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Friday, March 30, 2007
Weird Saturnian Hexagon
Not the name of a neo-prog band (…though were I ever to form such a band …), but an actual phenomenon, such as you’ll see should you venture below the fold.
Pretty, eh? That’s Saturn’s north pole. Wikipedia (if you scroll down a little) has another good photo of the hexagon in context, and below that a lovely little motion picture of the phenomenon over time.
What interests me here is the apparent lack of loony oddball fringe theories about this hexagon as self-evidently an artefact, evidence of intelligent life and so on. Think, if you will, of the fuss surrounding that apparent Face on Mars, also known as the ‘Cydonia Mensae’. That strange little cyberman countenance seemingly staring up into space is, very obviously, a chance arrangement of ordinary aspects of Martian natural topography. But that hasn’t stopped all manner of loonies extrapolating an Ancient Egyptian-style lost Martian civilisation, with this as its one remaining Sphinx-like relic. I wouldn’t want to spoil their wholly spurious fun. On the contrary; I want to know why these selfsame loonies (or loonies of some other stripe) aren’t making the same batty claims about the Saturnian hexagon. It’s surely not too much to ask. There is a race of Hexagonal superbeings living at the gas giant’s pole, who have constructed this great six-sided shield as a … or, it’s a blazon, a message, a symbol for us to read … or a portal into another dimension … or ….
You could probably do better yourself.
Whilst we’re on the subject of bonkers theories ... Why is nobody else (apart, that is, from me) advancing this one: that the surface of Venus is so very, very hot (hot enough, indeed, to melt lead) not, as scientists suggests, as a result of prodigious vulcanism, but because the original Venusians have retreated below the surface to escape the runaway global warming they carelessly created at some earlier point in their history. What we take for volcanoes are actually massive outlets or chimneys by which the Venusians dump excess interior heat into their outside world, and so preserve their bearable, though claustrophobic, subvenusian living conditions.
Hmm.
In other, less risible, news: I urge and exhort those of you interested in the future of manned space flight to hurry over to the latest scifidimensions, where a discussion between Geoffrey Landis, M. M. Buckner and Y.T. concerning that diverting subject may be found. Slightly embarrassingly, for me, my two interlocutors used this as an opportunity actually to discuss the future possibilities of manned space flight, where I, like a crassly eager guest on a chat show, seized the opportunity merely to plug my latest novel. Which makes me look venal and small. Which, alas, is, pretty much, what I am. But Landis and Buckner say interesting things. Go see.
That’s probably enough of the Xtre-heeemely Cheezy Sci-Fi Ga-haaarbage for now.
Comments
In order:
1. Loonies don’t go on about the Saturnian hexagon because people are so familiar with water swirling down drains, and because people have modules in their brains that turn patterns into faces that geometric patterns don’t trigger.
2. Loonies don’t talk about runaway greenhouse warming on Venus because environmentalists are science-based enough to not generally hold sciency loony theories (as opposed to the occasional New Age thing), and the vast right-wing loonydom is anti-environmentalist and doesn’t want to admit that global warming exists as a process.
3. I once got the usual denunciations on a Usenet group for suggesting that the best thing we could do for space exploration and usage was to do nothing for a couple of decades, in an attempt to wait for the leaders of the current group of space-involved people to die off. (Admittedly this was in the context of a proposal by Edward Teller to produce nuclear devices that could divert Earth-approaching objects.) Anything done now is going to be controlled by the same military-industrial complex that used modern space exploration as a sideline for the nuclear missile business. We need a societal fast during which these people fade from power, and the businesses they are in turn to other product lines—only then can we return to space with a new group of people that will not be so hopelessly morally corrupt. Otherwise, we face the reality that the only real near-term use for space is military. (I now think that I was off when I thought it would only take a couple of decades, obviously.)
4. I think that Scott is really going to regret teasing CR about that if people keep bringing it up, and CR already regrets it, so ix-nay on the XCS-FG.
You speak good sense, Rich, as ever. Though ... on (1), does the water swirl down your drain in a hexagon pattern? Really?
