Bible, titles of some classics and Oscar Wao

Here are a few links from the latest Hindu literary review edition:

• Ravi Vyas in his Classics revisited column writes about Bible, and mentions the ten themes or cluster of ideas that run through the entire book, and the role of Bible in the shaping of the Western literary tradition; a nice essay!
• Pradeep Sebastian writes about how some of the classics have got the names that they have got, and, as usual, his piece is full of nuggets of information that I, at least, am hearing for the first time–like e e cummings who refused to title a book of his, and that the name Reservoir Dogs for the Tarantino movie is a private joke — a mishearing of the French film Au Revoir les Enfant. A must read!
• Shelley Walia (finally, at least after the Pulitzer) reviews Oscar Wao for the literary edition; even the pieces that get quoted in reviews from Diaz’s book are so much fun to read:
  

  “He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator,” Díaz writes, “a personage so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.”

  Take a look, and don’t miss the fun! (I do not know if there is an affordable Indian edition: but whatever be the cost of the book, it is like, totally worth it!

Have fun!

On the contribution of Bohr

Robert P Crease writes about the life and legacy of Neils Bohr in this piece at Physics World:

Bohr practised physics as if he were on a quest. The grail was to fully express the quantum world in a framework of ordinary language and classical concepts. “[I]n the end,” as Michael Frayn has Bohr’s character say in the play Copenhagen, “we have to be able to explain it all to Margrethe” — his wife and amanuensis who serves as the onstage stand-in for the ordinary (i.e. classically thinking) person.

Many physicists, finding the quest irrelevant or impossible, were satisfied with partial explanations — and Heisenberg argued that the mathematics works: that’s enough! Bohr rejected such dodges, and rubbed physicists’ noses in what they did not understand or tried to hide. However, he did not have an answer himself — and he knew it — but had no reason to think one could not be found. His closest approximation was the doctrine of complementarity. While this provoked debate among physicists on the “meaning” of quantum mechanics, the doctrine — and discussion — soon all but vanished.

Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.

“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”

Thus while Bohr used the notion of complementarity to say that quantum phenomena are both particles and waves — somewhat confusingly, and in ordinary-language terms — the notion of Hilbert space provided an alternate and much more precise framework in which to say that they are neither. Yet the language is abstract, and the closest outsiders can come to grasping it is Bohr’s awkward and imperfect notion.

A must-read piece; link via Chad.