Quantum Quandaries

Everything that the General Public can be Told about the CIA

Difference and Repetition - On Assembly Theory

Uncovering the Boundary between Inert Chemistry and Life

Life is a chemical System that uses energy to keep itself from reaching chemical equilibrium. Equilibrium is the situation in which chemicals no longer have a tendency to react over time.

Chemistry is all about some orbiting electrons filling up the energy shells around different quantities of Proton combinations until achieving an Empty or Full orbital shells (w/electrons) and thereby achieving the lowest possible (or non-reactive) energy state (Full or Empty shell unable to exchange orbiting electrons).  Chemistry (and ultimately life itself) is all about this electron energy exchange (between far Left and far Right columns on the Periodic Table of Elements)

Generation from Opposites (+/-)

New 4K Quantum "Tin Vacancy" Computers (10% error rate) vs. PsiQuantum Photons (0.02% error)

...and Anti-Universe/Regular Universe Quantum Entanglements vs Gravity

5 Philosophical Concepts of Byung-Chul Han

Five Main Concepts In The Work Of Byung-Chul Han

The work of Byung-Chul Han urges people to oppose unlimited productivity, digitalisation and consensual slavery. These are contemporary realities that, according to this philosopher, affect us.

The philosophical work of Byung-Chul Han is very interesting. His concepts are definitely worth analyzing, especially because they allow us to reflect on the lifestyle that people have today.

This South Korean philosopher and author is also an expert on cultural studies and has become one of the most respected voices in modern thinking. His work focuses on the world we live in, including the effects of technology on our lifestyle, the culture of working too much, or the consequences of the globalization of capitalism.

Some of his notable works are The Burnout Society, The Agony of Eros, Topology of Violence and Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Some concepts stand out in these books, as they represent the way Byung-Chul Han sees the world.

1. Self-exploitation

Byung-Chul Han and his philosophy reflect how we work today. For Byung-Chul Han follows people spiritually absent a societal mandate: to do as much as possible. Some time ago, people did only what they had to do. Now, however, we believe that we must be successful at all costs, and we become anxious when we do not succeed.

The worst thing is that no one is forcing us to do this. Each of us voluntarily surrenders to a regime of labor and consumption.

2. Communication

Byung-Chul Han also stated that relationships have been replaced by connections. People are now communicating through sources of information that are spread all over the world.

He pointed out that real communication no longer exists due to lack of physical presence. Now it’s just an exchange of information. All our senses, except sight, are no longer used as before. And therefore there is poor communication. Also, people are only looking for those who agree with them, those who potentially want to “like” their posts on social media.

3. The garden: One of the main concepts in the work of Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han opposes what the digital world imposes. In his work, the garden concept is a warning to start using our senses more. This South Korean philosopher talks about a “secret garden”, an exclusive place where you can get back in touch with reality, where the digital world does not exist. According to him, keeping in touch with the secret garden is a way to restore what he calls “true beauty”.

4. The other

In our society we devote ourselves to the other , to that which is unknown, to that which is not ours. Everyone tries to be exactly the same. Trendy and “viral” things are obvious manifestations of the desire to belong to a society where everyone thinks the same way.

Byung-Chul Han says that the more we think alike, the more we feel the need to be productive. He argues that diversity goes against the goals of neoliberalism. If we lived in a world where only some people used smartphones and others did not, it would be detrimental to the market. But that is not the case. People are passive, so they are either the customer or the manufacturer.

5. Byung-Chul Han about time

Time is another critical element. Byung-Chul Han claims that we must change the way we spend time. We just care about working fast and working on insignificant things, about doing things as fast as we can, and letting them disappear as easily as they came into our lives. It is a blow to continuity and long-lasting, valuable things.

For Byung-Chul Han, it is fundamental that we dedicate some time to ourselves. We should take a moment for ourselves to do nothing or to have fun.

Undoubtedly, Byung-Chul’s work is enriching. The best part is that he acts in the way he thinks one should act. All he wants is to strengthen his soul and his freedom.

Happiness comes through the hands.  Happiness is hand work.  It's work done with the hands.  It's made by hand.  It is something that is completed with hands.  Happiness comes through hands.  And is made through hands...

...There is such a thing as joy. I think joy is completely different from happiness.  This is it.  If I have an idea that helps me reach knowledge or solve a problem, it's like an insight.  If I have an insight, I laugh and have a good life.  When a thought comes in, I smile.  I laugh, have fun, and then I feel happy.  So now I feel joy.  You can feel the joy of existence in small, everyday things.  So, for example, when you look at the raindrops slowly falling on the window, there is joy in that existence.  But I have never felt that happiness much, so it is a bit unfamiliar to me.  Happiness is a concept, but I think happiness is a very physical thing.  So, on the other hand, joy seems to have a certain mental dimension, so, but since when did I feel happy?  Since when did I feel happy?  But that feeling of happiness was at that time, that experience.  When I did the act of using my hands, I felt happiness.  Because I felt happiness when I used my hands a lot, I said that happiness comes through the hands.  That's what I said.

Profilicity Rising... A Twisted "Pride Month"- Commedia dell'Arte Ensues

The Insatiable (sometimes Childish) Desire for One's "Identity" to be Affirmed by Others

Now, as an "Out" Trans-Woman you MUST Address me by my preferred pronouns (Zer and Zem)!  And "Like" my latest Facebook post!  For Gay Pride requires Political AND General Affirmation and is in NO WAY indicative of Hubris!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, "As You Like It,"

Jaques: All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

So APPLAUD, Damn You!  APPLAUD or Be CANCELLED! I'm NOT just "Genuinely Pretending"!  I REALLY am my Profile!

*Takes a Bow*

On differences between the Actual Person, and his Curated Persona (of the moment)

Want to be a TikTok STAR/ INFLUENCER and Get LOTS of "clicks"?  Just TRANSITION!

So DON'T be BORING dull grey, be colourful and INTERESTING!

</Sarc>

Tearing Down the Weissman Barrier - w/ Collections of Bio-Electric Fields Completing the Kantian Whole?

Excerpts from the above video:

Evolution is acting on the whole to develop functions. If its' doing that and the functions are that important, this function serves the purpose of the whole.

-------
...An unconscious process that uses the harnessing of stochasticity to produce purposive behaviour is not necessarily intention. I think that's the way I would put it in philosophical terms.

Andrea: Interesting,

That's clearly so, because the immune system is not conscious.

Andrea: How do we know?

Well now, that's a good question, Andrea, we don't know, so it's not our consciousness. No, absolutely.

Andrea: Oh, oh, I like that distinction. Okay, so all we can say for sure is that we're not consciously doing it ourselves, whatever "our" is, and "selves" is, but our bodies are.

Ask the following question, "we exist because cells came together and found the mechanism to be assembling themselves into structures, that is, a body, that has different functions for the different cell types. Now all of those cells were at one time, going way back in the evolutionary process, isolated single cells. There are even organisms that go through stages in their life cycle in which they are just free floating amoeba like single cells and then come together to form the very elaborate spore forming process to reproduce "the colony", if you want to call it that. So, we've all, as multicellular organisms derived from single cells that came together.

Now, the single cell itself is clearly cognitive. It's got, a bacteria has many cognitive features in what it does, and I think it's correct to use the word "cognition" about it. But I don't know what it must be like to be a bacterium, but "I don't even know what it must be like to be a bat", to quote another famous philosopher. And I don't think I need to know that. what I need to know is that evolutionary process has somehow found a way in which my consciousness is not the consciousness of my particular cells. It's something that emerged from the coming together of a vast number of cells in a single organism, a multicellular organism. It makes perfect sense to me that part of those processes are not open to my conscious intent, I don't see why they, it, should.

Andrea: Can we define Cognitive Based Evolution (CBE)? It's an alternative to Neo-Darwinism, it proposes cellular intelligence, Cells that are capable of measuring and responding to their environment. It redefines "life" as fundamental based on cognitive abilities of cells. And "evolution" as a continuous non-random process where cells solve problems to adapt and survive.

Yep, it seems to me that its' correct to say just as AI is cognitive, it's a form of cognition which is enabling a solution to a question, "can you write this essay for me on XYZ" and life is certainly doing the same kind of thing, so I've no hesitation in describing a cell as cognitive. I've no hesitation in describing our nervous system as cognitive. And I don't see why we should have any hesitation in doing that.

Andrea: I think we want to be special, we want to be special in out brains, we want to think that there's this little special orb in our head that has all these special properties that make us all very unique.

If we attribute that to AI, I can't see why we shouldn't attribute it to an even more complicated process, which is the living cell. The harnessing of stochasticity is a purposeful process and therefore, it could also be another definition of purpose.

Andrea: Interesting,

That's how you can get to the neutral description, as the harnessing of stochasticity in the immune system.

---

Plato, "Charmides" (excerpt)

Socrates:...he (Charmides) asked me if I knew the cure of the headache, I answered, but with an effort, that I did know. And what is it? he said.

I replied that it was a kind of leaf, which required to be accompanied by a charm, and if a person would repeat the charm at the same time that he used the cure, he would be made whole; but that without the charm the leaf would be of no avail....

Socrates: ...are you quite sure that you know my name?

Charmides:  I ought to know you, he replied, for there is a great deal said about you among my companions; and I remember when I was a child seeing you in company with my cousin Critias.

Socrates: I am glad to find that you remember me, I said; for I shall now be more at home with you and shall be better able to explain the nature of the charm, about which I felt a difficulty before. For the charm will do more, Charmides, than only cure the headache. I dare say that you have heard eminent physicians say to a patient who comes to them with bad eyes, that they cannot cure his eyes by themselves, but that if his eyes are to be cured, his head must be treated; and then again they say that to think of curing the head alone, and not the rest of the body also, is the height of folly. And arguing in this way they apply their methods to the whole body, and try to treat and heal the whole and the part together. Did you ever observe that this is what they say?

Yes, he said.

Socrates: And they are right, and you would agree with them?

Yes, he said, certainly I should.

Socrates: His approving answers reassured me, and I began by degrees to regain confidence, and the vital heat returned. Such, Charmides, I said, is the nature of the charm, which I learned when serving with the army from one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zamolxis, who are said to be so skilful that they can even give immortality. This Thracian told me that in these notions of theirs, which I was just now mentioning, the Greek physicians are quite right as far as they go; but Zamolxis, he added, our king, who is also a god, says further, 'that as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul; and this,' he said, 'is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied also; for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.' For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. And he who taught me the cure and the charm at the same time added a special direction: 'Let no one,' he said, 'persuade you to cure the head, until he has first given you his soul to be cured by the charm. For this,' he said, 'is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.' And he added with emphasis, at the same time making me swear to his words, 'Let no one, however rich, or noble, or fair, persuade you to give him the cure, without the charm.' Now I have sworn, and I must keep my oath, and therefore if you will allow me to apply the Thracian charm first to your soul, as the stranger directed, I will afterwards proceed to apply the cure to your head. But if not, I do not know what I am to do with you, my dear Charmides.

Critias, when he heard this, said: The headache will be an unexpected gain to my young relation, if the pain in his head compels him to improve his mind: and I can tell you, Socrates, that Charmides is not only pre-eminent in beauty among his equals, but also in that quality which is given by the charm; and this, as you say, is temperance?

Socrates:  Yes, I said.

Dionysian Dithyrambs

"I would believe only in a god who could dance."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra."

Excerpt from Nietzsche's "Dionysus-Dithyrambs":

Only Fool! Only Poet!

In the fading light of dusk,

When the dew's solace begins

To well down to the earth,

Invisible, as well as unheard —

For the comforter dew slips on

Delicate footwear as all gentle consolers —

Then do you remember, remember, hot heart,

How once you thirsted

After heavenly tears and dewdrops,

Scorched and weary, thirsting,

While on yellow paths of grass

The spiteful evening glances of the sun

Ran around you through black trees,

Glowing sun-glances, dazzling with malicious delight.

"The suitor of truth—you?"—thus they mocked me —

"No! Only a poet!

