There’s lots of science and mathematics in “Solar” and given Ian McEwan’s reputation as a very assiduous researcher and given whatever I’ve picked-up in “Energy & the Environment,” I think that most of it is not bullshit. But, of course, that assumption does not apply to physicist Michael Beard’s brand new process for solar power.

The process involves reverse engineering “the capturing and converting of light and the splitting of water be self-organizing living forms [that has] been the engine of evolution.” Is that bullshit and, if so, why? I’m looking to what I’ve come to think of as “Solar Week” (oh the celebration!) in the class for the answer to these questions. This might sound flippant, but it’s not, after all, I have been known to tell students that the best way to enhance their bullshit detectors is a grounding in political philosophy. Why should science be different?

[Please note, if I was taking this course for a grade, I’d be confident of an F given my performance. If I was really taking this course for a grade, as a real undergraduate, I would, of course, have worked much harder. If I hadn’t worked hard while I was a real undergraduate I would have deserved my F. All this in praise of Professor Dominique D. Hamburger of LSU, my new hero!]

One of the best things that emerged from my sojourn in Dublin was snagging a copy of Ian McEwan’s extraordinary new novel Solar, a tale of sex, ambition, murder, and, of all things, physics and the environment. Michael Beard is short, fat, and clever, and his fifth marriage is ending as he confronts the dying embers of a brilliant career, only to be saved by a series of fortuitous events that lead him to become a hero to the environmental movement.

The novel is, as is everything by McEwan, beautifully written, but what’s interesting here is how Beard’s view of climate change evolves. Initially he accepts, as I do, that the planet is getting warmer, but he’s far less sure that we are heading for a cataclysm: “[Beard] was unimpressed by some of the wild commentary that suggested the world was in ‘peril,’ that humankind was drifting towards calamity, when coastal cities would disappear under the waves, crops fail, and hundreds of millions of refugees surge from cone county to another.”

To be sure, he acknowledges that something must be done about climate change, but he’s equally surely correct in finding, “an old testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils, and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination… to believe that one was always living at the end of days.”

And this, as I read McEwan, and as I read Nietzsche (or Thomas Kuhn, or John Gray), is precisely the problem. We tried to find a foundation in philosophy, then religion, now it is scientists to whom we must genuflect. But scientists are just as arrogant and self-important as philosophers and the religious! Worse, they seek to use religious imagery to bolster their case, even as they claim the sole mantle of rationality.

As the novel progresses, Beard becomes more certain that action must be taken, but primarily because he sees it as a way for him to become relevant again. McEwan is thus very clear-eyed about climate change and he doesn’t want the reader to lose sight of the fact that scientists as they make their discoveries are also making their careers.

On Thursday, sitting in an aisle seat next to an empty seat next to a pleasantly silent young Irish woman following a successful trip to Dublin, life seemed relatively fine; then the pilot came on to tell us that we had to turn back because of something or other so after a half an hour in the air Continental flight CO127 turned back to Dublin rather than, as he put it, “run the risk of running into problems over the Atlantic.”

As we began our descent the plane was rattling, pitching, shuffling, straining, yawing, and generally doing all those things that I don’t personally want a plane to do when I’m in it. The young woman began praying, someone puked a few rows behind me, a guy was being consoled by his very hot redhead girlfriend, some guy said, “Whoa!, I began to notice that the view through the window past the praying young woman was switching from grass to sky with all-too-much rapidity, then the pilot pulled out of the landing.

Someone said, “Shit,” or else that was me in my brain.

I offered a reassuring little smile to the girl, she smiled back, then went back to praying. I talked a little with the man across the aisle from me, a musician; he was headed for Long Island to sing some Irish ballads to a dinner crowd. The Irish Sea looked unusually choppy; then the co-pilot came on to say that there was a problem landing because of wind, but that we would now try the other runway. I assume the co-pilot spoke because the pilot was curled in a fetal ball sobbing gently in the furthest corner of the cockpit from the controls.

We began our second descent in a surprisingly quiet cabin, some retching behind me again, the redhead trying to calm down the boyfriend, a whole hell of a lot of praying…I suppose it’s hard to make noise when you’re praying. The descent seemed normal, than we were back to “generally doing all those things that I don’t personally want a plane to do when I’m in it.” This time the tires touched the tarmac, which would have been fine if they’d stayed there, but instead whichever of the pilots lost the toss pulled us up again.

I was, perhaps, too calm, too sanguine about this whole thing because they never asked us to get into “crash position,” but in retrospect they’ve probably figured that that’s a bit like going under a school desk if there’s a nuclear explosion. And, anyway, it might cause panic among the weaker passengers.

I thought, “Is there where they do the foamy-stuff landing?” I remember thinking that this would be a good thing, but this might have been because foam sounded a lot better than landing in the decidedly non-placid Irish Sea.

As we began our third descent, it occurred to me that Dublin Airport only has two runways. I said to the praying woman, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to die in a plane crash, I’ve always thought I’d have one of those ironic deaths: “He was on the way to join a gym…” She smiled a little, but God looked better to her than cheap gallows humor. The monitor on the seat-back in front of me registered our flight path as a yellow line which now looked like the work of a particularly un-artistic four-year-old.

We touched down to only scattered applause, perhaps because like me most people assume that stopping is the hard bit – well, it usually is in the movies. I heard someone mention pursuing emergency trucks. We seemed to be going pretty fast (as opposed to “fairly fast”), but we eventually stopped.

For about an hour, we waited on the tarmac to get off the plane so that I could have a cigarette and a vodka and tonic. I overheard the hot redhead tell someone on the other end of the line, “Tommy was a rock!” Note to self: fall in love again! The woman who was praying told me she was a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics – who knew mathematicians were even allowed to pray? After two subsequent nights in a hotel in Dublin airport, some chores and a few drinks with friends last night, I am finally feeling at home again.

I think I shall always sit in seat 31C.

Anyone interested in a more technical account of the incident can find details at http://avherald.com/h?article=428d2c90&opt=0

Probably inspired by O.J.’s sterling example in “If I did it,” I’ve been keeping a list of reasons why this whole enterprise won’t work, if it didn’t. Call it a kind of pre-post-hoc rationalization. I came up with several “good” reasons, or, more accurately, I adapted the list from the kinds of reasons I’ve had students offer me.

1. NYU doesn’t feel like a real university because it doesn’t have a campus.
2. Random personal stuff.
3. Lack of background in science.
4. Terrible professor.
5. Terrible T.A.
6. Science sucks!
7. The book is boring.
8. The mid-term was really unfair.
Of course, that whole “self-fulfilling prophecy” thing, I have indeed moved away from the notion of doing everything and having Trace give me a grade, or a “grade,” but not because 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8. No, I’d have to say it is the lack of background, number 3, or the presence of a very old background, along with my Mother taking a turn for the worse, number 2, that did me in. Oddly, it wasn’t the book, indeed since I’m now reading it rather than attempting to study it, it’s really not all that bad. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go out and buy it, and if I had done so, I wouldn’t be at all pleased, but reading it sans pressure is not too appalling a pastime.

But, more positively (I hope any scientists reading like this one!), the main reason I’m pulling back is that I trust scientists! Do you like it? I recently asked my orthopedic surgeon if many of his patients visit sites like webmd. “Don’t get me started!” he replied. I feel for him; I would never go to a doctor and think that my spending a few minutes on some web site made my opinion worth a damn. I wouldn’t do so because I think that I, and my insurance company, are paying him so that he’ll know what to do with my back, I’m going to stick to political theory and leave him to know the medical stuff.

Now, I’m off to Dublin to look in on the Mother, but I also hope to visit my alma mater and report on why my nephew, a biochem major at U.C.D., is thinking of dropping science.

Tomorrow, it’s time for the mid-term. After doing just an hour of revision yesterday, and barely half-an-hour today, I am woefully unprepared. This does not surprise me; what surprises me is that in spending my time worrying about not studying for the exam, I am not doing all the other things that I have on my 12 item “to do” list. Ignorance, and fear of exposure, which together form a kind of paralysis, thus seep out and infect all other aspects of my life. If I were a student, thus frozen by the midterm, I imagine I would not be working on the courses that interest me -- in this kind of situation, it seems there is no solace even in the books one want to read. So much for compartmentalization!

Or, “speaking of double-edged swords…”

I’m Albert Ferme-Bohr IV, I like chemistry, biology, physics, hell, name a science and I adore it. As a student at NYU, I have to do a course called “Conversations of the West” as part of my Morse Academic Plan (MAP) , NYU’s core curriculum. I just realized I couldn’t have escaped “Con’ West” while Dermot O’Brien could have, if he’d bothered his ass, escaped both Natural Science I, a course like his feeble “Energy and the Environment” and a Natural Science II with a 4 or 5 in AP Biology or Chemistry.

I’m pissed!

Knowing that Dermot wouldn’t have had to do the science parts of MAP if he’d done a science AP, I wonder why my APs in history and politics don’t do me any good vis a vis MAP? I wonder, above all, why the hell Dermot is complaining so much. After all, if science is really as dominant as he thinks (or fears), how come it’s so escapable?

Meanwhile, and this is what really pisses me off, in “Con’ West” I’m knee deep in Plato; I’ve read “the Symposium” and chunks of “the Republic.” I think it’s nonsense. Take the Symposium, a bunch of guys, about a third bi-, a third gay, and at least a third pedophiles, sit around and talk about love. No women at the conversation, but that’s okay because loving them is a lower kind of love…give me a break! Meanwhile, in the Republic, after a bunch of fatuous arguments about justice, “in-itself,” we’re presented with a utopia that features censorship, some form of eugenics, and a system built around the ridiculous notion that we already know what we know, we just have to recollect it.

We’re meant to respect Plato’s work because…because it’s old? Or because, as the professor put it, “it’s the foundation of Western thought,” but what does that mean? Did he mean it’s the foundation like a building has a foundation? I think he did. So far as I can tell his “foundation of Western Thought” is made of all the sexist, racist, aristocratic, stuff we’ve discarded, all the stuff that isn’t good enough for us to use in our actual building. All the stuff I don’t need to know.

I’ve been awake for about six hours now. During that time, I’ve cooked breakfast for my sons, showered, shaved, shopped, read 37 pages of John Keegan’s “Faces of Battle,” answered some e-mails, offered a few salty, irreverent, comments (ho ho!) on Facebook, and half-watched an episode of “Family Guy.” Busy, busy, busy, that’s me! But that’s not why I listed my activity. I’m interested in this because of a phrase from the textbook that’s been haunting me for weeks: “need to know.”

Leaving aside my shock that I could ever use the word “haunting” (in a good way too!) to describe anything in the book, and, for the moment, the thought that it’s kind of a double-edge sword to tell the reader of a textbook on the science behind the environment that the authors will just tell him what he “needs to know,” I wondered what I needed to know as I went about my business. I’m pretty hazy about the first few moments of today, I try to be that way every day, but I do remember turning on the stove to make breakfast, so in the interest of “moving this damn thing along” let’s start there…

I need to know that if I turn the given knob on my stove to “lite” [sic] a flame will emerge on whichever one of the four rings I wish. That a stove is where one cooks one’s food. That I must eat if I am to continue living. That, qua short-changed, university employee, qua divorced father whose kids like to cook with him, and qua excellent cook, it makes sense from the economic, familial, and taste vantage points for me to cook breakfast rather than going out. That I am a university employee, a father, and an excellent cook, what these terms mean, and why the first two roles involve extensive responsibilities backed up by legal, moral, and financial authority. English, even to read the word “lite,” and an understanding of the signs used by my stove to communicate with me. That the flame is the result of gas combining with a clicking sound and that if I turn the knob to “hi” (my stove has long been engaged in a fierce campaign against the English language) the clicking sound will go away. At this stage, the front right burner on my stove is emitting a blue flame, but I haven’t really done anything, yet I’ve needed to know a lot, and I left out a lot, all the stuff that led me to my stove, I probably glanced at my oddly long-lasting, black, plastic, Sony, clock-radio, I may have turned on a light, and I left out all the cool, interesting, worth-staying-up-all-night-to-read, continental, and, in contemporary terms, ‘non-scientific’ stuff about consciousness (all the stuff in “fuck off” books, as in “Fuck off, can’t you see I’m reading!”), so it seems safe to say that I needed to know, to put a definitive figure on it, tons.

Perhaps even tons and tons.

