The Blind Old Man Who Knew Nothing

I first read about him in an article by Homen Borghain, a journalist and literary figure in my language. Reading about him was fascinating, because that was the only way one was bound to feel when one read about him. For example, he applied for the post of the Librarian of the Buenos Aires Munucipal Library, and in the box for qualifications, he wrote simply a single sentence, "Throughout my life, without conscious effort, I have been gathering qualifications for this post."

He got the job!!

He applied for the job, mainly to be able to read all the books in the library. Fate played a cruel game with him and soon he would oscilalte between total blindless and partial visibility and yet he read many of the books there.

One of his most well-known and oft-mentioned statements is: "I am not sure thatI exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?"

(People who have read Marquez extensively would easily identify a phrase oft-quoted by Gabo: "I don't exist"!)

He was one of the literaty geniuses who never won the Nobel Prize. My gut feeling is that Milan Kundera will be another person of such stature never to have won it! As his eyesight kept going and coming, his writings kept becoming shorter and shorter; thus, his short-stories would end up being of a length of 30 lines.

"May nobody make light by tear or reproach

This demonstration of the mastery

Of God, who with excellent irony

Gave me at once the books and the night."

He also invented "literary forgery" where he translated non-existent books.

Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986.
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"Borges and I"

Text is from Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp.246-47.

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges
http://www.themodernword.com/borges/
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/english016/borges/borges.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jlborges.htm

The Lady Who Mentored the Godfather

As an arrogant and headstrong person, and someone trained by equally eccentric, headstrong and arrogant teachers, I have always insisted on paying respects to only those teachers who deserve it. I have also always considered Marlon Brando as a very arrogant person. And so, when he owes his acting capabilities to someone, I take it at face value, because an arrogant bastard won't bestow honors on someone who does not deserve it!

Interestingly, our lady is one of the onyl two people that Brando acknowledges as his mentor in acting, the other being Elia Kazzan. (Of course, the only person whose dialogues Brando committed to memery instead of trying to improvise was Tennessee Williams because, accroding to Brando, one could not mess around with what Shakespeare had written and so with Williams!)

She was Brando's first influential acting teacher. Brando met her through his sister, Jocelyn, who was studying drama with Adler, and he decided to take drama as well. Brando had been considered unsuitable for the army and had been expelled from the military school that his father had sent him to. She, however, believed when she met Brando that he would be the best American actor in theater before the end of the year.

She proved it!

If one looks at the actors she trained over the years, one sees the level of training and perfection she imparted to her trainees. Maybe that's why she said, "Life beats down and crushes the soul, and Art reminds you that you have one."

In memorium: Stella Adler (Feb. 10, 1901 - Dec. 21, 1992)

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Souerces:
http://imdb.com/name/nm0012245/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Adler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Stanislavski

Remembering the "Conscience of Physics"

I have been consistently against books on popular science ever since I started recognizing myself and the mistakes I made in my life. In my opinion, no teenage kids should be allowed to read popular scince books, because such books often impart a false pride and arrogance to very medicore people like me. We, in our teeange arrogance, fail to recognize our very mediocre talent and pursue very specialized brances such as the sciences, which is not meant for us. It's like that Latin adage goes, "Quod licet Jovi, non licet Bovi" (What is permitted to Jupiter, is not permitted to the ox).

However, while popular science books will highlight the life of likes of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger, it would never metnion the confusion that led Paul Ehrenfest to shoot himself, or the frustration that led Boltzmann to commit suicide.

Popular science books also do not talk about the pioneering role paid by a great scientist, Wolfgang Pauli.His role was that of "conscience of science." Pauli could see though what was happening, and bnever hesitated to call the spade a space. If Pauli said something was weong, it eventially was! That was the intellectual level of that person.

"Pauli made many important contributions in his career as a physicist, primarily in the subject of Quantum Mechanics He seldom published papers, preferring lengthy correspondences with colleagues (such as Bohr and Heisenberg , with whom he had close friendships.) Many of his ideas and results were never published and appeared only in his letters, which were often copied and circulated by their recipients. Pauli was apparently unconcerned that much of his work thus went uncredited."

"We can imagine the magnitude of the loss when we read Pauli's 12-page letter of 19 October 1926, where he adumbrates the uncertainty relations by pointing out that "one can look at the world with the p-eye and one can look at it with the q-eye. But if one wants to open both eyes at the same time, one goes crazy." This letter is, strange to say, not mentioned by Heisenberg in his recollections about collaborating with Pauli. From reading Heisenberg's responses to the missing Pauli letters, one gets the impression that much of Heisenberg's work was inspired by Pauli's ideas and suggestions."

"Pauli was determined to understand and criticize all of the new ideas that were emerging in the rapidly growing physics of his time. His criticisms were accurate and often merciless, and earned him the title 'the conscience of physics'. When Pauli condemned a piece of work as trivial or sloppy, his verdict was final. His friend Paul Ehrenfest called him 'God's whip'."

Wolfgang Pauli died on 15th December, 1958. ___________________________________________________________________
Sources:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6916/full/420607a.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Ernst_Pauli
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-2/captions/p43box1.html
http://bullarchive.web.cern.ch/bullarchive/0034/art3/Text_E.html
http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/40/6/10
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-2/p43.html#box1
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pauli.html

Happy Birthday, Werner!*

He was a staunch anti-communist, a street-fighter in his youth, and an arrogant man. He was a student of science, who scored the best grades in theory and the lowest grades in experiment; he was someone, who was awarded a PhD (with a grading of "C") as a compromise solution (after a bitter debate between Sommerfeld, his supervisor, and Wien, his examiner), due to his very poor performance in the experimental part of his oral examination.

But he was also the person, who at the age of 25 discovered Qunatum Mechanics (without knowing that he was dealing with Matrix Algebra, and Max Born, after a chance meeting with Pascual Jordan in a train at Hannover, two of the few people in Europe back then who knew about Matrices, would have to point it out to our guy what it was!), and at 26 one of the corner-stones of Physics, known as the Uncertainty principle. And yet, his theory of atomic structure, put forward with Mayorana, would turn out to be as incorrect as it could be. They even put electrons inside the nucleus!

He was nicknamed "white Jew" by the Nazis, and yet he would end up working for Hitler's Atomic Bomb project. He presumably won't do much to save his Jewish colleagues. The issue of whether he had no clue on how to make an Atomic bomb, or if he conscientiously avoided making one would be the topic of many debates over the decades.

His arrogance would make him completely unaccommodative regarding Schoedinger's version of Quantum Mechanics, that is Wave Mechanics. It would take John von Neumann of Hungary (beware of the Hungarians!) to show the equivalence of the two approaches.

*Werner Karl Heisenberg (5th December, 1901 - 1st February, 1976)

Note: Due to maintanance of Blogger.com, this posting is being added on 6th December, 12-30 AM)

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Sources:
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p01.htm
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Heisenberg.html
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1932/heisenberg-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p06.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heisenb2.htm

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/eht.html