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."

.:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:..:.

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 ;-)

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Comments (6 of 6)

The Hamillton year events

by trinity sunday - tehillim viii

Mon May 23, 2005 00:35

are intended by the FF/PD government to co-incide with Einstein year. (the man in the photo)

“Ireland’s future is dependent on establishing a culture of scientific and technological innovation and a globally competitive knowledge based economy. The Hamilton Year is a vital building block in national scientific awareness”. - Mary Harney TD.

And here are the proposals:
# An Post are issuing a commemorative stamp celebrating Hamilton's birth.
# Aer Rianta are planning an exhibition at Dublin Airport's Pier A celebrating 12 of Ireland's greatest scientists.
# The Royal Irish Academy are commissioning a series of TV shorts on Irish science.
# The Irish Film Institute are taking science as a theme for one of their film seasons in 2005.
# Nobel Laureate, John Nash on whose life the film The Beautiful Mind is based will give one of the Academy's free public lectures in Dublin. He will pay credit to Irish mathematician John Lighton Synge, nephew of playwright, J.M. Synge who inspired him.
# Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg, a giant of theoretical physics and author of The First Three Minutes will give one of the Academy's free public Hamilton lectures on 17th October 2005.
# Nobel Laureate, Harry Kroto, who discovered a new form of carbon, will also give one of the Academy's free public lectures

{the John Nash thing looks interesting, and anyone with a knowledge of Irish people getting upto mathematics will be interested in John Lighton Synge, who to my mind is much more worthy than Hamilton but didn't get born in a year which in fetishised memorial offers the Irish government more chance of winning brownie points in science investment than €urovision would benefit primary school conditions.
JL Synge fathered a mathematician as well, a woman whose important works is still unfolding, one of the few mathemticians at global class in the pay for view honest world of academia, but then - in algebra there are no glass cielings save those which existed in any algebraic language.
And no matter how pure the math, those little scrawls are still... "episode N of hebrew, greek or akhadian".}

I strongly advise all of you to use this year of "irish science" and "einstein-ism" to remind those who have married science with capitalism,
that biotech, and manipulation of genomic information in any species or organism is a hasty step for science and ethics, poorly thought upon, and very very dangerous territory and you know, maybe even not even worth the money.

Einstein knew something no-one else did. "€ = mc2". he really got up their noses.

.:.all that glitters is not gold.:.

by ©mac diarmada

Tue May 24, 2005 01:12

Mediterranean

As you might have thought, the Trinity sunday, " sunday papers" weren't gonna just pass on by with just a biography (mostly cogged in the detail) from a respected mathematician, about a mathematician, supported and adorned by an altered picture of a mathematician without a reference to the Bush of
Bush House.

{{{ Kill your TV }}}

¿ How many people who protested the Laura Bush visit to Jerusalem knew Bush House was to be on strike the following day?
¿ How many people knew the link; or connected Laura in her hijab / mantilla at the wall with the dates?

¡ Well heck, we didn't get a picture of her holding a crown of thorns like in the last Sunday Papers!

Merci Beaucoup Mon Professeur Don Paul Ricouer.

: The Selective & Collective memory
: Memory as fetishised community
: Communality as fetishised memorial
©=@

Putin joins Terry Wogan as a scab and voiceovers the BBC at Bush House.

Recovering from the completely state run media corporation "other crowd" Mr G. gets his birthmark back from the airbrush, "memory"

And they "say it with flowers!", the best way, fetishised memorial, medals, wars, veterans, The Bush wanted your attention .:. Trinity .:.

EU Constitution 'desecrated' in US

by redjade

Tue May 24, 2005 22:26

Tuesday, 24 May 2005
Exclusive! EU Constitution 'desecrated' in US

Rainy Day has received a tip-off from a highly reliable anonymous source to the effect that on Saturday, the eve of the French referendum on the proposed European Constitution, Le Monde will publish an explosive story based on information gathered from an anonymous eyewitness who claims to have read an internal Pentagon report that M Giscard's sacred document was 'desecrated'. In the White House.

According to Rainy Day's anonymous source, copies of the constitution were placed in toilets throughout the White House at the beginning of May and were used, well, you know when. At least one copy was flushed down a toilet. Approval for this act of profanity came from the office of Donald Rumsfeld, says Le Monde's anonymous source, a former Foreign Legion paratrooper who now operates a Domino's Pizza franchise in Chevy Chase.

found at....
http://www.eamonn.com/archives/001829.html

the "Question" of Ethics didn't really change for the great philosophers, it is almost always -

by iosaf - { hello redjade :-) }

Wed May 25, 2005 22:27

"If Ihad to lay out my vision of the world,"
Paul Ricoeur said in 2004,
"I would say: given the place where I was born, the culture I received, what I read, what I learned (and) what I thought about, there exists for me a result that constitutes, here and now, the best thing to do."

