The roofs caved in. 
The barns are gone. 
It is too late to say that I loved you.

The Eye of God Nebula - VIST image

Wonderglobe - NASA image

First millisecond of a nuclear explosion (Rapatronic camera) posted on reddit.

Going down to a post-apocalyptic earth, she finds another orderly, peaceful world still rebuilding itself two hundred years after the cataclysm of nuclear war. The reader comes to relax within these two different but tranquil cultures and settles into the pleasant enjoyment of a gentle adventure.

Familiarity in this story is key to its surprises. If you’ve ever wondered how the future might reinterpret things well known to us today, the book includes some highly entertaining cultural anthropology. For example, there is an especially delightful ritualistic description of baseball.

Everything goes along smoothly until dark seeds of the past germinate with a vengeance. Suddenly, things change. For some readers, there will be obvious comparisons to powerful, ambitious persons now living. For other readers struggling in real life to imagine scenarios that envision the threat of AI, they will find one scenario here. Throughout, there is always a whiff and wisp of our present as well as reminders that the future is unpredictable.

Be sure to set aside time for the last hundred pages, because you will not be able to put this book down.

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Raisinbread | By Dennis Paul Himes | 264 pp. | $14.99

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I was amused to see the library card of the scanned Internet Archive version of Einstein’s Jahrbuch article, shown below. The volume was checked out in August of 1981 from the UC Berkeley Physics Library. It was checked out again 7 years later in September of 1988. These dates coincide with when I arrived at Berkeley to start grad school in physics, and when I graduated from Berkeley to start my post-doc position at Bell Labs. Hence this library card serves as the book ends to my time in Berkeley, a truly exhilarating place that was the top-ranked physics department at that time, with 7 active Nobel Prize winners on its faculty.

During my years at Berkeley, I scoured the stacks of the Physics Library looking for books and journals of historical importance, and was amazed to find the original volumes of Annalen der Physik from 1905 where Einstein published his famous works. This was the same library where, ten years before me, John Clauser was browsing the stacks and found the obscure paper by John Bell on his inequalities that led to Clauser’s experiment on entanglement that won him the Nobel Prize of 2022.

That library at UC Berkeley was recently closed, as was the Physics Library in my department at Purdue University (see my recent Blog), where I also scoured the stacks for rare gems. Some ancient books that I used to be able to check out on a whim, just to soak up their vintage ambience and to get a tactile feel for the real thing held in my hands, are now not even available through Interlibrary Loan. I may be able to get scans from Internet Archive online, but the palpable magic of the moment of discovery is lost.

(Originally published in “The Light in Einstein’s Elevator” by Dr. David D. Nolte in his blog Galileo Unbound, June 12th, 2025.)

But in 1980, we were still optimistic that, as Mr. Macawber likes to hold out hope for in David Copperfield, something would “turn up².” Over the next decade, it dawned on most of us liberal arts types that it was time to buckle down and find a real “job-y job,” which usually meant going to school, or back to school, and earning some kind of marketable credential.

Going to school meant trying. Not only the largely abstract picture of trying to climb out of a retail or restaurant gig economy, but trying hard, every day. Try to go to bed on time, try to get up on time, try to get to class on time, try to get homework in on time, try to save getting together with friends for the weekends, trying to get home before ten on nights when getting together couldn’t wait until the weekend, etc. Gradually, artists and writers morphed into new roles as realters, teachers, nurses, librarians, bankers, and of course, parents. While trying to pay down student loans with interest rates ballooning to 10%. It didn’t seem like we would ever be independent, or at least reasonably debt free.

Gradually, though, months and years and decades passed and, finally, the loans were repaid. As another iconic quote, sung by Desmond Decker in 1970, consoled and inspired us to a Reggae beat, “You must try, try and try, try and try, you’ll be free at last³.”

Bibliography

1. Lucas, George. Directed by Irvin Kershner. Screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Film. (Lucasfilm, Ltd. Universal City, 1980).

2. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. (Oxford University Press. New York, 1991), 63.

3. Decker, Desmond. You can get it if you really want. (Ember Records. United Kingdom, 1970).

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Penny Nolte creates gentle narratives of family and place. Her newest work is found in The Avalon Literary Review, Macrame Literary Journal, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, among others. Originally from upstate New York, with a fortifying decade in Colorado, Penny now calls the Green Mountains of Vermont home.

BLUES JAM | By Stephen Rice | MindStir Media | 348 pp. | $22.49

(Vector image: Gothika.) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4308370

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/19/why-seashells-resemble-spiraling-galaxies-and-the-human-heart/

about the teleological writing of J. Bell Pettigrew in his book Design in Nature (1908).

Biologist Raymond Pearl, described Design in Nature as “probably the most extensive and serious single contribution to humorous literature which has appeared in recent years.” He went on to describe the idea of a “spiral philosophy,” the idea that “the Creator fashioned men and corkscrews on the same plan” as simply archaic. However, Pearl, himself, possessed his own dicey scientific provenance.

I am more sympathetic and wrote my friend -

My ski coach, Terry Barbour, said that in a good ski turn every atom of the skier follows a matching arc.

Dear K.

Sometimes, when my scientist brother David visits, I break out a little folder of my writing labeled ‘Bad Science,’ reach into it, and bring out some nuggets, one of which is ‘Nothing is Not Possible.’ Another is, ‘We are the microscope for the universe and its telescope and exist so that it might see itself.’

I get a grudging admiration from him about the power of my naivete, one that is not distracted by excessive learning. When I asked why, he said it was because, really, science knows very little and that one must leave the doors open, never knowing when good things might walk in (or thinking of Easter, out).

There is a great deal of bad science that eventually becomes good science, for example Copernicus did not live to see his heliocentric solar system become accepted science. Nor did Alfred Wegener know his ridiculed theory of continental drift would ultimately be accepted.

When I lost my library (shortly after I retired, The Vermont College of Fine Art Library building where I worked was sold to a performing arts center, and its collection reduced to piles of inaccessible boxes. I still hope for their eventual disinterment), I lost access to many books in the collection I intended to read in my retirement. One of those, written by Christopher Alexander, the author of A Pattern Language, is his four-volume work titled The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. If I remember correctly, he used illustrations from Pettigrew’s Design in Nature to support his philosophy of building which I believe reifies the teleology of symmetry.

Anyway, I see that the author of this essay, Kevin Dann, taught at the University of Vermont and that he leads bike tours of New York City. Sounds like someone we both would like. I think Leonardo DaVinci would have liked Pettigrew.

You might posit by the length of this reply that my ski season is over. Next stop: Summer.

J.

“Why Do Librarians Hate Books?” is the title of a piece published by my brother David D. Nolte, who is the Edward M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. Published on his blog, Galileo Unbound in August it is worth a read. This is not rhetorical. Libraries continue to be abridged in the face of computerization and its attendant costs. Academics educated in the scholarly process of peer review and citation are stunned by the changes they have seen in libraries.

At the end of the piece, he describes me, a librarian who specializes in virtual libraries, accurately enough, as a Frankenstein who has given life to a monster. But I cannot take all the credit.

The current state of academic libraries today is a bloody nightmare. I think of Vannevar Bush, the parent of numerous scientific progenies, as the father of digital libraries. He is the real Frankenstein. His essay “How We May Think” [1] [2] accurately predicted our current computerized structure of knowledge and knowledge creation.

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” - Vannevar Bush

This mechanism, which now includes the Internet search engines and Artificial Intelligence will eventually replace the comprehensive collection of the human record we call “libraries” with a kind of atomization. The separation of ideas from their original context encourages the storage and retrieval of only parts of knowledge. This form of organization lends itself to an easy preference for algorithms that advance only the appendages of knowledge that are currently popular and useful. That lack of coherence can lead to the building of monsters from the pieces. This horrific process of dismembering libraries and eviscerating books leaves behind the unused contexts and the constituent parts of their corpus in refuse piles which are often irretrievably shipped off to either book dealers or landfills. A real horror-show.

Note: (Recycling centers prefer that discarded books have their covers and bindings cut off. Otherwise, the book with its covers isn't recyclable. It is, instead, garbage.)

1. Bush, Vannevar (July 1945). "As We May Think". The Atlantic Monthly. 176 (1): 101–108.

2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024, August 20). As We May Think. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:44, August 20, 2024, from As We May Think - Wikipedia

Could Substack become a library? Now that we can present information ourselves, outside the traditional academic and commercial structures of communication it has weakened the traditional validation of scholarly editorial correction and peer review and is confusing for both libraries and scholars. The WEB is a massive information feedback loop. But it should be more than a swirl of brightly colored leaves, detached from their former green reality. Substack can be a localized nexis. It is a smaller swirl of the Internet, and it has potential for substantiation and validation. Maybe simply by likes and comments, maybe there are deeper structures similar to citation analysis or content analysis that will help integrate this kind of publishing into academic writing. It is hard to justify knowledge without critical review or having a way to cite the past. The past informs the forward. This needs more than tags and metadata. Maybe something like the Dublin Core*, controlled vocabularies and classification systems will help us find our way without losing the breadcrumbs in the forest.

*DCMI: Metadata Basics (dublincore.org)