Onomancy

Officially, I do not believe in anything like astrology, I Ching, palm reading, etc., etc..  

But secretly, sometimes, I inwardly notice to myself - though I almost never say it out loud - that it often feels like we are living in a Charles Dickens novel, where every character's name has some kind of meaningful significance.

Yes, I confess that occasionally I find myself subconsciously or semi-consciously dabbling in the ancient art of onomancy - the supernatural reading of people's names.  I can't help it!  I know it's not real.  I tell myself that it's a joke, that it's all in my imagination, that it's a matter of interpretation, that it's all due to apophenia - the human mind's tendency to see patterns in information that aren't actually there.  But...

I mean...

We live in a world that is an endless delicious buffet for us closet onomancers.

Consider: 

Newton - the discoverer of gravity - is called "new ton". 

The physicist who is famous for searching for deep symmetries in physics, which led him to rethink the nature of matter, and that it might be in some mysterious way equivalent with energy - well, he was named "Einstein": literally, "one stone".  In the process, he discovered "singularities," such as the black hole: the lump of matter so massive that it bends spacetime to the point that our laws of physics no longer apply.

Speaking of unities, James Clerk Maxwell is sometimes credited for the second great unification in physics (Einstein's relativity was an attempt to reconcile mechanics with Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism).  He contributed to a wide variety of fields, including statistical mechanics, where he postulated his famous "Maxwell's demon" which has become (sort of in reverse) a way for people to understand the relationship between entropy and intelligence.  Thus Maxwell conceived of a maximization of  intelligence (he "maxed well").

While we're talking about maxes, Max Planck was the founder of quantum physics - its foundational "plank," as it were, upon which all the others built their structures.  Although Planck laid the foundation, quantum physics was really born with - Max Born. 

In Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, certain lineages outcompete others... DAR-win? 

Immanuel Kant: Can you cognize things in themselves?  I Kant.   

Cantor: Infinity is, almost by definition, beyond our ability to comprehend.  Can mathematicians figure out anything about infinity?  You can't... or can you?

The behaviorist psychologist who declared that internal mental states don't exist, and thus everything about human behavior is skin deep was perfectly ironically named "Skinner".

Nick Land: "nick" as in "steal" - land is the territory that is deterritorialized. 

Charlie Manson: Charlie like the Viet Cong, Man - son, the Son of Man, you dig?

 


 

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