Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Sunday Science Poem: The Epicurean theory of vision, plus bedwetting in ancient Rome

640px-Ercolano03For those of you looking for a break from the pre-game show, here’s this week’s reading of The Nature of Things.

Discard, for the moment, everything you know about vision – about light sources that emit photons of various frequencies, about photons that pass through or reflect from materials before impinging on the photoreceptor cells in your retina, stimulating your optic nerve, and generating an image in your brain. As we set aside our modern knowledge and begin from scratch to think about the surprisingly knotty problem of how visual images are faithfully transmitted and perceived across the distance between an object and our eyes, it’s not hard to understand why Lucretius’ Epicurean theory of vision is so convoluted and not very explanatory.

Lucretius didn’t know anything about scattered and reflected photons, but he deeply believed that the world could be explained by the action of particles. So his theory of vision in Book IV of The Nature of Things is based on objects emitting particles:

Let me begin
by saying there are images of things - a sort of skin
shed from the surfaces of objects, from the outer layer -
films that drift about this way and that upon the air…”
- Book IV, lines 29-32

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: The Epicurean theory of vision, plus bedwetting in ancient Rome”

The End of the World, 1985: A Post-apocalyptic tropical paradise

Beach_in_key_westWithin science fiction, there is a great tradition of the oddball post-apocalyptic novel, pioneered by Philip Dick in Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) and Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny, 1976). It is a tradition still thriving today in books like Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon (1995) and Ryna Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife (2012), and it includes Denis Johnson’s lyrical Fiskadoro. The oddball post-apocalyptic novel is not concerned with the gritty realities of survival; instead, it takes place in a less lethal and much more hallucinatory setting that is populated with various hucksters, grotesques, dreamers, and generally confused people who are trying to figure out just what the hell is going on.

The post-apocalyptic setting of Fiskadoro is a group of small fishing communities in the paradise of the Florida Keys, about sixty years after a nuclear war destroyed North America and probably much of the rest of the world. Life here is based on scraps of the pre-holocaust world: physical scraps, scraps of language, scraps of identity, and scraps of awareness of the birth of the present world. Salvaged car seats make up the living room furniture, and people speak in a combination of broken English and Spanish. The residents of these villages piece together their identities by assuming names of celebrities nobody can any longer recall, or grandiose but largely irrelevant titles like ‘Manager of the Miami Symphony Orchestra’. Continue reading “The End of the World, 1985: A Post-apocalyptic tropical paradise”

Lucretius and the fear of death

Yesterday’s discussion of Lucretius’ The Nature of Things only touched very briefly on two of the many fascinating ideas of Books I and II. As a supplement to yesterday’s discussion, below is a bit more from the passage in Book I explaining why the fear of death is one of the Epicureans’ main targets, and why an understanding of the nature of things is supposed to aid us in living a life free of anxiety over death. This passage is taken from the Project Gutenberg translation by William Ellery Leonard:

And there shall come the time when even thou,
Forced by the soothsayer’s terror-tales, shalt seek
To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now
Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,
And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
By some device unconquered to withstand
Religions and the menacings of seers.
But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,
Since men must dread eternal pains in death. Continue reading “Lucretius and the fear of death”

Lucretius did not believe in non-overlapping magisteria

What does science have to do with how we should live? Not much, is often the official answer in our pluralist and technocratic society. We depend on science to be one of two non-overlapping magisteria, for the purpose of social harmony in a religiously diverse society that takes science as a dominating authority, at least in principle – even creationism or climate change denial needs to be couched in technological jargon for it to even pretend to be acceptable in discussion.

This attitude is the opposite of what we find in the Epicurean Lucretius, who wrote the world’s greatest science poem in the express belief that you can’t live life properly if you don’t understand the true nature of the universe. This idea is the key to making sense of what first struck me as an odd juxtaposition in two big features of Epicurean thought: the belief that life’s major goal is to maximize happiness, and the belief that the world emerges from the behavior of atoms. How are these two beliefs connected? The answer is death. Continue reading “Lucretius did not believe in non-overlapping magisteria”

Commenters

The other day I was perusing online reviews of iPad styli. The comments on the reviews were shockingly de-enlightening (ie, reading them made one stupider). Even an Internet veteran like myself can still be surprised by how quickly individuals trying to provide advice about an unnecessary gadget can dissolve into anger and name calling. Continue reading “Commenters”