Blake Ostler in Interpreter: "the Maxwell Institute is a pale reflection of its predecessor."

[Physics Guy]

I also got curious enough to try to read Alma 30-42. I made it through the first few chapters but after that I started rapidly skimming. I'm an impatient reader and there are a lot of books I have a hard time not skimming, so I don't really hold those dull later chapters against Alma, but the interest that Alma 30 does hold is not because it's so impressive. Korihor gets some surprisingly good lines for an atheist in a religious text, Alma blusters, then the author smacks Korihor down by deus ex machina. Mary Sue zaps the mean girls with her magic. It's interesting because it's so bad.

[Tom]

First, this jumped out at me:

There is not even a hint of expertise or discussion of ancient context — or any context beyond the text for that matter. All of the reviews of the books in this series should be called: “A Review of Texts Without Context.” Or perhaps we should call them textum solus. There is no attempt to situate the text in space and time beyond what the text says self-referentially.

Isn't this the guy who claimed to have read all of Saint Thomas's Summa in Latin over a summer? I'm sure he read the words, but this makes me wonder whether he understood any of them, because "textum solus" is the kind of mistake a student in his/her first few weeks of Latin would make. Not first-year, not first-semester but first few weeks. It should be solus textus, and he means this as analogous to sola scriptura, which is good Latin: the noun-adjective pair linked by gender agreement, and the adjective of size/quantity comes before the noun (this would be the case even in Italian—solo testo—which I assume to be the foreign language Ostler knows best as a former missionary there). Not just peer review but the informed eye of a competent editor would have seen this.

I see that the error has been silently corrected (but not in the PDF).

[Alphus and Omegus]

First, this jumped out at me:



Isn't this the guy who claimed to have read all of Saint Thomas's Summa in Latin over a summer? I'm sure he read the words, but this makes me wonder whether he understood any of them, because "textum solus" is the kind of mistake a student in his/her first few weeks of Latin would make. Not first-year, not first-semester but first few weeks. It should be solus textus, and he means this as analogous to sola scriptura, which is good Latin: the noun-adjective pair linked by gender agreement, and the adjective of size/quantity comes before the noun (this would be the case even in Italian—solo testo—which I assume to be the foreign language Ostler knows best as a former missionary there). Not just peer review but the informed eye of a competent editor would have seen this.

I see that the error has been silently corrected (but not in the PDF).

That's too bad. It was valid Reformed Latin, as altered by the ancient Algonquin. Interestingly enough, the alphabet is written solely in emojis.

[Kishkumen]

That's too bad. It was valid Reformed Latin, as altered by the ancient Algonquin. Interestingly enough, the alphabet is written solely in emojis.

LOL!

And here I wasn’t going to invite Ostler to join my project to translate the Book of Mormon into Latin! Now you tell me this!

[DrStakhanovite]

In some ways that ought to be easier in philosophy than in other fields because everyone has access to the subject matter. In physics one might be working on phenomena that most people have never seen or of which they have never even heard, so that you have to explain first what the thing even is before you can say what questions concern it.

In some ways you are right and in other ways it proves more difficult. Philosophy suffers from a “publish or perish” standard, thus securing entry level employment coming out of a PhD or Post-Doc gig often means having a few articles already in print before getting the honor of qualifying for food stamps whilst teaching a full semester’s load as a hapless adjunct.

This means absolutely *everyone* is submitting stuff and so the number of journals has risen accordingly to meet the demand. The result is that there is oversaturation of material that in all honesty shouldn’t have been published and the resulting bloat makes keeping up on anything that isn’t a very niche topic impossible. This also only increases the rate of which jargon is introduced and proliferates.

So when it comes time to try and explain a topic that you haven’t rehearsed for students, you can really struggle to find the appropriate words and analogies to use on the fly when having a real conversation with a healthy person outside the field. Parsimony can be a real struggle.

