More movie violence than I thought

Ahem, pardon me. I was wrong earlier in saying, first, that the stabbing of the dybbuk? is the only physical violence in the movie, and then was wrong again when I thought the car crash was the only other instance of violence.  However, I am sticking with my story that the movie is fundamentally (physicists like to say that word) a cartoon.  The violence, like the movie, is not to be taken seriously.  So of course the Coen brothers call it A Serious Man.  An obvious alternate misleading title would be A Serious Movie.  However, we can paraphrase good old A. D' Abro (below) and say the obvious is not necessarily credited with any deep significance in moviemaking.  It is the veiled.

The other cartoon-like violence in the movie occurs in each of Larry's three dreams.  First, in the classroom dream, Sy, the serious man of the movie (according to Nachtner, and also according to Sy himself in this particular dream-scene), bashes Larry into the chalkboard while telling him he made a cuckold of him.  Sy doesn't use the word cuckold, however. He uses the f-word, and this is the only time I can think of when an adult utters a profanity, unless you count the Torah hoister muttering "Jesus Christ!" when he almost drops the heavy scroll near the end of Danny's bar mitzvah.  (The kids are using profanity all the time.) The physical bashing of Larry by the dybbuk-Sy in the dream contrasts nicely with Sy's warm-huggy-bear approach to taking advantage of Larry when he, Sy, was alive.

The Sex with Mrs. Samsky dream ends with Sy putting boards over Larry like he was burying him alive, saying "Nailing it down, so important."  This isn't literal violence but is threatening nevertheless.  Mrs. Samsky's cigarette smoke is rather threatening, also, especially when you consider that Larry is, at the end of the movie, called back to the doctor because of something detected in his chest x-rays.

And the shooting, of course, of Uncle Arthur in the Escape to Canada dream.  The dream ends with Mitch being told by his dad, both of them in their hunting outfits with rifles, to shoot Larry next ("There's another Jew, son!") and Mitch aims and fires--then the dream ends.

"No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture," is the disclaimer after the credit roll at the end of the movie.

Coincidences

I was searching for something in my car's glove compartment last week and ran across the reciept from Webb's Auto Service for the last time I got my oil changed.  Not what I was looking for, but I'd written on the back the mileage at which I'd be needing another oil change (the little sticker they put on the inside of the windshield didn't stick).  I thought I might be getting close to time for a change, so I looked over from the passenger's seat at what the odometer reading was. Pre-zactly what the jotted-down mileage was!  That would be: 113,421.  Not bad for a 1996 car, eh?

And today I'm in the Pine Bluff library, waiting for my laptop to boot up and connect to the public wi-fi here, walking over to the stacks where Arkansas-related books are, planning to take another look at my brother Steven's poetry book (Half Life Burning, Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press, 2000), and gazing at the books as I head back to where I know Steven's book is, and what catches my eye?  I mean besides the old copy of Cotton Stealing, written by "Anonymous" and published in 1866 by John B. Walsh Co., Chicago.  None other than True Grit, by Charles Portis, published by Simon & Schuster in 1968!  I might have ignored it (again) but for the fact that it's been in the news lately due to the Coen brothers making a new movie of it.  And also, the coincidence here, the movie hits the theaters today.

Portis dedicated the book thusly:  "For my mother and father".  Acccording to one local wag, Bob Lancaster of the Arkansas Times, Portis created Mattie's personality and way of talking from his (Portis's) mother's personality.  (That information was delivered in a moment when Lancaster was not operating so much in the wag mode.)

In A Serious Man, one coincidence is the simultaneity of Larry's and Sy's traffic accidents.  Larry is not hurt in his collision, in spite of being in a sort of small car (small for those days) and not having the whiplash-preventing headrest of our modern day cars, while Sy, making a left turn in his big ol' Cadillac, is killed.  He musta been hit by a gravel truck or something.

Another coincidence (these are intentional, story-line coincidences) is Danny's resemblance to Abraham's son Isaac as portrayed in the painting on Marshak's wall.  You can see Danny reacting unfavorably to the painting, which is of Abraham being stopped at the last moment from following God's command to sacrifice Isaac. The painting shows a person stopping Abe from cutting Isaac's throat.  I don't know the story that well, but I though it was more like the voice of God at the last moment saying, "This was only a test!"  Anyway,  on the subject of Abraham, earlier in the movie we heard from Rabbi Nachtner, when he gave Sy's eulogy, that the afterlife is not a geographical place "like Canada," and not a place where we'll be rewarded for our good deeds (not a "VIP lounge" where milk and cookies are served eternally), but is rather "in the bosom of Abraham."  Danny can't be too impressed with the desirability of having his soul rocked in the bosom of Abraham after looking at the painting.

And of course, in Larry's dream of Arthur attempting to escape his legal troubles,  the place of sanctuary is intended to be Canada.  The early parts of that scene--the sign that tells us Canada is the destination and the fact that a boat is the mode of escape--made me think of Tim O'Brien's story "On the Rainy River".

Music in the movie

Danny's transistor radio seems to be somewhat magical, in that it's not only playing "Somebody to Love" in the opening classroom scene and the closing whirlwind scene, but also played it for Rabbi Marshak, apparently, otherwise how would he quote from the lyrics (slightly misquote, but never mind) and also choose to name members of Jefferson Airplane for Danny?  When the old principal of the Hebrew school examines the radio with a rather transcendent sort of curiosity, then slowly puts the earphone in his hairy ear and truly seems to go into a transcendent state, I couldn't tell what music was playing.  Ditto for Danny's return to the classroom, when he is inserting the earphone--it's not "Somebody to Love" but could be another song on the Surrealistic Pillow LP.  Two other songs from that album are used in the soundtrack.

The actual soundtrack, the musical theme of the movie, is something else I really like about it.  I'm not sure of the ethereal tune's actual notes, some of which are played on harp and some on piano, but they are quite harmonious.  I plan to try to pick out those notes on my piano, a recent purchase from Martin Piano Company in Pine Bluff (Rudolph Wurlitzer, refinished black spinet, $600).  I've taken lessons for a year and a half from a local piano teacher named Henry Moore, who's around ten years older than I am and seems to be a good teacher (better teacher than I am a student).  I was just using a cheap electronic keyboard to practice on until I bought the piano this month.

Why did Santana Abraxas and Creedence's Cosmos Factory both get mentioned in A Serious Man as Columbia Record Club selections of the month (for May and June), when they weren't released until 1970, three years after the movie's time period?  Well, I just realized that that is a third instance where three years has some relevance in the movie (can you name the other two?).

The Hebrew chanting and singing in the movie, including the song Dem Milner's Trern (The Miller's Tears) are another transcendent aspect of the soundtrack. 

An interesting aside on "Somebody to Love":  In an interview on Fresh Air (January 2009), Bruce Springsteen mentioned something about the "subtext" of rock n' roll being that it makes you want to take your pants off (I heard that story second hand so I don't have the exact quote).  A friend of mine once told me that when "Somebody to Love" started playing on her car radio, her young son in the back seat--five or six years old, I'm guessing--almost immediately started to take off his pants.

For starters

My take on A Serious Man is that it's the Coen brothers doing their version of slapstick.  In actual slapstick routines, and also in many old cartoons such as Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, and others from the 50s and 60s (and earlier), some of the characters continually get "hurt" physically, and it's funny.  Ditto for A Serious Man, but the hurt is emotional rather than physical. So we are not supposed to take A Serious Man seriously.

Just as some people don't care for the pratfalls and the Three Stooges' style physical comedy, some people don't care for and don't get the comedy in A Serious Man.  Pat Calkins, my best friend during junior high, watched part of the movie with me recently, and when the alleged dybbuk is stabbed by Dora, he just sort of didn't get it, wondering out loud by saying something like, "She stabbed him after he helped them?"  Well, you really do have to pay attention, and have missed the essentials of that part of the movie if you don't get the reason she stabs him. And you're going to be lost to the humor of the rest of the movie if you don't find the dybbuk?'s response to his stabbing to be funny.

The stabbing in fact is the one instance where there is a physical slapstick moment.  Maybe that's why the Coens refer to the opening sequence as being like the cartoon that preceded the feature presentation back when they (and I) were kids.  Well, okay, the car wreck is physical humor.  And Michael Stuhlbarg's body language--enhanced by 1967-era pants and shirt--and facial expressions are also excellent physical comedy.

