Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2118   Part of the series A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things 

Concevons qu’on ait dressé un million
de singes à frapper au hasard sur les touches d’une machine à écrire …
[translation: Let us imagine a million monkeys typing haphazardly on
typewriters …”¹

[Gasoline Alley, 1931]

There are some ideas that leave me with a powerful sense of nothing.

To me, “nothing” can be very important–especially in writing and speaking and action, doing or saying nothing has been the important and the correct thing to do.  “Nothing” isn’t necessarily an ending, and, just a period or a coma, can just be a placeholder for something that is developing.  There can be long nothings and short one, forever- and micro-nothings, and nothing that is nothing for almost nothing.  Nothing can be implied, insinuated, broadcast and defined, though self-defined extended nothingnesses (like John Cage’s 4’33”) is a tricky thing to make happen with success. 

The ideas that leave me with a sense of nothing are interesting things.  And there are a lot of them. When I can remember them they are in my nothing file, waiting for nothing–or something–to happen.

This is the sense I had when I was trying to explain randomness to my 10-year-old daughter and her 11-year-old cousin, sitting out in a park, looking at stuff.  Somehow I reached into the past and pulled up the infinite monkey theorem, and tried to make that interesting, but just couldn’t do it. Maybe it was the difficulty of super-large numbers, or the fascinating but incomprehensible thought-threats of Borges and his infinite library, but I was left with nothing.

It is Borges who writes a lovely piece on the history of producing everything from nothing, appearing in his “The Total Library” in 1939 (and then again in “The Library of Babel” in 1941²), reviewing machines and such of spectacular randomization that could produce the whole of what we recognize as what we know. 

Emile Borel wrote on it in 1913, finding the possibility of one million monkeys pounding away at one million typewriters.  In his wonderful work, The Math Book³, Cliff Pickover looks at 250 big ideas in the history of mathematics and gives each of them one page only for presentation and explanation.  He approaches the infinite monkey theorem by looking at one monkey wailing away at one typewriter, striking the keys, and analyzing how long it might take for the one monkey to produce one line from one book.  The line is “In the beginning…” at the beginning of one great nothingness, from the Old Testament, a 56-object sentence (including punctuation and spaces) and, Pickover reasons, that if there is a 93-character keyboard,then this monkey will have a 1/93⁵⁶ possibility times 10¹⁰⁰ of getting it right, and that if it worked for 24 hours a day striking one key every second then it will have used all of the time in the present universe–the Big Bang Monkey.

All I got back were big stares, and a big sense of nothing in my gut.  It reminded me of the cartoon featured above, a toss-off sub-cartoon in a panel of the Gasoline Alley series.  Did he actually look at the coin?  Did he just decide to keep it?  And why keep a phoney nickel? And who counterfeits nickels, even during the Depression?  What is the outcome of the panels–just some guy walking down the street with a nickel in his pocket.  Something may have happened, but it was a lot of nothing. 

I know that I should have a bigger sense of what Felix Edouard Justin Emile Borel and Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges were writing about and in many ways I do, but in the end I know that I am left with nothing.  But I have it in my pocket.  

Notes

1. Émile Borel (1913). “Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité”. Statistical mechanics and irreversibility) J. Phys. 5e série 3: 189–196.

2.  Jorge Borges,  “La biblioteca total” (The Total Library), Sur No. 59, August 1939. Translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin: 1999)

3.  Clifford Pickover, The Math Book, (2009), Sterling, page 328.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2101

As a part of my semi-developing History of Normalcy, I decided to see if I could find a place in this country that was “normal”–and indeed, I found one.  Several–quite a few, actually, Normal and Normals and Normalcies, enough for everyone.

Here’s one–Normal, Illinois.  (Population, 40,000, 1990), in Normal Township.  There’s also Normal Township, in North Dakota. And one in Alabama.

And the town of Normal (Kentucky) and Normal (Tennessee), Normal Hill and Normal Landing (Louisiana), Normal Park (Nebraska), Normal Square (Pennsylvania), and Normalville (Pennsylvania).

Normal may or may not be a desirable thing; if it was a model thing, there is also a place called Model (in Colorado). On the other hand although there are a number of “normals”, there are no places called Average, or Mean, or Natural, or Regular, or Typcial. 

Outside of the normals, perhaps on the more combative end of normal, there are places identified called Troublesome (Colorado), Truthville (New York, Washington County), and Halfway (Georgia, Lumpkin County); there is no place called hell, though there is a Heaven(er) (Kansas). 

Oh–and there is a Standard City, Illinois.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2100

There is no doubt that the working life of the miner was and is a very dangerous, incredibly demanding job.  Written descriptions and engraved and photographed and film images all will very quickly and profoundly depict the very demanding physical, psychological and medical demands that are made on the miner.  (Perhaps one of the most demanding accounts of the life of the miner is told by George Orwell in his The Road to Wigan Pier, which I quote from in an earlier post to this blog, here; see also an associated post on Welsh mining boys, also drawing on Mr. Orwell, here.)

Even in a sympathetic publication like Mining People–published by the Miners’ Welfare Commission in 1945–the idea of crushing proximity and indomitable closeness is present in almost every image, including those that have nothing to do with actually being underground.

There are a few images of miners at work, like so:

And so:

These would hardly have been investigative-style photos as the pamphlet was trying to sell certain ideas of the mining union for self-care and preservation, so I am guessing that the photos would be no more than “average”.  The odd bits come from the photos of miners out-of-the-mines, because there is no mistaking the extreme closeness of these men to one another in places where that didn’t necessarily have to be the case.  The locker room, for example, looks compact and tight, and unnecessarily so–I mean, why have men be compressed together in a changing room after having just spent 10 hours underground in tight and bunched quarters? 

Since this was basically a trade publication extolling good works with union dues money, perhaps this locker room is an improvement–still, there are two sets of lockers that are about five feet apart, with two benches that seem to be no more than six inches wide.

After sending men down into the mines to work all day it seems that the least that could be done would be to allow a wide enough space to allow for people to sit moderately comfortably.  The six-inch bench really bothers me.

Perhaps these showers were luxurious by those provided by other mines–perhaps other mines didn’t even have showers for the miners.  But again it seems to me another very cramped scene (and this one with the lead figure being a young boy).

AS I said, perhaps these after-work images were scene of comparative luxury.  The degrees of cramped closeness though are inescapable. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2099  

Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.

Timbuktu, “a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth”–Caillie, 1830, volume 2, page 45

Of the many legends of the hypnotizing idea of the city of Timbuktu none illuminated the place as a city of earthen structures.  It was long a center of trade, located on the outskirts of the Sahara and just north of the Niger, with settlement in modern times reaching back to the 12th century, though there were settlements pre-dating this period by centuries. In any event, it was an unreachable place for the Western mind even though in Africa it was a hub of activity for trade in salt, gold, ivory, and slaves–and scholarship.  There’s a reason for people nowadays referring to distant/far-removed/inaccessible places as “Timbuktu”–and that’s because before the 19th century, it really was vastly inaccessible. And so the rumors of vast wealth and mystery wove their way into whatever little fabric of truth existed for the place. 

Europeans were enormously desirous of real information about Timbuktu–the French government offered 10,000 francs to the first explorer to see the place, and live.  That person turned out ot be Rene Caillie, an exploring son of a baker, who made his way there after much adventure in 1828, and published his saga two years later.¹ His report was not one of the expected golden mystery, but of a long-established town of antiquity and earthen hurts. 

The image above comes from his 1830 work, and is remarkable–it is beautiful, and evidently accurate, if not very dramatic or fulfilling of floating expectations. It was truthful.  And unexpected. 

• Caillié, René (1830), Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo; and across the Great Desert, to Morocco, performed in the years 1824-1828 (2 Vols), London: Colburn & Bentley. Google books: Volume 1, Volume 2.
• Caillié, René (1830), Journal d’un voyage à
  Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l’Afrique centrale … pendant les années
  1824, 1825, 1826, 1827, 1828 … Avec une carte itinéraire, et des
  remarques géographiques, par M. Jomard. (3 Vols), Paris: Imprimerie Royale. Gallica: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3. Google books: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3.