Feb. 9th, 2007

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I had meant, some months back, to cite Kurt Andersen’s article in New York magazine (“The End of the World As They Know It”) on why everyone was either dreading or longing for apocalypse at the moment, depending on one’s condition of belief regarding the topic and expectation of what would follow thereafter.

In my glacially slow progress through Against the Day, this morning I reached this passage on page 712:

“This was a period in the history of human emotion when ‘romance’ had slipped into an inexpensive subfusc of self-awareness, … as if in some stylistic acknowledgement of the great trembling that showed through, now and then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly at hand and inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as physical symptoms, or another case of ‘nerves,’ or, like the earlier, dimmer Cyprian, some kind of ‘romance’ in the offing, however little prepared he might have been for that.”

This is very nearly a burlesqued, Pynchonized summary of Robert Musil’s oft-cited novel The Man Without Qualities, if you recall. The characters are all concerned with their inner lives, or the great themes of statecraft, or simply muddling through, except for the protagonist who is concerned with what it means to encounter what he thinks of as the Other Condition, and while this great dance of absurd circumstance and deep thought is going on, the world in which they live is on the verge of being plunged into precisely the historical nightmare that all of them are too preoccupied to see coming.

We see our environmental nightmare coming, and lackadaisically debate what it would take to keep the world’s oceans from creeping gradually up the beaches of Miami and over the entire country of Tuvalu, but the world capitals that happen to be inland and on higher ground find it difficult to get exercised about the topic, and those whose short-term future is built on not investing money in drastic solutions continue to insist that the phenomenon is as inevitable and inescapable as the Ice Ages.

In the meantime all the different energies of global cultural collision keep us preoccupied with the question of whether we will fall prey to the pettiest of anarchies or physical poverties long before larger forces can do us in. Ask any number of displaced professionals in highly diversified economies, not to mention the multitudes of day laborers who live out what Tolstoy, I think it was, called a migration in the search for work that rivals the wanderings of Odysseus. Every one of them, like myself, would just as soon be thinking exclusively about getting their prescriptions filled before showing up at work on time, and then what to do with the Friday night after, rather than with whether the framework that allows any of those things will continue to exist. And given the slightest amount of stability, each of them promptly lapses back into thinking that way. Who wouldn’t?

This is part of what lay behind my brief reflection on the delectable surreality of having Salman Rushdie and the Dalai Lama on the same university payroll. The two represent the most opposing solutions possible to the same vast general array of forces. In addition, each calls forth in other people the crudest of emotional responses for the highest and deepest of abstracted reasons, and responses at both ends of the emotional spectrum, too. (But perhaps, given the sheer diversity of ideologies, conditions and temperaments, all of us evoke love, hate, admiration and contempt in more or less equal measure? some just more spectacularly than others.)

One represents an imaginative, skeptical-analytical approach to resolving the dilemmas confronting his own life and the world in general; the other represents an analytic, nontheistically mystical approach that is in some ways as untraditional in terms of his own cultural inheritance as the other’s is in terms of the one into which he was born. There are few points on which they would agree unequivocally, except that we live on a planet in which self-deception, desire and unalloyed anger are as likely to plunge us into catastrophe as has ever been the case. And that parts of the planet have, at different times and for different reasons, been out to nail their asses.

And that, given the opportunity, we would all really just as soon go back to sleep and forget the whole thing.

Glad I got that out of the way a decent interval before Valentine’s Day. Damn, I wish my synthesizing reflections were better timed, but they aren’t.

More on why I wonder what Glenn Mullin knows about the inner life of the Dalai Lama, later. Salman Rushdie’s inner life is of immense interest also, but being as how he is a novelist and not a spiritual leader, it’s of interest more as a subset of our inherent desire to engage in gossip. A desire which is well assuaged by incomprehensible behavior, but Rushdie doesn’t seem to operate that way, nor does His Holiness. Both lead lives that seem consistent with their initial public premises, which already distinguishes them from a good many public figures we know and do or do not love.

Given the ongoing need to get some errands taken care of before the workday starts, I shall be surprised if the projected essay on this topic ever arrives. Really. Any day now. It’ll be great, I promise.

On the topic of apocalypse with which I began, my collected poems once had an epigraph (since displaced by a passage from John Crowley’s Love and Sleep ) extracted from an interview with Milan Kundera: “Q: Do you believe the world is coming to an end? A: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one. Q: So we have nothing to worry about? A: On the contrary. When a fear has been present in the human mind for countless ages, there must be something to it.”
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Physicists have learned how to imprison and release light, with implications for information processing and the creation of truly unbreakable codes. As they say, "That's the sort of stuff we find really sexy in this business.":

Wizardry at Harvard: Physicists Move Light

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: February 8, 2007

It’s like three-card monte. Now you see it. Now you don’t. Then you see it —
over there.

In a quantum mechanical sleight of hand, Harvard physicists have shown that
they can not only bring a pulse of light, the fleetest of nature’s
particles, to a complete halt, but also resuscitate the light at a different
location and let it continue on its way.

That ability to catch, store, move and release light could be used in future
computers to process information encoded in the light pulses.

“It’s been a wonderful problem to try to wrap your brain around,” said Lene
Vestergaard Hau, a professor of physics at Harvard and senior author of a
paper describing the experiment that appears today in the journal Nature.
“There are so many doors that open up.”

In 1999, Dr. Hau headed a team of scientists that slowed light, which
travels a brisk 186,282 miles a second when unimpeded, to a leisurely 38
miles an hour by shining it into an exotic, ultracooled cloud of sodium
atoms. At temperatures a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the atoms
coalesce into a single quantum mechanical entity known as a Bose-Einstein
condensate. Shining a laser on the cloud tunes its optical properties so
that it becomes molasses when a second light pulse enters it.

Then, in 2001, Dr. Hau and a second team of physicists, this one from the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, brought light to a complete
halt by slowly turning off the laser. The Bose-Einstein cloud turned opaque,
trapping the light pulse inside. When the laser was turned back on, the
trapped light pulse flew out.

The latest results add an additional twist: transporting the pulse to a
second Bose-Einstein cloud and regenerating the light there. “That’s the
sort of stuff we find really sexy in this business,” said Eric A. Cornell, a
senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In the new Harvard experiment, when the initial pulse slammed into the first
Bose-Einstein cloud, the collision caused 50,000 to 100,000 of the sodium
atoms to start spinning, almost like small tops, and pushed this small clump
forward at less than a mile an hour.

Dr. Hau described the clump of atoms as a “metacopy” of the light pulse.
Although it consisted of sodium atoms instead of particles of light, it
exactly captured the characteristics of the light pulse.

The clump floated out from the rest of the cloud, traveled about two-tenths
of a millimeter and burrowed into a second Bose-Einstein cloud. When a laser
was shined on the second cloud, the atom clump transformed into a new pulse
of light identical to the original pulse.

It was refinements to the 2001 experimental technique that extended the time
the particles maintain quantum collective behavior. This allowed the clump
to reach the second cloud.

Transforming a light signal into a clump of atoms could be a way of storing
information. (“You could put it on the shelf for a while,” Dr. Hau said.) It
could also enable a way of performing calculations in future optical
computers that employ quantum algorithms to speed through certain types of
calculations.

But one hurdle to building a computer that calculates with light is that it
is difficult to grab onto and manipulate a quick-moving light pulse.
Performing calculations with atomic clumps would be much easier with the
result changed back into light and then sped to the next step.

“That has been a missing link,” Dr. Hau said.

The advance could also find applications in quantum cryptography, which can
hide messages in codes that cannot be broken.

Dr. Hau said the current apparatus was just a proof of the concept and far
from anything that could be used practically for any applications.

But that has not stopped other physicists from starting to ponder what the
applications might be, just as her earlier experiments have spurred
physicists and engineers in a new active field of research, looking for ways
to harness slow light for use in optical networks.

Currently, optical signals need to be changed into electronic ones for
processing and then changed back into light. All-optical devices could save
on costs and power use.
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Re-reading recent posts, I began to wonder if the Freehold Township meteorite had indeed been an unusually elaborate hoax or urban legend. Not only does it appear to be confirmable (at least the addresses and names in this story exist on other sites) but this version of the story makes sense of what appeared to be mystery or pointless comedy in the original news report. Furthermore, this version feeds into some of the major ongoing themes of this blog:

msnbc )

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