroll
17.       Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austin
18.       Demian/ Hermann Hesse
19.       Gulliver’s Travel/ Jonathan Swift
20.       The Watchmen/ Alan Moore
21.       D’alembert’s Dream/ Denis Diderot
22.       To Kill a Mockingbird/ Harper Lee
23.       All Quiet on the Western Front/ Erich Maria Remarque
24.       Notes from the Underground/ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
25.       The Crying of Lot 49/ Thomas Pynchon
26.       The Hunchback of Notre Dame/ Victor Hugo
27.       Madam Bovary/ Gustave Flaubert
28.       One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest/ Ken Kesey
29.       High Fidelity/Nick Hornby
30.       The Hobbit/ J.R.R. Tolkien
31.       A Clockwork Orange/ Anthony Burgess
32.       Montauk/ Max Frisch
33.       Middlesex/ Jeffery Eugenides
34.       Letters from an Unknown Woman/ Stefan Zweig
35.       The Scarlet Letter/ Nathaniel Hawthorne
36.       The Old Man and the Sea/ Ernest Hemmingway
37.       Thus Spoke Zarthustra/ Friedrich Nietzsche
38.       1984/ George Orwell
39.       The Sound and the Fury/ William Faulkner
40.       The Tin Drum/ Gunter Grass
41.       Comet in Moominland/ Tove Jansson
42.       The Hounds of Baskerville/ Arthur Conan Doyle
43.       Venus in Furs/ Leopold Sacher-Von Masoch
44.       Siddhartha/ Hermann Hesse
45.       Of Mice and Men/ John Steinbeck
46.       Cat’s Cradle/ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
47.       V for Vendetta/ Alan Moore
48.       The Harry Potter Series/ J.K. Rowling
49.       The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe/ CS Lewis
50.       Animal Farm/ George Orwell


Obviously this list is entirely shit.  Well the notion of ranking literature is shit, but I was still wanting to make my own list based on the literature that I have read in order to see what it say about myself.  Most of my favorite literature is not on this list as I absolutely love reading poetry and drama.  Also at this point in my life I prefer a short story or a collection of short stories to a full novel. And let's not forget the volumes of critical theory and philosophy that are absent from the list.

The big exceptions to the Straight White Men Rule are as follows:

 11.       The Invisible Man/ Ralph Ellison
14.       The Portrait of Dorian Gray/ Oscar Wilde
17.       Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austin
22.       To Kill a Mockingbird/ Harper Lee
41.       Comet in Moominland/ Tove Jansson
48.       The Harry Potter Series/ J.K. Rowling

I haven't read Wuthering Heights, I dislike Silas Mariner, My Antonia is so pedestrian... so lay off. And next on my Docket:

Billy Budd/ Herman Melville
Rereading Danton's Death/ Georg Buchner
The Temptation of Saint Anthony/ Gustave Flaubert
Swann's Way/ Marcel Proust

Friday, July 13, 2012

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Rachel Maddow

For months I have been following the Court Room Epic known as Dean v. Maddow  (Dean v. NBC Universal would be its hypothetical case name), where Axel Rose (not really) gains 50 pounds and goes on homophobic tirades and then sues Rachel Maddow for quoting him. I have read all the available documents from the original Complaint issued by Bradlee Dean, to the Special Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to DC Anti-SLAPP Act, and now the Certification for Recusal or Disqualification of Judge.

I read the other day that the Judge in the case had docketed a judgment in favor of NBC Universal, awarding them attorneys fees. Subsequently the Plaintiffs are now quixotically pursuing a recusal. So in their honor I have gone through the main documents in the case to explain and critic themHopefully the case will make a little bit more sense now.


The Complaint:

Don't Put in a Dollar Amount.

In many jurisdiction putting in an actual dollar amount in a complaint is unprofessional. Secondly 50 Million Dollars is ridiculous and makes you seem without creditability. If you are suing for 50 Million dollars, that is saying, Maddow ruined your reputation to the point where you expected to earn 1 Million dollars per year for the next 50 years. Dean is not Axel Rose so... yeah...

