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Popular Culture Review
settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of
peoples.
Ten years later, fate pre-empted Albert’s own last picture show. Relativity
of simultaneity? Just bad timing, dilated, in transit to messengers waiting to send
and receive new signals. Reset your clocks, synchronize watches, take bearings,
adjust the compass. Meantime, we’ve got work to do, innocence to relose and
regain: presidents, ministers, and emperors to strip bare of their clothes. It’s a lot
of labor, but we must do it, to deserve a moral holiday. No hurry, but no time
like the present moment to start doing it. The One and the Many will stay in
business indefinitely. Shiva got it right, so grab the ineluctable wheel and hang
on to your karma. The end of all beginnings = the beginning of the end!3
University of San Diego
Notes
Dennis Rohatyn
1 This lecture was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation, including soundtrack. I
have left it intact, at the risk of baffling (or annoying) the reader. I hope that the taste
compensates for any missing ingredients.
2 This also applies to Luce Irigaray’s contention that Einstein’s most famous formula is a
“sexed equation.” [See “Is the subject of science sexed?” Hypatia, Vol 2 No 3 (Fall,
1987), 65-87.] Irigaray argues that science is inherently masculine because it privileges
speed and power over their opposites. Hence Einstein is simply a chauvinist: the
assumptions of relativity are patriarchal, hence its “laws” reflect and encode a phallic
world-view. Granting Irigaray’s premises, her conclusion still doesn’t follow, if only
because (as Einstein repeatedly stressed) a body traveling at light speed appears to itself
to be at rest. Hence it is only in motion relative to an observer, situated in another
reference-frame. Irigaray also makes much of the difference between hard and soft bodies
(as of the distinction between hard and soft sciences). But a major consequence of
relativity theory is that photons or other tiny “objects” traveling at (close to) light-speed
are all but immaterial, as well as immovable (infinite in mass, which means not that they
are very big but that they can’t go any faster, because in a sense they aren’t going at all).
In short, Einstein’s discoveries, far from being corollaries of a masculine metaphysics
already in place since the age of genius (the 17th century), compel us to redefine every
term we use or take for granted, including velocity (time) and occupancy (space). They
don’t just confirm what we already believed; they force us to abandon or re-examine
everything we though Ёݔ