Twas a summer, optimism, World Bank cancelled its BCN gig. Many thought despite a new Bush / the Swedish police shooting at reclaim, the G8 would see our movement accepted & listened to..

so many people got the flyer illustrated in the last comment

by io

Thu Jun 30, 2005 15:54

& went to showdown the G8 with pretty much the same leadership as it has this year. They were not cool, they were not fashionable, and their message was impossible to bring up from underground, or in from the cold, because it was never going to sit at the table underneath a linen napkin chewing the fat.

We are neither compromised morally or ethically by the publicity of our careers on the public stage. Our personal wealth is not measured in the response by the first worlds consumers to the insipidness of our vague protestations on what is "fair" what is "right" what is "wrong".

the G8 meeting 2005 will be exactly as the same as the G8 meeting 2001, non democratic decisions will be made which compound the inequality of the worlds populations and which do almost nothing to change exploitation. There will be no victory for campaigners. There will only be one difference. This time there will be "irish pop stars" and "irish flags" on display.

BASTA = DINERO GRATIS.
ta very much mr geldof but you're sooooooo
yesterday and so suspiciously blairite.

2006 - 1916 = 90 they are going to mess your memory.

by iosaf - (my sunday papers contribution for 5/3/06

Sun Mar 05, 2006 15:52

I read in the Irish Sunday Papers today, that Bertie Ahern is still gurggling about linking his regime to the 1916 thing. & to make it acceptable to orange people he wants to link it to the Battle of Somme as well. I wonder which slaughter and military struggle really represented the birth pangs of our 2 Irish states? I wonder how many times the mediocre will use the names of the dead. I wonder will they wheel out the presidential jet to fly roses to Flanders? Please remember they attempt to split our memory, which we must never stop reclaiming, by offering some memory of the Great War and others memory of the Rebellion, & I note they want to take our MayDay! holiday away.

Oh no greater love hath any man save he lay down his life for a friend. employer. local magistrate. licensed minister of publick worship. betrothed (without suffrage). kaiser or king. emperor or republic. neighbour or home ruler. careers officer. employment agency. sports instructor. president or queen. God or God. Nation or Nation. portable defillibrator or daily aspirine, they died. enough to say. they were not born with Lilleys, Red Flags, Votes, Leagues of any nation, or any type of Flu.
They were not born to die in trenches. They were mostly not laid to rest in Tricolours but in Quicklime inthe corner of Kilmainham after being tortured, broken and worse. So whatever happened afterwards, just take this time to remember all of them as the mostly men, some women they were. Less of the "official state shite". http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=72933
Nothing more to say for the moment except to reiterate the line above by which I attacked Harney and others' memorial of Hamilton an Irish mathematician of tippy toppy variety.
"The Selective & Collective memory : Memory as fetishised community : Communality as fetishised memorial"

© iosaf mac diarmada 2005-2006

& Note the True Irish communality :-
Francis Ledgewedge was born in Slane, County Meath, Ireland, 19 August 1887. He was killed on 31 July 1917 on the opening day of the third Battle of Ypres. He had been one of the founding members of the Slane branch of the Meath Labour Union. He Served with 5th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in the Dardanelles in August 1915 to December 1915, when he got away from the trenches to a hospital in Manchester where he heard of the April 1916 rising,and the death of his friend and fellow poet the signatory of the proclamation Thomas MacDonagh.
he wrote this:-

He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.

Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro' slanting snows her fanfare shrill
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.

And when the dark cow leaves the moor
And pastures poor with greedy weeds
Perhaps he'll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.

After which he was court-martialled and stripped of his rank in May for overstaying his leave and insubordination. He spent 7 months in penal custody in Derry. That done, & he a better man for the punishment in the eyes of his superiors, he went back to the front where he died on teh first day of the battle of Battle of Passchendaele better known as "Ypres version 3" Half a year later approximately 250,000 men serving the Kaiser, 300,000 for the British Empire (of whom 36,500 were Australians) had been slaughtered in the mud. No more than 3 km of which had changed side. 90,000 "British" and Australian bodies were never identified, and 42,000 were never recovered. An aerial photograph of Passchendaele taken after the battle showed over half a million shell holes in one half square mile (1.3 km²) area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Battle_of_Ypres

"The Selective & Collective memory : Memory as fetishised community : Communality as fetishised memorial"

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The Sunday Papers. "recollection of fools" edition.

Comments (6 of 6)