So, anyway, I let Pat off the hook less than halfway through the movie.  He wanted action, and actually asked me if someone was going to get killed--he needed to anticipate some serious physical movie violence in order to keep up his interest. The movie he had on his mind was Lord of War. That was the movie he wanted me to watch, and I did check it out from the library the next day.   And I like it, unlike him and his low opinion of, or at least lack of interest in, A Serious Man. 

During Robert Altman's acceptance speech for his Lifetime Achievment Oscar, he mentioned that he wasn't as interested in stories as he was in conversations.  You gotta be interested in conversations to care anything about A Serious Man, because that's what drives the action, and mostly is the action, in the movie.  It's Coen bros' intellectual slapstick.  It's a cartoon made with real actors. 

Like some cartoons--Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner come to mind--A Serious Man has lessons to be learned.  If you think just because someone does you a favor, helps you in some way, like helping you replace the fallen-off wheel of your cart in the snow, that he is your friend or that he is a good person, well, you better be careful.  He could be the equivalent of a dybbuk. He could be pure evil.

Or if you think you're actually in good health because your cigarette-smoking doctor tells you so, but your chest x-rays have not been developed yet, well, you're going to possibly find the "truth" to be a lie.  (The x-ray room, with its door ajar, is shown behind Larry when Dr. Shapiro gives him his supposed clean bill of health.)

And that's only for starters.

Not the Red Owl

The Airplane & the Guest House

The Wikipedia article on Jefferson Airplane is good, better than the Airplane's own website.  From either of those sites and numerous others, you can find out that Rabbi Marshak leaves out two members of the group when he names Grace Slick, Paul Kanter, Marty Balin, and Jorma "...Somebody" (Danny whispers "Kaukonen").  That's the Airplane minus its rhythm section:  Spencer Dryden on drums and Jack Casady on bass.

For some reason I was not a big enough fan of theirs to buy any of their albums (y'all might need reminding here that I was Danny Gopnick's age in 1967) until I saw a review of Volunteers in Circus magazine in 1970 and bought that album (cassette, that is).  However, strangely enough, in the remodeled garage/servant's quarters that my family called the "Guest House" (it's about 600 square feet and has no kitchen--not really a house) there was a Jefferson Airplane poster, not quite a psychedelic one, but it did have a woman's bare breasts on the nose of the falling-apart wooden blimp-like airplane at the center of the poster. This was a drawing/painting, and the way the group's name was written was the only psychedelic thing about the poster. It was hard to tell at first that the words even said "Jefferson Airplane."

The remodeling took place in '65 or '66, and my mother decorated the Guest House partly with moddish posters, including a Beatles poster, a Los Angeles Zoo poster (drawing not photo), and others (from the John Simmons shop in Little Rock).  But the Jefferson Airplane poster was the best of the bunch, although I didn't even know what it was and consequently didn't like it until I was in high school.  Starting in '67, the Guest House is where played my drums.  That's probably also when I started losing some of my high frequency hearing, since the Guest House was basically one big room with wood paneled walls and a brick floor, with maybe a small rug or two.  Quite reverberant, acoustically speaking, which mainly made the snare drum and cymbals louder.  Oop!

Some online reviews/etc of A Serious Man that I like are the Slate review by Dana Stevens, Some Thoughts from The American Scene, and Filmwell "Questions for Further Study".

Veiled quotes

“In the grouping of phenomena it is the similarities established in the impersonal world that are regarded as of particular significance; the more obvious similarities detected by our unaided senses are held to be of minor importance.  For this reason the physicist claims that visible light and invisible ultraviolet light are kindred in nature, for both are electromagnetic vibrations.  The accidental circumstance that the human eye detects the first kind of radiation, and not the second, is viewed as unimportant.  Indeed we need no appeal to theoretical physics to find illustrations of the same tendency.  Thus if we are judging from our immediate sensations, we should presumably claim that sugar and saccharin exhibited a striking similarity, for both are white crystals and have a sweet taste.  On this basis we should be tempted to class the two substances into one family.  Yet insofar as the chemist is concerned, sugar and saccharine are entirely different:  sugar is a carbohydrate containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen; saccharine, though sweet to the taste, has the chemical characteristics of an acid, and its molecule contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and also nitrogen and sulfur.  Likewise, the botanist places in the same family the potato and tomato plants, or the yellow buttercup and the hooded blue aconite.  No obvious similarities can justify such a classification.  These examples and many others that could be mentioned bring out the important point that it is not the obvious that is necessarily credited with any deep significance in science.  It is the veiled.”

--A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics, Volume One (of two), pages 15-16, Dover edition 1951.  Originally published in 1939.

“Inscrutable upon a sunlit day,

Her veil will Nature never let you steal,

And what she will not to your mind reveal,

You will not wrest from her with levers and screws.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, lines 672-675, published in 1808.

Bethe and Oppenheimer photos?

During the scenes where Arlen is standing in the door of Larry's office, there are two photos on the outer office wall, near where the secretary sits.  The photos are visibile when Arlen steps out of the way.  I looked at these using 4x magnification once before and couldn't identify them.  But in watching the movie again recently, I thought I recognized them. The one on the left appears to be Hans Bethe, and the other one appears to be J. Robert Oppenheimer.  I didn't find photos resembling either of these in searching on the web, but I think I've seen them before in books.

Why these two physicists?  Bethe received the Nobel physics prize in 1967, and Oppenheimer died in 1967 (as all you followers of this blog already know, ho ho). They were friends and also worked together at Los Alamos during WWII.  Bethe died in 2005.  He was interviewed, along with numerous other physicists and some common folk, in 1979 for The Day After Trinity, Jon Else's documentary film about Oppenheimer.  It was written by David and Janet Peoples, narrated by Paul Freeh, released in 1980, nominated for an Oscar, and is highly recommended by me.

Two things to keep in mind if you watch it:  Hiroshima was not destroyed in only "9 seconds" and it wasn't just "Hahn & Strassmann in 1938" who discovered nuclear fission.

Most of the destruction in Hiroshima--the complete devastation seen in photographs--was accomplished by the bomb's shock wave knocking over buildings (killing or trapping many people in the process), then, as John Hersey notes in Hiroshima, "ordinary cooking fires" and live electrical wires caused a conflagration, starting in the rubble of the homes and offices, that consumed the city--and it took a lot longer than nine seconds.  Here's the general idea:  The fireball of a nuclear explosion is certainly a horror, but the resulting shock wave kills and injures more people than the fireball.  That's why "Duck & Cover" is no joke. It also applies if a powerful conventional explosive is detonated near a building with windows enabling you to see the bright flash, which is caused by the air near ground zero becoming incandescent. The flash is a warning that a shock wave is on its way. Just the fact that you see the flash (rather than your immediately being consumed in it) means you may be far enough away to survive--but not if you're lacerated by flying glass.  Since there is no time to think about the meaning of the flash, the Duck & Cover drills actually did make sense. And another thing: An asteroid striking Earth would produce an extremely bright flash and huge shock wave also. It's not a bad idea to be prepared, at least mentally.

The study of the uranium nucleus for which Hahn and Strassmann too often receive sole credit was initiated by and led by the female nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew who had to flee Germany (she'd worked in Berlin for 30 years) after its annexation of Austria in March 1938, so she deserves most of the credit for the discovery, not least because of the fact that she and her physicist nephew, Otto Frisch, correctly interpreted what was happening to the uranium nucleus in the neutron bombardment experiments Hahn & Strassman continued doing (and wrote to Meitner about) after Meitner illegally left Germany for a refugee's life in Sweden. Meitner's side of the story had not been emphasized until after The Day After Trinity came out. Hahn alone won the Nobel physics chemistry prize in 1944 for the discovery, but as I wrote in a 1993 unpublished letter to The New Yorker, he saw the smoking gun of fission but the smoke just got in his eyes until Lise Meitner showed that where there was smoke, there was also fire.

Finally, whether those wall photos really are of Bethe and Oppenheimer is something of an undecidable proposition, at least from my perspective right now.  But I couldn't resist mentioning the possibility, mainly because of the historical connections of both men to the year 1967.

"Obviously..."

Is obviously a bad word.  What someone likely means when he or she says "obviously" is "observably,"  as in "this is what is observable here," in which case "obviously" is the wrong word, because it implies a collusion of the speaker with the listener. What's obvious to you, however, may not be at all obvious to me.  So it's a dangerous word, or at least a superfluous word, if you're really trying to understand something by discussing it with another person.

