Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

Pho­to by Tamiko Thiel via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

How can we know whether a claim some­one makes is sci­en­tif­ic or not? The ques­tion is of the utmost con­se­quence, as we are sur­round­ed on all sides by claims that sound cred­i­ble, that use the lan­guage of science—and often do so in attempts to refute sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus. As we’ve seen in the case of the anti-vac­cine cru­sade, falling vic­tim to pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic argu­ments can have dire effects. So how can ordi­nary peo­ple, ordi­nary par­ents, and ordi­nary cit­i­zens eval­u­ate such argu­ments?

The prob­lem of demar­ca­tion, or what is and what is not sci­ence, has occu­pied philoso­phers for some time, and the most famous answer comes from philoso­pher of sci­ence Karl Pop­per, who pro­posed his the­o­ry of “fal­si­fi­a­bil­i­ty” in 1963. Accord­ing to Pop­per, an idea is sci­en­tif­ic if it can con­ceiv­ably be proven wrong. Although Popper’s strict def­i­n­i­tion of sci­ence has had its uses over the years, it has also come in for its share of crit­i­cism, since so much accept­ed sci­ence was fal­si­fied in its day (Newton’s grav­i­ta­tion­al the­o­ry, Bohr’s the­o­ry of the atom), and so much cur­rent the­o­ret­i­cal sci­ence can­not be fal­si­fied (string the­o­ry, for exam­ple). What­ev­er the case, the prob­lem for lay peo­ple remains. If a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry is beyond our com­pre­hen­sion, it’s unlike­ly we’ll be able to see how it might be dis­proven.

Physi­cist and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Richard Feyn­man came up with anoth­er cri­te­ri­on, one that applies direct­ly to the non-sci­en­tist like­ly to be bam­boo­zled by fan­cy ter­mi­nol­o­gy that sounds sci­en­tif­ic. Simon Oxen­ham at Big Think points to the exam­ple of Deep­ak Chopra, who is “infa­mous for mak­ing pro­found sound­ing yet entire­ly mean­ing­less state­ments by abus­ing sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage.” (What Daniel Den­nett called “deep­i­ties.”) As a balm against such state­ments, Oxen­ham refers us to a speech Feyn­man gave in 1966 to a meet­ing of the Nation­al Sci­ence Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion. Rather than ask­ing lay peo­ple to con­front sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing claims on their own terms, Feyn­man would have us trans­late them into ordi­nary lan­guage, there­by assur­ing that what the claim asserts is a log­i­cal con­cept, rather than just a col­lec­tion of jar­gon.

The exam­ple Feyn­man gives comes from the most rudi­men­ta­ry source, a “first grade sci­ence text­book” which “begins in an unfor­tu­nate man­ner to teach sci­ence”: it shows its stu­dent a pic­ture of a “wind­able toy dog,” then a pic­ture of a real dog, then a motor­bike. In each case the stu­dent is asked “What makes it move?” The answer, Feyn­man tells us “was in the teacher’s edi­tion of the book… ‘ener­gy makes it move.’” Few stu­dents would have intu­it­ed such an abstract con­cept, unless they had pre­vi­ous­ly learned the word, which is all the les­son teach­es them. The answer, Feyn­man points out, might as well have been “’God makes it move,’ or ‘Spir­it makes it move,’ or, ‘Mov­abil­i­ty makes it move.’”

Instead, a good sci­ence les­son “should think about what an ordi­nary human being would answer.” Engag­ing with the con­cept of ener­gy in ordi­nary lan­guage enables the stu­dent to explain it, and this, Feyn­man says, con­sti­tutes a test for “whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a def­i­n­i­tion. Test it this way”:

With­out using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own lan­guage. With­out using the word “ener­gy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.

Feynman’s insis­tence on ordi­nary lan­guage recalls the state­ment attrib­uted to Ein­stein about not real­ly under­stand­ing some­thing unless you can explain it to your grand­moth­er. The method, Feyn­man says, guards against learn­ing “a mys­tic for­mu­la for answer­ing ques­tions,” and Oxen­ham describes it as “a valu­able way of test­ing our­selves on whether we have real­ly learned some­thing, or whether we just think we have learned some­thing.”

It is equal­ly use­ful for test­ing the claims of oth­ers. If some­one can­not explain some­thing in plain Eng­lish, then we should ques­tion whether they real­ly do them­selves under­stand what they pro­fess…. In the words of Feyn­man, “It is pos­si­ble to fol­low form and call it sci­ence, but that is pseu­do­science.”

Does Feynman’s ordi­nary lan­guage test solve the demar­ca­tion prob­lem? No, but if we use it as a guide when con­front­ed with plau­si­ble-sound­ing claims couched in sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing ver­biage, it can help us either get clar­i­ty or suss out total non­sense. And if any­one would know how sci­en­tists can explain com­pli­cat­ed ideas in plain­ly acces­si­ble ways, Feyn­man would.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: A Toolk­it That Can Help You Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Sep­a­rate Sense from Non­sense

The Life & Work of Richard Feyn­man Explored in a Three-Part Freako­nom­ics Radio Minis­eries

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Man­u­al by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt (RIP)

Richard Feyn­man Presents Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics for the Non­Sci­en­tist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

Read a nov­el by Charles Dick­ens, and you’ll still today feel trans­port­ed back to the Lon­don of the eigh­teen-twen­ties. Some of that expe­ri­ence owes to his lav­ish­ly repor­to­r­i­al descrip­tive skills, but even more to his way with dia­logue. Dick­ens faith­ful­ly cap­tured the vocab­u­lary of the times and places in which he set his sto­ries, and for some par­tic­u­lar­ly col­or­ful char­ac­ters, went as far as to ren­der their dis­tinc­tive accents pho­net­i­cal­ly: that of The Pick­wick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swap­ping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly over­took the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Lon­don­er of that time, and quite anoth­er to hear it.

No audio record­ings exist of Dick­en­sian Lon­don, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtu­ber Simon Rop­er — and specif­i­cal­ly the sec­tion that begins at about 11:30, when he per­forms the accent of a Lon­don­er in the year 1826. Most every­thing he says should sound quite intel­li­gi­ble to any Eng­lish-speak­er today, though few, if any, will ever have encoun­tered some­one who speaks in quite the same way in real life.

In this era, Rop­er adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glot­tal rein­force­ment, where a glot­tal stop is insert­ed between a vow­el and a plo­sive con­so­nant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhotic­i­ty (r‑loss in most posi­tions) has caused vow­els that were orig­i­nal­ly fol­lowed by ‘r’ to become cen­ter­ing diph­thongs.”

Seri­ous stuff, for a man who describes him­self as “not a lin­guist.” Nev­er­the­less, Rop­er has in this video assem­bled an impres­sive tour of Lon­don accents over 660 years, with “twelve record­ings, all of men with sus­pi­cious­ly sim­i­lar voic­es, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grand­son of the pre­vi­ous one.” (When the video went viral, the New States­man pro­filed him for his achieve­ment.) The ear­li­est, set in 1346, will sound more famil­iar in cadence than in con­tent, at least to those who haven’t stud­ied Mid­dle Eng­lish. Com­pre­hen­sion does­n’t become a much sim­pler mat­ter for most of us mod­erns until about 1586, but Rop­er’s accent comes to sound ver­i­ta­bly transat­lantic by 1766. Per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, that was just before the Amer­i­cans broke off deci­sive­ly from the moth­er­land to do things their own way — but also to pre­serve a few of the old ways, includ­ing ways of speech.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

One Woman, 17 British Accents

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

A Tour of U.S. Accents: Boston­ian, Philadelph­ese, Gul­lah Cre­ole & Oth­er Intrigu­ing Dialects

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

Christo­pher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — impe­ri­al­ism, fas­cism, and Stal­in­ism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them.

