This past week’s lecturer, professor Vittorio Loreto of Università La Sapienza in Roma, struck an interesting chord with me. As someone spanning both the humanities and the STEM in my studies, Loreto left me with a faint feeling of dread. He presented the novel ideas of quantifying innovation, an abstract concept in itself, and eventually concluded that the efficiency of innovation over time is decreasing. By his findings, the only reason the number of innovations is increasing steadily is due to the vast number of individuals seeking innovation. That only means one thing for an individual like myself (soon to graduate): competition. Therefore, there has to be a directly causational relationship between competition and innovation. As Loreto phrased it: ‘as I am writing a paper, I have to race to publish it, as my neighbors are likely doing the exact same work’. The space on which to innovate is shrinking, but the number of individuals tackling innovation is only growing.
Author: Walker Griggs (Page 2 of 2)
First, a confession: I’m writing this entry a few weeks after our museum visit, thus my topic is heavily influenced by later lectures; namely “The Origins of Innovation”
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Handed a staggering number of art works, I initially felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity. A few had rather dubious connections to the larger origins theme, and many just skirted the topic.Two works struck me in particular however…
The first work that I felt truly captured the essence of our lecture series was an unassuming installation of photographs hanging just beside the door. They depicted a peaceful mid-western prairie, but, upon closer inspection, I noticed that it documented a controlled burn. This intrigued me, as the purpose of a controlled burn in twofold: to preventative and restorative. The former is intended to burn a path around the crops to prevent wild files from advancing beyond a certain point; and the latter is to return nutrients to the soil in fallow plots. This, I find, is the essence of finding order amid chaos. Facing the threat of destruction, controlled burns both ensure the fertility of the land below and define a boundary for the land beyond. Moreover, while fire itself is a chaotic entity, it is orderly — hence, controlled burn — and used to keep true chaos — wild fires — at bay.
The second work of art that I will discuss is Ai Weiwei’s vase collection. See, these ancient clay vases have survived millennia, only to be drenched in a staggering array of industrial paints by a contemporary artists. Many in our tour group referred to the art as vandalism, as if Wei Wei were a graffitti artists spraying over someone else’s work. In fact, Wei Wei hired a man to smash a few of these pots in an gallery in Miami. Oddly enough, the same individuals who claimed painting the vases was vandalism saw the pot smashing as performance art.
I care to argue that he was giving these vases a new beginning. These pots were originally created to serve a purpose, and are entirely utilitarian in nature. Claiming that they serve a larger academic purpose is largely a moot point, as we have already learned what we could from them. Now that they have lost their utilitarian purpose, they are essentially worthless (ignoring the rarity aspect). Now, they have lost all value in that sense. Weiwei has reinstated purpose with a contemporary twist. He is essentially giving them a second chance; an origin in the modern world.
But how are these two works related? I argue that they both mark second chances — a rebirth. In both cases, the prairie and vase have lost their purpose. The prairie has been drained of all nutrients and the clay vases are simply not practical in industry. By committing what to some feels like a desecration, these artists and farmers alike renew the world’s lease on these objects. Both the acts, burning and painting are a point of origin, or rather a node on the hierarchical tree of origins.
A few words of Aaron Hanlon surrounding the origin of novels really stuck with me. The first being that early 17th century novels made a significant effort to simplify names and plots. Instead of “Hunt for the Red October”, they wrote “David Simple, the Adventures of, in Search of a Real friend. They connected with the reader, yet were didactic in nature. They taught, not through sophomoric monologues, but through an overwhelming sense of realism and great attention to the particulars. They created a discerning reader, and, above all, they produced rational expectations for rational thought. As Hanlon argued, they led to observational science linked to previous contextual understanding. In a ways, Hanlon argued, novelist helped shape the face of modern science.
Now, I care to argue that, through the birth of social media and ‘listicles’, society will begin to trend science towards the abbreviated and summarized. With forums and chats littered with acronyms like ‘rtfm’(read the friggin manual), ‘inb4’(before the obvious…), and ‘tldr’(too long didn’t read), previous research will be supplanted by ‘see above’ and ongoing research will gravitate to concise / abbreviated diction. Do note: I do not mean to say the modern science will deviate to improper, expedited methods abandoning due diligence. I DO mean to say I believe that the literature of modern science will follow the trends towards truncated and condensed writing — often referred to in academia as concise and controlled diction.
Twitter, limited to 140 character blurbs, is currently the foremost engine of contextualized observations. Daily, millions of individuals observe their surroundings and publish their findings for all to comment and react to — almost a peer review of twisted sorts. Facebook, with slightly larger posts, releases mass amounts of social and personal commentary into the public sphere for general consumption and scrutiny, often with abbreviated ‘Internet speak’. Even the diction we use in these posts have been reformed by this ‘literary revolution’, and words like ‘google’ have entered our dictionaries.
Will this inspire a new format for modern literature? I sure hope not. Will this impact how we perceive literature? The seems more likely. I wouldn’t argue that our attentions spans are on the chopping block, but it seems likely that our notions of a ‘long’ or ‘dense’ article may be shifting. Even in my own experiences in computer science, ‘man pages’ (terminal based plain-text documents explaining a command’s functionality in exhaustive detail and length) have been pushed aside by the now trendy ‘tutorials’. While, yes this does raise questions about work ethics in modern developers (myself included), I notice a clear shift away from all-encompassing bodies of knowledge, and towards easily digestible tid-bits of critical information.
That said, similar to Aaron’s assessment of how observational science marked by discerning observations of the particular impacted and informed 17th century literature, I argue that laconic diction in 21st century science may validate and promote our abbreviated communications. Call it impatience, but we seek a healthy serving of pertinent, applicable information without all the side-fixings; and modern science will soon follow suit.
Last week I wrote about the ties between religion and astrology, suggesting that perhaps we are asking too many questions pertaining to the ‘how’, and less of the ‘why’. I concluded with a loose suggestion that perhaps astrology and our pursuit of a proof-based origin story mirrors religious endeavors to instill comfort and confidence with a sense of understanding. After this week, I stand by that theory. However, I am left with a sublime sense of our aimless and haphazard existence. On the grand scheme of the cosmos, a human life span is a speck within a spec on a grain of the sands of time. Excuse my melodramatic angst, but we are nothing (relatively). But that’s not what I write about today.
Today, I write about the concept that systems, when starved/burned/ or otherwise introduced to chaos, find order. They adapt. Of course I find comfort in this, especially when I noticed this phenomenon on every scale. In the macro theatre, post gravitational collapse, space dust hurries to accumulate mass (and thus gravitational force) to overcome the pull of the collapsing star. The dust, and soon planets, are introduced to the star’s rotational axis and follow suit. On a micro scale, post big bang, the hydrogen molecules among the gaseous soup cool enough to form bonds, and soon life. Even on a human scale, after 59 individuals were shot dead at a Las Vegas music festival, hospitals fill with volunteers waiting to give blood. We organized among the chaos. The 18th century Industrial Revolution led to the organization of labor unions, the American Civil War drafted the Lieber Code, and World War II gave birth to the United Nations. While these examples are quite generalized, they serve to highlight systems bathed in chaos finding order.
Bringing it back to our lecture…
When media discusses global warming, they treat it as though the world were coming to an end (of course depending on what news program you watch), and, for many, the end of the human race is the end of the world. But, as I mentioned earlier, the end of the human race, by means of environmental shifts beyond the sufficient condition of the human species, is indeed not the end of the world. In fact, for the earth, humans are a relatively only a short blip in time. The earth has fostered the growth and reproduction of humans, and, as we upset the stability of our atmosphere by artificially releasing stored carbon, it must correct. To return to a stable state, as we discussed, the environment will make the necessary alterations to counteract the abundance of carbon-dioxide. Now this is not to say that we as humans will not find order within our new-found chaos, but will it be enough?
Will I be dead? Most definitely. Will I have left an impact or made a difference? We hope, and most likely on a local, relative scale. Will my carbon footprint have mattered? Now I dabble into question of morality. The earth will correct, that much we know. Will it do so fast enough to spare the human population? No, not unless we change our trajectory and artificially apply the carbon-hand brake. So it really boils down to one question, how does my environmental ignorance deviate from the trajectory of mankind? Is Asiimov accurate in his predictions of an everlasting, entropy-reversing walk of life, or are we destined to remain a spec within a spec on a grain of the sands of time.
I’m not an astronomer. I’m a computer scientist and fiction writer. So after Monday night’s lecture I was grasping for a take away, and I was struggling. I left the lecture with new found knowledge on red shifting, deuterium, and the hubble effect, but I had no new, definite insight on origins — the topic of this years humanities lab. After some thought, it dawned on me that I was approaching it from the wrong angle. I was asking myself the “how”, and no the “why”. I was asking “how was the universe derived from such confined origins” and “if the big bang was truly the creation of all, then what was before? What is nothing?”. I should have been asking “why do we need to seek for an origin in the stars” and “why do we cling to the belief that the big bang was the start of the universe?”.
My immediate answer: our obsessive need to define our origin through physics derives from our need for affirmation — a confirmation bias. That’s why Steven Hawking’s No Boundary proposal has ruffled so many feathers: it upends the commonly accepted, preexisting hypothesis of absolute creation. Similar to the general public’s reaction when proposing the world is not indeed flat (but rather continues on the ‘other side’), we have a hard time digesting that our universe may simply be a string of a higher-dimensional cosmos or a galactic reflection mirrored across this opaque primordial soup.
Of course, this is not unlike our desire to color our origin story with all shades of religion. A simple rule of thumb I carry as a fairly agnostic individual: we can neither positively confirm nor deny a Gods existence, thus claiming God is real is just as ignorant as claiming He is a farse. Similarly, we can neither confirm nor deny that the ‘big bang’ was the creation our universe. Moreover, just as religious individuals cling to their beliefs for the comfort, faith, or sanity, the scientifically minded cling to cosmic events. Disproving the big bang’s role in the creation of our universe would be adjacent to debunking religion.
But where does this leave us in the realm of our humanities lab? Obviously we’re are grounded many million years later on an apparently stable planet in an apparently stable galaxy. I arrive at the conclusion that all origins are hierarchical. The origins of man making fire led to the origins of cooking food over a fire, which in turn lead to the origins of gastronomy. Similarly, the origins of language led to the origins of story, which in turn lead to the origins of religion and so much more. My point is this: if origins can be traces up a lineage tree, it is only natural for human curiosity to trace it to the top — the origins of all origins. So, to come full circle, perhaps the greatest question to ask, and the question religion and astronomy alike attempt to answer, is “what is the origin of origins”?