Happy Birthday, Lord Byron: His Epic Poem “Don Juan,” Annotated by Isaac Asimov and Illustrated by Milton Glaser

by Maria Popova

 

Three of history’s greatest geniuses converge around some of the finest satire ever written.

Despite having fathered Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, Lord Byron (January 22, 1788–April 19, 1824) is best remembered for his poetry, countless collections of which have been published in the centuries since he put ink to paper. But arguably the best such volume is a rare vintage gem published by Doubleday — which also commissioned Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne and Edward Gorey’s paperback covers for literary classics — in 1972. The lavish thousand-page tome Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan (public library) presents Byron’s Don Juan — one of the great epic poems in the English language, launching an audacious and timeless attack on greed, complacency, and hypocrisy — with annotations by beloved writer Isaac Asimov, a man of strong opinions and a large heart, and breathlessly gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations by none other than Milton Glaser, creator of the iconic I♥NY logo and celebrated as the greatest graphic designer of our time.

What makes the pairing especially poetic is that, besides their match of cultural stature, Asimov and Glaser have in common a certain sensibility, a shared faith in the human spirit — Asimov with his religion of humanism and Glaser with his belief in the kindness of the universe.

To be sure, Asimov takes no prisoners with his annotations — or, rather, plays along with Byron — beginning with the opening verse, which reads:

FRAGMENT
I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling—
Because at least the past were passed away—
And for the future—(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say—the future is a serious matter—
And so—for God’s sake—hock and soda water!

Beneath it, Asimov winks:

This isolated stanza has nothing to do with the poem, but it epitomizes Byron’s utter lack of reverence for anything—even himself—and therefore sets the tone of what follows, even if it is divorced from the content.

After Byron’s third stanza, which begins with “You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know” and ends “… because you soar too high, Bob, / And fall, for lack of moisture quite a dry, Bob!,” Asimov, who wears the many hats of historian, etymologist, lexicographer, literary critic, and cultural commentator, adds an entertaining and educational clarifier:

“A dry Bob” seems to have been then-current slang for intercourse without ejaculation (“lack of moisture”). The use of the phrase shocked and (of course) titillated the public and was a particularly effective way of indicating that Southey went through the motions of writing poetry without producing anything poetic.

Though most of Asimov’s annotations offer biographical and historical context, they are by no means dry or bland. He imbues his commentary with his characteristic snark: After another Byron verse that reads “And recollect a poet nothing loses / in giving to his brethren their full meed / of merits, and complaint of present days / Is not the certain path to future praise,” Asimov snidely remarks:

It is obvious that Byron emphatically does not follow his own advice, but then few people do.

Indeed, Asimov seems entranced by Byron’s contradictions. In another note, he writes:

There was a great deal of cousin-marriage in Byron’s family. But that was not all. Perhaps the most scandalous item in the Byronic array of scandal was the fact that Byron seems to have made his half-sister, Augusta, his mistress, and to have had a daughter by her. He was fascinated by his own action in this respect and dealt with incest over and over in his writing.

Asimov’s own witty and spirited irreverence comes through once again in a comment on Byron’s usage of “wh—” and “G—d” in the fourth canto, wherein Asimov adds to literary history’s finest meditations on censorship:

Like “damn,” “whore” could not be spelled out, though what sense of purity is served by a missing “o” is known only to the Devil and to censors.
[…]
“God,” like “whore,” sometimes requires a missing “o” to be acceptable to the censor. Surely only a censor’s mind could find such neatly equal embarrassment in these two words.

Asimov weaves his own reservations about religion into the annotations, remarking in one about Byron’s line “‘But heaven,’ as Cassio says, ‘is above all—’” in canto nine:

The phrase “heaven is above all” is a kind of last resort of puzzled mankind. If problems are insoluble, leave them then to God, to whom nothing (by definition) is insoluble. THus, in Shakespeare’s Othello, when Cassio is tempted into drinking by the villainous Iago, the former quickly finds himself befuddled by alcohol and must find refuge in “Well; God’s above all…”

Above all, however, Asimov seems to peer straight into Byron’s soul, discerning his motives and intentions with equal parts clarity and compassion. In the twelfth canto, where Byron writes “I thought, at setting off, about two dozen / Cantos would do; but at Apollo’s pleading, / If that my Pegasus should not be founder’d, / I think to canter gently through a hundred,” Asimov remarks:

Byron may well have intended to keep writing Don Juan all his life as a perfect vehicle for satirizing the age. But, alas, he was approaching the end.

In his final footnote, Asimov revisits the subject of Don Juan’s intended fate:

Byron always maintained he had no plan for Don Juan, but simply improvised as he went along, taking all the world as his target. And, indeed, as we go from canto to canto, the plot grows thinner, the digressions longer, the satire deeper, so that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that no matter how long he had lived and how long written, Byron would never have finished Don Juan nor progressed enormously with the plot, even though the number of cantos had reached the century mark. At one time he said he would send Juan to every nation in turn, satirizing each in its own fashion, and have him end an extreme radical like Cloots in the Reign of Terror, or else to end by sending him either to Hell or to an unhappy marriage, whichever was worse. 