Orwell dis­plays his remark­able fore­sight in a fas­ci­nat­ing book review, pub­lished in March 1940, of Adolf Hitler’s noto­ri­ous auto­bi­og­ra­phy Mein Kampf. In the review, the author deft­ly cuts to the root of Hitler’s tox­ic charis­ma, and, along the way, antic­i­pates themes to appear in his future mas­ter­pieces, Ani­mal Farm and 1984.

The fact is that there is some­thing deeply appeal­ing about him. […] Hitler … knows that human beings don’t only want com­fort, safe­ty, short work­ing-hours, hygiene, birth-con­trol and, in gen­er­al, com­mon sense; they also, at least inter­mit­tent­ly, want strug­gle and self-sac­ri­fice, not to men­tion drums, flags and loy­al­ty-parades. How­ev­er they may be as eco­nom­ic the­o­ries, Fas­cism and Nazism are psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly far sounder than any hedo­nis­tic con­cep­tion of life.

Yet Orwell was cer­tain­ly no fan of Hitler. At one point in the review, he imag­ines what a world where the Third Reich suc­ceeds might look like:

What [Hitler] envis­ages, a hun­dred years hence, is a con­tin­u­ous state of 250 mil­lion Ger­mans with plen­ty of “liv­ing room” (i.e. stretch­ing to Afghanistan or there- abouts), a hor­ri­ble brain­less empire in which, essen­tial­ly, noth­ing ever hap­pens except the train­ing of young men for war and the end­less breed­ing of fresh can­non-fod­der.

The arti­cle was writ­ten at a moment when, as Orwell notes, the upper class was backpedal­ing hard against their pre­vi­ous sup­port of the Third Reich. In fact, a pre­vi­ous edi­tion of Mein Kampf — pub­lished in 1939 in Eng­land — had a dis­tinct­ly favor­able view of the Führer.

“The obvi­ous inten­tion of the translator’s pref­ace and notes [was] to tone down the book’s feroc­i­ty and present Hitler in as kind­ly a light as pos­si­ble. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the Ger­man labour move­ment, and for that the prop­er­ty-own­ing class­es were will­ing to for­give him almost any­thing. Then sud­den­ly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all.”

By March 1940, every­thing had changed, and a new edi­tion of Mein Kampf, reflect­ing chang­ing views of Hitler, was pub­lished in Eng­land. Britain and France had declared war on Ger­many after its inva­sion of Poland but real fight­ing had yet to start in West­ern Europe. With­in months, France would fall and Britain would teeter on the brink. But, in the ear­ly spring of that year, all was pret­ty qui­et. The world was col­lec­tive­ly hold­ing its breath. And in this moment of ter­ri­fy­ing sus­pense, Orwell pre­dicts much of the future war.

When one com­pares his utter­ances of a year or so ago with those made fif­teen years ear­li­er, a thing that strikes one is the rigid­i­ty of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t devel­op. It is the fixed vision of a mono­ma­ni­ac and not like­ly to be much affect­ed by the tem­po­rary manoeu­vres of pow­er pol­i­tics. Prob­a­bly, in Hitler’s own mind, the Rus­so-Ger­man Pact rep­re­sents no more than an alter­ation of timetable. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Rus­sia first, with the implied inten­tion of smash­ing Eng­land after­wards. Now, as it has turned out, Eng­land has got to be dealt with first, because Rus­sia was the more eas­i­ly bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when Eng­land is out of the pic­ture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a dif­fer­ent ques­tion.

In June of 1941, Hitler invad­ed Rus­sia, in one of the great­est strate­gic blun­ders in the his­to­ry of mod­ern war­fare. Stal­in was com­plete­ly blind­sided by the inva­sion and news of Hitler’s betray­al report­ed­ly caused Stal­in to have a ner­vous break­down. Clear­ly, he didn’t read Mein Kampf as close­ly as Orwell had.

