“Do what you can; I’ve yielded”: Deborah Warren reviews of A. M. Juster’s excellent translation of the elegies of Maximianus on the hard truths of aging (and other things). Read it yourself; or better still, buy the book.
In search of the Tasmanian tiger: “Andrew Orchard lives near the northeastern coast of Tasmania, in the same ramshackle farmhouse that his great-grandparents, the first generation of his English family to be born on the Australian island, built in 1906. When I visited Orchard there, in March, he led me past stacks of cardboard boxes filled with bones, skulls, and scat, and then rooted around for a photo album, the kind you’d expect to hold family snapshots. Instead, it contained pictures of the bloody carcasses of Tasmania’s native animals: a wombat with its intestines pulled out, a kangaroo missing its face. ‘A tiger will always eat the jowls and eyes,’ Orchard explained. ‘All the good organs.’ The photos were part of Orchard’s arsenal of evidence against a skeptical world—proof of his fervent belief, shared with many in Tasmania, that the island’s apex predator, an animal most famous for being extinct, is still alive.”
The world’s smallest desert is in Canada in case you were wondering.
Rockefeller Center’s lost botanical garden.
At 83 volumes, Notable British Trials is the most complete inventory of human depravity that has ever been assembled. The series ended in 1959. Will it be brought back?
Essay of the Day:
What makes science science? Daniel Sarewitz attempts to answer the question in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard:
“What separates science from other intellectual activities? The search for a distinctive logical structure of scientific inquiry and for the essence of scientific truth goes back at least to David Hume’s concerns with the limits of inductive inference (does the fact that the sun rose yesterday mean that it must rise tomorrow?) and has been pursued along a variety of philosophical lines. Perhaps best-known among such efforts is the falsifiability criterion devised by the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper, according to which science should be recognized not by the evidence it garners on behalf of one proposition or another (supporting evidence can be found for pretty much any proposition) but by the types of questions it asks—questions that can be empirically contradicted. ‘In Lost in Math, however, Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who is funny and writes with that slightly oblique flair sometimes found in totally fluent nonnative English writers, learns at a scientific conference that Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used . . . since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence.’ Exactly.
What, then, joins Hossenfelder’s field of theoretical physics to ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, and geology? Why do they all get to be called science? Certainly it is not similarity of method. The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical. Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the ‘demarcation problem,’ the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a ‘family resemblance’ among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called ‘science’ that the rest of the world should recognize as such.
“The demarcation problem matters because the separation of science from nonscience is also a separation of those who are granted legitimacy to make claims about what is true in the world from the rest of us Philistines, pundits, provocateurs, and just plain folks. In a time when expertise and science are supposedly under attack, some convincing way to make this distinction would seem to be of value. Yet Hossenfelder’s jaunt through the world of theoretical physics explicitly raises the question of whether the activities of thousands of physicists should actually count as ‘science.’ And if not, then what in tarnation are they doing?”
Photo: Rocket Plume Shadow
Poem: Micheal O’Siadhail, “Conversation with Messiaen”
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