In Plymouth, Tobago, lies a tomb with an enigmatic inscription:
Within these walls are deposited the bodies of Mrs. Betty Stiven and her child. She was the beloved wife of Alex B Stiven to the end of his days will deplore her death which happened upon the 25th day of Nov. 1783 in the 23rd year of her age. What was remarkable of her, she was a mother without knowing it, and a wife without letting her husband know it except by her kind indulgences to him.
Theories abound, but there’s no consensus as to its meaning.
What is sound? We’re told that it’s a wave traveling through a medium, but we don’t hear sounds as existing in the air; we hear them as located at the place where they’re generated. Is sound a quality of an object or of the surrounding medium?
“Listening to the birds outside your window, the students outside your door, the cars going down your street, in the vast majority of cases you will perceive those sounds as being located at the place where they originate,” writes St. Joseph’s University philosopher Robert Pasnau. “But if sounds are in the air, as the standard view holds, then the cries of birds and of students are all around you. This is not how it seems.”
Properly speaking, then, where should we say a sound is located? At its point of origin, or filling the air?
There’s something beautifully useless about this: The gardens at Rousham House, in Oxfordshire, occupy only 25 acres, so landscape architect William Kent added a sham ruin on the brow of a distant hill to give the impression that the house’s landscape extended far beyond its boundaries.
Horace Walpole wrote that Kent “felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament, and while they called in the distant view between their graceful stems, removed and extended the perspective by delusive comparison.”
A golfer takes a swing at a golf ball. Fortunately it’s a good shot, and the ball heads for the cup. Unfortunately, a squirrel, rather dangerously positioned near the cup, kicks the ball away, thus decreasing the ball’s chance of landing in the cup. Fortunately, the ball then hits the branch of a nearby tree and is deflected into the cup.
“Question: was the squirrel’s kick a cause of the hole-in-one?” asks Australian National University philosopher Helen Beebee. “According to some philosophers’ intuitions, the answer is yes. According to others, the answer is no: the ball went in despite the kick. According to a third view, the kick was a cause of the hole-in-one and the hole-in-one occurred despite the kick.” Who’s right?
In Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine writes, “Are the present hundred years a long time? But first see whether a hundred years can be present. If it is the first year of the hundred, then that year is present, but the other ninety-nine are still in the future, and so as yet are not; if we are in the second year, then one year is past, one year is present, the rest future. Thus whichever year of our hundred-year period we choose as present, those before it have passed away, those after it are still to come. Thus a hundred years cannot be present.”
Is the chosen year itself present? Not wholly: We’re in some particular month, and the other months are not present. And so on — Augustine applies the same argument to days, hours, and even “fleeting moments.” In the end, “If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided even into the minutest parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all. For if it were so extended, it would be divisible into past and future: the present has no length.”
It sounds straightforward to imagine being another person, but is it? If I want to imagine being Napoleon, I need to conceive some relation between our two identities. If I only imagine some situation that was faced by Napoleon, then the result involves too little of my own identity — I’m not really involved at all. But if I imagine myself in Napoleon’s place, then the result involves too little of him. It doesn’t seem possible for two people to share an identity in this way.
Philosopher Bernard Williams writes, “Leibniz, perhaps, made something like this point when he said to one who expressed the wish that he were King of China, that all he wanted was that he should cease to exist and there should be a King in China.”
But, Williams says, it does seem possible to play a role, to pretend to be Napoleon. In that case my first-person thoughts are framed in another’s point of view, so the identity of “I” is less problematic. In this sense perhaps I can imagine being Napoleon — but not having been Napoleon.
In 1988, tunneling operations began in both England and France. On Dec. 1, 1990, these two single-entrance holes met under the English Channel, after which there existed a two-entrance tunnel. The completed Channel Tunnel would not be ready for use until 1994. Now, suppose that a speaker in 1989 had said:
There is in the process of coming into existence, so we understand, the Channel Tunnel. Not many of us have seen it; I certainly have not. One understands that that will allow us, if and when it is made available, to travel by train from England to France.
Does this utterance imply that, at the time it was spoken, the Channel Tunnel already existed? If not, what is the it that the speaker says few people have seen? In 1989 all that existed were two blind tunnels, which together could not permit free passage between England and France, surely an essential feature of the Channel Tunnel.
“In the construction of the Channel Tunnel, the time at which we can say that a two-entrance tunnel first exists is 1st December 1990, when the two one-entrance tunnels met,” notes philosopher Antony Galton. “The Channel Tunnel is a two-entrance tunnel; so is this time, 1st December 1990, also the time at which the Channel Tunnel first exists?”
(Antony Galton, “On the Process of Coming Into Existence,” Monist 89:3 [July 2006], 294-312.)
Jami Johnson lost her wallet on December 11, 2007, when she left it on the counter at the Zip Trip convenience store in Clarkston, Washington. A surveillance video showed a man pick it up and walk out of the store with it.
The man, Michael Millhouse, was arrested two days later and charged with theft. How did police catch him so quickly? The Lewiston Tribune had published a frame from the surveillance video on its front page, directly below a four-column photo of Millhouse decorating a local window for the holidays. He was identified by name and was even wearing the same clothing as in the surveillance photo.
Clarkston Police Chief Joel Hastings said, “Initially, Millhouse denied taking the wallet and then said that he had taken the wallet, and thought it was his wife’s wallet. Later he said that he intended turning the wallet in to the police but had forgot about it.”
Police found the wallet at Millhouse’s business, Millhouse Signs of Lewiston, and returned it to Johnson. “This is the most unusual of any one I know of, to have both pictures on the front page at the same time and in the same location,” Hastings said. “I’ve never experienced that anywhere.”
During the Battle of Gettysburg, Battery B of the 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery were loading a Napoleon cannon when a Confederate shell scored a direct hit on the muzzle, killing two men. Corporal James Dye and Sergeant Albert Straight tried to force another round into the tube with a rammer and an ax, but the ball remained lodged in the dented muzzle until a second Confederate shell struck the cannon’s wheel, putting it out of commission. The spiked gun now stands in the Rhode Island statehouse in Providence.
Even more impressive, in the same battle Captain Hubert Dilger, commander of the 1st Ohio’s guns, personally sighted a shot that seemed to have no effect on its target, an enemy cannon. Only when he sighted it through field glasses did he realize what he’d done: “I have spiked a gun for them, plugging it at the muzzle.”
“It would be hard to calculate the odds of such an occurrence happening,” writes Michael Sanders in More Strange Tales of the Civil War. “Just hitting a gun with a ball would be considered a great shot. This would be equivalent to Robin Hood splitting an arrow with another arrow. Captain Dilger could truly say that he could never do that again even if he tried.”
Korf’s clock is of a novel sort
In which two pairs of hands are used:
One pair points forwards as it ought,
The other backwards a la Proust.
When it says eight it’s also four,
When it says nine it’s also three;
A single glance and you no more
Need fear the ancient Enemy.
For with this wondrous clock you’ll find
As, Janus-like, it turns about
(To such an end it was designed)
Time simply cancels itself out.
Palmström’s Clock
But Palmström’s clock has a “higher” power,
Balanced as lightly as a flower.
Scorning a set pedestrian pace,
It keeps time with a certain grace
And will, in answer to a prayer,
Go en retard, en arriéré.
One hour, two hours, three hours indeed,
Sympathizing with our need!
Though clockwork in its outward part
It hides within — a tender heart.
— Christian Morgenstern
Above: Built in 1586, the town hall in the old Jewish ghetto of Prague bears two clocks: a traditional clock tower with four faces bearing Roman numerals and a second clock bearing Hebrew numerals. The hands on the conventional clocks turn clockwise; those on the Hebrew clock turn counterclockwise. (Thanks, Danesh.)
