After years living among the Pintupi tribe
of Central Australia, I came to realise that
in order to understand modern physics one has only to
mind one's own business... a near-impossible feat
in our post-modern drift...
Billy Marshall Stoneking
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 1999 6:30 PM
Subject: Re: Pound Outside the Academy
> >
> >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!
>
> ~
>
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