LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF ATLAS SHRUGGED

 In the opening scenes of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand sets the conflict of values between the heirs of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad. James invested corporation rolling stock and his own money in a copper mining venture in Mexico. He relied on inside information from his friends in Washington and other corporate collaborators. Dagny has been withdrawing the engines and cars. Earlier this month, Caltrain sold 19 locomotives and 90 galley cars to the government of Peru for $6 million. The justifications for the sale are almost verbatim from James Taggart. 

“This agreement will help Peru embrace a more sustainable future while also bringing millions of dollars to help us keep Caltrain running,” stated Caltrain Executive Director Michelle Bouchard in a press release. “Our former Caltrain passenger cars and locomotives will enable the start of new commuter rail service in greater Lima, cleaner air for commuters and community members and the access to opportunity that great public transportation provides.”

As part of the state funding for the electrification, the F40 locomotives were supposed to be rendered unusable, per California state law. However, Caltrain was able to obtain a waiver from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District because of the environmental benefits of establishing a new commuter rail service in Peru. The deal was brokered with the Government of Lima, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of Commerce." https://railfan.com/caltrain-f40s-gallery-cars-sold-to-peru/

Previously on Necessary Facts

Greg Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths

That Goddam Ayn Rand Book 

The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 

HOW TO KEEP TEENAGERS FROM READING AYN RAND

The Ayn Rand Institute created a guide book for high school teachers who want to bring Anthem into their classroom as an assigned reading. I can think of no better way to make sure that no one who deserves to read it actually will. 

Appendix: Teaching Anthem: A Guide for High School and University Teachers

Lindsay Joseph -- February 16, 2024 -- 24 min read

How can we help students understand Anthem with greater depth and clarity?

https://newideal.aynrand.org/appendix-teaching-anthem-a-guide-for-high-school-and-university-teachers/

“This essay is intended as a guide for teachers as they help their students understand Anthem with greater depth and clarity.

“Once students have achieved an integrated understanding of Anthem, they should be encouraged to relate their newfound knowledge to the world around them. Their knowledge is not useful if it is compartmentalized. The third part of this guide is designed to help students apply Anthem’s meaning to other areas of study, the real world, and their own lives.”

First of all, if the essay is a guide, then that is what it is. To say that it is intended as a guide denies the premise: perhaps it will not be accepted as a guide or be understood as a guide. If so, then the writer of the guide failed. More to the point, no one who reads Anthem needs to have it explained. If they do, then the writer of the story failed—and she did not. 

 

Back in the ‘60s, sometime after I read Anthem, I saw a social commentary comedian on Ed Sullivan. He said that people are upset at campus protests. He said that some people think that kids should spend more time in church. He said that perhaps the way to get kids into church is to put tanks in front of them and order the kids to stay away. That sort of sums up the message in Anthem. I did not need it explained to me. No one did. In fact, just as a classmate of mine had passed the book to me, I handed it off to a girl who took great exception to its message and marked it up with counter claims. Turns out, she was a Christian who understood the message quite well and disagreed with it quite clearly. She also did need not a study guide.

 

You want to keep kids from reading Ayn Rand? 

Order them to do it.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Anthem as a Graphic Novel 

The Girl Who Owned a City 

“Star Trek: Discovery” and the Conflict of Values 

Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard “Serenity” 

LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF ATLAS SHRUGGED

Ayn Rand kept a "Horror File" of current news reports validating the worst aspects of her fictional universe in Atlas Shrugged. She said that she did that because often, in casual discussions at social occasions, someone would assert, "No one really believes those things!" or "No really says that." Well, yes, someone does and not just a random person but someone with social capital and personal status. 

Personally, I believe that from both an engineering standpoint and a market perspective, newer energy sources will eclipse oil and coal just as those outshone hardwood and charcoal. At the same time, I also believe in spontaneous order very well enucniated in Leonard E. Reed's essay, "I, Pencil" (Foundation for Economic Education here). 

Furthermore shutting off the oil that supplies you with heat and light and transportation will not deliver to me a solar-powered car, or a plasma power plant for my home.

More to the point, I believe that the people who oppose the production and delivery of oil today do not care if you have heat, light, and transportation (or food). They have them. So, they are satisified. And they have the leisure time to engage in an anti-industrial revolution. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Jerry Emanuelson's Algebraic Proof of Ricardo's Law of Association

What is Legal Tender?

Money is Speech

Debt: The Seed of Civilization

Celestron AVX Product Review, Part 3

Friday night, the 17^th, I intended to be out through dawn, the sky being clear, albeit with a nearly full Moon. However, after some frustration, I took it all down and brought it all in at 23:30. This morning, I went through the user manual again. I relied on the PDF editor to locate places in the hardcopy to make my own notes. I am a little smarter now. 

While working in the dark and wanting to actually view things, I have not always recorded the operations as I would if I were getting paid to write their user manual. This morning, I set it up (without telescope or counter-weight) to run through the menuing. 

 

It is easy to crash the software. 

• I attempted to run a simple two-star alignment. 
• I missed the second star in the menu, pressed Back too long, and found myself at Select First Star again. 
• So, as I was already pretty close to Vega, I pressed Enter and Align. 
• The mount stood on its head while it wrapped up the Declination cord and jammed one of the mount knobs into the Latitude knob as I furiously loosened screws. I should have just cut the power, of course. (Something like this happened the second time out, also, though it was not as dramatic. See the second review linked below.) 
• Writing this, and checking my work, the same thing happened again twice. Fortunately, I was ready to flip the switch to Off. Also, fortunately, no instrument was mounted or it would have been a head crash, as when a robot manipulator bashes its own base. The lesson here is the same as it was in 1991: Always stand at the E-Stop when running the robot. 
• And that is a design flaw here: The paddle has no Emergency Stop, no power cut-off.

Getting my facts straight to write this,
I found another interesting problem.
The documentation is wrong about the key pad.
 More to point, though,
the design of the user interface lacks consistency
because it lacks conceptual integration.
If the engineering were conceptually integrated,
 these contradictions would not exist.
 It is why as a technical writer
I rely heavily on Ayn Rand's theory
of objectivist epistemology
to inform the design process.

Running the test was easy because the mount has no internal power. The EEPROM (programmable memory) holds the last settings only. This morning, the onboard computer thought that this was still the night of the 17^th. So, it was easy to program in 21:44:44 hours and today’s date. Considering the utility and cost of a wristwatch battery, I can only regard this as a major engineering oversight. 

 

I did verify an undocumented feature. Holding the Back key clears the current menu (sometimes).

 

I found that accidentally on the night of the 16^th 20:21 hrs. I had three stars in the alignment but could not find a good fourth star in the Menu. So, I was stuck in menuland, pressing Back and Back and Back and not finding a good target until I accidentally held the key a little longer. Oh! Ah! It is not in the documentation that you can do that.

 

As noted, I do not know the faux Arabic names of the stars. Loving languages (see here), I can tell myself that Rasalgethi and Rasalhague are the heads of something or someone and Denebalgedi and Denebola are tails. The burden  remains with me to learn them as I learned Zubenelgenubi and Zubenalschemali because I am a Scorpio. Just to note: The Object Info database does have the common name and the Graeco-Latin designation as the two line header for each target in the Star Catalog. So, that will help with the learning.

Also, the documentation does clearly explain the difference between the Four (4) key Identify and the Zero (0) key Object Info. That was my problem the other night and a problem I recorded earlier. I lined up on a brighter star near along the ecliptic, pressed either Identify or Object Info and then Enter and nothing happened. So, I pressed Back and Enter and the telescope took off for the first item in the list, Achird (Eta Cassiopeia). 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Documentation is Specification 

Objectified: A Documentary About Design 

Celestron AVX Mount Product Review Part 1 

Celestron AVX Mount Product Review Part 2 

 

An Objective Philosophy of Science

In framing her philosophy as capital-O Objectivism, Ayn Rand was following in the tradition of Enlightenment objectivism, which was never explicitly defined in its own time. Enlightenment objectivism broadly asserted an integration of two schools of thought, continental rationalism and British empiricism. We know it commonly as the scientific method: theories explain facts; facts test theories. You cannot have one without the other. 

Furthermore, necessary factual truths do not contradict each other. Whatever is true in biology, sociology, history, or aesthetics supports and is supported by truths in physics, chemistry, economics, or ethics. It is also true that facts are contextual. Breaking a rack of billiard balls is different from charging into a crowd on a street corner.

 

I find it frustrating and disappointing when experts to whom I turn for knowledge about astronomy blunder when they discuss philosophy. For me, the nadir has been Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg who praises Paul Feyerabend in Dreams of a Final Theory. Unfortunately, Dr. Weinberg is not alone in lacking an objective philosophy of science. It remains true that Steven Weinberg has much to teach about applying philosophy to science. 

The Philosophy of Science according to Steven Weinberg.
He is always interesting and not always wrong.
I also have his textbook on astrophysics.
(If he's wrong there, it's above my level.)

Ultimately—and here I side with Weinberg and not with my Objectivist comrades—even mathematics describes and explains physical facts, whether or not we perceive them. See “Imaginary Numbers are Real: Pegasus is Not” here on this blog. For Objectivists who adhere to the final writings of Ayn Rand, mathematics is the science of measurement. (See Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Unpublished are any notes or journal entries from Ayn Rand on the tutorials that she took in mathematics late in life, even if they exist. Regarding the “hard realism” of mathematics, I offer my own theory, i.e., an integrated conceptual explanation of known facts, which differs from canonical Objectivism. My understanding was informed by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg’s book, To Explain the World. Weinberg asserts a philosophical assumption that he calls “hard realism” when he demonstrates that the modern scientific method was discovered, not invented. It exists independent of the observer and is the same for anyone anywhere.

These are two aspects of the same reality.
No dichotomy exists.
Leonard Peikoff's doctoral dissertation on the 
Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy is reproduced in
recent editions of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

Weinberg allies himself with the scientists who are being assaulted in “culture wars” in which postmodernists like Paul Feyerabend claim that there is no such thing as “science” only a “scientistic narrative” that (in their terms) “privileges white males and denies space, voice, and agency to women and persons of color” who have been and are oppressed by “the Enlightenment project” of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. 

 

I suffered through a semester of that in my final graduate class in criminology in which our texts were Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology, edited by Bruce A. Arrigo and Christopher R. Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Essential Criminology Reader, edited by Stuart Henry and Mark Lanier (Westview Press, 2006). Pseudo-mathematical fashionable nonsense such as “crime is a torus” and “crime is a strange attractor” were offered along with denunciations of open-market economics and the Enlightenment. (For more about “fashionable nonsense” see The Sokal Affair and Reflections on the Sokal Affair on this blog.)

 

Among the many strengths of Ayn Rand’s essays on philosophy was her insistence on connecting the higher studies of aesthetics, politics, and ethics to fundamental truths in epistemology and metaphysics. The lack of such integration is evident in the opinions of scientists who endorse political solutions to anthropogenic global warming. Even if AGW were real, the integration of reason and reality indicates that market solutions offering valuable products and services would be more effective than legislation restricting human action.

 

I read it often enough to wear it out.
The one on the right has my marginalia.

The relationship between inspiration and proof is that based on your lifetime of experience, you can have an intuitive feeling that a course of investigation will be fruitful and reveal new facts and therefore perhaps deeper or wider truths. But you cannot convince another scientist by a heartful plea. You must provide evidence and your method must be repeatable. 

 

As a judge in regional science fairs for the past eleven years, I have seen the consequences of failing to hold to that standard. Quite simply, we reward creativity and originality and discount and even denigrate the mere repetition of a known experiment. It is true that careful work is expected as the baseline of performance. So, you do not get an award just for doing a good job. But we never see any of these bright youngsters challenging or refuting a previously accepted claim. 

