PITFALLS: Some parts of Einstein really are easy!

TUESDAY, JULY 20, 2021

Most parts pretty much aren't:  Kurt Gödel has often been called "the greatest logician since Aristotle."

This assessment is often attributed to Albert Einstein, the lone friend of Gödel's adult years and the greatest physicist since Newton.

Einstein and Gödel developed their friendship in the 1930s, during the period when each was working at Princeton, New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study.

By that time, the greatest physicist was already quite well-known. For better or worse, the man described as the greatest logician never achieved that status.

Have academics, writers and journalists ever been able to make Einstein or Gödel easy? An array of books have tried to do so, but to what extent have writers been able to explain / describe / elucidate the work of these two men?

In the case of Einstein, we'll guess that people who know the name—many people still do—would associate him with "the theory of relativity," and more specifically with the most famous equation in the history of physics:

E = mc2.

When it comes to explaining Einstein's universe, that famous formula has turned out to be relatively easy. Almost everything else has turned out to be quite hard.

In the next few weeks, we'll examine some of the ways Walter Isaacson tried to make Einstein easy—tried to explain Einstein's universe—in his well-regarded 2007 biography,  Einstein: His Life and Universe. 

Like others before him, not excluding Einstein himself, Isaacson struggled with the task of explaining most parts of relativity—in explaining most parts of Einstein's universe. By way of contrast, shedding light on that one famous formula was relatively easy. 

Isaacson turns to that task at the end of his Chapter Six: Special Relativity. He does so in a short, concise manner. 

Below, you see the bulk of what he writes at that point in his book. For certain fairly obvious reasons, the general reader will be able to grasp large parts of this presentation:

The result [of certain of Einstein's explorations] was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two. As he put it in his paper, "The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content."

The formula he used to describe this relationship was also strikingly simple...

E = mc2.

Energy equals mass times the square of light. The speed of light, of course, is huge. Squared it is almost inconceivably bigger. That is why a tiny amount of matter, if converted into energy, has an enormous punch. A kilogram of mass would convert into approximately 25 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. More vividly: the energy in the mass of one raisin could supply most of New York City's energy needs for a day.

"Mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing?" Unexpected and ultimately puzzling though it may be, this formulation is one of the most approachable parts of Einstein's work for the non-specialist / general reader.

In the presentation shown above, Isaacson offers examples from everyday experience which are easy to visualize, however surprising or puzzling they may be. 

In Isaacson's treatment, "a tiny amount of matter" can be converted into an amount of energy we would regard as enormous. Indeed, "the energy in the mass of one raisin could supply most of New York City's energy needs for a day."

This may be a deeply surprising claim, but it comes from the realm of the everyday and it's easy to understand. Meanwhile, the plausibility of this claim comes from a place Isaacson doesn't mention at this part of his book:

Starting in the 1940s, the rise of nuclear weapons demonstrated, in the most dramatic and tragic ways possible, the fact that relatively small amounts of matter can somehow be converted into (what we would regard as) enormous amounts of energy.

We'll note that Isaacson uses the terms "mass" and "matter" almost interchangeably in that particular passage. That said, how can it be that mass and energy (whatever they are) turn out to be "different manifestations of the same thing?"

Attempting to answer that question wouldn't turn out to be easy. But to the extent that Einstein found that "a tiny amount of matter" can be converted into an enormous amount of energy, Einstein's universe is remarkably easy to describe or explain to the general reader. 

Basic questions are left unexplored. But other basics are easy to report and are easy to understand.

Amounts of matter which strike us as small can be converted into amounts of energy which strike us as enormous! In his 2001 book, E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, David Bodanis presents this basic part of Einstein's universe in the way shown below.

(To read this part of Bodanis' book, you can just click here.)

Bodanis starts by discussing Marie Curie's exploration of the "mysterious energy" emerging from "several metal-streaked ores that had been brought back from the Congo and Czechoslovakia and other places" in the 1890s.

Curie won the Nobel Prize twice for her work on such topics. She also died from her extended exposure to this mysterious energy, which she called "radioactivity."

Can small amounts of matter be converted somehow into large amounts of energy? "At first," Bodanis writes, "even she had no understanding that these metals achieved their power by sucking immeasurably tiny portions of their mass out of existence, and switching that mass into the greatly magnified form of sprayed energy."

In this process, "immeasurably tiny portions of mass" were passing out of existence as they were converted into energy. Bodanis goes on to describe the part if Einstein's universe which really is relatively easy:

Einstein's equation showed how large the result could be. To work it out for any chunk of mass, take the great speed of light and square that to get an even more immense number. Then, multiply that by the amount of mass you're looking at, and that's how much energy, exactly, the mass will be able to pour out.

It's easy to miss how powerful that idea is. For E=mc2 says nothing about what sort of mass can fit into the equation! Under the proper circumstances, any substance can have its mass exploded outward as energy. This is the power that's around us, encased within the most ordinary rocks and plants and streams. A single page of this book, weighing only a few grams, seems to be just an innocuous, stable mix of cellulose fibers and ink. But if that ink and cellulose could ever be shifted into the form of pure energy, there would be a roaring eruption, greater than that of a large power station exploding. It's easier to access that power in uranium than in ordinary paper as we'll see later but that's simply a limitation of our current technology.

The greater the mass being transformed, the more fearsome the power released. Put a single pound of mass into the "m" slot, and after multiplying by the vast 448,900,000,000,000,000 value of c2, the equation promises that, in principle, you could get over 10 billion kilowatt hours of energy. This is comparable to a huge power station. That's how a small atomic bomb with a core small enough to fit in your cupped hands could heave out enough energy to rip open streets and buried fuel lines; to shatter street after street of brick buildings; to tear open the bodies of tens of thousands of soldiers and children and teachers and bus drivers.

A uranium bomb works when less than 1 percent of the mass inside it gets turned into energy. An even larger amount of matter, compressed into a floating star, can warm a planet for billions of years, just by seemingly squeezing part of itself out of existence, and turning those fragments of once substantial matter into glowing energy.

And so it goes. 

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of every statement made in that presentation. That said, surprising though this conversion of matter into energy may be, the basics are easy to describe or report. The basics are easy to understand, even for the non-specialist / general reader.

As such, some parts of Einstein's universe actually are fairly easy! We offer this as a preemptive contrast to the many other parts of that universe which have proven to be extremely hard.

We'll turn to some of those difficult areas in the next few weeks. Tomorrow, we'll let theoretical physicist Brian Greene offer some other formulations which may be jaw-dropping in their strangeness, but are easy to understand.

On Friday, the worm will start to turn. We'll look on as Greene struggles badly at one point. 

We may visit a similar breakdown as Rebecca Goldstein, a biographer of Gödel, discusses the basic outlines of the findings of that "greatest logician." At such times, we start to encounter the pitfalls of human intellect which may obtain, even today, at the highest academic and journalistic levels.

Some parts of Einstein's universe actually are fairly easy. Others parts have been extremely hard, though we rarely seem willing, or possibly able, to come to terms with that fact.

Tomorrow: As seen in Planet of the Apes! Profoundly counterintuitive, but easy to understand

PITFALLS: Early attempts to explain the cosmos!

MONDAY, JULY 19, 2021

It may still be early: Explaining the cosmos has never been easy. Right at the start of his massive 1988 best-seller, A Brief History of Time, the late Stephen Hawking offered a whimsical alleged example—a whimsical alleged example from fairly modern times.

It's widely agreed that Hawking was one of our most brilliant physicists. He also had a flair for whimsy. In the very first paragraph of his book, he offered this example of an attempt to explain the world:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

That was Hawking's very first paragraph. To read the first half of his first chapter, you can just click here.

Hawking's anecdote involved some stereotypical types. For better or worse, it pitted the hopelessly daft "little old lady" against the supercilious high-end professor who thinks he knows it all.

If we regard this anecdote as anything other than whimsy,  an apparent disregard for actual fact is an additional part of the mix. Accepting this whimsical tale on its face, Hawking is willing to assert that a well-known scientist was confronted this way—but he isn't quite sure which one!

Presumably, this amusing anecdote is whimsy all the way down. But as he continues, Hawking makes an intriguing remark about our current state of certainty concerning the warp and woof of the world—of the universe or the cosmos:

Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun–or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.

"Only time (whatever that may be) will tell!" Given the title and subject matter of his book, Hawking was adding an additional measure of humor as his book's second paragraph ended. But as he did, he offered some observations which may resemble a warning:

Some of the things we believe today may turn out to be as ridiculous as that tortoise tower. Some of the things we believe today may turn out to be wrong!

Quite literally, that's what he said. It seems to us that that was a sensible warning. Indeed, it's quite conceivable that Hawking's wholly sensible warning isn't quite strong enough!

Within the western tradition, explaining the universe has always been hard.  In the beginning, it was hard, and it's still hard today. 

Our human reasoning capability has always been limited, flawed. Consider a portrait Hawking presents on the second page of his book, where he visits the man who, if only by inference, can be described as "the greatest logician until  Gödel came along."

Within the western tradition, Aristotle is widely and sensibly viewed as the first great logician. According to Hawking, he also reasoned in such ways as this:

Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in the second century A.D. into a complete cosmological model...