A cunning, plundering, stealthy beast,

That must lie,

That knowingly, willingly must lie,

Lusting after prey,

Colorfully masked,

Self-shrouded,

Prey for itself

This—the suitor of truth? ...

Only fool! Only poet!

Merely speaking colorfully,

From fools' masks shouting colorfully,

Climbing about on deceptive word-bridges,

On misleading rainbows,

Between false heavens

Rambling, lurking —

Only fool! Only poet!

This—the suitor of truth? ...

Not still, stiff, smooth, cold,

Become an image,

A pillar of God,

Not set up before temples,

A god's gatekeeper:

No! hostile to all such truth statues,

More at home in any desert than in temples,

Fraught with cats' mischief,

Leaping through every window

Swiftly! into every chance,

Sniffing for every jungle,

That you in jungles

Among motley-shagged beasts of prey

Would run sinfully sound and beautiful and colorful,

With lusting animal lips,

Blissfully sneering, blissfully hellish, blissfully bloodthirsty,

Plundering, prowling, lying would run ...

Or like the eagle that, for a long time,

A long time gazes with a fixed stare into abysses,

Into its abysses ...

— Oh how they spiral downward,

Down, down under,

Into ever deeper depths! —

Then,

Suddenly,

Plummeting straight down

Wings pulled out

To pounce on lambs,

Right down, hot-hungry,

Lusting for lambs,

Hating all lamb-souls,

Grimly hating whatever looks

Virtuous, sheepish, curly-wooled,

Dull, with lambs' milk-goodwill ...

Thus

Eagle-like, panther-like,

Are the poet's longings,

Are your longings under a thousand masks,

You fool! You poet! ...

You that have looked upon man

As god and as sheep —

Tearing to pieces the god in man

As well as the sheep in man,

And laughing while tearing —

This, this is your bliss,

A panther's and eagle's bliss,

A poet's and fool's bliss!" ...

In the fading light of dusk,

When just as the moon's sickle

In between green and crimson-reds

Enviously creeps —

The day's enemy,

With every stealthy step

At rose hammocks

Scything, till they sink,

Sink down pale in nightfall:

Thus I myself once sank,

Out of my truth-madness,

Out of my day-longings,

Weary of day, sick from the light —

Sank downward, eveningward, shadowward,

By one truth

Burnt and thirsty —

Do you still remember, remember, hot heart,

How you thirsted then? —

That I be exiled

From all truth!

Only fool! Only poet! ...

Byung-Chul Han - Burning Out

excerpt from above video:

Aren’t we living in the best age ever!? I mean, look at the world around us! Modern society grants us endless possibilities. Contrary to our grandparents (and their parents), who were told to just pray to God, have kids, work in the factory, and shut up, we, the children of modernity and neoliberalism, can become anything we want! We can become CEOs of our own startups, hustlers, innovators, YouTube stars, Instagram models, you name it! You only have to work hard and live on rice and beans for five years, and you’ll get there! And, yes, of course, this applies to everyone! So, get off your lazy ass, start grinding, listen to Gary Vee, and you’ll be among the rich and successful in no time. Because hey, you don’t want to be a loser, do you? No, of course not! So, what are you waiting for? Get your Grindset on, and start crushing it!

Beneath this shiny surface of boundless opportunity, there’s, unfortunately, a darker side. South Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han is concerned that our capitalist society is increasingly leading humanity toward collective burnout and many other problems, such as narcissism and hyperattention. His book The Burnout Society explains the effects of today’s achievement society and why people are more exhausted and disconnected than ever before.

Aoibhinn McBride, "Could the future of your job involve a 6-day week?"

Are you part of the ‘achievement society’?

Coined by Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book The Burnout Society, which explores contemporary capitalist culture, being part of an achievement society manifests itself as an internal pressure to achieve, do more and be more by working more.

The ‘work hard, play hard’ mindset has been a part of the American psyche for eons. From anecdotal evidence of chasing the American Dream to the very real fact that paid time off is not legislated for and is at the complete discretion of your employer, U.S. workers spend more time at work than their European counterparts.

A 2023 report from the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that 13.3 percent of Americans work in excess of 48 hours per week, compared to 7.9 percent of Europeans.

However, the report also highlights that the Covid-19-induced lockdowns and the resultant shift to remote work as standard helped to bolster work-life balance as we moved away from long working hours, not to mention grueling commutes.

All work and no play?

But where do we stand now, four years on from this seismic shift?

From compulsory RTO (return to office) mandates to mass layoffs, and fears of economic recession (notably the tech sector has witnessed 525,000 layoffs since the beginning of 2022), the pendulum of power seems to be swinging back in favor of the employer. Workers are once again putting in longer hours to keep apace.

At one extreme you have the so-called “996” culture, where workers are expected to work 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

Derived from Chinese tech culture, CEOs including Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce site Alibaba (BABA) and Tesla founder Elon Musk have endorsed long working days, with the latter infamously declaring on X that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”.

For Musk, the magic number to change the world is 80 hours per week as, “pain level increases exponentially above 80”, but what are the physical and mental implications of working to this extreme?

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Musk’s 80-hour theory could be fatal—long working hours led to 745 000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016, a 29 percent increase since 2000.

Of these deaths, 72 percent were male, and most deaths were recorded among people aged 60 to 79 who had worked 55 hours or more per week between the ages of 45 and 74 years.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed the way many people work,“ said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, of the findings.

“Teleworking has become the norm in many industries, often blurring the boundaries between home and work. In addition, many businesses have been forced to scale back or shut down operations to save money, and people who are still on the payroll end up working longer hours. No job is worth the risk of stroke or heart disease. Governments, employers and workers need to work together to agree on limits to protect the health of workers.”

“Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” added Dr Maria Neira, director, Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health, at the World Health Organization. “It’s time that we all, governments, employers, and employees wake up to the fact that long working hours can lead to premature death”.

Looking to the future

While Gen Z’s adoption of “quiet quitting” and “lazy girl jobs”—AKA doing their job within working hours but never working overtime or at the weekends—may have initially been dismissed by older generations (particularly Millennials who enshrined the concept of a side hustle in modern workplace lexicon), it looks like they’re on to something.