And yet I know nothing! And I don’t mean that in some form of Socratic, arrogant-faux-humble, sense; no, I mean I know nothing! Don DeLillo gets at something like this, he has the central character in “White Noise” awaken one morning and realize that he’s completely dependent on others, that he knows nothing (It’s peculiar that I remember this as I only read 50 or so pages of the book.) . So, what don’t I know? Well, the clicking sound, I assume that’s electrical, because there’s a plug and some cable running down the back of the stove, but I wouldn’t put money on it (whoa…something is true if and only if you’d put money on it – I smell tenure at UNLV!) , and anyway, what is electricity? How do you make it? And then there’s the gas.

But that’s okay, because I don’t need to know.

Thus the double-edged sword, for what do I need to know about the environment? I need to know the difference between climate and weather, check! That anyone who listens to Rush Limbaugh on the topic is a moron and if you read The New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, you’ll generally know what’s going on, check!

I don’t need to know anything else and that’s just as well because I don’t have any course materials here at home because NYU had a snow day on Friday (Yay!) so I didn’t bring my stuff home so now I’m not studying for my mid-term on Thursday, but that’s okay.

The worlds of science and politics were meant to be united in the fourth homework assignment for the course. After researching the topic, I had to write a one-page letter to my Congresswoman urging her to vote for, or against, a ban on sun tanning beds for under-18s. The science was unmistakably on the side of support for the bill, so I went with that. It was a bit of a slog to limit it one page (I eventually had to “cheat” by reducing the font from my usual 12 to 11 points), but, science aside, as it always would be in such a case, I would’ve preferred to take the opposing view - and, were this not a science course, I certainly would have. As I was writing this rather worthy piece (see below), I kept thinking of how the tanning bed industry would rubbish the science and, in some sense or other, accuse the bill’s proponents of being anti-American (or anti-freedom, the same thing for all-too-many Americans), or letting the terrorists win. And that, to a great extent, okay, maybe not the bit about letting the terrorists win, is what would happen and the average representative would probably find their arguments more compelling that the ones I offered not, of course, because the industry would offer arguments supported by that most telling of rhetorical devices, money.

The Honorable Nydia Velazquez
United States Congress
2241 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-2104

Dear Congresswoman Velazquez,

My name is Dermot O’Brien, I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and I am a keen supporter of the fine work you do in the House, most especially through the “Children’s Caucus.” I am aware of the pending legislation H.R. 6637 Tanning Bed Reduction Bill and I urge you to vote yes on this bill because it will protect my two pre-teen sons from the harmful effects of tanning beds until they are at least 18 years of age.

It is clear to me, having researched the issue, that tanning beds are dangerous. As far back as 1997 in the British Journal of Dermatology, Woolloons et al found that tanning beds, “produce the types of DNA damage associated with photocarcinogenesis.” Beds thus damage skin at the most profound level imaginable from 3 to 8 times more than sunlight. Europe is, on this issue, well ahead of America with solid research from Sweden backing the claims of the British dermatologists, and Prof. Tom Keane, Ireland’s Director of Cancer Control calling for an outright ban on tanning beds.

I know that kids feel pressure to look tanned, but recent reports on the “look” demanded in the fashion industry suggest that designers are beginning to want models whose skin glows in a healthy manner rather than looking like, as one insider put it, “hazelnut chocolate ice cream.” But even I wanted to look like one of Ben & Jerry’s more exotic flavors, I can always use self-tanning cream, indeed I sometimes use it myself, which is infinitely safer than tanning beds (I found no evidence of any possible ill-effects from such creams) beds, and quicker and cheaper too!

Critics of this bill, as in so many other bills which attempt to protect our young people from harmful products, will, no doubt, adopt their usual twin tactics. First, they will try to say that the scientific evidence is not yet conclusive and that further study is needed. Second, they will couch their arguments in terms of “freedom.” They will claim that it is the right of every American to have any skin tone he or she wishes and say that this bill is an affront to “the American Way.” To the first claim, I offer the evidence above and the words of noted dermatologist, Dr. James Spencer of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine who says of indoor tanning, “we know it will cause skin cancer. Not maybe. Not might. It’s going to cause cancer. No one under 18 should be allowed to use those things.” In response to the second argument, I wish to point out that this bill will still permit adults to be as tanned as George Hamilton if they so wish, and that the real freedom to be protected is the freedom of parents to know that their wishes for their children are not undermined by society.

