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kaibacorpintern · 4 years

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hi i forgot the ship name but would u write something thats seto and ryou? (platonic or romantic) where they play a ttrpg together or somethin idk

“or somethin idk” give me an inch, i have run a mile. a mile of 4.7k words.

platonic euroshipping. post-canon. ryou applies for a game writer position at kaibacorp and makes it to the final stage. contains: dragons, swords, some very sexy things about solidvision and the virtual world, kaiba covered in blood and having a great time, me the writer having a great time, hopefully you the reader having a great time, and ryou, not covered in blood, having a very, very, very anxious time

tw for some fantasy violence

++++++

Ryou inhaled, taking a deep breath of: the fresh, sweet smell of grass, the coolness of river water, something dry and grey in the wind, slightly rotten - smoke? And sulfur. The grasses were filled with the restless susurrus of the wind, each blade quivering with anticipation. Above him, a hawk tilted in lazy, wide circles, tracking the hidden paths of its prey. He stood on a dusty path halfway up the long slope of a steep hillside, the farmlands of the valley behind him peeled back to reveal the burned, blackened devastation beneath. The village from this distance looked like the charcoal remains of a bonfire, the air still shimmering with heat.

The sun itself was hot, making him sweat in the thick, coarse silk of his mage’s robe, every purple thread saturated with light and heat. Mopping sweat from his brow, Ryou opened his options menu, the holographic display falling open, in the guise of an illuminated manuscript, and hovering at waist-height in thin air, perfectly tilted for reading. The parchment was old and yellowed, almost velvet to the touch, the edges frayed with age, and he couldn’t resist the urge to smell it, leaning in cautiously to take an experimental whiff. Strong notes of dust, old ink, age; an undertone of knowledge, of the forbidden kind.

He selected Player Appearance and the page turned, with weight and heft, to reveal another. Kaiba didn’t miss a beat. Ryou had no doubt if he knelt down to drink from the stream that flowed down the slope, folding in clear ribbons past the rocks, the water would run cold over his fingers until they pruned. And the magic effects?

He swallowed. It was not just the sun that was making him sweat.

He’d just changed into something more practical - a short-sleeved green tunic, a pair of white breeches, leather boots that had just a bit of bite to the fit, like the player had to wear them in - when a chime pealed out from six feet away, as though someone had rung an invisible bell. The air tore apart, in odd, geometric anguish, like a broken mirror twisting into itself -

and there was Kaiba, standing in the knee-high grass in his customary black turtleneck and tight pants, frowning with his arms crossed.

“Hello,” Ryou said. “It’s so nice to see you again. Your technology is... this is amazing. The attention to detail is incredible. The player screen, with the parchment - it even smells like - ”

“What is this? Medieval?” Kaiba said, glancing around at his clothes, the distant village, taking no notice of his praise; Ryou bit his tongue in self-rebuke. As if buttering him up with compliments was going to help.

“Western Europe. From the mid-11th century to the 12th. The age of knights and chivalry,” he said, deciding that maybe his best strategy was to simply be straightforward.

“I’m familiar with basic history, thank you. How... classic,” Kaiba said, in a tone that screamed disinterest, and Ryou’s heart began to plummet - already starting from behind? No, no, no, he reminded himself, straightening the slouch out of his shoulders. Yuugi had warned him about this. Kaiba was fantastically tough to impress, in general, and the Virtual World was his world, a realm he'd built with sweat and tears, and stolen back with blood. So he hand-picked every writer that wrote for Virtual World games, refusing to squander a single pixel on conventional nonsense and uninspired cliché.

The last step - before he brought the axe down - was a short, playable demo, as proof of concept, written by the applicant and executed by the Virtual World team.

Ryou had come this far in the application process. Trust that, Yuugi said. And trust yourself.

Kaiba was looking at him, eyebrows arched with expectant curiosity.

“Er,” Ryou said. “Let’s get started, then. You’ll need to change.”

He pulled up the menu, revelling in the hovering parchment once more, and changed Kaiba’s appearance, like - like magic, the lines of Kaiba’s silhouette rippling like a sine wave from the bottom up, his modern-day clothing becoming a knee-length tunic of chainmail under a belted dark blue surcoat. Kaiba held still throughout the entire transformation, in smug admiration of the effect, his arms held out in a ballet dancer’s pose as chainmail draped down his shoulders to his wrists.

In his right hand appeared, with a sharp, diamond flash of light, a long arming sword, the edge nicked with age and bloodspill. The hilt was black, with a sapphire gleaming in the pommel. A plain shield dropped onto his left forearm.

He gave the sword an experimental spin, testing the heft with practiced ease, and slid it back into the leather scabbard on his belt.

“A knight, the charred, smoking remains of a village… I’m assuming I’m on a quest to kill a dragon?” he said, pushing back the hood of the chainmail so that it draped off his shoulders, and nodding up the slope to where the grasses tattered into rocky shale.

“Yes, you can assume that,” Ryou said politely.

On cue, a child no more than twelve years old staggered up the dusty path from the village, her small torso heaving with breath, sweat and tears running in clean streaks down her soot-stained face.

“Sir Knight,” she choked out. Flashing a look at Ryou that said cheap blow, but unable to deny his own fraternal instinct, Kaiba dropped to one knee and caught her, his hands swallowing her thin, shuddering shoulders. Playing along, at least.

“Calm down,” he said, steadying her. Ryou imagined his anxiety as a small, hard rock, packing in the twist of every fraying nerve, and leaned all his weight onto one foot, grinding the rock into the dirt with his heel. "What is it?”

“They sent me to warn you, about the dragon,” she panted. “They said only the Chosen One can truly defeat the dragon, and bring peace back to the land. Many have tried. All suffered the same terrible fate - a fate worse than death.”

“I see,” Kaiba said. “And who is the Chosen One?”

The girl glanced at Ryou over Kaiba’s shoulder, her eyes glinting with fear.

“No - no one knows,” she said. “But all the oracles say they’re coming… a knight with a pure and worthy heart. Sir Knight, don’t go. Come back to the village. It’s safe there. What do you gain from this? Our humble lands aren’t worth the danger!”

“I think they are,” Kaiba said, thumbing soot off her face, and frowning as her cheek pixelated, briefly, and resumed a skin-like texture. "Open master commands, user ID 000002510. Initiate master log. Begin recording: skin-to-skin contact glitch reappeared during writer play-test, candidate Bakura, R. Begin patch work immediately. End recording. Disperse to Virtual World team, flag Sawada, project manager. Close master commands. Did you know, one of the most compelling unsolved problems in physics is the lack of a theory that realizes both general relativity and quantum mechanics?”

The girl gave him a wary look, wide-eyed with faint alarm. Ryou sucked in a breath, grinding the anxiety rock down, down, down.

“You - you speak in tongues, Sir Knight," she said. "Are you also an oracle? Has your future-sight failed you? Don’t you see that only death lives on the mountain?”

Kaiba snorted and stood up, turning to Ryou. “A solid response to non-standard player input. Doesn’t ignore modern concepts, but re-contextualizes them in the setting of this world via a framework of prophecy, and redirects the player to the plot.”

“Um... thank you?” Ryou said. “I wanted this world to feel like it has a future, too, not just a history. I wanted to place it on a timeline, like it - ”

Kaiba’s attention swung back to the girl, still standing there with her eyes darting between them, full of bafflement.

“Return to the village, girl. Tell them my future-sight never fails me.”

The girl retreated backwards, warily, twisted on her heel, and fled down the path.

"If I go down to the village, what'll I find?" Kaiba said.

"More information about the Chosen One, and an outlaw who tries to recruit you to her band of thieves, with the option to join them for a stealth-based quest.”

"Hm. You have the imagination and the decency to offer me something other than blatant bait, which I don't always bite. The cliché of the Chosen One is boring as hell, it’s both over-done and deterministic, but I think... yes. Yes, I'll bite. Let's go see your dragon."

In the wake of this... compliment?, Ryou could only offer him a small, tentative smile, his heart clenching tight around Yuugi's advice.

Kaiba started up the path.

“Er, Kaiba - you might want to check your inventory before you encounter the dragon."

Kaiba’s hand padded around his waist until he found the small satchel that sat on his hip. Another parchment unfurled in the air before him, listing its contents:

Two full healing spells;

Two glamour spells, for changing the guise of a person or object;

Two transformation spells, for changing a person or an object into an animal;

Two scrying spells, for locating people or objects;

Two ignis spells, for commanding fire;

Two aqua spells, for commanding water; and

Two ventus spells, for commanding wind.

Ryou watched him as he read. He'd carved a small, thick groove into the dirt below his foot. Surely, that was enough for Kaiba to get creative?

Kaiba only closed the parchment with a brisk flick of his hand. Then he started up the mountain, Ryou following nervously behind.

***

The mountain path was rougher than Ryou expected, a tightly-coiled spring of switchbacks, leading to the curved lip of a high pass. After several minutes of trudging the dust in silence, he was panting for breath, his feet aching and blistering in their boots, and deeply regretting adding this little detail to the story. Next time, he was just going to put the dragon on a rolling, grassy plain, and he’d make it like an American autumn corn maze, because it still needed to be a challenge, and when the players got to the center they’d find the dragon’s decaying, rotting corpse and realize they’d been stuck inside the maze for five hundred years and everyone they loved was dead, and if they wanted to go back to their own time they’d have to find out how to resurrect the dragon, but only at a terrible cost, a sacrifice of some kind... Not his best off-the-cuff work, but there were usable concepts in there, somewhere. If there was a next time.

Despite being laden down with the chainmail, each tiny link flashing like fish scales in the airy slanting of the afternoon sun, Kaiba seemed unaffected by the demands of the hike, propelling himself forward with long, energetic strides. How?

Ryou thought about asking for a break. Or drinking water from the stream. Or changing his boots for something comfier, but he didn't have anything else in his outfit inventory except the mage robes, and the slippers might be even worse… he stopped, hands on his hips, gathering his breath.

From here the valley sprawled below them, a wide, velvety plain, its edges rising and scalloped by mountains. The village fit in the circle of his thumb and forefinger, a smoking black thumbprint. The team had done a fantastic job: the stream ran down the mountain, flattened into a river, and ran south, lazy and serpentine, a green-blue ribbon cutting through the yellow plains, just like he’d outlined in his initial description of the world….

Wait.

This was all virtual.

There was no such thing as air, here, or rivers or sunshine or grasses.

His real, physical body was half-asleep in a Virtual World testing pod on the 17th floor of the Kaiba Corp Tower, and his body here was just a series of algorithms, and if he didn’t want to sweat, he didn’t have to fucking sweat! Thank God!

Up ahead, Kaiba noted the absence of his footfalls and turned around, one hand resting easily on his sword hilt. From his position on the path, he looked down at Ryou from several feet up, which doubled the intimidation of his already formidable bearing.

“I’m fine,” Ryou said. “Just... admiring the view.”

“Are you having your Matrix moment? That’s what my programmers call it,” Kaiba said.

Ryou laughed. “I think so. I was tired but I don't feel it at all, anymore. Like all the fatigue's just melted away and I could run a marathon.”

“Is that something you enjoy?”

“Oh, no. I hate sports.”

Kaiba snorted.

“So, tell me. Why do you want this job?” he said. “At my company? Writing stories with my technology?”

“Er - ” Blindsided by the swerve in topics, Ryou tripped over his thoughts. Surely he must’ve read his application? Maybe he didn’t have the time. Stick to straightforward. “I’m sure you remember my performance in Battle City?”

“Yes, I remember,” Kaiba said, which was honestly more than Ryou expected of him.

“Well, I don’t play much Duel Monsters anymore,” he said, “but I still.. every once in a while, I turn my Duel Disk on and play a few cards, just to see my monsters come out, see them breathe… you know I run a Zombie deck, full of demons and dead things, but SolidVision makes them feel so - so alive. You took these fantasy monsters that exist only in our heads and put them in our world.”

“Virtual World game writers don’t work on SolidVision products,” Kaiba countered.

“Right, I know that. To me, Virtual World and SolidVision are the inverse of each other, or opposites that contain each other, like, like yin and yang - with SolidVision, the unreal enters the real, and becomes real. In the Virtual World, the real - ” Ryou motioned to himself - “enters the unreal, and becomes unreal. We like to put walls between imagination and reality, you know, taxes are real and unicorns aren’t, but with SolidVision and Virtual World, there is no wall. That’s the world I want to write stories for.”

“Hm,” Kaiba said, the corner of his mouth curving up in a smile. “Interesting take.”

And he waited, saying nothing more, until Ryou realized he was waiting for him; and trotted lightly up the path to join him.

***

By the time they reached the top of the mountain pass, the air had turned a clear, dusky gold. The mountains cast long, black shadows across the valley, like dark teeth, chewing up the farmlands. The mountain pass was saddle-shaped, one side sloping down into the valley they’d just come from, the other flattening into a smaller, higher bowl, cupping a pale blue-green lake between its rocky palms.

Kaiba scrambled onto the nearest large rock, his head swinging as he scanned the lake valley. Ryou wrapped one arm around his waist and bit his thumb. They had found a deep, penetrating quiet, the kind of wilderness quiet that was devoid of texture of any kind; no bugs or burbling streams or bird song. It was not even like holding your breath, waiting, because that implied a coming moment of exhale, a sigh of relief. This was a perfect stillness.

And hidden somewhere inside it was a dragon.

Ryou bit harder, until he remembered the pain was fake and did nothing, and he had to come up with something else to temper his anxiety, which was definitely, definitely real.

Kaiba's gonna flip his shit when he sees your dragon, Yuugi said, from the back of Ryou's mind, Ryou's demo manuscript in hand. In a good way or a bad way? Is it too derivative? What does it matter that he'll flip his shit for my dragon when he flips his shit for ANY dragon? He's a slut for dragons. Oh my god, you can't say that! Yuugi, please, help - nope. You got this. You know what you're doing.

Even the metallic shing of Kaiba’s sword coming out of its sheath seemed small, in an unnatural way, a pointless, petty defiance.

A shadow fell across the lake valley.

Both of them looked up -

and an enormous dragon hurtled out of the sky, landing with thundering force on all four clawed feet, flattening trees and boulders beneath its reptilian bulk. Ryou staggered backwards and fell, in an awkward, clumsy crab pose; Kaiba threw his shield over his face and dug in, undaunted.

"HAVE YOU COME TO KILL ME?" the dragon boomed. “MISERABLE WRETCH?”

Kaiba lowered his shield, just enough for his first full look at the dragon. From his spot, crumpled on the ground, Ryou saw, in the shadow below the shield, another slender smile. The dragon’s hide was a dark, luxurious blue-black, mottled like snakeskin but textured with the heavy crags and knobs of crocodiles. It lowered its head on its long, arching neck, gracefully bearing the weight of two massive, curving horns, and stared down at them with fathomless acid-green eyes.

Even Ryou, who had designed it, sat enthralled: every movement it made - the eager flick of its tail, the claws, curling into the dirt, glinting under a layer of blood and grime, the shuddering of its leathery wings as they folded into its long body - hinted at indomitable power. It was a true creature of legend, a titan from the youngest days of the world, demanding both reverence and terror.

“I have!” Kaiba replied blithely, despite announcing it in a ringing voice.

“ONLY THE CHOSEN ONE CAN DEFEAT ME,” the dragon said. “YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF SUCH A FEAT. I SEE YOUR HEART, BLACKGUARD KNIGHT. I CAN TASTE THE BLOOD YOU’VE SPILLED WITH YOUR SWORD, BRIGHT AND PUNGENT. I CAN HEAR THE CRIES OF ALL THE LIVES YOU’VE LET EBB INTO THE DIRT AT YOUR FEET!”

“I’m here to avenge the village!” Kaiba shouted.

“YOU COME UP HERE TO DEFEND SOME PATHETIC SCRAPS OF BRICK AND WOOD, THINKING YOU CAN KILL ME, AND CALL THAT HONOR? REDEMPTION? YOU CALL THAT COURAGE? ITS TRUE NAME IS VANITY! EMPTY AND FALSE! IT WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN BEFORE I DO!” the dragon boomed again. “LEAVE. I WAS ONCE NAIVE AND VAIN LIKE YOU. COME BACK WHEN YOU ARE MORE THAN A MERE WORM, OR ELSE SUFFER MY FATE!”

Ryou had clambered to his feet and bolted for the safety of a low ridge, which gave him a perfect view of Kaiba, head held high and proud as he gazed unflinching at the dragon, several hundred times his size. He’d written those words in his notebook on the metro, leaning his head against the cool midnight glass, pausing every other line to ferret out another piece of sour candy from his bag. Then he’d missed his stop. That trundling, light-washed world of a train car seemed impossibly distant now - a rapidly fading dream, to be remembered only in flashes and silence. To hear the words come out of the smoking jaws of this dragon, each syllable flowing in a delicious, indulgent baritone from its shining teeth, filled him with a breathless exhilaration, his heart hammering in his throat - this was real!

“Only one of us is suffering fate today!” Kaiba shouted back, a laugh in his voice, and then threw a glance at Ryou. “‘Suffer my fate?’ Is that a typo?”

“VERY WELL. COME KILL ME! THERE IS PEACE IN DEATH, AND ONLY ONE OF US CAN CLAIM IT!”

“I - watch out!” Ryou yelled, as the dragon lunged forward, its jaws snapping shut on the empty air where Kaiba had been standing half a second before. Kaiba threw himself out of the way, a nimble tuck and roll, and scrabbled across the shale towards higher ground. Behind him, the dragon swung its massive head, nostrils red and flaring, mouth curled up in a savage draconic grin, glinting with the promise of violence.

No sooner had Kaiba flung himself behind a scattering of boulders, shield raised, than it unleashed a jet of fire so hot and scorching the boulders glowed red, their rough faces melting in sheets. Ryou felt the heat wash across his face, from several dozen yards away.

The fire died out. The dragon snorted in satisfaction, horse-like, a loud, wet huff of smoke. The boulders sizzled as they cooled into their new, bizarrely dripping forms.

Kaiba emerged from behind a boulder, sweating and singed, his face streaked with ash and his eyes shining. He tossed the warped, melted wreckage of his shield aside, where it bounced and clattered against the rocks.

“SO YOU STILL LIVE? A MISTAKE. WHAT COMES NEXT WILL HURT WORSE!”

“For you!” Kaiba hurled back, and threw his hand into the air, a gesture Ryou had seen countless times on a duel field - a lightning rod, a summoning. “VENTUS!”

The wind picked up, in a giddy, howling whirl, bringing with it a cloud of dust that descended gritty and blinding and pale across the valley. Kaiba and the dragon vanished from sight inside it. Mentally Ryou subtracted one spell from Kaiba’s satchel.

“THIS WON’T HELP Y - ” Cut off by a wet chop and an ear-splitting draconic scream, a raw, awful sound, torn out of an unwilling throat. Just below it, a glorious, cascading laugh. “WRETCH! WORM!”

The dust settled, revealing glistening, dark-green blood splattered across the rocks, and a single severed claw, its flesh still twitching. The dragon seethed, its wounded foot curled in agony. Kaiba was clear across the other side of the pass, by the dragon’s tail, grinning open-mouthed as he panted for breath. His chainmail and surcoat dripped with dragon blood; his hair was thick with it.

“COME GET YOUR PEACE, DRAGON!” he bellowed, and the dragon slung its head around, tail coiling in an ominous whip.

Again Kaiba lifted his hand, shouted “VENTUS - !”

And a second dust cloud barreled into the valley, as the dragon roared back, “THAT WON’T WORK AGAIN!”

It whipped its tail through the dust cloud, a scythe-like sweep - smacking something hard into the rocks with a thick, fleshy crunch of bone that made Ryou’s insides clench tight with terrified sympathy.

The dragon whirled around, clearing the dust with several storm-gathering wingbeats.

This was not real. This was just pixels, neatly arranged and running in rivers of algorithms - just a clever series of ones and zeroes - and yet Ryou gasped, the dragon laughing, at the sight of Kaiba lying in a crumpled, motionless heap in the rocks. He hadn’t considered Kaiba might actually fail to kill the dragon - all thoughts of jobs and game-writing abandoned - unreality aside, the mind had a way of making it real - what the fuck happened if Kaiba died?

“IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE, WORM?” the dragon said, nudging Kaiba’s limp body with its claws, rolling him over. His head lolled, his body twisted into a horrifying, broken-boned slouch. How on earth was Ryou going to explain this to Yuugi? Hell. “I TOLD YOU, YOU'RE NOT W - ”

Ryou almost didn’t see it - a hawk in a dive, arrow-straight, from the top of the sky, diving through a blinding flash of light several stories up - and out of the light came Kaiba, alive and whole, plummeting towards the dragon’s head, gripping his sword with both hands - plunging it straight through the top of the dragon’s skull.

He left the sword hilt-deep in dragon flesh as he pitched forward with the force of impact, rolling over the dragon’s brow, flailing to catch himself - on the massive horn. Clinging, victorious, as the great dragon swayed, its green eyes filming, and finally slumped, in agonized slow motion, to the earth, body first, head last, with a thundering, bone-rattling crash.

It released one last, rattling breath, the trees shuddering in the fetid breeze.

The valley descended into stillness once more.

Ryou sat down on his low escarpment with a limp thump, burying his face in both hands. This was just a Virtual World, where at one point everything would power down and they’d wake up safe and sound in the squishy, air-conditioned comfort of a pod, and he had, after all, planned on Kaiba killing the dragon, but Kaiba’s sheer nerve seemed beyond that. Yuugi was right. The guy was, maybe, a little nuts. Completely off his rocker.

“Ryou,” Kaiba said, above him, and Ryou lifted his head. Kaiba rested the sword jauntily across his shoulder, the rest of him filthy with dragon blood and human blood and dirt. “I have to say, I enjoyed your dragon. A shame it had to die.”

“Your strategy... You used a glamour spell? On a... rock? To make it look like your dead body,” Ryou said. “And then a transformation spell.”

“Correct. Is that all for your demo?” Kaiba said, cocking an eyebrow, both bloody and disdainful, and Ryou swallowed. “I was hoping for more of a cha - ”

His words stopped hard in his throat, a harsh, hacking sound. His free hand flew to his neck, mouth dropping open in pain and confusion, eyes widening. He coughed - or tried to, achieving nothing more than a thin, ugly retching, his face going white - and Ryou watched, in fascinated horror, as his gamble began to play out. There was nothing he could do to help; he’d written it that way.

The sword clattered to the stones, green blood dripping off the shining edge, as Kaiba staggered sideways, gasping for breath, both hands on his neck - what was the algorithm doing to him? Ryou had only written ‘a suffocating, squirming pain, concentrated in the lungs,’ and resolved to think more carefully about what types of pain he might inflict on the player characters, if the gamble paid off... But how interesting to know even the creator of the Virtual World himself suspended his disbelief - his knowledge of the truth - sometimes, and indulged in pain...

He collapsed to his knees, stretching one hand out, fisting it around Ryou’s collar and dragging him closer -

“What - ” he choked out, eyes glaring into Ryou’s, in baffled, furious agony - terrified - they rolled backwards, the blue sliding away to white, as he slumped over himself.

His hand went slack and fell. What life remained slipped away in a low, shaking sigh.

Ryou took him by the shoulders and gently lay him down, passing a hand over his eyes to close them. Dead, but not really.

“Just hold on a moment,” he said. The body had been vacated. The soul - the player - was awakening elsewhere.

He waited a few moments, absorbing the stillness, the detail on the leaves of the pine trees; the way the lake water shimmered in golden flecks with late afternoon light. It was maybe his last few seconds to enjoy the world he’d written, rendered in full splendor by the magic of technology, and he’d banished his anxiety from both his mind and body, to live out its exile in the real world. It didn’t belong here.

The great dragon body began to stir, drowsily, waking up from a deep, deep sleep. The deepest sleep.

Ryou stood up and slid down the escarpment to the dragon, pebbles and dust avalanching around his feet. The stab wound in its skull was knitting back together; the severed claw was crawling back to its slow-bleeding joint. There was an agonized hiss, forced through the dragon’s tightly-clenched teeth, and a vibrating groan, deep in its chest, as it gathered itself out of death.

Its eyes opened, in wary slits - not the bright, acid green, but a stunning, oceanic blue.

“OW. FUCK,” it growled, in Kaiba’s voice, magnified and twice as resonant. “OPEN MASTER COMMANDS, USER ID 000002510. SUSPEND ALL PAIN ALGORITHMS. CLOSE MASTER COMMANDS.”

He rolled upright, flexing his wings with experimental care. He arched his neck, looking down at Ryou.

“YOU TURNED ME INTO A DRAGON.”

“Yes,” Ryou said cautiously.

“NO ONE HAS EVER TURNED ME INTO A DRAGON BEFORE,” Kaiba said. ”SO I WASN’T WORTHY? IS THIS WHAT IT MEANS TO SUFFER THE DRAGON’S FATE? EVERYONE WHO KILLS THE DRAGON BECOMES THE DRAGON, AND ONLY THE CHOSEN ONE BREAKS THE CYCLE. IS THAT HOW IT GOES?”

“That’s how it goes.”

“HOW DO I FIND THE CHOSEN ONE?”

“You choose them,” Ryou said. “You decide what makes them worthy.”

"SO ANYONE CAN BE THE CHOSEN ONE? ANYONE CAN BREAK MY CURSE?"

"That's right."

Kaiba pondered that for a moment, flexing his claws idly in the dirt, the massive slabs of muscle in his shoulders shifting as he tested the strength and fit of his new draconic body. His gaze drifted out over the lower valley, eyes clouding briefly with memories of another story, another game, another man; one who had always seemed real and unreal, all at once, no matter what world he lived in. Ryou had heard it all from Yuugi.

Then Kaiba looked at him and started to laugh, a sound that echoed and rebounded across the small lake valley, the water shivering as each delighted peal of laughter rolled across. Ryou blushed as it buffeted him from all sides.

“IS THAT SO,” Kaiba said, with dry relish. “YOU’RE HIRED.”

#sibbinthegivengibbon #fanfiction #euroshipping #(platonic)#oh my goddddddd this was a blast to write i just enjoyed myself the entire time #thanks for the prompt!!#its 1 AM i'm going the FUCK to sleep

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ultramaga · 3 years

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Science vs Anti-science

I was thinking about the destruction of the scientific community. Journals like New Scientist and Scientific American are proudly branches of leftist political organisations. They do not give a shit about skepticism. But without skepticism, science is dead, and there is only The Consensus. The Consensus, we are told, is always right. It is all scientists thinking alike. This is the direct opposite of reality. This is what existed before science, when a religious/political group would decide what reality was, and if you disagreed, you should be punished. Science was about being wrong. Science was about having ideas, but assuming they aren’t true until they are tested, and even then, another test might invalidate them. This amazing idea - that the Consensus is Bollocks - totally revolutionised the world. Suddenly technological innovations exploded, because ideas exploded, and they could do that because people were allowed to be wrong and still could be heard, and even if they were wrong, perhaps they inspired people to find something more right than was accepted at the time. Before Newton, it was perfectly accepted that heavier things fell faster than light things. The idea that it might be air resistance making the difference never occurred to anyone. Newton came up with this crazy idea, presented it to a scientific community that was able to tolerate dissent, and eventually persuaded everyone, and thanks to that, technology leapt forward. But that hit a wall. Reality kept finding ways of not quite meeting the predictions of the model. Either the model was wrong, or the reality was, and the zealot picks reality and tells you to ignore it, but the scientist accepts that the cherished model might be wrong. You can get away with Newton’s equations for most everything you will encounter, but when dealing with space, they are just wrong in critical ways. Einstein had better ideas. Again, he was the heretic, but he made his case, and it was tested over and over. Science and technology moved forward. Until Quantum mechanics proved irreconcilable with Einstein’s Relativity. Two fantastic productive models of the universe, but there were areas where they contradicted, and circumstances where the mathematics showed the equivalent of an error message. If you ever hear of the term “singularity”, that is an example. The inside of a black hole should be infinitely dense in an infinitely small point, but quantum mechanics says that that is simply impossible. Decades of research have indicated that the two great approaches must both be wrong, even if they are right enough to be incredibly useful. But we have no idea how to replace them. Yet. So how does that relate to 2020, current year, year of The Consensus? Well, before 2020 there were a lot of studies on the efficacy of masks. The humble cloth mask was found to be useless at stopping the flu and colds. It was as effective as the hijab at stopping rape - and yes, that was the original reason the hijab was supposed to be worn for. The problem is that viruses are very very small compared to the holes in a cloth mask. Viruses are bigger than air molecules, but not by much, and the masks most people used might, at best, stop large dust particles or balls of mucus. So what happened in 2020 when the emergency powers were activated, and the science became Teh Science!(TM)?

Well, all the old papers were disappeared. Scientists recanted, then their work vanished. If you don’t have a copy in archive.is, I doubt you will find it, because even the Wayback Machine seems to have been edited. Dissent shall not be allowed in the Covid Crisis. Different ideas are heresy. Yet when I look at the Mask Science papers they all read like this: WE GUESS THAT CLOTH MASKS STOP BIG PARTICLES AND DON’T IN SUM SPREAD MORE DISEASES THAN THEY PREVENT. WE GUESS THAT COVID DOESN’T SPREAD LIKE THE COLD DOES - IN AEROSOL. WE AREN’T GOING TO TEST, OF COURSE. Papers that support mask wearing seem to be utter garbage, flooded with weasel words. Mask wearing MIGHT, MAYBE ... That’s not science. That’s just speculation with extra steps. I noticed that when the media etc wants to present Teh Science!, it will interview a scientist who agrees with them. They never speak to anyone who doesn’t. The stultification of Science into just another dogma has been occurring across the board, according to dissidents I have spoken to. You have to be very careful if you say something that used to be utterly mundane, like that humans have two sexes. Anti-science is taking control. Sabine Hossenfelder is a very ‘progressive’ person, who is astonished that her esoteric area of interest is being affected. To simply say that another supercollider would be a waste of money is now a political badthink. She has a number of disagreements with Teh Consensus on pretty abstract matters, and is astonished when she finds she can be harassed over things like Dark Energy. So when someone like her, so far removed from what sane people would find ‘problematic’, someone who sees themselves as a Leftist but who just isn’t Leftist enough; when they can be attacked, then no-one is safe. And that, I think, is the lesson we have to take from all of this. No-one is safe from the powers governments gain in crises, and the incentive then becomes to extend the crisis forever, and to silence anyone who says anything about it, and laws now exist in places to arrest anyone who so much as questions the wisdom of the authorities about this. Yet without questioning, there is no science. So why should we trust someone in a labcoat trotted out for the cameras? For those interested in Sabine, this is an example of her work. She is irrelevant to the mask argument except as an example of someone who has simply carried on doing science in her field, without any understanding of the political shifts occurring that have put science into stagnation. Physics is still in crisis

#covid-19

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marginalgloss · 4 years

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the republic of heaven

Back in 2000 when The Amber Spyglass came out I feel like there was not so much news in the world. At the turn of the millennium we seemed to be entering a more optimistic time. Tony Blair was elected in 1997 at the head of a liberal Labour government, and while it may be true that Blair would never be so popular again as he was in the opening years of his premiership, the Tories seemed hopelessly outdated by comparison. They were still the nasty party of old, while the country was ambitious, outward-looking, internationalist. Explicit racism and homophobia were no longer tolerated. We were Europhiles, but we weren’t part of Europe. There seemed to be a lot of money about.

At home there were occasional horrors — the murder of Jill Dando, the homophobic pub bombings in London, Harold Shipman — but they were somehow isolated, disparate, inexplicable. They were exceptional. There was the war in Kosovo, which set a template for liberal interventionism in years to come. The economy was trucking along; unemployment was low; for the first time there was a national minimum wage. I skim the headlines today and it seems like such a comfortable time by comparison. Perhaps I am remembering it wrong. But when the years to come would bring a spiral of endless war, recession, and one of the most significant declines in relative generational living standards, I’m not sure there is any need for rose-coloured glasses.

