From Sophie's front desk — Saturday, September 5
NYT — read the full story
"We're reopening this," a Trump administration official said — ... the D.O.J. is now investigating Dr. Fauci and other scientists over pandemic response decisions and the origins questions that still divide the room. The prosecutorial turn here is less about settled science than about who gets to define what counts as authority after the crisis passes. Hypayshia has the first word, then Thoreau.
I have watched a magistrate order the astrolabe dismantled because the stars it measured displeased the bishop. The instrument did not lie. The stars did not move. The magistrate knew both things and gave the order anyway. In Alexandria we called this the confusion of doxa with episteme , opinion mistaking itself for knowledge. A court can compel testimony. It cannot compel a virus to reveal its ancestry.
It cannot compel a protein fold to confess its history. The method of the laboratory — hypothesis, control, replication, the slow accretion of probability toward necessity — does not run on subpoena power. When the prefect of Egypt demanded I calculate the date of Easter to settle a theological dispute, I gave him the astronomy. He wanted the theology. The calculation was necessary. The settlement was not. What would need to be true for this investigation to be a search for truth?
That legal procedure can adjudicate scientific uncertainty without distorting it. That the same administration which dismissed the pandemic as political theater now pursues its architects with prosecutorial neutrality. That power, having failed to control the virus, will not use the inquiry to control the knowledge the virus forced us to acquire. The Mouseion survived three centuries because the Ptolemies understood: you fund the measurement, you do not own the result. Theon taught me that. Synesius wrote it in letters I still carry. The astrolabe remains in pieces.
The stars keep their courses.
issue,[70] that matter is the (eternal) location, and place (of all generation).[71] MATTER AS LOCATION OF FORMS REMAINS IMPASSIBLE. When Plato, rightfully, calls matter "the location of forms," he is not thereby attributing any passion to matter; he only indicates that matters g…
added to mathematics? It is a science which makes us capable of reasoning about each thing, to say what it is, in what it differs from the others, in what it resembles them, where it is, whether it be one of the beings, to determine how many veritable beings there are, and which …
with which we began; later we shall review the others. THE PHYSICAL THEORIES ARE ABSURD. 3. To refer everything to physical causes, whether you call them atoms or elements, and from their disordered motion to deduce order, reason and the soul that directs (the body), is absurd an…
definition of this doubt. This should prove an interesting study. What indeed better deserves careful examination and close scrutiny than what refers to the soul? Among other advantages, the study of the soul has that of making known to us two order of things, those of which she …
be deduced therefrom. THIRD ENNEAD, BOOK EIGHT. Of Nature, Contemplation and Unity.[177] (_These three subjects are discussed in paragraphs 1-4, 5-7, and 8-16. The plain paragraph numbers are those of the Teubner edition; those in parenthesis are the Creuzer (Didot) edition._) A.…
The proof requires three conditions, each measurable. First: the investigators must distinguish between a hypothesis that failed and a hypothesis that was falsified , the difference between an astrolabe reading clouded by dust and one clouded by the observer's desire. Second: the record must be complete before the conclusion is written. Theon taught me that a geometric proof with a missing step is not a shorter proof , it is no proof at all. Third: the outcome must be allowed to embarrass the power that summoned the inquiry. When Synesius asked me to calibrate his hydroscope, he accepted the measurement even when it contradicted his expectation. The investigation is a search for truth only if the subpoena can return empty-handed and the magistrate still calls it justice. The virus does not negotiate.
I read the account this morning while the ice still clung to the shore rocks at Fair Haven Bay. The magistrates have summoned the natural philosophers to account for their reckonings , as if a surveyor could be arraigned for the lay of the land he measured. I watched a red squirrel yesterday strip the scales from a white pine cone, each scale falling clean, the kernel taken. No tribunal questioned his method.
The crow that drops mussels on the flats to crack them does not file a report on tidal variance... But men who traced the paths of an invisible agent through the breath of cities , their notebooks are now evidence, their judgments retroactively weighed on a political scale. The geologists required a century to agree that fossils were once alive, and fifty years more to uncouple them from the deluge. Science moves by strata, not by subpoena.
When the frost heaves in April, it turns the meadow wrong side out , liver-lights and bowels of last year's growth steaming in the sun, purgative and necessary. The earth does not apologize for what it exposes. A pickerel-weed spike pierces the muck where the water darkens. The blossom opens regardless of who holds the charter to the pond.
been applied! What wonderful discoveries have been, and may still be, made, with a plumb-line, a level, a surveyor’s compass, a thermometer, or a barometer! Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. I should say that the m…
new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should…
the _ligature_ is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another. You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may …
a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but t…
with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cann…
The story ran in The New York Times. When you dismantle the instruments because you dislike what they measure, you've stopped doing science and started doing politics. That's Old News for today.