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Trying to conceive of the geometry of a fourth dimension involves disregarding everything you thought you “knew” about reality, existence, and your ability to perceive the world around you. Typically when one hears about the fourth dimension, the mind goes directly to time, but in reality it doesn’t matter whether you call time the fourth dimension or the fortieth dimension. Each dimension must be perpendicular to all of the other dimensions, and it doesn’t matter what order you examine them in. In terms of this paper, the fourth dimension refers to a fourth spatial dimension.

Why seek to scale Mount Everest,
Queen of the Air,
Why strive to crown that cruel crest
And deathward dare?
Said Mallory of dauntless quest
`Because it's there.'

-Robert William Service

Inspired by George Mallory, a British mountaineer, Robert William Service’s poem, “Dauntless Quest”, poses a very interesting question (1). Why risk everything to climb one of the most dangerous mountains in the world for no tangible benefit? Or for that matter why risk losing your life for fifteen minutes of an adrenaline rush? For many years, extreme sports such as bungee jumping and skydiving, have appealed to many people despite the threat they pose to a person’s life. Personally, I have not partaken in many forms of extreme activity, but as strange as it sounds, I would very much like to satisfy my desire to jump thousands of feet out of a moving plane.

Biology/English 223: Evolution of Stories

Final Paper

In conjunction with our presentation given on May 1, 2007

The Author of a Theory and the Reader of a Text: Intentionality in Science and Literature

Introduction to the Project

            The idea of intentionality, in scientific theories and in fiction writing, has been an important and controversial one for our Evolution of Stories class.  Our class has mainly examined science, through biological evolution, as a non-intentioned, non-teleological process of development, and we have mainly examined literature as a product of the author’s craft and as an indication of his unique self.  My presentation, with Caitlin Evans and Jen Dodwell, aims to look at intentionality through different lenses than did our class.  Caitlin and Jen will turn in their papers and do their parts of the presentation separately from me, but I would like to situate my project by briefly explaining how Caitlin and Jen approached intentionality.  Caitlin reverses the paradigm through which our class has viewed science by showing how the scientist’s intention, and his analysis of his experiments and statistics, affects the scientific process, and she uses the novel, The Missing Moment by Robert Pollock to help prove her point.  Jen examines the relationship between the reader and the text.  What I examine, which follows this introduction, is the relationship between the author and the text, and how different conceptions of that relationship present differing and opposing opinions about how readers should engage with text.  I will do this by comparing what we have examined in class, Zadie Smith’s “Fail Better,” to a new postmodern framework laid down by Roland Barthes in his article, “The Death of the Author” and by Michel Foucault, in “What is an author?”  We aim to complicate and enrich the way our class has viewed the subject of intentionality in evolution and in literature.

Isabelle Winer

Professor Dalke

Story of Evolution

 “And She Aches Just Like a Woman”

The fight for social change does not occur for the iconoclasts only against the established norm but also with their own desires for security.  While convincing others to the cause may seem impossible, the battle within is simply a lost cause.  From birth we are constantly being initiated into our culture as we learn the social constructs, such as gender, which will serve as internal laws for the rest of our lives.  Like the process of evolution, true social change occurs slowly and over the passage of many generations.  For example each generation of women is fighting a gradually mutating battle for equality, causing each generation to struggle with a similarly gradual and mutating self-doubt.  Howards End and On Beauty portray how this doubt can manifest in two different time periods for two well-respected, self-sufficient women.  Margaret in Howards End feels that she is unable to make the decisions of a man and wants the comfort a husband can provide, despite the fact that she is financially independent.  While the women in On Beauty have gained political equality, Kiki has come to doubt her own intellectual self-worth outside of the accomplishments of her husband.  Both of these women display how difficult it is to maintain the resolve necessary for radical change.  

Empathy, defined by the American Dictionary Heritage as the “identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives,” is a capacity that is extremely essential to the development of social relationships between humans.  Empathy is a type of emotional intelligence that not only helps us to build strong, rewarding relationships, but also reduces friction in our social interactions.  When a person is capable of putting herself in someone else’s shoes she is better apt to predict how someone might respond to her actions and words, and thus avoiding unnecessary conflicts.  Besides from enabling us to predict the intentions and emotions behind other’s actions, empathy also allows us to learn vicariously through other’s actions.  In this way we learn the lessons and know the adverse emotional, physical, and mental consequences of certain actions without having to repeat the same mistakes of others.
 

