What happens now?
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Can i get back to you on that?
Thanks Viriato! You helped me collect my thoughts!
We met at the Harvest Coop Cafe. We talked about cycles of history.
It’s OK for non-historians to talk about cycles of history. Historians, on the other hand, seem not to understand the complexity of what they are looking at. It is as if Avogadro’s number doesn’t even exist. At least, think in 3 (2+1) dimensions and talk about a helix.* But I’ll grant the historians that physicists have their sins too. The idea that time can be made to look like a spatial dimensional and reduced to visual metaphor certainly does some damage. Fortunately, Professor Lisa is trying to do something about that.
Anyway, one distressing repetition of the past that surely will continue into the future is the debate about what “The American People” actually voted for [or against]. Did they vote against the Iraq war? Or are they, as Scott Ritter claims, “opposed to losing in Iraq”? If the Rumsfeld ‘plan’ had worked, would they vote differently. Here’s the thing. What “would have been” is very hard to measure.
* If you run around in a circle and end up in the same place only later, your world line is a helix.
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- Art feeds you …
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- Science Saturday at Harvard
