Waves Passing in the Night

In the history of astronomy, there was a conjecture in the 1760s that the planets orbit the sun in distances that can be described by a simple rule: 

Raise 2 to the power of the planet in sequence:

Multiply that by 3.

To that product add 4.

Divide that sum by 10. 

You get a measurement in “astronomical units” i.e., Earth-distances. And it is almost correct. After Mars, before Jupiter, there needs to be a planet Number 5. Then Jupiter is 6 and Saturn 7. Seeking Planet 5 led to the discovery first of Ceres in 1801, then Pallas (1802), Vesta (1807), and so on; and we are still finding asteroids in that gap. 

Today, the “Titius-Bode Conjecture” is ignored by serious astronomers. It is accepted as an accident of algebra that any small distribution can be described by some formula of arbitrary simplicity. 

Waves Passing in the Night:
Walter Murch in the Land of the
Astrophysicists; Bloomsbury, 2017.

Walter Murch found it compelling. Murch is a musician. He was born in 1943; his family was literate, artistic, and economically comfortable. Young Murch was fascinated by sound and by age 12 he had his own tape recorder. Decades later, he received Academy Awards for working on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, American Graffiti, and other films. Murch found a deep truth in the Titius-Bode Conjecture. To him, it is evidence of the Music of the Spheres: something that we perceive caused by something deeper, more subtle, that we do not. 

Murch’s biographer, Lawrence Weschler, loves his subject. Weschler is more than fair to Murch’s detractors. No serious astronomer agrees with him. They will not even read his papers to refute them. This is not about medieval geometry: Murch has extended his theory to include wave mechanics as applied to gravity. That led one scientist to ask: “Why do our interplanetary spacecraft not detect such disturbances?” It is a cogent question. 

I snagged this book from my city library’s “De-acquisitioning Bookcase.” (25 cents each, all with their library call numbers on them. What would Eratosthenes say to that?) I took it down because of the title, but it fell open to Ernst Chladni and his waves in sand on a vibrating steel plate. When I worked at the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, this was a learning station in the gallery. I referred to it often when explaining fireworks in the kitchen to mixed audiences. I would say, “We can imagine electrons as little balls with minus-signs orbiting a nucleus, but it is more helpful to think of them like those standing waves of sand, as probability distributions.” 

So, the book seemed complex, over-arching, challenging, and probably wrong, but certainly interesting. And it is all of that. 

Weschler lets Murch do his own advocating. Aside from the necessary explanations, Weschler just points the reader to Murch’s website and other works. For a thin book (150 pages), it stands on eight pages of references. It seemed like a good way to get lost and if I had more time, I might follow that path. 

For now, I am happy to have reinforced my belief that the universe is not merely knowable, it is comfortable. And there is sound in space.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

G. H. Hardy’s “Apology”

Elisha Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition 

Imaginary Numbers are Real. Pegasus is not. 

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers 

Brave New World: How Goodly and Beauteous We Are

All stories are about us, who we are and who we are not. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s message is that if we stopped to consider our lives and our civilization, we would hang ourselves now in shame and sorrow. 

Harry Lloyd as Bernard Marx and 
Jessica Brown Findlay as Lenina Crowne
In the book, Lenina appears once in a sailor suit
with bellbottoms and a cap, in mulberry for Betas.

This is who we were 1932 and who we were becoming. Collectivism was the norm; individualism was dead. Mustapha, Benito, Trotsky, and Hoover were to be the names of the future, the creators of central control and coordination, social stability and individual happiness. Henry Ford was the most successful of the planners. Ford enterprises were vertically integrated. Ford even built communities in the wilderness of Northern Michigan to mill lumber for the floorboards of the automobiles streaming from  his factories for everyone to enjoy. Seeing sawdust piled up, Ford ordered it pressed into bricks for fuel: Kingsford Charcoal. Ours is the year 642 AF and we are Fanny Crowne and Lenina Crowne no less than we are Bernard Marx and John Savage.

World Cup Soccer and Formula 1 

and every person carrying a gaming machine — 

“Real happiness looks squalid 

compared to the overcompensations for misery.” 

(page 221 Harper Collins edition 2017.)

Compelling though Huxley’s warning be, close reading reveals a lack of rigor. Despite the deification of Henry Ford, automation has stopped. Elevators have human operators. Farms with animals produce internal and external secretion even though fetuses are grown with blood surrogate. There is no attempt at colonizing the Antarctic or the seabeds or space exploration or a Lunar colony, even though such efforts would consume resources, which is the prime mover of that society. 

At Eton, an Alpha-double-plus learns Relativity. What is the motivation to learn a theory that was only good for astrophysics? 

Within the castes, individuals are further differentiated: Beta Plus and Alpha Minus, etc.. But they all dress alike and treat each equally according to that caste system. There seems to be no social advantage or deprivation for plusness and minusness. 

Reflecting Huxley’s society and his view of it, Alphas are males and Betas are females. And contrary to one of the basic lessons of hypnopaedia, they mingle. More aligned to the premise of social organization, we never see Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons associating outside of their castes.

Huxley asserts a basic human need for religion. Civilized people have the Solidarity Service and the Arch Community Songster of Canterbury and savages have ceremonies with Jesus and Pookong. Huxley is direct: “It reminds me of a lower-caste Community Sing,” she told Bernard. 

After 600 years of genetic and social conditioning of what use is a Ford Chief Justice? How deep is crime beyond what we saw with Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, settled as Marx says like a coffee klatch? Why is there a Young Women’s Fordian Association, in a society where all women are young? 

A society created for consumption and production must have an accounting system but Huxley delivered almost nothing about economics. There is one reference to the Bank of Europe. Bernard Marx worries that the open tap of eau de cologne will “cost me a fortune.” Marx is given six packets of sex hormone chewing gum as a noticeable politeness. John Savage pays a helicopter pilot but how much and with what the author does not say.  

In the brave new world 70% of females are fertile in order that there be a steady supply of different eggs for the factories that breed humans. We never see their eggs harvested. And how many different males would actually be needed? 

Leonard Nimoy
as Mustapha Mond (1998)

That a society entirely of Alphas would be unstable is an English point of view, an excuse for a class-based society rather than a meritocracy. It could be argued that 600 years after Ford, a totally automated world would be nicely enjoyed by all one million of Alphas. And they could apply Relativity to the problem of space travel. 

I found imperfections in the writing that an editor should have caught. Explaining that the horridly aged Linda was revulsive to all, Huxley says that she “cut no ice” an anachronistic phrase even in 1932. Viewing the native village, they observe “… smoke rising perpendicularly…” How else could it? Did he mean that it was undisturbed by wind? The reservation landscape presents “table topped mesas.” They are called that because “mesa” means “table” in Spanish. 

The characterization of Bernard Marx is the deepest. Marx is actually troubled, which no one else is, except John, of course, and as the theme of the book repeats for our conditioning: automatic happiness is the sine qua non of civilization. 

“… in spite of the fact that his friend's support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to mediate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. …One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Universal Television NBC 1980
Alphas wear gray, Betas mulberry, Gammas green
Deltas khaki, and Epsilons black, and styles are
fashionable not stark. Also, to the point here: 
no Alpha females, apparently.

“… Bernard's other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity–a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz's character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday.”

Huxley admits to individual differences of character among a population that has been carefully conditioned by heredity and environment to be homogenous. That, like religion, may be a fundamental fact of humanity which Huxley announces but does not explore.

"In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable.” Biohackers on NecessaryFacts https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/10/biohackers.html

The book has been adapted to screen with. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(1980_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(1998_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(American_TV_series)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

When Worlds Collide 

This Island Earth 

Eureka

Recent Science Fiction Reads (14 July 2024) 

Recent Science Fiction Reads (24 July 2024) 

Frankenstein, Rayguns, and Bicycles 

Book Review - Writing for Their Lives: America’s Pioneering Female Science Journalists

 

Writing for Their Lives: America's
Pioneering Female Science Journalists
by Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette
MIT Press, 2023.

Written from access to archives of memoranda and correspondences among the editors and journalists, this book is a case of special pleading. Every rejection is laid at the feet of the Science Service management, though the author also grants that the founders were egalitarian in their evaluation of writers and the works which they submitted for publication. In fact, Science Service stands out as evidence of a paradigm shift in western culture from tradition and privilege to merit and meritocracy. 

