Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
The following is excerpted from In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty, and Postmodern Identity by Ted Hiebert.
Just when we were coming to terms with the fact that the world is round, theoretical physics comes along and tells us the universe is flat. They know this by default, which is to say simply that none of their calculations make sense in anything other than a flat universe. And, of course, it could not be the calculations that are wrong. Yet, if this hypothesis had been tested in some way, we could feel a lot better about it. If, for example, they knew that the universe was flat because somewhere, at some time, a satellite strangely fell off the edge, that would at least make sense.
But perhaps we should not be surprised. We understand that the world is round, yet this is not how we live our lives. The sun comes up, then the sun goes down, but rarely does the sun go round and round. And of course we know that it is our planet and not the sun that is descending and ascending as the case may be, just like we know that gravity pushes down. But it’s all a little bit sketchy.
For example, theoretically nothing would change if we were to consider gravity as that which pushed us upwards – as perhaps it might do in Australia. It would simply be as if we were walking on the ceiling that was the carpeted floor, looking down into the night sky, while the birds fly belly-up beneath us, our feet firmly affixed to the ground above by that magical force that we all anyways knew. This too would make sense. And as long as the rhetoric was completely inverted, even physics should be untouched by such a manoeuvre. The example is not without impact, however, simply because it reinforces how little we live by that which we know. There is a vertigo that occurs when one performs a mind game such as this, a vertigo that happens despite there being no reason whatsoever for its occurrence.
To learn more about In Praise of Nonsense or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
Looks like a fascinating read, particularly for those of us who study who knowledge is negotiated and formed amidst events that are themselves uncertain.