KaiserScience

Ruth Fisker, Quanta Magazine

For more than four centuries, physics has been animated by a single powerful idea: that the bewildering diversity of nature arises from a very small set of simple principles. We call the project to uncover these simple ideas, unification. And the remarkable fact is that time and again, the history of physics has rewarded those who believed that nature is unified. Unification occurs when phenomena that once appeared unrelated are revealed to be different manifestations of the same underlying law. For example, Before Isaac Newton, the heavens and the Earth were seen as separate realms. The falling of an apple was thought of as fundamentally different from the motion of the Moon. Newton showed that both obey the same law of gravity. A single mathematical rule governed the fall of a stone and the orbit of a planet, indeed governed every heavenly body in the universe. Two centuries later the experiments of Michael Faraday and the equations of James Clerk Maxwell revealed that electricity and magnetism are inseparable aspects of a single force: electromagnetism. Countless examples of unifications have guided physics ever since. Today physicists understand the universe in terms of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. These forces appear very different in everyday experience. Gravity shapes galaxies and planets. Electromagnetism governs chemistry and light. The strong force binds protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei. The weak force drives radioactive decay and processes in stars. Are these too all unified? In the 1960s and 1970s physicists discovered that electromagnetism and the weak force are actually two aspects of a single interaction that we now call the electroweak force. This insight, developed by scientists such as Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg, was experimentally confirmed. This led us to our present project, Grand Unified Theories, GUTs – combining three of fundamental forces, all except gravity, into a single framework. We have many lines of evidence leading us to believe that such unification exists.

One major difficulty has long been recognized: quantum theory describes the fabric of spacetime as wildly fluctuating. But Einstein’s theory of general relativity – about gravity – describes spacetime as a smooth fabric.

Each theory works extraordinarily well in its own domain. Yet when we try to combine them, the mathematics breaks down. The effort to reconcile these two frameworks is known as quantum gravity. If we succeed then we could describe the quantum structure of spacetime, black hole evaporation, and the physics of the earliest universe. But wait, there’s more: even a quantum theory of gravity does not automatically explain everything. So physicists further work towards creating a Theory of Everything (ToE) which would unify gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, into one coherent framework. Many of us hope that a ToE might explain things like: why are there exactly the particles that we observe, why do the forces of nature have the strengths that they do, why do particle masses have their particular values, and why does spacetime have the number of dimensions that it does? Perhaps we could learn the entire structure of physics from a single set of principles. Whether such a theory of everything exists and is findable remains unknown. Yet we do know that our ongoing quest for unity has reshaped our understanding of the cosmos. Early attempts towards unification, quantum gravity, and a TOE Kaluza-Klein Theory (1920s–1930s) Einstein’s Unified Field Theory (1920s–1950s) Bootstrap Theory (1960s) S-matrix Theory (1950s–1960s) Early String Theory (1968–1970s) Modern attempts towards unification, quantum gravity, and a TOE String theory and M-theory Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) Causal Dynamical Triangulations CDT Emergent gravity theories Asymptotically safe gravity To be clear… Quantum gravity is not necessarily a TOE. Also, some physicists suspect that complete unification might not exist! The fundamental forces of nature come from two completely different kinds of symmetry. The gauge principle vs. spacetime symmetry divide. This is one of the reasons some physicists suspect that complete unification …wait for it… might not exist. Gravity comes from symmetries of spacetime itself. The relevant symmetry is diffeomorphism invariance (coordinate invariance). The idea is that the laws of physics should be the same under any smooth change of coordinates. This principle leads to General Relativity, where spacetime is dynamical. The other three forces of nature, gauge forces, come from internal symmetries. These are symmetries that do not act on spacetime itself, but on fields defined on spacetime. The key principle is the gauge principle: If a symmetry can vary independently at each point in spacetime, then a force field must exist. So these forces come from internal symmetries of quantum fields, not from geometry.

So we have two different conceptual pictures: Gravity: physics = geometry of spacetime Other forces: physics = quantum fields on spacetime These are fundamentally different. To unify them, a theory would have to explain both kinds of symmetry as manifestations of something deeper. But that is extremely difficult. In fact, there is a famous theorem that shows how hard it is. The Coleman–Mandula Theorem. In the 1960s physicists proved something surprising. spacetime symmetries and internal symmetries cannot combine nontrivially. This result strongly suggested that full unification might be impossible. The one known loophole is an idea called supersymmetry. This idea introduces new generators that transform bosons fermions. This mixes spacetime and internal structures in a new mathematical framework. That is one major reason string theory uses supersymmetry. Supersymmetry is also notoriously unproven. Because of this, some physicists suspect that the universe might fundamentally have two kinds of structure. So the ultimate theory might look like: quantum spacetime + quantum fields on spacetime rather than a single unified object (that’s like what we see in loop quantum gravity and asymptotic safety.) String theory attempts to overcome the divide by changing the starting point. Instead of geometry or gauge fields, the fundamental object is a string. From string vibrations you get: gravitons → gravity, gauge bosons → forces, and all the particles that we know if as matter. So everything comes from one underlying object. That is why string theory is often seen as the most natural candidate for a fully unified theory. The Big Philosophical Question Option 1. Nature is fundamentally unified. All forces come from one structure. Option 2: Nature has two fundamentally different layers: geometry and quantum fields. Programs like string theory pursue Option 1. Programs like loop quantum gravity are comfortable with Option 2.

 

Why is teaching art intrinsically important to being human? Some would have us believe that we should have art education in our schools because it “improves neuroplasticity,” or “develops pattern recognition,” or worse, correlates with higher test scores. To some extent all of that may be true. Yet if art education were to be defended only on the grounds that it boosts academic metrics, then we would have already conceded the battle. We would have accepted that schooling is merely the engineering of measurable outputs, that a child is just a test-taker.

Schools that do not value art, music, and philosophy do not deserve the name “schools.” They are “passing-the-test” factories. Consider this: Even those people who you might imagine only care about core subjects – doctors, scientists, engineers – harbor love for the arts. My friends go to Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Currier Museum of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some paint, sculpt, do photography; the walls of our homes are adorned with the art that we love for its own sake.

• Sofonisba Anguissola painted faces caught mid-thought, gestures suspended between restraint and revelation. In a culture that trained women to observe rather than declare, she turned intimacy into authority.

• Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino – known as Raphael – created finely ordered compositions that never feel stiff; every figure belonga exactly where it stands, as if harmony were the natural state of things.

• Van Gogh painted as if sensation were an emergency – color pressed into service, line vibrating with need. What endures is not his anguish but his ferocity of seeing, a belief that the world, if stared at hard enough, might finally speak back.

• Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings seep into the canvas, color behaving less like pigment than like weather. Tides of pigments and breath that arrive, linger, and withdraw, leaving our eyes changed.

• Yaacov Agam’s art focuses on pure color and form, inlfuenced in equal parts by Kabbalah and geometry. Much of his art is kinetic, mirroring his belief that reality is a constant state of “becoming” rather than a fixed “being”. Some of his works require the spectator to move around them to experience the changing imagery.

Art education trains us in attention: to seriously look at art is to slow down long enough to notice form, feeling, ambiguity, and intention – things that cannot be reduced to utility or speed.

Art places us in a lineage. When we study art, we encounter how others across centuries and cultures have made sense of being alive.

Art reaches us before we have words and after words have failed. Where argument persuades and information explains, art resonates. It bypasses our defenses through honesty of form. A painting or sculptures doesn’t tell us what to think; it creates a space in which something can happen to us.

To be sure, art does not make life easier but it does make life larger. It creates room for complexity, beauty, and sorrow.

Art education is not an “extra.” It is among the oldest practices of human civilization. It is the emotional and spiritual architecture of our species. Our kids can live without AP Biology or Statistics. But we need and deserve a rich art education in our public schools.

Symmetry is an important concept for understanding how our universe works.

Symmetry lets us see what stays the same when certain conditions change.

Symmetries are powerful because they reveal deep patterns in nature. They allow us to make predictions.

Many basic laws of nature – e.g. conservation of energy and of momentum – arise from symmetry.

Here we consider the idea of a broken symmetry: when any kind of symmetry is broken, new structures, behaviors, and distinctions emerge. Most complexity and richness in our universe – from the formation of crystals to the existence of mass! – comes from broken symmetry. Without symmetry breaking, the world would be far simpler, but also far less interesting.

Two kinds of broken symmetries Explicitly broken symmetries

This is when the laws of the universe, or the math equations that we’re studying, contain a term that breaks the symmetry. The brokenness is built in. Several basic laws of physics – the way our universe works – are inherently asymmetrical.

Gravity (breaking up-down symmetry) -Gravity has a preferred direction, symmetry is clearly not present!

Electric field (breaking left–right symmetry) – If we place a charged particle in a uniform electric field, the field picks out a preferred direction.

Magnetic field (these break several kinds of symmetry, one of which is directional)
A magnetic field puts a force on moving charged particles in a direction defined by the right-hand-rule.
The equations include a preferred direction that we can call helicity.
A positively charged particle feels a force in a direction defined by what we call the right-hand rule.
A negatively charged particle feels a force opposite to the direction defined by the right-hand rule.

Were all laws of nature originally symmetric? We have reason to believe that all the initial laws of nature, right after the Big Bang, were inherently symmetrical.
But very (very!) shortly after the moment of creation, they went through a phase of breaking symmetry – this led to the asymmetrical laws of nature that have since existed for the last fourteen and half billion years. To read more about this see

• The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
• The Cosmic Landscape, Leonard Susskind
• Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Heinz R. Pagels
• Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, Leon Lederman

When did the universe’s initial symmetry break into the asymmetrical laws that we know as the laws of nature?

Electroweak symmetry – At temperatures around the Higgs scale (~100–160 GeV) the Higgs field acquired a nonzero vacuum expectation value, splitting the unified electroweak force into the electromagnetic and weak forces and giving masses to W/Z bosons and fermions. We have strong reason to believe that this symmetry breaking happened in our universe about 10 -12 seconds after the Big Bang.

Grand Unified Theory (GUT) breaking – If the strong force and electroweak forces were unified at very high energies, that unification would have ended in a GUT phase transition at energies far above the electroweak scale. When this happened is speculative – estimates vary depending on what model we use. This may have happened between 10 -36 to 10 -33 seconds after creation.

QCD confinement (quark→hadron) – When the universe cooled to temperatures of order 100–200 MeV, quarks and gluons became confined into hadrons (protons, neutrons), and chiral symmetry was (approximately) broken. This seems to have happened at about 10 -5 seconds after the Big Bang.

Planck era / quantum gravity about 10^-43 seconds – At or before the Planck time, the classical description of spacetime breaks down. What symmetries existed or broke there is unknown and model‑dependent. This could have happened at the unimaginably tiny time of 10 -43 seconds after creation.

Caveats: The electroweak force and QCD transitions are grounded in laboratory-tested physics and cosmological reasoning. But GUT and Planck‑scale symmetry breaking are theoretical and depend on speculative physics beyond the Standard Model (GUT models, inflation, quantum gravity.)

Spontaneously broken symmetries

When the laws are symmetric, but the resulting state is not.

Examples of spontaneous symmetry breaking in classical mechanical

The Buckling Rod – A perfectly straight vertical rod under pressure has rotational symmetry (it looks the same from all sides). Once the pressure exceeds a critical limit, it spontaneously buckles in one specific direction, breaking that rotational symmetry.

The Balanced Pencil – A pencil balanced perfectly on its tip has rotational symmetry around its axis. Gravity acts symmetrically, but any tiny fluctuation causes the pencil to fall in a specific, arbitrary direction, breaking the symmetry.

Question: if we did this in a vacuum, with no air molecules, could the pencil theoretically balance forever?

Answer from Floris on Physics StackExchange answers:

No. The first photon of light that hits it would disturb your perfect equilibrium. AND the moon’s tidal forces (which are not always pointing in the same direction) would disturb it. AND the sun’s tidal forces would disturb it. I could go on. The equation of motion of a pencil tells us that as soon as you are off center by the smallest amount, the motion will build up. It is not a stable equilibrium.

And graphite cannot sustain the weight of a pencil on a mono-atomically sharp tip… According to this supplier of high quality graphite the compressive strength is about 25 ksi (~170 MPa – figure 5-2 from the reference). The smallest tip that can support the weight of 0.05 N would be a circle with a radius of 0.01 mm. That’s a pretty sharp tip, for a pencil. It’s not nearly “atomic”.

Finally, even at absolute zero, the uncertainty principle requires that the position of the center of mass not be known perfectly. The (quantum mechanically required) fluctuations of the position of the center of mass should be sufficient to cause the pencil to fall over eventually.

– Can we theoretically balance a perfectly symmetrical pencil on its one-atom tip

Similarly, there’s a great analysis here –

“Given that Quantum Mechanics exists, what is the longest time you could conceivably balance a pencil, even in principle? I will walk you through my approach to answering this question. I think it is a good problem to illustrate how to solve non-trivial physics problems….”

“…I know that in quantum mechanics there is an uncertainty principle which says that you cannot precisely know both the position and momentum of an object. This of course means that even in principle, since our world is dominated by quantum mechanics, I could never actually balance even my model pencil forever, because I could never prepare it with perfect initial conditions. The uncertainty principle tells us that the best possible resolution I could have in the position and momentum of an object are set by Planck’s constant…This has to be true for our pencil as well. In fact I can translate the uncertainty principle into its angular form…”

“…The real question is? How long will it take this pseudo-quantum mechanical pencil to fall? In order words the question I am really trying to answer is: Assuming a completely rigid pencil which you place in a vacuum and cool down to a few millikelvin so that it is in its ground state. Roughly how long will it take this pencil to fall?”

“…So, what is the best time you could balance a quantum mechanical pencil, i.e. what is the absolute longest time you could hope to balance a pencil in our universe? About 3.5 seconds. Seriously.”

You can read all the details and math here: How Long Can You Balance A (Quantum) Pencil, Alemi

Fine cracking pattern on porcelain or China (crazing, crackle glaze)

When the glaze is molten in the kiln, it is a smooth, liquid glass that fits the ceramic body perfectly. At this stage, the surface is uniform and looks the same regardless of where you look or how you rotate it.

As the piece cools, the glaze and the underlying clay body contract at different rates (thermal expansion mismatch). The glaze typically shrinks more than the clay, creating immense tensile stress. To relieve this stress, the glaze breaks. While the laws of physics acting on the plate are uniform, the glaze cannot stay smooth; it must fracture in specific, arbitrary locations.

The once-uniform surface is now replaced by a complex network of lines. Even though the stress was applied equally in all directions, the resulting cracks choose specific paths, breaking the original uniformity.

Ge-ware (Song Dynasty): One of the most famous examples, where Chinese potters intentionally mastered “crackle” as an aesthetic. They used glazes with high thermal expansion (often rich in sodium or potassium) to ensure a dense network of cracks.

Raku Ware: A Japanese pottery style where pieces are removed from the kiln while red-hot and cooled rapidly. The extreme temperature shock causes immediate, dramatic symmetry breaking in the glaze.

Vintage China (Accidental Crazing): Many antique plates develop these patterns over decades due to moisture absorption or repeated heating and cooling in daily use.

Snowflake Crackle: A rare, complex type of crazing where multiple layers of cracks overlap, resembling scales or ice crystals.

This is defined as spontaneous because the external force (cooling) is uniform and does not tell the cracks where to go. The specific web of lines is determined by tiny, microscopic imperfections in the material.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in condensed matter physics

Ferromagnetism: In a hot material, atomic spins point in random directions, maintaining rotational symmetry.

As it cools below the Curie temperature, the spins align in a single direction to reach a lower energy state, creating a magnet and breaking rotational symmetry.

Crystallization: A liquid (translationally and rotationally symmetric) freezes into a crystal with a specific, ordered lattice (breaking translational and rotational symmetries).

Superconductors: Electrons form Cooper pairs, breaking gauge symmetry, leading to the expulsion of magnetic fields., and allowing current to flow without resistance.

What does the freezing of water into ice have to do with symmetry breaking?
Water expands as it turns into ice. In a typical ice cube tray, the freezing begins at the edges and surfaces, which are in contact with cold air or the tray. A solid ice shell slowly forms around still-liquid water in the center.

As the interior water freezes and tries to expand, it pushes outward against this rigid shell. The ice can’t stretch much, so stress builds until it fractures—producing cracks.

Ice contracts as it cools even further after freezing. Initially, the outside of the cube is colder than the inside.
This is important: the colder ice contracts slightly more, while the slightly warmer interior ice resists cracking. This creates thermal stress, similar to cracking glass when one side is heated or cooled quickly. Even perfectly pure, bubble-free ice will crack under these gradients.

Another layer of what’s going on here: Clear ice (fewer bubbles) transmits stress, rather than diffusing it
Cloudy ice, paradoxically, can sometimes crack less visibly because all the bubbles and defects dissipate stress.

Now a deeper layer of understanding: the crack patterns can reflect the crystal structure of the ice! The ice is crystalline, in a hexagonal structure called Ice Ih.

There is a way to create large ice cubes with almost no bubbles or cracks: Freeze the water slowly and directionally (usually from the top-down.) This allows the expansion to push the liquid water away, rather than trap it. It allows the water’s dissolved gases and impurities time to migrate out. And the internal stress is released gradually

In physics we say that cracking ice is a form of symmetry breaking. It’s not a textbook example like magnetization or crystallization, but it fits the deeper idea of how initially symmetric conditions give rise to asymmetric outcomes.

What symmetry exists before cracking? Consider an idealized situation. A cube of pure, clear water. What’s special about a cube of water? It has no preferred direction. Water is spatially symmetric:

– Rotational symmetry (no direction is special)
– Translational symmetry (small shifts don’t change the physics)
– Stress within it builds uniformly as the freezing progresses

So what breaks the symmetry? When the internal stress exceeds the fracture threshold, the system must choose:

– Where the first crack forms
– Which direction the crack then propagates
– Which crystallographic plane the crack then follows

None of these choices is dictated by the macroscopic symmetry of the setup. The moment that a crack nucleates, the symmetry is gone. The governing physics is symmetric but the situation we end up with is not. This is the hallmark of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

What symmetry is broken as water freezes into crystallized ice?

Rotational symmetry: before cracking, all directions are equivalent. After cracking, the crack defines a **preferred axis**.

Translational symmetry – stress was uniform; now there is a localized discontinuity.

Time-reversal symmetry (effectively) – entropy jumps, energy is dissipated as sound and heat.

On the other hand, this is not a classic symmetry-breaking phase transition
Going from water → ice is a genuine symmetry-breaking phase transition
(continuous rotational symmetry → discrete crystal symmetry)

But cracking is a mechanical instability, not a new thermodynamic phase

Still, it belongs to the same conceptual family: symmetric laws → asymmetric outcome due to instability

When did the ancestors of native Americans arrive in what we now call New England?

Their earliest confirmed presence in New England is about 12,000–13,000 years ago (10,000–11,000 BCE.) This is when the last Ice Age was ending and the glaciers that once covered New England had recently retreated. There are contested hints of human activity in this region dating back 14,000–16,000 years, but none are universally accepted.

What routes did they take to get here?

The ancestors of Native Americans came from northeastern Asia, most likely Siberia. Two major routes are supported by current evidence:

(A) The Land Bridge Route (Beringia) – During the Ice Age, sea levels were lower. A land mass called Beringia connected Siberia and Alaska. People lived in Beringia for thousands of years before moving south.

(B) The Coastal Migration Route – Growing evidence says many early groups traveled down the Pacific Coast by boat, following kelp-rich shorelines, entering the Americas before interior ice-free corridors opened. This could explain faster and earlier migration.

Most archaeologists think both land and coastal routes played roles.

How did their settlement of the Americas progress?

Once in North America, some 16,000 years ago, early groups settled across the Pacific Northwest, Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands. As the Laurentide Ice Sheet receded, newly opened land in New England became habitable.

Paleoindian groups followed megafauna (mammoths, mastodons, caribou,) and riverways. They moved into newly forming forests and grasslands. New England became accessible by around 13,000–12,000 years ago, and that is when we begin to see firm archaeological evidence there.

Language

All the tribes listed below spoke languages within the Algonquian language family, allowing for some intertribal communication and trade.

From ancient to modern times

European diseases and warfare decimated the populations and disrupted these traditional political structures, leading to the merging of some tribal identities into “praying towns” and other communities. Descendants of these peoples continue to live in the region today, with some groups, like the Mashpee Wampanoag, Aquinnah Wampanoag, and Hassanamisco Nipmuc, having state or federal recognition.

Which tribes lived in northeastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire?

Pennacook – A large political-cultural confederacy. They lived in from what is now Salem Massachusetts, up into what is now southern New Hampshire.

The Pennacook in Massachusetts were the Agawam, Nashua, Naumkeag, Pawtucket, Pentucket, Piscataquog, Souhegan, Wachuset, Wamesit and Weshacum.

Prior to European colonization, it is estimated there were originally 12,000 Pennacook living in New England in about 30 villages. They were fishermen, farmers, hunters and gatherers. At first, the Pennacook lived in birch bark wigwams but eventually began building fortified villages of longhouses due to an increase in tribal warfare.

During 1616-1619, the Pennacook tribe was hit hard by an epidemic, possibly smallpox, which greatly reduced their numbers.

Naming confusion: Some English colonial sources called all Merrimack Valley groups “Pawtuckets” while others used “Pennacooks” to refer to the entire confederation. Still other old sources used local band names (e.g., “Wamesit Indians,” “Nashua Indians”). As a result, modern texts may sound contradictory, even though they’re describing the same people at different levels of social organization.

Massachusetts North Shore towns

The Pawtucket, a group within the Pennacook, lived on the coastal Massachusetts region from Salem north into southern New Hampshire, and along the lower Merrimack River.

Massachuseuck (Massachusett) – a set of closely related Eastern Algonquian groups living around Massachusetts Bay and inland toward the Charles, Neponset, and Taunton river valleys.

Massachusett Proper (Massachuseuck) – around Neponset River, Milton/Quincy, Great Blue Hill area, Chelseas (then Winnisimmet)

Pawtuxet – Shawmut Peninsula (early Boston) , Brookline, Cambridge, Quincy

Nonantum / Natick – a Massachusett-speaking group along the upper Charles River

Neponset Band – along the Neponset River (Milton, Dorchester)

Punkapoag (Ponkapoag) – southwest of Boston: Milton, Canton, Randolph, Stoughton

Musketaquid – Concord area, also connected to Nipmuc group

Southern New England

Wampanoag (Wôpanâak) –

A Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands. Prior to English contact in the 17th century, they numbered as many as 40,000 people living across 67 villages. These were on the east coast as far as Wessagusset (Weymouth), all of what is now Cape Cod, and the islands of Natocket and Noepe (now called Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard), and southeast as far as Pokanocket (now Bristol and Warren, Rhode Island). These communities including the Patuxet and Nauset

The Patuxet was a Wampanoag village in and around modern-day Plymouth. It was virtually wiped out by European diseases between 1615 and 1619, before the Pilgrims arrived in 1620. Tisquantum (Squanto), who famously aided the Pilgrims, was the last known surviving Patuxet.

Nipmuc
Algonquian-speaking peoples, Central and Western Massachusetts
Nipmuc bands often formed alliances with nearby tribes like the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Narragansett rather than uniting into a single political entity.

Pocumtuc
Connecticut River Valley, including Deerfield, Northampton, etc.

Nonotuck
around modern Northampton

Agawam
Springfield

Mahican
While living mostly in what is now New York, they had a presence in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts

References

The Massachuseuck (Massachusett) tribe lived on land that stretched from about Scituate in the south to Cape Ann in the north and west to Concord.

Indigenous People in Massachusetts: A Library Guide

Wampanoag History

Native American Tribes by Rebecca Beatrice Brooks

How New Science Is Editing Our Old Story of the First Americans. Humans colonized the New World earlier than previously thought—a revelation that is forcing scientists to rethink long-standing ideas about these trailblazers. By Heather Pringle, Scientific American, Nov 2012.

Maps

Map by Peter Vexillographer, Indigenous American nations, c.1500s (Public domain, copyright-free)

 

Why is music intrinsically important to being human?

Every year I read yet another article trying to persuade us that we should have music education in our schools because it “improves neuroplasticity,” or “develops pattern recognition,” or – my personal favorite (sarcasm intended) – “correlates with higher test scores.” I do not deny any of these claims; most are somewhat well-substantiated.

But let me say this clearly – if music education were to be defended only on the grounds that it sharpens the brain or boosts academic metrics, then we would have already conceded the battle. We would have accepted that schooling is merely the engineering of measurable outputs, that a child is just a test-taker.

Schools that do not value music, art, philosophy, and the classics do not deserve the name “schools.” They are “passing-the-test” factories.

Consider this: Even those people who you might imagine only care about core subjects – the physicists, mathematicians, engineers – harbor love for the arts. Many play instruments, attend concerts, compose. Einstein famously played violin not as a hobby but as a way of thinking.

Music for Its Own Sake

To reduce music to its extrinsic rewards is to misunderstand what music is. We do not ask of Homer or Shakespeare whether they improve test scores. We do not justify the existence of Michelangelo or Toni Morrison because art increases neuroplasticity. We do not defend Plato because philosophy teaches “critical thinking skills.” Some things are valuable for their own sake: music is one of those things.

Through the hardest times of my life, music carried me.

It helped me escape when nothing else could. It reached wounds I had no words for. It lifted emotions to the surface that speech could only circle around but never touch.

Music as the Language of the Soul

This insight is not unique to any one culture. In Hasidic Jewish thought, we speak of the nigun נִיגּוּן, a wordless melody that bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to our nefesh (soul.) A nigun does not argue or explain. It opens. It reveals. It awakens. As the Hasidic masters teach, every soul has a unique melody, and prayer is the act of calling that melody forth. Melodies uplifts the heart and breaks open hidden places of the self that spoken prayer might not reach.

For those of us who don’t think in traditional religious terms, the phenomenon remains the same. Unitarian Universalists approach the world through humanistic, existential, sometimes even atheist frameworks, yet they too describe music as a primary language of human spirituality. They teach that music connects us to awe, mystery, harmony, depth.

The Sufis whirl not to escape God’s world but to enter it more deeply through rhythm.

Unitarians sing to weave together diverse souls into a single fabric of meaning.

Jews and Chritians chant Psalms that align the mind and heart.

Buddhists chant syllables whose power lies not in their literal meaning but in their vibration.

