“And you’re right too”

General relativity v. quantum mechanics:

A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century. In the morning the world is curved space where everything is continuous; in the afternoon it is a flat space where quanta of energy leap.

The paradox is that both theories work remarkably well. Nature is behaving with us like that elderly rabbi to whom two men went in order to settle a dispute. Having listened to the first, the rabbi says: “You are in the right.” The second insists on being heard, the rabbi listens to him and says: “You’re also right.” Having overheard from the next room the rabbi’s wife then calls out, “But they can’t both be in the right!” The rabbi reflects and nods before concluding: “And you’re right too.”

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (London: Penguin, 2016).

The work of reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics has given rise to the study of quantum gravity, the subject of Rovelli’s more recent book, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017). I suspect that it’s a much scarier book than Seven Brief Lessions: 288 pages v. a mere 79.

I cannot claim to understand any of this stuff, not now, perhaps not ever. But I can try.

Also from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Elementary particles

Relativity: LPs

Walking past a stand of vinyl in Barnes and Noble, I realized how large LPs now look: they’re easily mistaken for wall calendars. CDs have changed my sense of scale. And it doesn’t help that the LPs I most often see are the ones on my shelves, just spines, 1/8″ or 3/16″ or so wide.

The LP’s size has always been to its advantage: front and back covers and the occasional gatefold invite and reward attention, before, during, and after listening. No background music: only background looking and reading.

Related reading
All OCA relativity posts

Paul McCartney and relativity

From “Like Professors in a Laboratory,” the fourth episode of the mini-series McCartney 3, 2, 1:

”George Martin was like our teacher, just because of the age. He was a little bit older. It wasn’t much. I mean, I think we always thought of him as an old man. I think he was like probably thirty when he started with us, which I certainly don’t think of as old now.”

George Martin was born in 1926 (d. 2016). Paul McCartney was born in 1942.

Paul is not my favorite Beatle, but four episodes in, McCartney 3, 2, 1 is a delight, a parade of surprises about what’s in Beatle songs and how those things got there. Rick Rubin, McCartney’s partner in conversation, is an enthusiast and a helpful maker of suggestions that McCartney picks up and expands upon. Too much head bobbing though.

Back to relativity: here’s Russell Procope, clarinetist, saxophonist, Ellingtonian, talking about King Oliver and Johnny St. Cyr and making a similar observation about age.

“An integral part of nature”

Carlo Rovelli:

Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution which our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past which haunts us and serenity. Our reality is made up of our societies, of the emotion inspired by music, of the rich intertwined networks of the common knowledge which we have constructed together. All of this is part of the self-same “nature” which we are describing. We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (London: Penguin, 2016).

This passage reminds me of something Jonathan Shay writes in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994): “Culture is as biologically real for humans as the body.”

Also from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Elementary particles : General relativity v. quantum mechanics

E=F♭

Here’s a theory of relativity I can understand.

As a boy caroler, Van Dyke Parks sang “Stille Nacht” for Albert Einstein. They once sat one row apart at the 3-D horror film House of Wax. And at the Princeton Junction train station, three days before Einstein’s death in 1955, twelve-year-old Van Dyke got an autograph.

Thanks to Van Dyke Parks, who sent this doctored photograph my way.

Happy birthday, VDP

Van Dyke Parks turns sixty-nine today. Happy birthday, Van Dyke.

[Sixty-nine is the new fifty-two. The explanation: the special theory of relativity.]

Russell Procope and relativity

I like this brief exchange from Chris Albertson’s 1979 interview with clarinetist and alto saxophonist Russell Procope (1908–1981). From 1946 to 1974, Procope was a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Here Procope recalls his growing awareness of older musicians in the mid-to-late 1920s:

Procope: They used to talk about Joe Oliver and Johnny St. Cyr, and all those old guys, you know.

Albertson: They weren’t really that old then.

Procope: Well, they were older than I was. I was about seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; they were probably about twenty-five. I called them old. [Laughs.]

The cornetist and bandleader Joe “King” Oliver was born in 1885; the banjoist and guitarist Johnny St. Cyr, in 1890. By the mid-to-late ’20s, they were past twenty-five, though hardly old. But age varies with perspective, right? Older than you is old.

Chris Albertson’s interview offers the rare opportunity to hear Russell Procope talk about his life and work: Part One, Part Two. And here, courtesy of YouTube, is one of Procope’s finest moments with Ellington, “Second Line,” from New Orleans Suite (1970).

Special theory of relativity

Forty is the new thirty. Sixty is the new forty. Eighty is the new sixty. Ninety is the new eighty.

Also, ninety-two is the new eighty-three. Ninety-six is the new ninety. Ninety-seven is the new ninety-two.

A hundred is still a hundred.

Relativity

My daughter's watching Meet Me in St. Louis this afternoon. It's one of her favorite movies. But it's not, she tells me, her favorite movie of all time. Marty is.

Meet Me in St. Louis, set in 1903, was released in 1944. I've always thought that an audience watching the movie in 1944 was looking back on an antique, bygone world. But now it occurs to me that their experience would be comparable to that of a 2006 audience watching a film set in 1965. And 1965 wasn't all that long ago. Heck, that's when Help! and Rubber Soul came out, along with The Sound of Music, which used to be my daughter's favorite movie of all time.