So we're sitting there sharing a cup of tea and a chocolate chip biscuit with our upstairs neighbours and every minute the conversation is edging towards the inevitable.
"So how bad is it? What will you need to do to repair it?"
The "it", of course, is.... the blot, the £20,000 question, the end of the house of which we do not speak, the room behind the door which is shut where we keep boxes of rubbish CDs, old letters and lots and lots of guitars (don't ask). It is the small question of the far end of our home sliding millimetre by millimetre into the latent floodplain of the Thames. We are sinking. And no-one thought to tell us before we bought it.
"Well," says my Dad expansively, "one of the things they might try is to prop it up."
"And what would that involve? How would they do that" says our neighbour slowly, he's grasping towards it, the cat is sharpening its nails and getting bored of its brown paper prison....
"Oh well," says Dad, adding comfortingly skating over the real issue with technical phrases such as "steel joist" and "RSJ".
Tom and I are desperately trying to maintain a serious, graven expression of concern as if it's all news to us too.
Then suddenly, without warning, its out! "Worst case scenario is that all this has got to come down," Dad says, standing on the balcony gesturing at the floor and the kitchen. His hands gesture the wall of their house away, he sweeps aside the roof and we're all standing on the ground floor surrounded by rubble.
I'm biting my lip, you've got to laugh really... haven't you? "I wanted a new kitchen anyway," says Gillie (or Ginny, after a year we're not sure), laughing to make us all feel better about it. But Anthony (previously Patrick) looks white, showing no trace of amusement.
And then we're off, thanking them for the evening, like we've all had a jolly time and they're not going to dream of demolishing balls and dust and destruction of their lovely home. I feel wretched about it, but the moggie is well and truly out of the bag.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Thursday, August 03, 2006
A man who went a very long way to prove a point
New Scientist press release
02 August 2006 The man who was both alive and dead under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT
TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.
Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see “Ahead of his time”, below), suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.
The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.
Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.
Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (www. arxiv.org/physics/0605001). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.
“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”
“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”
But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”
Author: Zeeya Merali.
02 August 2006 The man who was both alive and dead under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT
TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.
Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see “Ahead of his time”, below), suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.
The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.
Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.
Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (www. arxiv.org/physics/0605001). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.
“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”
“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”
But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”
Author: Zeeya Merali.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Can my ipod read my mind?
Walking to work today I lazily left my listening choice to "shuffle" on my ipod, wondering what it would come up with to suit my gloomy mood and the overcast day. I was left, not for the first time, thinking the thing could read my mind. I'll think you'll agree this is the ideal gloomtastic playlist for a grey Tuesday.
"Fell on Black Days" Soundgarden,
"I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine" Beth Orton
"Time Has Told Me" Nick Drake
"Fake Plastic Trees" Radiohead (I had to skip this one it was too much)
"Panic" The Smiths
"In Bloom" Nirvana
"Something in my eye" Ed Harcourt
"Season" Ash (Nothing like their typical poppy fare)
"Fruit Tree" Nick Drake (I mean, Nick Drake twice, there must be something going on)
"Fell on Black Days" Soundgarden,
"I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine" Beth Orton
"Time Has Told Me" Nick Drake
"Fake Plastic Trees" Radiohead (I had to skip this one it was too much)
"Panic" The Smiths
"In Bloom" Nirvana
"Something in my eye" Ed Harcourt
"Season" Ash (Nothing like their typical poppy fare)
"Fruit Tree" Nick Drake (I mean, Nick Drake twice, there must be something going on)
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Names of characters for books not yet written
Shady Fishbane - a hard-bitten
Parvin Zolf - a friendly, colourful, space-travelling alien for a kids book
Toon Wilderbeek - probably a cartoon cowboy, but may be I just think that because of the "toon" and "wild" bits
Halgabron - probably the oldest of these names floating around my head. Halgabron is a beefy, Barbarian-type, man of the woods. I think Halgabron is the ideal man for a choose-your-own-adventure triology. He doesn’t need a surname or a first name, he’s heroic enough already. Although perhaps in the final chapter when his true identity as a lost prince or heir to the wealthy laird comes out, his proper name can be revealed (and go on for two pages).