It is certainly true that even into the 21st century, men who hold power discriminate against women who do not. That is the definition of sexism. And it applies to racism, or any other “ism.” The problem is not prejudice but prejudice with power. At Science Service that prejudice never existed though it remained  very real (even rampant) in the wider world. 

Jane Stafford  was granted a special award for medical writing by the American Society for the Control of Cancer and correspondence across December 1937 and January 1938 reveals that she could not accept the award in person because women were not allowed to enter the Harvard Club. And the ASCC and Harvard were among many others that had no intention of changing their by-laws lest a roomful of men feel uncomfortable in the presence of a woman. (page vii-viii) 

“As novelist Josephine Tey’s fictional historian reminds us, ‘Truth isn’t in accounts but in account books.’ Hidden within the Science Service records at the Smithsonian Institution Archives were sufficient examples of ‘account books’ (budgets, financial reports, pay lists, rejection slips to stringers, carbon copies, memos, and handwritten notes in letter margins) to shed light on workplace interactions, the writing process, and reactions to success, rejection or criticism.” (WFTL, page xii)

It is easy for us to accept that such rooms should be more-or-less 50-50. I believe that because most women are smarter than most men, the populations of academic societies will be shifted toward the women, if not within this generation then by the end of this century. A century ago, that hypothesis would have been dismissed on metaphysical grounds: men are essentially different from women—different from each other in their Aristotelean essences. 

The question that Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette does not ask is why does not everyone else in the world see the same obvious truth that she does? In fact, at least one other person does: 

https://www.mpg.de/female-pioneers-of-science/caroline-herschel

'Caroline Herschel's legacy is undoubtedly lasting'

Astronomer Sherry Suyu from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics on comet-hunter Caroline Herschel, the first salaried female astronomer

[Q] Obviously, much has improved for women in science since the 18th Century. In your view and your experience, what do you regard as changes that have happened in terms of women in science?    

[A] The situation of course has improved in contrast to Caroline's time. In many areas, women and men now enjoy equal opportunities and there have been many positive changes. But there are still fewer women in STEM at higher levels – mainly I think because it is difficult to combine a professional career in science with having children. I think that employers should provide more support for women, so they can combine having a family with having a career. Scientists are evaluated by productivity. In that sense, when women start a family, their productivity is seen to decline as women who have families often take a break from their careers, hoping to return after a few years. But in reality, it's not that easy to continue with the same level of work productivity as before while rearing children. This means that in career terms, women still tend to be punished for having a family. Also, ironically, the time in women's lives when they want to have children and the time when they really want to work hard on their careers often coincides, when women are in their 30s. I think this should be reflected by family friendly initiatives in the workplace - women shouldn't have to choose between a family and a career.

https://www.mpg.de/frauen-in-der-forschung/caroline-herschel

https://www.mpg.de/female-pioneers-of-science/caroline-herschel

Das Gespräch führte Tanja Rahneberg Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

That program would allow women to work from home at the highest levels of management while men report to work to carry out the various tasks. Of course such generalizations must also acknowledge the Non-Binary Alphabet of Choices. Reconciling all of them equitably is a complex mathematical problem. However, if we only consider each person to be an individual, then the math is much easier. 

As for broad social change, during the late Middle Ages, English women who were shoemakers were called Shuster, bakers Baxter, brewers Brewster, and weavers Webster. It was a time of changes.

“The 1820s was the last decade in which no college for women existed. The first of its kind, Mount Holyoke, was founded not too far from Amherst in 1836. … Yet the very existence of Mount Holyoke (following a new array of academies providing high-school education for girls, and opening up posts for women teachers) must have shifted ideas for women’s futures.” (page 29) Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon, Viking, 2010.

Writers and their Beats Today

How much were the writers actually paid for their stories? How much did Science Service charge? We follow Hallie Hershberger in sales and advertising but never learn what the numbers were. There is very little mention of money, except as for example, Emma Reh in Mexico wrote to the home office for advances which were denied. Reh then sold her stories to other news outlets and even to other news reporters. LaFollette’s tone is that Emma Reh was not given everything that the author wants her to have had. I see Emma Reh as a very successful freelancer (“stringer” in journalism) who traveled to archaeological digs in Mexico and sold her reports. Ultimately, Emma Reh failed to deliver the book she promised. The economic problems at that time (the 1920s and 30s) were not hers alone. Failures happen and Reh accomplished much. 