“...so ix-nay on the XCS-FG.“
This is plenty sfnal enough for me; I relinquish usage of the former phrase. [’Hail! I am Ghnnk, ambassador for the mighty IxNay of the system XCS-SF’ and so on]
Hexapodia is the key insight.
There’s an skiffinese in-joke about gas giants and hexagonal things, anyway.
Yes, Adam. Beautiful. And I’m sure there’s more to it than we can see.
I suppose we shouldn’t think of it so much on “human” terms ...
The thing is obviously a nut. If you loosen it, the rings fall off.
The world certainly hasn’t been “constructed” so that human beings should necessarily be able to understand it. According to the “logic” of the “Saturn” the hexagon probably isn’t a “hexagon” at all. There’s no deeper “meaning” to that. But it’s beautiful. Beautiful ... I suppose sometimes we should take the things just as they are. Behold and wonder. And try to understand as best as we can.
But I like the notion of Venusian hobbits (sitting below the surface of Adam’s brain).
re natural hexagons, cf Critique of Judgment, 370
Interest ref, Caswell. For those who can’t be bothered to google it, is the relevant chapter. Check the second paragraph below:
§ 64. Of the peculiar character of things as natural purposes
In order to see that a thing is only possible as a purpose, that is, to be forced to seek the causality of its origin not in the mechanism of nature but in a cause whose faculty of action is determined through concepts, it is requisite that its form be not possible according to mere natural laws, i.e. laws which can be cognised by us through the Understanding alone when applied to objects of Sense; but that even the empirical knowledge of it as regards its cause and effect presupposes concepts of Reason. This contingency of its form in all empirical natural laws in reference to Reason affords a ground for regarding its causality as possible only through Reason. For Reason, which must cognise the necessity of every form of a natural product in order to comprehend even the conditions of its genesis, cannot assume such [natural] necessity in that particular given form. The causality of its origin is then referred to the faculty of acting in accordance with purposes (a will); and the Object which can only thus be represented as possible is represented as a purpose.
If in a seemingly uninhabited country a man perceived a geometrical figure, say a regular hexagon, inscribed on the sand, his reflection busied with such a concept would attribute, although obscurely, the unity in the principle of its genesis to Reason, and consequently would not regard as a ground of the possibility of such a shape the sand, or the neighbouring sea, or the winds, or beasts with familiar footprints, or any other irrational cause. For the chance against meeting with such a concept, which is only possible through Reason, would seem so infinitely great, that it would be just as if there were no natural law, no cause in the mere mechanical working of nature capable of producing it; but as if only the concept of such an Object, as a concept which Reason alone can supply and with which it can compare the thing, could contain the causality for such an effect. This then would be regarded as a purpose, but as a product of art, not as a natural purpose (vestigium hominis video).
But in order to regard a thing cognised as a natural product as a purpose also—consequently as a natural purpose, if this is not a contradiction—something more is required. I would say provisionally: a thing exists as a natural purpose, if it is [although in a double sense] both cause and effect of itself. For herein lies a causality the like of which cannot be combined with the mere concept of a nature without attributing to it a purpose; it can certainly be thought without contradiction, but cannot be comprehended. We shall elucidate the determination of this Idea of a natural purpose by an example, before we analyse it completely.
In the first place, a tree generates another tree according to a known natural law. But the tree produced is of the same genus; and so it produces itself generically. On the one hand, as effect it is continually self-produced; on the other hand, as cause it continually produces itself, and so perpetuates itself generically.
Secondly, a tree produces itself as an individual. This kind of effect no doubt we call growth; but it is quite different from any increase according to mechanical laws, and is to be reckoned as generation, though under another name. The matter that the tree incorporates it previously works up into a specifically peculiar quality, which natural mechanism external to it cannot supply; and thus it develops itself by aid of a material which, as compounded, is its own product. No doubt, as regards the constituents got from nature without, it must only be regarded as an educt; but yet in the separation and recombination of this raw material we see such an originality in the separating and formative faculty of this kind of natural being, as is infinitely beyond the reach of art, if the attempt is made to reconstruct such vegetable products out of elements obtained by their dissection or material supplied by nature for their sustenance.
Thirdly, each part of a tree generates itself in such a way that the maintenance of any one part depends reciprocally on the maintenance of the rest. A bud of one tree engrafted on the twig of another produces in the alien stock a plant of its own kind, and so also a scion engrafted on a foreign stem. Hence we may regard each twig or leaf of the same tree as merely engrafted or inoculated into it, and so as an independent tree attached to another and parasitically nourished by it. At the same time, while the leaves are products of the tree they also in turn give support to it; for the repeated defoliation of a tree kills it, and its growth thus depends on the action of the leaves upon the stem. The self-help of nature in case of injury in the vegetable creation, when the want of a part that is necessary for the maintenance of its neighbours is supplied by the remaining parts; and the abortions or malformations in growth, in which certain parts, on account of casual defects or hindrances, form themselves in a new way to maintain what exists, and so produce an anomalous creature, I shall only mention in passing, though they are among the most wonderful properties of organised creatures.
I’m really quite struck that Kant chooses a hexagon as his example of something that, if you found it in the world, you would have to ascribe it to Reason rather than Nature. You can see his point, but surely he’d have been aware of lots of examples of hexagons in nature. Beehives? The Giant’s Causeway? Insect scales? The plates in a turtle’s shell?
Couldn’t Kant come up with a shape (for instance) that doesn’t occur naturally?
"Couldn’t Kant come up with a shape (for instance) that doesn’t occur naturally?”
But there are no shapes that don’t occur naturally.
A still-unfinished thought-as-narrative-poem:
The Rock
It started with rock
Large, grey-streaked
Monolithic by the river
They found it there
The tribe
Settling by water
Looked up at its lines
Carved—by fire? by air?
Surely it meant something
Later, a city
Mud brick, straw on the roofs
And the traders from bark boats
Would stop there
Look at the rock
Go on
They invented writing
The runes on the rock
Forming their symbols
There, an ox, there
A sheaf of wheat
But when the first receipt
Had left the chisel of the first scribe
Everything changed
The rock was different
Was it the light?
The message was changed
It became their holy duty
The priests, mumbling
Incense-blessed
Would study the incised runes
The rock lit by sun, moon, fish-oil lamp
It was the name of God, they said
But their eyes grew dim
They made mathematics
Invented to decode the rock
The prayer wheels spun
Combining, subtracting
They made codes no one could break
They took the continent
Blessed be the Name, they said
But still unknown
Blank as the empty sky
As the centuries went
Lenses focused on the rock
Computers buzzed
Mystic visions rolled red-hot
And a special guard
All facing in
Watched it, unceasingly
In case it might change again
The cryptographers
-- Impossible, they said—
The cryptographers
-- Impossible, they said—
Any message would have fallen to them
Codes crack, shatter
There must be none
The first atomic blast
Flashed through an empty city
River vanishing in steam
They had left the bomb there
The runes marked on its case
An offering
Perhaps the rock would be left,
Some said, imperishable
Or the secret name be freed
Or the world vanish
The rock is there
The blast is there
We do not know the end
Hexagons are ubiquitous in nature for well-understood physical and mathematical reasons, including the fact that you can tile a plane with ‘em, which is presumably why the cells of beehives are hexagonal. And then there are all those snowflakes.
The Kant quote is tremendously useful in debates with I.D. types or anybody who still retails Paley’s watch argument. Explaining a cat is drastically different than explaining a watch (or a hexagon on Saturn) because the cat is, as Kant would say, both the cause and effect of itself while a watch, as Wittgenstein would say, is only a watch when considered with regards to the purposes of some other. In itself, it is just a complicated piece of metal.
I like that one. Though (a trivial observation, this) I wonder if the whole “The rock"/"Peter" inference doesn’t skew what you’re doing. Or is that what you were setting out to do?
“But there are no shapes that don’t occur naturally“
You’re saying that if I cut open enough pomegranates I’ll eventually find one that seems to spell “Rich Puchalsky”? Or do you mean there are no regular polygons that don’t occur naturally?
I didn’t even think of the rock == Peter thing, actually. I haven’t had enough of a Christian background to naturally catch those when writing poetry. I have no idea how to discourage that reading, though, or whether I should bother to do so. (If anyone reading this would like to recommend a good way to learn how to *revise* one’s poetry, as opposed to writing the initial version of it, please do.)
“But there are no shapes that don’t occur naturally“
I meant, on the first level, that there are no regular polygons that don’t occur naturally within rocks or plants or animal products, or even other regular, familiar shapes (spirals, ovals, circles etc.) On the second level, once you really dig into the biological-evolutionary destruction of teleological arguments, you have to question whether human writing is somehow not “natural”.
I think Kant’s example is a hexagon because we *do* find them in nature. Moreover, they have an ambiguity that requires reflection. That is, we have to decide whether to think of them as contingent with respect to mechanical laws-- as produced by natural purposivness (insect scales, for example)--, or else decide that they are not purposive, in which case we need some mechanistic account (presumably there are some available for Giant’s Causeway and Saturn). Such a decision is provisional (’regulative’, in Kantspeak).
Yes: Jim H.’s explanation makes it much clearer to me, as does Caswell’s: that the key is the decision or otherwise to judge such phenomena purposeful.
I don’t say there are no natural hexagons; but the notion of “hexagon” is a human notion. You need reason (or at least, say, the practical instinct of a bee, or the observing consciousness of a tortoise, if you like) so that you can identify a hexagon as a “hexagon”. I wonder whether “Saturn” has any such consciousness. As to whether the hexagon, as a shape, occurs in other places on Saturn, or in other parts of the universe, I don’t know; but what naturally occurs on Earth may very well occur in other parts of the world too.
Behold and wonder.
You don’t need consciousness or even the “practical instinct of a bee” to produce hexagons. If you crowd soap bubbles together on the surface of a dish, hexagonal patterns result as interior pressure makes each bubble expand as far as it can. The same mechanism results in the hexagonal cells in beehives. Each worker bee attempts to make as big a cell as it possible, and the aggregate effect is hexagonal cells. The bee’s instinct is simply to make the cells as big as possible. There’s no need to postulate a hexagon blueprint in the brain or DNA of the bee. (Details in Chapter VII of D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form.) Of course this explanation doesn’t work for the hexagon on Saturn.
I didn’t say you need consciousness to “produce” hexagons; I’m making a difference between the shape of a hexagon as a given thing in “reality” and the notion of a “hexagon” as an entity within people’s (or a bee’s ...) consciousness. But this is quite special stuff, I know. Probably got too much of linguistic theory, “signifiant, “signifié” (Ferdinand de Saussure), semiotic triangle, and so on; Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” ("On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense").
Still, I wonder whether a bee is actually aware it produces hexagons. It is not that I think a bee could count up to six ... (but in the end, who knows ...), or produce (or imagine) a chain of sounds like /heksagon/ (German pronunciation, don’t have the English signs) ... (interestingly enough, bees have a kind of language ...); but I wonder whether a bee (or a tortoise) might be able to recognise the shape of a hexagon in its entirety, to identify the visual impression as a whole ...
Thanks, by the way, for the tree passage from Kant; so I didn’t need to say it: a tree has a “soul”. So has the world. We cannot understand a tree, just as we cannot understand the world. And I’m sure there are “Trees” in other parts of the world too.
Adam, is this enough of a loony theory for you?
Or not quite so loony after all.
I use “Tree” and “soul” on the level of “parole” (Ferdinand de Saussure) to denote (connote) notions beyond human understanding, for which there is no word in human language.
Is there a way to insert phonetic symbols, schwas, and so on? In English /heksagon/ would be pronounced with schwas instead of an /a/ and an (open) /o/; but you know that better than I do.
I don’t manage to get italics either ...
Basically, I use Nietzsche’s speculative gap as a starting point to open up a new dimension, to apply to the world a “spiritual” (an animist) tinge and spread a colouring of imagination over the whole thing.
http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/tls.htm