You can read Orwell’s full book review here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s Polit­i­cal Views, Explained in His Own Words

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Edi­tor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trot­skyite” Nov­el Ani­mal Farm (1944)

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years

Image from New York Pub­lic Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you vis­it Osa­ka, you’ll be urged to see two old build­ings in par­tic­u­lar: Osa­ka Cas­tle and Shiten­nō-ji (above), Japan’s first Bud­dhist tem­ple. In behold­ing both, you’ll behold the work of con­struc­tion firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly run com­pa­ny in the world. It was with the build­ing of Shiten­nō-ji, com­mis­sioned by Prince Shō­toku Taishi in the year 578, that brought it into exis­tence in the first place. Back then, “Japan was pre­dom­i­nant­ly Shin­to and had no miyadaiku (car­pen­ters trained in the art of build­ing Bud­dhist tem­ples),” writes Irene Her­rera at Works that Work, “so the prince hired three skilled men from Baek­je, a Bud­dhist state in what is now Korea,” among them a cer­tain Kongō Shiget­su.

There­after, Kongō Gumi con­tin­ued to oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly for more than 1,400 years, run by 40 gen­er­a­tions of Kongō Shiget­su’s descen­dants. By the time Toy­oto­mi Hideyoshi had the com­pa­ny build Osa­ka Cas­tle in 1583, it had been estab­lished for near­ly a mil­len­ni­um. In the cen­turies since, “the cas­tle has been destroyed repeat­ed­ly by fire and light­ning,” Her­rera writes. “Kongō Gumi pros­pered because of these major recon­struc­tions, which pro­vid­ed them with plen­ty of work.” Through­out most of its long his­to­ry, an even stead­ier busi­ness came from their spe­cial­ty of build­ing Bud­dhist tem­ples, at least until seri­ous chal­lenges to that busi­ness mod­el arose in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

“World War II brought sig­nif­i­cant changes to Japan, and the demand for tem­ple con­struc­tion waned,” says the tourism com­pa­ny Toki. “Sens­ing the shift­ing tides of the time, the com­pa­ny made a strate­gic deci­sion to piv­ot its exper­tise towards a new endeav­or: the craft­ing of coffins.” Gov­ern­men­tal per­mis­sion was arranged by the wid­ow of Kongō Haruichi, Kongō Gumi’s 37th leader, who’d tak­en his own life out of finan­cial despair inflict­ed by the Shōwa Depres­sion of the nine­teen-twen­ties. Here time at the head of the com­pa­ny illus­trates its long-held will­ing­ness to grant lead­er­ship duties not just to first sons, but to fam­i­ly mem­bers best suit­ed to do the job; for that rea­son, the his­to­ry of the Kongō clan involves many sons-in-law delib­er­ate­ly sought out for that pur­pose.

The com­bined forces of the decline of Bud­dhism and the pop­ping of Japan’s real-estate bub­ble in the nineties even­tu­al­ly forced Kongō Gumi to become a sub­sidiary of Taka­mat­su Con­struc­tion Group in Jan­u­ary 2006. “The cur­rent Kongō Gumi work­force has only one mem­ber of the Kongō fam­i­ly,” the Nikkei Asia report­ed in 2020, “a daugh­ter of the 40th head of the fam­i­ly” who “now serves as the 41st head.” But its miyadaiku — dis­tinc­tive­ly orga­nized into eight inde­pen­dent kumi, or groups — con­tin­ue to do the work they always have, with ever-more-refined ver­sions of the tra­di­tion­al tools and tech­niques they’ve been using for near­ly a mil­len­ni­um and a half. Kongō Gumi con­tin­ues to receive inter­na­tion­al atten­tion for main­tain­ing its high lev­el of crafts­man­ship, but view­ers of Amer­i­can TV dra­ma in recent years will also appre­ci­ate its hav­ing solved the prob­lem of suc­ces­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Japan Has the Old­est Busi­ness­es in the World?: Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

Build­ing With­out Nails: The Genius of Japan­ese Car­pen­try

Hōshi: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

A Vis­it to the World’s Old­est Hotel, Japan’s Nisiya­ma Onsen Keiunkan, Estab­lished in 705 AD

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When Samuel Beckett Drove Young André the Giant to School

Are your idle moments spent invent­ing imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tions between strange bed­fel­lows? The sort of con­ver­sa­tion that might tran­spire in a pick­up truck belong­ing to Samuel Beck­ett, say, were the Irish play­wright to chauf­feur the child André Rene Rous­si­moff—aka pro wrestler André the Giant—to school?