Into this comes The Amber Spyglass, which is basically quite an optimistic anti-authoritarian novel. It was also the book which, for a handful of reasons, really brought Philip Pullman to the world’s attention. It was this which ensured that his name still lurks around the list of authors most frequently ‘banned’ in America, and which in the years after its publication would attract scores of avid cheerleaders and detractors. Inevitably most of those had no interest with engaging with the substance of the book itself. Instead, it became a sort of battleground: on one side, those convinced that religion was under attack from an educated elite; on the other, those who were committed to reducing the role of religion in public life, discourse, education, and so on. It is worth revisiting this typically excitable interview and profile by Christopher Hitchens for an example of how these novels were talked about.

To call the novel ‘optimistic’ might seem surprising, because much of it is shrouded in scenes of gloom and suffering. But when I think of the tone of the novel as a whole, it is pastoral. When the world isn’t tearing itself apart the language seems more lyrical than in either of the two preceding books. Some of that is to do with the perspective, which now has at least three (and sometimes more) main characters to follow. This means that a sense of distance, of floating high above the many worlds of the story, becomes necessary. But it’s also that the reader has a sense that this book is going to be about the promised war against the heavens outlined in The Subtle Knife, and it’s likely the reader will also understand that this is a war that must be won.

It feels like a world of binary opposites. Even characters who seemed villainous in the previous novels are here redeemed (at least in part) so they can be mustered against the ultimate figure of the ‘Authority’. A certain amount of good versus evil is likely in any book for children, but here things are now cast explicitly in terms of these two sides squaring up against each other. And taking sides is a matter of decision, not of belonging. This is a book where angelic figures can decide to fight alongside men, and where demonic harpies can be convinced not to consume the souls of the dead because they want to hear their stories instead. It’s plausible in terms of oldest storytelling traditions, where it is possible to talk one’s way out of anything — where the role of storyteller gives a person the ultimate kind of authority.

Is the capital-A ‘Authority’ in these novels intended to be absolutely synonymous with God? I’m not sure. The book is explicitly anti-religion in the sense of being anti-church, but the forces of the Authority (and the being himself) do not seem to represent any kind of absolute power in the universe. The Authority is not omnipotent nor omnipresent, nor is he very much of a creator or a father-figure any more — he is a despot, but he is also somehow irrelevant. Like a shrivelled relic, he is vastly reduced when we finally meet him. The worst aspects of his regime seem like the calcified remnants of decisions long since made and now barely remembered, like the afterlife that has become a giant prison camp. In fact it’s the abolition of the afterlife, not the death of its creator, that’s the only really significant consequence of the fall of the Authority.

So if God isn’t in the Authority, then where is he? In spite of the tendency for atheists to want to claim the author for one of their own, it seems like the heart of these novels is not in pure humanistic rationalism, but in a broader sort of pantheism. The idea of ‘Dust’ is the closest thing to a true divine presence here. It could be characterised as something akin to a spirit which moves through all things. It is ‘conscious’, and though it’s hard to determine what this means in practice, we know that it is not indifferent to humanity. It’s not like a host of little thinking homunculi (although Mary did have a whole conversation with it on a computer back in The Subtle Knife). But it wants to persist. It would seem to be the force that drives the Alethiometer. It has intentions.

The counter-argument to this would say that Dust isn’t divine at all — it exists at the bleeding edge of science, and has nothing to do with faith. It’s a material thing. It’s not a spirit. But I don’t know that this is especially convincing. The books often try to equate Dust with quantum mechanics, but this doesn’t entirely seem to add up — these are particles which are somehow small enough to slip through gaps between universes, but big enough to see with the naked eye. Everything about Dust seems too convenient from an authorial perspective. It’s as though someone took everything indefinable and unique about evolved human (and non-human) consciousness and made it into a quantifiable thing and then said: there, without this thing we are no longer what we are. It’s an easy solution to the hard problem.

It the article linked above, Hitchens described the Alethiometer and Will’s knife as ‘tools of inquiry and struggle, not magic wands’. This is only half-right. Clearly they aren’t tools like a microscope or an X-ray machine. Both items are bonded to their owners through an innate sensitivity that has little to do with rational enquiry or rigorous method. The Alethiometer is even compared to the I Ching at various points. It seems wrong to mistake ‘inquiry’ here for the scientific method; it has much more in common with ‘negative capability’, a term which is actually quoted in The Amber Spyglass — the ability to pursue truth and beauty via one’s innate sensibility, to ‘see feelingly’ through a fascination with a sort of natural mystery, and not to depend exclusively on reason and knowledge.

This leaves the reader in an odd sort of no man’s land between the armies who supposedly either adopted or despised this novel. A hypothetical arch-rationalist might find it difficult to accept all of what they find here without rolling their eyes at some of it. Negative capability does not sit comfortably alongside the scientific method as a tool, but nor does it have much to do with priests and popery. And yet it is a sort of inspiration, and in that respect I think it comes closer to a religious experience than it does a rational one.

The problem with this is that it is not possible to get any sense from this novel of what it means to be religious, or to believe in a higher power, or to be ‘spiritual’ (choose your own euphemism). There is Mary Malone, but while I like Mary’s story here, her account of her early life in cloisters and later conversion/defection is unsatisfying. We have no sense of doubt, of anguish, of guilt — it is an all-too-straightforward seeing of the light. Will is arguably more complicated, more conflicted, but for the most part he never seems to have to make any difficult compromises. If he ever loses out on anything by abandoning his mother to travel through a whole set of alternate universes, we aren’t told about it.

What if Will made the wrong call? What if he weren’t so trustworthy? He is, in a way, the lynchpin of the whole story. For all Lyra’s good intentions and inner strength, if it weren’t for Will, Asriel would have failed and nothing would have changed. So Will must be made to work. Yet it often seems as though he doesn’t want anything for himself, except perhaps to be with Lyra. It’s interesting to wonder what might have happened if Will weren’t quite so faithful (for want of a better word).

But it’s inconceivable in the world of these books that anyone could possess negative capability and then use it for anything other than a pursuit of — well what exactly is being pursued, anyway? What is Asriel’s goal, above and beyond the overthrow of the Authority? There is vague mention of something called ‘the Republic of Heaven’ — a heaven on Earth, as it were — but today that phrase can only make me recall the idea of ‘Outer Heaven’ in the Metal Gear Solid games. It’s difficult to discern any latent irony lying in wait for the reader in this case. Will whatever replaces the Authority be just as bad, eventually? Perhaps, but again, the vibe of optimism in this novel is so strong it feels odd to impose doubt on it from elsewhere.

The paradox of The Amber Spyglass is that while the explicit ‘moral’ of the novel is set against organised religion, it cannot help but describe the world in terms originally set by religion. (A very basic reading might declare the novel invalid for this reason, for much the same reason as a socialist might be declared hypocritical for buying a smartphone.) It isn’t just that there are angels, or that the story of Adam of Eve is central to the thing. It is the journey through the world of the dead and back. It’s the arc of redemption and overthrow.

At times it feels like this book is re-fighting a battle that was begun hundreds of years ago in the English reformation. In the pursuit of humanistic knowledge, a godlike figure is re-cast in the guise of an Authority who can be overthrown, and cast out of our land, and even killed. And all for the sake of nothing especially certain, nothing at all new in political or ideological terms, except a sense that we would be more free — that we would be better off without. Is it better to eject the columns of the dead into a kind of oblivion than to consider any improvement to their position? I don’t know. Perhaps things seemed simpler twenty years ago.

#books #philip pullman #the amber spyglass

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tilbageidanmark · 2 years

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Movies I watched this week #57

Reading this lovely ode to Scrabble by Oliver Roeder, I wondered if there are any good Scrabble movies. Then I found the wonderful little drama Sometimes, Always, Never, about fathers and sons who play badly together. Bill Nighy is a sophisticated tailor who‘s also an obsessive Scrabble grifter, setting up confidence games with strangers. After the first few flat theatrical scenes, it develops into a rewarding emotional story. ‘Walkaway’ Jenny Agutter is lovely in a small role. 8+/10.

“...Small pleasures, eh?... “

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RIP Monica Vitti:

La Notte, part two of Antonioni’s classic Tetralogy of Alienation, with exquisite sophistication & stunning emotive landscapes (and with Umberto Eco cameo as a party guest! Photo Above).

Ah, Milano in the early 60′s... I wish I was young again. 10/10.

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You, The Living is the best of Roy Andersson‘s ‘Living Trilogy'. I loved ‘Songs from the Second Floor' and I loved ‘A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence’ very much, and I love this one even more. Basically, it's 50 short cinematic Swedish Jokes, told with surrealistic pathos and genial originality. Monochrome, melancholic, tragicomic, hypnotic.

The very best of all my January’s films.

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Stephen Hawking bios X 2:

🎦🎦🎦 Hawking: Can You Hear Me?, a fascinating new documentary about physicist Stephen Hawking, who helped explain the beginning of the universe, the nature of black holes, and the connection between general relativity and quantum mechanics [...I have no idea what any of these words mean]. A simplified look at his personal relationships and some of his discoveries.

8/10 - would be even better if it didn’t have to drown in the incessant fucking music!

🎦🎦🎦 So I also had to watch (for the first time) Erroll Morris’s earlier A Brief History of Time. Obviously, it was not a filmed version of his book about theoretical cosmology, but a biography with interviews, etc. It was interesting to see some of the same people, f. ex. his sister Mary, 30 years younger.

The score by Philip Glass is an example of how to do soundtrack right, as compared to the modern disaster.

Why do we remember the past but not the future?...

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The chestnut man, a new 6-part Danish crime series. A typical Nordic Noir about parenthood, which eventually turns into blood-thirst and abuse, so much abuse. I doubt that in reality Copenhagen has that much violent crime in one year, let alone in one week, as it shows here.

7+/10 - Interesting parallels drawn between the two symbolic trees, the Chestnut Tree and the Family Tree.

Thanks, Sammy, for the recom'.

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Punk girl group The Linda Lindas just dropped their new song, Growing up. So I went back listening to all their infectious “old” stuff from last year, only to find that they actually performed as themselves in Amy Poehler’s coming-of-age comedy Moxie. It’s an uneven but empowering story of a reluctant fourth wave feminist teen who finds strength to fight the patriarchy. Must be good for its target audience, 13-16 year old girls, but I wish she would have used actors who looked like they were 15-16 (not like Arnold’s son who’s 28).

(I saw it twice in a row!) - 7/10.

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Maggie Gyllenhaal X 2:

🎦🎦🎦 In The Kindergarten Teacher she’s an amateur poet who passes as her own some poems that her 5 year old student wrote. Intimate and evocative, it’s a small, surprising “poem” of a film. 7/10.

With Office Space’s Samir Nagheenanajar as Jimmy’s dad!

🎦🎦🎦 Secretary is a daring exploration of a sadomasochistic relationship, between a submissive secretary and a dominant lawyer. It covers erotic themes that were not usual in mainstream American cinema, but it culminates as a tender love story between the couple. It’s not a’ Story of O’ though. 6/10.

