Another outstanding keynote lined up for the Heaviside Symposium.

In this talk, we focus on two more of Heaviside’s seminal discoveries in physics, Cherenkov radiation and gravitational waves. Both of these are now recognised by specialists as important discoveries, but neither are widely celebrated in the broader scientific community.

https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/peter-davidson-to-keynote-the-heaviside?r=lp6h7

"The document that starts the whole catastrophe is a merchant’s delivery order. A fragment of burned parchment found in the town of Provins, listing thirty-six sous for wagons of hay, six new lengths of cloth with seal for rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and six bunches of six Crusaders’ roses at twenty deniers each for six locations in the town on the feast of Saint John, including three bunches for the whores’ street because the prostitutes wanted little hats of roses for the feast day too. That is the entire secret. A retired colonel misreads it as a Templar plan for world domination, three editors at a Milan publishing house take his misreading and build a coherent seven-century conspiracy on top of it, and the readers who receive that conspiracy believe it so completely that they hang one of the editors from the wire of Foucault’s pendulum in a Paris museum on the night of Saint John’s Eve. This is the mechanism Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) puts under a microscope. The mechanism is not that credulous people invent patterns where none exist. The mechanism is that fabricated grand conspiracies serve as cover for the ordinary coordination of power. Invent a seven-century Templar-Rosicrucian-Merovingian synthesis and hand it to the credulous, and three things follow. You satisfy the appetite for hidden meaning, which lets people stop looking at what is actually in front of them. You produce the crank profile the establishment needs to discredit anyone asking real questions. You build a decoy elaborate enough that the actual mechanisms of power operate unremarked while everyone chases the map."

https://open.substack.com/pub/unbekoming/p/foucaults-pendulum-1988?r=lp6h7