Too sil­ly, you say? Non­sense. This isn’t some wack­adoo ran­dom pair­ing, but an actu­al his­toric meet­ing of the minds, as André’s Princess Bride co-star and soon-to-be-pub­lished film his­to­ri­an, Cary Elwes, attests above.

In 1958, when 12-year-old André’s acromegaly pre­vent­ed him from tak­ing the school bus, the author of Wait­ing for Godot, whom he knew as his dad’s card bud­dy and neigh­bor in rur­al Moulien, France, vol­un­teered for trans­port duty. André recalled that they most­ly talked about crick­et, but sure­ly they dis­cussed oth­er top­ics, too, right? Right!?

Even if they did­n’t, it’s deli­cious­ly fun to spec­u­late.

In the  bare­bones entry above, Bing­ham­ton, New York’s Därk­horse Drä­ma­tists play­wright Ron Burch has Beck­ett dis­pens­ing roman­tic advice in much the same way that he wrote dia­logue, to cre­ate a dialec­tic.  (“So I should embrace the nega­tion of the act in order to get the oppo­site reac­tion?” André asks, re: a girl he’s eager to kiss.)

Burch is not the only drama­tist to tack­le these mys­tery rides. Chica­go play­wright Rory Job­st was inspired to write Samuel Beck­ett, Andre the Giant, and the Crick­ets after lis­ten­ing to They Might Be Giants’ John Flans­burgh and John Lin­nell par­tic­i­pat­ing in a 3‑question André the Giant triv­ia quiz on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.

Car­toon­ist Box Brown is anoth­er to take a stab at the unlike­ly car­pool bud­dies’ chit chat, with his graph­ic biog­ra­phy, Andre the Giant. In his ver­sion, Beck­ett asks André why he’s so big, André asks Beck­ett if he plays foot­ball, and Beck­ett gives him his first cig­a­rette. (“Well, y’know, they stunt your growth so,” Beck­ett hes­i­tates, “…eh, okay.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s One Minute of Pro­fes­sion­al Wrestling Fame (1985)

The Books That Samuel Beck­ett Read and Real­ly Liked (1941–1956)

Neil deGrasse Tyson, High School Wrestling Team Cap­tain, Once Invent­ed a Physics-Based Wrestling Move

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Samuel Beck­ett, Absur­dist Play­wright, Nov­el­ist & Poet

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is inter­est­ed in hear­ing about unortho­dox pro­duc­tions of Wait­ing for Godot @AyunHalliday.

How an Ancient Roman Shipwreck Could Explain the Universe

In a 1956 New States­man piece, the British sci­en­tist-nov­el­ist C. P. Snow first sound­ed the alarm about the increas­ing­ly chasm-like divide between what he called the “sci­en­tif­ic” and “tra­di­tion­al” cul­tures. We would today refer to them as the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, while still wring­ing our hands over the inabil­i­ty of each side to learn from (or even coher­ent­ly com­mu­ni­cate with) the oth­er. Nev­er­the­less, recent his­to­ry pro­vides the occa­sion­al heart­en­ing exam­ple of sci­ences-human­i­ties col­lab­o­ra­tion, few of them as dra­mat­ic as the sto­ry told in the SciShow video above, “An Ancient Roman Ship­wreck May Explain the Uni­verse.”

The ship­wreck in ques­tion occurred two mil­len­nia ago, off the west­ern coast of Sar­dinia. Hav­ing set sail from the min­ing cen­ter of Carte­ge­na, Spain, it was car­ry­ing more than 30 met­ric tons of lead, processed into a thou­sand ingots. An impor­tant met­al in the ancient Roman Empire, lead was used to make pipes (like the ones installed in aque­ducts), water tanks, roofs, and weapons of war. While our civ­i­liza­tion has grown jus­ti­fi­ably wary of putting water through lead pipes (and has at its com­mand much stronger met­als in any case), it still has plen­ty of use for the stuff, espe­cial­ly in shields against X‑rays and oth­er forms of activ­i­ty.

No mat­ter how lit­tle con­tact you have with the sci­en­tif­ic cul­ture, you can sure­ly appre­ci­ate how researchers in need of radioac­tiv­i­ty shields must have felt when this lead ingot-filled ship­wreck was dis­cov­ered in 1988. Hav­ing spent a cou­ple thou­sand years at the bot­tom of the ocean, the Roman lead aboard had lost most of its radioac­tiv­i­ty, mak­ing it ide­al for use in the shield of the Cryo­genic Under­ground Obser­va­to­ry for Rare Events (CUORE) at the Gran Sas­so Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Italy. Engi­neered for research into the mass of neu­tri­nos, sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles long thought to have no mass at all, CUORE held out the promise of data that could lead to insights into the ori­gin of the uni­verse.

Ulti­mate­ly, the physi­cists and archae­ol­o­gists struck a deal, allow­ing the for­mer to melt down the least-well pre­served ingots from the ship­wreck (after first remov­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly valu­able inscrip­tions from its man­u­fac­tur­er) and use it to shield the high­ly sen­si­tive CUORE from out­side radi­a­tion. The design worked, but as of last year, none of the exper­i­ments have pro­duced con­clu­sive results about the role of neu­tri­nos in the emer­gence of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing. Prob­ing that ques­tion fur­ther will be a job for CUORE’s suc­ces­sor CUPID (CUORE Upgrade with Par­ti­cle Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion), sched­uled to come online lat­er this year. Though C. P. Snow nev­er lived to see these projects, he sure­ly would­n’t be sur­prised that, to find con­ver­gence between the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, you’ve got to dive deep.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Ship­wreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of His­to­ry,” Cor­rect 2500 Years Lat­er

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

“The Val­ue of Cul­ture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Jimi Hendrix Arrives in London in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clapton Away: “You Never Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”

Jimi Hen­drix arrived on the Lon­don scene like a ton of bricks in 1966, smash­ing every British blues gui­tarist to pieces the instant they saw him play. As vocal­ist Ter­ry Reid tells it, when Hen­drix played his first show­case at the Bag O’Nails, arranged by Ani­mals’ bassist Chas Chan­dler, “there were gui­tar play­ers weep­ing. They had to mop the floor up. He was pil­ing it on, solo after solo. I could see everyone’s fill­ings falling out. When he fin­ished, it was silence. Nobody knew what to do. Every­body was dumb­struck, com­plete­ly in shock.”

He only exag­ger­ates a lit­tle, by all accounts, and when Reid says “every­body,” he means every­body: Kei­th Richards, Mick Jag­ger, Bri­an Jones, Jeff Beck, Paul McCart­ney, The Who, Eric Bur­don, John May­all, and maybe Jim­my Page, though he denies it. May­all recalls, “the buzz was out before Jimi had even been seen here, so peo­ple were antic­i­pat­ing his per­for­mance, and he more than lived up to what we were expect­ing.” In fact, even before this leg­endary event sent near­ly every star clas­sic rock gui­tarist back to the wood­shed, Jimi had arrived unan­nounced at the Regent Street Poly­tech­nic, and asked to sit in and jam with Cream, where he pro­ceed­ed to dethrone the reign­ing British gui­tar god, Eric Clap­ton.

