Vukutu » Prophecy

At Swim-two-birds

peter — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:02:19 +0000

Brian Dillon reviews a British touring exhibition of the art of John Cage, currently at the Baltic Mill Gateshead.

Two quibbles: First, someone who compare’s Cage’s 4′ 33” to a blank gallery wall hasn’t actually listened to the piece. If Dillon had compared it to a glass window in the gallery wall allowing a view of the outside of the gallery, then he would have made some sense. But Cage’s composition is not about silence, or even pure sound, for either of which a blank gallery wall might be an appropriate visual representation. The composition is about ambient sound, and about what sounds count as music in our culture.

Second, Dillon rightly mentions that the procedures used by Cage for musical composition from 1950 onwards (and later for poetry and visual art) were based on the Taoist I Ching. But he wrongly describes these procedures as being based on “the philosophy of chance.” Although widespread, this view is nonsense, accurate neither as to what Cage was doing, nor even as to what he may have thought he was doing. Anyone subscribing to the Taoist philosophy underlying them understands the I Ching procedures as examplifying and manifesting hidden causal mechanisms, not chance. The point of the underlying philosophy is that the random-looking events that result from the procedures express something unique, time-dependent, and personal to the specific person invoking the I Ching at the particular time they invoke it. So, to a Taoist, the resulting music or art is not “chance” or “random” or “aleatoric” at all, but profoundly deterministic, being the necessary consequential expression of deep, synchronistic, spiritual forces. I don’t know if Cage was himself a Taoist (I’m not sure that anyone does), but to an adherent of Taoist philosophy Cage’s own beliefs or attitudes are irrelevant to the workings of these forces. I sense that Cage had sufficient understanding of Taoist and Zen ideas (Zen being the Japanese version of Taoism) to recognize this particular feature: that to an adherent of the philosophy the beliefs of the invoker of the procedures are irrelevant.

In my experience, the idea that the I Ching is a deterministic process is a hard one for many modern westerners to understand, let alone to accept, so entrenched is the prevailing western view that the material realm is all there is. This entrenched view is only historically recent in the west: Isaac Newton, for example, was a believer in the existence of cosmic spiritual forces, and thought he had found the laws which governed their operation. Obversely, many easterners in my experience have difficulty with notions of uncertainty and chance; if all events are subject to hidden causal forces, the concepts of randomness and of alternative possible futures make no sense. My experience here includes making presentations and leading discussions on scenario analyses with senior managers of Asian multinationals.

We are two birds swimming, each circling the pond, warily, neither understanding the other, neither flying away.

References:

Kyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence. John Cage’s 4′ 33”. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.

James Pritchett [1993]: The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Technorati Tags: John Cage, I Ching, Zen, Taoism

Silicon millenarianism

peter — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:09:29 +0000

Here we go again! We have another blogger predicting the end of the office. Funny how it’s almost always bloggers and journalists and thinktank-swimmers doing this – always people whose work, most of the time, is by themselves, and who therefore fail to understand the nature of actual work in modern organizations. As I’ve argued before, workplace interactions are primarily about the co-ordination of actions and the assessment of people’s intentions concerning these actions, not (or not merely) about sharing information. Why did Barack Obama summon the Chairman and CEO of BP to the Oval Office earlier this week? Why was the CEO also called to testify before Congress? Why didn’t the President or the Congressional Committee simply place a conference call? Because it is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to accurately assess another’s intentions without immediate physical proximity and face-to-face interaction.

If all you are doing is writing a blog or researching a story, perhaps you don’t ever appreciate this fact about work. But anyone tasked with doing something other than writing knows it. Seth Goodin thinks that within 10 years TV programs about office work will seem to be “quaint antiques”. I bet him they will not at all. Moreover, I bet the people in those offices will still be using paper, still having meetings, and still talking by the water-cooler. In fact, while you’re placing my bets, put me down for 100 years, not 10.

Poem: Tu ne quaesieris

peter — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:47:52 +0000

Ode I:XI of Horace, Tu ne quaesieris (translated by David West), ending with the advice, carpe diem.

Don’t you ask, Leuconoe – the gods do not wish it to be known -
what end they have given me or to you, and don’t meddle with
Babylonian horoscopes. How much better to accept whatever comes,
whether Jupiter gives us other winters or whether this is our last

now wearying out the Tyrrhenian sea on the pumice stones
opposing it. Be wise, strain the wine and cut back long hope
into a small space. Even as we speak, envious time
flies past. Harvest the day and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.

