All the Lights

[fearful_syzygy]

So has anybody read this?

It's in Issue 37 of Conjunctions Magazine, which I'm going to try and take a look at tomorrow.

I've managed to find one quote from it on the 'net:

“Nufro went ahead and proved mathematically that if you swim to an unknown boat out in the bay who you find owns it could be vastly different from who would have owned it had you taken a canoe there instead”

Sounds more like Eco than MZD, if you ask me, but this guy seems to have liked it, so...

[Ellimist]

I'm going to try and take a look at tomorrow.

How will you be going about doing that? My university's library doesn't have it, and the only place I could find it is on Amazon.com, and it costs $15.00.

However, when you "look inside," you see issue 34, not 37...

[fearful_syzygy]

Well, obviously my university's library kicks your university's library's arse then!

[marsjams13]

If you find it, maybe you could share the wealth :eusa_pray:

[Raminagrobis]

Edited - for pdf see this post.

[fearful_syzygy]

Excellent. I made a pdf of it on Saturday, and was waiting for MZD (via nikhsub1) to give the all-clear to put it up, but in the meantime everyone either take the opportunity to download those, or PM me and I might, as usual, find it in my heart to send you a copy.

[Raminagrobis]

Whoops. Didn't mean to pre-empt you there.

Anyway, what did you think of it? It is supposed to be a Borges pastiche, right?

[Ellimist]

I really like this story. :icon_biggrin:

[Raminagrobis]

I really like this story. :icon_biggrin:

Funny, I would have thought otherwise (what with you being a physicist and all).

I wonder if MZD wrote it as a provocation directed at Sokal and that crowd?

[Ellimist]

Anyway, I think the Sokal hoax was hilarious. I loved it. Academic journals needs to pay close attention to what is being published, and check peer reviews. Then again, "The Physics of Ero^r" was unpublished, right?

[Raminagrobis]

Anyway, I think the Sokal hoax was hilarious. I loved it. Academic journals needs to pay close attention to what is being published, and check peer reviews. Then again, "The Physics of Ero^r" was unpublished, right?

Yeah but Livia Bassil's Psychology of Physics was published! And it contained egregious impostures like this: 'It is a political imperative for any and all free thinkers to mistrust any institution claiming to be beyond the motions of our own impulses.' :banghead:

[Ellimist]

Yeah but Livia Bassil's Psychology of Physics was published! And it contained egregious impostures like this: 'It is a political imperative for any and all free thinkers to mistrust any institution claiming to be beyond the motions of our own impulses.' :banghead:

I must admit, I don't quite understand what she meant by that. Perhaps I read too quickly and missed the context, but... is she saying that there is something non-human about science and must be made humanized, sort of like what MZD was discussing at the beginning of the story?

[Raminagrobis]

I must admit, I don't quite understand what she meant by that. Perhaps I read too quickly and missed the context, but... is she saying that there is something non-human about science and must be made humanized, sort of like what MZD was discussing at the beginning of the story?

In context it's simply a refusal to recognize any absolute objective values in science, I think. Not that I'm imputing that idea to MZD, you understand. The fact that the story's packaged up in god-knows-how-many layers of narrative wrapping makes it difficult to do that. But it's difficult to get a handle on the story as a whole, isn't it? From what you're saying, it seems you read it as a piss-take, a sort of knowing critique of its own premise, casting sidelong glances at both sides fighting the 'science wars'...?

Incidentally - and this is slightly off the point - I was reading somewhere recently an article that made a much more convincing point about the 'psychology' of science, but from the opposite position. The point was that scientists (mathematicians and physicists especially) are extremely preoccupied with the ideal of 'elegance' in equations etc., and that this preoccupation is potentially detrimental to science as a whole, 'elegance' being a concept perhaps not quite so intrinsic to the fabric of the universe as we would like to believe.

[Raminagrobis]

Yeah, that makes sense, but doesn't the desire for elegance go deeper than just a practical need for neatness and efficiency? I mean Einstein spent many years being obstinately wrong about quantum physics precisely because he didn't think it was elegant enough. Not because the equations were too cumbersome, but because it clashed with his idea of what physics should be like.

By the way, I think you're right, that lyrical passage at the end of the story does just about make up for it.

On another matter, there was a rather good story by David Foster Wallace in the same issue of Conjunctions (did you read it, f_s?), plus an article by Paul Auster about why football (soccer) is a substitute for war. Go out and buy it immediately, it's worth $15 of anybody's money.

that was my token attempt to avoid accusations of copyright infringement

[modiFIed]

... it's almost like a belief.

Careful...

ha - String theory. I love listening to the physicists who support it paint the old school as bogged down in the physics of the last century, while those who dismiss it wonder how a theory that is incapable of being tested (and therefore disproved) can even be treated as science.

Still, it is quite an elegant theory. And it does provide a GUT, however untestable.

Wow - I've just melded String theory with ID. Now I'm in for it.

Edit: welcome back, Ramina. You slipped in so quietly - like you had just stepped out to get a paper.