Новости за 07.06.2016

A man gets on a train in London, travels 200 miles north to the Peak District National Park, walks out to a remote part of Saddleworth Moor, and dies. Cause of death: strychnine poisoning. Six months later, nobody knows who he was, or why came to die in this place, scene of the notorious “Moors murders” in the 1960s. His pockets contained only cash, a strychnine bottle made in Pakistan, and the train tickets which enabled police to reconstruct his journey. They were return tickets

If Aristotle was the founder of zoology, his friend and pupil Theophrastus was the founder of botany. Theophrastus studied, described and classified plants. If more of his work survived, he might have more of Aristotle’s fame. He wrote three hundred books; we have only two, and fragments, but we know from these that he wrote the first accounts of cotton, pepper, cinnamon, frankincense, and the Banyan tree, and that he speculated, two thousand years before Darwin, about “mutation according to place”

It isn’t only Tiananmen. In China you see the suppression, destruction and rewriting of history at every turn. There is no local history. The rebuilding of cities and the vast shifts of population means that hardly anybody knows what their own street looked like thirty years ago, let alone what happened there, if it existed at all. National history is whatever the Communist Party wants it to be. “A country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past – can it be trusted?”

Virginia Woolf’s claim that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” was a hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone started carrying a smartphone. “For the first time, practically anyone could be found and intruded upon, not only at some fixed address at home or at work, but everywhere and at all times. Before this, everyone could expect some time at least in which to be left alone. That era now came to an end”

Newton up-ended Aristotle’s theory of gravity. Einstein up-ended Newton’s theory. Would you bet against somebody in the future up-ending Einstein’s theory? In principle, disprovability is the basis of scientific method. But in practice scientists are generally pretty insistent that what they know is true, and the rest of us go along with them. “We constantly pretend our perception of the present day will not seem ludicrous in retrospect, simply because there doesn’t appear to be any other option”