“We were founded as an independent nonprofit in 1921 by newspaper magnate E.W. Scripps and zoologist W.E. Ritter, who wanted to improve the quality and accuracy of science journalism. We remain true to that mission today.” —  https://www.sciencenews.org/about-science-news (Accessed 6-June-2026.)

Science Service writer Gabriele Rabel reported from Germany from 1932 to 1938. LaFollette writes: “[Science Service editor, Frank] Thone expressed hope that ‘the financial sky will clear,’ but informed Rabel on March 6, 1933, that ‘in view of the monetary crisis which has suddenly developed in this country, it would be well if you did not send us any more manuscripts until further notice.” 

LaFollette seemed not to understand the Great Depression of the 1930s. The rolling bank failures began in Detroit on February 14, 1933. Michigan Governor William Comstock  declared a banking holiday. The proclamation had been signed at 1:00 AM, published, and delivered to bankers when they arrived for the start of the business day. Two weeks later, outgoing President  Herbert Hoover hesitated to declare a national bank holiday, so the newly-inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that on March 6, 1933. The flow of money in the United States stopped. 

They resumed eventually with many banks closed permanently and others reorganized and the dollar redefined from 1/20 of an ounce of gold to 1/32. Dollars were 60% smaller and there were more of them to go around. When LaFollette tallies payments made from 1928 though 1954 for 1 or 2 cents per word or $3 to $6 per article (p. 105-106) or editors paid $2600, $3640, $3900, or topped at $10,000 for the publisher 1927-1928 (p. 186) when dollars were much larger, the reader would have been helped with some standards of value against a market basket or comparable wages for clericals and college graduates. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

She’s Such a Geek!   

The Art of Finance 

The Madame Curie Complex 

The Science of Liberty 

Katherine Anne Porter

“She has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork. She has given to this little story all her wit and observation, her blistering humor and her just cruelty; for she has none of that slack tolerance or sentimental tenderness toward symptomatic evils that amounts to criminal collusion between author and character.” From Katherine Anne Porter's Introduction to A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty (Doubleday, 1941) in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press, 1970).

I sought out Katherine Anne Porter because Austin science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor spoke at Kyle’s Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center (508 West Center Street, 78640) and a review in the Hays County Free Press popped up for scrolling in my Kyle email. When I read the story, I merely recognized Porter’s name, not having read her before, but was nonetheless surprised that she is considered a local Kyle author. So, I went to the library. 

I found her pleasurable. Katherine Anne Porter is good company. I love listening to her  across our distances. In addition to a dozen essays here, some several times, I also read short stories and poems in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (Harvest/Harcourt Press, 1965, et seq). I read “Pale Horse/Pale Rider” through three times because that is what it took to understand the sequence of events. Clearly, even  though I had read several other stories ahead of that, I was not prepared for a serious engagement. Nonetheless, she was an inspiration. I could have fattened these two anthologies with post-its bearing exclamation points or quotation marks tagging the juxtapositions, the clever and insightful phrases. 

[Added 12 April 2026 8:48 PM - I checked out Ship of Fools from my local library but after about twenty pages, some even from the middle, it is going back tomorrow. She writes well. Her word portraits are cinematic. However, her sense of life is entirely negative and she only delivers a long torrent of small, spiteful insults.]

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet 

Neighborhood Book Kiosks 

When Worlds Collide

Dealers Make the Show: ArmadilloCon 41 Day 3 

Frank Romano's History of Desktop Publishing

“The combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript, PageMaker and the Mac’s GUI and built-in AppleTalk networking would ultimately create desktop publishing.” (page 84). Today, everyone is a publisher. To read is to print. To download is to copy. Copies are stored and retrieved. Sources are cited. This is how we got here. History of Desktop Publishing by Frank Romano is a narrative catalog. The story ends just before now and suggests some of the probable next generation of media, means, and methods. 