 

I find that especially disappointing because I judge in behavioral and social science. Unlike the physical sciences, working social science researchers do test and challenge each other’s published works. Unlike the physical sciences, in my undergraduate curriculum, I had a 200-level class in research methods that required the critical examination of peer-reviewed journal articles. In graduate school, even though I steered to starboard, as long as I presented a coherent reply based on facts, my essays earned A grades. And in one class, I had a colleague whom I would describe as “to the right of the Kaiser” and he got A grades, also. On the other hand, serving on a committee of the American Astronomical Society, criticism of AGW is pointedly unfashionable. The subject came up because astronaut, geologist, and “climate denier” Harrison “Jack” Schmitt is scheduled to be a guest speaker at the Astronomical League conference in 2022.

 

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis described how the inspiration for polymerase chain reactions came to him while driving his sports car through the Sangre de Cristo mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Whatever the personal inspiration, proof to others of the process required publishing repeatable results according to the scientific method. In that book, Mullis also mused about the validity of natal astrology when he noticed that many other scientists in his field were born about the same month as he. Astronaut Ed Mitchell attempted experiments with ESP. Any working scientist is in good company in denying or even denouncing astrology and ESP. However, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Lacking proof and making a claim is wrong but seeking proof according to the scientific method is not. On that note, I point out that we accept the electroencephalograph as a valid instrument and yet deny that people can communicate directly mind-to-mind. Maybe we just do not know how to measure it yet. 

On the problem of failed experiments, Edward W. Morley was not satisfied with the results of his famous tests and continued to pursue the luminiferous ether. This speaks to the fact that Ayn Rand called her philosophy Objectivism, not Absolutism. While many things in life are absolute, your choice of a career is not one of them. Morley was acting in his best interests by his best judgment when he continued to pursue empirical verification of the ether. He did not sacrifice everything, or even anything. He continued to be productive as a working researcher. His choice was objectively correct. 

 

In the AAS committee that I serve on to facilitate collaboration between amateurs and professionals, one of my colleagues suggested that we recommend that all of us who practice science engage in community outreach to teach critical thinking. I pointed out that Dr. Harrison Schmitt is not alone among my conservative comrades who are degreed engineers and who believe that they engage critical thinking when they deny climate change or endorse conspiracy theories. The attainment of objective knowledge requires more than doubting whatever you feel that everyone else believes.

 

In order to work successfully, scientists must implicitly accept the axioms of Objectivism: Existence, Consciousness, and Identity. These are colinear, not hierarchical. We accept that we possess consciousness, that something exists outside of our consciousness, that whatever we discover has a specific nature that we are capable of knowing. In Understanding Objectivism: A Guide to Learning Ayn Rand’s Philosophy, Leonard Peikoff addressed the fact that epistemology and metaphysics are interwoven. Many students of Ayn Rand’s works misunderstand the hierarchy of philosophy to mean that reasoning from the law of identity you can rationally derive the laws of epistemology. It cannot be done. That is the failure of philosophical rationalism from Plato to Descartes to Russell. The alternate choice of the false dichotomy is positivism going back to the ancient medical writers who treated diseases without attempting to understand their deeper causes. Objectivism integrates the mind and the body, our ideas with our experiences. 

 

Consider the moralistic handwringing of scientists awestruck and terrified by the atomic weapons they created and delivered to the political leaders of their world. Two of Rand’s novels address the question of who benefits from your work, The Fountainhead (implicitly) and Atlas Shrugged (explicitly). Rand wrestled with the problem earlier, as expressed in a play, Think Twice. I am not aware of anything like this in science education. I had a graduate class in ethics in physics. We were concerned more with adhering to the procedures of science than with the purposes to which it is put.

(To be continued.)

 

Previously on Necessary Facts

Gregory M. Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths 

The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 

The Scientific Method

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It 

That Goddam Ayn Rand Book 

 

Also on Necessary Facts

Patent Nonsense: Intellectual Property Rights and Non-Objective Law 

Four Books About Bad Science 

Another Case of Fraud in University Research 

Misconduct in Science and Research 

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science 

Criminalistics: Science or Folkway? 

Rachmaninoff

My mother was more for Chopin and Liszt and we had a lot of that, especially as sheets and books, but also on 33-1/3 LPs, eventually in stereo. So, growing up, we had at least one Rachmaninoff, the Preludes and Variation on a Theme by Paganini, perhaps. And also the Second Piano Concerto. But I never knew that until I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and my 11^th grade American history teacher told me that that particular work was one of Ayn Rand’s favorites. I listened to it often while reading Atlas Shrugged through twice. To me, it is the soundtrack for the book and the soundtrack that the movie should have had.

Rand mentions it and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in The Fountainhead, at the beginning of Part IV. We see an anonymous young man in the woods. Recently graduated from college and seeking a path for his future, he responds to the beauty of the world around him and yearns for something within himself to answer the promise in the music. 

 

Rachmaninoff was an icon in the society in which Rand matured. In Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, Lara, Komarovsky, and Pasha are all at the very fine party in a sparkling home, while in the background, Rachmaninoff plays for the guests. 

 

It is not that I don’t care for music (see Hallelujah here), but that I have a slight hearing deficiency. The piano worked well enough for me because you hit the key and you get the note. As open instruments, the coronet and French horn were impossible for me. In the third grade, we took a “music readiness” test in which we had to identify higher and lower notes; and once they got close, I could not tell them apart. But music is a language; and I am good at languages, dialects, and accents. I have two cassette tapes, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff and Gershwin Plays Gershwin. You can hear covers all over YouTube and the performers are accomplished professionals. But these are not just different performers with their own subtle interpretations. They are the right way to play the music because there is no substitute for creation.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Labor Day Celebrates Productivity 

Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged 

Autobiography of a Worker 

Reflections on the Passings of Comrades 

Ten Years of Necessary Facts

This blog was launched on 2 January 2011. It was inspired by Gregory Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths (University Press of America, 2001). I met Dr. Browne at Eastern Michigan University in the fall semester 2007. Waiting for a class in police operations, I was walking the halls and heard him lecturing. It was obviously a philosophy class and he sounded reasonable. I looked in and saw “Ayn Rand” on the blackboard closing an array of philosophers in historical sequence. A couple of weeks later, I heard him actually mention Ayn Rand. So, I introduced myself. And I bought the book format of his doctoral dissertation. It derives from a refutation by Leonard Peikoff of the Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. 

All-time Readership Frequency
(The anomalous spike is Hurricane Harvey)

All-time Readership Geography
At times Russia, India, or China dominated.

Before EMU, I was at Washtenaw Community College. Taking a class in symbolic logic (required for criminal justice majors), the instructor was Elizabeth E. Goodnick. She displayed a nervous habit typical of high-IQ children. So I took a Platonic interest in her and asked about her research. She said that she was pursuing David Hume even though she herself was a rationalist. I replied, “So you accept that A is A, but you are not certain that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow?” She said that was correct. That is the Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy: rational versus empirical; logical versus real; theoretical versus practical; moral versus practical; art versus science. 

 

Reclaiming the worldview of Aristotle, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is a modern instantiation of the rational empiricism of the Enlightenment. We commonly know it as the scientific method. Theories explain facts; facts validate theories. Contradictions do not exist. Existence is identity: to be is to be something. The senses are valid. Knowledge is possible because reason works. Moral actions are practical and money is a valid measure of moral action. It is not the only measure. 

 

Ten Most Popular Posts

Second Ten Most Popular Posts

After ten years posting 668 articles, resulting in 351,444 page views, I have seven followers. I stopped taking comments this year after a spate of spammers inserted their own links. I have had offers from search engine optimizers to help me monetize this blog. I turn them all down because here I write for myself. I do get paid to write what other people want and I am happy for those opportunities. For myself, writing here is research and development, or maybe just keyboard practice. Socially, for myself, this is like a concert violinist taking his guitar and a bottle of wine down to the park to jam, or Itzak Perlman playing klezmer. 

Speaking of music, though, I do not, or at least have not yet. That seems a curious lacuna.

