Maria Popova
Posts inspired by one of my favorite essayists
Music, cosmology, reading: "The Jazz of Physics" and "Letters to a Young Reader"
POSTED APRIL 4, 2019
Maria Popova's "Brain Pickings" newsletter of March 31 is one of her best. Among its essays are one on the relationship between music and cosmology and one on why we read. I've added some footnotes for her essays on "The Jazz of Physics" and "A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader".
Einstein remarked that when he got stuck while working on a theory, he would take a "violin break." Interdisciplinary thinking is a component in the work of many creative geniuses, including Leonardo Da Vinci and is a widely-touted tool in education. As neuroscientists have found, different brain regions, working as a "team", are involved in the creative process.
All the fundamental forces of the universe are known to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, save one: gravity. Quantum gravity is an attempt at a Theory of Everything. It seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics and thereby unify (a) general relativity with quantum mechanics and (b) gravity with the three other fundamental forces in nature (electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force). A crucial first step to know whether gravity is quantum is to detect the long-postulated elementary particle of gravity, the graviton. Gravitons bear the same relationship to gravitational waves that the photon bears to electromagentic waves. While the graviton itself has not yet been discovered, gravitational waves were detected in February 2016 by scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo).
Another attempt at a Theory of Everything is string theory. It too tries to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. String theory posits that all matter, forces, and physical constants (including the 20 fine-tuned constants that make the universe possible) can be explained by one-dimensional strings vibrating in ten dimensions of space and one of time. At its core, string theory uses a model of one-dimensional strings in place of the particles of quantum physics.
Since both proposed TOE's deal with the infinitesimally small, scientists are trying to devise experiments that would prove or disprove the theories.
Below: Link to Brian Greene's TED talk on string theory.
Below right: Link to Michio Kaku's explanation of some of the stranger consequences of string theory: the multiverse and wormholes.
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies...The man who never reads lives but one." - George R.R. Martin
Books have served us well over the centuries. The pleasures of reading have been celebrated by writers and readers - which is to say, everyone. One of my favorite (and most relaxing) activities is reading on the beach with the waves rolling in and the sun beating down.
It is not surprise that the scientific revolution that ushered us into the modern world began in the century after the invention of the printing press. "With the printing press, knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, suddenly could be much more easily spread. When documents had to be copied one at a time by human hand they were rare and expensive. The printing press made books relatively inexpensive."
More recently, science has pointed to several other benefits of reading.
Researchers at The New School in New York City have found evidence that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling. Literary fiction focuses on the psychology of characters and their relationships, often in a vague manner forcing us to "fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations...This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom." A related benefit is that "the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves. " (Scientific American, Oct 2013)
From Neuroscience News, Apr 2018: Summarizing findings of several studies, the Max Planck Institute notes that learning to read and write modifies the structure and function of the brain in beneficial ways:
"According to a study by French and Spanish researchers, people who are unable or barely able to read not only find analysing sequences of letters more difficult – they have similar difficulty processing sequences of images. A further study in Portugal found that illiterate persons also find it harder to distinguish how an object is oriented in space."
"Literacy has profound and lasting effects on cognition and knowledge. The ability to read and write is essential to the ability to analyse complex problems and for the flow of ideas and critical thinking. It facilitates informed public debate and sensible collective decision-making. The more literate people are, the better they are able to exercise control over public affairs and contribute to genuinely democratic government."
New Year's Resolutions
POSTED DECEMBER 13, 2019
It's getting near that time when people make their New Year's resolutions. Most popular are those to do with diet, exercise, smoking or alcohol. Inc.com reports on a survey of 2000 people: the top three resolutions of those surveyed for New Year's 2019 were diet or eat healthier (71 percent), exercise more (65 percent), and lose weight (54 percent).
Author and blogger Maria Popova had another idea a few years back. Rather than focusing on the purely physical, she writes, we might make our resolutions "the most meaningful ones, [aiming] at a deeper kind of health through the refinement of our mental, spiritual, and emotional habits — which often dictate our physical ones. In a testament to young Susan Sontag’s belief that rereading is an act of rebirth, I have revisited the timelessly rewarding ideas of great thinkers from the two millennia to cull fifteen such higher-order resolutions for personal refinement."
The result is her best post in 13+ years of Brain Pickings [link below left] (I know... I've said that before, but I just recently came across this one and it will be really hard to top.) Referencing passages from books by these great minds, Popova provides 15 resolutions for "refinement of our mental, spiritual, and emotional habits." Here are a few excerpts from the post:
Thoreau: "Walk and be more present"
Thoreau's walks were in the wild, close to nature, and he used the walks not only to connect with nature but also to still his mind. Occasionally even Thoreau failed to achieve this removal from the concerns of everyday. Popova writes:
"Thoreau reminds us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization... the passage that I keep coming back to as I face the modern strain for presence in the age of productivity, 150 years later, is this: "I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village..."
Seneca: "Make your life wide rather than long."
Maria Popova writes that she worries that "we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being." Quoting from Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life":
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it."
To Seneca's point that "Life is long if you know how to use it", psychotherapist and writer Thomas Moore has some suggestions. In his book "Ageless Soul", he discusses elements that make life more meaningful. Moore calls them 'soul values'. They've graced this web page from the beginning: beauty, contemplation, deeply felt experiences, meaningful relationships, knowledge, a sense of home, art, spiritual peace, community, relaxation and comfort.
But let's let Seneca's have the last word. The cure he prescribes to the perception of the shortness of life, Popova writes, is "rather simple, yet far from easy to enact":
"The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today....The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
Bruce Lee: "Be like water"
Now this was a name I did not expect to see on the list - which shows how easy it is to categorize people based on their most known accomplishments. Maria Popova introduces Bruce Lee: "With his singular blend of physical prowess and metaphysical wisdom, coupled with his tragic untimely death, legendary Chinese-American martial artist, philosopher, and filmmaker Bruce Lee (1940-1973) is one of those rare cultural icons whose ethos and appeal remain timeless."
The famous metaphor for his philosophy, "Be like water", derives from an experience he had while learning martial arts as a teenager, and is at the heart of the Chinese concept of wu wei, "trying not to try." Frustrated with his inability to master "the art of detachment", Lee relates his epiphany in a posthumously published compendium of his letters, notes and poems, "Bruce Lee: Artist of Life":
"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water."
Lee concludes his account, "Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."
You can read the short essays on each of these thinkers and resolutions in the link below to Maria Popova's post.
15 Resolutions for Self-Refinement
1. THOREAU: WALK AND BE MORE PRESENT
2. VIRGINIA WOOLF: KEEP A DIARY
3. SENECA: MAKE YOUR LIFE WIDE RATHER THAN LONG
4. ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: DEFINE YOURSELF
5. ALAN WATTS: BREAK FREE FROM YOUR EGO
6. CAROL DWECK: CULTIVATE A GROWTH MINDSET
7. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: TURN HATERS INTO FANS
8. HANNAH ARENDT: THINK RATHER THAN KNOW
9. ANNE LAMOTT: LET GO OF PERFECTIONISM
10. CARL SAGAN: MASTER CRITICAL THINKING
11. REBECCA SOLNIT: GET LOST TO FIND YOURSELF
12. BRUCE LEE: BE LIKE WATER
13: MAYA ANGELOU: CHOOSE COURAGE OVER CYNICISM
14. EMERSON: CULTIVATE TRUE FRIENDSHIP
15. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: LIVE BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS