4 Comments on “Harvesting The Other Landscape”   rss feed

1. Ed Hessler on Aug 21st, 2005 at 7:29 pm

   Professor Johnson:

   Thanks for the photograph of this first (?) harvest. It makes me hungry and on this late Sunday afternoon, having not had supper yet, perhaps I should have hopscotched and waited until tomorrow to check CV. Here–Minnesota–at least in the gardens I frequent, we have a few (or) more days to go although I did see some great melons in development today. There is a community garden near where I live that I pass almost daily and the scent coming off the dewey, sunlit leaves each morning is that wonderful mix of decay and promise, of endings and beginnings.

   I’m not a physicist although I enjoy physics–right now I’m reading and teaching myself some ideas on error enalysis–pretty simple stuff to those of you who flip the mathematics as adeptly as a short-order cook in a busy restaurant or work in Quantum’s Garage. I’m a K-12 science educator. Still, I very much appreciated your skillfully managed series of entries on stringy things. It was fun to read and I learned some things, e.g., more insights into perturbation/nonperturbation.

   I’ve enlyed thinking about the greatest paper ever published in physics (I’d been following the polls and have smiled and yelled at some of the choices.). What makes this fun to think about is the development of physics. It strikes me as a badly knotted fishnet with nodes here and there, some more important than others and the strands inbetween as one thing leads to (many) other things. My choice if I were forced/dared to make one is probably (the equivocation is obvious even to me) is Newton’s “Principia,” meaningless though since I’ve never read it but merely about it, excerpts, etc. However, I did today glance through a translation at my local bookstore.

   I also think Galileo is mighty important for having published in the vernacular, making these ideas accessible to many others, a bold (I rhink) and ahead of his time, move. But then there is Maxwell and Boltzmann (whose work I’m only coming to appreciate as I read more about it), and the miraculous work of Einstein, and….

   However, I’m going to wait to view the poll until tomorrow to learn more about how others who are truly at home in the territory are thinking about this landscape. What a great idea–a prod to imagination and thinking.

   This blog and several others make me really appreciate the Internet and the http://WWW. Thanks again, to all of you, for letting non-specialists look over your shoulders and gain a few insights into this wonder-filled place as well as to how it is understood.

2. Athena on Aug 21st, 2005 at 9:08 pm

   Clifford, your harvest looks scrumptious! Makes me pine for my former garden and orchard in Riverside, CA! I could just go out back and grab oranges, apricots, and lemons as I wished. Had a irrigation system similar to yours set up to water the courtyard plants - looks like you did a great job! I miss my old vegetable garden, but my container garden in the city works pretty well; just had some yummy tomatoes, basil, and peppers tonight with dinner. Bon appetit!

3. Clifford on Aug 21st, 2005 at 10:44 pm

   Ed, Athena: Thanks so much. It means a lot to me that you appreciated it. It means very much to me indeed that both the harvest and the physics discussions can resonate.

   Best,

   -cvj

4. robert on Aug 24th, 2005 at 8:23 am

   Hello Clifford

   So nice to see your produce. I am older, though not wiser, than you, and have only just embraced the land, having expended rather too much effort in the pursuit of a crust in the techno world. The good wife, recently retired from pharma mayhem, started to plough the fields, and scatter, a couple of years back: the corn, the beans and squashes, tomatoes, potatoes - not to mention the soft fruit - keep us in good shape. We even send a box down to the next generation in London town from time to time.

   One cannot help but point out (pace F. Uckoff) that Onsager liked to spend time in the garden as well

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