Souls of journalists dead and gone. . .

Just as a butcher should have the best of Christmas turkeys, and the fireman's house deserves especially dutiful attention in a fire, the Obituaries Editor of a newspaper has to be sent off in style.

Exactly thus, and very stylishly indeed, came the story of Tony Howard's life in The Times today (available to on-line subscribers and surely worth the charge in itself), a piece which the great man would have approved, honest, accurate, elegantly balanced between the goods and bads, ups and downs, failures and successes of our trade.

The way in which journalists were treated in obituaries was a matter of special interest to Tony, when he ran the obituary pages of The Times throughout  the latter part of my decade as Editor. When I disagreed with his predecessors in that job, the cause was normally that some monstrous African dictator was getting the nil nisi bonum respect better fitting for a harmless Ministry of Agriculture mandarin. Any disagreement with Tony, however, was always in the opposite direction.

The former New Statesman Editor, Observer Deputy Editor and polymath of church and state approved of a stern approach. When some of us thought that a dead editor or columnist should be given the gentle treatment of the civil servant or headmaster, Tony tended to see them as worthy of the warts-and-all picture that a politician might get. He wrote some of these obituaries himself, sending off a brilliant colleague and rival once with a dissection of failed ambitions that would have been wholly appropriate for an assassinated monarch or disappointed dictator.

He did not always see the problems this caused. One reason was that he knew so much about so many people, having a thirst for gossip that exceeded all other journalistic thirsts. An obituary which he saw as kindly omitting many failings in a man might still contain material of considerable  surprise to the subject's closest friends. . . .

Enough of this sharp reflection. It somehow seems wrong to write about him in a blog at all. A blog? He published some of my very first squibs in the New Statesman when I was barely a journalist of any kind. He failed to persuade me to join The Observer - for which I regularly thanked him when he later joined The Times. He was one of those few whose presence, especially when seated at the tiny window table of the Gay Hussar in Greek Street, was a signal that not everything in the trade had changed.

I'm always going to think of him there at that table - just as, in Andrew's breakfast cafe by the TLS offfice, I still think of my first Sunday Times boss, Roger Eglin, fuelling up, as he believed was absolutely essential, before writing his 2000-word, Saturday-morning Focus on the latest steel strike; and just as, in the All Souls corner of the Langham Hotel bar, once the BBC club, I think of Brian Hanrahan, who read books there when everyone else was plotting.

None of these eating houses is exactly a Mermaid Tavern. But then souls of journalism dead and gone are hardly Miltons or Shakespeares either.

They were just all three great men of journalism, all dead now just before this Christmas comes.

Comments

[Shelley]

At its best, what an honorable profession. To tell the truth, and the whole truth, about public life.

[Clayton Burns]

If Sir Peter looks just beside him, he will see: "God's equations? Is the universe a ‘fluctuation, like a bubble in boiling water’, or part of a succession of Big Bangs–and where do competing theories leave a Creator?" John Leslie.

I did reply to a science writer who may or may not finish books that I never start a book that I do not finish. Sometimes you have to wait for near the end to see a trend realized. For example, in "The Road to Reality," Chapter 31, "Supersymmetry, supra- dimensionality, and strings." Roger Penrose.

Apparently, he does not bother to read his own books with much
attention.

In the Vintage, London, 2005 paper version, some troubling signs manifest early in the book. Something about 'that,' how it tends
to attract error.

In Chapter 31 (of 34): "Yet the standard model itself is not free of
infinities, being merely a 'renormalizable' rather that a finite theory" (870).

And: "The original hadronic strings were rather like rubber bands, in that the the tension increases as the string is stretched, in proportion to the amount of the stretch" (892). And: "These complex 3-manifolds turn out to be Calabi-Yau spaces that the demands of string theory--according to the proposals of 'the second superstring revolution'--ought, via mirror symmetry, to be related to certain other Calabi-Yau spaces" (913).

And: "The fact that 11 dimensions seems now to be 'allowed' for a consistent string-type theory appears to be a conclusion due to Witten that, in some sense, the original argument that the 'one plus nine' dimensions needed to remove the string anomaly referred to in [Section] 31.7 are really to be regarded as an approximation (partly owing to the involvement of these higher-dimensional 'branes'), and the more correct answer is indeed 11 (=1+10, i.e. 1 time and 10 space dimensions)" (915).

And: "Later results do apply to ordinary 4-spacetime, but the initial excitement that led to proclamations such as the above seem to have been elicited by the original 5-dimensional calculation" (916).

You might wonder who has read this book through to the end.

A sign of something. Perhaps we should not examine the matter too minutely. It might reveal something about our cognitive limitations.

I have e-mailed Roger Penrose:

to roger.penrose@maths.ox.ac.uk,
claytonburns
date Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 3:52 PM
subject Neuron Culture--WIRED.

Professor Penrose:

You will note in my comment at the end of [David] Dobbs's post here that I have found some curious patterns in "The Road to
Reality."

It strikes me as even odder that professors of math and physics do not demand that (what an addictive word) English departments develop science English courses that would enhance cognition.

"The Strangest Man" is of some interest. "Dark Sun" is good. "The
Curve of Binding Energy" is superior. "The Road to Reality" is a
revelation.

The "COBUILD English Grammar" is dynamite, if you know what to do with it. Apparently, in science, that knowledge is not extensive.

When I was watching "Inception" (HD) on my ASUS 1015PN with Studio Beats Dr. Dre headphones courtesy of one of my students, I did think of what you might think of it.

Thanks for the enjoyable experience of reading "The Road to Reality."

Clayton Burns PhD Vancouver 604 222 1286.

In 2010, dead journalists would often not say anything about such a case. In 2011, perhaps they will put on their nightgowns and ask a few questions.