Requiem for a cathedral

As I sit in my office writing this, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is burning.

It's hard for me to describe what I am feeling.  Mostly, it's a deep, deep grief that something beautiful, something irreplaceable, is gone forever.  It was a place of devotion, a building that had been lovingly cared for and added to for almost nine hundred years, an iconic symbol of the city of Paris.

And now it's gone.

I know that loss is part of the human condition, but this is a big one.  It appears that there isn't even anyone to blame, to take our minds off the grief, as there was with 9/11; the best guess anyone has right now of the cause is an accident during renovation.  That one blunder could deprive the world of something this grand is mind-boggling, but that's what seems to have happened as of the time I'm writing this.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso creator QS:P170,Q28147777, Paris Notre-Dame cathedral interior nave east 01d, CC BY 3.0]

This sense of grief at the destruction of something beautiful has been with me for a long, long time.  My first contact with it happened when I was little -- probably not more than four years old -- and my mom, who was a devoted gardener, presented me with a little packet of forget-me-not seeds.  I was so excited I had to open it and pour them into my hand, and in the process stumbled walking across the yard and dropped them into the grass.  I don't recall what my mother did other than saying "so much for that."  What I do remember is crying inconsolably that something that could have been beautiful was lost.  Every time I've been confronted by loss since then, I remember that little packet of seeds and how final and irrevocable it seemed, how nothing I could ever do would change what had happened, would ever make it all right again, world without end, amen.

And it always launches us into the if-only trap, doesn't it?  When a chance set of circumstances led to the death of our beloved border collie Doolin a few years ago, I spent the next weeks trying to parse what we could have changed had we only seen ahead.  Tiny differences -- waiting two minutes, leaving our house through a different door, taking a different path into our yard -- any one of those would have meant that she and that speeding car would not have been at the same place at the same time.

But we're not prescient, and all of those tiny events only add up in retrospect.

Every time something irrevocable occurs, from the minor to the overwhelming, I can't help thinking if only something could have been done differently.  If only someone hadn't blundered, hadn't had a moment of carelessness, had been paying more attention.

And each time, I am brought to the reality that the if-onlys are pointless.  It's done, it's over, it will never be again.

It's the scale of this one that's so horrible.  Consider the love and wonder of the millions of tourists who visited Notre Dame; the ones (like myself) who wanted to go, always intended to go, but never did; the thousands who devoted their time, effort, and money to the upkeep and renovation of the structure; the countless devout Catholics who considered this a central icon of their deeply-held faith; and you have a glimmer of understanding of what people are feeling right now.

I keep going back to the news stories, watching the videos as if to make sure I've understood right, that Notre Dame is really gone.  A part of me still can't quite believe it.

Of course, I still mourn the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, so it may be a while before this wound heals.

Firefighters are still trying to save what they can, but the last word I heard was that even the vault might be in jeopardy.  Realistically, I don't see how anything but the stone framework will remain standing, and probably not even all of that.  And if they rebuild it, then what?  What they create might well be beautiful and awe-inspiring, as the 9/11 memorial and the new World Trade Center are, but it won't be what it was.  That will only exist in our remembrance -- and in our art, photography, and writing, which (after all) are our species's collective memory.

I'm not sure what else to say.  It still seems surreal, a blow to our false confidence that the world will always remain as it is.  I will be processing this for a long time, I think.  But for now, I'm going to go look at some photographs of a treasure that is now lost forever.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Elegy for a treasure trove

I've always felt a very visceral sense of loss.  Even breaking a valued keepsake, for example, strikes me as sad by virtue of being irreversible, and triggers in me something that feels very much like mourning.

The bigger the loss, of course, the harder the gut punch.  I still have a vivid memory of finding out about the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 B.C.E., and carrying around with me a feeling very close to horror for several days afterward.  (Especially since many historians believe that the fire was deliberately set by soldiers sent to Egypt by Julius Caesar.)  The result of the fire was a devastating loss of cultural knowledge -- no one knows how many scrolls and books were destroyed, but even conservative estimates are in the range of forty to fifty thousand, most of which were the only copies in existence.

And some historians have said that the figure might have been closer to four hundred thousand.

The Great Library of Alexandria (1886, woodcut by Otto von Corven) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Entirely lost were the works of Hipparchus (the "father of astronomy"), and the majority of the creative output of the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  Only one-third of the writings of Archimedes survive -- the other two-thirds were housed in the Library and were destroyed when it burned.

And that's just a few of the ones we know about.

I felt that same sense of crushing desolation two days ago when I heard about the destruction of the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro while listening to NPR.  The fire -- whose cause is, as of the time of this writing, uncertain -- completely destroyed the museum and its contents, although there's still some hope that a few of the more fireproof items may have survived.  The impact on scholarship can't be exaggerated; several of the scientists who were interviewed were obviously trying to hold back tears while talking about it.

According to an article by National Geographic, the museum, founded in 1818, housed twenty million items relating to a wide variety of disciplines.  There was the 11,500-year-old skull of Luzia, the oldest human skeletal remains ever found in Brazil.  There were specimens of forty thousand different species of mollusks and five million species of arthropods.  The museum also had South America's most extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts -- almost certainly all destroyed.

"When I saw the news about the tragedy, I just started crying, and all my colleagues, other archaeologists I know in Brazil, they had the same reaction—that’s a loss for all the world," said Maria Ester Franklin Maia Silva, a Brazilian archaeologist and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.

Silva isn't alone.  Marcus Guidoti, an entomologist nearing completion of his Ph.D. at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, has witnessed the loss of the entire collection his research relied on.  And anthropologist Mariana Françozo, of Leiden University, was equally devastated. "I have no words to say how horrible this is.  The indigenous collections are a tremendous loss…we can no longer study them, we can no longer understand what our ancestors did.  It’s heartbreaking."

Fingers are already being pointed at the government for standing by and watching the Museu Nacional fall into disrepair, neglect which is almost certain to have contributed to the disaster.  The museum's fire safety precautions were nil, and there were no funds to amend it even had the directors wanted to.  Three years ago, they were forced to crowdfund money for repairing extensive termite damage -- because federal funding to repair the damage was repeatedly denied.

Brazilian president Michael Temer called the Museu Nacional's loss "incalculable to Brazil" and "a sad day for all Brazilians."  But Mariana Françozo wasn't impressed by his reaction.  "[My]... reaction is anger, because they knew the museum needed funding for years.  How do you ‘rebuild’ a 200-year-old collection that has burned to ashes?"

Whoever is at fault -- or even if the fire at the museum was entirely accidental -- reading about it leaves me feeling sick inside.  The loss to the wealth of human knowledge is enormous.  Like with the Library of Alexandria, the museum housed thousands of specimens that had yet to be studied, and whose destruction leaves a hole that can't ever be filled.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fireproof

New from the "You Really Think The World Works That Way?" department, we have the edifying story of the guy who was in a fiery car crash, in which both he and his bible survived more or less unscathed.

The unnamed driver had his Jeep sideswiped while driving down the highway in Tennessee, veered off the road, and ran into a telephone pole.  The car burst into flames.

According to witness Anita Irby:

I just saw GOD on 385.  I'm always in awh [sic] of his wonders but today just blew my mind.  This car ran off the road and hit a metal post and burst into flames not to mention the passenger was trapped inside as the car was filled with smoke the flames began to fill the inside.  THE ENTIRE EXPRESSWAY STOPPED and people ran from their cars trying to break the windows and open the doors of this mans [sic] car to free him, as they were the others went up in prayer for God to deliver this man from the paws of the devil....  Now it appeared our prayers was in vain because he couldn't move and the flames had reach the inside of the truck.  But God!!!!!! .....the flames were on the inside but the way my God is set up The Way It Look Like and what it is, None of the flames touched him and even after the car exploded once All these God blessed people ran back up ... Now the passenger even begged them to just let him die .  End of Story he's Alive and well. ......  Jesus thats my Goddd

When the scene was investigated, they found something else -- that a bible on the front seat of the car had also escaped damage.  Another witness, Eugene McNeil, said, "That is God.  If you don’t believe it, I don’t know what to say."

Here's a photograph of the car, mid-explosion:

So that's pretty terrible, and I'm really glad the guy made it out alive.  What I'm going to say in addition should not be construed as minimizing the fact that there was a catastrophic accident in which no one was hurt.

But really -- attributing the whole thing to god?  How about the people who pulled him from the car?  How about the paramedics who helped him and made sure he wasn't badly injured?

And the whole bible thing... the cynic in me thinks that it was a deliberate plant by one of the witnesses or rescue crew.  I mean, bibles are made of paper, which last I checked was highly flammable.  Take a look at the photograph; the entire passenger compartment of the car was engulfed in flames.  The likelihood of a bible surviving unburned is awfully slim.

But even if it did -- you really think an all-powerful, all-compassionate deity would work that way?  If god really did want to protect the guy, how about keeping him from getting in the accident in the first place?  And the dude's car burned up.  Cars, you may have observed, are a hell of a lot more expensive to replace than bibles.

Yes, yes, I know, money's not the point, the love of money is the root of all evil, and so on.  But seriously.  People are absolutely convinced that god intervenes in football game outcomes, helps people find their lost car keys, and makes sure they find exactly the pair of shoes they were looking for in Walmart.  Don't you think that on the whole, there are more pressing things he should be attending to?

Evidently, the answer is "no."  Here are a few of the responses to the article about god making sure the bible didn't get burned:

"Behold, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt, and the form of the fourth is like unto the Son of God...."   If Nebuchadnezzar could say such things, then I think we can safely assume that they have happened, and continue to happen...  Only believe. 

Sometimes God make [sic] it as a lesson for the people who have a faith in him to make their faith even stronger.  And those who don't believe in God.  If you warn them or you don't do in either way they won't believe.  As they have locks on their hearts. 

Adonai, the Living God.  Glory is yours Father. 

God saved a man and proved that his word fireproof! 

Liberals must really hate it when God does things like this.  Oh make no mistake about it God is real.  The fact that the bible wasn't touched and the man got out on time like that is proof.  There is no scientific explanation.

Well, maybe this is because of my locked heart, but even if you start from the assumption that god exists, it doesn't make sense that he'd run the universe this way.  On the one hand, he answers prayers to eliminate minor inconveniences, and allows major suffering of innocent people without doing a thing?

Oh, but "God Works In Mysterious Ways."  I suppose that explains everything.

I'm not setting out to be obnoxious, here.  I just don't get this worldview.  It seems to be telling us that there's a deity who is super-concerned about trivial stuff -- not to mention disapproving heartily every time people masturbate -- but stands back and does nothing during famines, wars, and even the Holocaust.

Which is a way of thinking I simply don't get.  Probably explaining why for me, it seems far more probable that there's no deity up there in the first place.