The greatest logician formed this picture of the universe in accord with things he believed "for mystical reasons." A bit later in his opening chapter, Hawking visited Aristotle again:

According to a number of early cosmologies and the Jewish / Christian / Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have “First Cause” to explain the existence of the universe...

Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever.

Aristotle didn't like the idea of a creation "because it smacked too much of divine intervention." 

Hawking doesn't say why Aristotle disliked that idea so much. But in some of these areas, Aristotle's approach is starting to sound like reliance on mystical beliefs a good part of the way down.

Nor did the types of reasoning we might regard as faulty come to a sudden end in the time of the ancients or by the shores of the Aegean.  In the second chapter of his book, Hawking notes that Isaac Newton—the greatest physicist prior to Einstein—was "very worried by" a certain idea about "absolute space" (whatever that may be) which emerged from Galileo. 

Newton was very worried by the idea that absolute space did not exist "because it did not accord with his idea of an absolute God." Without any question, Newtown was one of the history's greatest intellectual giants. But his reliance of that idea will likely sound like a type of faulty reasoning.

Meanwhile, Hawking warmed the cockles of our heart with another observation in his opening chapter. Was even Hawking allowed to say this? We're not sure, but on page 8, he did:

The question of whether the universe had a beginning in time and whether it is limited in space were later extensively examined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his monumental  (and very obscure) work Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781...

As Hawking continues, he describes Kant reasoning in ways which might seem faulty today. Just for today, ignore that!

In that passage, Hawking voiced a rather puckish view about Kant's extremely famous book. He dared  to describe the famous book as being "very obscure!"

That warmed the cockles of our heart. Not to boast, but we formulated the very same view when we were still in college, in October of junior year!

Describing the cosmos has always been hard. Right from the start, our capacity for reason has always been limited. Often, it has been faulty. 

Presentations which seem like explanations may reach imperfect ends. Consider the basic stuff of the universe.

At the dawn of the west,  Leucippus and his pupil Democritus proposed that all matter was composed of atoms. The leading authority on the topic goes into more detail:

In the 5th century BCE, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus proposed that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles called atoms. Nothing whatsoever is known about Leucippus except that he was the teacher of Democritus...Democritus's argument for the existence of atoms hinged on the idea that it is impossible to keep dividing matter for infinity and that matter must therefore be made up of extremely tiny particles. 

"Democritus's argument for the existence of atoms hinged on the idea that it is impossible to keep dividing matter for infinity." This argument makes a type of sense as far as it goes, which may not be all that far and may not be all the way down.

Democritus' reasoning let him stop torturing himself with pictures of an infinite process of the division of matter. This may have let him sleep better at night, but it left us with a type of problem:

We were now asked to posit a type of entity no one had even experienced before—a type of entity which couldn't be divided further or reduced in size. 

One can always imagine or say that some such entity exists. But one is also forced to admit that he or she has never encountered any such entity, and he or she may soon be asked why the hypothesized type of entity can't be reduced in size.

We're thereby left with a new mystery—with a mystery to be solved later. In that sense, we haven't been taken all the way down.

In our view, a similar problem lurks today with our possibly somewhat vague understanding of history's most famous equation: E = mc2.

In essence, and colloquially, that famous equation tells us that matter can be converted into energy. A very large "mystery to be solved later" may be lurking in that formulation, but let's leave that one for later.

Hawking began his book with a portrait of the classic querulous lady offering a fairly ridiculous view of the cosmos. Very quickly, he warns us that our own more advanced current views may some day turn out to wrong—may even come to seem "as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises."

That strikes us as sage advice. It's also true that many of the ways in which modern physics is described may perhaps be a bit incoherent. Given the follies of human reason, these presentations may be less than coherent pretty much all the way down.

Has anyone ever been able to explain Einstein to the general reader? For the most part, we're going to say that the answer is no, but the story doesn't end there.

Even at the highest ends of journalism, academia and publishing, very few people have ever been willing or able to notice and acknowledge this fact. A serious cynic might see it this way:

They keep pretending to make Einstein easy and we keep pretending to get it.

Was Aristotle's reasoning sometimes flawed? No doubt, but so is our own. When human reason swings center stage, the pitfalls are everywhere.

Tomorrow: Brian Greene's extremely clear statements

The past is prologue: Last week, we started with Richard Cohen's "miracle column." In his column,  Cohen said he didn't understand Hawking's widely-praised, best-selling book. 

Five months later, Charles Krauthammer said the same thing. Our ruminations started here. They'll continue along this week.

Post headline: "We are failing our children"

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2021

Colbert King continues to speak: Colbert King is 81, going on 82.

He grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated from (Paul Laurence) Dunbar High, then moved on to Howard.

He has lived the bulk of his life in D.C. He joined the Washington Post's editorial board in 1990, then became the editorial page's deputy editor in 2000.

In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize in commentary "for his against-the-grain columns that speak to people in power with ferocity and wisdom."

(In our view, he made a terrible journalistic misjudgment during the 2000 campaign, but people do make mistakes and he might believe that we're wrong.)

King is the extremely rare, high-end commentator who focuses on urban youth. When he does, he tends to keep it local.

This morning, the headline on his column makes such a reference. Hard-copy headline included, his column starts like this:

KING (7/17/21): We are failing our children

Did you think for one second that the highly publicized March 23 carjacking of Uber Eats delivery driver Mohammad Anwar in Southeast D.C., which resulted in a horrific crash that left Anwar dead and two girls, age 13 and 15, under arrest, would cause a pause in carjackings and other offenses by juveniles? What planet are you on?

For the record, that fatal carjacking was heavily publicized in D.C. and pretty much nowhere else. It was executed by girls who were only 13 and 15—and as King notes, the trend didn't start or end there.

"Let’s return to grim reality," he says. Then he starts calling the roll:

KING: On March 12 and 16, less than two weeks before Anwar’s death, boys ages 15 and 14 were arrested and charged in the Feb. 27 armed carjacking of a ride-share driver in the 1400 block of Shippen Lane SE.

On March 25, two days after Anwar died, 13- and 14-year-old boys were arrested in an armed carjacking in the 100 block of 42nd Street NE.

On April 29 in the 300 Block of H Street NE, a driver was confronted by knife-wielding carjackers who took his vehicle and fled. A 15-year-old was arrested July 12 and charged with armed carjacking.

[...]

On July 8, a 15- and a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl were charged in an armed carjacking in the 1800 block of Central Place NE.

The next day, in the 1200 block of New Jersey Avenue SE, a driver was assaulted with a stun gun in an attempted carjacking. The suspects were unsuccessful in getting the car, so they fled on foot. Police officers arrested three girls, ages 16, 14 and 12, and charged them with armed carjacking. Police said they were seeking a fourth suspect as well.

Let that sink in: a 12-year-old girl.

We're only including cases with kids who are younger than 16. As King continues, he reports that police have shut down "an apparent teenage robbery spree" in which five teens—one of them only 13—"allegedly committed at least 19 crimes in D.C., including armed robbery, assault and unauthorized use of a vehicle, between July 3 and July 14."

In his column, King questions whether the D.C. government is doing enough to address the needs of the kids who end up committing such crimes. 

We can't speak to that question. But whenever we read about incidents like these, we always wonder how these kids reached the point of committing such horrific crimes—often, such horrific armed crimes—when they were so young.

What could have been happening in their lives? In many of these cases, their lives have largely been forfeited too.

How do kids who are so young end up committing such crimes? Except in columns by Colbert King, such questions are no longer popular or au courant, at least not here in Our Town.

In Our Town, our thought leaders rarely grew up in urban neighborhoods. When they perform their high morality regarding the lives of urban kids, they may tend to create the kinds of reports which appeared, for perhaps the ten millionth time, on the front page of yesterday's New York Times.

The report appeared on the Times' front page. Online, the headlines say this:

Boston Overhauls Admissions to Exclusive Exam Schools
A new policy will increase representation of Black and Latino students in the prestigious public schools, which serve as a gateway to elite colleges.

The report appeared on the front page. There the Times went again! 

The Times is concerned with the sliver of kids who may end up at Harvard or Yale. It very much tends to avert its gaze from the kids who, for whatever reasons, may end up committing armed robberies or violent carjackings when they're just 12 or 14.

Except for Colbert King, no one seems to wonder or care about those kids. We've noted this fairly obvious fact again and again and again.

Is it news that Boston is changing admission procedures to its venerable old Boston Latin High School? Within reason, yes it is.

That said, the front-page report in yesterday's Times was maddening for two different reasons. 

First, it was maddening because, once again, it front-paged those kids who may get into our "elite colleges," possibly after attending our "prestigious public schools." As seems to be policy at the Times, the report cares about those urban kids, and about no one else. 

The report was maddening on that basis—on the basis of values. It was also maddening on the basis of simple logic, for the same old reason:

Even as it plumps and preens in support of the (perfectly valid) goal of getting more black and Hispanic kids into schools like Boston Latin, it never asks the obvious question:

If that many kids can succeed at a school like Boston Latin, why not double the number of seats at the "exclusive, prestigious" school? Why leave the number of seats unchanged, then start looking for ways to kick other kids out?

Simply put, the New York Times is too limited to raise that obvious question. The Times writes on this theme again and again, and this blindingly obvious question never enters its head.