Your comment actually made me think of my favorite scene in the film ‘A Serious Man’ where Clive tries to get a re-test of a failed midterm in physics on the Uncertainty Principle. I crack up everytime the professor says, “You can’t really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works, that's the real thing. The stories I give you in class are just illustrative….I mean...even I don’t understand the dead cat….” [Here is the clip]

It sounds as though Ostler is out of his depth. That can happen to anyone but the problem is that once you're out of your depth at all, it's hard to tell how far out of your depth you are. BSing to fill in the gaps is a dangerous habit that can take you from undergrad naïveté all the way to sheer lunacy.

The above is a total truism and I think the saddest part is that Ostler really isn’t trying to B.S. people and that the lack of a proper editor with a relevant background could have done him a lot of good. At the end of the day I think the Interpreter set him up for failure.

[Physics Guy]

I crack up everytime the professor says, “You can’t really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works, that's the real thing. The stories I give you in class are just illustrative….I mean...even I don’t understand the dead cat….”

I'm not sure I need to see the clip. I would say exactly that, too.

Pretty much, anyway. I teach physics majors and grad students in Germany, and by the time people get to me for quantum mechanics they have enough math that I mostly just give them the math. But last semester I did make some goofy PowerPoint animations trying to explain quantum interference in terms of Pachinko, so I do sometimes tell stories. It's really true that the math is the only real Scripture. All the things in words and pictures are free translations.

That's something I think Thomas Kuhn got wrong about scientific revolutions. New and old theories are not incommensurable. The formulas can be directly compared and you can see quite clearly how one approximates the other in certain limits. Sure the stories that people tell about the two theories may be radically different, but as my advisor used to say scornfully, That's just the words. No-one ever took those things seriously.

Or at least nobody has taken the words seriously, as opposed to the math, for quite a long time. I think that one of the big scientific revolutions that went unnoticed may have been marked by Heinrich Hertz's dictum, "Maxwell's theory is Maxwell's equations." At that point, if not before, the proletarian formulas threw off their conceptual masters and seized the means of production for themselves.

Publishing is a requirement in all academic fields, I'm pretty sure. There's an enormous daily flood of new articles in any subfield of physics. I think in natural science the career on-ramps are still controlled by experiments, though. Experimental equipment is expensive, and not easy to use, so there are only so many productive labs in the world doing experiments of any given kind. It's hard to get an academic job in science, even as a theoretician, if you don't have some connection with one of those places. If you don't have a recommendation from someone who runs one of those labs, or from someone those people know, then just publishing a few articles in some obscure journal probably won't help you enough.

Science is a bit like a republic in which only people who own at least two hundred thousand dollars worth of property can vote. That does at least tend to lower the din somewhat.

[drumdude]

It was valid Reformed Latin, as altered by the ancient Algonquin. Interestingly enough, the alphabet is written solely in emojis.

Bretheren, Adieu

[Philo Sofee]

Physics Guy
It's really true that the math is the only real Scripture. All the things in words and pictures are free translations.

That is simply one of the absolute coolest things I have read in my lifetime. VERY WELL said!!!

[Symmachus]

It's really true that the math is the only real Scripture. All the things in words and pictures are free translations.

Cute. Perhaps a little too cute. Just what are you saying here with these "words"? That only something that is susceptible of mathematical description is true? Or are just saying this in relation to physics and the breed of physics popularizers that use lots of words and little math?

[Symmachus]

I see that the error has been silently corrected (but not in the PDF).

Well, that's good. The world has one less mistake in it. I didn't want to rub it in earlier, but since they're using this board for editorial help, I will point out that there is another error just after that one:

None of the authors has the education or training to comment on any ancient context or even the context of Joseph Smith’s Weltanshauung (roughly the contextual worldviews that dominate the thought of the time). A text that is an island in a contextual vacuum exists in a void of meaning.

A slight irony arises here in a paragraph about education and training when the writer condescends to the reader by defining the German word but misspelling it: it should be Weltanschauung, not Weltanshauung (but points for Teutonic capitalization).

As I recall, Herr Doktor Professor Peterson was a missionary in a German-speaking country, so he would know this. Doesn't he even read these things before they are "published"?