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The Third Culture EINSTEIN AND POINCAR&Eacute: A Talk with Peter Galison

"I tried to understand how Poincare and Einstein radically reformulated our ideas of time and space by looking at the way that philosophical abstractions, physical theories, and the technological problems of keeping trains from bashing into each other and coordinating mapmaking across empires might cross in a single story. I began with an extraordinarily simple idea that marked the last century: two events are simultaneous if coordinated clocks at the two events say the same thing. How do I coordinate these clocks? I send a signal from one to the other and take into account the time it takes for the signal to get there. That's the basic idea, but all of relativity theory, E = mc2, and so much of what Einstein does followed from it. The question is, where did this idea come from? Albert Einstein and Henri Poincare were the two people who worked out this practical, almost operational idea of simultaneity, and I want to see them as occupying points of intersection--of technological, philosophical, and physical reasoning. They were the two people who stood at those triple cross-sections."

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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