by Salman Hameed

We didn't have pigeons when I was growing up in Pakistan. But I remember (granted that it is a somewhat foggy memory) that some of my relatives did have "pet" pigeons on the roof of their house. The use of carrier pigeons is also mentioned in numerous stories in Urdu literature. And totally unrelated to Pakistan, I also enjoyed Jim Jarmusch's brilliant film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, where a mafia hit man (played by Forrest Whitaker) communicated with the mafia mostly via carrier pigeons (oh - and he lived his life following his interpretation of the code of the Samurai. But I digress). Well, here is a fascinating Asian and African Studies blog post about the Moghul obsession with pigeon keeping:

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī (‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhs and 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.”

And not just that, you also have a book of poems dedicated to pigeons (kabutar in Persian and also in Urdu):

One of the most visually attractive items in the exhibition ‘Mughal India’ is ‘The book of

pigeons’ (kabūtarnāmah) by Sayyid Muḥammad Mūsavī whose poetical name was Vālih. This work consists of a poem of 163 couplets, followed by a short prose treatise explaining the different types of pigeons, their colours and characteristics, and the art of pigeon-flying. It was written, as a gesture of friendship, for one Miyān Khūban who asked for an elegantly written account of pigeon flying.

Darwin knew about these pigeons and sought information about them:

Charles Darwin (1809-82) was himself a keen pigeon fancier and set up a breeding loft at his home in the village of Downe, Kent. In the course of his research he corresponded with Sir Walter Elliot (1803-1887) a naturalist and ethnologist working in the Madras Civil Service. Darwin knew about Abu’l-Fazl’s chapter on pigeons (see Darwin and Elliot’s correspondence 1856-59): "I should mention that I have heard that such exist in the Ayin Akbaree in Persian (I know not whether I have spelt this right) but as this work is translated I can consult it in the India House [i.e. India Office Library, now part of the British Library collections!]". Elliot supplied Darwin with skins of various birds from India and Burma in 1856 and also sent him an English translation of Sayyid Muḥammad Mūsavī’s treatise which Darwin referred to twice in The variation of animals and plants under domestication. London: John Murray, 1868 (vol. 1 pp.141 and 155).

Read the full post here.

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpufIn the Āʼīn-i Akbarī (‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhs and 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpufIn the Āʼīn-i Akbarī (‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhs and 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

One of the most visually attractive items in the exhibition ‘Mughal India’ is ‘The book of pigeons’ (kabūtarnāmah) by Sayyid Muḥammad Mūsavī whose poetical name was Vālih. This work consists of a poem of 163 couplets, followed by a short prose treatise explaining the different types of pigeons, their colours and characteristics, and the art of pigeon-flying. It was written, as a gesture of friendship, for one Miyān Khūban who asked for an elegantly written account of pigeon flying. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dp

One of the most visually attractive items in the exhibition ‘Mughal India’ is ‘The book of pigeons’ (kabūtarnāmah) by Sayyid Muḥammad Mūsavī whose poetical name was Vālih. This work consists of a poem of 163 couplets, followed by a short prose treatise explaining the different types of pigeons, their colours and characteristics, and the art of pigeon-flying. It was written, as a gesture of friendship, for one Miyān Khūban who asked for an elegantly written account of pigeon flying. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dp

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

In the Āʼīn-i Akbarī(‘Akbar’s regulations’), Abu’l-Fazl devotes a whole section (Book 2, Āʼīn 29) to amusements which include pigeon-flying (ʻishqbāzī), breeding and the different colours of the royal pigeons. Altogether there were estimated to be more than 20,000 pigeons at Akbar’s court, but only 500 were select (khāṣṣah). When the emperor moved camp, the pigeons were taken as well, with bearers carring their portable dovecotes. Pigeons were trained to do quite complicated manoevres: the wheel (charkh) “a lusty movement ending with the pigeon throwing itself over in a full circle” and turning somersaults (bāzī). A select pigeon could perform 15 charkhsand 70 bazis in one session. Although ordinary people were amused by pigeon flying, His Majesty, Abu’l-Fazl writes, “uses the occupation as a way of reducing unsettled, worldly-minded men to obedience, and avails himself of it as a means productive of harmony and friendship.” (Blochmann’s translation, see below).  - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/02/pigeon-keeping-a-popular-mughal-pastime.html#sthash.uMiacjxk.dpuf

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by Salman Hameed

Well, here is a good way to spend your four-minutes. Here is a short TED talk by Terry Moore on "Why is 'x' the Unknown":

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by Salman Hameed

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the radio broadcast about Martian invasion that spooked many (how many?) Americans in 1938. Below is pretty good American Experience episode that provides the background on the panic and on the genius of Orson Welles. I do think that the word "genius" is quite appropriate for Welles, as he transformed theater, radio, and then movies - all before the age of 26! He is the Einstein of the entertainment industry. Okay - I digress.

But while you watch the show, also read this Slate article that claims that the stories of widespread panic following the broadcast are a myth, created by the newspapers, and they criticize this PBS documentary as well. I think they have a compelling argument for reducing the size of the myth, but I think the documentary is more than just about the panic, and presents a broader cultural context as well as caveats in estimates about the freakouts. One thing I did not like in the documentary: Actors performing actual comments from listeners at the time. Annoying and distracting. The real story is so good that you don't need gimmicks to keep viewers' attention.

You can also listen to the original radio broadcast on OpenCulture, where they have also included the video of a press conference following the panic - and it contains an amusingly brilliant performance by Orson Welles.

Here is American Experience - War of the Worlds (it is about an hour long).

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by Salman Hameed

Here is an intriguing short film (about 20 minutes): Giordano Bruno in Conscious Memory. Bruno, of course, has come to stand in as a symbol for free speech etc., but that is a later construction (see this earlier post: Why was Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake? But this movie, takes it in another direction and presents his broader influence, including on the writings of Shakespeare (they were contemporaries - and some have suggested this connection. I don't know anything about this to comment on it). Despite the acting and some limited camera work, I like the ambitious nature of the short film. Enjoy!

