A love story, because philosophy alone is insufficiently hazardous

❤️ Around 1115–1117, Abelard was already a celebrity teacher in Paris. Héloïse was a young woman of unusual education living under the protection of her uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre-Dame. Abelard later admits, with a level of self-satisfaction that occasionally makes Historia Calamitatum unintentionally hilarious, that he noticed her intelligence, beauty, and learning and devised a scheme to get himself installed in Fulbert’s household as her tutor.

A fortyish philosopher convinces his student’s uncle:

I should live in your house so I can provide your brilliant niece with intensive private instruction.

Medieval history then behaves exactly as one expects.

They begin an affair.

Abelard later writes that lessons gave them convenient cover. Books were open, but considerably less Aristotelian activity occurred than Fulbert imagined.

Héloïse became pregnant.

Abelard secretly took her away to Brittany, where she gave birth to their son.

And because apparently no one involved believed this story required a less memorable detail, they named the child:

Astralabe.

Yes. Astralabe.

As in the astronomical instrument.

Imagine two extraordinarily educated medieval intellectuals having an illicit child and basically naming him Space Telescope.

Abelard then proposed marriage.

This is where Héloïse becomes much more philosophically interesting than the conventional romance allows.

She resisted.

Partly she feared marriage would destroy Abelard’s ecclesiastical career. But she also developed an argument against marriage as a social institution incompatible with the philosophical life.

She preferred to be known as his lover rather than his wife.

Not because she thought their relationship trivial.

Almost the reverse.

She feared that legal obligation would transform freely given love into something owed.

That is quintessential Héloïse:

if I love you because law requires fidelity, what happens to the moral meaning of freely choosing you?

They eventually married secretly.

Fulbert nevertheless believed Abelard had dishonored Héloïse.

Then the story becomes brutal.

Men associated with Fulbert entered Abelard’s room at night and castrated him.

Abelard subsequently became a monk.

Héloïse entered religious life.

And years later, they began the correspondence that made them immortal.

But here is the fascinating asymmetry.

Abelard gradually interprets their catastrophe within a theological narrative of sin, punishment, providence, and spiritual transformation.

Héloïse keeps saying, in effect:

That may be your interpretation. It is not necessarily mine.

She remains emotionally attached to him.

She remembers their sexual life.

She questions whether her religious vocation arose from genuine religious desire or obedience to Abelard.

And she applies something devastatingly close to Abelard’s own intentionalist ethics against Abelard himself.

If moral worth depends upon intention rather than merely external behavior, what moral value exists in her being an abbess if internally she still desires Abelard?

That is an extraordinary philosophical reversal.

Teacher develops doctrine.

Student understands doctrine.

Student applies doctrine to herself more rigorously than teacher expected.

Teacher now has a problem.

That, to me, is where the love story stops being medieval celebrity gossip and becomes philosophy. 

When Laughter Goes Silent: Dedicated to Connor

What happens when someone who has always believed in the restorative intelligence of laughter suddenly cannot laugh?

This question is a bit different from the typical “how humor helps grief” column of modern humor articles. The latter leads to advice; the former question results in deeper contemplation.

Recently we lost a family friend to a violent tragedy. Without going into unnecessary details of the events, I can say that a real tragedy can destroy the very mechanism this blog has been exploring.

For years I’ve asked what laughter can do for us. I’ve explored it for myself, in every post. Today I have a small comment on what its absence reveals.

There are some forms of grief in which the idea of smiling feels biologically impossible, where your only focus is breathing or maintaining yourself in proper social constructs. It’s not that your thoughts are 24/7 sad, though grief is steeped in sadness. It’s that you can’t think or organize your thoughts. You have no energy for cognitive lifts. No desire to explain yourself. No real desire to communicate. You start to, but then the words disappear, and all you feel is heavy.

Ordinary incentives lose their pull and importance flies out the window. The world seems to be focusing on absurd things while you’re feeling something closer to internal detonation.

As a philosopher I eventually make my way back by scanning theories on loss and grief. But they are too heavy to read. Something between recognition and response has gone askew.

HTTF has never been about jokes, though they are interspersed throughout. It is about exploring human connection. When that connection is lost there is no laughter. It is the experiment’s hardest reality.