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I have not seen Pather Panchali for over 40 years. Satyajit Ray’s 1955 masterpiece, the first installment in his Apu Trilogy, and one of the greatest films ever made. The hard life of Apu and his sister Durga and their dirt-poor family in a far away rural West Bengali village - farmers owning not much more than a torn rug to sleep on and a bowl to eat and drink with. With soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. Still a masterpiece. 9/10.

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2 Random Hitchcock’s:

🎦🎦🎦 1948 Rope, with James Stewart and a script adapted by Hume Cronyn (!). A classic “One continuous shot” set (actually broken into 10 nearly-seamless segments), and a piece of rope literally replacing ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ for the murder weapon.

The clear homosexual subtext between the two “roommates”, a controversial theme at the time, may have contributed to the film’s poor box office then. Re-watch.

🎦🎦🎦 Family Plot, his last comedy thriller from 1976. Two parallels stories of two couples of crooks, nicely developed so you don’t know who’s the bigger criminal until the third act: Pipe smoking Bruce Dern and his fake psychic girlfriend Barbara Harris, or toothy William Devane and his girlfriend Karen Black, specializing in kidnapping for ransom. Unlike his usual old fashioned sensibilities, this has some hip touches, cursing, explicit references to sex, etc. First watch.

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You Were Never Really Here, my first Lynne Ramsay’s film, an updating of Scorsese’s Travis Bickle to the modern age: Joaquin Phoenix is a broken man, a suicidal, traumatized ex-soldier who rescues a kidnapped child victim from a prostitution ring in NYC. Imagine an amplified 90 minutes of Taxi Driver’s final shootout scene - it was dark and loud, and too intensely violent for me. 6+/10.

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“Zero must equal 100 percent..”

The Zero Theorem, Part three of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Orwellian Trilogy’. It similarly exists in an elaborately baroque Minecraft world of wild colors and futuristic eccentricity. Christoph Waltz is “Q”, an elusive programmer searching the ‘Meaning of Life’ in a cryptic and confusing chaos. The melody ‘Creep’ even matches the break from reality that the song ‘Brazil’ did before. With Tilda Swinton as Dr. Shrink-Rom, an AI therapist. 4/10

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Your name, one of (if not THE) first anime films I ever saw, which was not done by Ghibli Studio. A story of a high school boy and girl who begin to swap bodies, while a meteor is about to destroy the girl’s town.

Not as good as Miyazaki’s films, but it was a legitimate well told story, with many beautiful scenes and ideas. It opened my eyes to the genre in general - and I will not block Anime films from my viewing any more.

Thanks, Gal, for the recommendation.

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How and Why George Harrison Formed The Traveling Wilburys, a 25-min YouTube documentary from 2007 about my second favorite band. Grainy footage but awesome music.

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2 docs about horrific human rights abuses:

🎦🎦🎦 Tankman is a Frontline documentary from 2006, about the June 1989 events in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In spite of the irrefutable massacre it describes (and condemns), it also shows how China made a clear choice after the event to pursue economic freedoms and political repression, and how it benefited (for the most parts) from that decision.

🎦🎦🎦 Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity. Amnesty International has analyzed Israel’s intent to create and maintain a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians and examined its key components: territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights. It has concluded that this system amounts to apartheid.

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Black Book, directed by Paul Verhoeven, the “most expensive Dutch film ever made”, and the “Best Dutch film ever, as voted by the Dutch public”. A horribly-exploitative Hollywood-style story of Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation, Showgirls meet Hogan’s Heroes. The 1956 prologue set in an Israeli Kibbutz starts with the singing of האוטו שלנו גדול וירוק in Hebrew. 1/10.

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Ridley Scott’s (?!) House of Gucci, my first exposure to Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (Lady Gaga). Tries to tell a real-life Godfather-style story about the luxury retailer. 3/10.

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Throw-back to the art project:

Monica Vitti Adora.

Ahed Tamimi عهد التميمي Adora.

Tank Man Adora.

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(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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shmosnet2 · 4 years

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Where Do Black Holes Lead?

Where does a black hole go? So there you are, about to leap into a black hole. What could possibly await should — against all odds — you somehow survive? Where would you end up and what tantalizing tales would you be able to regale if you managed to clamor your way back? The simple answer to all of these questions is, as Professor Richard Massey explains, "Who knows?" As a Royal Society research fellow at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, Massey is fully aware that the mysteries of black holes run deep. "Falling through an event horizon is literally passing beyond the veil — once someone falls past it, nobody could ever send a message back," he said. "They'd be ripped to pieces by the enormous gravity, so I doubt anyone falling through would get anywhere." If that sounds like a disappointing — and painful — answer, then it is to be expected. Ever since Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity was considered to have predicted black holes by linking space-time with the action of gravity, it has been known that black holes result from the death of a massive star leaving behind a small, dense remnant core. Assuming this core has more than roughly three-times the mass of the sun, gravity would overwhelm to such a degree that it would fall in on itself into a single point, or singularity, understood to be the black hole's infinitely dense core. Related: 9 Ideas About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind CLOSE The resulting uninhabitable black hole would have such a powerful gravitational pull that not even light could avoid it. So, should you then find yourself at the event horizon — the point at which light and matter can only pass inward, as proposed by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild — there is no escape. According to Massey, tidal forces would reduce your body into strands of atoms (or 'spaghettification', as it is also known) and the object would eventually end up crushed at the singularity. The idea that you could pop out somewhere — perhaps at the other side — seems utterly fantastical. What about a wormhole? Or is it? Over the years scientists have looked into the possibility that black holes could be wormholes to other galaxies. They may even be, as some have suggested, a path to another universe. Such an idea has been floating around for some time: Einstein teamed up with Nathan Rosen to theorise bridges that connect two different points in space-time in 1935. But it gained some fresh ground in the 1980s when physicist Kip Thorne — one of the world's leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity — raised a discussion about whether objects could physically travel through them. "Reading Kip Thorne's popular book about wormholes is what first got me excited about physics as a child," Massey said. But it doesn't seem likely that wormholes exist. Indeed, Thorne, who lent his expert advice to the production team for the Hollywood movie Interstellar, wrote: "We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age," in his book "The Science of Interstellar" (W.W. Norton and Company, 2014). Thorne told Space.com that journeys through these theoretical tunnels would most likely remain science fiction, and there is certainly no firm evidence that a black hole could allow for such a passage. Artist's concept of a wormhole. If wormholes exist, they might lead to another universe. But, there's no evidence that wormholes are real or that a black hole would act like one. (Image credit: Shutterstock) But, the problem is that we can't get up close to see for ourselves. Why, we can't even take photographs of anything that takes place inside a black hole — if light cannot escape their immense gravity, then nothing can be snapped by a camera. As it stands, theory suggests that anything which goes beyond the event horizon is simply added to the black hole and, what's more, because time distorts close to this boundary, this will appear to take place incredibly slowly, so answers won't be quickly forthcoming. "I think the standard story is that they lead to the end of time," said Douglas Finkbeiner, professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard University. "An observer far away will not see their astronaut friend fall into the black hole. They'll just get redder and fainter as they approach the event horizon [as a result of gravitational red shift]. But the friend falls right in, to a place beyond 'forever.' Whatever that means." Maybe a black hole leads to a white hole Certainly, if black holes do lead to another part of a galaxy or another universe, there would need to be something opposite to them on the other side. Could this be a white hole — a theory put forward by Russian cosmologist Igor Novikov in 1964? Novikov proposed that a black hole links to a white hole that exists in the past. Unlike a black hole, a white hole will allow light and matter to leave, but light and matter will not be able to enter. Scientists have continued to explore the potential connection between black and white holes. In their 2014 study published in the journal Physical Review D, physicists Carlo Rovelli and Hal M. Haggard claimed that "there is a classic metric satisfying the Einstein equations outside a finite space-time region where matter collapses into a black hole and then emerges from a while hole." In other words, all of the material black holes have swallowed could be spewed out, and black holes may become white holes when they die. Far from destroying the information that it absorbs, the collapse of a black hole would be halted. It would instead experience a quantum bounce, allowing information to escape. Should this be the case, it would shed some light on a proposal by former Cambridge University cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking who, in the 1970s, explored the possibility that black holes emit particles and radiation — thermal heat — as a result of quantum fluctuations. "Hawking said a black hole doesn't last forever," Finkbeiner said. Hawking calculated that the radiation would cause a black hole to lose energy, shrink and disappear, as described in his 1976 paper published in Physical Review D. Given his claims that the radiation emitted would be random and contain no information about what had fallen in, the black hole, upon its explosion, would erase loads of information. This meant Hawking's idea was at odds with quantum theory, which says information can't be destroyed. Physics states information just becomes more difficult to find because, should it become lost, it becomes impossible to know the past or the future. Hawking's idea led to the 'black hole information paradox' and it has long puzzled scientists. Some have said Hawking was simply wrong, and the man himself even declared he had made an error during a scientific conference in Dublin in 2004. So, do we go back to the concept of black holes emitting preserved information and throwing it back out via a white hole? Maybe. In their 2013 study published in Physical Review Letters, Jorge Pullin at Louisiana State University and Rodolfo Gambini at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, applied loop quantum gravity to a black hole and found that gravity increased towards the core but reduced and plonked whatever was entering into another region of the universe. The results gave extra credence to the idea of black holes serving as a portal. In this study, singularity does not exist, and so it doesn't form an impenetrable barrier that ends up crushing whatever it encounters. It also means that information doesn't disappear. Maybe black holes go nowhere Yet physicists Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski and James Sully still believed Hawking could have been on to something. They worked on a theory that became known as the AMPS firewall, or the black hole firewall hypothesis. By their calculations, quantum mechanics could feasibly turn the event horizon into a giant wall of fire and anything coming into contact would burn in an instant. In that sense, black holes lead nowhere because nothing could ever get inside. This, however, violates Einstein's general theory of relativity. Someone crossing the event horizon shouldn't actually feel any great hardship because an object would be in free fall and, based on the equivalence principle, that object — or person — would not feel the extreme effects of gravity. It could follow the laws of physics present elsewhere in the universe, but even if it didn't go against Einstein's principle it would undermine quantum field theory or suggest information can be lost. Related: 11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way GalaxyArtist's impression of a tidal disruption event which occurs when a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole. (Image credit: All About Space magazine) A black hole of uncertainty Step forward Hawking once more. In 2014, he published a study in which he eschewed the existence of an event horizon — meaning there is nothing there to burn — saying gravitational collapse would produce an 'apparent horizon' instead. This horizon would suspend light rays trying to move away from the core of the black hole, and would persist for a "period of time." In his rethinking, apparent horizons temporarily retain matter and energy before dissolving and releasing them later down the line. This explanation best fits with quantum theory — which says information can't be destroyed — and, if it was ever proven, it suggests that anything could escape from a black hole. Hawking went as far as saying black holes may not even exist. "Black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field," he wrote. There would be no singularity, and while the apparent field would move inwards due to gravity, it would never reach the center and be consolidated within a dense mass. And yet anything which is emitted will not be in the form of the information swallowed. It would be impossible to figure out what went in by looking at what is coming out, which causes problems of its own — not least for, say, a human who found themselves in such an alarming position. They'd never feel the same again! One thing's for sure, this particular mystery is going to swallow up many more scientific hours for a long time to come. Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto recently suggested that a component of dark matter could be formed by remnants of evaporated black holes, and Hawking's paper on black holes and 'soft hair' was released in 2018, and describes how zero-energy particles are left around the point of no return, the event horizon — an idea that suggests information is not lost but captured. This flew in the face of the no-hair theorem which was expressed by physicist John Archibald Wheeler and worked on the basis that two black holes would be indistinguishable to an observer because none of the special particle physics pseudo-charges would be conserved. It's an idea that has got scientists talking, but there is some way to go before it's seen as the answer for where black holes lead. If only we could find a way to leap into one.

https://ift.tt/2stoz06 . Foreign Articles December 02, 2019 at 04:13AM

#. Foreign Articles Where Do Black Holes Lead?

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sabbathmagazine666 · 4 years

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Feminist

I was reading Chaos Theory a few days ago. As I read, I thought, well - how was it possible for this strange and simultaneous position of this order and chaos, this symmetry and asymmetry in the world? This is the Vortex Man, this is the Golden Ratio, this is the Fibonacci Sequence, this is the talk of Nikola Tesla 3-6-9, I looked at the bronze statue of Nataraja in my house. I saw, strangely enough, an inverted 3-6-9-made Koira-headed lover Mahadev is standing with one foot on the ground! I thought, well - is this a symbol of the destruction of Nataraja? Religion always makes me think. Religion I reject as a child, I know for sure, I can't be a believer in religion in this life. But I always think about the power of religion. The way religion has a strange ability to control not only human life, but also its mind, I think, where is the source of this power. Atheists who learn to read new pages tend to believe that illiteracy is associated with faith, that is, uneducated people become believers. I don't see it that way. I believe that faith has nothing to do with education and especially formal education. A teacher with the highest degree in the university or a Nobel laureate physicist can also be a believer. Because faith in God is associated with the ancient human psyche. And I know for sure that you know - the ancient meaning is not void. I believe, the greatest invention of ancient man is not fire, not wheel. Words and language were the greatest discoveries of ancient man. It is true that modern people can go to the moon, it is true that they can build dams on rivers, it is true that genetic engineering can produce more productive crops in less time, but it has not been able to give birth to a second strange thing like language. The strange feeling that arises in a person when he hears a word, the strange way a picture of a mango or an elephant is formed in his head as soon as he hears the word mango or elephant, the way a person cries, laughs, gets angry - is another invention of the modern world. Dia is not replaced. I believe that religion, like language, is the second best invention of ancient man. Religion, like language, can create a surreal world in the style of 'Thika' was a handkerchief and became a cat 'and can control people's minds. There is a clear difference between the ancient pagan religions of the world and the Abrahamic religions. No, I'm not talking about gross differences like monotheism or polytheism. I'm talking about symmetry and asymmetry. As you can see, the main features of the pagan religions were chaos and inequality. The main features of the Abrahamic religions, on the other hand, are discipline and equality. The idol of Nataraja or Ganesha or Goddess Durga is a statue of unequal balance, on the other hand the first feature of any synagogue or church or mosque is unnatural geometric equality. That is why the pagan religions create in the human mind a desire to be one with nature and the Abrahamic religions create in the human mind a fear and a desire to kneel. Even though I don't believe in religion, I think about religion. I believe that the second best invention of ancient man after language is the story of the connection between religion or the idea of a Creator God with a religious God. All institutional religions were born for the purpose of establishing power through the creation of a resource-dependent economy and for the protection of power and the politics of exercise of power. And in this politics it was urgent to replace the god of human imagination with the god of religion. Because if man believes that his Creator God is omnipresent, and if he thinks that the source of quantum mechanics is God, then it is impossible to control him. Our ancient ancestors were undoubtedly intelligent. People live in Boila, we are becoming more educated and intelligent than the people of the previous generation. I don’t believe in these bhugichugi things. I believe, day by day we have become modern, advanced, unnatural and ass. Being modern advanced unnatural is certainly not a bad thing. There is no doubt that modern life is more interesting than walking naked in the streets, hanging in the bamboo bushes, raping, dying of cholera. But in contrast to this fascinating life, the way we are controlled by religion, the big brother of religion, capitalism, and the big sister masculinity, giving up all our freedoms, transforming ourselves into servants of the system, regardless of gender, is going to die at the end of the day. Honestly, it would not have been possible if he had not been less intelligent than the previous people. In religion, therefore, there is nothing to see in the small koira. Only stupid atheists want to blow away the things that have been able to control people in this way for so many ages. They go to Bhuila, the miraculous unreal unexplained subject is the daily companion of man. It's like a dream, you're on your knees on the street, and seven thousand miles away, your mother calls you to tell you if you have pain in your legs, it's a matter of marking a flock of birds, it's a matter of looking at your hands, The matter of calculating your destiny with the stars, you can dispel nonsensical superstitions in matters like the soul, you can say coincidences, unscientific or pseudoscience if you want - whatever you want to say so there is no problem, but even then all these things do not exist. And so through the space-time curve, or through the non-existence of time, or through the Grand Unified Field Theory, the day when Renেনে Descartes' famous Observer Theory's famous quote, "I think, so I am," will prove that the need for institutional religion in the world will end. Even if all the people of the world are educated in formal education, even if the prophets of religion are slandered all day long, even if thousands of gross gaps are discovered in the books of religion, it will not be possible to eradicate religion from the world by making the righteous militants, murderers and rapists. Gothold lacing has a funny thing to say. He was saying, “If God hides all the truths of the world with his right hand, and with his left hand shows the way to the unwavering search for that truth; And he told me to choose between the two, as long as I knew that I would go the wrong way forever, but in the end I would choose the left hand with humility. " And this is why I am an agnostic and will remain so for the rest of my life. I believe, truth is only relative, truth is only political, truth is only perspective dependent. So no one in the world is able to claim the truth. I believe that all knowledge is semi-knowledge. I believe that there is no such thing as the path of truth, only the path of truth-seeking in the world. And so I do not reject any knowledge of the ancient world, not even religion. I believe that the day man can answer without hesitation, who he is, the day only the need for religion will be met. I am not saying that religion is without problems. But no system in the world is without problems. There are problems in capitalism, there are also problems in socialism. There are problems in masculinity, there are also problems in feminism. We must get rid of all these problems in establishing an egalitarian society, but since all these systems can control one of the main human traits nurtured in the collective unconscious memory of man, namely greed for power and money, greed for control over others, these systems cannot be overthrown overnight. Should not be. I often wonder if the religion or economy that I oppose, or the patriarchy that I oppose, would not exist in the world today. I wonder if today's world is urgent. I wonder if the birth of religion or capitalism was the future of man. I wonder if we are carrying halahal only in search of immortality, whether we are destroying the earth with that halahal. Again, I think this, if not halahala shiberai or how would have been born? How could Shivai or Nilakantha be? I wonder, if there was no chaos in the world, how would we look for chaos? How would I celebrate life without death? If there was no subjugation, how could I go to Moira with my throat cracked for freedom? How could socialism come if capitalism was not born? How could feminism and these useless feminists like me be born if masculinity was not controlled? I wonder if the purpose of human life is to find the truth or to find the equilibrium and stability of the 3-7-9 of the world? I wonder if the balance is really something? I wonder if the homeostasis of our body is really eternal homeostasis? I know my thoughts are random. But I am not ashamed of it. Shame is only a characteristic of people who find their own identity. I do not know my identity. Still.

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pacificleo · 6 years

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You and Your Research'' by Dr. Richard W. Hamming

It's a pleasure to be here. I doubt if I can live up to the Introduction. The title of my talk is, ``You and Your Research.'' It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually do your research. I could give a talk on the other subject - but it's not, it's about you. I'm not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I'm talking about great research. And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?'' and ``What is the difference?'' I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to do this?'' I tried to find out what are the differences. And that's what this talk is about.

Now, why is this talk important? I think it is important because, as far as I know, each of you has one life to live. Even if you believe in reincarnation it doesn't do you any good from one life to the next! Why shouldn't you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant? I'm not going to define it - you know what I mean. I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, and I've been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to science.

In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.''

In order to get to the second stage, I have to drop modesty and talk in the first person about what I've seen, what I've done, and what I've heard. I'm going to talk about people, some of whom you know, and I trust that when we leave, you won't quote me as saying some of the things I said.

Let me start not logically, but psychologically. I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things.

You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

For example, when I came to Bell Labs, I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us did it at the same place and at the same time - it was in the atmosphere. And you can say, ``Yes, it was luck.'' On the other hand you can say, ``But why of all the people in Bell Labs then were those the two who did it?'' Yes, it is partly luck, and partly it is the prepared mind; but `partly' is the other thing I'm going to talk about. So, although I'll come back several more times to luck, I want to dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you do great work or not. I claim you have some, but not total, control over it. And I will quote, finally, Newton on the matter. Newton said, ``If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.''

One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, ``What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?'' Now he knew that electromagnetic theory says you cannot have a stationary local maximum. But if he moved along with the velocity of light, he would see a local maximum. He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around there, that everything was not right and that the velocity of light had something peculiar. Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments. Now that's the necessary but not sufficient condition. All of these items I will talk about are both luck and not luck.

How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. Most of you in this room probably have more than enough brains to do first-class work. But great work is something else than mere brains. Brains are measured in various ways. In mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, typically brains correlates to a great extent with the ability to manipulate symbols. And so the typical IQ test is apt to score them fairly high. On the other hand, in other fields it is something different. For example, Bill Pfann, the fellow who did zone melting, came into my office one day. He had this idea dimly in his mind about what he wanted and he had some equations. It was pretty clear to me that this man didn't know much mathematics and he wasn't really articulate. His problem seemed interesting so I took it home and did a little work. I finally showed him how to run computers so he could compute his own answers. I gave him the power to compute. He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department, but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field. Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away and he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate.

And I can cite another person in the same way. I trust he isn't in the audience, i.e. a fellow named Clogston. I met him when I was working on a problem with John Pierce's group and I didn't think he had much. I asked my friends who had been with him at school, ``Was he like that in graduate school?'' ``Yes,'' they replied. Well I would have fired the fellow, but J. R. Pierce was smart and kept him on. Clogston finally did the Clogston cable. After that there was a steady stream of good ideas. One success brought him confidence and courage.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn't know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, ``What would the average random code do?'' He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to do it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don't do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don't know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect.

But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, ``I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.'' Well I said to myself, ``That is nice.'' But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever.

I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident to me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren't going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go to the West Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I want to go or not?'' and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said to myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can do practically everything. Why can't you make them write programs?'' What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing and say, ``Gee, I'm never going to get enough programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?''

And there are many other stories of the same kind; Grace Hopper has similar ones. I think that if you look carefully you will see that often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, ``But of course, this is what it is'' and got an important result. So ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren't always the best ones for you.

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere. I've often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn't have so much to show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.

Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. And I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ``creativity comes out of your subconscious.'' Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, ``Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research,'' he says, ``but I think it was well worthwhile.'' And I said, ``Thank you Dave,'' and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, ``What are the important problems in my field?''

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don't have to hide in the valley where you're safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn't produce much. It's that simple. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.

Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey and others, I finally adopted what I called ``Great Thoughts Time.'' When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: ``What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?'', ``How will computers change science?'' For example, I came up with the observation at that time that nine out of ten experiments were done in the lab and one in ten on the computer. I made a remark to the vice presidents one time, that it would be reversed, i.e. nine out of ten experiments would be done on the computer and one in ten in the lab. They knew I was a crazy mathematician and had no sense of reality. I knew they were wrong and they've been proved wrong while I have been proved right. They built laboratories when they didn't need them. I saw that computers were transforming science because I spent a lot of time asking ``What will be the impact of computers on science and how can I change it?'' I asked myself, ``How is it going to change Bell Labs?'' I remarked one time, in the same address, that more than one-half of the people at Bell Labs will be interacting closely with computing machines before I leave. Well, you all have terminals now. I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things.

Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to me but I can't vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an airport talking to a friend of mine from Los Alamos about how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over in Europe when it did because that got us working on the atomic bomb here in the US. He said ``No; at Berkeley we had gathered a bunch of data; we didn't get around to reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission.'' They had it in their hands and they didn't pursue it. They came in second!

The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

I want to talk on another topic. It is based on the song which I think many of you know, ``It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.'' I'll start with an example of my own. I was conned into doing on a digital computer, in the absolute binary days, a problem which the best analog computers couldn't do. And I was getting an answer. When I thought carefully and said to myself, ``You know, Hamming, you're going to have to file a report on this military job; after you spend a lot of money you're going to have to account for it and every analog installation is going to want the report to see if they can't find flaws in it.'' I was doing the required integration by a rather crummy method, to say the least, but I was getting the answer. And I realized that in truth the problem was not just to get the answer; it was to demonstrate for the first time, and beyond question, that I could beat the analog computer on its own ground with a digital machine. I reworked the method of solution, created a theory which was nice and elegant, and changed the way we computed the answer; the results were no different. The published report had an elegant method which was later known for years as ``Hamming's Method of Integrating Differential Equations.'' It is somewhat obsolete now, but for a while it was a very good method. By changing the problem slightly, I did important work rather than trivial work.

In the same way, when using the machine up in the attic in the early days, I was solving one problem after another after another; a fair number were successful and there were a few failures. I went home one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another. After quite a while of thinking I decided, ``No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year's problems, not just the one in front of my face.'' By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things and did important work. I attacked the major problem - How do I conquer machines and do all of next year's problems when I don't know what they are going to be? How do I prepare for it? How do I do this one so I'll be on top of it? How do I obey Newton's rule? He said, ``If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.'' These days we stand on each other's feet!

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

Now if you are much of a mathematician you know that the effort to generalize often means that the solution is simple. Often by stopping and saying, ``This is the problem he wants but this is characteristic of so and so. Yes, I can attack the whole class with a far superior method than the particular one because I was earlier embedded in needless detail.'' The business of abstraction frequently makes things simple. Furthermore, I filed away the methods and prepared for the future problems.

To end this part, I'll remind you, ``It is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the best answer he can.'' And I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!

I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, ``Yes, that was good.'' I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't stop and read it, you won't get credit.

There are three things you have to do in selling. You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks. We had a lot of so-called `back room scientists.' In a conference, they would keep quiet. Three weeks later after a decision was made they filed a report saying why you should do so and so. Well, it was too late. They would not stand up right in the middle of a hot conference, in the middle of activity, and say, ``We should do this for these reasons.'' You need to master that form of communication as well as prepared speeches.

When I first started, I got practically physically ill while giving a speech, and I was very, very nervous. I realized I either had to learn to give speeches smoothly or I would essentially partially cripple my whole career. The first time IBM asked me to give a speech in New York one evening, I decided I was going to give a really good speech, a speech that was wanted, not a technical one but a broad one, and at the end if they liked it, I'd quietly say, ``Any time you want one I'll come in and give you one.'' As a result, I got a great deal of practice giving speeches to a limited audience and I got over being afraid. Furthermore, I could also then study what methods were effective and what were ineffective.

While going to meetings I had already been studying why some papers are remembered and most are not. The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give. As a result, many talks are ineffective. The speaker names a topic and suddenly plunges into the details he's solved. Few people in the audience may follow. You should paint a general picture to say why it's important, and then slowly give a sketch of what was done. Then a larger number of people will say, ``Yes, Joe has done that,'' or ``Mary has done that; I really see where it is; yes, Mary really gave a good talk; I understand what Mary has done.'' The tendency is to give a highly restricted, safe talk; this is usually ineffective. Furthermore, many talks are filled with far too much information. So I say this idea of selling is obvious.

Let me summarize. You've got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pasteur's ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important. I found in the early days I had believed `this' and yet had spent all week marching in `that' direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction? I either had to change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did and I marched in the direction I thought was important. It's that easy.

Now you might tell me you haven't got control over what you have to work on. Well, when you first begin, you may not. But once you're moderately successful, there are more people asking for results than you can deliver and you have some power of choice, but not completely. I'll tell you a story about that, and it bears on the subject of educating your boss. I had a boss named Schelkunoff; he was, and still is, a very good friend of mine. Some military person came to me and demanded some answers by Friday. Well, I had already dedicated my computing resources to reducing data on the fly for a group of scientists; I was knee deep in short, small, important problems. This military person wanted me to solve his problem by the end of the day on Friday. I said, ``No, I'll give it to you Monday. I can work on it over the weekend. I'm not going to do it now.'' He goes down to my boss, Schelkunoff, and Schelkunoff says, ``You must run this for him; he's got to have it by Friday.'' I tell him, ``Why do I?''; he says, ``You have to.'' I said, ``Fine, Sergei, but you're sitting in your office Friday afternoon catching the late bus home to watch as this fellow walks out that door.'' I gave the military person the answers late Friday afternoon. I then went to Schelkunoff's office and sat down; as the man goes out I say, ``You see Schelkunoff, this fellow has nothing under his arm; but I gave him the answers.'' On Monday morning Schelkunoff called him up and said, ``Did you come in to work over the weekend?'' I could hear, as it were, a pause as the fellow ran through his mind of what was going to happen; but he knew he would have had to sign in, and he'd better not say he had when he hadn't, so he said he hadn't. Ever after that Schelkunoff said, ``You set your deadlines; you can change them.''

One lesson was sufficient to educate my boss as to why I didn't want to do big jobs that displaced exploratory research and why I was justified in not doing crash jobs which absorb all the research computing facilities. I wanted instead to use the facilities to compute a large number of small problems. Again, in the early days, I was limited in computing capacity and it was clear, in my area, that a ``mathematician had no use for machines.'' But I needed more machine capacity. Every time I had to tell some scientist in some other area, ``No I can't; I haven't the machine capacity,'' he complained. I said ``Go tell your Vice President that Hamming needs more computing capacity.'' After a while I could see what was happening up there at the top; many people said to my Vice President, ``Your man needs more computing capacity.'' I got it!

I also did a second thing. When I loaned what little programming power we had to help in the early days of computing, I said, ``We are not getting the recognition for our programmers that they deserve. When you publish a paper you will thank that programmer or you aren't getting any more help from me. That programmer is going to be thanked by name; she's worked hard.'' I waited a couple of years. I then went through a year of BSTJ articles and counted what fraction thanked some programmer. I took it into the boss and said, ``That's the central role computing is playing in Bell Labs; if the BSTJ is important, that's how important computing is.'' He had to give in. You can educate your bosses. It's a hard job. In this talk I'm only viewing from the bottom up; I'm not viewing from the top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.

Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?'' To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,'' or if it's a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and song put together.'' And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They're always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn't do great work how they felt about the matter. It's a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

I've told you how to do it. It is so easy, so why do so many people, with all their talents, fail? For example, my opinion, to this day, is that there are in the mathematics department at Bell Labs quite a few people far more able and far better endowed than I, but they didn't produce as much. Some of them did produce more than I did; Shannon produced more than I did, and some others produced a lot, but I was highly productive against a lot of other fellows who were better equipped. Why is it so? What happened to them? Why do so many of the people who have great promise, fail?

Well, one of the reasons is drive and commitment. The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it, who work during the day and go home and do other things and come back and work the next day. They don't have the deep commitment that is apparently necessary for really first-class work. They turn out lots of good work, but we were talking, remember, about first-class work. There is a difference. Good people, very talented people, almost always turn out good work. We're talking about the outstanding work, the type of work that gets the Nobel Prize and gets recognition.

The second thing is, I think, the problem of personality defects. Now I'll cite a fellow whom I met out in Irvine. He had been the head of a computing center and he was temporarily on assignment as a special assistant to the president of the university. It was obvious he had a job with a great future. He took me into his office one time and showed me his method of getting letters done and how he took care of his correspondence. He pointed out how inefficient the secretary was. He kept all his letters stacked around there; he knew where everything was. And he would, on his word processor, get the letter out. He was bragging how marvelous it was and how he could get so much more work done without the secretary's interference. Well, behind his back, I talked to the secretary. The secretary said, ``Of course I can't help him; I don't get his mail. He won't give me the stuff to log in; I don't know where he puts it on the floor. Of course I can't help him.'' So I went to him and said, ``Look, if you adopt the present method and do what you can do single-handedly, you can go just that far and no farther than you can do single-handedly. If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you.'' And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system.

You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No', you just go to your boss and get a `No' easy. If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'. But if you want a `No', it's easy to get a `No'.

Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.

You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going to give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo and an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to be able to do this, that, or the other thing, and they pay a steady price.

John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.

By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help. For instance, one time for some idiot reason all the reproducing services at Murray Hill were tied up. Don't ask me how, but they were. I wanted something done. My secretary called up somebody at Holmdel, hopped the company car, made the hour-long trip down and got it reproduced, and then came back. It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort to cheer her up, tell her jokes and be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me. By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.

And I think John Tukey paid a terrible price needlessly. He was a genius anyhow, but I think it would have been far better, and far simpler, had he been willing to conform a little bit instead of ego asserting. He is going to dress the way he wants all of the time. It applies not only to dress but to a thousand other things; people will continue to fight the system. Not that you shouldn't occasionally!

When they moved the library from the middle of Murray Hill to the far end, a friend of mine put in a request for a bicycle. Well, the organization was not dumb. They waited awhile and sent back a map of the grounds saying, ``Will you please indicate on this map what paths you are going to take so we can get an insurance policy covering you.'' A few more weeks went by. They then asked, ``Where are you going to store the bicycle and how will it be locked so we can do so and so.'' He finally realized that of course he was going to be red-taped to death so he gave in. He rose to be the President of Bell Laboratories.

Barney Oliver was a good man. He wrote a letter one time to the IEEE. At that time the official shelf space at Bell Labs was so much and the height of the IEEE Proceedings at that time was larger; and since you couldn't change the size of the official shelf space he wrote this letter to the IEEE Publication person saying, ``Since so many IEEE members were at Bell Labs and since the official space was so high the journal size should be changed.'' He sent it for his boss's signature. Back came a carbon with his signature, but he still doesn't know whether the original was sent or not. I am not saying you shouldn't make gestures of reform. I am saying that my study of able people is that they don't get themselves committedto that kind of warfare. They play it a little bit and drop it and get on with their work.

Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system andbecome a first-class scientist.

On the other hand, we can't always give in. There are times when a certain amount of rebellion is sensible. I have observed almost all scientists enjoy a certain amount of twitting the system for the sheer love of it. What it comes down to basically is that you cannot be original in one area without having originality in others. Originality is being different. You can't be an original scientist without having some other original characteristics. But many a scientist has let his quirks in other places make him pay a far higher price than is necessary for the ego satisfaction he or she gets. I'm not against all ego assertion; I'm against some.

Another fault is anger. Often a scientist becomes angry, and this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.

Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative. I have already given you several examples, and there are many, many more; how, given the situation, by changing the way I looked at it, I converted what was apparently a defect to an asset. I'll give you another example. I am an egotistical person; there is no doubt about it. I knew that most people who took a sabbatical to write a book, didn't finish it on time. So before I left, I told all my friends that when I come back, that book was going to be done! Yes, I would have it done - I'd have been ashamed to come back without it! I used my ego to make myself behave the way I wanted to. I bragged about something so I'd have to perform. I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to say, ``Oh yes, I'll get the answer for you Tuesday,'' not having any idea how to do it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line and sometimes I failed, but as I said, like a cornered rat I'm surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn to use yourself. I think you need to know how to convert a situation from one view to another which would increase the chance of success.

Now self-delusion in humans is very, very common. There are enumerable ways of you changing a thing and kidding yourself and making it look some other way. When you ask, ``Why didn't you do such and such,'' the person has a thousand alibis. If you look at the history of science, usually these days there are 10 people right there ready, and we pay off for the person who is there first. The other nine fellows say, ``Well, I had the idea but I didn't do it and so on and so on.'' There are so many alibis. Why weren't you first? Why didn't you do it right? Don't try an alibi. Don't try and kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven't got enough manpower to move into a direction when that's exactly what you need to do? I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint and what was a defect became an asset.

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

(End of the formal part of the talk.)

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afurst · 7 years

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There’s Nothing You Can Do to Change the World, So Don’t Ever Stop Trying

At a retreat I was helping to lead some time ago, I made a comment during the Dharma talk that rustled a few feathers. It went something like this, “There’s nothing you can do to change the world.” At the end of the retreat one of the participants followed up for clarification. He asked with a friendly but incredulous look on his face, “Did you really mean that?”I admit, it sounds harsh. But, let me explain.

It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic book called This Explains Everything. It’s a series of essays by various prominent thinkers answering the question “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?”

The authors cover a gamut of disciplines including cognitive science, biology, economics, music, social sciences, and physics. I confess to being an avid pop physics fan. So I was drawn to the essays focused on cosmology and quantum mechanics. Three ideas that weaved through the book will help me make my point.

The first is order. The universe appears to follow a set of rules.Our formulations of these rules, for example Newton’s laws or Maxwell’s equations, are highly predictive and explain a lot about our experience. Even the bizarre probabilities of quantum mechanics demonstrate that there is a certain order to the universe.

Implicit in this observation is that the rules don’t change. This explains how we’re able to use them to predict events with some degree of probability. If the laws changed, things would be completely unpredictable, in fact life couldn’t exist.

Getting There From Here

The second concept is determinism. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics has shown that while the universe has order, it’s not precisely predictable. The laws of nature point to likely outcomes, but not rigid cause effect chains. This is a very important point. Ideas about determinism and free will have always been critical to defining our world view. If we misunderstand cause and effect, we’re at risk of misunderstanding everything.

The final idea is Emergence . This is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Scientists have used emergence to develop plausible explanations for everything from the creation of stars to the evolution of life. These explanations are truly deep, elegant and beautiful.

To illustrate how cool these ideas are, I’ll give you some examples. Interesting fact; in the beginning, if the universe had a perfectly uniform density, it would have been a very different, bland place. The ever so slight differences in density throughout the fledgling universe allowed particles to congregate by way of gravity (see a recent TED talk on the confirmation of this hypothesis). Over the course of billions of years these congregations of matter formed hydrogen and helium atoms which in turn formed the first stars.

As the process of emergence unfolded, the stars exploded as super nova, resulting in the creation of larger elements like carbon, iron and so on. These ingredients formed the raw materials for new stars, planets, and ultimately life.

It’s remarkable that scientists have been able to reverse engineer the story of the cosmos. We have a decent picture of the past and a certain degree of confidence that it’s correct because it was derived from the same rules that we use to reliably predict probable future states.

Emergent Selection

The human body and its behaviors are adaptations produced by an emergent process we call evolution. We’ve evolved to respond to our environment in ways that increase the likelihood of our survival (or more specifically, to increase the likelihood we reproduce).

For example, we blink when something approaches our eye. We produce adrenalin and its associated self-preservation responses when we are in danger. These naturally selected traits allowed our ancestors to live another day by surviving one moment to the next.

Evolutionary development has allowed humanity to move beyond the survival stage into relative comfort and wealth. We even enjoy the luxury of contemplating happiness.

Emotional Rescue

Is happiness an evolutionary trait?

Norwegian biologist Bjorn Grinde proposes in his textbook, Darwinian Happiness: Evolution as a Guide for Living and Understanding Human Behavior, that it may be.

He argues that human emotions find their cause in evolution. Evolution might tend to add stronger incentives for behavior benefiting the genes in an individual with a powerful free will; as otherwise, the free will could easily result in maladaptive behavior. — Wikipedia

Recognizing emotional traits as emergent phenomenon is not hard to see. The love between a mother and child clearly serves to ensure that genes are successfully passed on. But, day to day, it’s difficult to see our emotions in this context. We don’t view our love of family in the context of the perpetuation of our DNA. It seems a little more complex than that.

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public ― Cornel West

But Grinde is right in that free will without the incentive to self-preserve would likely result in the annihilation of life. Even with the power of evolution behind us, we don’t always act wisely. The effects of our bad decisions can be devastating. The fact that climate change is considered a man-made phenomenon, tells you how much of a mess we can make of things. But broadly speaking, our track record with free will has been net positive. The success of the human species speaks for itself.

So it seems that emergence has resulted in two natural principles. First, we are fundamentally motivated to perpetuate life — i.e. pass on our genes. Second, related to the first, is that freewill is also governed by natural selection. We’re incentivized, via emotion, to get along with each other. The latter principle I would describe as our natural inclination towards social justice.

There is Nothing You Can Do to Change the World

To steer back to my original point, we have to acknowledge that there is much in the world we cannot change. On an impersonal level, it’s fairly easy to recognize that the laws of nature are what they are. The acceleration due to gravity will be the same tomorrow as it was 300 years ago.

But getting a little more personal, there are some truths that can be harder to accept. Learning that your purpose is to perpetuate the information you carry in your genetic code can leave you a little cold. Viewing the love I have for my wife and children as simply the actions of “selfish genes” seems belittling. But no matter how I choose to view it, I am basically a DNA carrier.

Free will is a little more complicated. While our self preservation instincts tend to invoke simple mechanisms to help keep us alive long enough to reproduce, our exercise of free will doesn’t seem to be as automatic. Climate change, pollution, and addiction are all problems stemming from the misguided exercise of freewill. Why do we do these things?

These problems stem from a disconnect between our actions and their consequences. At the foundation is a faulty understanding of what is in our best interest. Why do we act in ways that are a detriment to our well-being? That’s literally insane. This is the root of suffering.

And there it is; the Buddha’s message!

The centrality of suffering and the causes of suffering in the Buddha’s teachings is very compelling to me. The journey begins with diagnosing and treating our own flavor of disconnection. If we fail in this, we’ll have little to offer the world.

Don’t Ever Stop Trying

The Buddhist teaching of the great embrace, the Mahamudra, tells us about the peculiar union of the unchanging eternal nature of the universe and it’s constantly evolving character. Both aspects of the world are observably true. The universe is what it is. Its laws are inviolable. But as these laws manifest over time, a vast diversity of matter, energy, and life unfolds before us.

This esoteric teaching is deep, elegant, and beautiful. It’s something I view as on par with the theories of evolution and quantum mechanics. It reminds us that both things are true in this quirky little universe of ours. The world is simultaneously unchanging and constantly evolving!

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead

We have freewill. We have intentions, make choices, and those choices affect the future. There is much good we can do. It seems we’re actually wired for it. We can listen and empathize. We can speak up when we see injustice and we can be better stewards of our environment.

But we have to do the hard work of putting our own house in order before we can start changing the world for the better. We need to align our efforts so that they actually do good.

It sounds obvious, but in practice it is monumentally difficult. We need only look to history for a multitude of people who have paved the road to hell with good intentions. These would-be saviors arise out of naive ideologies and their actions tend to do more harm than good.

The 1960s and 1970s were a showcase of misguided efforts to better the world. The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weatherman, and the Black Panthers were all founded on deeply held, but flawed premises. They spiraled out of control because they perpetuated the cycle of suffering.

We must accept the world as it is. If we don’t come to grips with the rules of life, we won’t be able to play the game. When it comes to social justice, there are a lot of dead end routes. Forcing people to adopt social change by legislation or coersion doesn’t work. These approaches don’t take seriously the fact that free will is not a group phenomenon.

The Buddha acknowledged that change comes one heart and mind at a time. It’s an act of freewill to see and acknowledge the world as it is. Its an act of freewill to discover the true path to happiness. We can only walk ourselves across that bridge.

So how do we promote social justice? By example. It may sound ineffectual, but it’s magical seeing how infectuous it can be. In the same way that smiles are contagious, enlightenment can move from one person to the next; sometimes like wildfire. Gandhi said it well:

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do. — Mahatma Gandhi

So get out there and change the world. Social justice doesn’t happen on its own. But do it from a firm foundation. Do the work that’s required to understand the causes of suffering and apply what you learn to reduce it. It often less about doing good for others, and more about living in a way that shows that you have found your way.

The post There’s Nothing You Can Do to Change the World, So Don’t Ever Stop Trying written by Andrew Furst appeared on Andrew Furst.

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