Side Bar Time

If you are suing someone for defamation, you should be mindful of the elements of a Tort. DBCD.  If you are claiming damages to your reputation and business, then making headlines (especially if it's the La Crosse Tribune):

DUNKERTON, Iowa — Administrators, teachers and students did not get what they expected Thursday during an extended school program.
Everyone anticipated the message from Junkyard Prophet, a traveling band based in Minnesota, to be about bullying and making good choices. Instead, junior and senior high students at Dunkerton High School and faculty members said they were assaulted by the group's extreme opinions on homosexuality and images of aborted fetuses.
"They told my daughter, the girls, that they were going to have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren't virgins," said Jennifer Littlefield, a parent upset with the band's performance..
... Littlefield also did not appreciate what she described as gay bashing.
"They told these kids that anyone who was gay was going to die at the age of 42," she said. "It just blows me away that no one stopped this."
Don't be in the news showing that the Maddow segment didn't affect your career. If you are still getting hired to preform at high schools, it is counter to your argument that you're damaged goods. Worse, if you are the one destroying your own reputation that undercuts the claim that Maddow is the causation. Worst, by saying sufficiently similar things to the alleged defamation, it shows the defamatory statements to be true, which is a defense against defamation.

Reduce the Pages

There are approximately 6 unnecessary pages out of 10. This is a court proceeding not the Newsroom at Fox. Slamming Maddow for being a gay leftist secular atheist will only anger the court because it has nothing to do with the case or the law.

State a Claim

Really why are you suing. If you can't state it in clear, concise words, then perhaps you shouldn't be suing.  Not everything requires a lawsuit.

Proof Read

Yes, hire a high school student if you need to. I'm dyslexic, and I would never, never submit anything without having 2 to 3 pair of eyes reading it, well except this blog because I'm lazy and cheap. Sentences like this should be edited "He is on information and belief a gay activist."  Once again I write a blog, I submit articles that I have proofread. They have spelling errors. If I were before a court I would pay someone to read it over. And get a style guide to learn how to comma properly. I suggest Eats, Shoots & Leaves.


The Special Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to DC Anti-SLAPP Act:

 Like her or hate her, Maddow has great lawyers. Really this motion is pure poetry. Well articulated, coherent and well reasoned. It is never abusive, but release on the law to make legal arguments.It is 51 pages, but if you ever get a chance to read the ant-slapp do it.  This is how a legal document should read.


The Recusal:


Good Faith vs. Bad Faith.

Because you are a Christian does not mean that you always have good faith. For example, if you move to dismiss your own action to bring the case to Federal Court to avoid Anti-SLAPP laws that is known as forum shopping. Forum Shopping is the antithesis of Good Faith. This motion clearly admits Forum Shopping, so it is doubly embarrassing.

While on the subject of good faith, NBC Universal could easily have filed a Motion for a change of venue. By getting a different venue Larry Klayman couldn't represent Dean, and let's face it DC is awkward in this case as Dean is primarily from Minnesota, Maddow Broadcasts from New York, and  NBC Universal is also out of New York.

It takes an Idiot...

When you are trying to get relief from judgment on the basis that the judge was prejudice it would behoove a litigant to do anything but call the judge a "woman scorned." It makes you seem like a jackass. Really why would you write that, all it can do is show that you were being unreasonable. Seriously, fuck, that's stupid.

!ekorts regna na dah tsuj I !ti nmaD

Ok. I'm better. When you are trying to claim prejudice, you yourself do not want to seem in the least bit prejudice. This is kindergarten shit.

It's a (Gay) Trap!

This is not Fox News. The Gay conspiracy doesn't exist. So stop it. It only hurts your argument as you seem unreasonable.


In the end it's real simple, the judge was in her right to order Attorneys' Fees. If you bring a suit forward only to drop it right before commencement you are wasting people's time and money.  What the Judge ordered was fair and reasonable. She could have gone a mile further and order deeper sanctions for wasting not only the defendants' money and time, but also the courts. She may also have been able to sanction Klayman (DC Bar Rule 3.2). This complaint is obviously frivolous because the plaintiff could barely state a claim. Dropping the case seconds before trial to pursue the same lousy case in a different court is a waste of time and money. Money the defendants should not pay.