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by Salman Hameed

This was created for BBC 2 (tip from Open Culture). Enjoy!


P.S. Note that in a little over four minutes, it also resolves the tension(s) between science and religion. 

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by Salman Hameed

[Updated below]

It is hard now to keep up with spectacular science news. Nevertheless, it is sometimes good to pause for a bit to appreciate the way scientists find clues about history. Here are three news items in the same issue of Science that I found riveting. This just reminded me of the crude nature of evolution-creation debates - and how those discussion take place in a parallel dumb universe ("where is the missing link?"; "Evolution is just a theory" etc.).

Here is the story of the bubonic plague. It was suspected that the Byzantine empire was hit by a bubonic plague that hastened its decline in the 6th century and later. This decline also facilitated the phenomenal expansion of Islam into the Byzantine territories. But do we know that this was a bubonic plague? Well now we do:

The Justinian Plague, which resurfaced regularly between the 6th and 8th centuries, is thought to have assisted the decline of the Roman Empire, but it has, until now, only been speculatively diagnosed as bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Using stringent ancient DNA anticontamination protocols, Harbeck et al. have genotyped new material from the early medieval graveyard at Aschheim, Bavaria, dating from the 6th century. This graveyard contained 438 individuals, often in multiple burials—a sign of crisis. The amount of bacterial material available was scant, but Y. pestis was identified from one individual using five key single-nucleotide polymorphisms identified in recent phylogenies. Genotyping confirmed this isolate as basal to isolates from the 14th-century Black Death and the modern (19th-century) third pandemic and that, like the other pandemics, it originated in China or Mongolia.

Full article at: PLoS Pathogens 9, 10.1371/journal.ppat.1003349 (2013).

Then we have this phenomenal work of decoding of the Neanderthal DNA as well as another hominid group called the Denisovians. What is fascinating is that the researchers can tell not only that humans and Neanderthals interbred (yes - for those outside of Africa, about 2% of the DNA comes from Neanderthals), but that at least in some cases Neanderthal first cousins had offsprings:

Neandertals, the closest known relatives to modern humans, ranged across Europe to western Asia from perhaps 300,000 years ago until about 30,000 years ago. Their overlap in time and space with our ancestors had fueled debate about whether the two species had interbred. Then, in 2010, Pääbo's group published a low-coverage sequence (1.3 copies on average) of DNA from three Neandertal bones from Croatia, which showed interbreeding: About 2% of the DNA in living people from outside Africa originally comes from Neandertals (Science, 7 May 2010, pp. 680 and 710). 

That first Neandertal sequence was a huge accomplishment, as Neandertal DNA made up just a few percent of the DNA in the fossils, the rest being bacterial and other contaminants. Since then, the Leipzig group has found ways to zero in on human genetic material and to get more from degraded ancient DNA by using a sequencing method that starts with single, rather than double, strands of DNA. The approach provided a startlingly detailed view of the Denisovan pinkie bone (Science, 31 August 2012, p. 1028). 

But this powerful technique had yet to be applied to Neandertals. So Pääbo was thrilled when the DNA in the sample taken from the toe bone proved to be 60% Neandertal. The researchers were able to sequence each base 50 times over, on average—enough coverage to ensure the sequence is correct. This approach also provided low coverage of the genome from another fossil, a Neandertal baby's rib, more than 50,000 years old, from a cave in Russia's Caucasus region between the Caspian and Black seas. 

In a 10 p.m. talk to a full house, Pääbo offered some surprising results from the toe bone. For long stretches, the DNA from each parental chromosome is closely matched, strongly suggesting that this Neandertal was the offspring of two first cousins, he said. Comparing the data with those from the fossils from Croatia and the Caucasus showed that these populations were fairly separated from one another. The group also compared the chunks of Neandertal DNA found in living people with each of these three Neandertal samples. The closest match was with the Caucasus population, suggesting that interbreeding with our ancestors most likely occurred closer to that region.

Okay - so scientists, I think, are now invading the privacy of this inter-species relations. Do we really have to know what our ancestors were doing tens of thousands of years ago on those cold nights? ;) 

Actually we do.

Full story here (but you will need subscription). 

Okay - so moving on from our misbehaving ancestors to the shipwrecks carrying marble for temples. What is amazing here is that scientists can not only identify the dates of the shipwreck, but they can tell where the marble was quarried from and where it was headed. This is pretty cool (and Urdu speakers will know why Marble is called Sang-e-Marmar - the stone of the Marmara): 

Sometime between 100 B.C.E and 25 B.C.E., a wooden ship carrying almost 60 tonnes of

stone foundered in Aegean waters just off the coast of Turkey. It went down bearing its entire cargo, including eight massive drum-shaped blocks of white marble. Those blocks fit together to form part of a tapering column that likely stood more than 11 meters tall, plus a square uppermost piece: a Doric column. 

Two thousand years after the ship went down, archaeologists excavating what is now called the Kizilburun shipwreck have figured out exactly where the marble blocks came from and where they were heading, illuminating the marble trade in the Roman province of Asia Minor.
...
Carlson and classical archaeologist William Aylward of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. first set out to learn where the marble came from. As reported in a 2010 study in the American Journal of Archaeology, the team sent out samples of the marble for stable isotope analysis and other tests. The marble's values of the isotopes δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O and its spectroscopic details led them to Marmara Island, known as Proconnesos in Roman times, in the Sea of Marmara, the inland sea connecting the Aegean and Black seas. This island was the site of an important marble quarry when Asia Minor became a Roman province around 130 B.C.E. 

But where was the marble heading? The blocks' size and style suggest that the column was intended for a major public building, most likely a temple. Carlson and Aylward drew up a list of all the Doric-style monumental buildings under construction in the 1st century B.C.E. on coastlines south of the wreck site, the probable direction of travel away from the quarry. Then they searched for sites with a finished lower-column diameter of about 1.73 meters. They concluded that the marble was headed for the Temple of Apollo at Claros, where people in Roman times flocked to seek advice from oracles, just 50 kilometers from the wreck. That finding is "utterly convincing," says architectural historian Lothar Haselberger of the University of Pennsylvania. 

The data show that the quarry workers on Proconnesos were in close contact with the temple builders some 500 kilometers or more away, shaping the marble to the builders' exact specifications. The findings also show that the builders received columns in pieces in small shipments, hinting at a lengthy construction process. This information, says Carlson, "is the missing link that tells us a lot about this process."                   

Read the full story here (yes - subscription will be needed).                  

[Update - May 29th: So scientists can say quite a bit from DNA analyses about what humans and Neanderthals were doing tens of thousands of years ago, but according to the Council of Islamic Ideology in Pakistan, DNA analysis cannot be used as primary evidence in rape cases (it can be used as secondary evidence). Shame for that]. 

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by Salman Hameed

A few things for Sunday.

Article: Last week's New Yorker had a fascinating and well written article by Burkhard Bilger on our changing perceptions of Mars. While it centers on two figures associated with the Curiosity rover, it starts with a longer overview. What struck me was the fact that some people not only imagined "canals" on Mars in the 19th century, but also saw the Hebrew word for Almight - Shajdai spelled out on the surface of Mars. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised then at the later claims of Face on Mars (these are all a result of human propensity to see patterns where none exist - known as Pareidolia). Here is the beginning of the article:

There once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were “Goldilocks planets,” our own astronomers would say: just right for life. 

The rest is prehistory. On Earth, the volcanoes filled the air with water vapor and carbon dioxide. The surface cooled, a crust formed, and oceans condensed upon it. In hot springs and undersea vents, simple carbon compounds bubbled up to form amino acids and peptides. The first bacteria moved through the ooze; then came blue-green algae, spreading across the planet like a watery carpet, drinking in sunlight and exhaling oxygen, giving breath to everything that came after. Geologists call this the Great Oxygenation Event—the most momentous change in the planet’s history. It seems inevitable now: life’s triumphant march toward complexity, toward us. But like most creation stories this one is also a cautionary tale. It has both a Heaven and a Hell. 

In 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew the first detailed map of Mars, he imagined the planet as an earthly paradise. He labelled one region Eden, another Elysium, others, on later maps, Arcadia and Utopia. Peering through his telescope on the roof of the Palazzo di Brera, in Milan, Schiaparelli had seen what looked like oceans, continents, and water channels swim into view. “The planet is not a desert of arid rocks,” he wrote. “It lives.” And his successors often took him at his word: the sharper their telescopes, the blurrier their vision. They saw mountains of ice and rivers of snowmelt, William Sheehan writes in his 1996 book, “The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery.” They saw fertile oases and a moss-green equator. They saw an irrigation system so linear and “trigonometric,” as the astronomer Percival Lowell put it, that it could only be the work of a highly intelligent race. Some even saw a Hebrew word for Almighty—Shajdai—spelled out on the planet’s surface. “True, the magnitude of the work of cutting the canals into the shape of the name of God is at first thought appalling,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 1895. “But there are terrestrial works which to us today seem no less impossible.” 

By the time humanity got its first closeup view of Mars, a little less than a century after Schiaparelli mapped it, the planet had come to seem like a second, more exotic Earth. Books like “The Martian Chronicles” described a place of eerie desert grandeur, inhabited by slender, tawny beings given to strange hallucinations—Taos without the tourists. And though infrared studies suggested that its surface had seventy times less water than Earth’s driest desert, biologists still hoped for the best. “Given all the evidence presently available, we believe it entirely reasonable that Mars is inhabited with living organisms and that life independently originated there,” a study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded in March, 1965. 

The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade. Forty spacecraft have been sent there, and not one has found a single fossil or living thing. The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds. By the time Earth took its first breath three billion years ago, geologists now believe, Mars had been suffocating for a billion years. The air had thinned and rivers evaporated; dust storms swept up and ice caps seized what was left of the water. The Great Desiccation Event, as it’s sometimes called, is even more of a mystery than the Great Oxygenation on Earth. We know only this: one planet lived and the other died. One turned green, the other red.

Book: Linked with the 19th century fascination with Mars and the discovery, here is an NPR review of a fiction novel set in Egypt. Equilateral by Ken Kalfus has a great premise and it is on my reading list:

The real-life premise is this: In the late 19th century, astronomers spotted what they thought were canals on Mars. Many of those astronomers theorized that, therefore, there must be life on the red planet. Kalfus' fictional astronomer, Sanford Thayer, is an Englishman who's obsessed with the dream of contacting the Martians. Thayer has

launched an internationally funded project to carve out an enormous equilateral triangle — 300 miles to each side — in the Western deserts of Egypt. Once it's dug out, the triangle will be filled with petroleum. Here's how Kalfus' somewhat pompous omniscient narrator describes the rest of the plan: 

"[S]ometime before dawn on June 17, 1894, at the moment of Earth's most favorable position in the Martian sky, the petroleum pooled in the trenches on each Side of the Equilateral will be ignited simultaneously, launching a Flare from the Earth's darkened limb that across millions of miles of empty space will petition for man's membership in the fraternity of planetary civilizations." 

Throughout the opening chapters of his novel, Kalfus is so captivated by his own fictional fantasy of that giant triangular 19th century greeting card flashing into space that he's content to just elaborate on the details. He describes how 900,000 native workers toil deep in what Thayer calls "the Great Sand Sea"; those workers are under strict command not to deviate one inch in their digging lest the Martians mistakenly think that a geometrically imprecise triangle is a natural, rather than a man-made, phenomenon. That's why, when the workers stumble upon the tip of a buried pyramid as they're digging a 40-foot trench on one side of the Equilateral, Thayer orders them to bury the pyramid again and pour the pitch over it. At this point, we readers begin to catch on that Thayer, in the fine literary tradition of Englishmen abroad, has stayed out in the midday sun too long. 

The great lure of Kalfus' kooky novel, at first, lies in its central premise: The book even contains diagrams to help readers visualize the growing triangle and the astronomical glide of Mars and Earth relative to the sun. We feel the blistering heat and the invasiveness of little "daggered" grains of sand that scratch the eyepieces of Thayer's telescopes, even when they're carefully packed away in Chinese cedar cabinets. Given that this is a novel preoccupied with geometrical design, it makes sense that the main characters here — Thayer, his lovelorn secretary, his solicitous native servant, and the practical British engineer on the project — drift closer and further from each other in shifting triangulated alliances. But halfway through this little book, a more ambitious theme begins emerging. Without giving the startling particulars away, I'll just say that violence erupts in the desert, stirring up a veritable sandstorm of troubling philosophical questions, all of them having to do with whether or not we Earthlings even have the right to think of ourselves as embodying "intelligent life."

Reality Show: Who knows when a human mission top Mars will ever take place. However, it seems that the chances for an earlier mission have gone up because of Mars One - a non-profit group. The Idea is to make a reality show of the first explorers on Mars - and we will all pay big bucks to see them prepare and then travel - one way - to Mars. The idea of a one-way travel to Mars has been around for a while and I see it as quite reasonable. After all, (some) humans have always been explorers and this will be a continuation of that tradition. Here is a bit about the idea:

But Mars One stands apart in very important ways: First, it will strive to be self-financed by selling the astronaut selection process, launch and landing as a reality television show. Second, the lucky winners will live out their lives in an inflatable habitat on another planet.
"If somebody's an outdoors person who says, 'I need my mountains, I need to smell the flowers,' then it's not the mission for him," says Norbert Kraft, the group's chief medical officer. 

Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp says that the idea of selling the trip as prime-time television really seemed doable after he saw the revenue numbers from the London Olympics. That event garnered more than $4 billion in just over three weeks, he says. With that in mind, the mission's $6 billion price tag "is actually a bargain." 

In fact, there will be a lot more to watch than the launch and landing. Even today, visitors to the Mars One website can check out public videos from applicants and vote on who they like the most. Those liked more will be more likely to go on to the next round of astronaut selection. Future rounds will be televised: Participants in each nation will square off against each other with only a single participant making his or her way to years of training. That final round will be an internationally broadcast show in which six teams of four vie for the chance to get voted off of Earth.

Here is the call for applicants:


Enjoy!

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by Salman Hameed

For those interested in history of science, there is a new book coming out on the work of Ibn al-Nafis: Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt: Ibn al-Nafis, Pulmonary Transit and Bodily Resurrection by Nahyan Fancy. Here are the details:

The discovery of the pulmonary transit of blood was a ground-breaking discovery in the history of the life sciences, and a prerequisite for William Harvey’s fully developed theory of blood circulation three centuries later. This book is the first attempt at understanding Ibn al-Nafis’s anatomical discovery from within the medical and theological works of this thirteenth century physician-jurist, and his broader social, religious and intellectual contexts. 

Although Ibn al-Nafis did not posit a theory of blood circulation, he nevertheless challenged the reigning Galenic and Avicennian physiological theories, and the then prevailing anatomical understandings of the heart. Far from being a happy guess, Ibn al-Nafis’s anatomical result is rooted in an extensive re-evaluation of the reigning medical theories. Moreover, this book shows that Ibn al-Nafis’s re-evaluation is itself a result of his engagement with post-Avicennian debates on the relationship between reason and revelation, and the rationality of traditionalist beliefs, such as bodily resurrection. 

Breaking new ground by showing how medicine, philosophy and theology were intertwined in the intellectual fabric of pre-modern Islamic societies, Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt will be of interest to students and scholars of the History of Science, the History of Medicine and Islamic Studies. 

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by Salman Hameed

Our next Science and Religion lecture at Hampshire College is tomorrow (March 28th). And it is my absolute pleasure to announce that it will be by historian Tracy Leavelle. I met him back when he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Smith College, and I know that he is a big fan of soccer and the band Wilco! But he is not only a fantastic researcher, but also a great story-teller. Tracy and I have collaborated on the issue of telescopes on the sacred Mauna Kea in Hawai'i (if you follow the blog, you must have seen umpteen posts on that).

His Science & Religion talk does cover the topic of Hawai'i, but not of telescopes. Nevertheless, it sounds fantastic (and I'm not saying this because he is my friend...). If you are in the area, join us for the talk tomorrow. Here are the details for the talk:


Hampshire College Lecture Series on Science and Religion:

The Awful Crater and the Eternal God: Volcanoes and Missionary Science in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i

by Dr. Tracy Leavelle

Thursday, March 28 at 5:30 pm

 Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Peterson Hall

Hampshire College

Abstract: In 1852, Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawai‘i erupted in dramatic fashion, sending fountains of lava hundreds of feet into the air and down the side of the mountain for miles.  The American missionary Titus Coan climbed Mauna Loa to study the event and found himself alone and afraid on the great volcano, aghast at “the awful crater.”  Here, Coan discovered the imprint of a mighty God of creation and destruction.  In a prominent American scientific journal, he reflected, “I seemed to be standing in the presence and before the burning throne of the eternal God.”  The volcanoes of Hawai‘i represented for Coan the dynamic contest between salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery.  As such, they became sites of both rigorous scientific study and deep religious contemplation.

Speaker bio: Dr. Tracy Neal Leavelle is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at
Creighton University and a former Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow at Smith College.  He has recently been appointed Director of Digital Humanities Initiatives at Creighton.  His first book is The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Penn, 2012).

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by Salman Hameed

Earlier this month, as part of our Science and Religion Lecture Series at Hampshire College, we had a fantastic lecture by Steve Nadler on Spinoza's God (or Nature). Here is your chance to find out if Spinoza was an agnostic, deist, pantheist, or an atheist. Plus, it is fascinating to hear about how Spinoza viewed succumbing to wonder and mystery (this comes out in the Q&A session after the talk). If you have some time, you should definitely check out the lecture.

As a refresher, here is the abstract for the talk:

Abstract:

In 1656, the young Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community with extreme prejudice; by the end of his short life he was regarded as one of the most radical and dangerous thinkers of his time. Among his alleged "abominable heresies" was, according to one contemporary report, the belief that "God exists only philosophically." In this lecture, we will examine Spinoza's conception of God, whereby God is identified with Nature, and address the question of whether he is, as is so often claimed, a "God intoxicated" pantheist or a devious atheist, as well as the implications of this for his views on religion.

Here is the video of the lecture:


Here is the Q&A session:

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by Salman Hameed

Our Center for the Study of Science in Muslim Societies (SSiMS) is hosting a lunch talk this coming Wednesday, March 27th, by Yael Rice. The talk will be in the lobby of Adele Simmons Hall (ASH) at Noon and the topic looks fascinating. Join us, if you are in the area. Here are the details:

Sound and Vision/Word and Image: Islamic Portraiture and its Many Forms

by Yael Rice

Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art at Amherst College

Abstract: It is a widespread misconception that the medieval and early-modern arts of the Islamic lands lacked a tradition of figural depiction. In fact, illustrated manuscripts from Mosul (Iraq) to Agra (India) provide clear evidence of a rich practice of figuration, including painted portraits of authors, patrons, and other important figures. With several notable exceptions, manuscripts of histories, poetic works, biographies, and other texts nevertheless evidence a pronounced reliance upon verbal, rather than pictorial, representations of likeness. This talk will address the complex relationship between textual and pictorial portrait imagery in the book arts of Greater Iran and South Asia from the 13th through the 17th centuries, focusing in particular on the Mughal court of northern India, which saw a marked shift towards a practice of mimetic portraiture rooted in optical, sensate experiences.

Speaker Bio: Yael Rice (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in the art and architecture of Greater Iran and South Asia, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Currently the Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art at Amherst College, she previously held the position of Assistant Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2009 till 2012. Her publications include studies of European engravings and Persian calligraphic specimens in Mughal royal albums, the 1598–99 MughalRazmnama (Book of war), and an early fifteenth-century Khamsa (Quintet) of Nizami copied and illustrated in the region of Fars, Iran.

Rice's current research concerns physiognomic analysis as a courtly and artistic practice, Mughal depictions of imperial dreams, paintings made for the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), and the cultural and material history of jade in early modern Central and South Asia.

--------------------------------------------
In the Adele Simmons Hall (ASH) Lobby at Hampshire College.        
A light lunch will be available at noon.

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by Salman Hameed

It is sad to see a steady destruction of the historical sites of Islam. This is not just a loss for Muslims. This is a loss of world heritage. What I find baffling is that on the one hand, there are Muslims who make pseudoscientific claims for the uniqueness of Mecca. On the other hand, there are actual good scientific reasons to preserve the archaeological and historical heritage of Mecca - sacred home to one of the biggest religions in the world. And we don't hear much protest at the opening of sky scrapper malls and mad expansion of the central mosque (though Paris Hilton's store, I guess, is necessary for a sacred experience in Mecca). The same has been done to Madina. Within Saudi Arabia, it may be because of the lack of any appreciation of history (see earlier post: How is history viewed in Saudi Arabia). But why is there silence in other parts of the Muslim world?

Here is the picture of expansion from The Independent:

From another article, Mecca for the rich: Islam's holiest site 'turning into Vegas':

Over the past 10 years the holiest site in Islam has undergone a huge transformation, one that has divided opinion among Muslims all over the world. 

Once a dusty desert town struggling to cope with the ever-increasing number of pilgrims arriving for the annual Hajj, the city now soars above its surroundings with a glittering array of skyscrapers, shopping malls and luxury hotels. 

To the al-Saud monarchy, Mecca is their vision of the future – a steel and concrete metropolis built on the proceeds of enormous oil wealth that showcases their national pride. 

Yet growing numbers of citizens, particularly those living in the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, have looked on aghast as the nation's archaeological heritage is trampled under a construction mania backed by hardline clerics who preach against the preservation of their own heritage. Mecca, once a place where the Prophet Mohamed insisted all Muslims would be equal, has become a playground for the rich, critics say, where naked capitalism has usurped spirituality as the city's raison d'être. 

Few are willing to discuss their fears openly because of the risks associated with criticising official policy in the authoritarian kingdom. And, with the exceptions of Turkey and Iran, fellow Muslim nations have largely held their tongues for fear of of a diplomatic fallout and restrictions on their citizens' pilgrimage visas. Western archaeologists are silent out of fear that the few sites they are allowed access to will be closed to them. 

But a number of prominent Saudi archaeologists and historians are speaking up in the belief that the opportunity to save Saudi Arabia's remaining historical sites is closing fast.
"No one has the balls to stand up and condemn this cultural vandalism," says Dr Irfan al-Alawi who, as executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, has fought in vain to protect his country's historical sites. "We have already lost 400-500 sites. I just hope it's not too late to turn things around." 

Sami Angawi, a renowned Saudi expert on the region's Islamic architecture, is equally concerned. "This is an absolute contradiction to the nature of Mecca and the sacredness of the house of God," he told the Reuters news agency earlier this year. "Both [Mecca and Medina] are historically almost finished. You do not find anything except skyscrapers."

And I find it amazing that there are no World Heritage Sites related to Islam in Saudi Arabia:

The destruction has been aided by Wahabism, the austere interpretation of Islam that has served as the kingdom's official religion ever since the al-Sauds rose to power across the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th century. 

In the eyes of Wahabis, historical sites and shrines encourage "shirq" – the sin of idolatry or polytheism – and should be destroyed. When the al-Saud tribes swept through Mecca in the 1920s, the first thing they did was lay waste to cemeteries holding many of Islam's important figures. They have been destroying the country's heritage ever since. Of the three sites the Saudis have allowed the UN to designate World Heritage Sites, none are related to Islam. 

Those circling the Kaaba only need to look skywards to see the latest example of the Saudi monarchy's insatiable appetite for architectural bling. At 1,972ft, the Royal Mecca Clock Tower, opened earlier this year, soars over the surrounding Grand Mosque, part of an enormous development of skyscrapers that will house five-star hotels for the minority of pilgrims rich enough to afford them. 

