The Massabki Brothers

 Today is the feast of the Blessed Massabki Brothers in the Maronite calendar. The following is my brief note on them from 2016.

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July 10 is the Feast of the Blessed Massabki Brothers, Abdel Mooti Massabki, Francis Massabki, and Raphael Massabki. They lived in Damascus during a time when tensions were very high in the Ottoman Empire. A great civil war broke out in the region of Mount Lebanon and Syria in 1860 between Maronites and their Druze governors. The fighting was fierce, and the Maronites at an inevitable disadvantage against Druze forces backed by Ottoman troops. In July 1860, the fighting came to Damascus, and the results were brutal as much of the relatively peaceful Christian population was slaughtered by Druze and Muslim paramilitary groups while the government looked the other way -- thousands of Christians died in the Damascus Massacre, perhaps as many as ten thousand, and the Christian quarter of the city was almost entirely destroyed. The massacre might well have been total had it not been for cases of Christians being saved by their Muslim neighbors, especially in poor areas around the city. Of note as well was the work of Abdelkader El Djezairi, an Algerian Sufi freedom fighter who was living in exile in Damascus at the time; having forewarning of the trouble, he and his fellow Algerians sheltered hundreds of Christians in his house as he sent his sons out into danger in order to bring Christians to safety. 

But there were many who had no such protection, and no recourse but to pray. The Massabki brothers, prominent Maronites in the city, were praying in a Franciscan church on July 9, 1860 and given the choice to die or convert to Islam. They were beatified in 1926 by Pius XI.

The Feast of the Three Blessed Massabki Maronite Martyrs

Let us praise Christ the Martyr;
He shed His blood for our sins
and crowns those who persevere.
Behold the Massabki saints!
Their crown is of purest gold.
Holy martyrs, pray for us! 

O brothers, You prayed in faith
and died in Christ, in His Church,
forgiving persecutors,
like the Lord upon His Cross.
Thus you are honored with Him!
Holy martyrs, pray for us! 

Jesus said, "Follow." You did.
You heard the call of heaven
and for love of Christ endured.
Trusting in Christ's great mercy,
You won crowns of victory.
Holy martyrs, pray for us!

The Principal Thing

 To be a person of taste, it seems necessary, that one have, first, a lively and correct imagination; secondly, the power of distinct apprehension; thirdly, the capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation, &c.; fourthly, Sympathy, or Sensibility of heart; and, fifthly, Judgment, or Good Sense, which is the principal thing, and may not very improperly be said to comprehend all the rest. 

 James Beattie, Of Imagination, Chapter IV.

The Mysterious Depths of Water

Among my most widely read posts here at "Siris" is the 2011 post, Water Is Not H2O, which is about how water is more complicated than it seems. The title, of course, is a provocative way of stating one of the key arguments: While H2O is the water-forming molecule, the behavior of that molecule guarantees that any amount of water that exists for a while will also be composed of H, O, H2, O2, H2O2, and similar combinations, and many of the properties of what we call 'water' depend on this fact that any significant amount of water existing for more than a moment is not just H2O. This is actually standard point made in philosophy of chemistry, one that has usually not diffused out to philosophers in other fields. But I also noted a few other things relevant to the nature, with the ultimate conclusion:

Water is an interacting society, not a molecule, and it is a society of related molecules, not just H2O; among those molecules H2O is just the most prominent family, not a single kind of molecule; and light water (what we usually think of as H2O) is just the most prominent branch of that family.

So I was interested to see a recent science news item come up about studies of the molecular structure of water:

A study published in Nature Physics provides new molecular-level evidence from simulations that liquid water is not a single uniform substance, but a constantly shifting mixture of two distinct microscopic structures.

As the article notes, this is not a new idea. It's not surprising, because it confirms what chemists and physicists had already suspected. For reasons tied to the behavior of water, it has long been hypothesized that water molecules shift around between two kinds of structures. This is known as the two-state model, and the reason why it was already taken to be probably true is that water seems schizophrenic, sometimes acting as if it were highly structured and sometimes as if it were very loose and disordered, but rarely in between. Naturally the easiest explanation of this is that it actually sometimes is highly structured and sometimes quite disordered, and rarely in between; and what we know of water molecules doesn't rule this out. The big puzzle was that it was very difficult to find any evidence of this, beyond the behavior that led to the model in the first place. One might think that you could confirm it by just checking how the molecules are related to each other, but it's actually quite difficult to get good direct evidence of the overall structures of vast numbers of molecules in constantly changing relationships. And in particular there was no clear idea of how the two states would even be related to each other in the actual behavior of water.

So, as I understand it, having looked at a number of these pop science articles and having briefly skimmed through what I could find of the relevant papers without forking any money over to get behind paywalls (and without pirating anything!), the state of things is something like the following.

The new discovery is repeatedly called 'direct molecular evidence for the two-state model', in this and other articles, and it is, but in a more complicated way than I think that makes it sound. Nobody has seen these two structures themselves, and there's a lot that is still unknown. The two-state model, to work at all, requires that there be a state of water known as liquid-to-liquid transition, in which water splits into a high-density state and a low-density state. It wasn't obvious that water had such a transition because you can only get it under certain conditions, in a very, very, very cold state in which liquid water is still liquid but is almost right at the edge of becoming solid. This is very difficult to set up, because water freezes so easily, and usually does so long before this point, so you have to supercool the water in such a way that it stays liquid. Computer simulations suggested that something like this state probably existed, but even the best computer simulations were quite messy; physical chemists could guess where it would have to exist if it did exist, but they had to make assumptions that were not yet proven; and nobody had yet been able to produce it in a way that got useful measurements. Improvements in computer simulation, however, made it possible to give a more precise statement of the relevant numbers for measurements related to energy and density under certain conditions, and the answer was coherent, and also consistent both with the two-state model and what else we know of water. And, without trying to make the model fit some more recent evidence based on new technology and measurement processes using X-ray lasers (which we began to get earlier this year; see here also  ), the model happens to fit new measurements that we were only just recently able to obtain.

Thus the 'direct molecular evidence' is that the two-state model now has clear and definite computer simulation of water that shows us how, given everything else we know about water, the two states would have to be related to each other, and new measurements under roughly the conditions expected by the model are consistent with what the precisified model says we should get. That is, the two-state model went from being a rather hazy idea with a lot of guesswork to being a fairly precise idea with definite features, and, importantly, when the hazy idea was made precise and definite, it fit both the old evidence and some new measurements we were just now able to start getting. William Whewell would really like this example, because he was always a champion of the idea that one of the routes of progress in the sciences was just making ideas more clear and precise; here, the computer simulation is evidence of the two-state model because it makes the two-state model much more clear and precise without breaking it in any way, despite measurements that have been improving at the same time. Nobody has seen or traced out the actual structures (because it is still very difficult to do); the evidence is not direct in that way. We just have new direct measurements that confirm their existence, in exactly the way the theory indicates that they should.

What is perhaps almost as important is that a new line of inquiry was opened up by this. The computer simulation indicates that the two structures change their behavior depending on the temperature and pressure, in ways that we might be able to confirm or disconfirm in the future.

Thus the two-state model, our best idea of how water might work, is almost certainly right, although there is still room for unexpected discovery. Thus water is not only an interactive society of many different molecules, of which H2O is only the most important, but an interactive society whose molecules are related in at least two different ways, each of which contributes to different aspects of water's behavior. Water is a surprisingly deep subject.

At Morn in Brake or Bosky Avenue

The Mocking-Bird
by Sidney Lanier 

Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray
That o'er the general leafage boldly grew,
He summ'd the woods in song; or typic drew
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay 
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray,
And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew
At morn in brake or bosky avenue.
What e'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.
Then down he shot, bounced airily along
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. 
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain:
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree? 

