{"id":1119,"date":"2007-02-05T17:19:08","date_gmt":"2007-02-05T22:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/02\/05\/a-tranquil-star\/"},"modified":"2007-02-05T17:19:08","modified_gmt":"2007-02-05T22:19:08","slug":"a-tranquil-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/05\/a-tranquil-star\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tranquil Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good science is always<\/em> poetry; some writers are just better at bringing it out than others. In this week’s New Yorker<\/em>, Primo Levi<\/a> (in a posthumously translated story) shows us how it’s done.<\/p>\n

An observer who, to his misfortune, found himself on October 19th of 1950, at ten o’clock our time, on one of the silent planets of al-Ludra would have seen, “before his very eyes,” as they say, his gentle sun swell, not a little but “a lot,” and would not have been present at the spectacle for long. Within a quarter of an hour he would have been forced to seek useless shelter against the intolerable heat\u00e2\u20ac”and this we can affirm independently of any hypothesis concerning the size and shape of this observer, provided that he was constructed, like us, of molecules and atoms\u00e2\u20ac”and in half an hour his testimony, and that of all his fellow-beings, would end. Therefore, to conclude this account we must base it on other testimony, that of our earthly instruments, for which the event, in its intrinsic horror, happened in a “very” diluted form and, besides, was slowed down by the long journey through the realm of light that brought us the news. After an hour, the seas and ice (if there were any) of the no longer silent planet boiled up; after three, its rocks melted and its mountains crumbled into valleys in the form of lava. After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor of chance and necessity, through innumerable trials and errors, had perhaps created there, and along with all the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined that sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some poetic license with the concept of simultaneity, but that’s okay. Read the whole thing<\/a>. Hat tip to Bob Kirshner, who was the fact-checker’s fact checker. There’s an accompanying article about the translation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good science is always poetry; some writers are just better at bringing it out than others. In this week’s New Yorker, Primo Levi (in a posthumously translated story) shows us how it’s done. An observer who, to his misfortune, found himself on October 19th of 1950, at ten o’clock our time, on one of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}