Nor will the Times report or discuss the "achievement gaps" which help define one of the problems we all continue to live with. Only recently did we realize why this silence is (possibly) being maintained:

Professor Kendi has said that even discussing the gaps is a racist act. On that basis, the frustrations and struggles of many kids are turned into dust in the wind as those kids get kicked to the curb.

In our nine years in the Baltimore City Schools, we taught no one but Baltimore City kids. We especially recall those lovely kids on three separate occasions:

We recall the outrage of our first fifth-grade class in the spring on 1970 when we watched the Steinbeck film, The Forgotten Village. The film describes how people react when an epidemic assails a rural, pre-modern Mexican village.

 How could parents possibly let their children die? these lovely kids angrily asked.

(We especially remember NAME WITHHELD angrily raising that question.)

We recall the question fifth-graders asked, several years later, in reaction to what they had seen on the gigantic TV show, Roots. 

How could anyone ever have been willing to hold other people as "slaves?" That's the question those very good kids asked, and they spoke in genuine puzzlement.

We also remember the way kids sat, enthralled, as Mrs. Young read Eleanor Estes' superlative book, The Hundred Dresses, to their fifth-grade class. The book describes a girl whose parents are Polish immigrants being teased by some of her classmates in a town near Pittsburgh.

Those Baltimore kids hung on every word. (We can still see the late NAME WITHHELD leaning forward in his seat.) The world  will score them as "black" kids, but they deeply cared about the unfairness being fictionally dished to that "white" Pittsburgh kid in Eleanor Estes' great book.

In our nine years, we taught only two kids who seemed to be some version of truly disturbed. One was fatally stabbed at age 38. A 19-year-old was arrested. We don't know what happened.

Moving ahead to the present day, what explains why a 13-year-old girl would take part in a violent carjacking? It can sometimes seem that the New York Times is too fine to wonder or ask. 

The famous newspaper is all wrapped up in the small number of kids who might end up at Yale. At present, it seems that these are the values, horizons and ways of our own deeply self-impressed Town.

Colbert King's assessment: King's column ends as shown:

KING: What is unknown is whether the city is offering more than rhetoric and made-up “sounds and feels good” services. What these youths, who have baggage that many adults have never carried, need is the steadfast attention of committed professionals with extensive therapeutic experience, along with supportive families—and a clerical community that seems to have lost its voice—to help them turn their young lives toward a different path.

Short of that, D.C., build more jails, and look both ways before driving.

These youths "have baggage that many adults have never carried," King says. 

Presumably, that's correct. Also, there but for fortune! (Try not to use the world "privilege.")

We would stress the idea that interventions should happen before kids commit terrible crimes. That said, King says those kids need "the steadfast attention of committed professionals...along with supportive families."

In many cases, we'll guess that the problem may begin with the lack of a supportive structure at home, or with something much worse. As for the clerical community, there are a lot of "communities" in Our Town which no longer seem inclined to talk about the lives, interests and experiences of deeply struggling kids.

According to the Times, these kids should all be sent to Boston Latin, and from there on to Yale. (Other kids will have to get booted.) These seem to be the moral and intellectual horizons which now obtain in Our Town.

One last point:

This point concerns the people to whom it doesn't occur that Boston Latin should maybe add seats. Are these the same people who read the Einstein-made-easy books, then stand in line to tell the world that they understood every word?

Imperfection is rampant in other towns. How about over here, in our own?  

THE PHYSICS / PHILOSOPHY HOWLER: The trampoline and the bowling ball!

FRIDAY, JULY 16, 2021

And the wisdom of Isaacson's joke: "The world is too much with us," Wordsworth famously said.

Arguably, the same can be said for Einstein's universe. Has anyone been able to explain that realm in a way the general reader—the average Jenny or Joe—can hope to understand? 

Is Einstein's universe comprehensible, even to the "educated person?" More to the point, has anyone ever been able to explain that realm in a way that makes it so?

As far back as 1988, Richard Cohen and Charles Krauthammer suggested, in columns for the Washington Post, that however devoutly it may be wished, such a thing can no longer be done. 

At issue was a best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, written by Stephen Hawking, one of the world's greatest physicists. 

Reviewers swore that Hawking's book was lucid, accessible, comprehensible—even easy to read.  In a pair of highly unusual columns, the columnists rose in dissent. 

Hawking's massively best-selling book was "utterly incomprehensible," Krauthammer even declared. In defense of his unconventional view, he adumbrated a theory:

The Hawking book may be proof that physics has reached the limits of metaphor. Sir Arthur Eddington was once told by a journalist that only three people in the world understood Einstein's general theory of relativity. "I am trying to think who the third person is," replied Eddington. There are more than three now. Thousands of graduate students understand the equations whose meaning Hawking has set out to communicate. But physics is becoming the province of a small cadre of cognoscenti who occasionally send out emissaries like Hawking to speak to the rest of us in parables.

Inscrutable parables...Physics has become a kind of fiction, an excursion into a mathematical universe so esoteric and so remote from ordinary experience as to be literally incredible.

In the beginning, Eddington had joked about the difficulty of Einstein's universe. He and Einstein understood it, he seemed to say, but he couldn't name anyone else.

According to Krauthammer, thousands of graduate students understood that world as of 1988. But they understand it mathematically—as a mathematical realm.

There are no homely metaphors which illuminate this world for everyone else, Krauthammer said in his column. We've reached the limits of metaphor for regular people like us. 

Thus spake Krauthammer in December 1988. A medical doctor and thus a scientist himself, Krauthammer suggested the possibility that the world had reached "the limits of metaphor" when it came to efforts to explain or describe Albert Einstein's universe.

It's all parables now, the columnist said—inscrutable ones at that. 

Thus theorized the columnist. For the record, Cohen's earlier column had cited one reviewer who had stated a different view. In her review of Hawking's book for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani had seemed to say that the physicist's metaphors were in fact pretty darn good:

Though it contains several dense passages dealing with ''imaginary time,'' ''string theories'' and ''inflationary'' models of the universe, which this reader (who never got beyond trigonometry in school) found impossible to follow, ''A Brief History of Time'' is, on the whole, a lively and provocative book...Mr. Hawking clearly possesses a natural teacher's gifts—easy, good-natured humor and an ability to illustrate highly complex propositions with analogies plucked from daily life. 

Hawking was skilled "with analogies plucked from daily life," Kakutani said. Several passages were too hard. But not so with the rest! 

In this way, a debate had been formed. More than thirty years later, our question would be this:

Have analogies plucked from daily life actually worked in the past thirty years, as writers have tried, again and again, to make Einstein's universe comprehensible? 

Krauthammer's thesis notwithstanding, have Einstein whisperers come up with the metaphors which let his universe swim into view? With this question on the table, let's consider a major example.

Let's return to the highly familiar metaphor which appears at the very start of Walter Isaacson's 2007 biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. 

Indeed, this highly familiar metaphor appears on page 3 of Isaacson's well-received book, as Isaacson sketches his initial overview of Einstein's revolutionary work. As we review this metaphor, we'll also return to "Isaacson's joke," the sensible quip which we discussed in Monday's report. 

Isaacson offers his well-considered joke as soon as his resort to metaphor is done. This sensible joke can also be scored as Isaacson's (sensible) warning.

Overview, metaphor, joke:

In the first part of this week's report, we quoted Isaacson as he offers his initial thumbnail description of Einstein's remarkable work. The basic history goes like this:

In 1905, Einstein produced his special theory of relativity. During this, his "miracle year," Einstein was still 26 years old.

Ten years later, Einstein produced the general theory of relativity. In the process, he'd reconfigured existing ideas about the way "gravity" works. 

Searching for a way to make Einstein comprehensible, Isaacson brings out the trampoline and the bowling ball, as many others have done. He's still on page 3 of his widely-praised book as his work with this metaphor starts.

As he finishes with this analogy, he offers his sensible joke. In doing so, he offers some much-needed comic relief, but he also offers a bit of a warning—Albert Einstein's universe may turn out to be hard:

A decade after that, in 1915, [Einstein] wrested from nature his crowning glory, one of the most beautiful theories in all of science, the general theory of relativity. As with the special theory, his thinking had evolved through thought experiments. Imagine being in an enclosed elevator accelerating up through space, he conjectured in one of them. The effects you'd feel would be indistinguishable from the experience of gravity.

Gravity, he figured, was a warping of space and time, and he came up with the equations that describe how the dynamics of this curvature result from the interplay between matter, motion, and energy. It can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. Okay, it's not easy, but that's why we're no Einstein and he was.

"Okay, it's not easy," Isaacson says, "but that's why we're no Einstein and [Albert Einstein] was."

That last sentence is Walter Isaacson's well-considered joke. Quite appropriately, he seemed to acknowledge a basic fact:

The metaphor of the trampoline and the bowling ball may not be all that easy for shlubs like us to follow.

Einstein understood his theory, but it may not be easy for us! That's what Isaacson seemed to be saying, though he was stating his warning in the form of a joke. 

The bowling ball on the trampoline is employed, with great regularity, in attempts to make Einstein easy (or at least understandable). But to what extent does that metaphor actually help? 

"Okay, it's not easy," Isaacson quips. But what makes that metaphor "not easy?" Let's start counting the ways:

In Isaacson's rendering, we're instantly told that gravity is "a warping of space and time." We can all learn to repeat those words. But do we really have any idea what those words mean in this context?

Presumably, we all can picture a warping of some object made of wood. But what does it mean to picture a warping of space? To picture a warping of time?

What does it mean to picture a warping of "space and time?" 

As Krauthammer stated in his column, we can always recite those words. But it we choose to recite and repeat, will we know what we're talking about? Will we understand what a "warping" might be in this unfamiliar context?

As Isaacson continues, this "warping of space and time" is quickly described as a "curvature." 

We all know how to apply that word in an array of everyday contexts. But what is a curvature of space and time? 

Does the general reader have any idea what that word might refer to, describe or mean in this new, unfamiliar context? And where would she go to find out?

Already, we're general readers in a strange land as Isaacson tries to explain. Now we're asked to picture ourselves placing a bowling ball "onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline." 

Presumably, we can all picture ourselves doing that. We can also easily picture what would happen next:

The trampoline's surface, which had been flat, would now sag toward the center under the weight of the bowling ball. Similarly, we can picture what would happen when a couple of billiard balls were introduced into this mix.

It's easy to picture the trampoline—to picture its "two-dimensional surface." Everyone knows what we're talking about when we refer to its "fabric."

But now we're asked to imagine this happening "in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time." For us, the average Jeremiahs, how well will that effort work out?

We all know what it means to talk about the fabric of a trampoline—but in what sense do space and time form something we'd call a "fabric," let alone a four-dimensional fabric? We can always repeat the words, but do we have any idea what they mean?

There's at least one more problem with this metaphor as offered by Isaacson. We refer to the part of the passage which says this:

[The billiard balls] move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. 

Technically, nothing is "wrong" with that passage. We can defend it as technically accurate all the way down.

But would anyone ever have said that the billiard balls would behave in the way we know they will—would roll down the slope of the trampoline, eventually joining the bowling ball—"because [the bowling ball] exerts some mysterious attraction" on them? 

That wouldn't be a common explanation of the billiard balls' movement. Somewhat ironically, the average sixth grader would probably say something like this:

The billiard balls roll down the slope of the trampoline because of the force of gravity! That's why balls of all descriptions roll down slopes or hills!

As presented, this metaphor is a multi-faceted jumble. We can agree to recite the words, but the words aren't likely to make a mountain of sense. 

Isaacson seems to acknowledge as much when he provides some comic relief in the form of his sensible joke.

"Okay, it's not easy!" That's what he sensibly says.

As Isaacson proceeds in his book, he explains Einstein's universe, or at least attempts to do so, at much greater length. 

He does a beautiful job with Einstein's life.  Einstein's universe is much harder.

Intermittently, Isaacson tries to explain. Two chapters in question are these:

CHAPTER SIX: Special Relativity, 1905

CHAPTER NINE: General Relativity, 1911-1915

Isaacson does a superlative job recounting Einstein's life. As our ruminations proceed in the next few weeks, we'll explore some of the ways he explains Einstein's universe in such chapters as these. 

Our view? We think he has a very hard time explaining Einstein's universe. He does a superlative job with Einstein's life—but in our view, Einstein's universe puts up a successful fight.

We'll look at those chapters in future weeks. For today, we're left with Krauthammer's riddle.

One reviewer after another said that Hawking's best-selling book was lucid, accessible, comprehensible—even easy to read. Nineteen years later, the same things were said about Isaacson's book, by a long list of reviewers and academics. 

Similar praise was showered on Rebecca Goldstein's 2007 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, her attempt to explain the work of the 20th-century figure who is routinely called "the greatest logician since Aristotle," including by Einstein himself.

Goldstein's book was aimed at general readers. Was she able to make Gödel easy? Was Stephen Budiansky able to do so in the book he published this year,  Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel?

Those books were aimed at general readers. Was Budiansky able to explain Gödel's theorem? Or would a reader simply be forced to recite a string of words?

When writers try to make Einstein easy, they've entered the World Series of explanation. Dating all the way back to Einstein's own book for general readers, they've tried and they've tried and they've tried and they've tried, and then they've tried again.

They've tried and they've tried to make Einstein understandable. According to Cohen and Krauthammer's witness, they've tried and they've massively failed.

This leaves us with Krauthammer's riddle—perhaps with Krauthammer's paradox. Dating back to Einstein's own general interest book, these writers have constantly tried and failed, but reviewers have persistently sworn that they've succeeded mightily. 

What might this tell us about ourselves, about our own human race? Have we perhaps been "seeing ourselves from afar" dating back to the dawn of the west?

We'll explore such questions in the weeks ahead, focusing on various attempts to make Einstein easy. Along the way, we'll also drift over to "Russell's paradox," and to the 700 pages he devoted to proving 1 + 1.

We'll discuss Wittgenstein's indictment, but also Horwich's hypothesis. We may even drop by the cold, dark waters of the Aegean, looking in on the dawn of the west—on Plato, Aristotle and them.

Lurking always will be a question:

How skillful have we the humans ever been at explaining anything at all? 

We can always recite the words! We'll call that Krauthammer's thesis.

Is it possible that this is what our self-impressed species has all too typically done? How often have we simply repeated the words, then claimed that we understood?

How often has Homey played it that way? Why would Homey do that? Why do we defer to failed explanations in this familiar way?

How often has Homey played it that way? We'd call that a very good question. When it comes to Einstein's universe—even to Gödel—we can't seem to stop doing it now!

What teachers can't teach in Oklahoma!

THURSDAY, JULY 15, 2021

Would we want them to?: We became aware of Karen Attiah in the aftermath of Jamal Khashoggi's death.

Khashoggi went missing in 2018. As the Post’s founding Global Opinions editor, Attiah surfaced as the voice of the Post during this episode. She was only 32 at the time. We assumed she must be very capable.

We've had a different reaction to her work as a columnist  in the past year or so. Her work strikes us as highly bombastic and highly (tribal) war like. One example would be this morning's column from Oklahoma—her column about "emergency rules...limiting what students in the state can be taught on race and gender."

Attiah speaks the language of war. We were most struck by some of the things she chose to omit. We'll focus on the emergency rules the State Board of Education recently approved. 

Were these rules necessary? Probably not. But the rules are eight in number, and as it turns out, here they are:

HB 1775 prohibits educators from teaching the following: 

1) One race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex

2) An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously

3) An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex

4) Members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex

5) An individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex,

6) An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex

7) Any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex

8) Meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race

A few of those rules are perhaps a bit fuzzy: 

Interpretation of Rule #3 would turn on someone's judgment of what counts as a case of someone being "discriminated against." 

Due to a double negative, Rule #4 is clumsily composed, though we think we know what it means. 

That  said, the draconian rules against which Attiah rails are, in the end, rather sensible, possibly even admirable. To wit:

Do we want educators teaching that "one race is inherently superior to another race?" 

Do we want educators teaching that "an individual, by virtue of his or her race, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race?"

Do we want educators teaching that "a hard work ethic is racist, or was created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race?" (Warning! Some high-profile ethnic justice training sessions have come very close to making that assertion. Our Town is capable of tilting toward very dumb statements too.)

Smoke was rising from Attiah's column—and then we searched and read these eight new rules. We don't know that these rules were needed, but especially given their rather gentle thrust, we feel the same way, even more strongly, about Attiah's smoke.

At times of tribal war, our lizard brains will instruct us to join the tribal fight. In our view, Our Town can't win this tribal war. Only the crazies can, because only the crazies want a war to the end.

We'll make one other point about Attiah's tone. At one point, she offers this standard complaint:

ATTIAH (7/15/21): Carlisha Williams Bradley arrived knowing she would cast one of the most consequential votes of her professional life. The only Black member of the board, she wondered whether she would be removed from her position for pushing back. But the education advocate and former executive director of Tulsa Legacy Charter School spoke truth: that the right-wing’s current bête noire, “critical race theory”—which the legislature claimed to be responding to—means merely the examination of laws and legislation that uphold racism and oppression. Oklahoma’s new education law and harsh punishment, she said, would serve only to generate fear in teaching an accurate history of the United States.

Bradley, we were told, is the only black member of the state board. As if by instinct, we wondered how large the board might be.

As it turns out, there seem to be six board members, with the superintendent seeming to make it seven. Based on surface indicators, the demographics seem to break down like this:

Five white members, one black member, one Hispanic member.

That said, the state is 65 percent white; it's less than 8 percent black. How many black members should be on the board given demographics like that?

Attiah didn't list or explain the rules or the demographics. To our ear, she only engaged in war. In fairness, engaging in war is an easy thing. Also, it tends to sell.

One last point:

Attiah spoke to the superintendent. She then proceeded to clown Post readers by offering this:

ATTIAH: Ultimately, there would be little debate, though Oklahoma State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister acknowledged the lack of transparency with the process and then voted yes on the emergency rules anyway. Once the governor signs off on them, Oklahoma will have the harshest penalties in the nation for the crime of making White people uncomfortable.

“We didn’t ask for this law,” Hofmeister told me with an air of helplessness, arguing that the move was necessary for the sake of clarity.

The super spoke "with an air of helplessness." Meanwhile, the new rules are designed to regulate "the crime of making White people uncomfortable."

Our judgment on those presentations would be sad and sad. For the record, as we did some background reading, board members and statewide teacher reps referred to the pre-existing statewide curriculum. They said the curriculum does teach our nation's brutal history with respect to race.

What does the state curriculum actually look like? Attiah blew past that question too. 

We see no way out of this tribal war. Can a war like this be won? (There's no good answer to that.)

Is the Post just peddling pure warfare now? That's the way it sometimes seems. In the process, is it possible that readers get disrespected, dumbed down, treated like fools, poorly served?

Is it possible that this sort of thing is unhelpful? That a certain amount of imperfection also exists in Our Town?

Brian Williams asked a good question!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2021

When he did, Michael Wolff replied: We're happy to be able to say it! We saw Brian Williams ask a very good question last night.

The Wall Street Journal's Michael Bender avoided the very good question two times. So Williams asked the question again a bit later on. This time, Michel Wolff answered:

WILLIAMS (7/13/21): If you attached a polygraph to [Donald J. Trump], would it indicate that he really, deep inside his soul and brain, thinks he won? That he could really perhaps overturn the results?

Did, and does, Donald J. Trump really believe that he won? We think that's an excellent question. 

Because our tribe loves tribal war, we prefer to assume, and to say, that Trump is "lying" when he says such things. But is he possibly crazy enough to believe that he actually won? 

Is he crazy enough to believe such a thing? Michael Wolff's answer was yes:

WOLFF (continuing directly): I am absolutely convinced. And this is from talking to literally everyone in the White House, in his campaign, in his family and ultimately talking to Trump himself. I am convinced that he believes this. He singularly believes the thing that literally no one else believes. Yes, he is delusional.

Wolff saying it doesn't make it true, but that's what he says he believes. Because we prefer to say that Trump is lying,  and because press corps barons prefer to observe The Goldwater Rule, Our Town has spent the past several years refusing to discuss the obvious possibility that Donald J. Trump is "delusional."

Wolff was appearing on the show to discuss his new book,  Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House. Below, you see his initial statement. It teed up Williams' subsequent very good question:

WILLIAMS: Michael, it's great to have you, and coming off Fire and Fury, it's an interesting, interesting choice of a title, and an interesting choice of a time period to report on.  Who was running our country, which we enjoy calling the greatest on earth, during this period?

WOLFF: Well, certainly Donald Trump was not running this country then. All Donald Trump was concerned about was that this election had been stolen from him. And he was singularly obsessed about this. This is an obsession that went beyond—I mean, this was the grand obsession. You know, forget "The Big Lie," which—I mean, I think I would prefer to call it The Big Lunacy, and he is the lunatic-in-chief.

Our ears perked up when Wolff said that. It implied that Trump really does believe that he won the election. That insinuation led to Williams' very good question, the one we've posted above.

Our Town is in love with tribal war—with a tribal war we can't win. For that reason, we prefer to keep saying that Trump lied and is lying.

That claim carries a moral judgment. The notion that Trump is "delusional" could suggest, to decent humans, that we might even pity the fool—or perhaps "the poor immigrant."

In Our Town, we like to talk about Others getting locked up, while we laugh about their spelling mistakes. It doesn't matter how insignificant these Others may actually be.

(See Rachel, as usual, just last night, focusing on the spelling errors of the ridiculous bank president who loaned that money to Manafort. In these ways, we poke and prod and extend a forever war—a war we can't possibly win.)

Wolff said Trump is crazy enough to believe that he actually won. He was also asked about Giuliani. This is what he said:

WILLIAMS: Michael, what should the people watching know about Rudy Giuliani—he of the very dark bombast and even darker dripping goo, the man he's become in the present day?

WOLFF: Well, the first thing that they should know is that he's drinking all the time. He's, you know, if not constantly drunk, certainly buzzed throughout this period, actually probably for, throughout most of the Trump administration. Beyond that or in addition to that, you know, Rudy is—he's a desperate figure, a desperate he will do anything for to be at the center of attention. And if that involves saying anything that Trump wants to hear, he will certainly do that, as we've seen. And, again, everyone in the White House, in the campaign, in Trump's family knows that this is incredibly destructive to the Trump White House.

Many of them actually blame Rudy even more than they blame the president, although everybody also blames the president for the catastrophe of the last four years.

What explains the lunacy Giuliani has churned in recent years? We don't know, but this is the first time we've heard alcohol mentioned. Can that be what this has been?

Our Town will never be able to win the ongoing tribal war. The only people who can win this war are the people who are crazy enough to want a full-blown civil war—a full-blown war to the end.

Crazy people love love love it when tribal fighting is stressed. They want to fight their war to the end. It's the hand-to-hand combat they crave.

In theory, we in Our Town want to see the nation return to something resembling a functional entity. This can only be achieved through some kind of comity. It will never be achieved through a forever war extended on a nightly basis by cable news multimillionaires.

That said, Us against Them has always sold a lot of tickets. It's always good for ratings. People like Rachel keep churning it out. It's pretty much all Our Town gets on cable at this point, and the dumb stupid warfare continues.

That silly Chicago bank exec spelled "prospective" wrong! (He had it confused with "perspective!") When Our Own Rhodes Scholar—a Stanford / Oxford grad—entertains Our Town by mocking such dumbness, people in the Other Towns know where it's coming from. 

It comes from a condescending place. A certain element in Our Town has always behaved this way.

Also this: Was Our Town badly misled by the Steele dossier?

We know, we know—it just felt so good, especially the pee tape section! But were we badly played by that dossier? 

Over at New York magazine, that's what T. A. Frank seems to be saying. Personally, we don't know.

THE PHYSICS / PHILOSOPHY HOWLER: Einstein reads his book aloud!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2021

The teenaged niece's dilemma: Making Einstein easy—comprehensible—isn't an easy task.

It wasn't an easy task even for Einstein himself! Consider the book he wrote for general readers all the way back in 1916, as his worldwide fame had begun taking form.

Einstein devised his special theory of relativity in his "miracle year"—1905—when he was just 26. In Walter Isaacson's 2007 biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Isaacson describes what happened next: 

A decade after that, in 1915, he wrested from nature his crowning glory, one of the most beautiful theories in all of science, the general theory of relativity. As with the special theory, his thinking had evolved through thought experiments. 

As Isaacson explains, Einstein's fame had begun to take hold at this point. A publisher approached him with what was, at least in theory, an excellent idea: 

Einstein should write an account of relativity which would make his revolutionary ideas and discoveries accessible to general readers. So the publisher sensibly said.

The book was published in German in 1916. It appeared in English in 1920. It remains in print today. 

That said, was Einstein able to make Einstein easy in this historic book? Was he able to explain relativity in a way the general reader would be able to understand? 

In our view, that didn't happen. As part of his story of Einstein's "life," Isaacson explains the process by which the book was written:

[In 1916], he produced an even more understandable version [of his work]—a book for the lay reader, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, that remains popular to this day. To make sure that the average person would fathom it, he read every page out loud to Elsa [Einstein]'s daughter, Margot, pausing frequently to ask whether she indeed got it. "Yes, Albert," she invariably replied, even though (as she confided to others) she found the whole thing totally baffling.

Elsa Einstein was Einstein's cousin (and later, his second wife). At that time, Margot Einstein was his 16-year-old niece.

According to Isaacson's account, Margot Einstein was too much in awe of her famous uncle to tell him she didn't understand the passages he was reading aloud from his (well-intentioned) book. 

And yet, according to Isaacson's account, this is the way Einstein decided that the average person would be able to understand the book, which remains in print to this day. From this, we can draw a simple conclusion:

Einstein was one of human history's great intellectual giants. That doesn't mean that he was blessed with special skills when it came to making his work "understandable"—when it came to explaining things to us non-specialist shlubs.

The book which Einstein read aloud is still in print today. It's adorned with blurbs, supplied by the publisher, about how accessible it will be for the general reader. 

In the weeks to come, we'll look at one key part of the book—at an explanation which, just on its face, doesn't seem to make sense. 

In the passage to which we refer, Einstein explains—or seems to explain; or attempts to explain—a basic concept commonly referred to as "the relativity of simultaneity." 

In Isaacson's telling, the concept came to Einstein in the spring of 1905, on "a beautiful day in Bern." In Isaacson's telling, Einstein, "while talking with a friend, took one of the most elegant imaginative leaps in the history of physics."

(We have no doubt that he did.)

Isaacson describes this as a "eureka moment"—as the moment when "the key insight" which would lay at the heart of Einstein's "most famous [scientific] paper" suddenly came to this brilliant theoretical physicist.

This was Einstein's "key insight!" In his biography of Einstein, in his chapter on special relativity, Isaacson reproduces the way Einstein explained this matter "in a 1916 book written to explain this to nonscientists." 

Plainly, he's referring to the way Einstein explained this key insight in Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, the general interest book which remains in print to this day. 

As Isaacson describes the content of Einstein "eureka moment," he carefully tracks the explanation offered in Einstein's own book. In 2015, so did Nova, as part of a PBS hundred-year retrospective.

Isaacson tracks the explanation offered in Einstein's own book. But does the explanation make sense? 

Did it make sense in Einstein's book? Does it make sense in Isaacson's? Did it make sense when Einstein read the passage aloud to his niece—when Margot Einstein told her uncle that yes, she did understand?

We'll examine that explanation at a later point in our ruminations. For today, let's say this:

We're not suggesting that something was "wrong" with Einstein's "key insight." We're not suggesting that something is wrong in the engaging, highly literate way Isaacson lays out these basic stories—basic stories from Einstein's astonishing life.

Regarding Einstein's universe, we're asking a different question. We're asking if anyone, Einstein included, has ever found a way to explain or describe that realm in a way which is accessible to the average person.

Has anyone ever made Einstein easy? Beyond that, we offer a second question:

To what extent are book reviewers and general readers able to see, or just to say, that no, we don't understand? 

At one time, that was Margot's dilemma. Even today, is it ours?

Back in 1988, one reviewer after another said that Stephen Hawking's best-selling book was lucid, accessible, comprehensible, even easy to read. In his "miracle column" in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen said, in the face of this onslaught, that he didn't understand.

Five months later, the Post's Charles Krauthammer reported the same incomprehension. The columnists suggested that modern physics has reached a point where it simply can't be explained to the average reader.

Nineteen years after that, Isaacson's book appeared—and we strongly recommend it. It's a well-crafted, highly literate account of Einstein's remarkable life.

Concerning Einstein's universe, we'd call the book very murky. And yet, the book is filled with blurbs in which scholars and critics assert how clearly and lucidly Isaacson has managed to lay out the science.

Tomorrow, we'll return to one of Isaacson's first explanations—to his page 3 explanation involving the trampoline and the bowling ball. 

This metaphor is widely employed when writers explain—or seem to explain; or attempt to explain—Einstein's theory concerning the "warping" or "curvature" of the "fabric" of something called "spacetime." 

Isaacson turned to this metaphor very early in his book. Wisely, though, as we noted in Monday's report, he decided to throw in his joke: 

"Okay, it's not easy," he admits on page 4. At that point, he throws in his joke.

The trampoline / bowling ball metaphor is quite widely employed—but does anyone understand it? Sure, we can repeat or recite the words. But do we know what the words mean?

Also this:

When reviewers and scholars all say that they do understand, are we humans perhaps engaged in a very old human practice?

Are we humans, here in the West, "seeing ourselves from afar?"

Tomorrow: Back to Isaacson's joke

Important events in human history!

TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2021

First-graders, listen up!: This morning's New York Times should become source material in Grade 1 World History class. 

Some very old coins have been found in Poland. They help shed light on some events from world history.

You don't want to hold the truth back from kids! It's never too early for this:

HIGGINS (7/13/21): One theory, promoted by a Polish archaeologist leading the hunt for an explanation, is that the silver coins date from one of Europe’s earliest and most traumatic episodes of armed extortion—when an invading Viking army laid siege to Paris in 845, and had to be paid off with more than two tons of silver to prevent it from destroying the city.

The Vikings—Scandinavian warriors greatly feared because of their unruly habits and military prowess—later systematized what became an elaborate protection racket in the 11th century by imposing taxes in England known as Danegeld, tribute payments in return for safety.

What happened to the huge ransom they received for sparing Paris in 845, however, has always been a mystery.

The Vikings had a major trading post called Truso just 30 miles from Biskupiec, the Polish village where the coins were found. That has led some experts to speculate that the silver extorted in Paris made its way there and then spread into nearby areas as part of a flourishing Baltic-region trade, whose main commodity was slaves.

[...]

Mateusz Bogucki, the head of the laboratory, said he was skeptical about the Paris ransom payment theory but said the coins were still a very significant find, indicating the reach of the Carolingian Empire far beyond its heartland in Western Europe.

The coins, he said, have little financial value and would most likely fetch under $200 each on the open market, “but their value as a source of information is absolutely amazing.”

Particularly important, Mr. Bogucki said, is the light they shed on medieval trade routes, many of which revolved around the buying and selling of local people who had been captured in battle and sold or forced into bondage by slave merchants.

The Vikings played a major role as intermediaries in a brutal business fed by a voracious appetite for slaves from Europe among wealthy Muslims in the Middle East and later Central Asia. Silver coins found previously in the area have mostly been Arab dirhams, used by Muslim merchants to pay for human chattel.

This helps provide a lot of context for first-graders as they assemble their fully contextualized understanding of world and American history. This material would be especially important for first-graders who identify as Scandinavian, Viking, Middle Eastern or wealthy Muslim.

First-graders of the nation, unite! You have nothing to lose but your lunch!

THE PHYSICS / PHILOSOPHY HOWLER: "I can repeat and recite what he said!"

TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2021

Krauthammer's second opinion: In one of his lesser-known poems, Robert Frost said he had "a lover's quarrel with the world."

(The statement became a bit of a trademark. In 1964, the Academy Award for Best Documentary film went to a biography/profile, "Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World.")

Decades later, in June 1988, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen had a somewhat jocular columnist's quarrel with the nation's book reviewers. His columnist's quarrel concerned the warp and woof of the world.  

Stephen Hawking, one of the world's greatest physicists, had written a wildly popular book designed to explain modern physics to general readers. Hawking's book started with Einstein, then moved on from there.

According to Cohen—and yes, he provided quotations—reviewers had sworn that Hawking's best-seller was lucid, accessible, clear, comprehensible, even easy to read.  As we noted yesterday, the querulous columnist now complained that the book was anything but. 

The lucid and accessible book was "incomprehensible," the querulous columnist said.  Cohen even seemed to suggest that he'd been misled. 

He had believed the reviews he read! As a result, this happened:

So I turned to the book itself. Surely a book read (or at least bought) by so many would be accessible to me. But it wasn't—not fully, not so I could stand in class and tell the teacher what I had learned. I understood some of it but not, I think, the parts that really mattered...

In his book, Hawking refers to theories or discoveries that scientists claim in their own name...I have one for Hawking himself: the Hawking Limitation. It is the inability of the ordinary person, the ordinary educated person, to understand what in heaven scientists like Hawking are talking about.

These scientists today! According to Cohen, even educated people could no longer hope to understand what they were talking about.

As he continued, Cohen worried about certain public policy consequences of this state of affairs. Five months later, a second columnist at the Post offered a second opinion concerning's Hawking's book.

By now, the book was a massive best-seller, but Charles Krauthammer wasn't sure why. He'd won the Pulitzer Prize one year before. But now, it had come to this.

Like his colleague Cohen before him, Krauthammer had tried to read (and understand) Hawking's best-selling book. But on December 2, 1988, right at the start of his column, Krauthammer said he'd tried to understand the book—and he seemed to say he'd failed:

There are two great mysteries in this world. First, how did the universe begin? Second, how does a book that attempts to answer that question—a book about muons and gluons, about thermodynamic arrows and space-time singularities, about quantum gravity and superstrings, a book that argues convincingly against the existence of Einstein's cosmological constant—become the No. 1 best seller for 20 weeks in a row? Having now twice read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," a smash popularization of modern physics, I am preoccupied with the second question and no closer to an answer for the first than I was when I started.

By now, the book had topped the best-seller lists for twenty consecutive weeks. Krauthammer said that he'd read the book twice. Later, he said he'd devoted 13 hours to the Sisyphean task.

Krauthammer had given the old college try. Defeated, he offered this verdict:

"The problem with Hawking's book is that it is utterly incomprehensible."

No, really. That's what he said!

Five months later, this second opinion comported with the first. But where Cohen had tended to fret and to fume, Krauthammer offered a (slightly puzzling) account of his reading experience.

At one point, Cohen had said this: "Most of us believe that anything, if written clearly, can be understood by a reasonably educated reader." At least for Cohen, Hawking's book had brought that long-held idea into question.

Krauthammer went further as he described his experience. With apologies for the lofty language, he began to describe the phenomenology of his thirteen hours:

[The book is] incomprehensible in a very interesting way. Hawking's language is simple. The syntax is clear. The exposition is careful, at times even graceful. With the exception of E=mc2, now a staple of subway walls, not a single equation appears in the book. (Hawking was persuaded of the well-known rule of thumb: every equation cuts your sales in half.)

If given enough attention, every sentence makes sense. But when you have registered all the sentences, you realize in the end that you understand nothing. It is not Hawking that is beyond comprehension, but modern physics.

According to Krauthammer, the language was simple, the syntax was clear. On its own, each sentence made sense.

He seemed to say it wasn't Hawking's fault! But in the end, Krauthammer said, the reader of this best-selling book is going to understand nothing.

At that point, the columnist's logic turned on itself, but what he said was important. In our view, the Pulitzer winner introduced two key words into the conversation:

For example: I understand, and if asked can readily repeat, the current notion of superstring theory that the universe has 10 (or 26) dimensions, all but four of which are curled up into tiny little balls. But what can that possibly mean?

I can also recite Hawking's solution to the age-old question: Did the universe have a beginning, or has it existed through an infinity of time? Hawking proposes a finesse: space-time is finite in extent but has no boundary or edge. Meaning: space-time is like the surface of the earth, which also is finite (197 million square miles) but round and enclosed, so that you can go around forever without reaching a beginning or an end. A universe of no beginning and no end, but no infinity. I understand. But what does it mean?

Krauthammer said the could "repeat" the various things which Hawking said. He could "recite" his formulations.

He could repeat and recite the author's key formulations. But in the end, Krauthammer said, "What could [those formulations] possibly mean?"

