Too Much To Dream

well, now...will just have to go out and purchase MORE of Sayers schtuff...have read one book of hers already, called 'The Mind of the Maker' which was, for me, an excellent book in describing the connections writers have with God and the creative process. I recommended it to one woman, who came back and told me she automatically did not like it because she did not like the way the author looked and the way she wrote was 'arrogant.'

I have had another friend tell me they thought she was too racist in her mystery series.

Go figure. I found the things she said to be rather valuable, if not different.

A pet peeve of mine is the tendency to look at discredited scientific theories in hindsight as having been poorly motivated or logically absurd, when they were really only had the defect of being incorrect. This triumphalist ridicule shows up frequently in popular and elementary accounts of the history of science, especially if they were not written by historians of science.

This shows up particularly in discussions of theories that supposedly involve unnecessary entities. For instance, it's popular to heap scorn on the idea of the luminiferous ether: those idiots-- they thought there was a substance pervading the universe that was perfectly elastic, perfectly permeable by solid matter, undetectable by normal means, etc., etc... how could they have been so dumb? Fortunately Einstein set us straight and we are now on more solid ontological ground, and no longer make use of such unnecessary entities.

If you really look into it, though, and study the physics, you'll find that relativity is not such an ontological clarification at all. Modern physics posits all sorts of entities existing everywhere in the vacuum that have something like these properties; all Einstein did was change the assumed symmetry group of the resultant physical laws. When we say there is no luminiferous ether we really mean that mechanics is Lorentz invariant and not Galilean invariant.

Einstein said as much himself, especially later in his career, in some statements that often lead cranks to think he recanted.

Similarly, there was once a think-piece in the Washington Post about the dumbest ideas of the past millennium, in which they claimed that the number one dumbest idea was the phlogiston theory! The reason it was so dumb, according to the Post writer, was that phlogiston was a proposed substance that could not be detected in any way save through its role in combustion; clearly anyone with intelligence could have identified it as a chimera. Of course, at the time the same would have been true of electrons. The Post author seems to have believed that extreme Machian positivism was the right way to approach science, when in fact it was abandoned a long time ago.

Now, having written what I wrote, I have to add that I don't think "Gummo Trotsky" actually committed the error I described.

He may have had a simpler misunderstanding based on a different annoyance. I've heard it claimed from time to time that in the light of modern science, Ptolemy's geocentric model is just as correct as the heliocentric one, because they both explain all the data and the only thing differentiating between them is a change of coordinates. (Sometimes there's some handwaving in there about general relativity, though the ability to make arbitrary coordinate changes is not actually unique to general relativity.)

Now, for various reasons, this claim is actually incorrect, because Ptolemy's system actually makes predictions that are not borne out by observation. It's more true if stated about Tycho's somewhat different geocentric cosmology, but even that has its problems if taken too far-- problems that may not have been detectable in, say, 1700, but certainly are today.

"Trotsky" may have mistaken Sayers' vague statement (which I interpret as being about nothing more than the intuitive appeal of Ptolemy's world) as advocacy of this incorrect claim. It's an understandable mistake if one has gotten into two or three arguments about this already.

AND*, I might add (at the risk of putting anyone who is still reading to sleep), there *are people out there such as John Lukacs who insist even today that, while modern physical theories may explain data better in some hoity-toity mathematical way, it was a grave mistake to adopt them because they have destroyed the vital, fuzzy, human-centered cosmos that we used to live in. (Not all of these people are New Age hippies; some of them are paleoconservatives of a hardcore sort.) And if you've read a truckload of that kind of crap already, you might understandably react crankily to anything that sounds like it.

RE Dante and Ptolemy: Sayers was obliged to describe Dante's cosmology because it is vital to understanding the poem. It would be useful to read C.S. Lewis's delightful and learned The Discarded Image to gain understanding about how the Ptolemaic system arose.

RE Sayers's racism: well, yes, the Lord Peter stories contain comments that in our eyes have anti-semitic and racist qualities. Other comments in the same books go entirely in the other direction. Her time did not have our obsessions.

Er . . . what Matt said. I didn't get the idea that Sayers was in any way endorsing the Ptolemaic model, but merely stating that it has intuitive appeal because it looks like what most people see when they look up at the sky. And she's right about that -- explaining to a child that the sun remains in place and only appears to rise and set because of the rotation of the Earth is a case of, "Who am I going to believe, you or my own lying eyes?" It runs counter to what they observe daily, and therefore isn't always appealing.