A Partial Index of Ideas Within This Blog (2017)

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

General Topics:

Imaginary Numbers are Real: Pegasus is Not 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

The Economic Value in a Liberal Education 

Why Evidence is Not Enough 

Supplies and Demands 

 

Military:

Leaders are Readers 

Hurricane Tejas 

 

Criminology:

Integrating Criminologies 

Employee Theft 

20% of Scientists are Crooks 

 

Ayn Rand:

The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 

Ayn Rand and Star Trek 

 

Science:

The Scientific Method 

Science in the Middle Ages 

 

Astronomy:

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe 

Asterisms 

 

Numismatics:

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 

Numismatics: History as Market 

 

Linguistics:

Linguistics Debate: What Colors are Your Rainbow?  

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma 

The Living Fish Swims Under Water 

 

Popular Culture

Nerd Nation 4.5

She’s Such a Geek! 

World Peace Through Massive Retaliation 

 

Turing Never Said That

“I think that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” The line is spoken twice, first by Knightley qua Clarke and then by Cumberbatch qua Turing. But they never said it. It should be attributed to a different genius, the screenwriter, Graham Moore.

I never accepted the quote as genuine, but it came up again when a colleague used it in their signature block. I wanted to warn them about that; so I did another Google search for an authoritative reference to debunk the false citation. I found the work of Sir John Dermot Turing.  

Dermot Turing – like his celebrated uncle Alan Turing – was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College, Cambridge. After doing a D.Phil in Genetics at Oxford, he concluded that scientific research was not for him, and moved into the legal profession. … His specialism was financial sector regulation, particularly the problems associated with failed banks, and financial market infrastructure.  -- More at https://dermotturing.com/about/dermot-turing/

In a blog on his website, Sir John explains: “Fake quotes - July 30, 2019 - We all know about fake news, but only recently I discovered fake quotes. I was asked where Alan Turing’s famous quotation ‘Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible’ had come from. After a lot of digging, the answer was ‘It didn’t.’ Not in his broadcasts. Not in his published papers. Not in his unpublished speeches.” 

The statement is insightful, powerful, and empowering. It deserves repetition and popularization. The author was Graham Moore. Moore received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his screenplay of Imitation Game. He understood Turing. 

“I had been this huge computer nerd my entire life. I went to space camp and computer programming camp. I was that kid. From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing - among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, 'it's a mathematician that you've never heard of.' When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I'd do anything to write this film, I'd write it for free. It was all about luck and passion. That is how it started, and I felt that everyone else involved was just as committed to the story.” -- Graham Moore via IMDB at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2441699/

 

Dermot Turing has developed an interest in his uncle’s work, publishing several books about the wartime projects at Bletchley Park. I bought two of them through Amazon UK. For myself, that was evocative on several levels. 

First, I am a globalist and I love global commerce. Unlike my conservative comrades who have fallen into the abyss of nationalism, I find an overarching  vista in Ayn Rand’s warnings against the Balkanization of western society. (See the Ayn Rand Institute here.) To be able to buy a product from across the Atlantic ocean with a few clicks is a tribute to human ingenuity in a open market.  

Second, my money was exchanged from dollars to pounds automatically and at a trivial cost. On the one hand a global society needs a global currency. On the other hand, an open market allows a plethora of monetary media. Friedrich A. Hayek called gold “the wobbly anchor.” (On NecessaryFacts here.) At the American Numismatic Association convention in Chicago in 2019, I spoke on the future of money and predicted a world coming soon with personal currencies. (See a version on Necessary Facts here.) During the Middle Ages, bankers rationalized the variegated fabric of local coinages with an abstract system of “pounds-shillings-pence”; and when they met at great fairs, using the new Arabic numbers and algebraic methods, they cleared their books without ever touching a coin.

 

Third, the transaction was secured with public key cryptosystems. Software agents shook hands and established trust in order to safely carry my money and order the transport of the seller’s product. 

