i am going to guess that the chapter of this book most relevant to lovecraft is VIII. Man's Place in the Universe. beginning covers some similar material as de sitter. eddington briefly describes heat death which i imagine had an impact on lovecraft's imagination
Conversation
then he speculates a bit about alien life, 20 years before the fermi paradox and 30 years before the drake equation. some beautiful sentences here - "how many acorns are scattered for one that grows to an oak? and need [nature] be more careful of her stars than her acorns?"
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the other chapter that might be relevant to lovecraft is "XV. Science and Mysticism" which is again lovely. i have never seen a differential equation and a poem presented on the same page in direct contrast like this. gorgeous. where has sir arthur eddington been all my life
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then he takes the poem seriously as a subject of philosophical inquiry. he asks: in what sense can the *waves* be blown to *laughter*? whence the impression that "the gladness in ourselves was in Nature, in the waves, everywhere" given, y'know, hydrodynamics etc.?
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"If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone..."
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"..., but are glimpses of a reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness ⎯ that the harmony and beauty of the face of Nature is at root one with the gladness that transfigures the face of man."
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"The mystic, if haled before a tribunal of scientists, might perhaps end his defense on this note. He would say, 'The familiar material world of everyday conception, though lacking somewhat in scientific truth, is good enough to live in; in fact...'
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maybe relevant to lovecraft: "The idea of a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory; at least it is in harmony with it. But if so..."
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"Science cannot tell whether the world-spirit is good or evil, and its halting argument for the existence of a God might equally well be turned into an argument for the existence of a Devil."
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i find it hard to understand much of this chapter honestly because i think it's grappling with a problem i find hard to really empathize with, something like whether physics inevitably leads you into a kind of nihilism or not?
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one thing that really strikes me here is that lovecraft and eddington share a strong concern with understanding the *spiritual significance* of discoveries in physics and astronomy. lovecraft wants to know: what does it *mean* that the universe is so vast and empty?
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i want to know what it was like to be an intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century just reeling from the incompleteness theorem, relativity, quantum mechanics, all these blows to what i imagine seemed like an unassailable rational-newtonian universe
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what calls "the collapse of rational certainty" which i think is in some way very much lovecraft's subject
meaningness.com/collapse-of-ra
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speaking of which also wrote a thing about lovecraft and nihilism that also seems very relevant:
buddhism-for-vampires.com/lovecraft-harm
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we're drifting away from portals now but that's how these deep dives go. i reread "the collapse of rational certainty" which is great. one of the footnotes references "a century of controversy over the foundations of mathematics" by chaitin, also great!
arxiv.org/html/nlin/0004
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there's a bunch of nice background about the foundational crisis in mathematics i don't want to summarize, then a description of chaitin's own work in algorithmic information theory, better than any i've read from authors who are not chaitin
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chaitin defined a real number called the halting probability, which he finds a little horrifying - and i never properly got this sense of horror from anyone else's description of this stuff. what he finds horrifying about it is that it "maximally unknowable"
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the bits of the halting probability have "no structure" to them whatsoever - it's not possible to compress them in any way, they are "mathematical truths that are true for no reason, they're true by accident! And that's why we will never know what these bits are."
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in the context of lovecraft and horror and nihilism the halting probability is this sort of bizarre encroachment of total senselessness into mathematics; it's impossible to make any sense of the halting probability whatsoever, its bits are random in a very strong sense
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but it's funny because i was never introduced to algorithmic randomness as a *horrifying* thing; the way it was introduced to me was "hey, someone came up with a way to define the randomness of a *specific* infinite sequence, isn't that cool?" which, yes, that is cool!
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which feels related to this:
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