To build the skyscraper city, the authorities dynamited an entire mountain and the Ottoman era Ajyad Fortress that lay on top of it. At the other end of the Grand Mosque complex, the house of the Prophet's first wife Khadijah has been turned into a toilet block. The fate of the house he was born in is uncertain. Also planned for demolition are the Grand Mosque's Ottoman columns which dare to contain the names of the Prophet's companions, something hardline Wahabis detest.

What a shame! Both for history and for religion.

Also see:

How is history viewed in Saudi Arabia?

Can Muslim archaeological sites be saved from Muslims?
The Problem with peddling pseudoscientific claims regarding Mecca Clock
Mecca Clock: Seeking Prestige via Borrowed Science

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by Salman Hameed

If you live in Western Massachusetts, then you are in for a treat. We have three fantastic talks coming, including our next Science & Religion Lecture.

So lets start with tomorrow (Thursday, March 5th). The Culture Brain and Development (CBD) program at Hampshire is hosting a talk by Darrin McMahon:

Pursuing Happiness in the Past and in the Present

by Dr. Darrin M. McMahon

Thursday February 28th 5:30-7:00 p.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall, Main Lecture Hall

Bio: Dr. Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. Educated at Berkeley and Yale, he is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001) and Happiness: a History (Atlantic Monthly, 2006), which has been translated into thirteen languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and The Library Journal. Dr. McMahon?s writings have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is currently writing a history of the idea of genius, forthcoming with Basic Books in 2013.

Abstract: Professor McMahon will sketch some of the principal ways human beings have thought about happiness in the past. Examples will draw primarily from the Western tradition, but the discussion will open out to encompass other traditions as well. McMahon will then discuss the ?Revolution in Human Expectations? that occurred in the 18th century, and explain how its consequences--for better and for worse--are still with us today. The lecture concludes by looking at some aspects of the recent "science" of happiness to explain how a good number of its central insights are consistent with truths long understood by the world's major religious and wisdom traditions.


Then we have Glenn Greenwald next Tuesday:

Endless War, Radical Presidential Power, and a Rotted Political Culture

by Glenn Greenwald

March 5 (Tuesday) 2013 at 5:30pm

Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA

Glenn Greenwald will be speaking at Hampshire College about the U.S.’s “Endless War, Radical Presidential Power, And A Rotted Political Culture.” Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer, and is now a columnist for the Guardian and a best-selling author who writes critically and powerfully about the war on terror, national security, the expansion of executive power, and other pressing political issues. He has published several books on us politics; his most recent book is With Liberty And Justice For Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality And Protect The Powerful. Greenwald was named by the Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He has won numerous awards for his investigative journalism.

After a brief talk, he will participate in a roundtable conversation with moderator Falguni A. Sheth, Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College.  The event will be held on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 5:30 pm, in the Main Lecture Hall in Franklin Patterson Hall, Hampshire College.  It is open to the public, and members of the community are warmly invited to attend.


And next Thursday, March 7th, we have our next Science and Religion Lecture:

Spinoza's God (or Nature)

by Dr. Steven Nadler

Thursday, March 7 at 5:30 p.m. in Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall

Abstract:

In 1656, the young Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community with extreme prejudice; by the end of his short life he was regarded as one of the most radical and dangerous thinkers of his time. Among his alleged "abominable heresies" was, according to one contemporary report, the belief that "God exists only philosophically." In this lecture, we will examine Spinoza's conception of God, whereby God is identified with Nature, and address the question of whether he is, as is so often claimed, a "God intoxicated" pantheist or a devious atheist, as well as the implications of this for his views on religion.

Speaker bio:

Professor Nadler is William H. Hay Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on philosophy in the seventeenth century, particularly issues in metaphysics and epistemology, as well as conceptions of reason and happiness. He has written extensively on Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza, and Leibniz. He also works on medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy. His two most recent books are a collection of his papers, Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians (Oxford, 2011); and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011). His new book, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes, will be published by Princeton in spring 2013. He is currently the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

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by Salman Hameed

Perhaps, appropriately, Persian polymath Nasir al Din Tusi (1201-1274 CE) decided to have his birthday on February 19th, a day before Copernicus. Google then decided to have a Tusi doodle on the 18th, but kept it away from the non-Arab world. Here is Tusi doodle that appeared only on Arabic Google (tip from House of Wisdom):

So why care for Tusi? Well, like other natural philosophers of his time, he contributed to many different fields. He even waded in on idea of the development and evolution of species, including that of humans. But it is his Tusi-Couple that ended up changing the face of astronomy (he also formed the important Marageh Observatory in 1259 CE). Something very similar was used by Ibn al-Shatir in his geocentric model and Copernicus in his heliocentric model. Historians now believe that Copernicus must have known about the Tusi-Couple and adapted it for his model (for clarification, al-Tusi or Ibn al-Shatir did not place the Sun at the center of the solar system).

Here is the Tusi-Couple:

And on queue, February 19th was the 540th birthday of Copernicus. Here is the Google doodle for that:

Happy belated birthdays!

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by Salman Hameed

Next year will be the 450th birth anniversaries of Galileo and Shakespeare. Last week's New Yorker has a beautifully written piece by Adam Gopnik on Galileo that wonders what Shakespeare would have written about his contemporary. Actually he delegates that responsibility to Bertolt Brecht and his famous play, Galileo. The article is very good but it also reinforces couple of misperceptions.  For example, it uses the famous 19th century painting of a defiant Galileo above as the set-piece for the article. The problem is that from what is known, Galileo was a frail old man when he came up in front of the inquisition and he did not want to offend them. And the inquisition itself wanted a way out as well and struck a plea bargain with him that would have let him off with a slap on the wrist. It was the Pope - the former friend of Galileo - who overrode the plea agreement. This is not to say that the treatment of Galileo was not shoddy and unjust. But that it is always good to read an article that also gets smaller thing right. The painting more reflects the view of the Church in the 19th century than a depiction of Galileo in front of the inquisition. Gopnik also implies that Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake because of belief in the plurality of the worlds. While Bruno did believe in the plurality of the worlds, and that was indeed considered heretical by the Church, there were also many more reasons for the Church to be angry about. It would be misleading to cherry-pick the reasons four centuries later (See this earlier post: Why was Giordano Bruno Burnt at the Stake?).

But these critiques aside, this is a fantastic and highly enjoyable article:

Although Galileo and Shakespeare were both born in 1564, just coming up on a shared four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, Shakespeare never wrote a play about his contemporary. (Wise man that he was, Shakespeare never wrote a play about anyone who was alive to protest.) The founder of modern science had to wait three hundred years, but when he got his play it was a good one: Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” which is the most Shakespearean of modern history plays, the most vivid and densely ambivalent. It was produced with Charles Laughton in 1947, during Brecht’s Hollywood exile, and Brecht’s image of the scientist as a worldly sensualist and ironist is hard to beat, or forget. Brecht’s Galileo steals the idea for the telescope from the Dutch, flatters the Medici into giving him a sinecure, creates two new sciences from sheer smarts and gumption—and then, threatened by the Church with torture for holding the wrong views on man’s place in the universe, he collapses, recants, and lives on in a twilight of shame. 

It might be said that Brecht, who truckled to the House Un-American Activities Committee—“My activities . . . have always been purely literary activities of a strictly independent nature”—and then spent the next bit of his own life, post-Hollywood, accessorized to the Stalinist government of East Germany, was the last man in the world to be pointing a finger at someone for selling out honesty for comfort. But then the last man who ought to point that finger is always the one who does. Galileo’s shame, or apostasy, certainly shapes the origin myth of modern science, giving it not a martyr-hero but a turncoat, albeit one of genius. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no heroes,” his former apprentice says at the play’s climax to the master who has betrayed the Copernican faith. “No,” Galileo replies, “unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” It is a bitter valediction for the birth of the new learning. The myth that, once condemned, he muttered under his breath, about the earth, “But still, it moves,” provides small comfort for the persecuted, and is not one that Brecht adopted.

Interestingly, Gopnik sees a closer connection of Galileo with that of Michelangelo:

Although the twinship of Shakespeare and Galileo is one that we see retrospectively, another, even more auspicious twinning was noted and celebrated during Galileo’s lifetime: Galileo was born in Pisa on the day that Michelangelo died. In truth, it was probably about a week later, but the records were tweaked to make it seem so. The connection was real, and deep. Galileo spent his life as an engineer and astronomer, but his primary education was almost exclusively in what we would call the liberal arts: music, drawing, poetry, and rhetoric—the kind of thing that had made Michelangelo’s Florence the capital of culture in the previous hundred years. 

Galileo was afflicted with a cold and crazy mother—after he made his first telescope, she tried to bribe a servant to betray its secret so that she could sell it on the market!—and some of the chauvinism that flecks his life and his writing may have derived from weird-mom worries. He was, however, very close to his father, Vincenzo Galilei, a lute player and, more important, a musical theorist. Vincenzo wrote a book, startlingly similar in tone and style to the ones his son wrote later, ripping apart ancient Ptolemaic systems of lute tuning, as his son ripped apart Ptolemaic astronomy. Evidently, there were numerological prejudices in the ancient tuning that didn’t pass the test of the ear. The young Galileo took for granted the intellectual freedom conceded to Renaissance musicians. The Inquisition was all ears, but not at concerts. 

Part of Galileo’s genius was to transfer the spirit of the Italian Renaissance in the plastic arts to the mathematical and observational ones. He took the competitive, empirical drive with which Florentine painters had been looking at the world and used it to look at the night sky. The intellectual practices of doubting authority and trying out experiments happened on lutes and with tempera on gesso before they turned toward the stars. You had only to study the previous two centuries of Florentine drawing, from the rocky pillars of Masaccio to the twisting perfection of Michelangelo, to see how knowledge grew through a contest in observation. As the physicist and historian of science Mark Peterson points out, the young Galileo used his newly acquired skills as a geometer to lecture on the architecture of Hell as Dante had imagined it, grasping the hidden truth of “scaling up”: an Inferno that big couldn’t be built on classical engineering principles. But the painters and poets could look at the world, safely, through the lens of religious subjects; Galileo, looking through his lens, saw the religious non-subject. They looked at people and saw angels; he looked at the heavens, and didn’t.

And he gets back to the question of Brecht's hero towards the end, and I love the way Gopnik then connects it to science in general:

Could he, as Brecht might have wanted, have done otherwise, acted more heroically? Milton’s Galileo was a free man imprisoned by intolerance. What would Shakespeare’s Galileo have been, one wonders, had he ever written him? Well, in a sense, he had written him, as Falstaff, the man of appetite and wit who sees through the game of honor and fidelity. Galileo’s myth is not unlike the fat knight’s, the story of a medieval ethic of courage and honor supplanted by the modern one of cunning, wit, and self-knowledge. Martyrdom is the test of faith, but the test of truth is truth. Once the book was published, who cared what transparent lies you had to tell to save your life? The best reason we have to believe in miracles is the miracle that people are prepared to die for them. But the best reason that we have to believe in the moons of Jupiter is that no one has to be prepared to die for them in order for them to be real. 

So the scientist can shrug at the torturer and say, Any way you want me to tell it, I will. You’ve got the waterboard. The stars are still there. It may be no accident that so many of the great scientists really have followed Galileo, in ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered. In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme. Newton escaped the world through nuttiness, Darwin through elaborate evasive courtesies and by farming out the politics to Huxley. Heisenberg’s uncertainty was political—he did nuclear-fission research for Hitler—as well as quantum-mechanical. Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals. It’s one of the things that make it move.

There is a lot more in the article. If interested in the subject, please read the full article here.

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by Salman Hameed

Actually, I want to make two recommendation. In December, I had a chance to read Pankaj Mishra's fantastic new book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia. It uses the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 as a fulcrum to talk about the response of Asian intellectuals to 'Western' colonialism. Apart from a broad historical perspective of the epoch that was shaping the modern world, Mishra focuses on the intellectual odyssey of three influential writers: Jamal al-din Afghani (in Iran, India, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire), Liang Qichao (in China), and Rabindarnath Tagore (in India).