And yet — I wonder if Byron might not have relented. Might he not have had Don Juan visit Hell, but have had him saved from damnation by the intercession of the shade of Haidée, surely to be found in Heaven? Might he not, then, in the end, have married Leila, the little girl he had saved at Izmail, and settled down to the blameless life of husband, father, and country squire?

Though Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan is, sadly, long out of print, I was fortunate enough to find a surviving copy of this out-of-print treasure at Heather O’Donnell’s wonderful Honey & Wax, which is a gift to bibliophiles everywhere and a heartening game-changer for the world of rare books.
Copies can also be found elsewhere online as well as at some better-stocked public libraries, and are well worth the splurge or the trip.

Complement this treat with other rare artistic editions of literary classics, including Matisse’s 1935 etchings for Ulysses, Picasso’s drawings for a naughty ancient Greek comedy, William Blake’s paintings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Salvador Dalí’s prolific illustrations for Don Quixote in 1946, the essays of Montaigne in 1947, Alice in Wonderland in 1969, and Romeo & Juliet in 1975.

Physicists Produce Quantum Version of the Cheshire Cat

2014-01-22 16:45

Katia Moskvitch in ScienceNow

 

 

 

In Lewis Carroll's famous children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice meets the Cheshire Cat, which disappears and leaves only its grin behind. Now, physicists have created a quantum version of the feline by separating an object—a neutron—from its physical property—its magnetism. The experiment is the latest example of how quantum mechanics becomes even weirder using a technique called weak measurement and could provide researchers with an odd new experimental tool for performing precision measurements.

In quantum physics, tiny particles can be in opposite conditions or states at the same time, a property known as superposition. For instance, an electron can literally spin in opposite directions simultaneously. Try to measure the spin, however, and that state will "collapse" so that the electron is found spinning one way or the other. That's because quantum theory generally forbids you to measure a particle's state without altering it—at least ordinarily.

But in 1988, Yakir Aharonov, a theorist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and colleagues dreamed up a way to measure delicate quantum states without disturbing them through so-called weak measurements. There's a price to pay, of course. A weak measurement can't reveal anything about an individual particle, but only the behavior of many particles all in the same state. And it requires not only putting the particles in just the right state to begin with, but also picking only those in a specific different state in the end, so the whole experiment has to be analyzed retrospectively. Nevertheless, weak measurements can probe phenomena that ordinary measurements can't, and last November Aharonov and colleagues described how they could be used to realize a quantum Cheshire Cat.

Here’s the idea. A beam of neutrons all magnetized in the same direction, say right, enters a device called a neutron interferometer (see diagram). The beam strikes a beam splitter, which splits not only the macroscopic beam but also the quantum wave describing each neutron. So after the beam splitter, each neutron is in the bizarre quantum state: in path 1, polarized right, and in path 2, polarized right. This is the "preselected" state. After taking different paths, the waves recombine at the second beam splitter and interfere with each other so that the neutrons all exit the interferometer through one of two "ports," the light port.

Now, here's where things get weird. Experimenters install a few gadgets before the second beam splitter that work like a filter so that if a neutron is in the state in path 1, polarized right and in path 2, polarized left—the "postselected state”—it will come out the dark port instead. That may sound superfluous, because each neutron is not in that state. However, the two states have a common part—in path 1, polarized right—and that overlap ensures that some neutrons emerge from the dark port, just by virtue of trying to filter out this postselected state.

If you look at only these postselected events, you can say for sure that the neutron went through path 1. That's because the only parts of the preselected and postselected states that overlap are the ones for path 1. On the other hand, if you try to measure the magnetism, you'll find that all the magnetism is in path 2. That's because to know the magnetism is there, you essentially have to apply a magnetic field that flips the neutron’s polarization. So after the measurement, the parts of the altered preselected state and postselected state that are identical are the ones for path 2.

The traditional interpretation is that the whole argument is moot. If you reach into path 1 with a neutron detector, then that measurement alters the original quantum state, making it pointless to speculate about what you would have seen if you'd measured magnetism in the path 2 instead, and vice versa. According to Aharonov’s theory though, the measurements could be done weakly, so that they would not alter the neutrons' state. And that's exactly what Yuji Hasegawa of the Vienna University of Technology and colleagues have done, as they report in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.

Using a neutron interferometer at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, the researchers inserted an absorber that soaked up only a few percent of the neutrons—not enough to ruin the interference of the waves. When they put it in path 2, the rate of neutrons leaving the dark port remained the same. When they put it in path 1, the number decreased, proving that the neutrons in the postselected state go through path 1. Then, they applied a small magnetic field to slightly rotate the neutrons’ polarization and perturb the interference pattern. When the field was applied to path 1, it had no effect. But in path two, the number of neutrons exiting the dark port changed, proving the neutrons' magnetism was all in path 2. Thus the cat—the neutron—was separated from its grin—its magnetism.