Reference:

Horace [1997 AD/23 BCE]: The Complete Odes and Epodes. Translation by David West. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Technorati Tags: Horace, carpe diem

Nicolas Fatio de Duillier

peter — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:18:50 +0000

Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664-1753) was a Genevan mathematician and polymath, who for a time in the 1680s and 1690s, was a close friend of Isaac Newton. After coming to London in 1687, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society (on 1688-05-15), as later did his brother Jean-Christophe (on 1706-04-03). He played a major part in Newton’s feud with Leibniz over who had invented the differential calculus, and was a protagonist all his life for Newton’s thought and ideas.

Newton and Fatio were particularly close friends in the period leading up to Newton’s nervous breakdown in 1693 (Manuel 1980), and some have speculated that Newton’s relationship with Fatio was somehow the cause of the breakdown. However, the two seemed to have remained on good, although not close, terms subsequently, and no doubt Jean-Christophe Fatio could not have become an FRS in 1706 without the approval of Newton, who was President of the Royal Society at the time. Among Fatio’s many activities, he co-developed a technique for drilling holes in rubies, a procedure of importance to precision watch-making through the 18th century. Fatio is included (under the spelling “Faccio”) in Robert Allen’s list of 79 important inventors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain (Allen, p. 270).

In the first decade of the 18th century, Fatio become involved with a Millenarian sect which arose among the French Protestant Huguenot refugee community in London, the so-called Camisards or Prophets of Cevennes (Schwartz 1980). Despite legal repression and public humiliation of him and the sect leaders by the English authorities, he continued to support this movement for the remaining four decades of his life. The conventional wisdom among scientists of the period and subsequently was that this religious fervour was evidence of a sudden descent into madness. Charles Domson (1972/1981) has argued persuasively that Fatio had held religious beliefs since at least 1693, when he was still a close friend of Newton, and so any adoption of belief was not sudden. Moreover, he continued to undertake scientific work before and after his period of public association with the sect. Domson argues that, like Newton’s scientific, alchemic and scriptural activities, Fatio’s life was all of a piece. It is only a very condescending (and particularly modernist and Western) viewpoint that sees scientific activities and religious beliefs as being incompatible. (See Stephen Toulmin’s wonderful book on the pernicious effects of this viewpoint over the last three centuries.) This arrogant condescension has perhaps extended to Newton’s biographers: Manuel (1980) calls Fatio “the ape of Newton”, as if all he did was imitate the Great Man and then not very well (since Fatio got religion), while Gleick’s recent biography (Gleick 2003) tries very hard, if unsuccessfully, to not mention him at all. (Gleick does not appear to have read Domson’s book, for example.) In contrast, White (1998) writes at length, but scathingly, of Fatio; his vituperation is matched only by his ignorance of science, not understanding, for example, the difference between prediction and explanation.

Newton’s theory of gravitation was a predictive theory but not an explanatory one: it presented a mathematical model (the inverse square law) to predict the extent of influence which bodies of mass, such as planets, have on one another, but Newton’s model provided no causal explanation as to why this influence occurred. Fatio sought an explanatory theory of gravitation and was the first to propose a so-called “push theory” of gravity: objects of mass emit particles which create pushing forces on other objects (van Lunteren 2002). Although ridiculed at the time and since by physicists, push theories are now being taken seriously in physics (Edwards 2002). It seems that Nicolas Fatio de Duillier may at last receive some recognition for his contributions to science 250 years after his death, despite Newton’s biographers. I wonder when Fatio will himself get a biographer worthy of his or her subject, i.e. a biographer with knowledge of the calculus, of science at the beginning of the scientific age, of politics at the time of the Glorious Revolution, and sympathetic to millenarian religious impulses. This seems to be a rare combination of qualities, which only proves to me Fatio de Duillier’s distinction.

Between 1694 and at least the northern summer of 1698, Fatio was employed as a tutor to Wriothesley Russell (1680-1711), later the second Duke of Bedford. In 1695, Russell married Elizabeth Howland, daughter of rich land-owner John Howland, who bequeathed the couple land in the east end of London. Wriothesley Russell and his family used this land in 1696-1698 to build Howland Great Wet Dock (later called Greenland Dock), the first riverside dock in London. This dock was capable of holding 120 large ships, and was immensely successful commercially. Its success led to other docks being built — for example, Liverpool’s first dock was constructed in the early 18th century, and was the basis for that city’s subsequent trading dominance. During the same years as the dock construction was taking place, Fatio was investigating the impact of sunlight on fruit trees growing on sloping surfaces, undertaking experiments during the late 1690s and publishing a treatise on this topic in 1699. He would therefore have known something about creating artificial slopes and walls. An interesting question is whether Fatio had any involvement in the conception or construction of the Howland Great Wet Dock, or indeed Liverpool dock.

UPDATE (2010-01-01): According to Jane Longmore’s account of the building of the Liverpool wet dock, said to be the world’s first commercial wet dock, construction took place between 1709-1715. The engineer engaged to oversee construction was Thomas Steers (c. 1672-1750). According to the biography of Steers in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Evetts/Chrimes 2006), Steers had acquired water engineering skills while a soldier in the Netherlands in the 1690s. Steers does not appear to have worked directly on the construction of the Howland Great Wet Dock, although he married someone from, and lived in, nearby Rotherhithe while that dock was under construction, and also undertook land surveying work for the Howland family. It is not clear why or how Steers was selected as the chief engineer for the Liverpool dock, although the Howland chief engineer, George Sorocold, had been consulted about the Liverpool dock prior to the passage of the enabling act of Parliament in May 1709, so Sorocold may have recommended Steers. Given the mathematical calculation skills then required for such engineering tasks, and their relative rarity at the time, it is not inconceivable that Fatio and Steers were in contact prior to the construction of the Liverpool dock. However, the dates of that construction (1709-1715) make it unlikely that Fatio was directly involved in work on the Liverpool dock, since he was at that time active and traveling with the Camisards.

Notes:

If you know more about Nicolas Fatio de Duillier or the late Charles Domson, I would welcome hearing from you.

I am grateful for assistance received from Michael Heyd, Scott Mandelbrote and Hillel Schwartz. I alone, however, am responsible for the contents of this page, and for the opinions expressed here. Please note that this page is copyright 2003, 2008, and 2009; unauthorized copying or public display or dissemination is prohibited. All rights are reserved.

Latest revision: 2010-07-11.

References:

Robert C. Allen [2009]: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Michael Clarke [2005]: Thomas Steers. Available here, accessed 2010-01-01.

Charles A. Domson [1972/1981]: Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and the Prophets of London: An Essay in the Historical Interaction of Natural Philosophy and Millenial Belief in the Age of Newton. New York, NY, USA: Arno Press, 1981. Originally presented as a PhD Thesis at Yale University in 1972.

Matthew R. Edwards (Editor) [2002]: Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage’s Theory of Gravitation. Montreal, Canada: Apeiron.

Naomi Evetts [2006]: Thomas Steers (c.1672–1750). revised Mike Chrimes. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38006, accessed 2009-12-29.

James Gleick [2003]: Isaac Newton. London, UK: Fourth Estate.

Michael Heyd [1995]: “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Leiden, The Netherlands: EJ Brill.

Margaret C. Jacob [1978]: Newton and the French Prophets: new evidence. History of Science, 16: 134-142. Available here.

Jane Longmore [2006]: Civic Liverpool: 1680-1800, pp. 113-169 of: John Belchem (Editor) [2006]: Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.

Frans van Lunteren [2002]: “Nicolas Fatio de Duillier on the mechanical cause of universal gravitation,” in: Edwards [2002].

Scott Mandelbrote [2004]: “Fatio, Nicolas, of Duillier (1664?1753)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9056, accessed 25 April 2008].

Scott Mandelbrote [2005]: “The heterodox career of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier,” in: John Brooke and Ian MacLean (Editors): Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Note that the two articles above contain a minor error of fact: Fatio was employed from 1694 as a tutor to Wriothesley Russell, who was a grandson, but not, as stated there, a son, of the (first) Duke of Bedford.

Frank E. Manuel [1980]: A Portrait of Isaac Newton. London, UK: Muller.

Hillel Schwartz [1980]: The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth Century England. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press.

Stephen E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Michael White [1998]: Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Fourth Estate.