I have three hours to complete my digital clock in my last advanced Physics lab of the second semester of my junior year. In front of me, I have a soldering iron, a partially completed breadboard and ten fingers that are shaking. The shaking makes the chips on my violet nail polish even more revolting. I sit on my hands, now a barrier between myself and the lab bench. The seven other seats in the lab are each filled with a male college student plugging in their iron, pulling out more solder from its sweet coil, studying their circuit diagrams (neater than mine) and not seeing the hands of the only female student shake because I am sitting on them. Problem solved. But how to get through the next three hours handless?

Pure science does not need hands. That's what he told me. Professor White did, my academic knight in shining armor. After that first semester, no, the first exam freshman year. Pure science is not about hands or things, he said, but thought experiments. Einstein-theoreticians predict the world before hands discover it. Your hands, your body is not what is important. He did not know-- the years at the barre, the exquisite pleasure of watching, no feeling, no both, your leg curving, the calf muscles clenching into the pointed toe. But ballet was not a profession; college was for professions and there was no ballet major here. Just now, this required physics course. He did not know-- Your grade on this final is so high, if I curved to you, everyone else in the class would fail, he said. I write the exams expecting everyone to fail. But you, you are brilliant, no your mind is brilliant. I don't know how you knew that much without coming to class regularly-- I knew: 3 days and nights alone with the text book, alone feeling the pot of coffee imbibed sawing its way through my temple, alone reading the theories until fluent in the symbols and equations, alone with the constants, unreal numbers that do not change (genius. what other truth does not change?), the laughing voices of the drunk girls in the hall searing my heart till I cry on the calculator, why this need to be perfect?

The boys down the street had Giant Killer Robotz™. They went to the same school as Kylie, and got off at the same bus stop. Her mother always told her to try and get along with them, because Kylie had no one else to talk to when she was shooed out of the house to go 'play outside.' They were okay, but they were boys, and sometimes boys didn't quite get it.

Like the sometimes when they didn't let her play with them. They always had their reasons, she didn't have the right toy, she was wearing the wrong color, they only needed three people... but she knew the real reason they didn't let her play.

The day they all had Giant Killer Robotz™ was one of those days.

"How can you play with us if you don't have a robot?" Michael asked in that philosophical way he had, and pushed the glasses up his nose because the sweat was making them slide off.

"No one told me that it we needed robots today." Kylie looked at the three boys with their three robots. The robots were only two feet tall, and didn't look very giant to her. Maybe the standards for Giant Killer Robotz™ were different, and no one had told her that, either.

David looked at Billy.

Billy chewed on his lower lip and squinted up at her. "No one has to tell you about robots," he told her.

"Oh," Kylie said, realizing that he was right. Everyone should know about robots.

She didn't get to play with the boys that day. It was her fault that she didn't know about the robots, after all.

"Mom, I need a Giant Killer Robot."

"You know I don't like that kind of play," her mother told her. Her mother normally said that kind of thing, whether Kylie wanted a Dress Me Up™ doll or a Deathzone Frontier Battlesaur™. There would be no changing her mind, no matter how much Kylie asked, pleaded, or asked her father. That much she had learned from painful trial and error.

Kylie decided that this simply wouldn't do.

So she stayed up late one night and made a plan, and stayed up late the next night to set that plan in motion.

“I can’t believe this” Maude muttered into the glove compartment as she fished out her insurance and registration.

A minute ago the car ahead of her had slammed on its breaks to avoid colliding with the Hummer that had barreled out of the gas station. Maude tried to turn onto the shoulder but there wasn’t enough time. Her car crashed into the other with a nice, loud crunch. She had bit her lip in her moment of panic and could taste the blood.

Left In The Dark

By Liz Newbury

She could not feel the grit of reality

For they had wrapped her in silk

I haven't written a poem (where anyone could read it) in almost ten years. I was, therefore, a little afraid because I had volunteered to write poetry for this paper assignment. I tried several different things, and they were all pretty crummy. Words that sounded great and made sense in my head looked silly on paper and came out wrong when I read them back to myself. I think I was forcing meaning, rather than naturally making it or just letting it happen. Then I remembered the joke I'd made in class on Wednesday - that a single haiku wouldn't exactly equate to five pages of writing.

That was, perhaps, untrue. I also remembered what Anne had said in reply, that a haiku filled with words of the right weight could in that sense perfectly fit the bill. All this remembering happened as I was walking across campus, and simultaneously thinking about how I'm really going to miss the weeping cherry trees when I graduate.