The experiment will “surely help us understand better the counter-intuitive nature of quantum phenomena,” says Sandu Popescu, a theorist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the experiment. The odd quantum phenomenon might even prove useful for making better precision measurements, he says. Some physicists have been testing whether Newton's law of gravity remains correct at distances shorter than a millimeter or so; the delicate experiments can be muddled by extraneous electromagnetic effects. But if researcher could split the mass of neutrons from their magnetism, then they might be able to study gravitational effects without being disturbed by electromagnetic ones, says Aephraim Steinberg, an experimenter at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Epigenetics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the unfolding of an organism or the theory that plants and animals (including humans) develop in this way, see epigenesis (biology). For epigenetics in robotics, see developmental robotics.

In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence; it also can be used to describe the study of stable, long-term alterations in the transcriptional potential of a cell that are not necessarily heritable. Unlike simple genetics based on changes to the DNA sequence (the genotype), the changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype of epigenetics have other causes. The name epi- (Greek: επί- over, outside of, around) -genetics.^[1]

 

The term also refers to the changes themselves: functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve a change in the nucleotide sequence. Examples of mechanisms that produce such changes are DNA methylation and histone modification, each of which alters how genes are expressed without altering the underlying DNA sequence. Gene expression can be controlled through the action of repressor proteins that attach to silencer regions of the DNA. These epigenetic changes may last through cell divisions for the duration of the cell's life, and may also last for multiple generations even though they do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;^[2] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.^[3] (There are objections to the use of the term epigenetic to describe chemical modification of histone, since it remains unclear whether or not histone modifications are heritable.)^[4]

 

One example of an epigenetic change in eukaryotic biology is the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. In other words, as a single fertilized egg cell – the zygote – continues to divide, the resulting daughter cells change into all the different cell types in an organism, including neurons, muscle cells, epithelium, endothelium of blood vessels, etc., by activating some genes while inhibiting the expression of others.^[5]

 

In 2011, it was demonstrated that the methylation of mRNA plays a critical role in human energy homeostasis. The obesity-associated FTO gene is shown to be able to demethylate N6-methyladenosine in RNA. This discovery launched the subfield of RNA epigenetics.^[6][7]

Molecular basis of epigenetics

Epigenetic changes can modify the activation of certain genes, but not the sequence of DNA. Additionally, the chromatin proteins associated with DNA may be activated or silenced. This is why the differentiated cells in a multi-cellular organism express only the genes that are necessary for their own activity. Epigenetic changes are preserved when cells divide. Most epigenetic changes only occur within the course of one individual organism's lifetime, but, if gene inactivation occurs in a sperm or egg cell that results in fertilization, then some epigenetic changes can be transferred to the next generation.^[22] This raises the question of whether or not epigenetic changes in an organism can alter the basic structure of its DNA (see Evolution, below), a form of Lamarckism.

 

Specific epigenetic processes include paramutation, bookmarking, imprinting, gene silencing, X chromosome inactivation, position effect, reprogramming, transvection, maternal effects, the progress of carcinogenesis, many effects of teratogens, regulation of histone modifications and heterochromatin, and technical limitations affecting parthenogenesis and cloning.

 

DNA damage can also cause epigenetic changes.^[23][24][25] DNA damages are very frequent, occurring on average about 10,000 times a day per cell of the human body (see DNA damage (naturally occurring)). These damages are largely repaired, but at the site of a DNA repair, epigenetic changes can remain.^[26] In particular, a double strand break in DNA can initiate unprogrammed epigenetic gene silencing both by causing DNA methylation as well as by promoting silencing types of histone modifications (chromatin remodeling) (see next section).^[27] In addition, the enzyme Parp1 (poly(ADP)-ribose polymerase) and its product poly(ADP)-ribose (PAR) accumulate at sites of DNA damage as part of a repair process.^[28] This accumulation, in turn, directs recruitment and activation of the chromatin remodeling protein ALC1 that can cause nucleosome remodeling.^[29] Nucleosome remodeling has been found to cause, for instance, epigenetic silencing of DNA repair gene MLH1.^[19][30] DNA damaging chemicals, such as benzene, hydroquinone, styrene, carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene, cause considerable hypomethylation of DNA, some through the activation of oxidative stress pathways.^[31]

 

Foods are known to alter the epigenetics of rats on different diets.^[32] Some food components epigenetically increase the levels of DNA repair enzymes such as MGMT and MLH1^[33] and p53.^[34][35] Other food components can reduce DNA damage, such as soy isoflavones^[36][37] and bilberry anthocyanins.^[38]

 

^{For more details and references see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics}