Thursday, December 31, 2009
einstein's compass
einstein's compass
experiencing a miracle
trembling with excitement
sparking genius
creating a world of thought
flying certainly away from the miraculous
a small book of Euclidian Geometry
seeking the miraculous in clarity and certainty
gravity
ρ(v, T) = 8πhv³/c³ 1/exp(hv/kT) – 1
E = hv – P
Cv = 3R ( hv ) ²/kT exp (hv/kT)/[exp (hv/kT) – 1]²
Rydberg's Constant = 2π²e⁴m/h³c
landing uncertainly in probability
wandering and wondering in the quantum universe
playing symphonies on strings
Galileo's Telescope
I hope to be Galileo's telescope - helping people see, discovering, bringing faraway near, confronting fear
2009 was the four hundredth anniversary of Galileo Galilei's telescope. Galileo (1564-1642) was a scientist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and physicist. He was a "wonderer", and this "wondering" quality encouraged him to think differently from his fellow Pisans. When he was a child people said, "He has stars in his eyes."
Copernicus (1473-1543) was also a "wonderer". He looked up into the sky and wondered: "What if the world doesn't act the way people think it acts? Maybe the earth revolves around the sun." He wrote down his wonderings but didn't publish them because he couldn't prove them and because he was afraid, fearful of the power of the Church. Italy was like a quilt in those days, sewn out of patches of city states, each city state with its own laws and government. The only thing the city states had in common was a common religion, the Catholic faith, and the Church was a powerful influence.. The Church believed the Bible taught that the earth was the center of the universe. To go against this belief of the Church meant the possibility of suffering and punishment.
In 1609, Galileo heard about an instrument that could make small things big and bring faraway near. He wrote: "A report reached my ears that a certain Fleming had constructed a spyglass...Upon hearing the news, I set myself to thinking about the problem...Finally, sparing neither labor nor expense, I succeeded in constructing for myself so excellent an instrument that objects seen by means of it appeared nearly one thousand times larger and over thirty times closer than when regarded with our natural vision." (The word telescope was coined two years later, in 1611.). This instrument helped him use his senses, reason, and intellect to show people that Copernicus was correct - the earth and the other planets moved around the sun.
Each night, Galileo looked up and out into the night sky and wrote down everything he observed. He published his observations in a book that he called "The Starry Messenger". He sent telescopes and copies of his book to all the kings and princes of Europe. When he was a young man he had entertained and amused people with his brilliant observations. The people would say, "Galileo is our star!" Now his brilliance made him Chief Philosopher and Mathematician to the Medici court.
Galileo wrote: "I hold the sun to be situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial orbs while the earth rotates on it axis and revolves around the sun.". His belief about the way the world worked differed from the Church's belief. He stated: "I do not feel obliged to believe the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use...He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations...If they (the ancient philosophers) had seen what we see, they would have judged as we judge". The Church disagreed with him and brought him before the Inquisition.
He was tried by the Inquisition and found guilty of heresy. "Namely for having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture; that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to the Holy Scripture" (June 1633 Rome). He was condemned to spend the rest of his life locked in his house under guard. The stars that had been in his eyes since his birth in Pisa went out. Later, he went blind.
Galileo's ideas lived on, as truthful ideas do. On October 31, 1992, three hundred fifty-nine years after he was sentenced by the Inquisition, he was pardoned by the Church. His blind eyes opened the eyes of others and helped them see. The wonder of his genius is a star that guides us still.
WPA
The Federal Writers Project was created in 1935 out of the dust of the Great Depression as a part of the Work Projects Administration in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. In my home state of South Carolina, the writers in the writers' program journeyed through the Palmetto counties, from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, from the Upstate to the Midlands, to the Low Country, and wrote down the sights they saw and the stories they heard, writings that were collected and binded into a book titled, "The WPA Guide to the Palmetto State."
I am writing a story about two brothers growing up in Clarendon County, SC during desegregation and the early Civil Rights Movement so I am using the Guide to help me journey back to that time and place and listen to the stories of the people and see the sights on the land as they were in the 1930's and 1940's. On one of those journeys I discovered a story from a trail to Scott Lake in Clarendon County, a place near the Liberty Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church where meetings were held in the 1940's and 1950's that led to local court cases which helped bring about the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating public schools. Here is the story as it was written by the FWP writer.
"The trail leads around the lake through virgin timber and dense undergrowth. Here rises the vast bulk of an INDIAN MOUND (R), 1 m., 50 feet high and 800 feet in circumference. Legend recounts that it is under the curse of an Indian girl deserted by her lover. Atop the mound is the SITE OF FORT WATSON, a British Revolutionary post. In 1780 General Francis Marion decided to capture the fort. Bombardment was out of the question, for the Americans were out of artillery, but Colonel Maham, one of Marion's officers, proposed building a log tower higher than Fort Watson. Hidden by the trees, men hewed logs and the tower was erected in a single night. At dawn a shower of lead poured down into the enemy enclosure, effecting a quick victory. The scheme was used several times in later Revolutionary encounters."
So this place was under a curse, not only the legendary curse of the indian girl deserted by her lover but also the curse of a people deserted by neighbors, the curse Jim Crow. And so this place was the site where other kinds of fighters in another kind of revolutionary war, fighters who were ministers and farmers and people of the land named JA and Mattie DeLaine, Levi Pearson and Harry and Liza Briggs, fighters who gave their hearts, souls, minds, and bodies to build a movement that was hidden in the South Carolina soil but that poured down on Jim Crow like a shower of lead from the sky, a Civil Rights Movement that would lead to victory over segregation in the South, though not as quickly as the victory of the old swamp fox Francis Marion and his compatriots.
As a writer, I am wandering the paths of the FWP writers, learning the stories, the people, and the land of my state in the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's, trying to see and feel through the eyes and hearts of two boys growing up on a farm during those times of great hope and great fear, wondering.
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