Tense Logics and Counterfactuals

 Considerations relevant to tense logic go back to Aristotle, but modern tense logic begins with Arthur Prior, who recognized that you could have with tenses an analogue of alethic modal logics (with necessities and possibilities). The Diamond or weak modality operators are:

P: at some point in the Past
F: at some point in the Future

The Box or strong modality operators are:

H: Has always been so in the past
G: Going to always be so in the future

Thus you can get a 'tense logic' in two different directions from a reference point, with pastward strong and weak modalities and futureward strong and weak modalities. In each direction, many standard things for modal logic hold true, including that the relevant strong and weak modalities are interdefinable, e.g.,

Pp = ~H~p
Fp = ~G~p

It follows from this that for every modal logic you can name, you can give a tense interpretation of it. Of course, many of these are weird tense logics -- but, by definition, they are logically possible ways a kind of tense could work. In terms of our ordinary grammatical tenses, we need to have a logic that has strings of modal operators. For instance, getting something like

It had been the case that John went to the store

requires that we be able to talk about what is to the past of something in the past:

PP(John goes to the store).

[ADDED LATER: As Aron notes in the comments, this is actually not a good example for this argument.] We also, of course, need to be able to talk about what is to the future of what is in the past, what is to the past of what is in the future, what is in the future of what is in the future, and so forth. One of the earliest important results in tense logic proved that, if we are dealing with a time that is completely linear (no branches), all possible ways of talking about it can be reduced to fifteen combinations of two tense operators. There are thus fifteen possible tenses, if we think of time as being something like a line. Most languages do not use all fifteen. (They also often combine tense with other things, so not all grammatical tenses can be captured by a tense logic alone.)

But of course, we can have tense logic interpretation for any modal logic we want, and we don't have to think of time as linear. It's common to think of time as branching in at least one direction (usually the future). You can also think of many times. For instance, instead of thinking of time as a line, you could think of it as a plane or volume. Thus, in addition to the past, we could have an eckwise and andwise direction (to borrow terms from the short story, "The Dark Tower"). Every point in time would have a pastward, a futureward, an eckwise, and an andwise direction. The eckwise and andwise would work exactly like past and future, but would just not be to the past or to the future. We couldn't guarantee that they were perpendicular, which requires not just tense but a precise way to measure time, but we could recognize them as not all on one line.

This might seem rather silly. But in fact this is not very different from how spacetime works in relativity theory; it gets more complicated when you bring in precise measurements, but if we are only looking at tenses, thinking of several dimensions of time is not any different from thinking of spacetime. Spatial directions too have 'tenses' (forward and backward).

And, of course, in science fiction, we often find people treating counterfactual possibilities as alternative tenses. This is actually older than you might expect; the late medieval scholastics in discussing the logical operation of ampliation identified five logical tenses: past, present, future, possible, imaginable. In medieval logic, it's generally taken to be the case that propositions (or 'enunciations') can be true or false depending on the present moment they are said, but it was also recognized that we sometimes 'ampliate' (make wider) what we are considering. 'John went to the store' is talking about John, who exists now, but is not confined to what John is doing now.

Because of this, we would expect to find analogues of counterfactual conditionals -- counterpresential conditionals, we might call them. And this is what we do find. They're not even very strange:

If John went to the store, he has already bought milk.

If John will go to the store, he will then get milk.

Can we just treat counterfactuals as just another kind of tense? This is almost built in -- tenses, at least in tense logic, are just interpretations of Box and Diamond, strong modality and weak modality, and counterfactuals, at least in alethic modal logics, are also such interpretations. But the kinds of modal logic that most people think make sense of temporal tenses are not obviously the ones you would propose for counterfactuals (and vice versa). The analogy is strongest when we think specifically of 'not being present'. But it maybe gets weaker if we really think about past, future, or alternate possibilities. But we also have to keep in mind that there is no one single view of how time works. Certainly counterfactuals seem more like alternate branches in branching time than parallel linear times. (If we try to understand counterfactuals in this way, we seem to need time to branch in both the pastward and the futureward direction. But perhaps counterfactuals also require an eckwise and an andwise direction.)

Standardization

By some official oversight, which I am quite unable to explain, we are still allowed to write private letters if we put them in public pillar-boxes. The Postmaster-General does not write all our letters for us; even the local postman has as yet no such local powers. I cannot conceive how it is that reformers have failed to note the need for uniting, reorganizing, coordinating, codifying, and linking up all this complex, chaotic, and wasteful system, or lack of system. There must be vast amounts of overlapping, with some six young gentlemen writing letters to one young lady. There must be a terribly low educational standard, with all sorts of poor people allowed to put into a private letter any spelling or grammar they like. There must be a number of bad psychological habits being formed, by foolish people writing their sons in the Colonies or their mothers in the workhouse. And all this anarchy and deterioration could be stopped by the simple process of standardisation of all correspondence.

G. K. Chesterton, Government and the Rights of Man. 

A Quarter of a Millenium

 On the Fourth of July two years ago, reflecting on some comments made by Abraham Lincoln in 1858, I said:

At the present time, about 248 years after the beginning, the United States is a mighty nation of about 340 million people, and we own and inhabit somewhere near six percent of the world's dry land and an even larger share of the world's habitable land, having added Alaska, Hawaii, and various islands to its bulk, as well as having regularized some borders and territories that were still in flux in Lincoln's day. There were only 32 states in 1858, Minnesota having just been admitted in May. We are the world's fourth largest country by land area, the world's third largest country by population. We cover just under two percent of the entire earth's surface and have just under five percent of the world's population. We are by far the world's wealthiest country, having about one and a half times the total wealth of the second wealthiest country. We are an agricultural superpower, the largest agricultural exporter by monetary amount (about eight percent of the entire world market) and the second largest by tonnage; we are an industrial superpower, the second largest manufacturing exporter (about 16 percent of the entire world market). And, of course, nobody needs to be reminded that we are a military superpower.

To which can be added many other things. We are the only nation to have put footsteps on the Moon, an extraordinary achievement that cries out for a national epic that has not yet been written. We made the airplane viable, industrialized the automobile, made personal computing successful, created the Internet, invented GPS. It has been a busy quarter of a millenium. May those who are alive in 2276 look back at something even more impressive than we have seen.

But all of this is in many ways secondary, because none of these is the greatest achievement of the United States. The greatest achievement of the United States is the United States itself. There is a core of who we are that stands on its own, and would still stand even if we were considerably less overwhelming, a set of ideas forged by fire and preserved by tradition and passed down from the generation of the Founders: popular sovereignty, federation, division of powers, natural rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness, civil equality, constitutional respect, unity of nation, pragmatic daring, republican vigilance for liberty, appeal to a higher and more moral law. The labels are abstract, but the actual working is very concrete. In the century in which the United States was born, the British Constitution was seen as the wonder of the world, a strangely impossible mix of balanced oppositions in a patchwork that worked so well that it seemed nearly miraculous. The United States is also very much a near-miracle. But of course the chaos of the British Constitution was not really a chaos; all of the apparent inconsistency was the complexity required to do justice to the one key original idea that the Englishman, even the ordinary Englishman with no title, truly mattered, expanded to the notion that free Britons never would be slaves. By happenstance and providence and very occasional clear sight, and despite all its mess and imperfection, it had built up in such a way as to make that idea breathtakingly visible. Much the same, I think, can be said of us.

We are certainly no Kingdom of Ends, but we are also no mere ideal in a philosopher's head. The difficulty in this world is to maintain a clear view of the importance of the person, both as individual and as in community, that doesn't flatten the person into a mere idea within a mere scheme. Attempts to build a society that can do this generally fail; the best successes are dim and wavering and muddled. But if there is one thing that I hope will still be true in another 250 years, it is that we still capture some of it. May it be!