 

A final note on Turing from Turing: “One scene in the movie which had puzzled me is the one where a young Alan Turing is pinned beneath the floorboards at his boarding-school and jumped on by his schoolmates. That’s bizarre, in many ways, not least because there is no evidence that Turing was bullied at school, and certainly none in Hodges’s book. Oho, it turns out that this scene is lifted from another book altogether – A Madman dreams of Turing machines, a novel by Janna Levin. So what started as fiction has been recycled as biography.” – Sir John Dermot Turing.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 

Turing’s Cathedral 

Variations on Enigma 

BASIC: Turing’s Truth 

The Code Book 

Coins and Codes 

Galileo and Saturn: Epistemology not Optics

It is commonly claimed that Galileo did not perceive the rings of Saturn because the telescope he was using was not capable of magnifying the image. That is not true. After Galileo, astronomers needed another 50 years to think about the problem and re-imagine it. They needed to ask the right questions. Christiaan Huygens was the first to perceive the structure as a ring. However, it was another 200 years before the ring was understood as a system of particles, rather than a rigid body. The problem was epistemology, not optics.

Galileo’s Images of Saturn 1610 and 1616
https://attic.gsfc.nasa.gov/huygensgcms/Shistory.htm

    “Galileo Galilei was the first to observe Saturn with a telescope in 1610. Because of the crudeness of his telescope, he couldn't determine what the rings were. He incorrectly guessed that there were two large moons on either side of Saturn. Two years later when he viewed Saturn again, the "moons" had disappeared. We know now this is because Galileo was viewing the rings edge-on so that they were invisible, but at the time it was very confusing to Galileo. After another two years, Galileo viewed Saturn again and found that the "moons" had returned. He concluded that the rings were “arms” of some sort.

            “Many years later, in 1659, a Dutch astronomer named Christiaan Huygens solved the mystery of Saturn's "arms." Because of improved telescope optics, he correctly deduced that the "arms" were actually a ring system. Huygens also discovered Saturn's moon, Titan, and for this reason, the probe exploring Titan is named after him.” 

From NASA’s Cassini-Huygens Mission website (no longer current) here https://attic.gsfc.nasa.gov/huygensgcms/Shistory.htm

“Galileo’s Sketch of Saturn” 
from Galileo and the Scientific Revolution 
by Laura Fermi and Gilberto Bernardini,
Basic Books, 1961.

“When he turned his telescope on the planet Saturn, he found that this did not always look like a round body but seemed of strangely variable shape. He thought it to be “three-bodied; that is it … was an aggregate of three stars arranged in a straight line parallel to the ecliptic, the central star being much larger than the others.” His telescope was not sufficiently powerful to let him to distinguish the three, possibly four, rings we now know are around Saturn. It was the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens (1625-1695) who discovered Saturn’s rings.” -- Galileo and the Scientific Revolution by Laura Fermi and Gilberto Bernardini, Basic Books, 1961.

 

“Galileo continued his telescopic observations from his new home in Florence. Here he discovered that Saturn sports a pair of curious appendages, but his telescope was not powerful enough to reveal their true nature. (They were Saturn’s rings.)” Parallax: the Race to Measure the Cosmsos by Alan Hirshfeld, W. H. Freeman and Company, 2001. 

 

“1610 - Galileo Galilei becomes the first to observe Saturn's rings with his 20-power telescope. He thought the rings were “handles” or large moons on either side of the planet. He said “I have observed the highest planet [Saturn] to be tripled-bodied. This is to say that to my very great amazement Saturn was seen to me to be not a single star, but three together, which almost touch each other”. 

“1612 - Galileo was astounded when he found that the rings he first observed a couple of years earlier had now disappeared. He wrote "I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel". The rings were, in fact, edge-on from Earth's perspective. Galileo inadvertently became the first person to observe a Saturn ring plane crossing. 

“1616 - Galileo now observes the rings as two half ellipses. He wrote “The two companions are no longer two small perfectly round globes ... but are present much larger and no longer round ... that is, two half ellipses with two little dark triangles in the middle of the figure and contiguous to the middle globe of Saturn, which is seen, as always, perfectly round.”

 From Views of the Solar System Copyright © 1995-2015 by Calvin J. Hamilton. https://solarviews.com/eng/saturnbg.htm

 

Museo Galileo, Florence
https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/indepth/SaturnsRings.html

“In some observations conducted in 1610, Galileo (1564-1642) saw Saturn as tricorporeo [three-bodied], i.e.,composed of a central body and two lateral bulges, which he mistakenly thought to be satellites. In 1655, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), thanks to a more powerful telescope, observed Saturn's rings for the first time. He described them accurately in Systema Saturni (The Hague, 1659). The Accademia del Cimento was concurrently investigating the nature of the rings. Between 1671 and 1684, Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712) discovered four satellites of Saturn, in addition to the one previously found by Huygens. Cassini also observed and studied the divisions between the rings. Recently, the Voyager space probes have revealed that the many concentric rings are thin bands consisting of countless rock and ice fragments that orbit the planet and reflect sunlight.”

© 2018 - 2020 Museo Galileo - Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza 

https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/indepth/SaturnsRings.html

 

https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs
/978-0-8165-0829-7-frontcover.jpg

“Telescopic studies of Saturn, its ring system, and its satellites from 1610 to about 1900 are surveyed. Early observations of the Saturn system and changing beliefs about the constitution of the rings are covered, showing that what an observer sees in the heavens depends not only on the quality of his instruments, but also on what he expects to see. The first observations of the Saturn system by Galileo, the development of the ring theory by Huygens, and the replacement of Herschel's and Laplace's solid ring theories by Maxwell's particle ring theory are recounted.” 

Saturn Gehrels, Tom; Matthews, Mildred Shapley (Editors). Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1984, p. 23-43.

 

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
by Ayn Rand (2nd. edition)

In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Ayn Rand asserted that a sensation must be identified to become a percept. A set of percepts, identified and integrated by common attribute becomes a perception. A set of perceptions integrated by their common characteristics are given a name and thereby made into a concept. Concepts are further abstracted by their essential distinguishing characteristics, according to objective context, into wider (and more powerful) ideas. Without identification, a sensation alone is meaningless. Not knowing what to expect, Galileo could not perceive the rings of Saturn correctly.

Just as it took time for the nature of Saturn’s rings to be teased out from the observations, so, too, did someone 400 years after Galileo finally put 2 and 2 together. In 2005, the science of epistemology informed astronomy.

“Saturn was first seen through the telescope by Galileo in the summer of 1610. In the ensuing half century, Saturn's strange appearances became a celebrated puzzle. The problem was often not the poor quality of telescopes: a number of observers drew images that we would interpret as showing a ring around the planet. It was also a problem of concepts because for several decades observers had the wrong model in mind when they observed the planet. Thus we could say that their telescopes could show them the ring, but their preconceptions did not allow them to see it. The manner in which Christiaan Huygens arrived at the solution, in the winter of 1655-56, shows that more than good telescopes were necessary, although for rhetorical reasons Huygens maintained the opposite. And Huygens's ring-theory, [elegant] as it was, had several shortcomings that were slowly fixed--often by others.” --  “Saturn through the Telescope: The First Century” by Albert Van Helden. American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #37, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 37, p.620. Pub Date: August 2005

 

Explore Scientific First Light 102
660 mm focal length

Last night, I went out with my telescope to see what Galileo could or could not have perceived, had he held the identifying concept. Admittedly, the 102 mm objective of my Explore Scientific refractor has 16 times the area of his. However, I am inside a city, a mile from a major shopping center. He was in Florence, a city with smoke, perhaps, but no arc vapor street lights. 

I tested three magnifications: 20.8x (32 mm), 26.4x (25 mm) and 38x (17 mm). At 21 power, it was a strong “maybe” given Galileo's patience. At 26.4 power the rings were discernable without question, and at 38x, they were undeniable. Although his 20x telescope was his primary instrument, it was not his only telescope. He had made a 30-power at the same time, but gave it to Cosimo Medici. I believe that Galileo’s instruments were good enough, but understanding of the taxonomy of the solar system required a conceptual leap that would have to wait for later astronomers.

PREVIOULSY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Scientific Method 

Feynman's Rainbow 

Harriman's Logical Leap

Cosmos: a Spacetime Travesty