All in all I am a little comfuzeded by this whole case.  I thought both Klayman and Dean were small government conservatives. So why do they need the Government to solve their problems? And why are they now seeking help from the largest, most gay loving intrusive level of government?

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Homersexual Agenda


The Homosexual Agenda a brief history.

In the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), Antonin Scalia wrote:
Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.
The problem with relying solely on group morality in a constitutional democracy to dictate the laws is that the constitution often interferes with the group morality. When we have penumbras such as privacy and the equal protection clause discrimination based on morality will be . Another way to put it is that our morals are eclipsed by our laws. The large distinction between morality and law is the concept of harm. Many things that are immoral are harmful: murder, theft, breaking-people's-legs. Other things are "immoral" but are not harmful and not illegal: eating bacon, sloppy gay sex, being a douche, etc. There is also another category of harmful but not immoral: jaywalking, speeding, being too awesome.

So obviously there are somethings that are harmful and immoral and those definitively should be against the law. But it is sloppy to say that because something is immoral that it is also illegal. And for good reason. Who's morality are we going to use? And what principles are behind that chosen morality?

The legal approach has its goods and its bads; however, the concept of harm as the basis of all laws is rather non-arbitrary, when compared to morality.

The moral approach is highly arbitrary particularly among religious zealots and literalists. They probably claim that they are the ones who definitely are not arbitrary since they follow every word of the bible, rationality be damned. But that is the problem, what rational reason is there for something to be illegal or immoral without harm. In the bible it often justifies morality by saying it displeases God. Eating cilantro displeases me; however, I don't consider it to be a sin nor think it should be illegal.

Here are somethings that the bible says are immoral:

Shellfish
Pork
Peeing while standing up (seriously 1 Samuel 25:22)
Gay Sex
Wearing Boyfriend-Jeans
Girls wearing pants
Men wearing skirts (Sorry Scotland)
Adultery (Punishable by Stoning)
Sex for Pleasure
Hair cuts
Palm reading
Leather
Polyester
Mixed Fabrics
Having Acne
Not Washing your Shower
Tattoos
Worshiping the wrong god (funny how that's every religion)
Saying Abracadabra
Forgetting the Incense
Simply wanting new things

Arguing with your parents (death penalty)
Wear gold
Shaving
Marring Foreigners
Doing anything on Sunday (goodbye football) 

And here are somethings the bible conveniently forgets:


Slavery
War
Homelessness
Illiteracy
Outsourcing
Tax Evasion (well Jesus said not to evade them)
Land Annexation
Burning of Fossil Fuels
Genocide
Over Population
Pre E-ZPass Toll Booths (evilest of all things)



So why is homosexuality immoral to some, and what is this Scalia-called homosexual agenda?

Morality is arbitrary and often based on religious text or philosophical work based on religious tenants. (As Nietzsche would say in today's parlance "suck it Marx.") Some people guess that religious texts are ancient survival guides and nation building manuals. So in that context perhaps then there was some rationality, but it no longer is applicable.

The homosexual agenda is not some scary menace. There is no conspiracy to convert teens into gays. There is a legal defense fund called Lambda Legal, the Human Rights Campaign, and organizations like the SPLC.

These organizations promote issues that actually matter in the lives of gay people and have little impact on the rest of Americans.

The Real Homosexual Agenda's Issues:

1. The right to marry whomever a person chooses.
2. The right to stick it in any consenting hole.
3. The right to continue Health Insurance in cases of HIV.
4. To be protected from acts of physical violence and destruction of property.

Wie schrecklich! It is so menacing to want to marry a person and have legal rights, or to not be arrested for having consenting sex in your own house (or blackmailed for it), or not lose your health insurance from catching a communicable disease, or to ask the police to actually investigate and catch criminals.


Anyway, I was trying to think of how a hick would say homosexual, and I came up with the word homersexual. And then I thought of a gay Homer Simpson, so this is today's disturbing photoshop:

two homers kissing, gay homer, homersexual
Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me

Monday, July 9, 2012

Newton After Einstein

Einstein did not disprove Newtonian Physics, rather he improved them. It is simplistic to think of Quantum Mechanics as a revolutionary force that disproved three hundred years of thought.  I have in the past indulged myself in this myth because of the glorious rush of the revolutionary feeling and the joy that concepts are not fixed and definite. It is as easy to say everyone in the past was wrong about practically everything, as it is easy to say that the past was far better than today.