Nobody knew who he was, but “in those days any­body could get up with any­body,” Clap­ton says in a recent inter­view, “if you were con­vinc­ing enough that you could play. He got up and blew everyone’s mind.” As Hen­drix biog­ra­ph­er Charles Cross tells it, “no one had ever asked to jam” with Cream before. “Most would have been too intim­i­dat­ed by their rep­u­ta­tion as the best band in Britain.” To hear the sto­ry as it’s told in the clip above from the BBC doc­u­men­tary Sev­en Ages of Rock, no one else would have ever dared to get onstage with Eric Clap­ton. Clap­ton, as the famed graf­fi­ti in Lon­don announced, was God. “It was a very brave per­son who would do that,” says Jack Bruce.

Actu­al­ly, it was Chan­dler who asked the band, and who also tried to pre­pare Clap­ton. Jimi got onstage, plugged into Bruce’s bass amp, and played a ver­sion of Howl­in’ Wolf’s “Killin’ Floor.” Every­one was “com­plete­ly gob­s­macked,” Clap­ton writes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “I remem­ber think­ing that here was a force to be reck­oned with. It scared me, because he was clear­ly going to be a huge star, and just as we are find­ing our own speed, here was the real thing.” Fear, envy, awe… all rea­son­able emo­tions when stand­ing next to Jimi Hen­drix as he tears through “Killin’ Floor” three times faster than any­one else played it (as you can see him play it in Stock­holm above)—while doing the splits, lying on the floor, play­ing with his teeth and behind his head…

“It was amaz­ing,” writes Clap­ton, “and it was musi­cal­ly great, too, not just pyrotech­nics.” There’s no telling how Jimi might have remem­bered the event had he lived to write his mem­oirs, but he would have been pret­ty mod­est, as was his way. No one else who saw him felt any need to hold back. “It must have been dif­fi­cult for Eric to han­dle,” says Bruce, “because [Eric] was ‘God,’” and this unknown per­son comes along, and burns.” He puts it slight­ly dif­fer­ent­ly at the top: “Eric was a gui­tar play­er. Jimi was some sort of force of nature.”

Rock jour­nal­ist Kei­th Altham has yet a third account, as Ed Vul­liamy writes at The Guardian. He remem­bers “Chan­dler going back­stage after Clap­ton left in the mid­dle of the song ‘which he had yet to mas­ter him­self’; Clap­ton was furi­ous­ly puff­ing on a cig­a­rette and telling Chas: ‘You nev­er told me he was that fuck­ing good.’” Who knows if Hen­drix knew Clap­ton had strug­gled with “Killin’ Floor” and decid­ed not to try it live. But as blues gui­tarist Stephen Dale Petit notes, “when Chas invit­ed Jimi to Lon­don, Jimi did not ask about mon­ey or con­tracts. He asked if Chas would intro­duce him to Beck and Clap­ton.”

He had come to meet, and blow away, his rock heroes. “Two weeks after The Bag O’Nails,” writes Clas­sic Rock’s John­ny Black, “when Cream appeared at The Mar­quee Club, Clap­ton was sport­ing a frizzy perm and he left his gui­tar feed­ing back against the amp, just as he’d seen Jimi do.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Unplugged: Two Great Record­ings of Hen­drix Play­ing Acoustic Gui­tar

23-Year-Old Eric Clap­ton Demon­strates the Ele­ments of His Gui­tar Sound (1968)

Jimi Hen­drix Opens for The Mon­kees on a 1967 Tour; Then Flips Off the Crowd and Quits

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view Ani­mat­ed (1970)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Early Electronic Instrument That Could Be Played Without Being Touched (1954)

You know the sound of the theremin, that weird, war­bly whine that sig­nals mys­tery, dan­ger, and oth­er­world­ly por­tent in many clas­sic sci-fi films. It has the dis­tinc­tion of being not only the very first elec­tron­ic instru­ment but also the only instru­ment in his­to­ry one plays with­out ever touch­ing any part of it. Instead, the theremin play­er makes hand motions, like the con­duc­tor of an invis­i­ble choir, and the device sings. You can see this your­self above, as the instrument’s inven­tor, Leon Theremin, demon­strates his therem­invox, as he called it at the time, in 1954. Speak­ing in Russ­ian, with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, Theremin describes how the “instru­ment of a singing-voice kind” works “by means of influ­enc­ing an elec­tro­mag­net­ic field.”

