>
>As a life-long reader of both Pound and the _Post_, I have to comment on
>this one -- I would challenge anyone to look through the _Post's_ sports
>section, chess column, bridge column etc. and then continue to make this
>argument -- Why is the jargon of sports reporting considered "accessible"
>no matter how opaque it gets, while modernist verse is considered elitist?
>On any given day, the paper's sports section (and business section for that
>matter) is filled with arcane refs. comprehended only by the intiates --
>And my freshmen find the bridge columns easily the equal of Pound at his
>most allusive -- Many on this list are familiar with my criticisms of
>Pound's politics and racism -- BUT, it's no more difficult to look up
>Pound's refs. than it is to look up a player's "rubies" for the year 1984.
Nobody has mentioned this yet, so I'll heave it in--
To understand modern physics in general, and quantum mechanics
in particular, requires several special "languages" -- all of them
mathematical -- and, in addition, a general background in operational
philosophy, pragmatism, non-aristitelian logics and non-cumutative
[Hamiltonian] thought.
Far more work than required for either EP or the bridge column......
I wonder if Mr Wagner considers physicists as elitist snobs, too?
mark chan
[log in to unmask]
That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon
sense. One of the chief services whcih mathematics has rendered the
human race in the past century is to put "common sense" where it
belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dust cannister labeled
"discarded nonsense."
Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics: Queen of the Sciences
Las die Lasagne weiter fliegen!
~
|