Comments on: Metaphor to Action

By: Lewis

Lewis — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:48:58 +0000

“Willard Gibbs” by Muriel Rukeyser is a strange book. For one thing, she spends thirty pages on the Amistad slave mutiny just because Gibbs’s father, a linguist and biblical scholar, played an incidental role in finding black sailors who could translate the slaves language into English for the trial.

It’s also quite strange to read a science biography by a woman who is deeply, deeply influenced by the early 20th-century poet and novelist Thomas Wolfe. Some of her writing is almost a parody of Wolfe. Here’s a single paragraph about Gibbs from page 91:

“Lost days. The river he knew, the faces he first saw against the sky, the pier he sat on and watched break the circles and waves of the Sound, the leaf he picked up and broke brittle yellow in his hand, the little sisters whom he loved. And the autumn-colored books, the scrawls of childhood, the cliffs he grew to know: red precipice of East Rock, West Rock which ends in a basalt cliff of columns. Lost. To see it as it once was seen by him; to know that it was these colors and qualities into whose nature he first inquired; and to know that they are lost. When did he realize the snow and ice, and their fine kinship with the rain that fell over the streets of snow? When did the stars spell a meaning to him? And the steam of the harbor ships, the screaming train? The words his father spoke, of words and meaning? And the simple, irreversible soup, that can never again be what went into it - the water, colored forever by one drop of ink that winds in the clear air-bright bowl and is lost to the eye, but hangs forever there? The numbers written on slate in the schoolroom? The story of his father learning to talk to the African captives because he could count up to ten in their tongue? Lost, with the lost days, and the little boy lost.”

By: Costanza

Costanza — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:45:00 +0000

J.W. Gibbs was more important than you might think. Until Gibbs, the Powers That Be in science (European physicists and chemists. mostly) didn’t take American scientists and their endeavors seriously. Gibbs “put us on the map”, so to speak.

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:38:58 +0000

Does this biography of Josiah “Big Willy” Gibbs adequately describe his important contributions to the theoretical framework that underpins the thermodynamics of hot chicks?

By: Albatross

Albatross — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:38:28 +0000

Ouch! I’ve never seen someone suffer a hyperextended sarcasm before, but the dismount in that last paragraph looked painful! You need to ice that down?

By: Brendon Brewer

Brendon Brewer — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:58:27 +0000

Wow, that’s really interesting. I’d just like to point out that kinetic theory and statistical mechanics are quite different theories, and Gibbs is more associated with the latter.

By: joseph duemer

joseph duemer — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:11:01 +0000

I saw Muriel Rukeyser read her poems at the University of Washington many years ago, shortly before her death. She had suffered a stroke and walked with a pronounced limp as she came to the podium, but her voice was remarkable — light but strong. It was an astonishing, strong performance of her work. A remarkable poet.

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:26:43 +0000

William, thanks, that’s a good suggestion. I have the Gibbs biography on order, so I’m looking forward to reading that.

By: William L. Rukeyser

William L. Rukeyser — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:19:12 +0000

Sean-

You might also like her biography of a much earlier scientist (Elizabethan era): Thomas Hariot, arguably the earliest English speaking scientist in the New World. (The Traces of Thomas Hariot, 1971)

By: jeff

jeff — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:36:58 +0000

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

The mind is made of physical things, but every physical thing is also an image or a “story” in the mind. So which is more fundamental? Hard to say. A chicken and egg problem. Realism vs Idealism. But so far, the physical-as-fundamental has been more useful.

Just append everything you write (no matter how seditious) with “in God we trust”, then the FBI will overlook you.

By: Ali

Ali — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:45:12 +0000

Sounds like an interesting writer, I’ll have to look into her work. I particularly like her quote: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

By: John Merryman

John Merryman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:41:07 +0000

Political wholism/socialism is ok, but physics wholism is too unscientific and non particle based?

By: How Muriel Rukeyser became my favourite poet this morning! « Entertaining Research

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:57:00 +0000

[…] Muriel Rukeyser became my favourite poet this morning! I read Sean’s post at Cosmic Variance: So I was poking around Amazon.com looking at biographies of some of the founding names of […]