Or perhaps Halgabron is a place where people live, a dark hamlet. It’s a wooded place on a nastily steep slope. Everything seems normal at first…
Halgabron comes from the name of a house near my parents. But I think “Halgabron” has a life of its own and it’s a shame to leave it in metal letters painted white on the gate of a surburban house with shingle drive. Appears to be the name of somewhere in
Shifting picture
I keep thinking of the future, but the future is shifting.
In Back to the Future, Michael J Fox’s character has a picture which alters as he tinkers with the past, making the future less and less certain. His brother and sister disappear from the photo because it looks increasingly likely that their parents will never meet, fall in love and have children.
I have my own version of the photo in my head, but it shifts constantly. Sometimes I see a family photo with curly haired children and a doting, slap-stick father. Other times it’s me alone, probably fairly happy with lots of friends and interests, but with a job not a family. In the first I’m fat and baking cakes. Surely my cheeks will never look that ruddy? In the second I’m thin, surrounded by books, and, although you can’t tell from the photo, probably listening to opera. My greying hair is swept back into a severe bun, but is set off nicely by my black dress. Like Marty’s photo, as things shift – lonely spinster to family matriarch – things fade in and out of the scene. Possibilities and impossibilities swill around like clothes in a washing machine.
Usually the future is a half-done sketch. Places, circumstances are still to be sketched in, but the bare bones are there. It’s not even a work in progress, but a doodle on the back of a gas bill tucked in between the books on the shelves. In time I’ll find it and think it was strange I ever thought the future would turn out that way, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it in the present.
But now I am like an irritable painter with the easel set up, the light in the attic room just right, my pens and pencils set out before me, the floor is neat and tidy and there’s no more procrastinating to do… but the inspiration is nowhere. I keep starting something and tearing it up again. I need to get it get it right. I can’t just put it away and forget about it.
In Back to the Future, of course, Marty gets his parents to fall in love, saves the day, and his siblings reappear in the photo. I’m not sure what’s going to set in mine yet.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
metamorphosis
The Tadpole by E E Gould
Underneath the water weeds
Small and black, I wiggle,
And life is most suprising!
Wiggle! waggle! wiggle!
There's every now and then a most
Exciting change in me,
I wonder, wiggle! waggle!
What I shall turn out to be!
Underneath the water weeds
Small and black, I wiggle,
And life is most suprising!
Wiggle! waggle! wiggle!
There's every now and then a most
Exciting change in me,
I wonder, wiggle! waggle!
What I shall turn out to be!
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Heavyweight postmodernists face off
I don't know very much about either Italo Calvino or Paul Auster, and although I (so far) like Calvino - I think his dissection of the process of writing and reading insightful yet funny - and I (so far) don't like Paul Auster - he is cruel, in New York Triology the readers and characters are pawns in an apparently meaningless game for Auster's pleasure alone, I think they have quite a lot of similarities.
In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Calvino imagines two writers obsessively watching the other while they write; and a third author frozen in writer's block because he can only think of a reader reading the perfect book he hasn't written. In Auster's Ghost Story in the triology, an author can only write when being watched by a character whose only purpose is to watch him.
So I was surprised to read Auster dismissing Calvino out of hand in this interview
Interviewer: Have you read Italo Calvino
Auster: A couple of books. I'm not a big fan ... I get bored with it.
In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Calvino imagines two writers obsessively watching the other while they write; and a third author frozen in writer's block because he can only think of a reader reading the perfect book he hasn't written. In Auster's Ghost Story in the triology, an author can only write when being watched by a character whose only purpose is to watch him.
So I was surprised to read Auster dismissing Calvino out of hand in this interview
Interviewer: Have you read Italo Calvino
Auster: A couple of books. I'm not a big fan ... I get bored with it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