Music shows us that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

I have had communion with thousands at concerts listening to Journey, Chicago, Hall & Oates, Tangerine, Yes, or ELP, with spectators at football areans where marching corps bands buoyed the spirits of all present, with the well-dressed people at the Boston Sympany Orchestra. And in 1985 I and all my friends were in rapt, spiritual union listening to the world’s greatest bands perform at the 1985 history making Live Aid concerts at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Music as Human Flourishing

f education is to prepare us for anything, it must be for the project of becoming human. That isn’t about mere utility. It requires beauty, transcendence, connection. When students perform music together something ancient and profound occurs. Breath synchronizes. Hearts align. Barriers between us soften. Music helps bind individuals into a community. This is not an accidental side effect; it is part of why we invented – or discovered? – music in the first place. Long before schools, even before agriculture, humans chanted, drummed, and sang.

Music education is not an “extra.” It is among the oldest practices of human civilization. It is the emotional and spiritual architecture of our species. Our kids can live without AP Chemistry. But they need and deserve a rich musical education in our public schools.

Regions of Massachusetts: Sudbury, Assabet and Concord river watershed and the Nashoba Valley.

This area extends from part of the area here shown as the northeast, into part of the MetroWest region.

Nashoba Valley is a commonly used regional name in north-central Massachusetts around the Route 2 and interstate 495 area. To be sure, it isn’t a valley, it is not defined by a geographical feature. It’s a term used by locals in this area. It covers parts of northwestern Middlesex and northeastern Worcester counties.

“When the English first settled in this region—which became Acton and Littleton—the Native Americans living here were known as the Nashoba. The name means, roughly, ‘land between the waters’, a reference to the many ponds, wetlands, and streams that abound in the area. The Nashoba Indians were a small extended family band loosely affiliated with the regional Nipmuc tribe, which occupied an inland area of eastern Massachusetts, south of the New Hampshire Pennacook.”

Native American Kiosk, Regional Native American Presence

Hydrologically the area contains Nashoba Brook (a large tributary of the Assabet River) and lies inside the larger Nashua/Nashua–Assabet watershed landscape. But there’s no actual one topological valley that fits this region. It’s more of a cultural name.

Towns commonly considered part of Nashoba Valley Acton, Ayer, Bolton, Boxborough, Devens, Dunstable, Groton, Harvard, Lancaster, Littleton, Pepperell, Shirley, Stow, Townsend, Westford

The Nashoba valley can be thought of as a part of the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord watershed region. This is a geographically defined region – and one that can be seen when flying overhead. This is the land where precipitation drains toward the connected rivers, the Sudbury, the Assabet and the Concord. This region, depending on how it is measured, comes close to 400 square miles. It covers 36 towns in Middlesex and Worcester Counties, just west of Boston. This region has distinct geographical features resulting from past glacial activity, including kames, kettle holes, and drumlins.

Notes: A great map can be found here: The Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Wild and Scenic River Conservation Plan 2019 Update

 

“Housing affordability is a shared problem that is getting worse across the country: 80 percent of Americans living in rural communities believe housing affordability is getting worse in their community, while 72 percent of residents in urban areas feel the same. This sense is shared across all demographics, regardless of partisan identification, race, age, gender, education, or whether you own or rent your home.”

– – Joe Radosevich, Doug Turner, Americans Recognize Housing Affordability Crisis

We can have a lovely, walkable, bikeable, environmentally conscious town that shows up on “happiest cities” lists. But if our grocery clerks and nurses and teachers and firefighters can’t afford to live here, it’s not a community. It’s a theme park.
– thetallnathan

We need to work together across political lines to create solutions

• Ban some or most AirBNB. Some European countries are already doing this.

• Have cities purchase some homes that go on the market, and turn them into either public housing, or homes sold at reasonable rates to families. Otherwise, as we have seen, those houses are snapped up by oligarch investment firms that keep these homes empty on purpose. They artificially drive up rents. This isn’t free market capitalism, this is neo-feudalism.

• Impose a vacancy tax for homes that are not occupied by a primary resident. Vancouver and Paris are doing this.

• “Income restricted owner-occupied housing is an often overlooked tool that increases resident equity and creates affordable housing submarkets. NYC did this through HDFCs, owner-occupied apartments that have income caps at the time of purchase. (Such as 160% of AMI). This returns residences to their primary social purpose: housing. This lets people find long term homes and enables ownership and wealth generation.

• Get rid of the “Only build near big cities.” For example consider the attempts to build more affordable housing near Boston. All have failed: every single social justice demanded making more building only in the areas with the highest constructionist costs. None seriously looked at the rest of Massachusetts: It’s beautiful.

A genuine solution would be to make it more attractive to build and live outside the greater Boston area. How can we convince more people to build homes and apartments here? More people will want to live there when those areas get:

* Significantly improved, reliable, transportation.

* Tax breaks for business/job districts: encourage new business, factory, and job growth

* Increased support of the arts & culture: public libraries, farmers markets, funky live music venues, opera, ballet, pops type symphony orchestras, artist lofts and galleries.

* Initiatives to improve local public schools,

* Funding to create more, and more affordable, daycare

Ideas that sound good but probably won’t work

Proposal: Have the president reduce federal regulations that increase the cost of housing?

Problem: There are no federal regulations that directly increase the cost of housing. And a bigger problem: There are important safety regulations that some people want to get rid of to lower costs but that could be catastrophic: it is a bad idea to get rid of EPA. “Construction General Permits, right?!” These permits prevent the erosion of construction-contaminated soils into waterways.

Some Libertarians want to gut OSHA requirements, but those are the only laws that keep America’s construction workers from getting maimed or killed too often. Construction work is the 4th most lethal (fatality rate) career in the US, the one with the most actual deaths, and the 8th highest rate and number of non-fatal injuries or deaths.

EPA 2022 Construction General Permit (CGP)

Most Dangerous Industries: National Safety Council.

proposals on affordable housing

Proposals: First home buyer grant back

Problem: Australia implemented a first home buyer grant back in 2000. It increased the purchasing power of first homebuyers, but in doing so it further inflated house prices. This is because demand-side policies that give people more money to spend on housing … tend to just end up increasing prices more. This suggests that the idea may reduce housing accessibility in the long term – the very problem that such measures are designed to address.

First-home buyers grants – 20 years of failed attempts to improve housing affordability

A fascinating proposal to solve the housing crisis

The most uncomfortable housing truth: 65-year-old empty nesters are living in 4-bedroom houses. But 35-year-old families are crammed in 2-bedroom apartments Why don’t they switch? Because they are in mortgage rate prison. We will explain, and show the solution:

The Boomer situation:
They bought a house in 1995: $150k
Refinanced in 2020: 2.5%
House now worth: $600k
Current payment: $800

So if they downsize to a smaller $400k home?
Their new payment: $2,400
This is TRIPLE the payment yet for LESS house.

So what happens? They. Don’t. Move.

