The Sunday Papers. "recollection of fools" edition.

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Sunday May 22, 2005 15:47 by ipsiphi .:. (ipsi)(phi...) / i(psi...)(phi) barcelona.

"Science applied only to material uses of life waged war with and wished to extinguish imagination."

It has long been observed that the mediocre praise the dead and refract the vision of living folly with a mythic myopia.

This weekend saw the philosopher Paul Ricoeur die peacefully in his sleep, and the Irish State really kick into its Hamilton year. Whom they term "Ireland's greatest scientist" = utter crap.

In honour of Paul Ricoeur, this week's sunday papers is an attack on false memory, the Selective and Collective memory : Memory as fetishised community : Communality as fetishised memorial & I hope readers will bear with the different style as I recover from watching Star Wars episode 2 & I Robot, on DVD, and writing encylcopedia pages and blogs wonder, what has Ricoeur to offer the XXI century???

The Dangerous Place for consideration this Trinity Sunday is the future of Biotech and Human Cloning.

he Selective & Collective memory : Memory as fetishised community : Communality as fetishised memorial

All around us the genius of science treads relentlessly to territory as yet unknown to ethics, where ethical debate is secondary to invention, where ethical direction is led by innovation.

Where Money alone points the way.

It is thus does not surprise me that the Hamilton year (an idea of Mammy Harney) saw to commemorate William Rowan Hamilton, linguist, mathematician, failed astronomer, alcoholic, dismal poet, and bridge vandal with a 10€ coin. Just enough for 20 cigarettes and a millky coffee.

Hamilton discovered a way of multiplying numbers, polished the work of french and british mathematicians before, didn't get married to teh right woman, and discovered a way to use algebra which he personally over-rated but was the ne plus ultra of its day. The system is called quaternion. He also worked on refraction, in optics building on the work of Newton and running the reputation of the nascent TCD astronomy club into the ground.

Really hot stuff in the 1840s you'll remember nothing much else was going on. He had by this time been persuaded _not to write poetry_ by William Wordsworth who wrote thus to him in the 1830s:-

"You send me showers of verses which I receive with much pleasure ... yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of science. ... Again I do venture to submit to your consideration, whether the poetical parts of your nature would not find a field more favourable to their nature in the regions of prose, not because those regions are humbler, but because they may be gracefully and profitably trod, with footsteps less careful and in measures less elaborate."

(very subtle old William eh?)

The poet (you know the one, wandered lonely as a cloud) also scolded Hamilton's beliefs that mathematics was a beautiful a language as poetry:
"Science applied only to material uses of life waged war with and wished to extinguish imagination."
Perhaps the youthful Hamilton who had mastered greek and hebrew by puberty and so internalised qabalistic notions of the underlying cryptic relation of all letters and numbers that he could not see the verse for the converse.
Certainly he had problems with keeping the lense in his telescope at Armagh when visiting Romney Robinson a noted astronomer of the time, when the "love of his little life" Catherine Disney (no relation to Walt) who had in proper 19th century fashion been earlier married off to someone with a bit more dosh, dropped by to say hello.

This was the period of his "Theory of Systems of Rays" a lengthy series of papers, which is essentially a treatise on the characteristic function and saw him expand on the work of french mathematician A.J. Fresnel "wave surface" and
apply it to optics. He popped the papers in the post and his mate in TCD did the right proofs and bingo Hamilton was famous.

He thus turned to the dhrink and dynamics
and got knighted and his wife left him and ran off to Engurland. And he became obsessed with multiplication of algebraic triplets. So much so that every morning his kids would ask him-

"Well, Papa can you multiply triplets?"

And he forlornly admitted that he could not. But then the legendary 16th August 1843 a Monday as it happens, he came up with the equation!!!!!!!

And having a mallet and chisel to hand as a good mason decided to carve the equation for posterity onto Broom Bridge. This is how he remembered it :-
"And here there dawned on me the notion that we must admit, in some sense, a fourth dimension of space for the purpose of calculating with triples ... An electric circuit seemed to close, and a spark flashed forth."

Unfortuanately because of modern day QWERTY keyboards I can not reproduce the equation here.

{The quaternions are a set of symbols of the form
a + bi + cj + dk
where a, b, c, d are Real numbers.
They multiply using the rules
i "squared" = j"squared" = k"squared" = -1 and ij = k.
They form a non-commutative division algebra.}

Posterity never lasts that long.
even in stone, and so the good folk of Dublin replaced the vandalised bridge, and it wasn't until Eamon De Valera (that latter day mathematician) came along and ordered the RIA to put up a plaque in 1958 that people knew how clever old Hamilton had been. But to be honest he wasn't as clever as he himself thought. This is how clever he thought he was:-

"I still must assert that this discovery appears to me to be as important for the middle of the nineteenth century as the discovery of fluxions [the calculus] was for the close of the seventeenth."

(he wasn't that clever). And other people knew. Hamilton became progressively more difficult at the soirrees and bashes organised by the RIA, TCD and people who did that sort of thing during the famine period, which is a euphemism for-
"Pissed up roaring drunken yobo"

This was recorded by the eminent Macfarlane-

"... at a dinner of a scientific society in Dublin he lost control of himself, and was so mortified that, on the advice of friends he resolved to abstain totally. This resolution he kept for two years, when ... he was taunted for sticking to water, particularly by Airy ... . He broke his good resolution, and from that time forward the craving for alcoholic stimulants clung to him."

Yet was not incapable of victorian anthropocentric arrogance :- "On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind."


Yep. He died of gout in 1865. By which stage he had written quite beautifully it must be said an awful lot on quaternions in the style of Euclid and learnt many progressively more obscure languages including akhadian and malay.

This is how he was written up by William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, (1824-1907) another who lays claim to be Ireland's greatest scientist, indeed you all know what a Kelvin is don't you? How many of you know what a Hamilton is?-

"Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way."

& here so that this sunday papers end now
is an example of his poetry:-

"Time is said to have only one dimension, and space to have three dimensions. ... The mathematical quaternion partakes of both these elements; in technical language it may be said to be "time plus space", or "space plus time": and in this sense it has, or at least involves a reference to, four dimensions.
And how the One of Time, of Space the Three,
Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled be."

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to find out more about Hamilton consult the encyclopedia.
his papers are here
http://www.emis.de/classics/Hamilton/
and consult here-
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Hamilton/
and Mammy Harney cobbled a site together, but you'll find nought on quaternions there, but rats in the schoolroom yes.
http://www.hamilton2005.ie/
& no the man in the picture isn't hamilton, he's someone else ;-)