Technorati Tags: Fatio de Duillier, Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Millenarian sect, Camisards, Prophets of Cevennes, Wriothesley Russell, Howland Great Wet Dock, Greenland Dock

Social forecasting: Doppio Software

peter — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:49:20 +0000

Five years ago, back in the antediluvian era of Web 2.0 (the web as enabler and facilitator of social networks), we had the idea of social-network forecasting. We developed a product to enable a group of people to share and aggregate their forecasts of something, via the web. Because reducing greenhouse gases were also becoming flavour-du-jour, we applied these ideas to social forecasts of the price for the European Union’s carbon emission permits, in a nifty product we called Prophets-360. Sadly, due mainly to poor regulatory design of the European carbon emission market, supply greatly outstripped demand for emissions permits, and the price of permits fell quickly and has mostly stayed fallen. A flat curve is not difficult to predict, and certainly there was little value in comparing one person’s forecast with that of another. Our venture was also felled.

But now the second generation of social networking forecasting tools has arrived. I see that a French start-up, Doppio Software, has recently launched publicly. They appear to have a product which has several advantages over ours:

Doppio Software is focused on forecasting demand along a supply chain. This means the forecasting objective is very tactical, not the long-term strategic forecasting that CO2 emission permit prices became. In the present economic climate, short-term tactical success is certainly more compelling to business customers than even looking five years hence.
The relevant social network for a supply chain is a much stronger community of interest than the amorphous groups we had in mind for Prophets-360. Firstly, this community already exists (for each chain), and does not need to be created. Secondly, the members of the community by definition have differential access to information, on the basis of their different positions up and down the chain. Thirdly, although the interests of the partners in a supply chain are not identical, these interests are mutually-reinforcing: everyone in the chain benefits if the chain itself is more successful at forecasting throughput.
In addition, Team Doppio (the Doppiogangers?) appear to have included a very compelling value-add: their own automated modeling of causal relationships between the target demand variables of each client and general macro-economic variables, using semantic-web data and qualitative modeling technologies from AI. Only the largest manufacturing companies can afford their own econometricians, and such people will normally only be able to hand-craft models for the most important variables. There are few companies IMO who would not benefit from Doppio’s offer here.

Of course, I’ve not seen the Doppio interface and a lot will hinge on its ease-of-use (as with all software aimed at business users). But this offer appears to be very sophisticated, well-crafted and compelling, combining social network forecasting, intelligent causal modeling and semantic web technologies.

Well done, Team Doppio! I wish you every success with this product!

PS: I have just learnt that “doppio” means “double”, which makes it a very apposite name for this application – forecasts considered by many people, across their human network. Neat! (2009-09-16)

Article in The Observer (UK) about Doppio 2009-09-06 here.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, social-network forecasting, greenhouse gases, carbon emission, Doppio Software, causal modeling, semantic web technologies

Newton and scientific publication

peter — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:14:05 +0000

While on the subject of Isaac Newton, here are several statements by historian Scott Mandelbrote on Newton’s attitude to the public dissemination of his work. The more we know of Newton, the less we should consider him a scientist in the modern meaning of the word.

His [theological investigation] was a voyage of personal discovery; even the Principia required Halley’s exertions as a midwife to bring them to light. Newton might share his religious opinions with other members of the remnant, as he did in his letters to Locke, but he worried about the consequences of their wider dissemination: ‘I was of opinion my papers had lain still & am sorry to heare there is news about them. Let me entreat you to stop their translation & impression so soon as you can for I designe to suppress them.‘ Newton’s concern may have reflected fear of being discovered to hold unorthodox opinions, but it was also the product of religious motives. Not everyone could be expected to comprehend ‘strong meat’, which was intended for personal consumption, and which might be wasted on others.” (p.299)

His [Newton's] theology pervaded his alchemy, in his analysis of the Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus, and in turn his alchemy suggested to him how matter might be understood physically. A true understanding of the uses of language enabled Newton to introduce astronomical calculation into his chronological writings, and to complete his mathematical arguments with theological references:

[pagebreak]
. . . .

Mathematics was God’s language; the language of the prophets communicated God’s purposes and ‘times’ to men. Newton felt it was his duty to understand and to reconcile the two, to decipher the hieroglyphs which corrupted religion and learning had obscured. The problems of mathematics ended in the solutions of divine majesty, and mathematical language solved the theological problem of describing Newton’s Arian interpretation of the relations within the Trinity:

. . .

Newton’s natural philosophical and theological discoveries removed the obscurities from divine language, in the books of nature and of scripture. In the life of the true believer, the two could not be separated. But most had to be content with the milk for babes, because Newton’s own language was beyond them.” (pp. 300-301).

Reference:

Scott Mandelbrote [1993]: ‘A dute of the greatest moment’: Isaac Newton and the writing of biblical criticism. British Journal of the History of Science, 26: 281-302.