“I rattle around this 4-bedroom like a ghost, but my mortgage is $750. A senior apartment is $3,000.”

They are trapped in a financial prison.

Meanwhile many young families say things like : “Our second kid sleeps in a closet. Literally. A closet. But hey, at least Grandma has a craft room she uses twice a year.”

This is the housing mismatch that is destroying America. The numbers are STAGGERING:

• 68% of 3-4 bed homes: Occupied by 1-2 people
• 42% of studios/1-beds: Have families with kids
• Estimated mismatch: 15-20 MILLION households

We do have the houses: they’re just with the wrong people. The bitter irony:
Boomers WANT to downsize ✓
Young families NEED those houses ✓
Everyone would be happier ✓
The mortgage market: “LOL no” ✗

What other countries do:
• Property tax breaks for downsizing
• Stamp duty exemptions
• Mortgage portability

What America does about this: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The solution? Let people take their mortgage rate with them when they move! We should look into getting politicians across the aisle to work on something like this!

What’s the hold up? Oligarch banks would lose money, so it’ll never happen without pressure from the government. Welcome to the intergenerational housing hunger games

Source – Macro Pulse on Threads, 6/30/2025

One of the problems: Oligarchies are buying up real estate, taking them away from American homeowners

Picture this: you’ve saved for years, pinched every penny, and finally found a house you want to call home. But just as you’re ready to make an offer, someone swoops in with a fistful of cash—no contingencies, no hesitation—and snatches it away. That “someone” isn’t a neighbor or a growing family. It’s a financial titan like BlackRock, Vanguard, or State Street.

These corporations aren’t just managing trillions of dollars for Wall Street; they’re coming for your living room. These three firms, often called the “Big Three,” have built a web of investments that stretches across industries, and now their fingerprints are all over the housing market. And make no mistake—this isn’t just a real estate story. This is about how America lives, who can afford to own, and who’s left paying rent forever.

…BlackRock, through its subsidiary Invitation Homes, owns more than 80,000 single-family homes across the U.S., making it one of the largest landlords in the country. Vanguard and State Street aren’t far behind, with stakes in similar companies like American Homes 4 Rent and Tricon Residential.

Example – J, a 24-year-old mechanic in Charlotte, North Carolina, thought he’d found the perfect starter home—a modest three-bedroom in a quiet suburb. He offered $275,000, his absolute max. The seller said another buyer offered $300,000 in cash. That buyer was Invitation Homes. Now, J rents an apartment for $1,900 a month—ironically, paying more than what his mortgage would’ve cost. “It’s heartbreaking,” J told me. “I wanted a backyard for my dog, a place to build a family. Instead, I’m handing over my paycheck to some faceless corporation.”

The Big Three don’t stop at snatching up homes—they profit off the squeeze. Invitation Homes, for example, doesn’t just buy properties. It turns them into rentals and often raises rents year after year. A 2022 study found that corporate landlords like Invitation Homes charge 15-22% higher rents than mom-and-pop landlords.

When BlackRock or Vanguard buys 100 homes in a neighborhood, it’s not just the housing market that shifts. The community does, too. Families lose out on homeownership, schools see declining stability as renters come and go, and local businesses take a hit when people feel less rooted.

See the full article here

– The Housing Crisis Monopoly: How BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Are Taking Over Your Neighborhood, MB’s Global politics Substack, Dec 08, 2024

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has been trying to get traction for a bill he has authored which would stop hedge funds from buying up homes and sitting on them. Oddly, he seems to be having difficulty finding much support for the bill…

“The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 2023, introduced by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Washington Rep. Adam Smith, would force hedge funds to sell at least 10% of the single-family homes they own for the next 10 years. After 10 years, investors would be fully banned from acquiring single-family residences.”

“Blackstone is now the largest corporate landlord on Earth with over 300,000 homes in the U.S. Billionaires and corporations have bought millions of homes and either raised rents or left them as empty investments. There are 16 million vacant houses-28 for every homeless person.”

 

 

 

Article archive for students from – They’re using the techniques honed by oil and gas to find near-limitless clean energy beneath our feet, CNN, 7/22/2025

Deep beneath Utah’s desert soil, an oil drill bored through the Earth at a blistering pace earlier this spring. Gnarly looking drill bits tore through granite at around 300 feet per hour. It was done after just 16 days. The borehole, completed in April, stretches nearly 3 miles toward the center of the Earth, where temperatures reach around 500 degrees Fahrenheit and fossil fuels lurk between ancient sediments.

But this project is not searching for fossil fuel. It’s seeking next-generation clean energy. Fervo Energy, the Houston-based company leading the project, is one of several using the tools and advanced techniques of the oil and gas industry to drill many miles underground to reach the hot rock below. Their quest is to make clean, abundant geothermal energy available anywhere on the planet.

Next-gen geothermal has the potential to meet global electricity demand 140 times over, according to the International Energy Agency. It’s one of the only forms of clean energy that may be palatable for the fossil fuel-focused Trump administration.

Yet the pathway to success is littered with challenges, from high costs and complex engineering problems to the risk of earthquakes as drills prod deep into the ground.

Advocates say geothermal could be a clean energy gamechanger. But to work, the industry needs to figure out how to drill deeper, faster and more cheaply — and time is of the essence as the climate crisis escalates. Humans have used geothermal energy for thousands of years, first for cooking and bathing, and more recently for heating homes and generating electricity. It is the stuff of clean-energy dreams: near limitless and available 24/7.

Solar and wind are cheap but intermittent, relying on the sun shining and the wind blowing. Finding a so-called baseload source of clean energy that can support them, one that can turn on with the flick of a switch and run all the time, is a climate holy grail — especially as electricity demand soars, driven by AI and data centers.

This is where geothermal could shine. The problem is how to scale it. Conventional geothermal needs natural, underground reservoirs of hot water or steam, and it needs the rocks down there to be porous, allowing the water to move through them, heat up, and be sucked up to the surface.

“Conventional geothermal needs natural, underground reservoirs of hot water or steam, and it needs the rocks down there to be porous, allowing the water to move through them, heat up, and be sucked up to the surface.”

“This geology is rare, present only in certain places including China, Iceland, Kenya and parts of the United States. Geothermal currently accounts for less than 1% of global demand.”

“Next-gen geothermal promises get around these limitations. It just needs heat; the rest it creates artificially. Fervo’s next-gen technique is called “enhanced geothermal.” It drills two wells deep underground, first vertically then horizontally. It pumps down fluid at high pressure to shatter the rock in a process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” very similar to the technique used to extract oil and gas. Water is then pumped down one well, to circulate through the cracks and heat up, before it’s brought to the surface via the second well.” – source – CNN article

Enhanced geothermal still faces many challenges, including earthquake risks

“Some companies are developing a different technology able to decrease the earthquake risk. It involves no fracking. Instead, it’s like a “massive underground radiator,” said Robert Winsloe, an executive vice president at the Canadian-based company Eavor. Eavor’s technique works like this: it drills two deep vertical wells close to each other and brings them together horizontally in a closed loop. It then drills and connects multiple loops off the horizontal pipe. Water circulates through the pipes, picking up heat from the rock and flowing to the surface”

“Operating costs are very low, as is seismic risk. But many experts question whether it could ever be economically viable given thr eye-watering upfront costs. The system relies on huge loops to collect enough heat, Moore said: “It’s very expensive drilling.””