In The Rise of the New Physics, the writer D. A'Bro (that abbreviated name is all I know about him or her) says something like: the obvious is not necessarily credited with any deep significance in science.  Which is one reason I love the movie A Serious Man.  It's pretty much a frontal attack on the obvious, starting with the question of whether the old man in the Yiddish "cartoon" at the beginning of the movie is a dybbuk. I say "cartoon" because one of the Coens, in the interview included with the movie on the DVD, nostalgically compares this opening sequence to the cartoons that once-upon-a-time in U.S.  theaters preceded the movie--and also back then, you could only see movies at the theater (unless they were old enough to appear occasionally on TV).  No movie rentals in 1967!  Not until about 1980.

MARSHAK (the physicist)

Robert Marshak, an almost-famous physicist, would have been 94 this year on October 11 (yesterday).  He was a Brooklyn kid who graduated from high school at 15 and from Columbia College at 20.  As a 22 year old graduate student in physics at Cornell, he helped Hans Bethe work out the theory of the particular series of nuclear fusion reactions that allow stars to exist.  (Bethe won the Nobel prize--in 1967--for the discovery.)  Marshak also worked as assistant chief of the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the development of the first atomic bomb.  Then, later on, he did some theoretical elementary particle work that nearly won him a Nobel prize.  See his obituary which appeared in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1992, or see the Wikipedia article about him for info on his published physics work.  His death was caused by accidental drowning at Cancun two days before Christmas.

From what I can tell, he was a very wise man, although since he died at age 76 (like Einstein), he never was very wise and very old at the same time, like the Rabbi Marshak allegedly was.  The fact that Rabbi Marshak turns away Larry in his hour of great need seems to indicate he was getting senile.  More about that later.

Done Anything Lately?

When Judith comes into the kitchen where Larry is grading homework, she starts off her announcement that Larry is going to be sloughed off in favor of Sy by saying, "Honey?"  Larry, not really seeming to listen at first, responds with an automatic and barely audible echo of this term of endearment.  (I recommend turning on the subtitles on the DVD, so the dialogue can be followed better.)  This scene is where the "I haven't done anything" thematic element--if that's the right term--first appears.  Larry in defending himself against Judith wanting to divorce him says, "I haven't done anything."  Then Judith says, after Larry more or less asks, that she and Sy haven't "done anything."  Whether they have done the deed together is one of the mysteries of the film, like the dybbuk question at the beginning.

In the Columbia Record Club call scene, Larry says he didn't do anything and Dick Dutton's voice explains or tries to explain how doing nothing is what resulted in his being sent Santana Abraxas.  So, doing nothing also has consequences, which is a rather complementary idea to what Larry tells Clive about actions having consequences.

When Arlen--with studied casualness standing at the office door each time he is seen--asks Larry about publications of his that might be of interest to the Tenure Committee in their deliberations,  Larry says, "No, I haven't done anything, I haven't published."

When Arthur is brought to the house in handcuffs by the police,  he pleads, "I didn't do anything!"

So at this moment I count four scenes of I haven't done anything in the movie.

And finally for today, a thought from The Moviegoer by Walker Percy:  "There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer nights at twelve and one and two o'clock when the seats endured alone in the empty theater.  The enduring is something that must be accounted for.  One cannot simply shrug it off."

This is something I thought of myself, in regard to a particular new classroom where I took the first semester of calculus at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, years before I read any of Percy's books. Those empty, unobserved seats attached to the floor in the classroom while no one is in there--that fact needs to be considered, thought about, questioned.  Percy said it better, though:  Accounted for.  How the heck can that be achieved?  I bring this up here because this is what quantum mechanics deals with, sort of.  A quantum system supposedly endures quite deterministically, and quite beyond observation, until the moment it is subjected to a "measurement" or "observation."  Then quantum probability and the Copenhagen interpretation of observation--or some other interpretation--must be considered.

The lonely enduring of Schrodinger's Cat in his or her box unobserved during the one hour period in which the poison gas has a 50% probability of being released must somehow be accounted for.

Whose the dumbest

I just wanna see if my blog will show up on a Google search (Google by the way is a homonym of googol, a  name invented by a nine-year-old in about 1940 for the number "one followed by one hundred zeros") if I include my non-unique name, David Trulock, as part of my postings and not just in my low profile. 

I wonder how many times "I haven't done anything" or "we haven't done anything" appears in A Serious Man. It's definitely a repetitive element in the movie.  Later.

Questions

One reason I like A Serious Man is it raises many interesting questions that are internal to the movie and others that are real.  Is the old man in the opening sequence dead or alive?  The way he reacts to being stabbed with the ice pick is one of the funniest parts of the movie (something like, 'well, come to think of it, i'm not feeling all that well'). In the credits at the end of the film he is listed as "Dybbuk?"--yes with a question mark--played by Fivush Finkel.  Then of course there is the real question of the interpretation of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment.  How can the cat be both dead and alive until observed?

A big question for me is why did the Coen brothers have Dick Dutton, on the phone from Columbia Record Club, refer to two albums that weren't released until 1970?  Those would be Santana Abraxas and Creedence's Cosmos Factory.  Jimi Hendrix's song Machine Gun, played during the "goy's teeth" scenes, is also from 1970.  The movie of course is set in 1967, which is when the song Somebody to Love was released by Jefferson Airplane. (An earlier and inferior version of the song was recorded in 1966 by Grace Slick and the Great Society, before she joined "The Airplane!")

I was approximately Danny Gopnick's age in 1967, but I can't relate at all to the pot smoking at that age or the frequent use of the f-word.  Oh yeh, the pot smoking came later -- in 1970, actually, when I was in the 11th grade.  We never referred to it as "pot" though.  That's what we said all the old folks called it.  To us it was grass or weed.  I only smoked it occassionally, for a few months, until I met my high school girlfriend and quit hanging out with the grass-smoking crowd.

Yes, "you have to be able to do the math," but...

Larry tells Clive, in regard to Clive’s not being sufficiently prepared to do the math on the mid-term and thus his flunking the mid-term, that the physics is really contained in the math and the examples like Shrödinger’s cat are “fables” to help with understanding the math.

It’s certainly true, as I am well aware, that one has to jump through the mathematical hoops as presented by physics professors in assignments and on exams. This is the Dictatorship of the Professariat, and nowhere in academia is it more pronounced than in physics. But if the professor doesn’t do his part in preparing the students for exams, and the student doesn’t do his or her part in preparing (which, I suggest, means in physics and math that you should work on the assignments and study for exams with one other person from your class—don’t try to go it alone), then the result is what Clive experiences in the movie.

I love math and I love physics, but I love straightforward writing even more, and I’m here to tell you that badly written textbooks are another factor that must be somehow compensated for if one is to survive in the standard physics curriculum. (One like myself, I mean, not one like an average physics brainiac.) Fortunately there are a few good textbooks out there. Griffiths’ quantum mechanics text and his electrodynamics text are good ones at the upper undergraduate level. Unfortunately, the standard texts used in most of the graduate classes I’ve taken are poorly written and focus less on physics than on, yes, jumping through mathematical hoops. And also on what seem more like engineering problems than physics problems (“problems” means homework assignment problems).

The math part of physics is indeed where the real physics is. It is necessary to learn it to some extent—enough to survive the Dictatorship of the Professariat—but really the math is not sufficient for understanding the physics. Physicists make progress—or at least until 60 years ago or so, made progress—by having intuitive insights that are translatable into math but are not exclusively mathematical.

One of the great physics expositors of the early-to-mid 20th century was the British astronomer-philosopher Arthur Eddington (that would be Sir Arthur Eddington for you anglophiles). He gave a series of lectures in 1938 at Cambridge University that were transcribed and published in 1939 as a book called The Philosophy of Physical Science. In the Ann Arbor paperback edition (U. of Michigan Press, 1958), you can find near the bottom of page 55 a sort of summation of Eddington’s complaint that physicists routinely ignore the epistemological aspect of their pursuit while over-emphasizing the math:

This vagueness and inconsistency of the attitude of most physicists is largely due to a tendency to treat the mathematical development of a theory as the only part which deserves serious attention. But in physics everything depends on the insight with which the ideas are handled before they reach the mathematical stage.

So there, all ye physics dictators.  The ideas are antecedent to the math-o-matics.  Well, most of the time. 

 

And about Niels Bohr and those 3 rabbis, it was actually three stories told by one rabbi.  Here's what H.B Gellat says about it on the Institute of Noetic Sciences webpage (www.shiftinaction.com/node/7179), posted as The Certainty of Uncertainty: Beware of Your Dogma:

Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, tells a story about a young student attending three lectures by a very famous rabbi. The student said the first lecture was very good --- he understood everything. The second lecture was much better --- the student didn’t understand it but the rabbi understood everything. The third lecture was the best of all --- it was so good that even the rabbi didn’t understand it. Bohr tells this story because he says he never understood quantum physics, even though he helped create it.  

And one other thing: when Larry is saying to Clive, "Even I don't understand the dead cat," the audio was apparently dubbed in. You can see his lips still moving for a fraction of a second after he says "dead cat."

The Rabbis

The woman at the lake in the leg braces that Larry talks to before seeing a rabbi turns out to have better things to say to comfort Larry than any of the three rabbis, who only get progressively worse. Rabbi #1 is not bad, suggesting a change in perspective (“just look at the parking lot, Larry!), which is advice that makes sense to Larry once he gets stoned with the seductive sunbather. Rabbi #2 is awful, totally non-spiritual, telling the same unhelpful story to people who come in needing spiritual help. The lawyer in his sportsman’s lair is a more spiritual person and more empathetic than Rabbi #2.

And what’s the problem with rabbi #3, the great and wise Marshak? Maybe he’s thinking or meditating or whatever, but he just seems senile. And he won’t even see Larry, (“too busy” everyone says) although they literally see each other (if Marshak can see that far) before Marshak’s horror-story of a secretary closes the sliding door.

I certainly think it’s cool that Marshak quotes the lyric of “Somebody to Love” (changing “joy” to “hope”) and he names the members of “The Airplane!” when Danny gets in to see him, but it’s significant that Marshak tries to pronounce Jorma Kaukonen’s last name and can’t, and ignores Danny as he mouths the correct pronunciation in a whisper. Then Marshak tells Danny, who is of course happy (and the audience is happy) that he gets back his radio and twenty dollar bill, to “be a good boy.”

Okay, I almost forgot. Marshak does say “Den vaht?” after misquoting the lyric: “When the truth is found to be lies /and all the hope within you dies.” That, at least, is a worthwhile question.

The great physicist Niels Bohr liked to tell a story about three rabbis, and how it related to explaining quantum mechanics. I’ll have to look it up.

What really makes A Serious Man funny is the acting of Michael Stuhlbarg. He’s on a par with, and seems to be a linear combination of, Harold Lloyd and Robin Williams.

It's the Standard Deviation dummie (sorry)

The mathematical thingy Larry was writing on the board in the classroom dream sequence is just the common, how-could-I-forget, well-known standard deviation. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in position-momentum language says that the product of the standard deviation of position and the standard deviation of momentum cannot be smaller than Planck’s constant divided by 4π. 

My favorite reference on this subject is David J. Griffiths book Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, 2nd edition, which shows a drawing of a live cat on the front and a dead cat on the back. Although if you didn’t know better you could think the back cat was sleeping. It’s proposed as a mere thought experiment only, so no need to worry about the cat. And, as Griffiths mentions in his book, the problem is not considered a paradox by most physicists.

Intro

Shrodinger's cat is "in limbo" said the textbook used in the first physics class I enrolled in, which was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, in the year--well never mind the year.  The textbook was Physics for the Life Sciences, by Alan Cromer.  I lost the textbook or maybe someone stole it and I've thought since then that whenever I find that book, that will be when I solve the paradox of Schrodinger's Cat.  It's been a long time, and the textbook has not reappeared, so it's becoming likely I will not solve the paradox. 

The cat paradox was put to good use in the movie A Serious Man.  I'll be discussing the movie and the cat problem in this blog.  I'll start with a problem that occurs in the classroom dream scene in the movie, a problem you might have noticed.  Larry writes an equation on the board that contains the square root of <P>^2 - <P>^2.   It's quite easily seen to be zero--something minus itself--but of course his answer isn't zero.

After the class leaves (one of the Coen brothers can be seen getting up from a front row seat) and Larry and Sy are talking (Sy would be a dybbuk in the dream, by the way) the equation is on the board behind Larry, but now it's been corrected!  Now underneath  the square root is <P^2> - <P>^2, which is what it should have been in the first place. This is an expression from statistics, not just from physics.  I'll come back to it later.  Another thing about that scene is that Sy calls mathematics the art of the possible.  Larry is a little flustered by this, and says he thinks something else is the art of the possible, but he can't remember what.  I could well identify with Larry in that scene, partly because the mathematical thing he wrote on the board is called something, but right now I can't remember what...  However,  I did look up "the art of the possible."  It's politics, not math, so Larry was right, but couldn't "prove" it at the time.