White Holes by Carlo Rovelli

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I love Carlo Rovelli. He is brilliant at making advanced physics understandable to us mere mortals, while also bringing a deep humanity to the discussion. 

 

I have previously read (and definitely recommend) Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. Although you can read either of those in whatever order you want, I do think that you should read both of those before reading White Holes, unless you already have a fairly good understanding of the topics. It also helps to have a decent understanding of how black holes work - The Little Book of Black Holes is a great place to start. 

 

So what is this book about? Well, it is a theoretical look at the life and death of black holes - and what comes after. 

 

Without trying to explain things entirely, the fact that the event horizons of black holes give off Hawking Radiation means that they are losing energy - that is, the other form of mass - and this eventually means a shrinking of the horizon, and some very weird stuff. 

 

Also, because time slows the further one goes from the event horizon toward the core - the star remnant - at the center, spacetime gets stretched in a really weird way. Until the sides of the cone that is formed come close enough to trigger quantum effects. 

 

In Rovelli’s opinion, this eventually runs time “backwards” in a way of thinking, unwinding the effects of the horizon and allowing information to escape. The black hole becomes a white hole. 

 

That is as far as I will go with that, because it gets pretty deep into the limits of my ability to grasp. 

 

I should be clear here: Rovelli admits that he cannot at this point know for sure if white holes exist. He could be wrong. He thinks he is more likely right, though, and explains why. 

 

As this is a Rovelli book, though, it is about a lot more than the dry physics of the thing. In this case, the book is saturated with references and analogies to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Conveniently, I have read the first two parts of that, Inferno, and Purgatorio - and those are the ones that form the core of the analogy. 

 

After all, Hell is, in Dante’s vision, a cone descending into the core of the earth. After traversing the entire distance, Dante and his guide, Virgil, emerge on the other side of the earth, then ascend the inverse cone of Purgatory, before Dante is granted access to Heaven with a new guide, Beatrice. 

 

An Italian-American friend of mine once explained to me that Italian schoolchildren study Dante the way we English-speakers study Shakespeare, so it is no surprise that Rovelli is intimately familiar with the work, and is able to sprinkle appropriate quotes throughout the book. It’s really fun.

 

Rovelli is clearly well-read in other literature as well, including English literature, as other works make it into this book. His ability to seamlessly switch from theoretical physics to great literature is amazing, and is one of the reasons I enjoy his writing so much.

 

As with his other books, this one is short - a mere 141 pages. But this is plenty of room for him to explain his topic. 

 

There are, as always, some great lines. Like this one. 

 

When I was studying for my doctorate in Padua, Mario Tonin taught us theoretical physics. He told us he thought that every week the good Lord reads Physical Review D, the celebrated physics journal. Whenever He came across an idea He liked, shazam! He would put it into practice, rearranging universal laws accordingly. 

 

In another passage, about the brilliant physicist Schwarzchild, who was killed in World War One (one of so many great lights extinguished in that pointless conflict), he expresses my thoughts these days about most wars. 

 

“What can be more stupid than to die for a border?”

 

Yeah, seriously. I’m not talking about defending against an invasion, but the whole idea of rigid borders is stupid, and fighting over where to draw a line is the height of that stupidity. 

 

Here is another excellent passage, about how hard it is to give up on long-held beliefs, even when those beliefs turn out to be wrong.

 

In order to digest such ideas, the difficulty lies not so much with the new concept as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem so obviously to be true; bringing them into doubt seems inconceivable. We are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more.

 

I am reminded strongly of so many arguments I have had with my mom over the decades. She tends to default to “I just know I am right.” And yes, I have confirmation that she is still doing this, particularly about her beliefs that everything from yoga to Harry Potter will give you demons. 

 

One of the fascinating points of this book and others by Rovelli is that it appears that everything in the universe eventually gets to quanta that are too small to be further divided. We know this to be true for atoms (break an atom and the element is no longer the element),and light (photons) but also for time. Rovelli notes here that it looks likely that space itself has quanta. 

 

Applied to space, this basic idea implies that there should be elementary grains of space, of finite size. Quanta of space. That is, there are no arbitrarily small things; there is a lower limit to divisibility. Space is a physical entity, and like any other entity, it is granular. Einstein’s theory and the mathematics of quantum theory combine to imply this fact.

 

Quantum theory - specifically loop quantum gravity - also implies that a rebound and expansion of a black hole is possible. In fact, this basic idea may be what happened with the Big Bang. 

