The Quantum Physics of Harry Potter, Broken Down By a Physicist and a Magician

in Books, Science | October 10th, 2012

If you con­sid­er your­self a Har­ry Pot­ter fan, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly read read all sev­en of J.K. Rowl­ing’s nov­els and watched all eight of their film adap­ta­tions. The ques­tion of where to go from there has many pos­si­ble answers. Some true believ­ers plunge straight into, and often con­tribute to, the vast body of unof­fi­cial read­ing mate­r­i­al that is Har­ry Pot­ter fan fic­tion. Oth­ers turn to the schol­ar­ship sur­round­ing Pot­ter and his world, a field that includes such stud­ies of vary­ing seri­ous­ness as The Sci­ence of Har­ry Pot­ter, Har­ry Pot­ter and Phi­los­o­phy, The Values of Har­ry Pot­ter, Look­ing for God in Har­ry Pot­ter, and If Har­ry Pot­ter Ran Gen­er­al Elec­tric. In the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to lec­ture above, quan­tum physi­cist Kris­ter Shalm explains, appro­pri­ate­ly enough, the quan­tum physics of Har­ry Pot­ter.

Shalm thus faces two tasks: to explain the rel­e­vant facts of quan­tum physics in a man­ner under­stand­able to the lay­man, and the even more for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of relat­ing the rel­e­vant facts of Har­ry pot­ter in a way that won’t com­plete­ly alien­ate the unini­ti­at­ed. But pulling this off in an enter­tain­ing fash­ion would seem to land right in the wheel­house of a man who bills him­self as “The Danc­ing Physi­cist” and states his mis­sion to “make some of the mind-bog­gling con­cepts in quan­tum mechan­ics more approach­able” by col­lab­o­rat­ing with “a magi­cian, musi­cians, and dancers.” That magi­cian, a cer­tain Dan Trom­mater, turns up in this lec­ture to com­ple­ment Shalm’s phys­i­cal angle with a mag­i­cal one. Togeth­er, they illus­trate for us how Dra­co Mal­foy’s tele­por­ta­tion tech­niques resem­ble what quan­tum physi­cists do in the lab on a reg­u­lar basis, and what rel­e­vance Schrödinger’s famous cat has to that fate­ful prophe­cy that either Har­ry Pot­ter or Lord Volde­mort would ulti­mate­ly die. (Luck­i­ly for me, Shalm does­n’t reveal which one; I haven’t read the books myself yet!)

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cel­e­brate Har­ry Potter’s Birth­day with Song. Daniel Rad­cliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune, The Ele­ments.

Har­ry Pot­ter Pre­quel Now Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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University Presses & Libraries Turn to Pinterest to Promote Books

in Books, Web/Tech | October 8th, 2012

I’ll admit it: I’m not a big Pin­ter­est user. Until very recent­ly I thought the social net­work­ing site was a bit twee—too much about cute clothes and crafts, not enough about ideas.

Turns out the web’s 15th largest site has a lot more to offer.

Open Cul­ture has its own embry­on­ic Pin­ter­est page. But, more impor­tant­ly, uni­ver­si­ty press­es are mak­ing wide­spread use of Pin­ter­est to pro­mote new book titles. Like­wise, aca­d­e­m­ic libraries are using their Pin­ter­est pages to pro­mote events and help fund major cap­i­tal improve­ments. For libraries and archives, a major ongo­ing mis­sion is to keep the col­lec­tions vis­i­ble. It’s not easy to let the world know about your one-of-a-kind hold­ings, and Pin­ter­est poten­tial­ly offers a great way to bring these mate­ri­als to new and  younger audi­ences.

Big retail­ers haven’t fig­ured out how to make real mon­ey off of Pin­ter­est yet, though one the­o­ry holds that the site’s high­ly visu­al nature puts peo­ple in the mood to click and buy. True or not, uni­ver­si­ty press­es and libraries need all the help they can get to gin up sales, so they’re wad­ing into the Pin­ter­est waters and see­ing what hap­pens.

Alice Northover has cre­at­ed a Tum­blr that cat­a­logues a few of the best uni­ver­si­ty press­es that have Pin­ter­est pages. The list is a handy map of trea­sures to be found online.

There are the usu­al, and com­plete­ly worth check­ing out, sus­pects: Of course, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press has a page that fea­tures, among oth­er things, inter­views with Har­vard Press authors. Watch math­e­mati­cian Paul Lock­hart, author of Mea­sure­ment, trip out on par­al­lel­o­grams.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­sis­sip­pi has a robust pres­ence that fea­tures an exten­sive col­lec­tion of Faulkn­er crit­i­cism and appre­ci­a­tion.

Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty’s page links to its audio archive, which includes a fun, episod­ic pro­gram called “Wait? They Banned What?”. You might be sur­prised to find out that Bing Cros­by song was banned dur­ing World War II for being too catchy.

One of the best may be one of the most unsung, how­ev­er. New Zealand’s Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty of Welling­ton’s library hous­es a major col­lec­tion of Samoan his­tor­i­cal objects. Check out the library’s repos­i­to­ry of amaz­ing South Pacif­ic his­to­ry.

These sites offer very few dec­o­rat­ing tips for your Air Stream trail­er, and I found no links to loca­vore jam-mak­ing busi­ness­es, but Alice, whomev­er she may be, has cre­at­ed a great cura­to­r­i­al tool for explor­ing a new trend in book pro­mo­tion.

But wait. Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press has a pin on its page called “Lib­ri­an­ista” that links to short-hem­line clothes mod­eled by bespec­ta­cled cuties. I guess even the world’s old­est pub­lish­er gets to have a lit­tle fun.

Thanks to Kirstin But­ler for send­ing Alice’s Tum­blr our way.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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Albert Camus Talks About Nihilism & Adapting Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed for the Theatre, 1959

in Books, Literature, Theatre | October 5th, 2012

If there is no God, said Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky, life is mean­ing­less. And with­out mean­ing, men and women will “go stark, rav­ing mad.” For the deeply skep­ti­cal and agnos­tic Albert Camus, Dos­toyevsky’s books were a rev­e­la­tion. While he could­n’t agree with the Russ­ian nov­el­ist’s pre­scrip­tion of faith in an unseen deity, Camus felt Dos­toyevsky had con­vinc­ing­ly described the tragedy of man’s exis­tence in an indif­fer­ent uni­verse.

Camus first read Dos­toyevsky when he was 20 years old, and lat­er called it a “soul-shak­ing expe­ri­ence.” He was moved by the moral weight of Dos­toyevsky’s words. When the hor­rors of Stal­in’s purges came to light, Camus refused to look away. As he lat­er said, “The real 19th cen­tu­ry prophet was Dos­toyevsky, not Karl Marx.”

One of Dos­toyevsky’s works that affect­ed Camus the most was the apoc­a­lyp­tic 1872 nov­el The Pos­sessed, which in recent years has been trans­lat­ed as Demons or The Dev­ils. It’s a com­plex sto­ry of a con­flict­ed Russ­ian soci­ety as it descends into anar­chy and chaos with the spread of nihilism. The themes explored in The Pos­sessed were so absorb­ing to Camus that in 1959 he pub­lished a three-act stage adap­ta­tion, Les Pos­sédés. The play pre­miered on Jan­u­ary 28, 1959 at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, and on that day he gave an inter­est­ing inter­view with Pierre Dumayet for French tele­vi­sion, which you can watch in the video above. In the pro­gram hand­ed out at the the­ater that night, Camus described the nov­el­’s impor­tance: “Les Pos­sédés is one of the four or five works that I rank above all oth­ers. In more ways than one, I can say that it has enriched and shaped me.”

You can down­load a copy of The Pos­sessed and oth­er works by Dos­to­evsky from our col­lec­tion of 375 Free eBooks. Major works by the great Russ­ian author can also be found in our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion.

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John Waters Reads Steamy Scene from Lady Chatterley’s Lover for Banned Books Week (NSFW)

in Books, Literature | October 3rd, 2012

In case you did­n’t real­ize it, we’re smack dab in the mid­dle of Banned Books Week, which reminds us not to take intel­lec­tu­al free­dom for grant­ed. Hun­dreds of books are cen­sored each year in Amer­i­ca’s schools, book­stores and libraries, many of them works of unques­tion­able lit­er­ary mer­it, books like The Catch­er in the Rye, To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and Huck­le­ber­ry Finn.

The New York Times has cre­at­ed a handy guide out­lin­ing Ways to Cel­e­brate Banned Books Week, while City Lights, the beloved San Fran­cis­co book­store found­ed by Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, came up with its own way to raise aware­ness. They got film­mak­er John Waters to read a steamy pas­sage from D.H. Lawrence’s con­tro­ver­sial nov­el, Lady Chat­ter­ley’s Lover. Although orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1928, an uncen­sored ver­sion of the book did­n’t appear in Britain until 1960. And almost imme­di­ate­ly Pen­guin, the pub­lish­er, was tried under the Obscene Pub­li­ca­tions Act. A jury returned with a ver­dict of ‘Not Guilty.’ As you can imag­ine, the lines read by Mr. Waters are not safe for work. You can find Lady Chat­ter­ley’s Lover housed in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

–  Cen­sor­ship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. Mark Twain

via @GalleyCat

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Frank Zap­pa Debates Cen­sor­ship on CNN’s Cross­fire (1986)

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Clas­sic Beat Poem, Howl

Mike Wal­lace and Ben­nett Cerf (Founder of Ran­dom House) Talk Cen­sor­ship

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The ‘Tractate on the Steppenwolf’: Max Von Sydow Narrates Animated Scene from Hermann Hesse’s Novel

in Animation, Books, Literature | October 3rd, 2012

Her­mann Hes­se’s 1927 nov­el Step­pen­wolf is a curi­ous mix­ture of mys­ti­cism and exis­ten­tial angst. It’s the sto­ry of a strange man who appears one day in an unnamed town and rents an attic apart­ment. By day he stays alone in his rooms, read­ing Goethe and Novalis. By night he wan­ders the dark alley­ways of the Old Town, like “a wolf of the steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd.”

Despite a strong ele­ment of mag­ic in the sto­ry, Step­pen­wolf is essen­tial­ly an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal book. Hesse wrote it dur­ing a time of acute per­son­al cri­sis, when he had entered mid­dle age and was deal­ing with the fail­ure of his mar­riage to a younger woman. Strug­gling against thoughts of sui­cide, the book­ish Hesse sought to over­come his sense of iso­la­tion and estrange­ment from soci­ety by going out at night to the tav­erns and dance halls. For a sense of his men­tal state, here is a pas­sage from Step­pen­wolf in which the pro­tag­o­nist Har­ry Haller talks in a dream to his “immor­tal” hero, Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe:

Like all great spir­its, Herr von Goethe, you have clear­ly rec­og­nized and felt the rid­dle and the hope­less­ness of human life, with its moments of tran­scen­dence that sink again to wretched­ness, and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of ris­ing to one fair peak of feel­ing except at the cost of many days’ enslave­ment to the dai­ly round; and, then, the ardent long­ing for the realm of the spir­it in eter­nal and dead­ly war with the equal­ly ardent and holy love of the lost inno­cence of nature, the whole fright­ful sus­pense in vacan­cy and uncer­tain­ty, this con­dem­na­tion to the tran­sient that can nev­er be valid, that is ever exper­i­men­tal and dilet­tan­tish; in short, the utter lack of pur­pose to which the human state is condemned–to its con­sum­ing despair.

But Hesse saw Step­pen­wolf as an opti­mistic book. It’s about a man’s jour­ney to self-aware­ness and spir­i­tu­al lib­er­a­tion. As he wrote in the intro­duc­tion, “The ‘Trea­tise’ [see above] and all those spots in the book deal­ing with mat­ters of the spir­it, of the arts and the ‘immor­tal’ men oppose the Step­pen­wolf’s world of suf­fer­ing with a pos­i­tive, serene, super-per­son­al and time­less world of faith. This book, no doubt, tells of griefs and needs; still it is not a book of a man despair­ing, but of a man believ­ing.”

The ani­mat­ed sequence above is from the rarely seen 1974 film of Step­pen­wolf by Fred Haines, in which the Har­ry Haller char­ac­ter played by Max von Sydow reads from the “Trac­tate on the Step­pen­wolf,” a mys­te­ri­ous text that was giv­en to Haller and then left behind by him, describ­ing the Step­pen­wolf’s divid­ed nature. The scene fea­tures imagery by the Czech artist Jaroslav Bradác.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Franz Kaf­ka: The Ani­mat­ed Short Film

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The Real Alice in Wonderland Circa 1862, and Our Favorite Culture Links on the Web

in Books, Literature | October 2nd, 2012

Over at The Retro­naut they’re fea­tur­ing a gallery of images of Alice Lid­dell cir­ca 1862. Who is that you may ask? Well, it’s only the young girl who inspired Lewis Car­rol­l’s clas­sic sto­ry Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (a text that you can down­load from our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books). If the men­tion of the great children’s tale warms your heart, we’d encour­age you to re-vis­it Maria Popo­va’s guest-authored post, Alice in Open­land, which has all kinds of great relat­ed mate­r­i­al — read­ings of Alice by Cory Doc­torow, film adap­ta­tions of the sto­ry from 1903 and 1915, and much more.

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Christopher Hitchens Remembers Ayatollah Khomeini’s Fatwa Against His Friend Salman Rushdie, 2010

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | September 25th, 2012

When his tele­phone rang on Feb­ru­ary 14, 1989, Christo­pher Hitchens was thun­der­struck. A news­pa­per reporter was on the line, ask­ing for his reac­tion to a radio speech from Tehran ear­li­er that day in which the theo­crat­ic ruler of Iran, Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khome­i­ni, called on Mus­lims around the world to mur­der his friend the nov­el­ist Salman Rushdie because of some­thing Rushdie had writ­ten in his book The Satan­ic Vers­es. As Hitchens lat­er wrote in his mem­oir, Hitch-22:

I felt at once that here was some­thing that com­plete­ly com­mit­ted me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a mat­ter of every­thing I hat­ed ver­sus every­thing I loved. In the hate col­umn: dic­ta­tor­ship, reli­gion, stu­pid­i­ty, dem­a­gogy, cen­sor­ship, bul­ly­ing, and intim­i­da­tion. In the love col­umn: lit­er­a­ture, irony, humor, the indi­vid­ual, and the defense of free expres­sion. Plus, of course, friendship–though I like to think that my reac­tion would have been the same if I had­n’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argu­ment again: the theo­crat­ic head of a for­eign despo­tism offers mon­ey in his own name in order to sub­orn the mur­der of a civil­ian cit­i­zen of anoth­er coun­try, for the offense of writ­ing a work of fic­tion. No more root-and-branch chal­lenge to the val­ues of the Enlight­en­ment (on the bicen­ten­ni­al of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion, could be imag­ined.

Rushdie went into hid­ing, but his Japan­ese trans­la­tor, Hitoshi Igarashi, was mur­dered, and attempts were made against the lives of sev­er­al oth­er trans­la­tors and a pub­lish­er. Book­stores in Eng­land and Cal­i­for­nia were fire­bombed, and many more received threats of vio­lence. The pub­lic reac­tion to all of this was a bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment to Hitchens. In his book, God is Not Great: How Reli­gion Poi­sons Every­thing, he wrote:

One might have thought that such arro­gant state-spon­sored homi­cide, direct­ed at a lone­ly and peace­ful indi­vid­ual who pur­sued a life devot­ed to lan­guage, would have called forth a gen­er­al con­dem­na­tion. But such was not the case. In con­sid­ered state­ments, the Vat­i­can, the arch­bish­op of Can­ter­bury, the chief sephardic rab­bi of Israel all took a stand in sym­pa­thy with–the aya­tol­lah. So did the car­di­nal arch­bish­op of New York and many oth­er less­er reli­gious fig­ures. While they usu­al­ly man­aged a few words in which to deplore the resort to vio­lence, all these men stat­ed that the main prob­lem raised by the pub­li­ca­tion of The Satan­ic Vers­es was not mur­der by mer­ce­nar­ies, but blas­phe­my. Some pub­lic fig­ures not in holy orders, such as the Marx­ist writer John Berg­er, the Tory his­to­ri­an Hugh Trevor-Rop­er, and the doyen of espi­onage authors John Le Car­ré, also pro­nounced that Rushdie was the author of his own trou­bles, and had brought them on him­self by “offend­ing” a great monothe­is­tic reli­gion. There seemed noth­ing fan­tas­tic, to these peo­ple, in the British police hav­ing to defend an Indi­an-born ex-Mus­lim cit­i­zen from a con­cert­ed cam­paign to take his life in the name of god.

This month Rushdie pub­lished Joseph Anton: A Mem­oir, describ­ing his nine-years of life in hid­ing under the Ayotol­lah’s death order. The new book’s rel­e­vance could not be more obvi­ous, giv­en the Anti-Amer­i­can riot­ing that broke out in much of the Mus­lim world this month in reac­tion to a YouTube video called Inno­cence of Mus­lims. Hitchens died last Decem­ber, and his voice in the mat­ter is sore­ly missed. But it isn’t hard to imag­ine what he might have said. In a 2009 Van­i­ty Fair essay, “Assas­sins of the Mind,” Hitchens wrote: “For our time and gen­er­a­tion, the great con­flict between the iron­ic mind and the lit­er­al mind, the exper­i­men­tal and the dog­mat­ic, the tol­er­ant and the fanat­i­cal, is the argu­ment that was kin­dled by The Satan­ic Vers­es.”

For a recent dis­cus­sion with Rushdie, lis­ten to his Sep­tem­ber 21 inter­view with Studio360:

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Discovered: Lord Byron’s Copy of Frankenstein Signed by Mary Shelley

in Books, Literature | September 22nd, 2012

The sto­ry behind the writ­ing of Franken­stein is famous. In 1816, Mary Shel­ley and Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley, sum­mer­ing near Lake Gene­va in Switzer­land, were chal­lenged by Lord Byron to take part in a com­pe­ti­tion to write a fright­en­ing tale. Mary, only 18 years old, lat­er had a wak­ing dream of sorts where she imag­ined the premise of her book:

When I placed my head on my pil­low, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imag­i­na­tion, unbid­den, pos­sessed and guid­ed me, gift­ing the suc­ces­sive images that arose in my mind with a vivid­ness far beyond the usu­al bounds of rever­ie. I saw — with shut eyes, but acute men­tal vision, — I saw the pale stu­dent of unhal­lowed arts kneel­ing beside the thing he had put togeth­er. I saw the hideous phan­tasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the work­ing of some pow­er­ful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.

This became the ker­nel of Franken­stein; or, The Mod­ern Prometheus, the nov­el first pub­lished in Lon­don in 1818, with only 500 copies put in cir­cu­la­tion.

Near­ly two cen­turies lat­er, a first edi­tion signed by Shel­ley has turned up in the ves­tiges of Lord Byron’s library. The grand­son of Lord Jay notes, “I saw the book lying at an angle in the cor­ner of the top shelf. On open­ing it, I saw the title page, recog­nised what it was at once and leafed hun­gri­ly through the text — it was only when I flicked idly back to the first blank that I saw the inscrip­tion in cur­sive black ink, “To Lord Byron, from the author.”

Today this inscribed copy is on dis­play at Peter Har­ring­ton’s, a Lon­don spe­cial­ist in rare books. And there it will be put on auc­tion, like­ly fetch­ing north of £350,000, or $575,000. The video above gives you more of the back­sto­ry on the writ­ing and gift­ing of the book.

You can find Franken­stein in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. Also don’t miss the first film adap­ta­tion of Franken­stein from 1910 here, or the 1931 ver­sion list­ed in our meta list of Free Movies Online.

via Huff­Po

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