Wisdom from the 42nd Page

Dreaming

On the forty-second page of “Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction” author J. Allan Hobson wrote (italics in the original; bold emphasis added):

the rocks. I am glad that I was forewarned (by C.?) that the rock was rotten because I quickly adapt to the succession of slides of large slabs of the cliff side. Each time I take a step, some of the granite falls away. These huge chunks of rock make not a sound as they fall, out of view, to my left. Finally, with relief, I am at the summit, which is a grill-like threshold on to which I level myself with two hands. I thank my benefactress—hostess (C.?) for having prepared me to cope with this hazerdous ascent.

The universal characteristics that this REM sleep dream evinces are intense frequent hallucinations (called hallucinosis in psychology)—in this case the climbing movements are all perilously gripping—and a complete lack of self-reflective awareness. The setting is typically indefinite: it is my house but not really; the characters are vaguely defined—in this case particularly C.; emotions such as fear and elation are strong.

It is as if my brain were activated in a particular, selective way to form hallucinations and emotions that are sensorimotor (coordinating perception and action) in character, causing these elements to be combined in a completely novel but personally meaningful way. This is the 'synthesis' part of the dream process

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(Oxford University Press, 2005. Paperback, 153 pages. ISBN: 0192802151; EAN: 9780192802156.)

The Chilling Stars

On the forty-second page of “The Chilling Stars: The New Theory of Climate Change” physicist Henrik Svensmark wrote (some emphasis added):

other galaxies. Solar cosmic rays are relatively feeble and come from explosions on the Sun. Often called solar protons, they are hazardous for astronauts and spacecraft but seldom have any effect at ground level. Anomalous cosmic rays are also feeble. They come from distant shock waves in the Sun's magnetic field and are of interest only to space scientists.

Whenever cosmic rays figure in our story, we mean the ordinary galactic sort. They arrive from outer space as primary cosmic rays and generate knock-on products in the air, called secondary cosmic rays. These are the ones—the secondaries made by the primary cosmic rays from the exploded stars—that are passing through your skull about twice a second, even as you read this paragraph.

Not just an optional extra

For a long time, most astronomers regarded cosmic rays as curious but unimportant by-products of the death of stars, like litter found after a funeral. By the end of the 20th century a very different perspective was emerging, and in 2001 Katia Ferrière of the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, headquartered in Toulouse, wrote a manifesto about it. Her opening sentences promoted cosmic rays to their rightful place in the scheme of things astronomical.

The stars of our galaxy—traditionally referred to as 'the Galaxy' with a capital G to distinguish it from the countless other galaxies—are embedded in an extremely tenuous medium, the so-called 'interstellar medium' (ISM), which contains ordinary matter, relativistic charged particles known as cosmic rays, and magnetic fields. These three basic constituents have comparable pressures and are intimately coupled together by electromagnetic forces.

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(Totem Books, March 2007. Paperback, 246 pages. ISBN: 1840468157; EAN: 9781840468151.)

Black Holes and Time Warps

On the forty-second page of “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy” renowned physicist Kip S. Thorne wrote (emphasis added):

As the ship descends, your crew make a photographic record of the changes in the appearance of the sky around the starship. Most remarkable is the change in the hole's black disk below the ship: Gradually it grows larger. You expect it to stop growing when it has covered the entire sky below you like a giant black floor, leaving the sky overhead as clear as on Earth. But no; the black disk keeps right on growing, swinging up around the sides of your starship to cover everything except a bright, circular opening overhead, an opening through which you see the external Universe (Figure P.4). It is as though you had entered a cave and were plunging deeper and deeper, watching the cave's bright mouth grow smaller and smaller in the distance.

In growing panic, you appeal to DAWN for help: "Did Kares miscalculate our trajectory? Have we plunged through the horizon? Are we doomed?!"

P.4  The starship hovering above the black-hole horizon, and the trajectories along which light travels to it from distance galaxies (the light rays). The hole's gravity deflects the light rays downward ("gravitational lens effect"), causing humans on the starship to see all the light concentrated in a bright, circular spot overhead.

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(W. W. Norton & Company, January 1995. Paperback, 619 pages. ISBN: 0393312763; EAN: 9780393312768.)

The Annotated Turing

On the forty-second page of “The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine” author Charles Petzold wrote (some emphasis added):

was not used at the time, at least not in its modern sense. The modern usage of the word only became common in the 1960s in literature about computers.¹³

In that 1900 address, Hilbert invited his audience to "lift the veil" behind which the twentieth century lay hidden. Neither he nor anyone else could have imagined quite the spectacle they would have seen. If physicists believed they were on the verge of total knowledge, those hopes were dashed in 1905, the year now known as the annus mirabilis of physicist Albert Einsten (1879–1955). In a single year, Einstein published a doctoral thesis and four other papers that established the basic principles of relativity and quantum mechanics.

No longer was there any sense that the universe was linear, Euclidean, and fully deterministic. Space and time lost their moorings in a relativistic universe. In a famous 1907 paper on relativity, Hilbert's friend Hermann Minkowski would coin the word Zaumreit or spacetime. (Minkowski had come to G&oumalt;ttigen in 1902, but died suddenly of appendicitis in 1909.) Eventually, the century's best known result of quantuum mechanics would be something known as the Uncertainty Principle (1927).

Perhaps in response to this new displacement and uncertainty, modern art and music went in startling and provocative directions. Visual forms and objects were broken apart and reassembled in cubist paintings and sculptures. As the real-word "objective" universe became less reliable, surrealists looked inward to their subconscious lives and irrational dreams.

In music, the chromaticism of late romantics like Wagner and Debussy seemed almost tame as it gave way to the harsh dissonances and jagged new rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which incited riots at its 1913 Paris premiere. In the early 1920s, Austrian composer Arnold Schöat;nberg's development of twelve-tone music represented nothing less than a re-axiomatization of the principles of musical harmony to create a non-Euclidean music.

Twentieth-century mathematics was not immune to these upsets. The first jarring notes sounded in 1902.

Gottlob Frege, born in Wismar, Germany, in 1848, had received his Ph.D. at Göat;ttingen two decaes before Hilbert arrived there, and then began teaching at the University of Jena, where he would remain for 44 years. The first volume of his life's work, the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, was published in 1893, and attempted a systematic development of all of mathematics beginning with mathematical logic—a program now known as logicism. This first volume sold so poorly that the publisher didn't want to hear about the second volume, so in 1902 Frege was attempting to publish it at his own expense.

¹³See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. I, 313. Also see the opening pages of Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume I, Fundamental Algorithms, 3rd edition (Addison-Wesley, 1997). The most famous algorithm of them all is Euclid's method to find the greatest common divisor of two numbers, but the first known usage of the term "Euclid's Algorithm" seem to date only from the early twentieth century.

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(John Wiley & Sons, June 2008. Paperback, 372 pages. ISBN: 0470229055; EAN: 9780470229057.)

Science as Salvation

On the forty-second page of “Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning” author Mary Midgley wrote (emphasis added):

Destiny is written as and while, not before, it happens... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?¹⁰

Notice how hard it is to depersonify one's world. Clearly, Monod thinks of a casino as embodying the total lack of order and purposive connexion which he takes as the basic condition of nature. This story is a gross insult to casinos. Real casinos are not chancy things at all but highly purposeful human artefacts, devices to produce a peculiar arrangement that is never normally found in nature—namely, a calculated disorder which can baffle prediction. How artificial this kind of 'chance' is can be seen from the amount of trouble it takes to produce it. Complex techniques and ceaseless vigilance are needed to make the roulette tables (or whatever), and the people running them, following this peculiar pattern.¹¹

The same thing emerges from the difficulties experienced by the people who publish random number tables. They must carefully examine these tables so as to remove orderly sequences which constantly get into them by accident. The fact that these sequences are accidental—that is, natural—does not mean that they can be accepted. The randomness of these numbers does not really mean 'chance' at all in the sense of accident. It means aptness for a very special purpose—namely, defeating prediction.

Why, then, should the basic constitution of the universe be—as Monod claims it is—this particular, highly artificial arrangement of disconnected items? There is no obvious reason in the nature of science why it should be so. This pattern was indeed the one used when physicists thought of matter as composed of standard little chunks which acted merely by being banged against each other. But that kind of physics was not successful. The idea of a 'scientific' approach as commited to it cannot be right.

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(Routledge, May 1994. Paperback, 239 pages. ISBN: 0415107733; EAN: 9780415107730.)

The Turk

On the forty-second page of “The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine” author Tom Standage wrote (emphasis added):

Altering the automaton for travel, so that it could be taken apart, packed, transported, and then put back together again, took several months. To Kempelen's chagrin, it also put a stop to his work improving his speaking machine. Buy by the beginning of 1783 the preparations were complete and the Turk was ready to go on the road. It must have seemed to Kempelen that the automaton had a life of its own. He had brought it into the world—yet now it was controlling his destiny.

Of all the cities of Europe, two were renowned for their enthusiasm for chess during the eighteenth century: Paris and London. Chess had been a popular pastime in coffeehouses in both cities since the beginning of the century and enjoyed a period of heightened popularity in the 1770s and 1780s, when it became extremely fashionable in high society. As the nearer of the two cities to Vienna, Paris was the logical place for the first stop on the Turk's tour of Europe.

As the French writer Denis Diderot put it in 1761, "Paris is the place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the place in Paris where this game is played best." The Café de la Régence was a coffeehouse founded in the 1680s, and by the 1740s it had become the most prominent haunt of chess players in the city. Well-known intellectuals who were regulars at the café over the years included the philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the American states[man]

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(Berkley Trade, August 2003. Paperback, 288 pages. ISBN: 0425190390; EAN: 9780425190395.)

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

On the forty-second page of “Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist” authors William R. Maples & Michael Browning, wrote (hyperlink & emphasis added):

you are walking around with several thousand dollars' worth of bones encased within you, and that your skeleton is getting more valuable every year.

All of my students take what they call "the bone course," human osteology, in their junior or senior year. As they progress, I give them spot examinations. I begin by handing them ten large fragments of bone and allowing them a minute and a half to identify each one, to tell whether it is human, what bone it is, and whether or not it is the right or left bone. Then, as the semester progresses, the intervals of time get shorter and shorter, and the bits of bone get smaller and smaller. By the end of the term all ten samples can fit in a small matchbox.

Bones can riddle us devilishly. Often I try to fool my students by including fetal bones or bones from a bear's paw, which can look astonishingly human. I've been called out on two cases where "human hands" turned out to bear paws. I have seen forensic pathologists identify lost bones in skulls as penetrating injuries by weapons. I've seen the bones of a blue heron gravely identified as human. I have seen specialists who should know better identify with great confidence the sex of a teenager incorrectly. I have seen sheep's ribs identified as human ribs. Turtle shells can cause terrible confusion, and gopher tortoises and snapping turtles are awful tricksters. Pieces of their shells look very like fragments of human skullcaps. Only recently I was called out to investigate some suspicious bone fragments found near a spot where a body had been found earlier. The police asked me if a serial killer were using this area as his dumping ground. I was able to reassure them immediately: the fresh "skull" was a crushed turtle shell.

It is one thing when we are fooled by nature's mimicry. It is quite another when a cunning skeletal hoax is put before the scientific community and passed off as a revolutionary discovery. Perhaps the most famous fraud ever attempted along these lines was the renowned skull of "Piltdown Man," which was "unearthed" early in

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(Main Street Books, January 1994. Paperback, 304 pages. ISBN: 0385479689; EAN: 9780385479684.)

The Velocity of Honey

On the forty-second page of “The Velocity of Honey: And More Science of Everyday Life” author Jay Ingram wrote (emphasis added):

be hard-wired differences (even the great apes have them) can change over a relatively short time. Also, the examination of Central and South American art showed that regional differences existed at the same time. If you then take into consideration one additional study revealing that in Madagascar, women prefer to hold their babies on the right, not the left, the puzzle deepens even further.

If the secret lies in the brain, then explanations will have to be found for these contradictions that seem to have existed over time, and from place to place. That won't be easy, for however plastic and adaptable the brain is, it would take some powerful influence—as yet unidentified or even unimagined—to switch hemispheric specializations. Such switching does occur in some, but by no means all, left-handed people, but there's no evidence that baby-holding follows handedness; in fact, most left-handers hold babies on the left too.

It might be that we're still not close to an answer here. I have to admit that when I heard the brain-hemisphere theory for the first time, I found it hard to believe. After all, the advantage gained by having the "emotional" right hemisphere the one on duty must be marginal at best. It doesn't take a right hemisphere to hear the tone of distress in a baby's cry or see the happiness in a smile. Maybe the scientists are making too much of it. But if it isn't the brain, then what is it?

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(Basic Books, February 2005. Hardcover, 224 pages. ISBN: 1560256540; EAN: 9781560256540.)

Sleep Demons

On the forty-second page of “Sleep Demons: An Insomniac's Memoir” author Bill Hayes wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

man's criteria? I was alert to noise, heat, the sky, as if my senses were turned on at high volume; I was aware of myself as separate from my mother, separate from the aircraft. Still, I know this wouldn't be enough for him. It's far too subjective. In the same way that it's difficult to determine the exact instant a person wakes up, Dr. Kleitman felt that the transition from "the primitive nonconscious wakefulness" of a newborn to full consciousness does not occur all at once.

If I were to meet with him, he would demand of me unassailable proof, exactly as he had of Eugene Aserinsky when the student came to him in 1951, claiming to have discovered the existence of REM. He presented numerous polygraphic recordings of subjects in REM sleep, including his son. As Dr. Aserinsky later wrote, the evidence seemed irrefutable. But Dr. Kleitman wanted to see the "wiggling" eyes for himself. He gave Aserinsky a small home-movie camera.

Mindful of the blinding floodlights required for filming, Aserinsky rigged up a dimmer switch to raise their brightness gradually while his sleeping subjects progressed toward REM. To enhance visibility, their eyelids had been blackened with greasepaint. The camera was held close to the subjects' faces and made a loud whirring noise, Aserinsky later recalled; he was sure they'd wake up. They didn't. Hence, by accident, he'd found that in REM, a sleeper's resistance to arousal was quite high, a previously unknown aspect of this state. Because of its distinctive EEG, he had thought of it before as a variant of wakefulness.

Aserinsky returned to Dr. Kleitman's office to show his "home movies." But even this documentation was not enough. The doctor could not be convinced until he had observed a session in the sleep laboratory. For a subject, Dr. Kleitman insisted upon using one of his daughters. Finally he was satisfied. The data confirmed that REM sleep occured with tremendous activation of the brain—a finding in direct con[flict]

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(Washington Square Press, January 2002. Trade Paperback, 368 pages. ISBN: 0671028154; EAN: 9780671028152.)

Five Quarts

On the forty-second page of “Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood” author Bill Hayes wrote (hyperlink & some emphasis added):

careful placing of two or three fingers along a tiny stretch of artery used to be considered an art form, a notion largely lost in the mad shuffle of contemporary health care. One needs to page back a good hundred years or so to rediscover a time when this vital sign retained all of its, well, vitalness. I've found no more erudite an advocate than Sir William Henry Broadhent, personal physician to Queen Victoria and author of a unique monograph, The Pulse (1890). In its pages Sir William is a spirited defender of what he calls "the educated finger." In an early passage he subjects the wrist and its pulse point to a curious clinical analysis, as if describing a patient with an odd case history. He is long-winded, but endearingly so: "At first sight it seems strange that the radial artery, which supplies [blood to] merely the structures of part of the hand—a few small bones with their articulations, a few muscles and tendons, the sking and nerves distributed to it—should afford the varied and far-reaching knowledge we look for in the pulse. The hand is not essential to life, it contains no organ of any importance, and a priori it might have been supposed that the variations in the circulation of the blood in so small a member could have no significance." There is little about this passage I do not love, from the doctor's crisp visaul dissection to the delicious irony he's blinded to in his academic fervor: If not for the irrelevant hand, he could not even take the pulse, let alone write about it. But I digress. The distinguished doctor, who'd practiced medicine for more than thirty years by the time this book was published, goes on to state without equivocation that the wrist pulse is a "trustworthy index," a reliable gauge for the entire circulatory system.

A portrait reproduced on the frontispiece of his memoirs broadens my sense of the man: Seated, he looks the very essence of "bedside manner"—compassionate, patient—as though he's just asked, "What seems to be the problem?" A stout gentleman

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(Ballantine Books, January 2005. Hardcover, 304 pages. ISBN: 0345456874; EAN: 9780345456878.)