Reading: Loren Eisley.

This morning I picked up my old copy of Loren Eisley's 'The Invisible Pyramid' (1970) and began reading, from the Prologue through the end of section III (p. 22). Eisley begins by recalling being held aloft as a young boy by his father to see Halley's Comet in 1910; there are some meditations on the immensity of time and space. He reflects on the revelation during the 19th century of the antiquity of the world and the universe; the voyage of Lewis and Clark was a journey in time as much as in space. "Tell us what is new," the explorers were enjoined, but really they were telling us what is old; and yet, that in itself is new. Evolution as described by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace (who is profiled extensively in TAOM, ch. 9) was a great stage play in which the actors, one by one, would each expire, "pinched out of existence in a grimy corner". Man, uniquely, developed a brain "whose essential purpose was to evade specialization" (p.19). This brain could use language with the "tongue and hand, so disproportionately exaggerated in the motor cortex", as illustrated by the iconic "homunculus" diagram of Penfield that's reproduced in my LSL book on 'The Mind' (p. 38).

"About ourselves there always lingers a penumbral rainbow - what A.L. Kroeber [the father of U.K. LeGuin] termed the superorganic - that cloud of ideas, visions, institutions which hover about, indeed constitute human society, but which can be dissected from no single brain. This rainbow, which exists in all heads and dies with none, is the essential part of man. Through it he becomes what we call human, and not otherwise." (p. 21)

Loren Eisley (1907 - 1977) would not live to see the return of Halley's Comet in 1986. The Wikipedia entry on Eisley has a generous section on his early life. Growing up on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska in the early 20th century, he would have memories of the "far-off train headlight ... on the prairies of the West" (p. 9). On the early ancestors of man, Eisley writes (p. 10), "We talked, but the words we needed were fewer. ... We meant well, but we were terrifyingly ignorant and given to frustrated anger. There was too much locked up in us that we could not express." Perhaps he was thinking of his own deaf and mentally disturbed mother when he wrote these words.

Eisley himself proved to be a man of words from early on, publishing in the then-new 'Prairie Schooner', which sees its centennial this year. The bio lists him as an anthropologist, but the Wiki article clarifies that "he came to anthropology from paleontology, preferring to leave human burial sites undisturbed", which sheds light on the numerous knowledgeable references to paleontology, archaeology, and prehistoric burial practices already evident in the few pages of the book I've read so far. [483]

Reading: Astronomy.

"And God said, 'Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens, to distinguish between the day and the night; and they shall be for signs and seasons, and for days and years." - Genesis 1:14.

"He counts the number of the stars, to all of them He calls by name." - Psalm 147:4.

Nowadays I don't think we usually think of the science of astronomy as proceeding directly from mathematics (or vice versa). We might think about observing the stars with a telescope in the backyard and of learning the constellations; or we might think about the nuclear fusion process that powers the stars, having learned something about it from a book or a science documentary on televison. We might think about space explorers in science and science fiction, and how man harnessed the power of the rocket to overcome gravity and explore space. If you were to ask me to design a scheme to organize books, I might start the sciences with Mathematics, and then go to Physics, and maybe I'd put Astronomy after that. But the Library of Congress system - designed by John Russell Young and Herbert Putnam at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century - puts Astronomy (QB) immediately after Mathematics (QA); Physics (QC) comes after that.

The astronomer Fred Hoyle explains (Astronomy, pp. 10-11) that if man had not been able to observe the sun, moon, and stars, he might not ever have evolved the idea of the compass directions, time, geometry, or mathematics itself. Mathematician Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man, p. 165) agrees: "Why did astronomy advance as a first science ahead of medicine? ... A major reason is that the observed motions of the stars turned out to be calculable, and from an early time ... lent themselves to mathematics. The pre-eminence of astronomy rests on the peculiarity that it can be treated mathematically; and the progress of physics, and most recently of biology, has hinged equally on finding formulations of their laws that can be displayed as mathematical models." When speaking of mathematical models in the life sciences, Bronowski is undoubtedly thinking of the skull of the Taung child, which led to JB's own interest in the broader evolution of science.

It was Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica which formulated the basic principles, not only of astronomy or of physics, but of mathematics itself (calculus) - prompted by a visit from the young Edmond Halley (TAOM, p. 233).

And when you think about it, astronomy, like mathematics, is not only in the heavens, but it is a thing very near to you. If you want to look at Mars with that backyard telescope, you've got to know where to aim it; and that entails learning how to use astronomical charts and right ascension and declination and sidereal time. And all of that, in turn, means thinking mathematically about your place in the universe. And not just with a telescope: understanding the cycles of the moon, and even the times of sunrise and sunset - that's astronomy too. And all of it proceeds from understanding the basic fact that you are standing on the surface of a sphere that is spinning and orbiting in space.

And even the measurement of that sphere leads us to mathematics (geometry, or geo-metry, the measurement of the Earth). And that brings us back to "universals of experience. There are two experiences on which our visual world is based: that gravity is vertical, and that the horizon stands at right angles to it." (TAOM, p. 157.) [589]