 

I also want to mention a philosophical idea. Rovelli mentions this in context of colleagues he disagrees with on the theories in this book, but he makes it more universal. 

 

I think that certain of my colleagues err out of impatience (they want everything resolved before the end of evaporation, where quantum gravity becomes inevitable) and because they forget to take into account what is beyond that which can be immediately seen - two mistakes we all frequently make in life. 

 

He goes on to note that the alternative to his theory requires a good bit of hand-waving regarding what happens to the information that enters the black hole. He notes that this leads to some strange speculations that sound not unlike magic. I am not enough of a scientist to be able to evaluate the relative merits here, but one of his lines certainly applies to ideologies in general.

 

Basically, they are clutching at straws - looking, like all dogmatists in difficulty, for abstruse ways of saving the dogma. 

 

I cannot help but be reminded of Young Earth Creationism and the bizarre twists they do to protect their dogma of a 6000 year old earth. But it could equally apply to everything from the subordination of women to anti-LGBTQ bigotry. 

 

Toward the end of the book, it starts to overlap a bit with The Order of Time. I won’t rehash that discussion, but I do want to quote a good bit. Time exists because of disequilibrium in the universe - inequality of entropy. When our part of the universe reaches equilibrium, not only will we have long since ceased to exist, all possible existence will cease, and indeed time itself will no longer be possible. 

 

If a system reaches complete equilibrium, there are no more traces, no more memory, nothing to distinguish the past from future. Sooner or later, every memory vanishes, canceled through the wear and tear of time. Sooner or later, of our proud civilizations, of everything that we have understood, of the words in books such as this one, of our controversies and of our desperate passions and loves . . . no trace will remain. 

 

Hence why dying for a border - or any of other other reasons for killing each other - is beyond stupid and meaningless. 

 

I was a bit surprised to see Spinoza come into this book alongside Dante. But it actually fits. 

 

But as Spinoza clarified in the seventeenth century, freedom is our way of designating the fact that we are not able to fully reconstruct what happens in the decision making, to predict what we will decide. 

 

Both Spinoza and Rovelli are ambivalent about the extent to which free will exists, and how much of our lives are governed by determinism. I guess this will always be a paradox, something that can never be definitively shown to be entirely one way or another. At the population level, determinism seems to be stronger than at the individual level, for example. 

 

Another line comes in to the more philosophic ideas at the end of the book. 

 

We always make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as different from the world around us, of thinking that we are looking at it from the outside. We forget that we are like other things - that we, too, are like the things we look at. 

 

One final thought in the book. If Rovelli is right, time is massively distorted in a black hole. In his thought experiment about the experience of entering and leaving the horizon, he notes that time for the traveler will be completely different from the observer. 

 

Whoever enters the horizon instead (as we did, together with the matter that forms the hole by collapsing), or does so at any subsequent moment, would arrive at the quantum zone in a fraction of a second - or at the most in a few hours, if the star was truly gigantic - crossing it in a heartbeat, and in an equally short space of time coming out of the white hole’s horizon, finding herself transported into a very distant future, in just a brief moment of her time. 

 

In the meantime (whatever that means), time for the observer would have stretched many billions of years. 

 

Whatever your view of time and eternity, this is mind-blowing stuff - and not really controversial, as Einstein’s theories have proven true over and over. 

 

I enjoyed this book, even if I cannot claim to understand it at the level that a math genius would. I appreciate that Rovelli makes these advanced concepts not only understandable, but beautiful and even poetic. 

 

Late Lyrics and Earlier by Thomas Hardy

Source of book: I own this

 

This is the third collection of Hardy’s poetry I have read, and the longest. For reasons I do not remember, I started backwards, with Winter Words, followed by Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles. 

 

As with the other Hardy collections, I find that I have mixed feelings about Late Lyrics and Earlier. There are some excellent poems, but also a lot of Victorian dreck. Introspective poems that have aged well, next to lurid stories of dead women. So many dead women. 

 

Perhaps the origin of the collection might help explain it. As Hardy’s introduction notes, the title refers to the fact that about half of the poems in the collection were recently written, while the other half consisted of older poems that somehow never managed to make it into earlier collections. 

 

Exactly when these were written is not always clear - some poems have dates to them, typically from the 1910s. But others do not, and Hardy himself couldn’t remember exactly when he wrote each of them. Some feel like juvenalia, some feel unpolished, but others seem simply to be poems written earlier that missed the cut.

 

It is also interesting how this collection, published in 1922, fit with Hardy’s personal life. His first wife, Emma, had died in 1912. As I have noted in previous posts about Hardy, the marriage wasn’t happy, and became increasingly miserable as time went on. 

 

However, instead of finding her death a relief, Hardy instead practically deified her. Many of the poems in this collection seem to be in that vein. Actually, in both veins, being either about a beloved dead woman or a harpy who deceived her man. 

 

Also in the mix here is that Hardy had quickly remarried a younger woman, Florence, who wasn’t exactly thrilled that Hardy was still writing poems about his dead wife. 

 

It’s a mess, to be sure.

 

Add in the Victorian tendency to write over-emotional pathos-drenched poems about beautiful and simpering women who died too young, well, you get a lot of poems that seem all too alike and not that interesting. 

 

Hardy may have lived through the Edwardian and well into the 1920s, but his aesthetic was still firmly Victorian. There is nothing of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or even W. H. Auden in his style. 

 

Where Hardy was ahead of his time was in his prediction of the fall of the British Empire - and indeed his deep suspicion of the entire project. For this, he was labeled a “pessimist,” which isn’t entirely accurate. 

 

As Hardy explains in the introduction, what is alleged to be “pessimism” is actually just his introspection and questioning the presence of evil in the world. To me, these are often his best poems, telling truth slant to an audience often unwilling or unable to hear what he is saying. 

 

Anyway, here are the poems from the collection that I liked best. 

 

I Sometimes Think

 

I sometimes think as here I sit

Of things I have done,

Which seemed in doing not unfit

To face the sun:

Yet never a soul has paused a whit

On such-not one.

 

There was that eager strenuous press

To sow good seed;

There was that saving from distress

In the nick of need;

There were those words in the wilderness:

Who cared to heed?

 

Yet can this be full true, or no?

For one did care,

And, spiriting into my house, to, fro,

Like wind on the stair,

Cares still, heeds all, and will, even though

I may despair. 

 

Is this pessimism? Or just the question of how the best that we do so often seems to go unnoticed, and unremarked? 

 

The next poem is labeled as a song, and the very many of these he apparently intended to be sung are titled with quotation marks. This one was written soon after his first wife’s death, and I suspect it is about her. 

 

“The Curtains Now Are Drawn”

 

I

 

The curtains now are drawn,

And the spindrift strikes the glass,

Blown up the jagged pass

By the surly salt sou'-west,

And the sneering glare is gone

Behind the yonder crest,

While she sings to me:

"O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,

And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,

And death may come, but loving is divine."

 

                                    II

 

I stand here in the rain,

With its smite upon her stone,

And the grasses that have grown

Over women, children, men,

And their texts that " Life is vain;"

But I hear the notes as when

Once she sang to me:

"O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,

And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,

And death may come, but loving is divine." 

 

The next one is one of my favorites. 

 

A Night in November

 

I marked when the weather changed,

And the panes began to quake,

And the winds rose up and ranged,

That night, lying half-awake.

 

Dead leaves blew into my room,

And alighted upon my bed,

And a tree declared to the gloom

Its sorrow that they were shed.

 

One leaf of them touched my hand,

And I thought that it was you

There stood as you used to stand,

And saying at last you knew!

 

Interestingly, Hardy often wrote poems that seem similar in title and theme. There are multiple poems about nights in various months, and more than one about November. Likewise, there are whole groups of poems about birds, and ones about other topics. 

 

I also like this next one for its atmosphere. 

 

The Wanderer

 

There is nobody on the road

But I,

And no beseeming abode

I can try

For shelter, so abroad

I must lie.

 

The stars feel not far up,

And to be

The lights by which I sup

Glimmeringly,

Set out in a hollow cup

Over me.

 

They wag as though they were

Panting for joy

Where they shine, above all care,

And annoy,

And demons of despair -

Life's alloy.

 

Sometimes outside the fence

Feet swing past,

Clock-like, and then go hence,

Till at last

There is a silence, dense,

Deep, and vast.

 

A wanderer, witch-drawn

To and fro,

To-morrow, at the dawn,

On I go,

And where I rest anon

Do not know!

 

Yet it's meet this bed of hay

And roofless plight;

For there's a house of clay,

My own, quite,

To roof me soon, all day

And all night.

 

I mentioned that a number of poems seemed to be about Hardy’s first wife. This next one is the most striking. 

 

A Wife Comes Back

 

This is the story a man told me

Of his life’s one day of dreamery.

 

A woman came into his room

Between the dawn and the creeping day:

She was the years-wed wife from whom

He had parted, and who lived far away,

As if strangers they.

 

He wondered, and as she stood

She put on youth in her look and air,

And more was he wonderstruck as he viewed

Her form and flesh bloom yet more fair

While he watched her there;

 

Till she freshed to the pink and brown

That were hers on the night when first they met,

When she was the charm of the idle town,

And he the pick of the club-fire set... 

His eyes grew wet,

 

And he stretched his arms: ‘Stay – rest! – ’

He cried. ‘Abide with me so, my own!’

But his arms closed in on his hard bare breast;

She had vanished with all he had looked upon

Of her beauty: gone.

 

He clothed, and drew downstairs,

But she was not in the house, he found;

And he passed out under the leafy pairs

Of the avenue elms, and searched around

To the park-pale bound.

 

He mounted, and rode till night

To the city to which she had long withdrawn,

The vision he bore all day in his sight

Being her young self as pondered on

In the dim of dawn.

 

‘ – The lady here long ago –

Is she now here? – young – or such age as she is?’

‘ – She is still here.’ – ‘Thank God. Let her know;

She’ll pardon a comer so late as this

Whom she’d fain not miss.’

 

She received him – an ancient dame,

Who hemmed, with features frozen and numb,

‘How strange! – I’d almost forgotten your name! –

A call just now – is troublesome;

Why did you come?’

 

Another one that seems to touch on their marital troubles:

 

Side by Side

 

So there sat they,

The estranged two,

Thrust in one pew

By chance that day;

Placed so, breath-nigh,

Each comer unwitting

Who was to be sitting

In touch close by.

 

Thus side by side

Blindly alighted,

They seemed united

As groom and bride,

Who'd not communed

For many years -

Lives from twain spheres

With hearts distuned.

 

Her fringes brushed

His garment's hem

As the harmonies rushed

Through each of them:

Her lips could be heard

In the creed and psalms,

And their fingers neared

At the giving of alms.

 

And women and men,

The matins ended,

By looks commended

Them, joined again.

Quickly said she,

"Don't undeceive them -

Better thus leave them:"

"Quite so," said he.

 

Slight words! the last

Between them said,

Those two, once wed,

Who had not stood fast.

Diverse their ways

From the western door,

To meet no more

In their span of days. 

 

After those somewhat bitter lyrics, here is one, from 1904, that seems merely melancholy. Another of my favorites.

 

An Autumn Rain-Scene

 

There trudges one to a merry-making

   With sturdy swing,

On whom the rain comes down.

 

To fetch the saving medicament

   Is another bent,

On whom the rain comes down.

 

One slowly drives his herd to the stall

   Ere ill befall,

On whom the rain comes down.

 

This bears his missives of life and death

   With quickening breath,

On whom the rain comes down.

 

One watches for signals of wreck or war

   From the hill afar,

On whom the rain comes down.

 

No care if he gain a shelter or none,

   Unhired moves on,

On whom the rain comes down.

 

And another knows nought of its chilling fall

   Upon him at all,

On whom the rain comes down. 

 

Here is another song that I thought was good - and perhaps also speaks of a crumbling relationship. 

 

The Rift

 

’Twas just at gnat and cobweb-time,

When yellow begins to show in the leaf,

That your old gamut changed its chime

From those true tones – of span so brief! –

That met my beats of joy, of grief,

As rhyme meets rhyme.

 

So sank I from my high sublime!

We faced but chancewise after that,

And never I knew or guessed my crime. . . . 

Yes; ’twas the date – or nigh thereat –

Of the yellowing leaf; at moth and gnat

And cobweb-time.

 

I love the form of this one, with the bookending of “gnat and cobweb time,” the rise in the first stanza and the descent in the second, and the way the rhyme scheme works. 

 

I’m also a sucker for epitaphs. This next poem is a fine example of the form. The idea that our atoms live on in the universe, becoming part of other living things, is delightful. 