Theremin orig­i­nal­ly invent­ed the instru­ment in 1919 and called it the Aether­phone. He demon­strat­ed it for Vladimir Lenin in 1922, and its futur­is­tic sound and design made quite an impres­sion on the ail­ing com­mu­nist leader. Theremin then brought the device to Europe (see a silent news­reel demon­stra­tion here) and to the U.S. in 1927, where he debuted it at the Plaza Hotel and where clas­si­cal vio­lin­ist Clara Rock­more, soon to become the most devot­ed pro­po­nent and play­er of the theremin, first heard it.

Although many peo­ple thought of Theremin’s inven­tion as a nov­el­ty, Rock­more insist­ed that it would be tak­en seri­ous­ly. She appren­ticed her­self to Theremin, mas­tered the instru­ment, and adapt­ed and record­ed many a clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion, like Tchaikovsky’s “Berceuse,” above. More than any­one else, Rock­more made the theremin sing as its inven­tor intend­ed.

The ori­gin sto­ry of the theremin, like so many inven­tion sto­ries, involves a hap­py acci­dent in the lab­o­ra­to­ry. Just above, Albert Glin­sky, author of the his­to­ry Theremin: Ether Music and Espi­onage, describes how Theremin inad­ver­tent­ly cre­at­ed his new instru­ment while devis­ing an audi­ble tech­nique for mea­sur­ing the den­si­ty of gas­es in a chem­istry lab. The first iter­a­tion of the instru­ment had a foot ped­al, but Theremin wise­ly decid­ed, Glin­sky says, that “it would be so much more intrigu­ing to have the hands pure­ly in the air,” manip­u­lat­ing the sound from seem­ing­ly nowhere. Although there are no frets or strings or keys, no bow, slide, or oth­er phys­i­cal means of chang­ing the theremin’s pitch, its oper­a­tion nonethe­less requires train­ing and pre­ci­sion just like any oth­er musi­cal instru­ment. If you’re inter­est­ed in learn­ing the basics, check out the tuto­r­i­al below with therem­i­nist Lydia Kav­ina, play­ing a ‘there­ami­ni’ designed by syn­the­siz­er pio­neer Moog.

In his day, Theremin lived on the cut­ting edge of sci­en­tif­ic and musi­cal inno­va­tion, and he hoped to see his instru­ment inte­grat­ed into the world of dance. While work­ing with the Amer­i­can Negro Bal­let Com­pa­ny in the 1930s, the inven­tor fell in love with and mar­ried a young African-Amer­i­can dancer named Lavinia Williams. He was sub­se­quent­ly ostra­cized from his social cir­cle, then he either abrupt­ly picked up and left the U.S. for the Sovi­et Union in 1938 or, more like­ly, as Lavinia alleged, he was kid­napped from his stu­dio and whisked away. What­ev­er the case, Theremin end­ed up in a Gulag lab­o­ra­to­ry called a sha­ras­ka, design­ing lis­ten­ing devices for the Sovi­et Union. There­after, he worked for the KGB, then became a pro­fes­sor of physics at Moscow State Uni­ver­si­ty.

Theremin nev­er gave up on his elec­tron­ic instru­ments, invent­ing an elec­tron­ic cel­lo and vari­a­tions on his theremin dur­ing a 10-year stint at the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry of Music. He gave his final theremin demon­stra­tion in the year of his death, 1993, at age 97. (See him play­ing above in 1987 with his third wife Natalia.) To learn much more about the inventor’s fas­ci­nat­ing life sto­ry, be sure to see Steven M. Martin’s 1993 doc­u­men­tary Theremin: An Elec­tron­ic Odyssey.

And if you’re intrigued enough, you can buy your very own Theremin made by Moog.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn How to Play the Theremin: A Free Short Video Course

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

Leon Theremin Adver­tis­es the First Com­mer­cial Pro­duc­tion Run of His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment (1930)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.