Author Archives: Larry Franz

Simply Napoleon by J. David Markham and Matthew Zarzeczny

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Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most important people who ever lived. I’ve been curious about him but haven’t wanted to read an 800-page biography. That’s why I got a copy of this brief one. It’s part of the “Simply” series of short biographies for the general reader. Other titles in the series include Simply Freud, Simply Dickens and Simply Tolstoy.

I now have a better understanding of Napoleon’s life, but do not recommend this book. It’s a second-rate production. It covers the major events in Napoleon’s military and political career, but provides little insight into his thinking or character. It lists precise statistics for the losses in battles that happened more than 200 years ago but never indicates that the numbers aren’t necessarily to be trusted. For example, it’s stated that 243 Spaniards were killed and 735 were wounded, while some 2,200 Frenchmen were killed, 400 wounded and 17,635 were captured in the same battle. Is it plausible that almost 10 times as many Frenchmen were killed while almost twice as many Spaniards were wounded? A number of illustrations appear as black splotches.

Furthermore, the subjects emphasized are sometimes bizarre. One paragraph covers Napoleon’s seizure of the French government and the creation of a new constitution in 1799. That’s immediately followed by almost nine pages devoted to the slave revolt in Haiti and its repercussions.

If you want to read something short about Napoleon, you might try Napoleon: A Very Short Introduction and A Very Short Introduction to the Napoleonic Wars. I haven’t read those two, but the “Very Short Introduction” books from Oxford University Press tend to be quite good.

Speechless (Almost)

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It’s been five weeks since my last post. Several times, I’ve almost written something, but each time I asked myself “Why bother?”

I could have written about climate change, but nothing you or I do is going to change how that turns out (for us humans, it’s not going to turn out well).

I could have written about gun control. The Washington Post reported that there have been 29 students or teachers killed in 16 incidents this year. Compare that to the 36 killed during the same time period (January to May) in the previous 18 years combined.

Or I could have written about the crisis in Washington, D.C. There is a new development every day. Our foreign policy is for sale (the buyers we’ve heard about so far have included Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar). The president and his supporters in Congress are doing whatever they can to obstruct justice. The Republican Congress continues to ignore blatant corruption. The Supreme Court seat stolen by the Republicans is starting to pay off.

But why bother? If you get your news from Rupert Murdoch, you’re a lost cause. If you get your news from the reality-based media, you already know how bad things are. 

What matters now is to vote for Democrats on November 6th, try to get other people to vote for Democrats on November 6th, and support Democratic candidates however you can. “Why bother?” doesn’t apply to any of that.

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https://thismodernworld.com/

To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism by Rob Riemen

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The author is a Dutch writer and “cultural philosopher”. The dust jacket says To Fight Against This Age was an international best seller. The book has two parts: “The Eternal Return of Fascism” and “The Return of Europa”.

The first part argues convincingly that fascism is a recurring tendency in Western civilization. The second argues that a united Europe could be much more than it has turned out to be, which is “nothing other than an Economic Union, where the terms soul, culture, philosophy, and live in truth are as impossible as a palm tree on the moon” [167].

The situation in the United States being more urgent, I found the discussion of fascism more engaging. We hesitate to apply the word “fascist” to the right-wing extremists who have gained ground in America (and in some parts of Europe),  mainly because they haven’t taken total control of society and spread bloodshed in the manner of Hitler and Mussolini. Rieman, however, says we should use the term to make clear how extreme these movements are and also make it easier to stop them:

… the fascist bacillus will always remain virulent in the body of mass democracy. Denying this fact or calling it something else will not make us resistant to it…. If we want to put up a good fight, we first have to admit that it has become active in our social body again and call it by its name: “fascism” [34].

In the twenty-first century, no fascist would willingly be called a “fascist”. Fascists aren’t that stupid, and it fits with their mastery of the skill of lying. Contemporary fascists are recognizable partly through what they say, but just as important is how they operate…. Fascist techniques are identical everywhere: the presence of a charismatic leader; the use of populism to motivate the masses; the designation of the base group as victims (of crises, or elites, or of foreigners); and the direction of all resentment toward an “enemy”. Fascism has no need for a [small “d”] democratic party with members who are individually responsible; it needs an inspiring and authoritative leader who is believed to have superior instincts (making decisions that don’t require supporting arguments), a faction leader who can be obeyed and followed by the masses [83-84].

Sound familiar?

Where Does the Weirdness Go? (Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think) by David Lindley

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If you want an introduction to quantum mechanics, this is a very good book to read. I didn’t get some of it, but I don’t blame the author, who does an excellent job. He was a theoretical astrophysicist before he began editing science magazines. Since the book was published in 1996, some of it may be out of date, but not enough to make a difference to the general reader.

The title “Where Does the Weirdness Go?” refers to a puzzle. Since events at the quantum level are weird, why doesn’t that weirdness show up at the level of our ordinary experience? Reality looks fairly well-defined to us. We don’t see the things around us as probabilities. The chair you’re sitting on is right there under you; it’s not possibly there and possibly not there. Electrons and photons may be in an indeterminate state, possibly here and possibly there, but that probabilistic weirdness disappears when it comes to higher-level stuff.