From the perspective of this blog, the long section of Afghani (1838-1897) would be of interest. He has been a bit of a mystery. His writings say different things in different places. But, apart from his Pan-Islamic movement, he is also responsible for creating the narrative of Islam and science narrative, arguing that Islam is a 'modern' religion and that science is essential for the progress of Muslims. However, he rejected evolution - at least in the 1880s, but his rejection was more aimed at Sayyid Ahmad Khan than an intellectual response to evolutionary biology. In fact, he changed his mind later and not only appropriated evolution by attributing it to medieval Muslim scholars, but by also calling Darwin "a mere specimen collector".

Mishra's book does not focus on Afghani's views on science or education, but it does a fantastic job of taking us around the world with him. Afghani must have been an amazingly charismatic guy. He managed to gain access to sultans, kings and the czars, while also fomenting popular uprisings in most of the places he went. His rate and span of travel is quite incredible for 19th century. But his writings can only make sense if we see them through the lens of his single-minded opposition to the British colonial rule (both direct and indirect). Mishra's section on Afghani is riveting as he takes us on an intellectual roller coaster ride with this fascinating character. Later he does the same with Liang Qichao and Tagore - but I think the Afghani section really stands out.

If you have a chance, do check out Mishra's book. Also read this fantastic review by Vijay Prashad: Under Eastern Skies.

But while I was reading this book, I was also listening to a Teaching Company course titled The Long 19th Century: European History from 1789 to 1917 by Prof. Robert Weiner. Now I'm a Teaching Company junkie, and have listened to over 30 of their courses. The bar is very very high, but I can still say that this is one of the best courses I have listened to (the three lecture set on Middle Ages by Prof. Philip Daileader also comes close to perfection).

What was really cool about this were the two different vantage points. Weiner's 36 lectures provided a detailed look into the making of the modern world from the European perspective, and Mishra's book complimented that view with the perceptions of those who were affected by European imperialism. I absolutely loved the combination. If you have a daily commute longer than 15 minutes, I would highly recommend The Long 19th Century, and reading Mishra's book, when not driving.

Enjoy!

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by Salman Hameed

A confession first. No, I have not read Moby-Dick. I really want to. In fact, this past summer it was on my reading list and I even bought a new copy, but I didn't get a chance to read it. Next summer, I promise.

But apparently, I'm not the only one. Here is a fantastic project, Moby-Dick Big Read, that brought together artists, scientists, musicians, writers, academics to read Moby-Dick. The motivation was that this is the "great unread American novel". As a result of the project, you can now listen to the whole book here.

But here is a fascinating article in last week's Nature about the way science inspired Herman Melville in writing Moby-Dick (you may need subscription to access the full article):

More than a century and a half after it was published, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick remains a key cultural bridge between human history and natural history — expressed in the vast and ominous shape of the whale. This epic novel is a laboratory of literature, created in an age before art and science became strictly demarcated. 

Melville wrote his book — which drew on his own youthful experiences on a whaling ship — as a tribute to the first period of modern whaling in the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, which he claimed to be worth US$7 million a year to the fledgling United States. At the same time, science was undergoing a sea change as the gentleman scientists and polymaths of the century's start gave way to more specialized and professionalized successors. 

Melville's attitude to, and use of, science in Moby-Dick was in line with the eclectic ethos of that period. Drawing on the work of luminaries such as William Scoresby, Thomas Beale, Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz, Melville used contemporary knowledge of natural history — or the lack of it — to his own ends. 

Seventeen of the book's 135 chapters focus on whale anatomy or behaviour. Titles include 'The Sperm Whale's Head — Contrasted View' and 'The Right Whale's Head — Contrasted View'; such sections lay out the whales' physical structure with a wry mixture of known facts and arch analogy. (In a witty 2011 essay, marine biologist Harold Morowitz speculates on Melville as a “cetacean gastroenterologist or proctologist”.) Melville's must also be the first, and perhaps last, work of literature to feature a chapter on zooplankton. 

In the famous Chapter 32, 'Cetology', Melville attempts to categorize species of whale as he would catalogue his library, in 'folios'. It was a playful gesture that reflected the fluid classification of cetacean species at the time.

Also, the characters embody the change in thinking:

Of course, the greatest scientific figure of the age hovers over Melville. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, eight years after Moby-Dick came out. Melville's sole mention of Darwin is a quote — from Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist (sic) — in the extracts at the start of Moby-Dick. He had read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle (1839) in preparation for his own 1854 work, The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles — as the Galapagos were then known. Melville visited the islands in 1841, six years after Darwin's fateful landing. Darwin's recorded observation of marine iguanas as “imps of darkness” seemed to set the tone for Melville's metaphoric view of the Galapagos, which he saw as “five-and-twenty heaps of cinders ... In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist”. 

Such dark analogies are in line with a man who declared all human science to be “but a passing fable” — and yet created a fable of his own. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael is a perpetually sceptical and questioning figure, a man attuned to science — a stark contrast to the vengeful Ahab and his pursuit of the whale that “dismasted” him. As the critic Eric Wilson, in his essay 'Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being', notes, a “primary subtext of Melville's novel is the passing of pre-Darwinian, anthropocentric thought, espoused by Ahab, and the inauguration of a version of Darwin's more ecological evolution, proffered by Ishmael”. 

Melville lived through that process. US Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature (1836), with its declaration of moral law at the heart of the cosmos, was the new philosophy of Melville's youth. But as biographer Andrew Delbanco points out, Melville read A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells's Darwinian-inflected view of society. Moby-Dick itself has been seen as a parody of the Transcendentalists' 'back-to-nature' excesses. But Melville does more than lambast philosophy or use science as interior decoration. He achieved a marvellous synthesis of his own poetic and philosophical impulse with the increasingly science-aware ethos of his age. And he did so with a sense of black humour that transcended Transcendentalism to prove that nature — and its science — was much stranger and more wonderful than they had imagined.

Read the full article here. And in case you are interested in the evolution of whales, you can find some information here, including that of Pakicetus.

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