And it isn't as if Ptolemy has gone away. Pick up any book on beginning amateur astronomy, and at some point you will see a diagram explaining metaphorically how the fixed stars appear in the sky that is indistinguishable from a Ptolemaic universe: Earth at the center, surround by a huge sphere marked with a grid, on which the fixed stars, Messier objects and other deep-sky objects all lie. The math and the more correct model comes later.

Well, the people ahead of me largely covered the big points, so I will add just this:

"with its nostalgia for a simpler world" and "Sayers is woefully ignorant of the science"

Where in the hell did he get that? The direct quote was "superior as a description of what the heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena" which is entirely correct. This is entirely analogous to the assertion that the earth is flat or that objects naturally come to rest: that is exactly what it looks like, without probing deeper.

One feels obligated to point out to Gummo that the Ptolemaic model fits the observed phenomena so well that it lasted for thousands of years. Also, it's not sporting to make fun of beliefs that old.

Re: Sayers' "racism" — can someone please tell me where it is? The only black character I remember in all the Wimsey novels is the wholly sympathetic Rev. Hallelujah Dawson in Unnatural Death.

In that book, another character reports yet a third character as describing the Rev. Hallelujah as a "dirty N----." But if books containing racist characters are to be counted as racist, we should have to throw out nearly all of American black literature. You can't denounce racism without describing it. Sheesh.

Actually, it is valuable to be aware of the progression of our view of the universe. Each successive model of how the world and universe around us behaves was, at the time, both within the margin of error of current measurement technology. There might be a few exceptions, as there were some models that were used long after being disproven for theological reasons.

The reason it's valuable is that people in general have the tendency to accept current theory as fact. Yesterday morning, I was explaining (attempting to, at least) to my seven-year-old daughter the distinction between being smart and knowing a lot. So, she asked me something I don't know. The first example, swiped from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (IIRC) was gravity. We all understand how objects behave under the pull of gravity. But, I explained, no one understands what gravity actually is. We have a model for it. But we don't understand what actually causes it, other than it has a strong correlation to mass. Someday, we might understand gravity (as well as the weak force, etc) really well. But for the time being, all we have is the same equations Newton came out with several hundred years ago (as sharpened by Cavendish).

If you're interested (even slightly) in the history of this kind of thing, I strongly recommend Coming of Age In The Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris. It basically explores the...evolution of the human worldview.

Gummo Trotsky? Isn't it time for his date with Gummo Icepick?

I just recently finished Unnatural Death. I thought her dialogue was just her being true to her characters. It would be ridiculous for her hard-bitten provincial cops to have a progressive outlook and speak in the politically correct tones of today (especially when the books themselves were written in the twenties). But then we have people today who still insist that Huckleberry Finn is a racist book.

Someone mentioned C S Lewis' "The Discarded Image"--it's a really interesting speculation about the psychological and social meaning of the Ptolemaic view and other aspects of the medieval and Renaissance mindset. I personally think it's both interesting and valuable to try to understand such things.

BTW, I believe that in learning celestial navigation, the student basically takes a Ptolemaic view...both conceptually and in the structure of the tables in the Nautical and Air Almanacs, the model is basically one of the celestial bodies revolving around the earth.

David, this is because having the Earth as the center of the universe is a valid simplification of the truth, given the accuracy required. Star charts are updated yearly (because of several factors I won't get into here) and are also accompanied where necessary by local derivatives of the things that do change.

It should also be noted that this simplification is wholly unsuitable for use inside the solar system. But even as close as Alpha Centauri, the parallax is only a few seconds of arc. For seagoing celestial navigation, this is negligible compared with the accuracy of the instruments. For stellar-aided navigation systems, you'd select stars that are at a distance where the parallax is small compared with your measurement resolution.

Model simplifications are extremely handy. If they weren't, you'd have to do something ridiculous such as solve the n-body problem for the entire local group.

On the use of the present: I have a feeling he was going for an expanded version of the literary present, so as not to have to say "Sayers writes" (as is stylistically necessary when quoting someone) and also "Sayers believed."

On Sayers' racism.... well, ditto on the above, but also she's much less racist in regards to South Asians than most authors even today, as in, she mentions them (for example, in Gaudy night, listing the names of people on a hall, Banerjee shows up among them with no particular emphasis) but does not emphasize that they're different, non-white, brown, exotic, all that. In that way, she's ahead of our time...

(As the point of true color- and sex-blindness (hmm that latter sounds like the product of too much meat-beating...) can only be reached when people no longer feel a need to point out, "look! there's a black woman! she made it!" -- nobody gets excited about the racial success story of a black basketball player, for example, which is good!)