Roberto Trotta – At the Edge of the Sky
By Albert Haldane – December 2014 (CE)
My original interest was real (by hearing the author speaking and reading extracts of his work on C-SPAN) for the literary endeavor of physicist Roberto Trotta who wrote “”The Edge of the Sky”, But I feel compelled (after reading the book entirely and with quiet pleasure) to put my thoughts in writing to convey something very dramatic and very different from the admiration found in the quasi unnanimous opinion of the “critics”. (see amazon Editorial Reviews of the book)
I shall explain later the relevance of those thoughts with the pervasive theme of this website – namely the quest for the fundamental elements of all languages.
First, if you have not read the little and illustrated volume (about 80 pages), here is how it presents itself on amazon.com :
“From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to dark energy, from the origins of the universe to its ultimate destiny, The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the most important discoveries and mysteries in modern cosmology—with a twist. The book’s lexicon is limited to the thousand most common words in the English language, excluding physics, energy, galaxy, or even universe. Through the eyes of a fictional scientist (Student-People) hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World), cosmologist Roberto Trotta explores the most important ideas about our universe (All-there-is) in language simple enough for anyone to understand.”
Up to you to read the book before reading my words. (my thoughts). If you stop now, you have a chance to develop your own experience, without external influence.
Pause
Pause more
Pause again, and think more.
Make a decision:
X– Stop reading this post and purchase “The Edge of the Sky” with the intent to read the book.
Y– Continue reading this post.
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Here are my thoughts:
What a pity! The use of common words to describe the Universe as understood today by the best scientists in the world, excluding all scientific terms, has on my mind a deleterious effect: wiping out all knowledge I had previously acquired (over years and years) from reading multitudinous books written by scientists who did not avoid using the specific terms used by the best members of their profession.
Yes, I admit it, I have become the equivalent of a genuine ignoramus! Cosmologically dum! A conceptless physicist! My representation of elemental and cosmological nature is now dissolved in a splash of vaguely white light. Before reading this little volume, my mind was exploring and enjoying the universe of electrons, protons, neutrons, leptons, bosons, quarks, strings, electromagnetic fields, weak and strong nuclear forces, galaxies, nebulae, photons, gamma rays, cosmic particles, neutrinos, dark energy, dark matter…
Now, my representation of the universe is bathing in a kind of whitish vaguely meaningful substance resulting from the juxtaposition or blend of commonly used English words.
Reader, now pause again.
Do not despair! Maybe your cousin or friend, who chose Option X (read the book before reading this post), had no previous scientific knowledge of sub-particles or particles’ interactions, or spectrographic astronomy; maybe she and he were never made aware of the speed of light, or even of the distance between our sun and earth, or even of the rotation speed of planet earth on its axis…If that is the case, they are not at risk to be submitted to any “wiping out” of knowledge by common words, their mind never having fraternized with scientific words, notions, models and theories.
Neither are you at risk, dear reader, if you too, chose to refrain from entering the world of modern science whenever quantum-physicists, chemists, biologists or astronomer-cosmologists open the door to their class by the mean of books or Youtube lectures.
No absent knowledge can be washed out of your mind.
So, maybe cousin, friend and you (if you are ignorant of all that modern science has to offer) will gain some kind of knowledge by reading “The Edge of the Sky”. It is my wish that you benefit from your reading.
The rest of my thoughts, I shall publish in a new post.
I shall then reveal that, in fact, I did not lose my scientific knowledge. It has been preserved in my “scientific memory”, apparently unconnected to my “ordinary memory” in which the common words used the Edge of the Sky have been stored. Common words have rejoined ordinary words, their meaning remaining common and ordinary, while scientific words preserve their vigor, fertility, and evolving colors.
So, for me at least, the common words cannot replace the scientific terms. Common words are certainly useful, in a lexicon, to expand on the meaning of terms selected by scientists to designate their discoveries – be it a particle of matter or an energy field – but they cannot replace the term itself. Roberto Trotta reversed the way lexicons work. A “Big Seer” cannot mean “LargeTelescope”, “Great-Father-God” is not equivalent to Saturn, “normal drops” is not usefully describing “elementary particles”, “sister drop” is scandalously far from informing on the reality of “antimatter” etc etc
Science, with its terms well crafted, carefully etymologized, proposes to human curious minds, a full blooming and productive orchard. Sciences enrich us; the work of Roberto pauperizes.
More on the power of words in the next post