Humor is for those who can breathe their way through the day. Not for those who are truly mourning. On the ascent back you can find a soft respite in lighthearted humor. In puns or wordplay, but no word associated with the trauma of real loss or violence could ever be funny.

Visitors will note a deliberate absence of those words in this blog. This is for one very specific reason: respect for human dignity. You never know what others are surviving through; humor isn’t the time to remind them.

For anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one to violence, my most profound condolences. I’ve long since said that we may speak different languages but we laugh in the same language. And now I am reminded that we also cry and hug without needing a single word to be uttered.

Dedicated to Connor. You will always be remembered as the friend who would stay over and help pick up after parties, for your laughter, your calm and kindness, and your devotion to saving people. Our hearts cannot fathom how this could have happened to a young man who spent his entire life learning how to save other people’s lives. Our hearts break for your family and for Dan and Talon, who did everything they could to try to save you. 💔

How to Play Existentialist Charades

Caption: you are here, you are free to do something, and unfortunately nobody is going to tell you what that something ought to be.

Existentialist Charades follows the ordinary rules of charades, except that everyone involved must quietly accept that meaning is unstable, communication is inadequate, and the person pretending to be a toaster strudel is ultimately alone.

Divide the group into two teams. This creates an immediate tension between individual freedom and collective identity. Sartre objects to being assigned a team, but joins anyway because refusing to choose is itself a choice. Camus asks whether keeping score is absurd. Kierkegaard has already become anxious about disappointing his teammates.

Write words, titles, people, objects, or phrases on slips of paper and place them in a bowl. The bowl represents existence. The slips represent possibilities. Nobody chose to be placed in the bowl.

One player draws a slip. That player must communicate what is written without speaking, mouthing words, spelling with the hands, or directly pointing to the answer. The player therefore confronts the central problem of human existence: possessing an internal truth while being condemned to express it through an imperfect physical form.

The timer begins.

Traditional charades gestures remain permitted. Holding up fingers may indicate the number of words. Tugging the ear may indicate “sounds like.” Pretending to open a book may indicate a literary work. None of these gestures possesses inherent meaning. Their significance exists only because everyone has collectively agreed to behave as though it does. Heidegger finds this interesting and brings the game to a temporary halt.

Teammates shout guesses while the performer acts out the clue. The performer may nod, shake their head, gesture wildly, collapse onto the carpet, or stare into the middle distance as circumstances require. Speaking remains forbidden. Screaming internally is unrestricted.

If the team guesses correctly before time expires, it receives one point. Sartre insists that the performer is responsible for having made themselves intelligible. Beauvoir points out that communication occurs between situated freedoms and that perhaps everyone could stop blaming the person who had to act out The Brothers Karamazov in sixty seconds.

If time expires without a correct answer, the opposing team may attempt a final guess. Camus considers this strangely beautiful: one struggles against an arbitrary deadline, knowing failure is possible, yet continues flapping one’s arms because the answer is The Albatross.

Play continues until every slip has been drawn or the group becomes distracted by whether the rules of the game existed before the players agreed to obey them.

The team with the most points wins.

This victory confers no objective meaning upon existence.

Nevertheless, congratulations 🎉 

How To Cultivate A Linguistic Quirk

 

I have cultivated a linguistic quirk. Like all known quirks, it wasn't intentional. It evolved out of a comfort habit where I self-soothe by listening to lectures on quantum mechanics. Just like some linguistic quirks are present from early age, depending on one's family culture, geography, or just an eccentric 4th grade teacher whose pronunciation permanently takes up residence in your head. 

Other linquistic quirks are cultivated slowly, like when you live in another country and your reaction to an event occurs in the host language. That sound is like a song that you remember and sing whenever you need to say "give me a minute" and instead "un instant, svp" comes out. You don't have to be fluent in French to have French-like reactions. On a totally unrelated topic, The Story of French is an absolute page-turner of a book. Mine is marked up and annotated from cover to cover. Totally worth the read. 

Now, back to that linguistic quirk. My go-to word is energie. 

I use the word "energie" as an ontological noun, whereas physics uses "energy" as a quantitative property. 

In standard physics, energy is not usually treated as a thing in the same sense that an electron, photon, field, or excitation is a thing. Energy is a conserved quantity associated with the state of a physical system. I have a sense for this concept professionally, when our engineers design Waste-to-Energy (WtE) facilities. Basically, they analyze and categorize a mountain of rubbish similar to how a power company views coal or natural gas. Essentially, as a fuel source. Once you account for the energy that goes in (the trash), conversion (turning fire into steam), and for the turbine (turning steam into electricity) you get a standard mass-burn facility that converts about one-forth of the trash's raw energy into usable electricity. To put this in practical terms, a typical modern facility can safely transform 1 tone of everyday city rubbage into roughly 500-700 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. That's enough to power an average home for about 2-3 weeks. 

So, clearly when I talk about using the word "energie" as a linguistic quirk, I'm not talking about the way I use the word "energy" at work. There, I talk about energy in terms of lifecycle, footprints, and sustainability. Depending on the application, we're talking energy density, decay heat, and half-life. 

Using the word energie turns into a linguistic quirk because in my subconscious mind somewhere there is a tendency to reach for superclasses to understand the universe. Things like particles, field excitations, a quantum, a vibrational mode or a frequency or string vibration. Basically whatever physically instantiated dynamical entity is propagating, oscillating, interacting, or otherwise changing states. 

That's why the word "energy" feels ordinary or inadequate for what I'm wishing to convey. I'm not just talking about joules, I'm talking about the physical carrier or manifestation of activity. That's the stuff that grabs me and accounts for such a disporportionate amount of books I have on physcis vs philosophy, my actual major. 

I think there's a historical reason that this linguistic temptation is so strong. Classical physics encourages us to picture matter and energy as totally different categories: particles have mass, waves transmit energy, objects possess kinetic and potential energy. Okay, easy peasy. We read that book in elementary school. But then we get to quantum field theory which totally destabilizes that intuitive taxonomy. At first there was nothing, and then nothing exploded. POW! 

Our minds are blown. A particle is now understood as an excitation in a field, while a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field. Now consider that electrons are excitations of the electron field. This means their identities are associated with quantum numbers, interactions, mass, spin, momentum, and energy. What colloquially looks like "little pieces of matter" is already much closer to a patterned field behavior. 

Even though a lot of physicts reject string theory, it's an interesting theory of gravity (if nothing more) for the purpose of this post. So let's step into that theory, which I gotta admit, would be compelling if we could physically test it. Since we don't have an accelerator the size of our galaxy, I don't foresee that happening anytime soon. Anyhow, the theory itself in the usual heuristic description, is what distinguishes one particle species from another. It's called the vibrational state of the underlying string. So calling the underlying phenomenon a "particle" sounds a bit downstream from the phenomenon that I'm actually thinking about. 

Since hierarchies help us organize objects, including packets of thought or meta-thinking, my mental hierarchy looks roughly like this: 

ordinary language 

matter ↔ energy

standard physics language

fields → excitations/particles → states possessing energy and momentum

my intuitive language

underlying physical activity → energie → particular manifestations such as particle, vibration, excitation, radiation, etc.

That's why using the word "energie" would hurt the ears of a physicist and yet be perfectly intelligible once they push past that bias and we chat about the topic. The error I'm making is terminological vs conceptual. If I said, "An electron is energy," a physicist would object or reframe that statement because energy is a property represented by the Hamiltonian/state relationship, not the ontological twin identity of the electron. But if I explained, "I use energie informally to mean a physically instantiated excitation or dynamical configuration, without commiting to whether its is a particle, a wave, a field excitation, vibration, or some other force, they would know exactly what distincting I was trying to preserve and state an example using the correct physics terminology. That's when you know they know their stuff. 

Admittedly, particle itself is a dangerous word for building intuition across theories. Classical particles are localized objects with trajectories. But quantum "particles" don't behave that way. QFT makes fields fundamental in the conventional forumuation. String theory, if ever proven correct, supplies another underlying ontology. So when my mind travels rapidly across classical mechanics, QM, QFT, and string theory, just for fun, I grab onto words that don't force me to change ontological vocabulary every thiry seconds. Working in complex industries is already a massive cognitive race on a daily basis, when I'm relaxing, I just want to be entertained and let my mind and imagination wander. 

So, while the word "energie" does not fit all configurations in which I utilize the term, it is an invented (i.e., quirky) placeholder for the physically active substrate or excitation before you decide which theoretical description to impose on it. It totally fails as a technical term, but when you're tired of speaking technically and want a short-hand or private conceptual tool, its function is surprisingly coherent. 

Energie = not simply a form of energy. That collapses it back into the standard concept I'm trying to escape. 

energie = a provisional name for a physical excitation, oscillation, or dynamical entity capable of carrying energy and information. 

That's surprisingly close to what I am trying to say when I use the word. 

🌌 When Infinity Goes Wrong: A Cosmic Facepalm

In math and physics, infinity is a cool concept. But sometimes, infinity is like that one friend who takes a joke way too far and ruins the party. When infinity shows up in the wrong places, physicists panic, math self-destructs, and reality gives up and calls an Uber home. 

In the landscapes of physics and mathematics, infinity is a concept best handled with extreme caution. While abstractly elegant, its unbridled appearance in physical models usually acts like a theoretical distress flare, signaling that somebody’s calculation has broken down entirely. When equations yield infinite values for physical properties (like energy, mass, or density), they cease to describe reality and instead create logical absurdities. These "disastrous infinities" (like all first dates) are historical or theoretical anomalies where mathematical rigor collides head-on with physical boundaries and mess with the limits of our current frameworks.

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

In the late 19th century, classical thermodynamics ran into a literal wall of infinite energy. According to the Rayleigh-Jeans law, an ideal black body in thermal equilibrium should radiate electromagnetic energy at a rate proportional to the square of the emission frequency. 

So what does that mean? It means that while this model held true for very long wavelengths, it suffered a catastrophic divergence in the ultraviolet spectrum, predicting that a simple heated cavity would emit an infinite amount of high-frequency energy. 

This totally absurd result meant that turning on a standard kitchen oven should theoretically vaporize the universe. 

The crisis was only averted when Max Planck introduced quantum discretization, proposing that energy is exchanged in discrete packets (called quanta) rather than a continuous infinity. 😅 

Hilbert’s Paradox of the Grand Hotel

On the purely mathematical front, David Hilbert illustrated the deeply counterintuitive nature of transfinite arithmetic through a thought experiment involving a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms. 

Even when every single room is occupied, the hotel can accommodate an infinite influx of new guests. By simply shifting the occupant of room \(n\) to room \(n + 1\), room 1 is instantly vacated for a newcomer. If an infinite fleet of buses, each containing an infinite number of passengers arrives, the manager can still accommodate them all using a precise geometric rearrangement. 

While mathematically airtight within Cantor's set theory, the Grand Hotel highlights how physical intuitions regarding scarcity and capacity utterly collapse when handling infinite sets. 🏨 

The Infinite Self-Energy of the Electron

Modern quantum electrodynamics inherits its own battle with infinity by treating elementary particles like the electron as zero-dimensional point charges. 

Classical physics dictates that the electrostatic potential energy of a charged sphere increases as its radius shrinks. When the radius reaches absolute zero, the electron's self-energy diverges to infinity, which would theoretically grant it infinite mass and collapse local spacetime. 😬 

Physicists managed to tame these mathematical infinities through a rigorous subtraction procedure known as renormalization. 

So basically, by matching the theoretical infinities with measured laboratory values, they successfully cancel out the divergent terms, yielding the most precisely verified predictions in science despite the foundational absurdity of the starting math. 🧮 

Now, for the jokes… cause that was “heavy” lifting 💪 

General Infinity

Infinity is the ultimate houseguest: it shows up uninvited, ruins your equations, and forces reality to call an Uber home.
Doing math with infinity is like trying to pay for a dollar menu item with an endless void. It breaks the register and everyone panics.

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

Classical physics looked at a warm kitchen oven and concluded it was a weapon of mass destruction capable of vaporizing the universe.
Max Planck saved the world from getting toasted by inventing "fun-size" energy packets so the math wouldn't throw an infinite tantrum.

Hilbert’s Grand Hotel

Hilbert’s Hotel proves that "No Vacancy" just means "Time to inconvenience everyone in the hallway."
If an infinite number of buses show up at a fully booked hotel, a normal manager quits. Hilbert just tells the guy in room 1 to sleep in the lobby chair and shifts everyone else down forever.

The Electron's Ego

Electrons are zero-dimensional divas with an infinite mass ego until physicists give them a timeout called "renormalization" and subtract the drama.
Renormalization is just scientists sweeping infinity under the rug, calling it a "measured value," and pretending the math didn't almost break reality.