This is just a minipostlet, but I have to record one of the best typos I’ve ever seen. I’m reading Christopher Priest’s sf novel Inverted World and have just gotten to a passage about how the world works; I won’t provide context (spoilers!), but in the e-book I’m reading I came across the sentence “Here the universe is the rule.” I was startled and amused, realizing in a split second (thanks to years of copyediting) that it was an error for “Here the inverse is the rule” (which is apparently what is found in other editions). That would make an excellent item for an editing test!
My guess is, it might have been a typo — “unverse” inst. of “inverse”, what with U and I being next to each other on the keyboard, — that was then (automatically?) corrected the wrong way.
Not a free translation of “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist”?
my greek’s not up to phrasing it, but perhaps a wittgensteinian reading of protagoras?
Inverted World is an incredible book. I think there are two versions of it out there. I read the first version a long time ago (40 or 50 years ago), so I can’t be sure, but I think the earlier version (if it exists) was better.
The universe is the rule, but the cosmos is the exception. Discuss.
The universe is the rule, but the cosmos is the exception. Discuss.
Universe: Everything rolled into one (primary meaning). World as whole shebang. (All that is the case, as it happens.) From Latin, not (apparently) calqued from any Greek.
Cosmos: Everything in order (primary meaning). Κοσμέω is “place in order; arrange; adorn”; and cosmetic is related. The Latin calque is mundus, which means “clean, neat; adorned” and as a noun “ornamentation; orderliness; world” (cf. French immonde “unclean”). The opposite is often said to be chaos. Greek χάος is “unordered material preceding the emergence of κόσμος”, itself of disputed origin but perhaps suggesting “the void” and related to χώρα (“[empty] space”) or χάσμα (“chasm, abyss”); gas is a doublet of chaos, because of its lack of structure.
World: The age of humankind (primary meaning). Anglosaxon weorold; Proto-Germanic *weraldiz: *weraz (“man, human”) + *aldiz (“age, lifetime”), with further Proto-Germanic and PIE roots well established. There are many derivative senses, including of course “universe”; but in anglophone philosophy world and universe are usually distinguished. A multiverse would not normally be considered the same as an ensemble of worlds, and the acceptability of these notions is at least dependent on limiting the ontological reach of universe or of world.
The universe is “the rule” in that it is what there is, in its entirety; so nothing is “ruled out”. Nothing is “exceptional”, because by definition (subject to the proviso mentioned above in connection with “multiverse”) everything is in the fold. But the cosmos is more deserving; it can be identified metonymically as “the rule” because it embodies “the rule”: a presumed ordering principle.
Is there anything (in the world or the universe, or in the multiverse or the ensemble of worlds if you will) beyond the cosmos – anything not subject to some ordering principle (perhaps even making the cosmos the exception)? Is there more than one ordering principle? If there is, why shouldn’t the ensemble of all cosmogenic ordering principles be taken instead as the (highest-level, highest-order) ordering principle? Discuss, with mention of Tegmark.
In “The Last Question,” the later computer names go through “Galactic AC,” “Universal,” and “Cosmic.” The story was written after the meaning of galaxy had changed, so that it rarely if ever meant “everything” in 1956. However, to me the two subsequent adjectives don’t really seem to distinguish the scopes of the computers they refer to, although “Cosmic AC” sounds more mysterious (which fits; as the story advances, each computer is more powerful than the previous AC, but also physically smaller and less comprehensible to its human users).
“Cosmic AC” sounds more mysterious
Anything Greek has more class, kudos, and charisma. Compare ethics and morals, yes?
What interests me especially about galaxy is that few people, including astronomers, seem to understand its milky origin in Greek γαλαξίας (“via lactea” “Milky Way”; γάλα means “milk”, and English galactic also means “milky” in general; compare galactose, a monosaccharide which when combined with glucose makes the disaccharide lactose). People know that our galaxy is the Milky Way, but few grasp that galaxy is a semantic generalisation of this sort. It’s as if all stars were called “suns”.
Relatedly, I had occasion to explain to an Australian academic entomologist – as we waited for our flight to depart from Nanjing – the etymology of entomology (as connected intimately to the etymology of insect). How I had longed for such fortune!
Speaking of tmesis, I was delighted to find signs something like “Όριο δέκα ατόμων στον ανελκυστήρα” in a lift (or elevator) in Athens: A limit of ten “atoms” (individuals) in the lift.
Is there more than one ordering principle? If there is, why shouldn’t the ensemble of all cosmogenic ordering principles be taken instead as the (highest-level, highest-order) ordering principle? Discuss, with mention of Tegmark.
There’s a slight sleight-of-hand in your syllogistic. You presume without argument that these ordering principles are partially ordered, in particular transitive. That would not suffice even to show there is a supremum, much less only one, much less a Supreme Supremum from which all smarts flow.
Anyway, putting all ordering principles into a bag or ensemble still leaves you holding the bag, with no clue what to do or think. Regardless of whether the contents are partially ordered.
As for Tegmark, he seems to mean well. Unfortunately that cuts no epistemological butter for me.
@Stu, I think you’re poking at the wrong weak spot. IF the “ensemble of all cosmogenic ordering principles” is even admissible as a cosmogenic ordering principle, (for instance, if the “principles” are orderings on the same universal set, and “ensemble” means “union”) and IF it wasn’t already a member of the collection you had, you can just add it as a supremum to the existing partial order. (Make a discrete order to add it to if your collection was not ordered at all).
If the ensemble was already a member of the ensemble, either there’s no problem, or you have bigger problems than ordering.
It’s as if all stars were called “suns”.
This is not a counterfactual. OED s.v. sun:
I am grimly amused by the obsequious Ld. in “Ld. Tennyson.” They won’t skip the title even to save precious space! (I realize space is no longer an issue, but this is obviously carried over from the print version.)
And I work on temnospondyls (among others)! ^_^
The example from The Magician’s Nephew* seems slightly different from the others. In that case, the “sun” is being viewed from the surface of the world (not necessarily a planet; Narnia has a sun, but its world is flat, and its stars are not other suns but angelic beings) of Charn. Moreover, the human visitors to Charn arrived there via teleportation, not by space travel. It would seem very weird to refer to the celestial body seen in the firmament above, lighting the whole world, as a “star,” rather than a “sun” in that context.
* The OED cites The Magician’s Nephew with an abbreviated title, omitting the definite article. Omitting “The” in the name of a periodical sort of makes sense, for two reasons. In a name like “The Times,” the word “Times” refers to the publication itself (albeit by an arguably twofold metonymy: first referring to the publication by its contents, then referring to those contents by their topic matter). There is also a frequent call to refer to the contents of a periodical, and it sounds a lot better to talk about “the Economist article by**…”*** than “the The Economist article by…,” even for a publication like The Economist, where the proper name of the publication is not in any way identifiable with the periodical itself (but rather with its writers, publishers, and maybe readers).
However, neither of those arguments seems particularly relevant to C. S. Lewis’s novel. The title is not, even metaphorically, as description of the book itself, but rather of its main character. I suppose one could write about “the Magician’s Nephew chapter ‘The Deplorable Word,'” but that locution does not seem likely to be called for much. So the omission of the article seems more like a cutesy attempt to save space (now unnecessarily, as noted by languagehat above) than an actual useful convention.
** After entering this, I realized that it was a bad example, since The Economist does not have bylines.
*** Normally, I put asterisks after all other punctuation,**** but here, putting them after the ellipsis seemed to separate them too much from the word “by,” which is what they were really supposed to be attached to.
**** Are asterisks for footnotes “punctuation”? It certain senses, they clearly are, yet it feels less natural to refer to an asterisk that way than it would to refer to a comma.
What interests me especially about galaxy is that few people, including astronomers, seem to understand its milky origin in Greek…
As a former astrophysicist, I can only say that I thought the etymology was well-known, even among scientists with no classical training.
There used to be (perhaps still is) a chocolate candy bar in England with the name ‘Galaxy.’ Whether it was named for the milky connection or because it was supposed to have a galactic taste/appeal I don’t know. It was a very ordinary milk chocolate bar, as I recall.
I am grimly amused by the obsequious Ld. in “Ld. Tennyson.” They won’t skip the title even to save precious space! (I realize space is no longer an issue, but this is obviously carried over from the print version.)
Nope, other way around! Click over to the previous version: it was “Tennyson” in the print versions, now mass-replaced by “Ld. Tennyson” in OED3, even in entries that aren’t fully revised.
I think Noetica meant “as if all stars were *only* called suns”, as if there weren’t two different words. I suspect that’s a counterfactual in every language, given how stable the words for SUN and STAR are in the World Loanword Database; any counterexamples?
Dave Wilton counts as an astronomer, a serious amateur. He traces the semantic extension of galaxy in more detail than the OED.
@David L: To me, the dairy-related etymology of galaxy is a learned one not a transparent one that influences how I perceive and interpret the word. Of course, I had minimal exposure to Romance languages in childhood, but even if I had taken French or (more than six hours of) Spanish when I was in elementary or middle school, I would have learned galaxy well before that. Moreover, thanks to light pollution, I had long since given up wondering about the origins if the name before I ever got to see the “milky” streak across the sky. (And I saw that in a planetarium show before I actually got to see it in the firmament.)
Nope, other way around! Click over to the previous version: it was “Tennyson” in the print versions, now mass-replaced by “Ld. Tennyson” in OED3, even in entries that aren’t fully revised.
Well, hush my mouth! There’ll always be an England…
the dairy-related etymology of galaxy is a learned one not a transparent one
Oh, I completely agree, but I picked it up somewhere along the way in learning basic astronomy. Maybe it was in one of Asimov’s science books, which I read along with his fiction when I was young.
The first time I saw the Milky Way for real was when I was in grad school at the University of Sussex. I think I might have been walking home along country roads with fellow students after an evening at a pub in the country somewhere. It’s an impressive sight.
Stu, Lars:
There’s a slight sleight-of-hand in your syllogistic.
Syllogistic, Stu? Rather an erotetic. I offered questions for discussion; then you both discussed.
You presume without argument that these ordering principles are partially ordered, in particular transitive.
You presume. Let’s at least note that terms involving order have been used here in two distinct ways:
• To suggest a regimentation, in particular the “ordering principle” that may be inferred from the regularities and non-chaotic character of a cosmos.
• To suggest features associated with ranking and the like, as in partial ordering and transitivity.
That would not suffice even to show there is a supremum, much less only one, much less a Supreme Supremum from which all smarts flow.
Good, though perhaps not on track for the discussion that I invited. My questions, for the record:
Let me pose these questions another way (or pose similar but better questions), without any talk of ordering:
Discuss. (Show all working. Bonus marks for any mention of Tegmark that will butter atomic partsnips.)
David L, Brett:
the dairy-related etymology of galaxy is a learned one not a transparent one
Yes, Brett. And while some large histories and handbooks of astronomy say why galaxies are so-called, others do not. I have encountered at least serious amateur astronomers who benefited from my explanation.
Hat, ktschwarz:
[as if all stars were called “suns”] is not a counterfactual
I do appreciate a good quibble, Hat. As ktschwarz suggests, I had in mind (as you must know) “if stars were instead called ‘suns’ by default”. Interestingly, even if we lacked the word star and used only suns to refer to those bodies, my point would stand. It’s hard to see how that could arise though, given that the sun appears very different from the other stars to the naked eye and brain; hence the different basic terms. The story with galaxies is not the same; non-Milky Way galaxies, if they were perceived at all before modern telescopy, were taken to be stars. Moons and stars are called “suns” by poetic analogy or the like: a quite different kettle of ordering principles.
“as if all stars were *only* called suns”, as if there weren’t two different words. I suspect that’s a counterfactual in every language
The discovery that stars are the same sort of thing as the sun is quite recent, after all.
“Daystar” in English seems to have originally meant “Venus”; I don’t know how far back its use for “Sun” goes. It turns up in Lycidas, but Milton will have known about stars being suns, of course.
Oti-Volta languages never use the “star” etymon *ŋ͡màt- for “sun”, though a lot of them have promoted it to mean “moon” (in place of proto-Oti-Volta *kìr-), with “star” being reduced to “moonlet” (e.g Kusaal nwadig “moon”, nwadbil “star”, versus Mooré kíuugù “moon”, ã́dgà “star.”) It’s a bit perplexing, in fact: the languages that do this don’t form any kind of genetic subgroup. so it must be some kind of areal thing, given that star/moon doesn’t seem to be a particularly common conflation cross-linguistically. Or it it?
Milton will have known about stars being suns, of course.
I’m not at all sure of that. According to various websites I found, the first person to suggest that our Sun was like the stars except closer was Anaxagoras, ca. 450 BC, but his opinion was regarded as heretical and he was banished from Athens because of it. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that spectroscopy provided definitive proof that the Sun was indeed a star. In the meantime, I imagine many people suspected that to be true but could not prove it.
non-Milky Way galaxies, if they were perceived at all before modern telescopy, were taken to be stars.