 

Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard

 

These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd,
Sir or Madam,
A little girl here sepultured.
Once I flit-fluttered like a bird
Above the grass, as now I wave
In daisy shapes above my grave,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

— I am one Bachelor Bowring, ” Gent”,
Sir or Madam;
In shingled oak my bones were pent;
Hence more than a hundred years I spent
In my feat of change from a coffin-thrall
To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

— I, these berries of juice and gloss,
Sir or Madam,
Am clean forgotten as Thomas Voss;
Thin-urned, I have burrowed away from the moss
That covers my sod, and have entered this yew,
And turned to clusters ruddy of view,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

— The Lady Gertrude, proud, high-bred,
Sir or Madam,
Am I — this laurel that shades your head;
Into its veins I have stilly sped,
And made them of me; and my leaves now shine,
As did my satins superfine,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

— I, who as innocent withwind climb,
Sir or Madam,
Am one Eve Greensleeves, in olden time
Kissed by men from many a clime,
Beneath sun, stars, in blaze, in breeze,
As now by glowworms and by bees,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

— I’m old Squire Audeley Grey, who grew,
Sir or Madam,
Aweary of life, and in scorn withdrew;
Till anon I clambered up anew
As ivy-green, when my ache was stayed,
And in that attire I have longtime gayed
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

— And so these maskers breathe to each
Sir or Madam
Who lingers there, and their lively speech
Affords an interpreter much to teach,
As their murmurous accents seem to come
Thence hitheraround in a radiant hum,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

 

I’ll end with one involving musicians, because, well, you might imagine. I should also give a mention to “The Country Wedding” for its mention of the serpent, a rather unique obsolete instrument. (You can see and hear one in the A&E Pride and Prejudice series.) 

 

In the Small Hours

 

I lay in my bed and fiddled

With a dreamland viol and bow,

And the tunes flew back to my fingers

I had melodied years ago.

It was two or three in the morning

When I fancy-fiddled so

Long reels and country-dances,

And hornpipes swift and slow.

 

And soon anon came crossing

The chamber in the gray

Figures of jigging fieldfolk -

Saviours of corn and hay -

To the air of "Haste to the Wedding,"

As after a wedding-day;

Yea, up and down the middle

In windless whirls went they!

 

There danced the bride and bridegroom,

And couples in a train,

Gay partners time and travail

Had longwhiles stilled amain! . . .

It seemed a thing for weeping

To find, at slumber's wane

And morning's sly increeping,

That Now, not Then, held reign.

 

Hardy’s career started with Under the Greenwood Tree, about the transition from church bands to the organ, and I feel he has a soft spot for the old village players - the forerunner of community orchestras and bar bands. 

 

Anyway, those are my favorites from this collection. Hardy may or may not be your cup of tea, but he has some real gems. 

The Equal Earth Projection and the Right Wing Extremist Meltdown

This post was inspired by a post by a friend (sharing the news article) and a response by one of his friends. To be clear, I don’t think this friend was a MAGA. But I do think that Dunning-Kruger was strong with him. There were so many factual errors that I strongly considered replying (usually a bad idea - the whole “answer a fool according to his folly” thing.) However, I was in the middle of a concert week and had better things to do.

 

Instead, I decided it would make an interesting blog post, particularly since I am in the middle of a bunch of books but haven’t finished one recently. Also, because I care a LOT about maps. (See below.)

 

***

 

So, here is the kerfuffle. The United Nations recently passed a resolution encouraging the replacement of the Mercator Projection with the Equal Earth projection. And also to teach that no projection can accurately represent the sphere of the earth. This isn’t a mandate. It is just an encouragement to schools and other institutions to make the change. 

 Equal Earth Projection

This is a laminated classroom map you can buy on Amazon and other places 

And apparently a "radical ideological project" if you are a MAGA 

 

The reason for this is pretty clear: the Mercator Projection distorts the relative size of continents and countries, making those in the north (such as Europe, Canada, and Russia) substantially bigger than they are, and those near the equator (particularly Africa but also South America) look significantly smaller. 

 

In practice, this has led to widespread belief that Africa is smaller than the United States or Europe. 

 

[True story: during the last Ebola outbreak, my wife had to calm some staff down about the admission of a visitor from the opposite side of Africa. People have no idea where the countries are anyway, but also failed to realize the vast distance between eastern and western Africa.]

 

While a handful of eastern European countries abstained from the vote, the only no vote was….the United States.

 

Because we are currently led by a pack of vicious racists, they whinged that this was a “radical ideological project.” Because of course they did. 

 

And yes, this is totally embarrassing for many of us Americans. 

 

But, the right wing here is nothing if not completely allergic to change, and if the Mercator was good enough for their grandparents, gosh darn it MUST be preserved for eternity. 

 

And also: racism. 

 

*** 

 

Before I dive into the debunking of the misinformation this guy posted, let me establish my bona fides for this topic.

 

I have loved maps since I was a small child. Our house always had a globe and a variety of maps, and I spent many hours with them. 

 

I grew up in the Los Angeles area, and, for anyone of my generation, we had a Thomas Guide. This was a spiral-bound book of street maps for Los Angeles County. (You can also get them for Orange County and San Diego County.) If you can drive there, it’s on these maps. I poured over them regularly as a child. 

 

Because of this, from the age of about 12, I could draw the Southern California freeway system from memory. I probably can still do that. I also was able to name all the primary and secondary streets of the San Fernando Valley in order, south to north, and east to west. I’m a bit out of practice on that one, since I haven’t lived there in 35 years. Well, I can probably still do the primary streets.

 

Also around this time, my brother and I created an entire neighborhood which we drew on paper. As in, every street, house, business. If we laid out all the pages, it was probably bigger than our house. 

 

Anyone who has traveled with me knows I have a strong sense of direction. On a clear day or night, I quickly orient myself to cardinal directions, and can think in terms of a map - I absolutely have a map in my head wherever I go. 

 

Same thing hiking in the wilderness. I usually bring a map and compass, not a GPS, and I am oriented to where I am at all times. On several occasions, I have done route finding off trail with others, and I’m generally the one who knows where to connect to other trails. 

 

Even though I do use navigation software at times, I really prefer paper maps, and will tend to study routes in advance so I know where I am. 

 

All this to say that I care deeply about maps and have since childhood. I know a good bit about them, can use them (including map and compass navigation), and have spent a lot of time thinking about things like projections for literally decades. I’m not glomming on to recent news and conjuring up an opinion. 

 

I should also mention that my brother has been on a one-man anti-Mercator crusade for decades. So believe, me, I have heard all the arguments for or against all the major projections. For what it’s worth, I kind of like the Goode Projection, because it’s a bit quirky and also preserves shape and size remarkably well. 

 

Also, here is a plug for Simon Garfield’s delightful book, On the Map. Check it out. 

 

***

 

So, on to the debunking. 

 

Misleading claim: The Mercator Projection is useful for navigation

 

This is at best a half truth, but is misleading. 

 

First, the history. 

 

Belgian mapmaker Gerardus Mercator first created the map in 1569. His intent was to provide a better map to be used by sailors in transoceanic voyages. And it worked pretty well for its time in history. 

 

The basic idea was that you could follow straight lines of latitude across the ocean. 

 

So, the true part of this is that the Mercator Projection was once useful for transoceanic sailing using a map, compass, and sextant. 

 

It had its flaws, however, one of which was that it was actually ahead of its time. While the technology of the time could accurately determine latitude, there was no great way of determining longitude. 

 

It’s not that people of the 16th Century didn’t know how to do this. You simply need an accurate way of determining global time. But creating a reliable and accurate clock that would work in extreme conditions such as violent weather at sea was devilishly difficult. In fact, the chronometer wouldn’t be created and used until 200 years after Mercator created his map. 

 

Once this happened, global travel exploded: the golden age of sail that has inspired literature and art ever since.

 

I’ll also recommend reading about Nathaniel Bowditch, one of my heroes, who was instrumental in creating detailed star charts and calculations for navigation. Oh, and he also was a big deal in the areas of trust, insurance, banking, and higher education. Seriously, one of the greatest men few have heard of.

 

[Side note: the fact that the Polynesians managed to navigate accurately long before Europeans, and without modern technology, is astonishing. It required huge amounts of memorization as well as skill in reading the ocean and atmosphere.]

 

So, here is where the claim is misleading: 

 

The Mercator Projection was once useful for a specific kind of navigation: transoceanic voyages using compass, sextant, and eventually a chronometer. It was never useful for terrestrial or coastal navigation - for those you need a detailed map of the particular area, not one with straight latitude lines. 

 

These days, literally no one uses the Mercator Projection for navigation. It is beyond useless for the Great Circle routes our aircraft fly. And, for that matter, the routes our ships travel. Straight lines on a globe are not straight on a Mercator-based map. 

 

So, the better way to put this is that the Mercator Projection used to be useful for navigation, but has been outdated for, well, at least a century. 

 

False claim: All of our current maps, including computer navigation, are based on the Mercator Projection

 

This is straight-up bullshit. 

 

To even claim this shows a gross ignorance about maps, mapmaking, and projections. 

 

Here is a somewhat oversimplified version of what mapmaking does:

 

When taking a spherical earth and converting it to a flat map, the first thing you have to do is determine where you are going to center it. Basically, put a pin where the page touches the sphere. At that point, the map is accurate for both page and ball, and as you get further away from that point, it gets increasingly inaccurate. 

 

For Mercator, his map touches the globe at the equator. As the map gets further from the equator, it gets increasingly inaccurate. 

 

When mapmakers create maps for smaller areas, they don’t just cut a piece of the Mercator projection. They instead pick a center, and work outward from there. 

 

This is blindingly obvious if you have ever spent time with an atlas or with maps in general.

 

Seriously. Go get yourself a map of a state like, say, Colorado. Here is one from Britannica. 

 

Notice anything weird about it? 

 

Oh yes, it isn’t as rectangular as a Mercator map would make you believe. 

 

Instead, the top and bottom curve a little, and the top is narrower than the bottom. Why is that?

 

Well, the lines of latitude are not actually straight on a globe. They curve. And the lines of longitude aren’t parallel at all. They converge at the poles. 

 

This map is, in a very real sense, more accurate than a Mercator map would be. It better represents the actual shape of the state of Colorado, and is thus better for actual navigation. 

 

My guess is that to make this map, the mapmaker put a pin in the middle of the state, and worked outward from there. 

 

Again, anyone who has spent any meaningful time with an atlas would know this - every state is drawn to be as accurate as possible. Same thing with the United States, which displays the same curves and corrections in any good map. 

 

The exact same idea is how our digital navigation maps work. Except they constantly readjust the center to be where you are at any given time. (That’s literally the basis for GPS mapping - it is a three-dimensional map of the globe, and the computer calculates where you are and draws the area around you. 

 

It is easy to miss the way GPS maps work, because they display such a small area. The curvature of the earth is pretty negligible at a smaller scale - if I build a table I don’t have to account for it at all. But the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge are nearly two inches further apart at the top than the bottom. A few inches is not noticeable on a map covering a couple miles at most. But I can tell you that GPS apps do not distort more and more as you go toward the poles. They simply re-center and adjust. 

 

This is precisely what the Mercator Projection does not do. 

 

A second issue here is the claim that “nobody is switching their GPS maps to the Equal Earth Projection.” Of course they aren’t. Global projections aren’t used for local maps. And nobody is or ever has used the Mercator Projection for local maps either.

 

This is a red herring and a distraction from what the UN resolution actually is about. It is about which projection is used for teaching and other places where a global projection is needed or useful. It has nothing to do with local maps or GPS software. 

 

False claim: The Mercator Projection accurately shows shapes, unlike other projections

 

Again, clearly bullshit if you actually know maps. 

 

Every projection distorts shapes to some degree, and the Mercator Projection is actually one of the worst. 

 

It’s not like Mercator didn’t try to compensate - he did so by expanding the latitude lines toward the poles so that the vertical dimension got bigger along with the horizontal dimension. 

 

But that doesn’t actually preserve accurate shapes. 

 

On a Mercator map, a rectangle would become a trapezoid, bigger at the top than the bottom (in the northern hemisphere.) Check out the difference between how Russia (to use an example) looks on a Mercator projection compared with a more accurate map using Russia as the center pin. It’s not even close. 

Mercator Projection

Note the stretching of the latitude lines and the huge distortion of shapes 

 

 A more accurate map of Russia, from the World Atlas

You can see how much the Mercator Projection distorts the shape 

 

Now, take a look at the Equal Earth Projection. It is actually quite a bit more accurate as to shape than the Mercator. Perhaps the main objection is that at the edges, it gets a bit less accurate. Meaning the United States, of course. But one could center the map wherever - and online versions let you spin the globe, so to speak. 

 

For nerds: yes, the Equal Earth Projection is based on the Robinson Projection, but compensates more to preserve relative size. This means a bit of elongation for some areas of the map. Again, every projection distorts to a degree. The Mercator is one of the worst offenders. 

 

Misleading claim: Digital maps have mostly replaced printed maps

 

This is at best a partial truth. Yes, most people these days rely on GPS navigation apps. I think this is a horrible development in that fewer and fewer people seem capable of orienting themselves without a device. Heck, it seems most people can’t even walk in an unknown city without staring at their phones to get around. If the networks go down, there are going to be a lot of lost people. Sigh. 

 

Anyway, the point of the UN resolution isn’t to replace digital maps (which don’t use the Mercator Projection anyway - see above), but to replace the global maps we use for teaching. 

 

Come on, all of us had maps in our classrooms, right? And my kids seem to have them in theirs. From a young age, all of us are taught about the world, and a map of the planet is a part of that. 

 

I think globes should be used more too, but they are bulky and more easily broken (and more expensive to replace) than a laminated paper map on a wall. 

 

The UN does have a point here too: the use of the Mercator Projection has indeed created generations of people who think Canada is far bigger than Africa. In subtle ways, this leads to implicit bias in how we think of the world and how we should view the other humans who live in it. 

 

Is a new map going to fix everything? Of course not. Neither is accurately teaching that projections are only approximations of three-dimensional reality. But they are a small change that can nudge our thinking. 

 

Which is, of course, why the Orange Fascist and his government are stoking outrage about it. Anything that might possibly make black people look more important infuriates them.

 

***

 

I am also puzzled by the faux-outrage about this. My parents were and are pretty right wing, but we were taught accurate information about globes and maps and the relative sizes of the continents. It wasn’t even controversial. 

 

These days, however, anything, no matter how innocuous, that in any way challenges white supremacy, triggers right wingers. Even attempts to bring our maps forward 450 years. 

 

Because of this, I want to address two more of the false claims in that comment.

 

False Claim: There are real injustices that need addressing, so we shouldn’t be talking about maps

 

I am so sick of this distraction and redirection. 

 

First, it is possible to work on multiple problems at the same time. One can work on smaller, more symbolic issues at the same time one works on addressing larger injustices! Seriously. 

 

Second, I find it interesting who the people are that keep harping about how we shouldn’t spend any time on symbols are. As in the case with this guy, it is pretty much always white people. Who dismisses the removal of Confederate monuments as meaningless? Pretty much only white people. And usually white men. 

 

This is what you get when the symbolism of our world almost entirely glorifies you and people like you. You don’t notice the constant pernicious effects of symbolism. Think of what happens whenever Jesus is portrayed as a color other than white. People flip out, right? Because the symbolism matters. 

 

And that is the point. Symbolism matters a lot more than middle class white guys realize. At least until they see a symbol changed from them to other kinds of people. As Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign minister, said before the vote:

 

“Maps shape our understanding of the world. They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.” 

 

This is why I think that the argument of “we shouldn’t focus on the symbols” has a significant racist (and sexist and classist, etc.) thread to it. The UN resolution was raised by a group of non-Americans, mostly from Africa. 

 

As I note below, combine this with the “don’t make the racist right wing extremists mad” thing, and it all starts to look like it is more about white comfort than anything else.

 

False Claim: The UN resolution ultimately hurts the left

 

This is one of the most idiotic jingoistic piles of bullshit I have heard. 

 

The vote at the UN was 164 to 1. We were literally the only country to object. 

 

What is more accurate to say is that our white supremacist fascist government decided to throw a tantrum about a change to a more modern map, calling it a “radical ideological project.”

 

The only people who actually think that are apparently….white racist Americans. Full stop. Countries that range from relatively leftist to relatively right wing were fine with the change. It wasn’t even controversial at all. 

 

Only here, where the Orange Fascist and his goons and ghouls are obsessed with ethnic cleansing and American jingoism is this an issue. 

 

And, stay tuned for the book-banning crowd to now go on a jihad against the non-Mercator maps that are in classrooms around our country already. 

 

And you know what? I am so beyond caring what racist right wingers think. Every time we cave to them, we let the Overton Window get dragged ever further rightward. I’ve had enough. 

 

Let’s call this what it is: a racist right wing extremist tantrum. And an absolute embarrassment to our country and most of us Americans. 

 

By opposing the resolution and throwing a racist tantrum, all that has been accomplished is to further convince the rest of the world that the United States is freaking insane and dangerous and deeply stupid. Which, unfortunately, is not inaccurate. 

 

Those of us (like my friend) who are pointing out what an embarrassment this is and that it is a symptom of deep racism and jingoism are not the problem. The racist right wing extremists in our government are the problem. Whether you want to admit that truth or not. 

 

***

 

If you like the Mercator Projection, for whatever reason - nostalgia is probably the most likely - go ahead. Feel free to defend it on its merits. 

 

But don’t make misleading or false claims about it. And don’t pull the “we shouldn’t upset racist right wing extremists by calling out their embarrassing bigotry” card.