Alan Jacobs

If you really want complete freedom of choice, complete openness of information, where nobody is spying on you, no one is selling your presence to advertisers, the only place to find it is a library, where they keep books.

Bang & Olufsen stuff is cool in its retro-futuristic way, but this is more my style. Though, alas, not my budget.

But the genuinely impressive moments in a journey through B&O’s world come from peeking at its process. You expect a company that sells incredibly expensive products to pour tremendous time, effort, skill, and craft into making them. But in an age of outsourcing and cost efficiencies, it’s still something to witness. In one of the dozen soundproof garages where B&O car stereos are fine-tuned, engineers are testing the audio in an Audi Q7 tricked out with some 50 speakers. Elsewhere, a Rube Goldberg machine burns cigarettes and shoots the smoke at TVs to make sure their screens can withstand such abuse. Best of all is the tidy Factory Five, where robots and humans mill and polish aluminum to insanely precise standards. The guide points out an enormous Swiss-made Niederberger grinding machine used to create the grain on the frame of the BeoVision 7 TV. Like everything in the factory, this assembly line was meticulously organized to turn designers’ exacting visions into reality.

When you have eliminated the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes told Watson, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This rule holds for presidential contests as well as for whodunits: Romney is improbable, but his rivals are impossible, and so he will be the nominee.

Making his own choice of the best time to have been alive, Edward Gibbon, author of “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-89), didn’t have much doubt. “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” This was the second century AD, when Rome’s “five good emperors”, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, brought a peace and stability that western Europe would—in Gibbon’s view—never see again. But maybe it was an easier question then. Gibbon was white, smart and male. He could walk from the right end of one hierarchical society into another without a tremor. Nor was he sacrificing much technology to do so. Barring gunpowder and the printing press, his world and Hadrian’s were close enough to let Gibbon swap breeches for a toga and barely notice the difference. For us, the question needs a little more thought.

Anyone who dislikes pain, prefers their operations under anaesthetic, and has no wish to die of smallpox, might well choose to live now. We can balance that by awarding ourselves perpetual good health, but it’s harder to level the playing field when it comes to gender.

science-fiction IKEA manuals

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

For Bohr, physics was not about finding out what nature is, but about what can be said about it. Quantum mechanics was a complete theory of the behavior of matter and light, and we just have to come to terms with the limitations it places on what can be known, for example as illustrated by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein was having none of it. He believed that there is an objective world out there and that it is the job of scientists to describe it. The appearance of probabilities in the theory was, for him, evidence of its incompleteness. …

In the late 1970s, I had the pleasure of talking with John Bell about the Bohr-­Einstein debates during a train journey from Oxford to London. Every seat was taken, so we had to stand. Pressed against me by sullen commuters, Bell summarized his apparently reluctant conclusion as we pulled into Paddington station: “Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.”

Physics at the moment is again very muddled; in any case, for me it is too complicated, and I wish I were a film comedian or something of that sort and had never heard anything about physics.

Nor can Oxfordians provide any explanation for the manifest stylistic differences between Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and his Jacobean plays, or the technical changes attendant upon the King’s Men’s move to the Blackfriars theatre four years after their candidate’s death. Unlike the Globe, the Blackfriars was an indoor playhouse; it therefore depended on artificial lighting; candles would not burn unattended for the full length of a play, so act-divisions were introduced, during which they could be trimmed or replaced (the audience, meanwhile, was entertained with music). The plays written after Shakespeare’s company began using the Blackfiars in 1608, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale for instance, have what most of the earlier plays do not have: a carefully planned five-act structure. No Oxfordian has addressed this difficulty for their faith. Presumably they would say that Oxford wrote a batch of five-act plays just in case the King’s Men one day happened to acquire an indoor playhouse and that he gave instructions on his deathbed for these plays to be kept in a closet until such a day arrived. That there is no record of Oxford ever having had any contact with any of the King’s Men has not deterred Oxfordians in the past and will not deter them in the future.