Those that are relatively close, since they could be seen in modest telescopes as extended objects, were thought to be nebulae. The catalog of Messier objects, first published in 1774, includes nebulae within our galaxy as well as distant galaxies.
Anaxagoras, ca. 450 BC, but his opinion was regarded as heretical and he was banished from Athens because of it.
Anaxagoras gave several accepted explanations of natural phenomena; Socrates knew of him. But if banished, amazing that that particular opinion has come down the centuries.
Originally there was a distinction ‘fixed stars’ — meaning the background of stars that didn’t move relative to each other vs ‘non-fixed’ — that is, planets and comets (as we’d now say) that did move relative to the background. So ‘stars’ was used of all of them. You can see even with the naked eye that planets aren’t points, don’t twinkle, and aren’t the same colour as the fixed stars.
You can also see with the naked eye that planets aren’t always disc-shaped — that is they go through phases like the moon. You might also observe eclipses crossing them.
In the seventeenth century, Huygens and Newton each concluded that other stars were most probably similar in their basic nature to the sun. However, they did not know how far away they were. The unobservably small parallax of even the brightest stars showed that they must be very distant. However, Galileo had actually previously argued that this meant that they could not be suns like our own, because he noted that some stars seemed to have observable angular widths, which would make them far larger than the sun. Of course, some bright stars—giants—really are much larger, but the apparent angular sizes of the stars, as visible on Earth, is not actually indicative of their geometric size and is mostly related to atmospheric and telescopic diffraction. For example, the true angular diameter of Betelgeuse is only about 0.05 arcminutes.
There were no good ways to figure out how close those stars were in Huygens’ and Newton’s time. Huygens tried to measure the size of a pinhole of sunlight that was as bright as the brightest star Sirius, but he did not get a good estimate of the true distance to the star. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, getting accurate photometry estimates by eye is very, very hard. We perceive brightness (as in, for example, stellar optical magnitudes) on a basically logarithmic scale, so small errors is measurement can correspond to big absolute differences in luminosity. Secondly, Sirius is a much brighter star than the sun (about 25 times greater total luminosity), whereas Huygens guessed that they should be similar in absolute magnitude.
After developing his universal theory of gravitation, Newton was troubled by the fact that the stars seemed to be so far away that their gravitational interactions must be negligible, since they did not appear to be moving relative to one another. However, without accurate understanding of the masses of solar system objects (as opposed to their dimensions and positions), it was still hard to use this to figure out how far away they must be.
You can also see with the naked eye that planets aren’t always disc-shaped — that is they go through phases like the moon.
Maybe if your naked eye was unusually good by human standards. (I’ve heard of reports of people like that.) Otherwise you’d need some magnification – though not very much.
Venus is the usual candidate for this; the largest possible angular size of Venus (as visible from Earth) is in fact just over the usual figure for visual resolution. However, when Venus is near largest size, it is always in its thin-crescent phase – even the semicircular phase of Venus is less than half the size. In addition, the larger angular sizes of Venus occur when Venus is very close to the Sun on the sky, significantly complicating observation.
Jupiter also has a large angular size, but its phases are much less obvious than those of Venus, with only a tiny crescent part of the disc missing at minimum phase.
EDIT:
Huygens tried to measure the size of a pinhole of sunlight that was as bright as the brightest star Sirius, but he did not get a good estimate of the true distance to the star.
…in modern terms (and with modern knowledge) this actually sounds like fairly simple math. The Sun has a visible magnitude of -26.74, and Sirius of -1.46, a difference of 25.28 magnitudes, or approximately a factor of 10 billion; this means that such a pinhole would need an angular diameter about 100,000 times smaller than the Sun itself (or about 0.02 arc seconds), and would imply a distance to Sirius of about 100,000 AU (or 0.5 parsecs).
In fact the true figures are 0.006 arc seconds and 2.3 parsecs. That said, I imagine that with technology Huygens had access to it would also have been hard to make, never mind measure, a pinhole this tiny!
a pinhole this tiny
I didn’t have enough editing time to do a good estimate of this; but 0.02 arc seconds is really not a lot. An object that takes up an angle of 0.02 arc seconds is roughly 57*60*60*50, or about 10 million, times as far as it is wide.
This means that the Huygens pinhole, at a width of 0.1 mm, would have needed to be 1000 meters away. A width of 0.01 mm – too small to resolve without a microscope, and hard to make even with modern tools – would still require a distance of 100 meters. No wonder the experiment failed!