Friday, February 27, 2009

Total Perspective Vortex

Thanks to the indefatigable Tolstoy I was this week introduced to the recently launched Galaxy Zoo 2, a project which aims to enlist the help of the general public in classifying the 250,000 or so galaxies that have so far been photographed. That means you, bloggers and blog readers, if you have too much time on your hands, which you obviously do. Check out the tutorial on how to classify galaxies, and the current Top 10 Galaxies as voted for by the site's users (rather an odd selection, this; my favourite, below, is only ranked at No. 3!).

By a curious coincidence, on the very same day I stumbled upon this video on YouTube discussing the enormity (yes, 'hugeness' might be better; see comment below, from "Mr Hubble" himself) of the Universe as illustrated by the stunning "Deep Field" photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.



"It just showed me what a really great guy I am."

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

You don't really mean 'enormity', do you?

Froog said...

Interesting call, Edwin.

I admit it was a somewhat incautious choice. And I could hide behind the defence of writing in a hurry and having had far too little sleep this week.

However, I would like to ponder further, and perhaps do some investigation into what the online dictionaries are saying these days.

I am a British English speaker, and my education was uncommonly old-fashioned, pedantic, backward-looking. Much of my early reading was from the 19th or early 20th Century, so I may occasionally be guilty of a slightly anachronistic turn of phrase.

I feel the the original meaning of 'enormity' as 'extreme size' should still be possible. I rather fear that, as with 'egregious', it has been hijacked by our Transatlantic cousins for facetious or disparaging use only.

If that shift in usage were recent and predominantly American, I would be inclined to resist it; but I fear it perhaps goes back rather further and deeper.

Living in a non-native speaker environment for so much of the time, one is in danger of losing sensitivity to these nuances.

I shall go to bed and consider further.

Froog said...

I suppose the facetious (American?) usage would also be possible here. I wasn't intending to strike a humorous note there, but I think it might work.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if your "situation" over there allows you to download Google software. But in recent versions, Google Earth has included a sub-system called Google Sky which lets you zoom through space in a way similar to this video (sans voiceover).

And then there's the Eames brothers' "Powers of 10" film. As a pop-culture maven, you know of this, right?

Froog said...

No, that one had passed me by thus far, JES, but thanks for the tip.

I had heard of Google Sky, but I don't think I'll have a chance to try it out any time soon. Both of my laptops are too old and decrepit to support Google Earth properly - I'm pretty much out of working memory. And the Internet connection here is so slow that I doubt if I'd fare much better even with the brand spanking new computer I hope soon to buy for myself. Even YouTube is a bit of a trial for me at the moment.

Froog said...

By the way, JES, do you have a view on the 'enormity' issue?

I suspect "Edwin Hubble" is OMF Tony in disguise.

Froog said...

By the by the way.... I wonder if anyone spotted the opening and closing references here?

The 'Total Perspective Vortex' was an idea from Douglas Adams's The Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy. Although I later enjoyed the books, my first and most vivid experience of this sci-fi fantasy comedy was through the original BBC Radio 4 series back at the end of the 1970s. I suspect this gag might have been in the radio series only, or at any rate didn't make such a prominent impression in the books.

The TPV was the most terrible punishment ever created, an excruciating psychic torture machine; it was a kind of very sophisticated virtual reality generator which gave its subject an intensely vivid impression of the vastness (if you will, "Edwin") of the Universe, and hence of the subject's own utter insignificance - an experience so overwhelming that it would induce immediate insanity and/or death.

However, when Zaphod Beeblebrox, the playboy conman protagonist of the stories, was sentenced to suffer this fate, he walked away completely unfazed - the only person ever to survive the machine. As he cheerfully observed, "It just showed me what a really great guy I am?".

The Voice of 'The Book' (played in the original radio show by the great English comic actor Peter Jones) conjectured - in one of the droll cliffhanger questions which would wrap up the radio episodes - that perhaps Beeblebrox's "ego really was bigger than the entire Universe".

FionaJane said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
FionaJane said...

I hate knowing that I've almost certainly read everything good Douglas Adams ever wrote - and think that the person who decided someone else should be commissioned to write a sequel should be fed very slowly to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal while being forced to watch Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway (on the basis that it is much, much worse than any poetry Douglas Adams ever imagined - I watched it last week, and am still in a state of outrage). I was thinking of the total perspective vortex only last week, in the context of the credit crunch. I wondered what it would make of the bank chief execs - or, indeed, what they would make of it.

And back in the UK, enormity still means what it used to mean. At least, it does in this little corner of West London.

(ps - the deleted post was the same as this one, but with an additional spelling mistake)

Froog said...

Ah, yes, typos. I've just noticed that I intruded an utterly unnecessary question mark into my Beeblebrox quotation in Comment 7.

Thanks for supporting me on the question of enormity, FJ, and on the importance and usefulness of the Adams oeuvre.

Did you enjoy the video clip?

Anonymous said...

Enormity: sorry, I had an opinion but didn't want to weigh in on a potentially inflammatory question.

The opinion is pragmatic. That is, trying to change (or stay!) the course of linguistic change is a losing battle, so we might as well decide to make do with whichever survives.

The thing is, I can see the usefulness of having two separate words for the two separate senses, even though each has its own synonyms (so from a certain standpoint we could do without "enormity" altogether).

"Enormity" is one of those words which just begs for co-optation, just because it implies an extreme. And 21st-century pop culture and language love nothing so much as an extreme; overstatement is all.

Have to confess I do allow myself a smirk of superiority when some clod misuses "noisome." So watch that one.

Froog said...

My problem with 'noisome' is that I always want to pronounce it as if it were French.

Anonymous said...

...which equally baffles both French- and English-speaking audiences within earshot.

Do English-language classes over there get into ideas like enormity (in whatever sense) and noisomeness? Maybe advanced classes? I'm always curious but hopelessly naive about the ways in which one's native language (to say nothing of culture) limits what s/he can "hear" while learning a different language.

Froog said...

Well, I sometimes get into high-level vocabulary and etymology; but I'm a bit of a freak. I think it's useful to give students an idea of how much they don't get every once in a while.

I'm afraid these fine nuances are completely lost on the Chinese. The Western writing system is so alien to them that they are extremely inattentive even to matters of spelling, much less morphology. And there doesn't seem to be much of a tradition of comparative linguistics here. Very few people learn more than one foreign language.

I love the way the French use 'nuance'. Spoken by someone like Gerard Depardieu, it can be a subtle but devastating put-down.