To say Newton has been disproved or wrong is an error. For one thing in Newton's Principia he never claims to understand what gravity is or how it works.  He shows the mathematical principals behind gravity. Since he never claims to understand what gravity is there is nothing to disprove.  Einstein was only able to improve the equations, and through quantum mechanics physicists have been able to begin to understand what gravity is and how it works.

Einstein's Field Equation states:

R_{\mu \nu} - {1 \over 2}g_{\mu \nu}\,R + g_{\mu \nu} \Lambda = {8 \pi G \over c^4} T_{\mu \nu} \,.




This formula solved Mercury's seemingly erratic trajectory, and changed forever the way humans understand the universe. On a solar eclipse we can see light from stars bends around the sun. Newton's theory doesn't give us that possibility.
   
In his Principia, Newton states:

F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}\

Through a long series of equations involving scalar curvature and tensors, and other calculus based jargon Newton's formula exists in the Einstein Field Equation. I don't fully understand what the entirety of the mathematics; so showing the full math would be useless, but you can look it up for yourself.

The main practical problem with Newton's Theory is that it is not truly universal. In fact Newton's Laws can still be used today, for ordinary earth bound applications. However, the lack of universality does not make his work untrue, and thus it does not mean that the Quantum Mechanics revolution disproved Newton. Newton's universe is only a stock image or a subset of a greater universe.

A bit of the defrocking of Newton comes from the Historical concept of Newton the man. How history came to define Newton as a rationalist, the father of calculus, and a brilliant scientist is wrapped up in the French Revolution.   The man Isaac Newton was born 1643 and died in 1727.  He was an alchemist and an empiricist, and his Christian theology was centered around disproving the great scourge of Spinozaism (or that is my sense from reading the Clarke-Leibniz letters.) During the French Revolution Newton's biography was scrubbed clean of all things non-rational. During this time he transformed into something more French and more Post-Enlightenment-Era appropriate: a deist, a naturalist, and a rationalist. The somewhat modern invention of Newton created by the Sorbonne placed Newton on a pedestal.  No longer is Newton a fallible man but a romanticized scientist.

After Einstein came along this once inescapable force, was turned on its head.  Time and space are one phenomenon which can be bent by matter via gravity.  It must have seemed so alien compared to "shit falls to the ground when dropped." And with Einstein, another god was seemingly disproved. But once again these two theories are not contradictory, but fit together.

It will be interesting to see in one hundred years how Newton is viewed.  It will be more interesting to see how Einstein is view in light of String Theory and other advancements Einstein only could have wished to theorize. With the discovery of the Higgs-boson it would appear we have pushed the era of Einstein to its outer limits. (Well science still needs to find the graviton.) It will be interesting to see whether another god falls to the history of time or if humanity has finally accepted a constantly changing universe. It doesn't look good for Einstein, as his name is synonymous with genius, and people have already forgotten that Einstein did not stand alone (Heisenberg, Bohr, David Hilbert).


As a child I had a mantra:

All ideas are simply waiting to be proven false.

Now as a man I realize that all concepts which appear true are awaiting a deeper nuance.



Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Happy No Taxation without Representation Day


Too hot to eat; that phrase is not recognized by the American idiom. So go stuff your orifice of patriotism with all the meat products and potato salad you can find.

Heads up. Rumors started pouring out a few days ago that CERN discovered a new subatomic particle which may be the Higgs-Boson Particle.  If it is indeed a new particle either way it will change the notions the universe (if it’s the Higgs-Boson it comfirms many previously unconfirmed hypotheses and aspects of quantum mechanics will now be theory; if it is a new unpredicted particle then all bets are off.)  I think the next article I write will be on Newton after Einstein where I regurgitate a Hegelian Deconstruction of Newtonian Theory after the era of Quantum Mechanics.

Oh yeah, and remember Free DC.

Liam ‘12