I cannot supervise my sons for 24 hours of the day, but if this bill passes, at least I can know that they are being protected from this highly carcinogenic practice.

Sincerely etc.

I don’t remember the title of the first book I read in college, but I do remember how I read it. It was a hefty tome on the state and as I read I wrote notes (“p 12 – state more capacious term than government” etc) on a pad. I remember feeling good -- all student-y, even intellectual, as I moved slowly through the text. After reading 50 pages, I decided to take stock. I had 20 pages of notes. I was new to the whole student thing, but I knew something was up.

Next, I tried I highlighter pens, these were definitely prettier than notes, but I could never remember why it was I’d used the different colors. Did pink mean civil society? Was pale blue power, or representation? And, of course, it wasn’t much use if I was reading a library book.

Gradually, I developed my own method (using the word method in its very loosest sense) which involves, in no particular order, Post-Its, marginal glosses, computer files, index cards, scribbled phrases on the edge of lecture notes, and, naturally, the occasional use of the highlighter. It has, on the one hand worked beautifully, I have a Ph.D., but, on the other, not so well, I don’t have tenure.

I’ve been thinking about study methods all weekend long (well, occasionally) because the mid-term is suddenly looming (I guess it isn’t suddenly looming, more like I’ve suddenly realized that it’s looming – bottom line, I’ve got more than my share of loomingosity in my life) and I want to do well. In theory, a good study method should lead to a good grade, and I’d say that’s true in my own field: I expect a student to come to class having read the texts, thus having arrived at what understanding he can, and open, through discussion in class, to having his view tested and challenged. But that’s not what goes on in Energy and the Environment.

In the world of science, I have to know stuff. And this stuff I have to know isn’t, at least at my level, open to interpretation. This would all be terrifying me if I hadn’t overheard one student tell another that we’d get study questions, I’m not wholly sure what they are, but I’m awfully glad they exist. Now I can calmly work on my letter to a Congressman telling him why he should support a law banning sun-tanning beds (due on Thursday). I can’t, I assume, write a letter extolling the virtue of “freedom” and telling her to ignore ‘the science,’ the fact that I can’t remains a subject for another day.

Still experiencing the afterglow of being in the presence of the transcendent artistry of Nina Stemme’s magnificent performance as Ariadne in Thursday night’s performance at the Met, I turn again to studying for the course. Hearing something like Stemme’s performance also, for me at least, produces a deep sadness: I will never do anything as well as she sang that role. Nonetheless, I must go on with my struggle to continue.

Today, Sunday, as I wait to head to my local to watch Super Bowl LXIV (my head says Colts, my heart wants the Saint -- I’ve never been to Indianapolis, but I find it hard to imagine I’d like it as much as New Orleans), I’ve decided to revive my fortunes in the course with one hour of studying.

I had planned to start this hour about two hours ago, but I had first to eat breakfast, vacuum my apartment, re-organize my closet, hear Tom Waits 1978 live performance of “On the Nickel” on the BBC’s “Old Gray Whistle Test,” read the latest of Tony Judt’s luminous memoirs in the New York Review of Books, bask in my relief and joy that my elder son was accepted into his dream high school, Beacon, answer some e-mails -- in short, anything but actually start studying. But now, with music switched from Van Morrison to some far less distracting Mozart horn concerti, I will...

Well, that was … well, I don’t know what that was: to be sure, I gave my full concentration to the text (by which I mean that, more often than not, I thought only about what I was reading) and I could see how it was building one formula on top of another as it explained light and its relationship to everything from pollution to sun tans.

Yet, I did not grasp it in the same way I would have grasped an hour’s worth of study of Plato’s Euthyphro. There are many reasons for this, most so obvious I need hardly recount them, but the main one, at least for today’s reading, is that it lacked a narrative.

Narrative aside, the main problem is that one hour is a drop in the ocean. If I was taking “Energy and the Environment” as a normal student, it would be one of four courses. I do not remember exactly how much studying I did for each course when I was an undergrad, but I’m certain that it would have been, over the course of three days, far more than 3600 seconds. I console myself that it is a necessary start, but I cannot delude myself into thinking that it is remotely close to being sufficient.