Closed loop geothermal, with no fracking

And here is a possible major breakthrough – Quaise ultra-deep geothermal drilling

“Other companies are trying to go deeper and hotter, using technology that sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie. Massachusetts-based Quaise Energy wants to drill down more than 6 miles to reach temperatures of over 900 degrees Fahrenheit, by vaporizing dense rock. Its gyrotron device produces high-powered energy waves that will be sent down a long metal tube miles into the Earth to destroy rock by heating it to temperatures of around 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

The company is conducting field trials in Texas, and plans to drill its first full size geothermal boreholes by 2028. The eventual aim is to be able to drill 6 miles in just 100 days, said Matthew Houde, co-founder and chief of staff at Quaise. For comparison, the deepest well ever drilled, the Kola borehole in Russia completed in 1992, is 7.5 miles deep and took two decades to drill. Quaise’s plans are bold but many are skeptical. “Quaise really hasn’t done a lot in terms of field demonstrations yet,” Tester said. “They’ve made some incredible claims, and I’m not even sure that they’ll get there.”

MM wave directed energy drilling. High resolution image from – Quaise’s ultra-deep geothermal drilling plans: Your questions answered

About geothermal in general, this CNN article states – “A big advantage of geothermal in the US is that it seems to be the rare form of energy with bipartisan support. It’s green and creates jobs, pleasing Democrats. It’s home-grown and fits with an energy independence agenda, pleasing Republicans. Even better, geothermal harnesses years of American drilling and fracking know-how from oil and gas extraction, helping bridge an energy culture long dominated by fossil fuels.”

From – They’re using the techniques honed by oil and gas to find near-limitless clean energy beneath our feet, CNN, 7/22/2025

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This has been in the news recently – a successful rocket launch using a rotating detonation engine. This could be a great phenomenon for physics teachers to use in a high school physics class.

This animation was created by Michelle Lehman a Science Animation Producer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs. Her website is michesniche.com.

From Oak Ridge National Laboratory: What are rotating detonation engines?

Revisiting an engine concept first proposed in the 1950s, researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) are conducting trailblazing research that may finally unlock its potential for ultra-high-efficiency propulsion and power generation…. The concept for RDEs was pioneered in the 1950s by the late James Arthur Nicholls, a professor in UM’s Department of Aeronautical (now Aerospace) Engineering. Like many innovations in engineering, his idea was the result of asking an unorthodox question. Noting how malfunctioning rocket engines tended to explode, it made him wonder: What if such explosions were used in an engine to propel rockets?

A conventional rocket engine uses compressors to send a pressurized mixture of fuel and oxygen into a combustor where the mixture ignites and burns via deflagration—essentially the same combustion process used by car engines or jet turbines. This deflagration releases energy, which can be used to drive a mechanical device (such as a turbine) or to thrust a rocket upward. An RDE, on the other hand, burns its fuel by detonation rather than deflagration—combustion occurs in a wave front that is led by a sustained shockwave that continuously rotates within a cylindrical combustor’s inner and outer walls.

In the RDE combustion process, the detonation wave builds its own pressure rather than losing pressure as occurs in conventional compressor-equipped engines. The result is a much higher degree of efficiency in pulling energy out of the fuel since it, in effect, acts as its own compressor even as it’s releasing energy. While a detonation engine’s burn rate is much faster than that of conventional turbine engines, its combustion chamber is also much smaller, resulting in higher pressure levels—and even more efficiency in extracting the energy.

In the RDE combustion process, a detonation wave builds its own pressure rather than losing pressure as occurs in conventional compressor-equipped turbine engines. The result is a much higher degree of efficiency. Animation by Michelle Lehman/ORNL

High resolution version available here.

Such efficiency gains are especially appealing for electricity production—a keen point of interest for NETL, which focuses on transitioning technology from the laboratory to industry.

“The application we’re looking at here is in power generation with a 3 to 5 percentage-point improvement in overall cycle efficiency. This is huge in the gas turbine world, where they’re usually looking at a tenth of a percent of improvement in efficiency. Ultimately, that boils down to lowering your energy bill,” said Don Ferguson, a research engineer with the Thermal Sciences group at NETL’s Research & Innovation Center. “If we can produce more power for a given amount of fuel, then ultimately you reduce the cost of electricity as well as reduce the amount of carbon that’s generated at the power plant. We’re extracting more energy out of the fuel, in this case maybe natural gas or some coal-derived syngas.”

However, this pressure-gain combustion process is very difficult to study and develop, which is one reason why RDE technology hasn’t been fully realized since Nicholls’ initial prototypes. Conventional turbine engines have been much simpler to refine—increasing their efficiency typically meant raising the gas temperature going into the turbine or raising the compressor’s pressurization—so that’s where most R&D money went for the past 50-odd years. But now we’re reaching the limits of materials science to increase temperatures or pressure in these engines, which has renewed interest in RDE technology and its potential to burn a variety of different fuels. However, its extreme variations in temperature (between 300 and 3,000 kelvin) and the speed of its shockwaves (2 kilometers per second) make experiments extremely difficult.

“Because the physics is so complex, the operating environment so harsh, there are limited measurements that we can make. We can measure macroscopic things like pressure and temperature, but it’s hard to get in there with lasers and stuff like that to really understand the physics of what’s going on,” said Peter Strakey, a research scientist with NETL’s Thermal Sciences group. “We have to understand this optimization process—how do you redesign the injector and the fuel manifold and the air manifold to actually achieve a pressure gain? The simulations are critical to understanding the physics and being able to kind of see inside these devices and understand what’s going on.”

Understanding all of the physics at play during an RDE detonation wave is critical to making the technology safe for the commercial uses GE is pursuing. For example, in order to replace an aircraft engine with a detonation engine, you must take into account all of the plane’s different operating conditions—taxiing, taking off, cruising—to ensure the detonation engine’s efficiency remains stable. And to do that, the first step is to understand what happens to the key physics inside the engine when those conditions change.

“So many of the techniques we have for conventional jet engines and gas turbines don’t work in these kinds of extreme environments. So simulations are the only way to go. There’s no way around it,” Raman said. “However, simulating the complicated physics in RDEs is very challenging. These simulations have as much physics as the most complicated problem you can think of—fluid mechanics, shockwaves, chemical reactions, a heat transfer to the wall.”

Fortunately, Raman did find a way around those obstacles to produce the most insightful combustion simulations to date…. Beyond higher efficiency, Raman sees another advantage to RDE technology: new options for machine design. For example, detonation engines would not necessarily need to be located under jetliner wings like conventional turbines—they could be placed in more compact locations or even wrapped around the fuselage.

“You can come up with very unconventional designs that so far are not possible. That, to me, is a game-changer. All of this research into RDEs came because we thought we’ll get a higher efficiency, but I think this has really opened up the design space,” Raman said. “Jet engines and stationary gas engines, which generate electric power, are nominally the same kind of devices, but they have all different kinds of physics. But in the case of RDE, you can deal with one physics and target many different applications.” Tangirala predicts that we’ll see RDE-powered rockets soon, followed soon after by aircraft and power-generators.

From Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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Teachers, philosophers, historians, and scientists clarify ideas, arguments, and narratives. Our tools are precision, transparency, and logical coherence. We define our terms and explain our reasoning, thus making our arguments comprehensible to others.

In contrast, postmodernists and deconstructionists use dense, jargon-heavy language that intentionally obscures ideas. They often deny the possibility that we can speak about truth, objectivity, and meaning. Their writing is deliberately opaque. They use words to undermine straightforward interpretation.

Postmodernists and deconstructionists claim that they write this way because

• Reality is too complex to be reduced to plain language, so one must use language that is too complex to have straightforward meaning.

• Clarity can be deceptive, masking deep structural issues or ideological assumptions. Therefore one must avoid clarity.

• Ambiguity and complexity reflect the real nature of human experience, so they conclude that their writing must mirrors that complexity.

The problem with their position is two-fold:

(A) It is not they who discovered that the world is complex, but rather us philosophers, historians, and scientists. We have always admitted that reality is complex, and that words can be misunderstood. That’s precisely why we work so hard to make our ideas understandable: we want our arguments to be understandable and amenable to peer review.

(B) Instead of working harder to make things clear, they use words to confuse and darken, rather than to illuminate.

Here’s a comparison of a clear writer, whose goal is to be understood, followed by an example of postmodernist writing:

Bertrand Russell writes “The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.”
– The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Russell is making a clear, concise point: philosophy helps free us from unexamined beliefs. His sentence structure is straightforward. You don’t need specialized jargon to grasp his meaning.

Now compare this to the postmodern/deconstructionist writing of Jacques Derrida:

“The grammè—thought of as the most elementary unit of the trace—cannot be positioned as a sign. It is the sign of that which is not itself a sign, but the possibility of the sign. Hence the trace is not only the disappearance of origin—within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow—it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never there in the first place.”
– Of Grammatology (1967)

Derrida is discussing a deconstructionist idea called “trace” His writing is abstract, recursive, and intentionally elusive. He’s trying to undermine the reader’s usual assumptions about “origin,” “sign,” and “meaning” without clearly explaining anything.

Let’s cut right to the chase: postmodernism is often just a dodge:

Philosopher John Searle reports this conversation with Michel Foucault about deconstructionist Jacques Derrida:

‘You can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.”
But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy.
I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste.
And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?”
And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”’

Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle. By Steven Postrel and Edward Feser, Reason magazine, February 2000

Many of us have seen these techniques used shamelessly by postmodern academics

“The fundamental silliness of postmodern relativism is often concealed by obscure prose and an appeal to authority. When challenged, the response is often: ‘If you don’t understand it, it’s because you’re not clever enough.’”

—Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (2008)

“There are lots of things I don’t understand—say, the latest debates over whether there are 4 or 5 fundamental forces in nature. But I don’t think it’s gibberish. What I don’t understand in the writings of Lacan or Derrida, I do think is gibberish. Why? Because it’s not just obscure—it’s empty.”

—Noam Chomsky, Interview with The New York Times (2004)

And “What you find is a lot of play with language that doesn’t really say anything. And if you ask for a coherent argument, you’re told you just ‘don’t get it.’”

—Noam Chomsky, Interview with The New York Times (2004)

“What Derrida is saying is both obscure and trivial. He has discovered a way of writing that gives the appearance of depth to something that is, at best, shallow. It is a literary form of intellectual blackmail.”

—Roger Scruton’s summary in various essays

“Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life. Postmodernism is for you. All you need to do is learn a few tricks of the trade—obfuscation, relativism, a smattering of technical vocabulary—and you’re in.”

—Richard Dawkins, Foreword to Intellectual Impostures (also known as Fashionable Nonsense, 1998)

John Searle offers a concise and insightful critique:

“I believe that anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.”

“In my review, I gave examples of all these phenomena. There is an atmosphere of bluff and fakery that pervades much (not all, of course) deconstructive writing. What becomes even more surprising is that the authors seem to think it is all right to engage in these practices, because they hold a theory to the effect that pretensions to objective truth and rationality in science, philosophy, and common sense can be deconstructed as logocentric subterfuges”

“To put it crudely, they think that since everything is phony anyway, the phoniness of deconstruction is somehow acceptable, indeed commendable, since it lies right on the surface ready for further deconstruction. Thus, the general weaknesses of the deconstructive enterprise become self-justifying. With such an approach I am indeed not sympathetic.”

John Searle, from An Exchange on Deconstruction. Louis H. Mackey, reply by John R. Searle. The New York Review of Books, 2/2/1984

Paul Fry, Yale scholar, knew Derrida when Derrida was in residence at Yale. In this 2010 lecture (chapter 2 on Derrida’s style) he makes it clear what Derrida’s strategy was in being difficult: Derrida is engaging in an evasive dance and he doesn’t even have distinct positions for any idea. Derrida dances around arguments, to avoid having his words come from any kind of definite argument. (Starts at the six minute mark here)

Let’s not be misunderstood: It’s perfectly fine to write about challenging topics using academic jargon – but jargon should make things easier to understand.

In physics we have precise terms – jargon – such as energy, force, momentum, and impulse. To a person who never took a physics class, these words might seem hard to understand. Some folks may even use those words interchangeably (which is an error!) But once we take even a high school level introductory class, we soon realize that each has a precise definition. The purpose of these words is only to help clarify how our world works. From planets to automobiles, from the ways our lungs work to the way that airplanes work – these words are used to clarify and explain.

Postmodernists and deconstructionists have the opposite approach: They take already existing words – like semiotic, sign, trace, text, discourse – but use them in deliberately ambiguous and often contradictory ways (and an article on how they do this is coming soon.) Also, they create neologisms which may sound technical or profound, but which are vague and used in self-contradictory ways (and yup, an article on this with examples is coming soon as well.)

While you’re here see our articles on Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, ELA, and working with all our parents, of every philosophy and background, we’ve worked on responsible ways to utilize DEI without politics.