In our lexicon, if you can repeat a claim but you don't know what it means, then you don't understand it. For some reason, Krauthammer started saying that he did "understand." He just didn't know what Hawking's recitable claims could possibly mean.

Krauthammer said he could repeat and recite; could that be what reviewers were doing? Were the reviewers simply reciting, then imagining that they were able to understand?

Tomorrow, we'll return to Walter Isaacson's joke—the joke he offered right at the start of his widely praised biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

We'll also return to the bowling ball on the trampoline—the metaphor which is endlessly used to explain Einstein's claim about the curvature of "space-time."

There's a bowling ball on a trampoline, and then some smaller balls come in. As we noted yesterday, Isaacson employs this metaphor very early, on page 4 of his book. After that, he offers his very good joke.

Everyone repeats and recites this well-worn trampoline hook. It's meant to explain the curvature of space-time, whatever space-time is. 

Everyone knows how to repeat and recite it. But does anyone actually understand what it actually means?

Tomorrow: "We're no Einstein," he jokingly said

Professor Coleman describes "the way out!"

MONDAY, JULY 12, 2021

Of "toxic polarization:" Here at this site, we've been asserting a certain view for the past several years. We've been saying it's hard to see a good way out of our nation's current mess. 

Our current mess is a tribal mess—a war of competing tribes. It's hard to see a way out of this mess because it's so heavily fueled by new technologies and by the large profits acquired therein.

People are making lots of money promoting our current mess. The technologies in question aren't going away. Neither is the widespread, all-too-human desire to make lots of money any darn way you can.

Talk radio isn't going away. Neither is cable news or the Internet, or our sprawling "social media."

Something else isn't going away—the human impulse to align with a tribe and engage in tribal loathing. For all these reasons, it's hard to see a good way out of our spiraling mess.

Today, we're flipping the focus of this site, or at least so we intend. There are questions we've pondered for fifty years which we want to pursue to the end. At present, we're planning to explore those topics in our principal morning posts.

Our focus on our current mess will shift to briefer afternoon posts. Today, we want to introduce Peter Coleman, who offers the view that there actually is a way out of our current mess.

Who the heck is Peter Coleman? He's a professor at Columbia. He describes himself as someone who works "in the field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation." 

That sounds like a very good field! The leading authority on Coleman's career thumbnails him as shown:

Peter Thomas Coleman (born September 9, 1959) is a social psychologist and researcher in the field of conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Coleman is best known for his work on intractable conflicts and applying complexity science.

Coleman is a professor at Columbia University and the executive director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) and the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution...

The profile continues from there. Yesterday, we watched the bulk of a C-Span event concerning his latest book.

That book is built around some useful terminology. Its title is this:

The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

We've been saying it's hard to see a way out. Coleman's book suggests that there is a way out of this mess—out of the mess he defines as "toxic polarization."

You can watch the C-Span book event here. To read a short but instructive excerpt from Coleman's book, you can just click here.

For our money, that excerpt draws from the worldview of Our Tribe more than it does from Theirs. But we'll recommend Coleman's basic focus—his search for "cooperation and conflict resolution"—even as we continue to think that the factors cited above make it hard to picture a good way out.

Tribal wars will often involve propaganda from both warring tribes. The "toxic polarization" in question won't come from only one side.

At this site, we've largely focused on the messaging which now animates  Our Town. We've done that because everyone who lives in Our Town has been able to see the toxic shortcomings of Donald J. Trump. It's harder to see the propaganda we may be fed from within our own tribe.

Our primary posts this week will start to define a new "Physics / Philosophy Howler." In the afternoons, we'll still tend to focus on the unhelpful propaganda which emanates from our own side.

In our view, such propaganda suffuses the pages of Our Town's leading newspapers. Some such work is completely accurate. It may be part of Our Town's  contribution to "toxic polarization" nonetheless.

Coleman mentioned Gandhi and Mandela at several points during his book event. They were high achievers.

Dr. King, but also John Lewis, advocated refusing to hate. We still think that's a good idea. For everyone in all human towns, stopping the toxic starts here.

THE PHYSICS / PHILOSOPHY HOWLER: In search of Albert Einstein's findings!

MONDAY, JULY 12, 2021

Cohen's column, Isaacson's joke: A story has to start somewhere. We'll start ours in two different places.

We'll start our story with Richard Cohen's miracle column in the Washington Post. But also, we'll start our story with Walter Isaacson's fully appropriate joke.

Cohen was a high-profile columnist for the Post for more than forty years. The "miracle column" to which we refer appeared on June 26, 1988—relatively early in his tenure. 

In the column, Cohen discussed attempts to explain the fruits of Albert Einstein's "miracle year" (1905) and of his subsequent career. 

Stephen Hawking had written and published a giant best-seller—a book which purported to make Einstein's work understandable for the general reader. Cohen did something extremely unusual in his miracle column:

In his column, he made it clear that he didn't understand. 

Cohen started, not with a joke, but with a joking tone. He railed at Hawking for having written such an incomprehensible easy-to-understand book:

Damn you, Stephen Hawking. Damn you and your book, A Brief History of Time, which rests, at this writing, on the best-seller lists and which has been praised as lucid, accessible, containing only one equation (Einstein's E = mc2). A scientific book written for the layman, an important book about the beginnings of the universe, of time and matter and the unified theory that would combine those of quantum mechanics and relativity to explain everything: everything, that is, but how the layman can possibly be expected to understand this book.

Right from the jump, Cohen was saying he didn't understand the lucid, accessible book. His frustration was obvious throughout. As he continued, he described one source of his frustration.

"As kids, my friends and I used to go down to the beach at night," Cohen wrote. (Judging from Cohen's basic biography, this may have been out in Far Rockaway.) 

"We would lie on our backs and look up at the stars and wonder—wonder about space and about nothingness."

"I still wonder," Cohen wrote; he said that was why he'd leaped at the chance to read Hawking's book.  But also, he said that he'd read a bunch of reviews, and this is what they'd said:

[M]ost of them started, as did the one by Jeremy Bernstein in The New Yorker, by saying how easy this book was to read. "Charming and lucid," Bernstein said, although his review was anything but.

Ditto The New York Review of Books. "Hawking's prose is as informal and clear as his topics are profound," wrote Martin Gardner, the author of several books on science. He then outdid Bernstein in proving that the informal and clear could be reduced to sludge. Newsweek weighed in with a profile of Hawking. It noted his use of "imaginary" time, adding that " 'Imaginary' is used here in a technical mathematical sense—meaning the square root of a negative number . . ." What???

And so it has gone, each review proclaiming that the book made the incomprehensible comprehensible, even though the review itself was incomprehensible. 

According to Cohen, the reviews all said the book was easy. But the reviews themselves were extremely hard—indeed, they were incomprehensible!

According to Cohen, he had seen only one review which touched upon the difficulty of Hawking's widely-praised book. Even there, he seemed to say, the critic may have been fudging a bit:

Only one critic I read (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times) admitted that the book contained "several dense passages . . . which this reader . . . found impossible to follow." But even she praised the work, while concluding, "It is hard for the lay reader to grasp all of Mr. Hawking's arguments." Hard? Try impossible.

According to the frustrated Cohen, Kakutani had been willing to admit that "several" parts of the book will be "hard for the lay reader to grasp." Cohen took things to the edge of the event horizon, subbing the word "impossible" in for the reviewer's "hard."

Cohen was aggressively rejecting conventional wisdom about a very high-profile book by a very high-profile writer. Especially concerning books which claim to make Einstein's work accessible—books which are said to be easy-to-read—this was a very rare stance, and would still be so today.

Cohen went on to make some sound observations about the state of modern physics. Five months later, in early December, another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer, published a similar column, describing his own inability to understand Hawking's allegedly easy book.

In their columns, Cohen and Krauthammer made sound points about the difficulty involved in any attempt to understand modern physics. But before we consider some of those points, let's consider Walter Isaacson's joke.

Isaacson's joke comes right at the start of his widely-praised 2007 biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. By the time the book appeared, Isaacson had turned from a career as a highly capable, high-ranking mainstream journalist to a career as a highly capable, widely-praised biographer.

As with Hawking's earlier book, so too here. When Isaacson's biography of Einstein appeared, a long string of major figures praised it for the way it made Einstein's work accessible to general readers. 

The blurbs were numerous and unanimous. To his credit, Isaacson may have been less sure. 

In the first few pages of his well-crafted book, Isaacson offered a thumbnail overview of Einstein's work. 

He wasn't yet making a major effort to explain what Einstein had discovered; those efforts would come later, in several stand-alone chapters. Already, though, Isaacson threw in a joke, perhaps suggesting the nature of the problem at hand.

Einstein had produced his "miracle year" in 1905, when he was just 26, Isaacson wrote. In that year, Einstein had introduced his "special theory of relativity."

Einstein's explorations had continued, and so did Isaacson's overview. Starting on page 3, Isaacson described Einstein's next great finding—the general theory. 

Isaacson described Einstein's crowning achievement. As he did, he threw in a joke:

[I]n 1915, he wrested from nature his crowning glory, one of the most beautiful theories in all of science, the general theory of relativity...

Gravity, he figured, was a warping of space and time, and he came up with the equations that describe how the dynamics of this curvature result from the interplay between matter, motion, and energy. It can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. Okay, it's not easy, but that's why we're no Einstein and he was.

The joking remark appeared on page 4. You can read Isaacson's entire first chapter here.

According to Einstein, gravity was "a warping of space and time," Isaacson wrote. Gravity was a "curvature" of those entities.

Isaacson then presented the "billiard balls on the trampoline" metaphor to explain what this meant. This metaphor is constantly used to "explain" Einstein's concept—and that's where his joke came in:

"Okay, it's not easy," Isaacson said. That's because "we're no Einstein and he was," the writer correctly said.

We'll score that comment as a joke, and as a very good one. Also, we'll score it as a vindication of Cohen's miracle column. 

Isaacson proceeded to offer a superb, clearly rendered account of Einstein's remarkable life. But when it came to describing Einstein's "universe"—when it came to describing Einstein's theories and findings—we'd have to say that Isaacson's book, like Hawking's before it, is much less lucid than the blurbs and the reviews might have said.

We don't know if Cohen and/or Krauthammer ever read Isaacson's highly praised biography. But if they did, we'll guess they would have echoed their earlier judgments concerning Hawking's book.

The reviews and the blurbs had widely said that Isaacson made Einstein easy. We'll join with the spirit of Cohen's column—perhaps with the spirit of Isaacson's joke—to say that those uniform sanguine claims are (perhaps instructively) wrong.

At this point, we'll advance our own thumbnail assessment of those uniform sanguine claims, claims which are routinely made about such high-profile books: 

They point they way to Horwich's thesis—and onward to Wittgenstein's muddle. 

Tomorrow: Cohen's observations

For the record: With this entry, we're introducing a new frame of reference—a new point of emphasis—for this site. (Or at least, so we hope.)

At some point, we'll explain these changes as the week proceeds, or at least so we expect.

Are we part of the world the slaveholders made?

SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2021

Do we believe what the slaveholders said?: We've never met Paul Butler.

That said, we've seen him on TV a million times. (He's a legal analyst for MSNBC.)

We probably haven't always agreed with his analyses. Also, as we've mentioned a time or two in the past, he has often struck us as a person who seems to be very sad, for which he may have good reason.

That said, Butler has always struck us as a person who's fully and completely sincere. In part for that reason, we found ourselves thinking all day yesterday about that last thing Butler said in yesterday's column in the Washington Post.

We aren't inclined to agree with most of the things Butler said in his column. But the last thing he said involved his personal experiences and his personal feelings, and because he strikes us as a good, decent person who's fully sincere, we were struck by the last thing he said.

Butler was discussing Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has taken a hike from UNC and decided to touch down at Howard.  Good for her, Butler said. But then too, he also said this:

BUTLER (7/9/21): I have no beef with Hannah-Jones for declining a job at a journalism school that is literally named after the White man who, as he so delicately put it, "expressed my concerns" about her hiring. But, for now, I am okay with working at a university that in its early years was financed by the sale of enslaved people. I love my students and respect my colleagues, and have been part of the community’s efforts, still incomplete, to make reparations for that travesty. Sometimes, helping majority-White spaces be less racist and more inclusive feels transformative. Other times, it feels like an intellectual version of my great-grandfather’s job; he cleaned outhouses—i.e., shoveling White people’s excrement.

Sometimes, Butler—he's a professor at Georgetown Law—feels like he's "shoveling White people’s excrement." 

That seems like a remarkable thing to say. Why did Butler say it? 

When does Butler feel like he's "shoveling White people's excrement?" He set the stage for that possibly surprising statement in this earlier passage:

BUTLER: Most professors of color work at majority-White schools...

People of color in majority-White spaces often find themselves having to do “diversity” work that is not part of their job description. This can be draining and frustrating, making it difficult to refute the wisdom of Hannah-Jones’s observation that “for too long, powerful people have expected the people they have mistreated and marginalized to sacrifice themselves to make things whole.”

Nevertheless, some of us persist, based on another lesson from critical race theory: that those Hannah-Jones described as the “powerful people who maintain” racial injustice are unlikely to seek change, because the status quo provides them with too many benefits. Unfair as it is, that work remains up to people of color and our allies.

Butler is a professor at a high-ranking law school. He's a columnist at one of the world's most important newspapers. He's a frequent commentator at one of our "cable news" channels.

Still, he often finds himself "having to do 'diversity' work that is not part of [his] job description." Apparently, this makes him feel that he is "shoveling White people’s excrement."

In one mood, an observer could react like this:

Dr. King surrendered his life at the age of 39. (39!) Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner surrendered their lives at an earlier date, at even earlier ages.

Long before she became well known, Rosa Parks routinely risked her life in her own civil rights work. By possible way of contrast:

In this later generation, highly privileged, highly-paid people sometimes feel that they're shoveling ("white") people's sh*t when they have to work on diversity issues, perhaps even taking time away from one of their other well-paid, high-profile positions.

In one mood, this can seem like one of the recurrent stories of human experience. In this recurrent story, one generations sacrifices itself so the next generation can acquire and complain. 

(We thought of Stella Dallas yesterday, but also of Mildred Pierce. With the direction of implied moral judgment flipped, we also thought of Fences, in which the earlier generation won't let the new one move on.) 

In one mood, such thoughts can appear. In another mood, Butler has always struck us as a person who is decent and good, and also who's wholly sincere.

What sorts of experiences at Georgetown Law make Butler feel the way he (somewhat indelicately) described? This is his story to tell (or not), but we wondered about that all day.

Along the way, Butler also said what's shown below. This strikes us as a very important note about the current drift of the national culture, to the extent that a nation exists:

BUTLER: Critical race theorists advanced concepts such as structural racism and intersectionality. Some were skeptical of civil rights strategies that relied on integration, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.

In a classic article published in 1976, Harvard professor Derrick Bell argued that during the Jim Crow era, Black students might have been better off if they had sought more resources for segregated schools rather than access to White schools. Bell’s premise was that actual integration would never happen, even if it were legally mandated, because of “massive white hostility.”

Critical race theorists described the heavy toll of desegregation efforts, including placing Blacks in hostile environments, in a way that resonates with Hannah-Jones’s explanation for her decision: “At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you . . . you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.”

As best we can tell, Hannah-Jones has been invited into quite a few high-end institutions. 

More specifically, one thinks of the Little Rock Nine (and of so many others), children and teens who sometimes accepted a very heavy toll in desegregation efforts.

That said, is integration the god which has failed? Would black kids (and possibly everyone else) possibly have been better off if the nation  had instead decided to create schools which were separate but truly equal—presumably, equal in terms of facilities and funding? 

In the Brown decision, the Supreme Court ruled, perhaps somewhat flimsily, that legally segregated schools could, in fact, never be "equal." 

Such schools could never be equal, the Court held, because of the harmful psychological effects this system of legal separation perpetrated on the "hearts and minds" of black kids. 

(Legal segregation's bad effects on the hearts and minds of white kids went unmentioned.)

In the passage posted above, Butler has begun to wonder if black kids would have been better off had the nation taken a different approach back in the 1950s—if the nation had chosen to stick with legally-mandated separation of the "races." 

There is, of course, no ultimate way to answer that perilous question. That said, current forces are pushing in a certain direction. In this emerging framework, we Americans actually aren't one people, and we should just go ahead and say so.

For ourselves, if we were devising a new curriculum on "race" for the public schools, we would start, in the earliest grades, with these basic concepts:

1) Everyone's skin is good. The only reason you have skin is to keep your bones from falling out. If your bones aren't falling out, that means that your skin is good. Let's hear it for everyone's skin!

2) We're all good kids and friends in this room. Everyone here is your friend. We're all good kids in this room.

3) Everybody's skin is good, and everybody's skin is alike. Your skin is your very good friend. Your skin keeps you healthy and happy!

4) Children around the world are good, just like the kids in our classroom. Children like you around the world are pretty much all alike.

(The notion that kids are the same all over the world has long been a basic public education social studies concept.)

Are some kids "white" and some kids "black?" Long before this nation was founded, that was the decree which went out from "the world the slaveholders made."

Do we believe the things we were told by those earlier people? Especially over here in Our Town, we increasingly seem determined to say that we do.

That said, has integration failed? Was integration perhaps a mistake?

There's no ultimate way to answer that question. But Butler's feelings seem very real, and Butler is a good, decent person who has always struck us as completely sincere.

Why does Butler feel as he does? Needless to say, it's his story to tell or to withhold. 

But do we need to understand other people's experiences? Other people's assessments? Putting that another way, do we plan to continue trying to be a nation? Or are we deciding to move ahead as a string of groups and tribes?

Butler sometimes feels that he's shoveling "white" people's sh*t! We are in no position to say that he shouldn't feel that way.

That said, does he feel like he's shoveling every white person's sh*t? Are all "white people" involved in this labor, or is it just the "white" people with whom he's fated to work at Georgetown? Whose excrement is he forced to shovel in the times he describes? 

Also, was that perhaps an odd thing to say on a journalistic basis? Absent attempts at explanation, is it wise when newspapers like the Post keep putting such statements in print?

Does everybody belong to a race? Granted, people will be viewed, and will often be treated, as if they belong to a race. But in the end, is that perception accurate?

Do we affirm the world the slaveholders made? Here in Our Town, in the end, do we believe what the slaveholders said?