"September Affair"

Yesterday I watched the 1950 American film "September Affair" on TV. The director of the film was William Dieterle. The story goes like this:

During the time of plane engine troubles, the pianist Marina Stuart (Joan Fontaine) and the engineer David Lawrence (Joseph Cotten) go sightseeing in Naples. When they have come back to the airport, the plane just flies away, and their continued short trip leads to deeper emotions. Then they learn from a newspaper that the plane they are supposed to be on has been crashed to kill all the passengers. They decide to change their world forever. ...

The scenery of Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Capri and Florence reminded me of the group trip my wife and I joined in May 2003, and I much liked this classic, short-lived love story. (You can see some sketches and photos of our trip to Italy at my website [1, 2].)

1. Sketches in Italy.
2. Thirteen-Day Travel to Italy: Selected Photos.

Bush vs. Einstein

The U.S. President George W. Bush delivered the State of the Union speech on February 2, 2005. It included the following passages [1]:

Pursuing our enemies is a vital commitment of the war on terror, ... During this time of war we must continue to support our military and give them the tools for victory.

America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.

Right now, Americans in uniform are serving at posts across the world, often taking great risks on my orders. ... The volunteers of our military are unrelenting in battle, unwavering in loyalty, unmatched in honor and decency, and every day they are making our nation more secure.

In spite of many use of the words, "freedom," "democracy" and "liberty," President Bush's speech is in contradiction to these words as well as to recent facts. The first passage cited above shows that he considers the war in Iraq was the one on terror, but it was not. Attack on Iraq was started on the wrong assumption of her having illicit weapons stockpiles.

In the second to fourth passages cited, President Bush shows his wish to expand democracies to other countries by U.S. Forces to make U.S.A. more secure and the world peaceful. However, making attack on a country without the United Nation's support is to violate international democracy, and a trial to advance freedom by war would only destroy peace for a long time.

The following words by Albert Einstein [2] sound like the prediction of President Bush's distorted policy:

General fear and anxiety create hatred and aggressiveness. The adaptation to warlike aims and activities has corrupted the mentality of man.

Einstein uttered these words in his address at the second annual dinner given by the Foreign Press Association of the United Nations, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, November 11, 1947.

At the end of the address Einstein said, "We scientists believe that what we and our fellow-men do or fail to do within the next few years will determine the fate of our civilization." However, the goal of the comprehensive renunciation of nuclear weapons is still far, so that scientists and their fellow-men and fellow-women have much to do for this purpose.

1. Transcript: President Bush's State of the Union Address (nytimes.com, February 3, 2005).
2. Albert Einstein, "The Menace of Mass Destruction" in Essays in Humanism (Philosophical Library, New York, 1950).

Serenades Played by Erhu

A young friend of mine, Yoro, is running a small company to make and sell CDs in Ebetsu, Hokkaido. Last week I ordered him a CD [1] made in China and sold by his company. It is a collection of serenades played by Zhu Changyao with an erhu by the accompaniment of the Orchestra of the Music and Dance Troop of Jiangsu Province of China. Zhu Changyao is a famous Chinese erhu virtuoso and composer. The erhu is a traditional Chinese string instrument with two strings.

The CD arrived this afternoon. It includes "English Serenade," Schumann's "Träumerei," Dvorak's "Humoresque," Schubert's "Lullaby," De Curtis's "Come Back to Sorrento," Brahms's "Lullaby," etc. Listening to those well-known pieces of music played with an erhu in calm and nostalgic tone, my heart, being hurt by dark pieces of news these days, was much soothed and warmed, though it was very cold today.

1. "Zhu Changyao's Art of Erhu No. 4: Serenade" (Jiangsu Culture Audio and Video Publishing House, China; dealt by Booxbox).

The Physicist Who Became Death

Quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, the holy book of the Hindus, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds" when he saw the large cloud of the test atomic bomb rising over the New Mexico desert in 1945. Thus he may be a devil for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, he was, in a sense, a victim of the war himself. A commission to investigate his loyalty rendered in 1954 its judgment that Oppenheimer was unfit to serve his country, U.S.A. [1].

I have read an article "Remembering Oppenheimer: The Teacher, The Man" [2] by Edward Gerjuoy, professor of physics emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. Gerjuoy describes the observation of Oppenheimer he made as a graduate student in the UC-Berkeley physics department from 1938 to 1942. I give here a much-abridged version of Gerjuoy's passages about Oppie's style of teaching (Gerjuoy have called Oppenheimer Oppie since his student days):

Oppie gave no final exams or any other tests. He did not designate a textbook for any of his courses (the hypermodern materials he taught could not be found in any of the then available textbooks). He delivered a class lecture at high speed along with numerous equations written on the board and chain smoking. His relations with his students were surprisingly informal. The seminar was Oppie's domain, his fiefdom. Despite his sometimes overly ferocious questioning, his students respected him and felt indebted to him. ...

The physicist who became Death had a good face as a teacher of physics. Some classmates of mine at a university knew very well about textbooks on physics, and said that one of the best textbooks for electrodynamics was Oppie's. At that time (late 1950s) I sought a Japanese translation of that book at bookstores, but could not find one. I now find an English edition (possibly a revised edition) at Amazon [3].

By the way, many famous physicists were also a good teacher and ferocious questioner at the seminar. I liked to organize seminars in my work years at an institute and a university, and wanted to be a ferocious questioner, though I may not have been successful in it.

1. J. Daintith, et al. ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, 2nd edition (Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, 1994).
2. E. Gerjuoy, APS News, Vol. 13, No. 10, p. 8 (November 2004).
3. J. R. Oppenheimer, Lectures on Electrodynamics (Gordon & Breach, 1970) (Out of print--limited availability).

Math Could Help Art History

Authors of novels have been identified through context-free word counts. Similarly, one might be able to identify painters by analyzing the frequency of certain types of curves. This was the idea of the mathematician Hany Farid and two colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A. [1].

They have developed an approach that builds a statistical model of an artist from the scans of a set of authenticated works against which new works are compared. The statistical model consists of first- and higher-order "wavelet decomposition." They have analyzed 13 (8 true and 5 false) drawings that have been attributed to the 16th century artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and have gotten the results that confirm expert authentications [2].

The researchers have also applied these techniques to determining the number of artists that may have contributed to the painting "Madonna with Child" attributed to the 16th century Italian painter Pietro Perugino, and again have achieved an analysis agreeing with expert opinion [2].

This indicates the possibility that the computer can help research in art history, rendering one of examples of cooperation between arts and science in a broad sense.

1. "Verifying art with math" Science, Vol. 306, 1678 (2004).
2. S. Lyu, D. Rockmore and H. Farid, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Vol. 101, 17006 (2004).