Because beyond the worrying health implications, an additional study has found that working excessively long hours (over 50 hours per week) is bad for productivity––and the bottom line.

MAGA: Will a Supplanted Minor Cultural Narrative Regain Its' Pre-1945 Majority?

Deleuze & Guattari, "Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature"

“Enclosed in my own four walls, I found myself as an immigrant imprisoned in a foreign country;… I saw my family as strange aliens whose foreign customs, rites, and very language defied comprehension;… though I did not want it, they forced me to participate in their bizarre rituals;… I could not resist.”

Mehdi Babaei, "Minor literature and the language of the minorities"

The Metamorphosis

While I was reading the above lines from Franz Kafka’s diaries, I wondered how many immigrants today feel the way he felt during 1910-1923. Though his trajectories were different from those of today’s immigrants, I wonder if any immigrants feel “imprisoned in a foreign country,” or if they are forced to participate in “bizarre rituals.” The analysis of Kafka’s literary works set the scene for what is known as minor literature, which I will elaborate on below. I have come up with the topic of this post for a good reason. As part of my story reading group, this month I have been reading and analyzing Kafka’s stories. Also, as someone who has recently completed a doctoral project on language, identity, and immigrants’ lived experiences, I am enchanted with the narratives of immigrants. The unadorned triad of this post is thus Kafka, minor literature, and immigrants’ narratives.

Kafka (1883-1924) was born to German-speaking Jewish parents living in Prague. He received his doctorate in law in 1906. His parents, fancy-goods retailers by profession, were proud of being both parts of the Jewish community and the higher echelons of Prague society. There was, however, a hostile relationship between the German and Czech language speakers (not sure if this is the case today). While Kafka grew up in Prague as a German-speaking Jew, he felt no attachment to his parents’ heritage and even alienated by his minority status. Kafka wrote most of his stories in German, but he also wrote and spoke in Czech. He authored several terrific books, including The Castle, The Trial, and The Metamorphosis. His works are a fusion of elements of realism and surrealism. The word Kafkaesque is applied to bizarre and nightmarishly complex situations where an individual feels hopeless and powerless to understand or control what is happening around him or her. In retrospect, I recollect the Kafkaesque experience of the immigrant participants of my research in their early years of arrival in Canada.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and his sister Ottla

Inspired by Kafka’s works, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983) introduced the term minor literature (or minority literature), defined as a literary production created by a minority using the majority language, as opposed to the literature created by a minority in their own minority language (similar terms are littérature mineure in French, and small/minor literatures). Minor literature, however, seems to be the widely accepted term. Deleuze and Guattari based their work on Kafka, who used the German language for writing his stories when he lived in Prague, the Czech Republic. According to Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature has three characteristics: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (2003, p. 18). In all its manifestations, literature is an effective representation of these three characteristics. Literature can project a true image of collective expression of a nation, albeit altered, torn, or disturbing. In minor literature, however, what the writer writes is essentially political and even revolutionary (leading to great improvements) – and this is what glorifies it: being minor, while revolutionary in the broader term of literary works.

Minor literature also speaks to the migrant literature – the literature produced by migrants and the literature which tells the stories of migrants and their migration experiences. Since the 1980s, migrant literature has gained significant momentum due to increasing transnational mobility. An avalanche of stories has been written on people who have left their homes in the hope of starting a new life in a different land. This way, every immigrant’s narratives, which has the three characteristics of being deterritorialized, political, and collective, is lodged in the minor literature sphere.

Kurdish refugee’s painting. Source: MotionAgeDesigns

The 21st century’s growing trends of globalization, diversity, and cultural flows have created societies with hybrid and dynamic features, accelerating mass migration and creating multi-layered communities and diasporas. When immigrants move from their home countries to the receiving societies, they bring along a series of snapshots of their histories, identities, and values, as well as a strong feeling of self-affirmation. In the host society, immigrants strive to establish themselves while making attempts to retain their roots. This retaining process is manifested through activities such as heritage language maintenance, social and cultural activities pertaining to one’s country of origin, and preserving one’s norms, values, and social knowledge. A more sophisticated layer of value transfer is represented in the minor literature: an obscure and often politically-overlooked socio-cultural space in the host society. That said, minor literature cannot be ascribed to immigrant literary writers only. To me, an immigrant who reads and writes on immigration and immigrants’ stories is part of the minor literature. More so, as aptly described by the author of four novels, Mohsin Hamid, in the August 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine, “In the 21st century, we are all migrants.” The author backs up this statement by saying:

“…None of us is a native of the place we call home. And none of us is a native to this moment in time. We are not native to the instant, already gone, when this sentence began to be written, nor to the instant, also gone, when it began to be read, nor even to this moment, now, which we enter for the first time and which slips away, has slipped away, is irrevocably lost, except from memory…”

How many people today live in a language other than their own language? How many immigrants have forgotten their language or have not yet had a chance to learn it? More importantly, how can an immigrant writer write in the language of the majority and become the revolutionary figure of his own ethnic community? What are the new layers of identifications in the literary production of immigrant literature? Is literature produced by immigrants regarded as a third space (Bhabha, 1994) bridging a me-them cultural duality? And how would this new hybrid identification enhance our understanding of issues of belonging and attachment? Minor literature is about the experiences of immigrants and their children: the minorities. Minor literature, nonetheless, is an issue concerning all of us. In a broader sense, the identities, networks, and practices of the minorities directly affect all of us and should inform our language choices. The term minor literature thus brings to the fore other related terms and concepts such as endangered language, language minority, marginalized language, minorized language, native language, non-territorial language, indigenous language, or even social movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, or #antibullying.

No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison is an autobiography written by Behrouz Boochani about his journey to Christmas Island. The book was written on a mobile phone using WhatsApp and “smuggled out of Manus Island as thousands of PDF files” (Wikipedia).

Kafka’s social position as a marginalized author – a Czech Jew who wrote in German – brings to mind the narratives of many immigrants: those who bring their literature from their home countries to the receiving society, but might be restricted to use the language of the majority – the language of the host society. From a minor literature lens, language is regarded as a collective means of communication, and not associated with a body or person. In this sense, minor literature is the language and literature of any groups such as immigrants or refugees – those who seek new identities through their languages and stories. Minor literature is about the language of search, of becoming, of belonging. It is the language of refusal of predominant identities. It is the language of finding new forms of expression in order to forge new identities: the identities of migrants, women, LGTBs, marginals, or aboriginals. Minor literature is a major element of today’s world.

References

Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., & Brinkley, R. (1983). What Is a Minor Literature? Mississippi Review, 11(3), 13-33. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/20133921

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2003). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by D. Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hamid, M. (2019, August 16). In the 21st century, we are all migrants. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/08/we-all-are-migrants-in-the-21st-century/.

The Difference between Doctors of Free Men, Doctors of Slaves, and Writers of Self-Help Books

 

Featured image: Arthur Garfield Dove. Sunrise III, 1936–37. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Katherine S. Dreier to the Collection Société Anonyme. Yale University Art Gallery (1949.3). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed June 10, 2024.

Josh Cohen, 'Quiet Please: On Anna Katharina Schaffner’s “Exhausted” and Byung-Chul Han’s “Vita Contemplativa”'

IT’S HARD TO TALK about the everyday malaises of advanced consumer societies—“overwork,” “hyperstimulation,” “burnout”—without calling forth a critique of the explicit and tacit contracts governing our economic, cultural, and psychic lives. Don’t these words contain an implicit anatomy of neoliberalism’s discontents, its unrelenting instrumentalism, torn social bonds, and moral indifference?

And yet the same words are also ripe fodder for the perpetuation of existing arrangements, for the exploitation of our physical and mental vulnerability. Burnout, consumerism assures us, doesn’t require a new social order, just a new mattress, diet, fitness regimen, meditation program, or general attitude.

Writing about exhaustion is liable to become a symptom of these competing pulls between the polemical and the palliative—that is, to decry the illness and then look for remedies in the very forces (wellness consumerism, self-improvement, positive psychology, corporate yoga) making us ill.

Entering a chronically overcrowded market for the fickle and stretched attention of potential readers, a writer on exhaustion is all too likely caught between excoriating the society that threatens their survival and, well, surviving itself, which tends to mean not biting the cold, bony hand that barely feeds them. You can’t just lament how tired we all are, chides the superego of burnout society; you must give us practical prescriptions for feeling less tired, or at least feeling less bad about it.

One way of circumventing this dilemma, unfortunately not readily accessible to most of us, is to become a superstar in the firmament of social theory. Judging by Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023), a philosophical meditation on the meaning of inactivity, the Korean German thinker Byung-Chul Han, who over the last decade has put out more than 20 such brief, urgently concentrated interventions into the state of psychosocial life under late capitalism, isn’t feeling undue pressure to offer hacks on carving out a little me-time from your busy day. Ironically enough, the status conferred by achievement and fame seems to earn its holder the right to eschew any obligations toward practical guidance.

The book makes a fascinating and telling contrast in this regard with Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhausted: An A–Z for the Weary (2024), a glossary of burnout that explores the possible remedies for exhaustion alongside its causes and vicissitudes. The author of the excellent Exhaustion: A History (2016), Schaffner used to be a cultural historian working a full-time job in a university English department that, like so many academic posts in the United Kingdom, had long been menaced by the threat of soul-crushing administrative burdens or even redundancy.

Schaffner’s way out of this trap was to train and start a practice as a coach specializing in “helping the exhausted.” Exhausted is something like the distilled wisdom of that practice, a short compendium of reflection and counsel on the various causes and cures for exhaustion from “Capitalism” and “Dante” to “Xenia” and “Yellow.” The book attests to the depth and breadth of Schaffner’s erudition and critical sensibility. You will not find many avowed self-help books rich in discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Melville, and Walter Benjamin, or that ask us to take seriously the depredations of neoliberalism and corporate culture as a central source of physical and spiritual corrosion.

But it’s also here that the book comes to be entangled in the predicament it’s diagnosing. In order to conform to the terms of the self-help genre, Exhausted has to carve out shortcuts from sober pessimism to peppy affirmation. Apparently leaning into a critical politics, the “Burnout” entry notes that “the happiness industry pushes individual coping strategies, while research shows that in the vast majority of cases, it is our working environments that are making us sick.”

She returns to this observation five entries later, in “G Is for Ghosts,” invoking Bartleby, titular protagonist of Melville’s great story whose famous refrain, “I would prefer not to,” would become a key slogan of the Occupy movement and a byword for the impulse to refuse. The cadaverous young copyist who one morning abruptly stops working has been sapped of all life, Schaffner notes, by “his dull and oppressive working environment.”

The unsettling power of Bartleby’s refrain for so many generations of readers is that it shuts down the circuits of negotiation and exchange, cancels all shared rules of communication. Bartleby doesn’t say yes to the attorney’s request to copy a document, but neither does he refuse or defy it. He induces outrage in his colleagues above all because they cannot fathom what he’s trying to say or why.

Schaffner seems to recognize that the power of Bartleby’s refrain lies in its sabotage of functional discourse, and at the same time, she wants to restore him to it, effectively to bring him back to work. “What, then, can we learn from Bartleby?” she asks, and unlike the attorney and his fellow employees, for whom Bartleby is evidently a hole torn in the fabric of learning, she has an answer: he can teach us to be less negative. “Let us therefore counter Bartleby’s repetitive rejoinder with a question: ‘What would you prefer to do instead?’”

Can a writer as thoughtful as Schaffner really be commending us to read “Bartleby”—Bartleby!—as an object lesson in the virtues of a positive attitude? Seeing Melville’s story reduced to a cautionary lesson in the need to have “a positive vision of what we want to do with our life,” it is hard not to resort to weary snarl.

But before rushing simply to deride the platitudinous use of this great story, we might remind ourselves that against the more abstracted and sealed-off scholasticism of so much modern academic philosophy, Schaffner wants to recover a more venerable conception of philosophy as guided by the question of how one should live. It’s a sound impulse, if vulnerable to the temptation to offer easy takeaway reassurances.

In fact, Schaffner’s book is most interesting and surprising when addressing the privations and wounds of our contemporary cultures of work and leisure, conditions that surely defy any quick fix. She introduces us to Nietzsche as the great seer of modernity’s morose instrumentalism, quoting The Gay Science on the effective abolition of joy and the vita contemplativa. Already in 1882, Nietzsche was warning that “educated people” were increasingly able to understand rest only as a peripheral function of work and the “need to recuperate,” an insight whose salience today is painfully obvious.

Another entry, “C Is for Capitalism,” gives us a fine summary exposition of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), focusing especially on its adumbration of the Lutheran injunction against “waste of time” and unproductive activity, arguing that the same morality tacitly underwrites our own codes of living and working, and pushing us to subject those codes to “critical attention.”

But passages like these only accentuate the irresolvable tensions between such critical attention and the compulsory positivity of the self-help genre. These tensions lend Exhausted a peculiarly split quality. The book stirs in us a spirit of discontent and protest against the stifling pressures neoliberalism exerts on our minds and bodies, only then to enjoin us to an equanimous “acceptance” of our feelings of anger and loss.

The subject of the first entry (“A Is for Acceptance”) is also the presiding spirit of the whole book. Schaffner quotes the Daoist parable of the farmer who “accepts both what seems initially positive and negative with equanimity, refusing to make rash judgements.” Acceptance is the basis for Schaffner’s preferred therapeutic approach, as formalized in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

The basic thrust of this approach is to come face-to-face with our inner critic, “naming it, observing what it does without judgement and then letting it go.” ACT involves noting the ongoing broadside of the inner critic without “fusing” with it, thus turning negative thoughts “into objects of our critical discernment rather than accepting them as the truth about ourselves.” In other words, we must decline to take our superego too seriously, to be railroaded into buying its version of the truth about ourselves. In a comparison taken from ACT practitioner Russ Harris, the flow of our thoughts is likened to the rotating dishes on a “kaiten” or conveyor belt sushi bar—we simply let the unappetizing dishes or thoughts pass us by.

The comparison reveals an implicit model of the mind as commanded by a discerning consumer who knows what they like. On this model, the psychic ear hearing the negative thoughts is fully separate from the psychic mouth speaking them, notwithstanding their occupation of the same skull. It’s this kind of split that makes it possible to treat the superego’s punishing pronouncements as we might an unappetizing passing sando. But our relationship to our superego is not that of a choosy consumer. Even if we reject Freudian metapsychology, experience alone will show us that the power of the inner critic lies in our vulnerability to it, as well as in our availability to the bad news it tells us about ourselves. If simply ignoring the superego were enough to diminish it, we’d surely have tried that already.

All this may simply demonstrate an inbuilt limitation of the self-help genre: in the face of the self’s helplessness, it can only run aground. Schaffner’s appeal to acceptance feels like a way of acknowledging the chasm between the psychosocial burdens imposed by neoliberalism and the self’s capacity to bear them. It is a basic premise of her book, after all, that burnout is a structural effect of working environments that are making us poor, exhausted, and ill—conditions that severely restrict our capacity to help ourselves.

Han starts from the same premise, placing the emphasis more on the spiritual poverty of what he has famously called “burnout society,” for which inactivity can be perceived only as a deficiency, and not as the substantial “capacity in itself” it really is. As a region of experience that cannot be bought, sold, or otherwise put to work, inactivity is a cipher of utopia, of freedom from the tyranny of wage labor and the commodity. More radically still, Han follows Maurice Blanchot in conceiving the inactive as refractory to knowledge. Embodied in the figure of Eurydice, avatar of “night, shadow, sleep and death,” it is what cannot enter the daylit world without being instantly dissolved by it. In inactivity, the will abdicates its own sovereignty in the service of the higher state of “not-doing”: “Activity reaches perfection in inactivity.”

For Han, inactivity is not in a relation of opposition to activity but a permanent possibility within it, one to which our neurotically goal-oriented society is blind. As for Schaffner, Nietzsche is an essential thinker here. Han cites a late fragment on “inventive people” and their need for sufficient time to work without purpose or productivity. Only in such nonpurposive creativity is it possible for something authentically new to emerge, “something that has never been there before.”

Han’s praise for inactivity as midwife to the new doesn’t prevent him from using much of the second half of Vita Contemplativa to stage a sustained critique of Hannah Arendt’s advocacy for the “vita activa,” specifically what he sees as its fetish of novelty. Centered on the imposition of a sameness and conformity that blocked the birth of the new, Arendt’s midcentury critique of “mass society” failed to anticipate the emergence of a society of compulsory novelty, presided over by social media.

In this society, laments Han, “everyone thinks they are unique. Everyone has their own story to tell. Everyone is a performer of their self. The vita activa takes the form of a vita performativa.” In this world of singular selves competing for attention and status, of start-ups and new editions, meaningful novelty gives way to relentless iteration—the latest iPhone, food fad, or reality TV format.

By yoking the new to activity, Han argues, Arendt entrenches the rule of sameness, the repetitive cycle of business as usual. By disentangling us from the demands of the clock, inactivity extricates us from this cycle and creates the space for the new as a real event rather than a predictable iteration of the same. In Han’s formulation: “To oppose the compulsion of work and performance, we must create a politics of inactivity that is able to produce a genuinely free time.”

There is a palpable beauty, at once philosophical and aesthetic, to Han’s vision of the insinuation of a sabbatical time of freedom and purposelessness into the dominant time of productivity and work. This pure time, uncontaminated by the intrusions of need and obligation, makes a telling contrast with the moments of relief and amelioration snatched from the unforgiving flow of clock time by the exhausted imagined readers of Schaffner’s book.

Taken together, these two forms of time serve as an analogue to the two forms of culture (high and mass) famously described by Adorno as “two halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.” On Schaffner’s side, we have the precarious and short-lived freedom of “acceptance.” On Han’s, the ideal and impossible freedom of inactivity. Opposed to one another, these two conceptions of time are also phenomena of the same commodified logic they would each, in their very different ways, wish to oppose.

Kronos v. Kairos 

(躺平的韭菜不好割, Tǎng píng de jiǔcài bù hǎo gē)

Robert Oppenheimer to APS

Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Summary:

Full movie, but in reverse:

h/t - "Q"... 

Order & Chaos

A static 2D+ solution to the 3-Body Problem Solution Set as seen from the point of string attachment.

Drops of Life and Death in the Midst of a Deep Grey and Infinite Sea

On the Nature of Hunting Secrets:

...and the Vanity of the Grey Man:

...with a Blessing in Marriage, perhaps?:

Meet Your New Bride:

...for the final Reminiscence:

...may she forever implant them in me:

Why Hyperstition Now Rules the World

...and why Democrats Continue to win elections

Hyperstition is a term used to describe self-fulfilling prophecies that come true through their existence and spread. It is associated with science fiction, speculative fiction, futurism, occultism, and conspiracy theories.

Hyperstition was coined by the British cultural theorists Nick Land and Mark Fisher to describe the way in which certain cultural ideas or narratives can become self-fulfilling prophecies. The term is a portmanteau of the words "hyper" (meaning beyond or above) and "superstition" (meaning a belief or practice that is not based on reason or knowledge). In other words, hyperstitions are beliefs or stories that, through there very existence and dissemination, bring about their own reality, or truth. They are often associated with the fields of science fiction, speculative fiction, and futurism, as well as with certain forms of occultism and conspiracy theory.

Excerpts from the above video:

I will confess, when I have a question on a moral, ethical, even practical political kind of issue, and I don't have a strong opinion about it, even if I do, but I'm questioning my opinion, I will just figure out what St Thomas Aquinus said about it. I will go to one of the early search engines, known as the Suma Theologia. There's this, you know, great Theologian who wrote down the answer to pretty much every question, and I'll look it up. And nine times out of 10, more 99 out of 100, if I disagree with St Thomas, I'm probably just going to change my view and go with his. Now at least in that case, I'm doing that very intentionally. I'm saying, "I trust this guy, I trust his intellectual and spiritual formation, and I think he's going to be more correct than some, you know, Joe Blow on the street."

I guess every day I do the same thing to Google, except it's totally unwitting. There is, when I go to the Suma Theologia, there's no pretense of neutrality or some you know objective uh standard beyond the objective standard, that I guess, St Thomas and I would agree on. You know, God and religion. With Google, there is, it's there's no person that you're seeing. And then, what's very scary, is as you point out there might not even be some senior engineer there who's trying to. It's just like a some kind of ghostly entity in the algorithm that's pushing me, without any human even being aware of it. And people, as a result because they can't see the human element, they're very trusting of what Google shows them.

[...]

Okay at this moment in time, only my new friends whom I call my right-wing conservative nutcase friends...

Because you've been a liberal your whole life basically...

...Yeah, so I tell this to their face, and they laugh. They think it's funny because they think I'm just kidding. But anyway, NPR called me, so this was maybe a year and a half, two years ago. I was already seen somehow or other as a right-wing nutcase. Myself, I don't have a conservative bone in my body. But, point is, NPR calls me. I said, "wow, yes, mainstream... they're talking to me again." And, I mean, I used to write for all these places. I was editor chief of "Psychology Today," which is mainstream leftwing, and... but they stopped talking to me after I testified before Congress in 2019. So anyway, here's NPR. So NPR sends a crew to my house and they do all the set up, it's just you know, a big deal. And then, there's the host and whatever. So they finally start, just like you and I did a little while ago, and this host starts out by saying, "So, Dr Epstein, I know that in one of the very first experiments you ever conducted on Google you got some enormous shift something like a 43% shift due to the bias you thought in Google search results, and isn't that a bit hard to believe?" So of course I'm realizing now, okay, they didn't come here to learn about my work, they came here to make fun of me and discredit you this is a hitpiece. Yeah, so I replied, "Um, hard to believe," I said, "No, absolutely not. In fact, it was completely unbelievable." I said, "You're understating the nature of the problem. It was completely unbelievable," I said, "...and that happens all the time in science. You find things that just don't make any sense, you figure, I made a mistake somewhere, so you repeat it. So we repeated the experiment with another group of Representative voters, and this time we got a shift of 66%."

The poor guy, the poor guy, I felt so bad for him because I could just see his face drop. He was thinking, "Oh no, we're not going to get our hitpiece here," and so he did the whole interview, and then they all left. And they never aired the interview, of course, they never aired it. Of course, they didn't get what they came for. But what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm very skeptical about my work. I'm very skeptical about all these things I say. I'm skeptical about our discoveries. But we do what good scientists do. We replicate. W do variations. We talk to other teams. And other teams now have have replicated what we call "the search engine manipulation effect". So that's been replicated multiple times now. But all of this stuff though is so it's so inherently disturbing, which is kind of what you're getting at. You're saying, "Okay, this is disturbing and creepy and probably has a lot of implications for a lot of things, not just elections you know ."

When you believe in things

That you don't understand,

Then you suffer,

Superstition ain't the way...

...Hyperstition IS!

The Photo-Molecular Effect

Just one more reason why your Climate Model doesn't work.

David L. Chandler, "How light can vaporize water without the need for heat"

Surprising “photomolecular effect” discovered by MIT researchers could affect calculations of climate change and may lead to improved desalination and drying processes.

It’s the most fundamental of processes — the evaporation of water from the surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind. Evaporation is all around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long as we have existed.

And yet, it turns out, we’ve been missing a major part of the picture all along.

In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn’t alone in causing water to evaporate. Light, striking the water’s surface where air and water meet, can break water molecules away and float them into the air, causing evaporation in the absence of any source of heat.

The astonishing new discovery could have a wide range of significant implications. It could help explain mysterious measurements over the years of how sunlight affects clouds, and therefore affect calculations of the effects of climate change on cloud cover and precipitation. It could also lead to new ways of designing industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination or drying of materials.

The findings, and the many different lines of evidence that demonstrate the reality of the phenomenon and the details of how it works, are described today in the journal PNAS, in a paper by Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering Gang Chen, postdocs Guangxin Lv and Yaodong Tu, and graduate student James Zhang.

The authors say their study suggests that the effect should happen widely in nature— everywhere from clouds to fogs to the surfaces of oceans, soils, and plants — and that it could also lead to new practical applications, including in energy and clean water production. “I think this has a lot of applications,” Chen says. “We’re exploring all these different directions. And of course, it also affects the basic science, like the effects of clouds on climate, because clouds are the most uncertain aspect of climate models.”

A newfound phenomenon

The new work builds on research reported last year, which described this new “photomolecular effect” but only under very specialized conditions: on the surface of specially prepared hydrogels soaked with water. In the new study, the researchers demonstrate that the hydrogel is not necessary for the process; it occurs at any water surface exposed to light, whether it’s a flat surface like a body of water or a curved surface like a droplet of cloud vapor.

Because the effect was so unexpected, the team worked to prove its existence with as many different lines of evidence as possible. In this study, they report 14 different kinds of tests and measurements they carried out to establish that water was indeed evaporating — that is, molecules of water were being knocked loose from the water’s surface and wafted into the air — due to the light alone, not by heat, which was long assumed to be the only mechanism involved.

One key indicator, which showed up consistently in four different kinds of experiments under different conditions, was that as the water began to evaporate from a test container under visible light, the air temperature measured above the water’s surface cooled down and then leveled off, showing that thermal energy was not the driving force behind the effect.

Other key indicators that showed up included the way the evaporation effect varied depending on the angle of the light, the exact color of the light, and its polarization. None of these varying characteristics should happen because at these wavelengths, water hardly absorbs light at all — and yet the researchers observed them.

The effect is strongest when light hits the water surface at an angle of 45 degrees. It is also strongest with a certain type of polarization, called transverse magnetic polarization. And it peaks in green light — which, oddly, is the color for which water is most transparent and thus interacts the least.

Chen and his co-researchers have proposed a physical mechanism that can explain the angle and polarization dependence of the effect, showing that the photons of light can impart a net force on water molecules at the water surface that is sufficient to knock them loose from the body of water. But they cannot yet account for the color dependence, which they say will require further study.

They have named this the photomolecular effect, by analogy with the photoelectric effect that was discovered by Heinrich Hertz in 1887 and finally explained by Albert Einstein in 1905. That effect was one of the first demonstrations that light also has particle characteristics, which had major implications in physics and led to a wide variety of applications, including LEDs. Just as the photoelectric effect liberates electrons from atoms in a material in response to being hit by a photon of light, the photomolecular effect shows that photons can liberate entire molecules from a liquid surface, the researchers say.

“The finding of evaporation caused by light instead of heat provides new disruptive knowledge of light-water interaction,” says Xiulin Ruan, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, who was not involved in the study. “It could help us gain new understanding of how sunlight interacts with cloud, fog, oceans, and other natural water bodies to affect weather and climate. It has significant potential practical applications such as high-performance water desalination driven by solar energy. This research is among the rare group of truly revolutionary discoveries which are not widely accepted by the community right away but take time, sometimes a long time, to be confirmed.”

Solving a cloud conundrum

The finding may solve an 80-year-old mystery in climate science. Measurements of how clouds absorb sunlight have often shown that they are absorbing more sunlight than conventional physics dictates possible. The additional evaporation caused by this effect could account for the longstanding discrepancy, which has been a subject of dispute since such measurements are difficult to make.

“Those experiments are based on satellite data and flight data,“ Chen explains. “They fly an airplane on top of and below the clouds, and there are also data based on the ocean temperature and radiation balance. And they all conclude that there is more absorption by clouds than theory could calculate. However, due to the complexity of clouds and the difficulties of making such measurements, researchers have been debating whether such discrepancies are real or not. And what we discovered suggests that hey, there’s another mechanism for cloud absorption, which was not accounted for, and this mechanism might explain the discrepancies.”

Chen says he recently spoke about the phenomenon at an American Physical Society conference, and one physicist there who studies clouds and climate said they had never thought about this possibility, which could affect calculations of the complex effects of clouds on climate. The team conducted experiments using LEDs shining on an artificial cloud chamber, and they observed heating of the fog, which was not supposed to happen since water does not absorb in the visible spectrum. “Such heating can be explained based on the photomolecular effect more easily,” he says.

Lv says that of the many lines of evidence, “the flat region in the air-side temperature distribution above hot water will be the easiest for people to reproduce.” That temperature profile “is a signature” that demonstrates the effect clearly, he says.

Zhang adds: “It is quite hard to explain how this kind of flat temperature profile comes about without invoking some other mechanism” beyond the accepted theories of thermal evaporation. “It ties together what a whole lot of people are reporting in their solar desalination devices,” which again show evaporation rates that cannot be explained by the thermal input.

The effect can be substantial. Under the optimum conditions of color, angle, and polarization, Lv says, “the evaporation rate is four times the thermal limit.”

Already, since publication of the first paper, the team has been approached by companies that hope to harness the effect, Chen says, including for evaporating syrup and drying paper in a paper mill. The likeliest first applications will come in the areas of solar desalinization systems or other industrial drying processes, he says. “Drying consumes 20 percent of all industrial energy usage,” he points out.

Because the effect is so new and unexpected, Chen says, “This phenomenon should be very general, and our experiment is really just the beginning.” The experiments needed to demonstrate and quantify the effect are very time-consuming. “There are many variables, from understanding water itself, to extending to other materials, other liquids and even solids,” he says.

“The observations in the manuscript points to a new physical mechanism that foundationally alters our thinking on the kinetics of evaporation,” says Shannon Yee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, who was not associated with this work. He adds, “Who would have thought that we are still learning about something as quotidian as water evaporating?”

“I think this work is very significant scientifically because it presents a new mechanism,” says University of Alberta Distinguished Professor Janet A.W. Elliott, who also was not associated with this work. “It may also turn out to be practically important for technology and our understanding of nature, because evaporation of water is ubiquitous and the effect appears to deliver significantly higher evaporation rates than the known thermal mechanism. … My overall impression is this work is outstanding. It appears to be carefully done with many precise experiments lending support for one another.”

The work was partly supported by an MIT Bose Award. The authors are currently working on ways to make use of this effect for water desalination, in a project funded by the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and the MIT-UMRP program.