Episode 49

The second of eleven episodes in which Miriam returns to ramble with me on my mind map. The six topics we randomly generated this time were left- and right-handedness, "cultural self-harm", fractality in nature, MK Ultra, ley lines and Conlon Nancarrow. We continue discussing left- and right-handedness, both in humans and in fundamental physics, touching on invert sugar, "the Wu experiment" and a very strange Philip K. Dick novel.

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Some relevant links:

• left-handedness and witch burnings
• theory as to why every organism on Earth has a right-handed DNA helix
• "Il y a du gauche!" (some notes I compiled a while ago on the etymology of the words for "left" and "right" in several languages)
• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale Univ. Press, 2009)
• Chris McManus, Right Hand, Left Hand (W&N, 2003)
• Fleming's left- and right-hand rules
• chirality
• enantiomers
• Chien-Shiung Wu
• the Wu experiment   [Having Googled "Mrs. Wu's experiment" out of curiosity, I got very few hits. But I distinctly remember an 'Encyclopedia of Knowledge'-type book in the 70s (quite advanced, not aimed at kids) which called it that. I have no idea why they couldn't give her full name, or just call her Wu. I wasn't intending to belittle her incredible work in nuclear science by laughing about this (women scientists have a hard enough time as it is, so it's a sensitive matter), rather laughing at the stuffy old fashioned language of old science books.

  Oh, and big up the Wu!]

• Philip K. Dick, VALIS (Bantam, 1981)
• my recent talk on "Retrocausality and other reverse-time phenomena"
• Charles Musès, Destiny and Control in Human Systems: Studies in the Interactive Connectedness of Time (Chronotopology) (Kluwer Academic, 1985)
• Isis and Osiris
• Luigi Fantappiè
• Teilhard de Chardin
• Victoria's riflebird (Ptiloris victoriae)