From The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley

By the standards of the past in the time before the Renaissance in Italy any improvement from the first typewriter could have sustained three generations over a century and today we would be enjoying the first teletypes in our homes. In science fiction we call that subgenre Steampunk: life in 2000 as seen from 1865. But that is not what happened. Instead, we have experienced a rapid evolution of tools for thinking and for the communication of those thoughts.

In the human lifetime after individual letters in lead type were no longer pulled from job cases and placed in composition sticks, type met ink and paper via keys, wheels, balls, film images, and matrices of 7, 9, or 24 striking wires. Ink was and is blown through magnets or fixed by electrical charges or by heat or both or chemical reaction with the paper and air.

Storage evolved through magnetic tape on large reels and small cassettes, floppy disks (first large and then soon smaller and denser), driven by direct friction contact or floating on a cushion of air. Semiconductor memory arrays are still mounted on the computer motherboard while others are conveniently removable even to be carried on a keychain. 

The genius of these rapid intellectual achievements, is exactly that many of them were incremental and just as many were truly new attempts to solve the same problems of transmitting ideas by giving permanent form to words.

In the 12th grade, his guidance counselor sent him to
Mergenthaler to seek a job interview. Romano went with a
classmate. Frank got the job but his classmate did not.

Frank Romano has a lot of good visibility as the historian of modern printing. Modern printing needed his formal investigations and detailed reports because the evolution was so rapid. Gordon Moore’s Law (observation) is that overall commonly available computing power has and will double every 2.5 years. “Moore’s Law is Dead” is a meme that asserts changes in the dimensions of understanding of the tools themselves. One path is that the changes are much greater; another is that they cease. 

Fortunately for us, Frank Romano is not alone and his Museum of Printing in Havehill, Massachusetts, is one of several institutions that preserve the tools, techniques, and traditions of the arts and sciences that instantiate and transubstantiate our thoughts across time and space. 

• Museum of Printing
• 15 Thornton Avenue, Haverhill, MA 01832
• The Museum of Printing is dedicated to preserving the rich history of the graphic arts, printing and typesetting technology, and printing craftsmanship.
  The collection contains hundreds of antique printing, typesetting, and bindery machines, as well as a library of books and printing-related documents.
  A unique holding is the Mergenthaler Font Library, the original drawings that were the starting point for manufacturing matrices for Linotype machines. Other font libraries are those for the Intertype Photosetter and the remains of the font library of the Photon Corporation (after the unfortunate destruction of much of this resource).
• The Museum will also become the home for the archives of the TUGboat editor, including many items related to TeX and to the typography of mathematics.
• Providence Public Library Special Collections
• The Updike Collection on the History of Printing
• 150 Empire Street, Providence, RI 02903
• Daniel Berkeley Updike was proprietor of the Merrymount Press in Boston.
• In addition to thousands of books (among them many early type specimen books), prints, ephemera, and some artifacts (including the matrices for the Montallegro and Merrymount types, commissioned by Mr. Updike for his own use), the collection includes Mr. Updike’s personal correspondence from 1878 to his death in 1941.
• An annual event is the Updike Prize for Student Type Design
• For more information, call +1 (401) 455-8021.
• It is best to plan ahead and make arrangements to see this collection.
• Rochester Institute of Technology
• Cary Graphic Arts Collection
• 90 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623-5604, USA
  Phone: (585) 475-3961
  Fax: (585) 475-6900
• Dedicated to graphic communication history and practices, this library is included in the curriculum of several courses offered by RIT's College of Imaging Arts and Sciences.
• Among the holdings is the most substantial collection in America on the work of Hermann Zapf, who held the Melbert B. Cary Distinguished Professorship at RIT from 1977-1987.
• They have many videos posted on their YouTube channel, including a tour of the press room and use of their Goudy printing press.
• Stanford University Library
• Information about opening hours and library locations can be found here.
• Department of Special Collections
• Donald E Knuth papers, 1962-2015 - Held offsite; must be reserved at least 48 hours in advance.

https://www.cincinnatitypeprintmuseum.org/

These preservations are valuable because they are beautiful and their operations are harmonious and parsimonious. And they work. These are the moorings and anchors of our fragile civilization. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Raymond Loewy 

Michael Shermer's Moral Arc

The Rational Optimist and the Grand Complication 

Hypatia of Alexandria 

Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletus