Creating a Black Hole

Today, I went to see the talk “Constraints on Quantum Gravity”

“Superstring theory is currently the best candidate for ultimate unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics”

A question I never asked, but still got answered:

“I’m an intellectual historian, so my knowledge of physics is very limited, infinitely small so to say, maybe contained somewhere in the singularity…

You showed a slide that stated: ‘The Planck scale accelerator would create a black hole.’ How would that look like?”

“The scale of such an accelerator would outweigh the earth, so we would need a new paradigm of how to conduct such experiments…”

“So like a nuclear fusion reactor?'“

“Maybe”

We just found a piece of meteroite that is older than the earth:

7 billion years

Nature Poetry Walk

Today I went on a nature poetry walk through the Arboretum at Ann Arbor that was led by a poet. She gave each of us a poem and guided us through several stops where we sat down to take a moment to breathe. The stops were usually a circular arrangement of wood and stones where we could sit upon, we also stopped by the Huron River and sat on the grass. She invited us to activate all of our senses and try to connect to nature. At the first stop, she invived us to think about how trees are all connected via a complex network of underground roots that allows them to communicate with each other, make decisions including loosing leafs and also exchange resources, when one is in need.

“Trees

We’re all one

connected

Whenever one of us suffers

We all suffer

Whenever one of us feels joy

We all enjoy ourselves.”

At the second stop, she made us think about: where do we begin and where do we end?

Fractals: Patterns of continuous breaking, from the structures of tiny cells to the giant universe

At the third stop, we sat down at the river and thought about concepts of time:

—

O

~

At the fourth stop, she asked us about our connection to the landscape that we were currently moving through.

“Roaming through the high grass with my new friends

Connected to my love

two old Austrian ladies

just want someone to talk to

“we should have brought bread”

said the young girl.

(for the ducks)

At the 5th stop, she asked us to think about a landscape that we carry around inside of us and feel connected to, and what ghost it is inhabited by.

“The tiny black dog used to liven up the green grass fields and hills, forests, around home, his curious spirit surrounding all of us.”

At our last stop, we arrived back to where we started, and she asked us for our connecting thoughts:

“It made me think about how 14 billion years ago, the whole universe, all possible times, spaces, and beings, were contained in a tiny pinhead that expanded with the Big Bang. One day, it might contract again and all of us will be connected again. An eternal pulse”

An we came full circle.

*

From September 20-22, I went on a retreat at Lake Charlevoix in Michigan with my colleagues from the Michigan Society of Fellows. Thinkers and educators from all disciplines—incl. Astrophysics, A.I., Psychology, Anthropology, Performance, etc.—came together in the middle of nature to spend a few days on the water or on the grass. Highlight was sitting around a campfire and subsequently stargazing through a telescope that one of us brought. At the camp fire I met an astronomy student who was about to apply for Graduate School at UM and I asked her what motivated her to study the stars and she told me it was the discovery of so-called Dark Energy that kept her looking up. Just the day before, the astronomy professor who was with us told me that Dark Energy supported the theory that the expansion of the universe accelerates the bigger it gets until all will turn into a vast empty space. Rather than buying into this theory, I find comfort in an alternative theory about the universe, the so-called Big Bounce, which proclaims that once our universe has reached its maximum level of expansion, it will contract again, from where it will expand again, forming an ‘eternal pulse’. Looking at the stars and trying to gauge beyond the scale of human space, time, and identity is always an experience that is both grounding and transcendental. On the one hand, it reminds us, how confined our range of action and motion is, on the other hand, it shows us how much there is out there for us…

Kobaltblau

Caspar David Friedrich. A name I associate with the individual that grapples with its own ephemerality in the face of the infinity of space and time. Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea Fog) is one of my favorite paintings. A reproduction of it used to hang in my apartment in West LA, where the beach was never far away, the seagulls used to carry the shore up to my balcony. A romantic longing to reunite with the world shines through his paintings that often depict landscapes during sunset or sunrise, laying out the many shades between concrete and other-worldly. Unendliche Landschaften. The name of the special exhibition about his work in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin right on the Museumsinsel, where you find treasures such as the Pergamonaltar, the Ishtar Tor of Babylon, and Nofretete. What caught my eye was a rather unusual object. A cupboard that contained the colors Caspar used to work with. Kobaltblau was the color that resonated deeply with me. From the Blaue Blume of Novalis to the Thalassale Regression of Benn, something seems to deeply move me about this symbolic yet sensual experience of blueness. I hope one day someone will publish a Blue Theory that might capture the vulnerable moments of reconnecting with the world one day…

Das Archiv

Archives are like black holes. Things, a lot of them, get inside but never get back out again. Either they stay inside, or, they get destroyed. That’s how the director of the Landesarchiv Berlin described the mechanics of his institution during our tour that was part of the annual Germania Seminar of the community organization Berliner Underworlds. Obviously, things do get outside of the archives, but they are bent through the perspective that the researcher takes on the topic they are writing about. Bent through the researcher’s specific space-time-identity continuum, they come to see the public light, significantly warped and worm-holed things arrive in the public consciousness. History is a story we construct, more than reconstruct, out of the source materials, to lend the words of the director again. His words are reproduced, even if significantly distorted, decontextualized, deconstructed, etc., here on this blog. Sometimes gravity literally undermines the archive. For the example of the city archive in Cologne, where the ground underneath wielded, leading to a collapse of the archive’s and the neighboring buildings. As a result, documents from and outside of the archives mingled in the pit, leading to an overarching historical confusion. Archives need to be well tempered, otherwise the papers dissolve, leading the users of the archives to dissolve as well, as the mold attacks their lungs. Given the growing world population, archives are growing drastically as well. Last Saturday I went to an art market, where I saw a black hole-like layered circle made from fabrics that came in different colors. The artist, Muriel, explained that the different fabrics represented the ethnic layers of the world population, with the Asian and African populations being quantitatively dominant. The association of both the archive and the art piece with the black hole made me connect these two sets of data, leading to a very different type of archive, this blog as form of writing that archives my associative flow of thoughts.

On a Sunday at the Cylinder #2: History falling on our heads

When I arrived at the cylinder this time, I saw the proleptic pile of helmets in the entrance hall and the red and white tape around the site signalizing: » Don’t come closer, or…«. Once more, the unstoppable mechanics of decay that had taken control over the ruinous ferroconcrete giant were threatening the visitor with potentially fatal consequences. Big chunks of debris were breaking out of the once-solid armor of the cylinder: history was literally threatening to fall on top of our heads. While I did not witness this myself, I imagined big pieces landing on the ground that was shaken by the consequences of gravity. The violent sound made me think of the blows to the head that the prisoners of the nearby concentration camp SA Gefängnis Papestraße had to endure. I had just taken a tour through the premises immediately before I had arrived at the cylinder and the impressions were still fresh. The narrative of the tour guide, an acquaintance of mine, and the first-hand reports of the victims exhibited on the walls alongside photographs that showed the signs of mistreatment, created quite a vivid image of these violent days of the first half of the 20th century. I had invited a fellow soil scientist whom I met at the Max Planck Institute the same week and who was also interested in obscure architecture to the tour. We were both from Munich originally but had spent most of the last decade in the US. Together, we ruminated about the translation of soil scientist into German, arriving at the translation Bodenkundler, which has quite an archaic tone to it. Unlike the Bodenmechaniker, soil mechanists, who had done research on the cylinder from the 1940s-1980s and were interested in soil solely for its mechanical properties, not caring too much if it was dead or alive, but how it reacts to pressure, the soil scientist looks at soil as a living organism. Somewhere, a spider was lurking through its web spanning over a crack in the concrete. In the background, the lively noise of a beehive someone had installed on the greenery at the cylinder that was being taken over by the forces of nature, slowly, but surely, unlike humanity a never-ending story….

Max Planck, Berlin

Today, I presented at the Max Planck Society in Berlin, alongside soil scientists, landscape architects, artists, activists, anthropologists, and historians from all over the world. The talks took place at the Harnack House where Albert Einstein also presented in 1929, before he fled the country like many members of the German intelligentsia. Before the fascist period, Germany was the leading country in science, engineering, and culture, having earned more Noble prizes than the US, Britain, and France—combined (see Peter Watson’s book: The German Genius Europe’s Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution And The Twentieth Century from 2011). Germany never recovered from that dark chapter, even if, notoriously, some technological progress was made during that time under the most inhumane pressure, often in military-related fields including road-building, geotechnology, and aerospace engineering, which most often involved concentration camp labor. The Max Planck Society, founded in 1948, carries on the spirit of the Golden Age of German thought and science before fascism. Restoring some of this spirit of unity, our »Thinking from the Substrate« Workshop (Jun 3-5) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science brought together thinkers and practitioners to think with, through, and about soil. In my talk, I meditated about the soil that carries the heavy load-bearing cylinder and what this means for the geological foundations of human history and the pressure we are applying to the planet. The results will be published in website form and as essays soon.

An einem Sonntag am Zylinder#1: Betonmassen, verlassene Gleise, ferne Schreie

Während der wöchentlichen Tour am Schwerbelastungkörper, die sehr gut besucht war, traf ich auf einen Bauingenieur. Es war ein heißer Spätnachmittag im Mai, der schon vom Sommer bedrängt wurde. Der Mann vom Fach konnte nicht nur einige Elemente am Zylinder fachmännisch einordnen konnte, die meinem Auge fremd sind, sondern er verdeutlichte auch, wie eindrucksvoll die Betonarbeit ist, da bei so einer Masse von heißem flüssigem Beton Kräfte entfesselt werden, die es sehr schwer machen, diese Massen zu kontrollieren und in Form zu halten. Hitze, Gewicht, Formveränderung. Bei meinem anschließenden allsonntäglichen Schlendern durch den naheliegenden Gleisdreieckspark, bei dem ich immer auf den mal mehr mal minder gut erhaltenen Querstreben der Gleise trat, versuchte ich meine Eindrücke zu sammeln und meine Gedanken auf eine klare Linie zu bringen. Es misslang, wie es mir scheint verläuft die Zeit nun einmal nicht auf klaren Linien, sondern bewegte sich gleichzeitig auf mehreren mal mehr mal minder betretenen Pfaden umher, sowie die verlassenen Gleise hier im Park. Mein Bündel an Gedanken enthielt folgende Geschichtsstränge. Vor der Tour am Zylinder war ich im ehemaligen SA Gefängnis Paperstraße (ein sehr frühes Konzentrationslager) gewesen und hatte die Folterberichte von Überlebenden an der Wand in handschriftlichen Briefen gelesen, die mit erschütternden Photographien untermalt waren. Der Zylinder, seine fortschrittliche Technik, und die barbarische Folter des Regimes, welche diese Technik gefördert hatte, erzeugten ein hämmerndes Sausen in meinem Ohr, als ich so über die Gleise stapfte, Betonmassen, ferne Schreie verlassene Gleise, die ebenfalls eine schwere Symbolik tragen, verschmolzen zu einer ehernen Rythmik der Vergangenheit, das Gleisdreieck spiegelte dabei die dreieckige Form Sachsenhausens wieder, die wiederum auf den Jacken der Gebeutelten abgebildet waren, die in dieses Bermuda-Dreieck geraten waren, aus dem es kein Entrinnen gab…

Die rote Blume

The blue flower is a well-known symbol of German romanticism. Coined by mining engineer and writer Novalis, it embodies the longing for a return to a beautiful unity of nature and culture. Along these lines, later on, the expressionist poet and medical doctor Benn used the color blue to express what he called thalassale Regression, the inherent longing of all forms of life to return to the ocean, to dissolve its form into the formlessness of water as the origin of life, echoing Freud’s obscure idea of a death drive. I encountered the red flower during a hot summer day when visiting the concentration camp Sachsenhausen close to Berlin for the first time. As Peter Watson put it in The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century (2011), the 20th-century was supposed to be Germany’s absolute blossoming—but it was cut off right at its peak. The contingent course of history took a fatal turn and led from a Germany that was flourishing in terms of culture and science right into the barbaric era of National Socialism. The red flower reminded me about the dialectical course of history, as Benjamin said, every document of culture is also a document of barbarism. The heavy load-bearing cylinder, a technologically highly advanced »laboratory« is inherently intertwined with the victims of Sachsenhausen whose blood turned the blue flower red like the bricks being produced in the nearby Klinkerwerk Oranienburg, a collaboration of Himmler and Speer.

zerfliessende Ge-schichte

The day I climbed down the ladder into the depth of the heavy load-bearing cylinder’s lower measurement chambers, I encountered this rusty piece of metal. It was part of the remains of the instruments used to measure the reaction of the soil to the immense weight of the cylinder. The handwriting of decay had transformed the corroding piece of metal into what I think looks similar to an acrylic pouring but schematically also resembles a vertical cut through a geological profile. The different layers distinguish themselves by color: a dark grey, a reddish brown, and a golden yellow. Schwarzrotgold? These layers flow into each other and their expansion is not clean-cut but quite messy. The geotechnical engineers mapping out the soil layers underneath Berlin for Speer encountered a similar earthen ground structure. History herself, I believe, can be mapped out like this, in layers that coincide and enrich or contaminate each other. At the cylinder, a complexity of historical layers are intertwined: (geo-)technological history, architectural history, the history of violence and suffering, and many more. Technological history, motivated by the human desire to analyze and subdue the earth, architectural history, motivated by the desire to protect us against the forces of nature, and the history of violence and suffering, motivated by the will to dominate and control others for one’s own benefit: the forced laborers ordered to cut the stones and put together the gigantic monuments of German fascism and the earth bearing the weight of human hubris and enduring her penetration through human instability….

Das Los der Schwere

My journey, my literary downward spiral, began at this cylinder in Berlin-Tempelhof in late February on a cold and windy day that was already sinking into darkness. The last rays of the sunset’s dying light put a mysterious cloak on top of the ruins of this ferroconcrete giant framed by eery branches of reaching for it from naked trees. The cylindrical ruin appeared like a geometrical remnant of a violent vision of infinity in the midst of a Wagner opera or a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Upon arrival, my idea was to write a genealogy of the Tower of Babel motif during German modernity from Kant to Sloterdijk, to look at the correlation between ambition and destruction, dissect the human desire to pile higher and higher and fall deeper and deeper. This initial project was shaped by Nietzsche’s enigmatic discussion of an absolute Höhentrieb, drive to height, that he diagnosed when looking at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin shortly before he lost his mind. But another, even heavier, story was lurking here for me, at the concrete remains of fascist megalomania. Here, at the Schwerbelastungskörper, heavy load-bearing cylinder or body, I heard voices rising from the depth of the earth, stecht tiefer ins Erdreich, voices that came pouring through the cracks in the cylinder and whose bodies had been ravaged and brutally erased, waiting to have their story told, and they awakened something inside of me. A long and draining thought process began, the shadow of the giant seemed to bear upon me from this moment on. Ich zog das Los der Schwere.