Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
China watchers currently worry that the more recent shift towards centralization portends an increase in draconian control. As much as this appears to be the case, we can rest assured that as the inefficiencies caused by concentrated power increase, pressure will mount for yet another wave of decentralization. China is under normal circumstances a nation striving for balance, and as such, it is always a mistake to see short‐term moves as a march in one direction only.
What's Wrong With China
Paul Midler
It’s here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich. This task, in other words, is an act of deep work. Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work. Benn was no exception to this trend.
At the leading edges of science, at the threshold of the truly new, the threat has often nearly overwhelmed. Thus Rutherford’s shock at rebounding alpha particles, “quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life.” Thus Heisenberg’s “deep alarm” when he came upon his quantum mechanics, his hallucination of looking through “the surface of atomic phenomena” into “a strangely beautiful interior” that left him giddy. Thus also, in November 1915, Einstein’s extreme reaction when he realized that the general theory of relativity he was painfully developing in the isolation of his study explained anomalies in the orbit of Mercury that had been a mystery to astronomers for more than fifty years. The theoretical physicist Abraham Pais, his biographer, concludes: “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him. He had to be right. ‘For a few days, I was beside myself with joyous excitement.’ Later, he told [a friend] that his discovery had given him palpitations of the heart. What he told [another friend] is even more profoundly significant: when he saw that his calculations agreed with the unexplained astronomical observations, he had the feeling that something actually snapped in him.”555 The compensation for such emotional risk can be enormous. For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. Bohr especially understood this mechanism and had the courage to turn it around and use it as an instrument of assay. Otto Frisch remembers a discussion someone attempted to deflect by telling Bohr it made him giddy, to which Bohr responded: “But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.”556 Much later, Oppenheimer once told an audience, Bohr was listening to Pauli talking about a new theory on which he had recently been attacked. “And Bohr asked, at the end, ‘Is this really crazy enough? The quantum mechanics was really crazy.’ And Pauli said, ‘I hope so, but maybe not quite.’ ”557 Bohr’s understanding of how crazy discovery must be clarifies why Oppenheimer sometimes found himself unable to push alone into the raw original. To do so requires a sturdiness at the core of identity—even a brutality—that men as different as Niels Bohr and Ernest Lawrence had earned or been granted that he was unlucky enough to lack. It seems he was cut out for other work: for now, building that school of theoretical physics he had dreamed of.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise