Applied Philosophy

Jersey Girl, 2004, directed by Kevin Smith, starring Ben Affleik and Raquel Castro.

The Trotsky, 2009,  directed by Jacob Tierney, starring Jay Baruchel, Jessica Paré and Ricky Mabe.

The best characters in literature are those that get transformed. Shakespeare presented one of the best and moving transformations, from Prince Harry to King Henry V, in his trilogy: Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two and Henry V.

Kevin Smith tried to do the same in Jersey Girl by transforming a Public Relations guy, a person who lives by lying to the general public, to a spirited and dedicated public servant, but where Shakespeare was successful Kevin Smith fails: when it was time to present the beliefs of the character through a speech Kevin Smith has nothing to say.

Smith fails to deliver a modern day St. Crispin’s Day Speech because he does not believe in public works the way Shakespeare believed in English nationalism.

In Hollywood anything could be forgiven except believing in something and the failure of Smith was the failure of conviction:

An extended cut was shown at Kevin Smith’s private film festival Vulgarthon in 2005 (and was shown again at the 2006 festival). Cut scenes that featured in the extended version included a much longer extension of the Jennifer Lopez section of the movie that fleshed out the characters more, Ben Affleck’s full speech in the city hall, a longer ending, and some music changes.

—Jersey Girl, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

Either Smith failed to write a moving speech or hesitated when it was time to deliver the final cut.

Slavoj Žižek wrote a book, On Belief, which discussed the need to believe in something to change the world, he presents Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, as an  example of someone acting on his belief even though Žižek personally does not agree with the beliefs. The interested reader can read the book and evalute the arguments for himself, but I like the short judgement given by Hegel: Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion (see Weekly Lesson (2)).

Jacob Tierney,another writer-director, fails to deliver a transforming character, his protagonist has passionate beliefs  from the first until the last frame of the film. Tierney does deliver the speech, the School Sucks Speech, but prefers to let a secondary character delivers it and then have him add that he doesn’t really believe in it, but he will put deeds before beliefs.

Modern artists are unable to observe society and can only express solipsist views, I suspect that Tierney hesitated to let the protagonist of his film, i.e. his avatar, express his views in a compelling speech, but by doing so he gave the best expression for the students’ “revolt” of the sixties: young students following ideas they do not really believe in without any adult leadership, except for a few fellow travellers cheering from a safe distant. This lack of belief, of passion, explains why the students used to take exams in the morning and riot in the evening; they also put deeds before beliefs and one does not sacrifice his future for deeds alone.

This lack of belief is present in every artistic expression of modern society, from the cheapest action film to the historical epic, it seems that there are no more Bolsheviks in modern Western society.

This post is dedicated to those who are still reading and to the dead,
who cannot read anymore.

In Scale Appreciation in Modern Science I wrote the following:

Almost all resources have been put towards developing better computational implementations and bigger computational capacity; while very little has been devoted to developing theories that need less computation.

Now we read in a recent article:

“The models run on these computers can generate visualizations of everything from supernovas to protein structures.But even with the speed supercomputers provide, the complex models are quickly overwhelming current computing capabilities.”

—Mock Supernova Created by Supercomputer [my emphasis]

The real problem is that supercomputers are being overwhelmed by the models, while scientific theory has hardly moved forward for the last two generations. Now that is a scientific crisis.

In the past science advanced by bounds and leaps from one generation to another, sometimes the scientific output of one country declines while that of another increase. Now the whole modern world, with its modern science, is declining without an alternative to take over. There is a real qualitative difference between the so-called scientists of today and real scientists who advanced science in the past.

Newton, who died in 1727, built on the foundation of his predecessors. His three abstract laws became the foundation for scores of empirical laws already discovered by great scientists like Johannes Kepler (died 1630), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) and Christiaan Huygens (d. 1695), to name just a few.

Those men had built their empirical laws on a solid foundation consisting of observations collected by their predecessors, great names like Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543) and Tycho Brahe (d. 1601).

They in turn built on the science developed by the Islamic East and in particular the invention of Algebra, the basis for all subsequent mathematical advances (see the Wikipedia articles: Astronomy in medieval Islam & List of Muslim astronomers).

Newton himself acknowledged this when he wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”. Unfortunately the view of modern science is blocked by huge super-computers.

In The Fable of the Cannoneer and the Observer I wrote the following:

They have spent huge amounts of money on building larger and larger accelerators, the failure of each one to advance the science becomes the reason for building an even bigger one; this process of enlargement has resulted in an accelerator as big as a city, the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end.

And now the recent article:

“The world’s largest scientific machine has cost $10 billion, has worked only nine days and has yet to smash an atom. The unique equipment in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel with cathedral-sized detectors deep beneath the Swiss-French border has been assembled by specialists in many countries, with 8,970 physicists eagerly awaiting the startup.

But despite the expense, thousands of physicists around the world, many of whom hope to conduct experiments here, insist that it will work and that it is crucial to mankind’s understanding of the universe.

…

The collider emerged as the world’s largest after the U.S. canceled the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas in 1993. Congress pulled the plug after costs soared, and questions were raised about the value of the science it could produce.

…

They hope the higher energy will enable them to see particles so far undetected, such as the elusive Higgs boson, which in theory gives mass to other particles — and objects and creatures — in the universe.”

—Particle collider: Black hole or crucial machine? Associated Press [my emphasis]

I can say no more than: “the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end”.

The Fable

A cannoneer sets up his cannon on a high plateau and starts firing cannonballs into the valley below him. His cannonballs are all alike but for every shot he varies the elevation of the cannon and the charge-the charge affects the velocity of the cannonball as it leaves the cannon-according to a pattern set in advance.

Science would say that an observer in the valley who would observe where the cannonballs hit the ground and how fast they are travelling would be able to deduce the elevation and charge used by the cannoneer, thus deducing the pattern used to vary them and subsequently predicting where the next cannonball would fall.

In practice an observer placed in the bottom of the valley measuring the velocity of the cannonballs would discover that they all hit the ground at the same velocity! All cannonballs would be moving at their terminal velocity, because air friction would reduce the velocity if it is higher and gravity would increase it if it were lower than terminal velocity.
Read the rest of this entry »

The worst thing that happened to science in the last fifty years is the invention of the super-computer, while the great computational power of these machines made it possible to solve some problems using the latest scientific theory it has also been a barrier to the development of newer and more efficient theories.

Almost all resources have been put towards developing better computational implementations and bigger computational capacity; while very little has been devoted to developing theories that need less computation.
Read the rest of this entry »