Keeping The Fires Burning - Part 1
Indulging the life part of work life balance
As you know, dear reader, I love libraries and books. Since starting at the University of Melbourne I’ve enjoyed perusing the mighty Bailieu Library, and am working up the wherewithal to explore the University’s many other libraries. It’s such a nice feeling hunting down titles, stumbling across others in the process and walking out with a stack of new books. The promise of knowledge, insight, entertainment, wisdom, escape, the unknown. A sheepish feeling that I have better things to do. A shadowy feeling that I mightn’t actually get around to reading them.
In recent years I’ve noticed my relationship with books seems to have shifted slightly. A slightly grim, disciplined quality has descended, in stark contrast to my patterns of yore. I find myself clinging to books a little more tightly, not because I’m savouring them but because I feel a duty to them, to read them from cover to cover and most certainly not to cavalierly cavort as my whims dictate between chapters or God forbid between completely different books in the pile beside the bed. Now that I have recognised this pattern I am trying to fight it. I am pleased to report on some exciting early results.
I have beside me as I write five library books*. Four of them appeared today, having made their way home from the office with me in anticipation of an unknown but sizeable additional quantum of reading time that a Father’s Day-themed weekend away to Wilson’s Prom promises. [Ed. This was written before Father’s Day.] I have just read the prologue/foreword/introduction of each. The other one has been there for a week or two and I’m a bit further into it.
The Ascent of Science by Brian Silver.
I used to own this book written in the late 90s, but packed it up or gave it away during The Move. It’s one of those sweeping histories of science and I have fond memories of it. Revisiting it, I’m pleased to report it is living up to my memories. The word masterful comes to mind. As I commented recently on Mastodon, in a busy first fifty pages
we've met Newton, Berkeley, Willis, Boyle, Hooke, von Guericke, Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, Sizi, Voltaire, Aubrey, Pepys, Cremonini, Locke, Huygens, Kant, Whewell, Popper, Feyerabend, Mach, Spinoza, Brahe, Kepler, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Aristotle, Hume, Ockham, Lichtenberg, Diderot, Hobbes, Aquinas, Gassendi and Halley.
I’m now up to page 113, having just made it through the enjoyable tale of the unification of magnetism and electricity (“Lodestone, Amber and Lightning”) and a very brief detour through falsifiability and the structure of scientific revolutions.
Somewhat disappointingly, but predictably, I have picked up a few slightly offputting things in the book on this reading that eluded me the first time round, many moons ago. One is the general vibe of #OldWhiteMen that pervades the book, although it still does much better than the Australian high school science curriculum, apparently. Another is when Silver refers to the Chinese and Muslims as having made no contribution to rational scientific theory until they encountered the West. I’m no scholar but this strikes me as a misleading and uncharitable view. Something similar happened on re-reading HG Well’s Short History Of The World, where he goes out of his way to vilify Tasmanian Indigenous people. In a completely different domain, I watched some of The Man With Two Brains a couple of years ago and was gobsmacked by the frequent, casual objectification of women.
What strikes me is a) my privileged and sheltered younger self’s lack of awareness of various sorts of chauvinism and b) the general phenomenon of some (but not all) things in older times coming across as not just old-fashioned but inappropriate, deluded and even damnable**.
Not only will I likely look back on some of the views of my current self with some combination of pity and scorn when I’m older, but much of what our society produces today may well be viewed by future generations with similar judgement and disappointment (and I don’t just mean climate change). David Suzuki made this point when observing how his students judged early theories of genetics and molecular biology harshly. The students didn’t seem to consider the possibility that the leading theories of their day would be equally ripe for derision with the passage of time.
Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea. Subtitle: “What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune can teach us about digital technology.” Published in 2019, the Introduction begins with a vignette about Don Carlos, a 16th Century character who inspired the construction of The Monk, an automaton sitting in the Smithsonian at the time of the book’s writing. The device is a metaphor for the relationship between people, history and technology. If anything I wish O’Shea spent a little more time describing the Monk***.
Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall. Classic sociological text about life in corporate America in the 1980s. Jackall’s accessible and wry style of writing is immediately apparent in the short introduction, which explains the genesis and aims of the book. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it****. And curious if any of the cast will utter the words ‘greed is good’.
Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin. Gribbin has a talent for making salient some of the profoundly strange theories and observations from general relativity, quantum mechanics and science more broadly. The intro to this book about complexity and chaos theory is short and sweet. Like Jackall it left me longing to dive in.
Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid. I just could not go past a book with a title like that. This book by Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt is also about the changing relationship between people and technology, using historical records and present day interviews to understand how different technology has been used, received and implicated in the accentuation or even creation of new emotions. The introduction was a bit long and academic for my liking, with some discussion of methods and the contents of each chapter. Looks like a really interesting read though.
These finely honed introductions highlight the painful fare served up regularly in scientific journal articles (I do not exclude myself from this criticism). One often hacks one’s way through thickets of bland and vaguely related statements in the introduction before one finally gets to the meat/tofu of the article. Once I tried to write some code to sift through the first paragraph of research papers and find out how many different ways there were to say ‘fire is a big deal’. Not that many, as it turns out - and usually some variant of ‘fire is bad’. Interestingly, the generous and talented folks in the grant support team at Uni also seemed quite fond of the ‘fire is bad’ frame when they were recently helping me to write yet another application.
So there we have it. I dipped into four different books in quick succession, using the introduction to get a feel for them and kindle my interest in going deeper. If I ever write a book, I really need to make sure it’s got a rock solid - and short - intro*****.
ADDENDUM
Following on from my previous post about the Beatles and fire-themed song titles, my colleague Tom has just assembled a Spotify playlist on precisely this pyrological topic, with contributions from the whole FLARE Wildfire Research group. Enjoy!
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*A sixth book sits at the bottom of the pile - Jeremy Sherman’s unusual, entertaining and thought-provoking Negotiate With Yourself And Win. Good luck finding that in a library.
**I’m also reminded of the ever-present risk of having one’s enjoyment of art diminished by the discovery that the artist is a douchebag. Apparently Van Morrison has said awful things, which may well cross my mind the next time I listen to the transcendent Astral Weeks. If you’re a fan check out this episode of Open Source. And regardless of who you’re a fan of, think twice before meeting them.
***I listened to O’Shea talk about her book and was delighted to learn that she is something of an outsider in the world of tech, being a lawyer by trade as well as a qualified historian. This has clearly not stopped her from getting involved and making a difference, which I find most heartening as a card-carrying outsider myself.
**** I also listened to a rather quirky podcast about Jackall’s book that made the point that his observations still ring true several decades after it was written. It got me thinking that I would like to read the Moral Mazes of academia, if it exists.
*****The prefatory essay is a different story entirely!