I think the book’s subtitle (“Not As Strange As You Think”) refers to the puzzle’s answer. Lindley explains that, roughly speaking, quantum weirdness disappears when something called “quantum coherence” turns into “quantum decoherence”. When a quantum state is “coherent”, its properties are mere probabilities. But that can only be the case if the quantum system is isolated from other quantum systems. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:

… when a quantum system is not perfectly isolated, but in contact with its surroundings, coherence decays with time, a process called quantum decoherence. As a result of this process, the relevant quantum behaviour is lost.

The quantum behavior referred to here is the weirdness (things like “is it a particle or is it a wave?” and “spooky action at a distance”). Since quantum systems (photons, electrons, paired particles) are rarely, if ever, appropriately isolated inside objects like chairs, clouds and chickens, those types of things don’t behave weirdly.  The constant atomic and sub-atomic turmoil inside everyday objects means that their properties are defined or definite, not probabilistic. The stuff we see around us doesn’t display any quantum weirdness because there are trillions upon trillions of quantum-level interactions occurring at every moment.

One thing the book makes clear is that there’s nothing special about quantum states being measured. Nor does human consciousness have any special role in quantum mechanics. In fact, measurement is an example of decoherence. When a physicist measures an electron, it is no longer isolated. In order to be measured, the electron has to interact with something else at the quantum level. That results in the electron’s possible position or momentum becoming real, not probabilistic. So when we hear about the importance of measurement in quantum mechanics, it only means that something at the quantum level is interacting with something else at that level. Most such interactions have nothing at all to do with us humans. 

Something (among many) I don’t understand: Once an electron has lost its probabilistic nature by interacting with some other quantum-level thing, do any of its properties ever become probabilistic again? If not, it would seem like every electron or photon in the universe would eventually have well-defined properties. 

I’ll say one more thing about the book. The author subscribes to what’s known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics. Apparently, most physicists do. The Copenhagen interpretation is a response to questions like “what’s really going on at the quantum level?” and “is it possible to explain why quantum events are so weird?” The answer given by the Copenhagen interpretation is: “Don’t bother trying to understand what’s happening. We can’t explain what’s happening and there is no sense in trying, because there is no definite reality to be explained at that level until measurement (or quantum-level interaction) occurs. This is just the way the world is.”

The author concludes by asking “will we ever understand quantum mechanics?” Here’s his answer:

But we do [understand it], don’t we? As an intellectual apparatus that allows us to figure out what will happen in all conceivable kinds of situations, quantum mechanics works just fine, and tells us whatever … we need to know….

[But] quantum mechanics clearly does not fit into any picture that we can obtain from everyday experience of how the world works… It throws us off balance… Physics, and the rest of science, grew up with the belief in objective reality, that the universe is really out there and that we are measuring it…. And the longer the belief was retained, the more it came to seem as it must be an essential part of the foundation of physics….

Then quantum mechanics came along and destroyed that notion of reality. Experiment backs up the axioms of quantum mechanics. Nothing is real until you measure it [or it comes into contact with something else!], and if you try to infer from disparate sets of measurements what reality really is, you run into contradictions….

A true believer might conclude that objective reality must still be there somewhere, beneath quantum mechanics. That’s what Einstein believed….[But] if quantum mechanics does not embody an objective view of reality, then evidently an objective view of reality is not essential to the conduct of physics…

[But] quantum mechanics, despite its lack of an objective reality, nevertheless gives rise to a macroscopic world that acts, most of the time, as if it were objectively real… And so, almost paradoxically, we can believe in an objective reality most of the time, because quantum mechanics predicts that the world should behave that way. But it’s because the world behaves that way that we have acquired such a profound belief in objective reality — and that’s what makes quantum mechanics so hard to understand [222-224]. 

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

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Family Lexicon is an autobiographical novel, first published in 1963, by the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg. I read an article about it recently and since our local library had a copy, I brought it home. I almost stopped reading it two or three times but kept going.

It’s a strange book. It tells the story of the author’s family in the 1930s and ’40s. The author doesn’t say much about herself. For example, she only mentions in passing that she’s gotten married the two times it happens. Instead, she describes the personalities, activities and especially the conversations of her parents and four siblings. The rise of fascism and the war play a relatively small role (people are arrested by the fascists, or taken away by the Germans, but not much is said about it). Ginzburg concentrates instead on the day to day lives of her family and their friends. The book is often amusing, but you have to put up with a lot of numbing detail (my mother said this, my father said that, we took a walk, the maid got upset, the new apartment was nice).

Her father is a biology professor who tells most everyone around him that they are “jackasses” and “nitwits”. Her mother is an easy-going sort who tries to see the good in everyone and everything. Her sister and three brothers are less interesting and get less attention. It’s the distinctive way the characters, especially her father and mother, talk to each other that’s the most interesting thing about the book.

Family Lexicon has gotten renewed attention because of last year’s new translation. If you’re interested, you can read positive thoughts about it here, here, here, here and here.