Chasing the sources: a Newtonian mystery

peter — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:32:46 +0000

As is well-known to historians (although less so among scientists), Isaac Newton was a devout religious believer, an alchemist, and a seeker after ancient wisdom about God and the cosmos. He was a Unitarian, a belief not permitted at the time, and so he kept his religious views very, very close to himself and to a small circle of intimates. When his friend and fellow FRS, Nicolas Fatio de Duiller, publicly supported the millenarian French Protestant sect, the Camisards (aka The French Prophets), in London in the first decade of the 18th century, Newton kept in touch with him to learn of their prophecies, and came close to publicly supporting them also.

So when an historian writes the following it is very plausible, at least to people aware of Newton’s religious beliefs and interests:

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was also enamored of Egyptian wisdom, as we shall see in the next chapter, even if it is not clear that he accepted the Hermetic tradition. It was essential for his theory of gravitation to have an accurate measure of the world’s circumference, and for that he needed to calculate exactly a single degree of latitude. Newton was convinced that there was no need to send a team of surveyors to plot distances on the ground, as the French were doing. It was rather easier to determine the exact length of an Egyptian cubit, which ancient authors insisted was directly related to a degree of latitude. This information could be obtained from the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, which was always believed (perhaps rightly) to enshrine perfect units of length, area and volume, as well as pi. Sadly, the results of the Pyramid experiment did not fit Newton’s calculations, but, instead of scrapping the theory, the great scientist blamed the surveyors instead. As luck would have it, the French astronomer Jean Picard (1620-82) succeeded in 1671 in measuring perfectly a degree of latitude in Sweden, so Newton could prove his theory of gravitation without the Egyptians.” (Katz 2005, page 31)

The reference the author David Katz cites for this story is Shalev 2002. But consulting that reference, we do not see mentioned the story Katz relates here. Instead, we find this sentence (on page 574):

As Robert Palter has argued in his critique on Bernal’s Black Athena, there is no evidence to show that Newton related his interest in the Egyptian cubit to his physics and geodesy.”

with the reference being to Palter 1993, pages 245 and following.

What is going on here? Has Katz mistakenly cited the wrong source for the story above, something easy enough to do in academic writing? Perhaps Katz could tell us. I hope it is a simple mistake in citation, and not something more sinister.

References:

David S. Katz [2005]: The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. (London, UK: Jonathan Cape).

Robert Palter [1993]: Black Athena, Afro-Centrism, and the history of science. History of Science, 31: 227-287.

Zur Shalev [2002]: Measurer of all things: John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid and early modern metrology. Journal of the History of Ideas, 63: 555-575.

Technorati Tags: Isaac Newton

How environment shapes cosmology

peter — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:01:00 +0000

Further to the post below about the relationship between language and thought, a friend has just remarked to me that the absolute (East-West-North-South) spatial reference system in the language of the Kuuk Thaayorre is in fact a relative system, relative to the magnetic poles or (since they are unlikely to have known about the poles) relative to the movements of the sun. Accordingly, such a language would have been unlikely to have developed in parts of the world with continuous cloud cover. Which observation brought to mind a famous article by French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, where he considered what type of mathematical physics humans may have developed if the earth had been always covered in cloud: no theory aiming to predict the return of meteors, no models of planetary motion, not much study of ellipses and related number theory, and perhaps a theory of gravitation long delayed. (Thanks: DW).

Technorati Tags: Henri Poincare

The future is not what it was

peter — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:28:51 +0000

The Internet, as imagined in 1969, complete with free sexism. (Hat tip: SW).

On prophecy

peter — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:35:15 +0000

They know not what to make of the Words, little time, speedily, shortly, suddenly, soon. They would have me define the Time, in the Prophecies of my ancient Servants. Yet those Predictions carried in them my authority, and were fulfilled soon enough, for those that suffered under them . . . I have seen it best, not to assign the punctual Times, by their Definition among Men; that I might keep Men always in their due distance, and reverential Fear of invading what I reserve, in secret, to myself . . . The Tower-Guns are the Tormenta e Turre aethera, with which this City I have declared should be battered . . . I have not yet given a Key to Time in this Revelation.”

John Lacy, explaining to his followers among a millenarian French Huguenot sect in Britain in 1707 why his prophecies had not yet been fulfilled, cited in Schwartz 1980, p. 99.

Reference:

Hillel Schwartz [1980]: The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press)

Technorati Tags: Prophecies, John Lacy, French Huguenot, prophecies