Lovecraft and Math

At a late date, Lovecraft's Aunt took on a school class as a substitute teacher and called on Lovecraft to assist in grading math papers. He was able to do this, but with great difficulty.

That's a bit surprising since he once wished to be an astronomer (or chemist). He obviously had an amazing memory, and yet didn't graduate from high school. At an earlky age, he had tutors who helped, and visiting Brown University professors noticed him, and attempted to groom him for an academic career - Appleton and Upton, for instance.

Then, *poof*. Even before his grandfather died, he was doing poorly in school, and missed a great deal of class time.

Studies show that talents such as writing, history, and so forth can be maintained over a summer - or other extended breaks - but not math. Children who practice math by going to summer school, or science camp, do exceedinlgly well the following term, but children who do nothing over the summer break lose and have to do remedial work to catch up and maintain what they'd learned the previous term. Lovecraft, then, was doomed. His long illnesses would have made him a wretched math student, and even with rote memorization, his applications of those techniques would have been rusty. It's unknown how many real calculations he did in his amateur astronomy, but his newspaper articles quote facts and statistics, and not actually how to perform math.

A new article may shed more light on how Lovecraft failed to achieve his goal of being an astronomer.

FOR KIDS: Math is a real brain bender

Learning mathematics may make the brain reorganize the way it worksBy Tia Ghose Web edition : Monday, December 8th, 2008 Text Size Zoom
MATH ON THE MINDPracticing arithmetic may cause the brain to restructure its processes, helping kids move from rough estimates to symbolic, precise math at older ages.

As kids grow up, the parts of the brain used to do math problems change. In elementary school kids, a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex lights up while doing arithmetic.

But by the time kids become adults, that region takes a backseat when crunching numbers, and another part of the brain, called the left superior temporal gyrus, kicks in. A nearby region called the parietal cortex also plays a bigger role in adults’ calculations.

Scientists have shown that the left superior temporal gyrus may help connect the sounds of speech to written letters. The region may also get in gear when you play an instrument, helping you link the sound of your clarinet solo to the notes written on sheet music. It’s possible that this part of the brain helps adults tie the symbols for numbers to precise amounts, says Daniel Ansari, of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Ansari and his colleagues conducted the study that uncovered the shift in brain regions used for math.

To understand how the brain tackles math at different ages, Ansari’s team matched 19 children, ages 6 to 9, with 19 adults, ages 18 to 24. The researchers showed both groups pairs of written numbers from one to 10, and then asked the kids and adults to say which number was bigger. Next, the people were shown pairs of images — each one with a group of one to 10 squares. The volunteers were asked to say which image in the pair had more squares. During the experiment, the scientists took pictures of the participants’ brains using a functional MRI scanner. This machine measures blood flow, which offers clues about the activity of certain regions of the participants’ brains during each task.

Adults performed the tasks better than children, but it took everyone longer to choose the bigger amount when the difference between the numbers was smaller. (For instance, deciding if two squares is more than three squares was harder than comparing one square and nine squares.)

The scientists found that as the numbers got closer together, the parietal cortex got more active in adults, but didn’t rev up in kids’ brains.

“Our results demonstrate that the brain basis of number processing changes as a function of development and experience,” Ansari says.

The findings suggest that people’s ability to link symbols with precise quantities builds on an older system used to gauge rough amounts. Animals like monkeys use this older number sense, for instance, to estimate the better deal when choosing between handfuls of sunflower seeds.

After many years of math problems, however, people’s parietal cortex takes over from the older system, jumpstarting translation of approximate amounts into symbolic, precise numerals. And after even more practice, the left superior temporal gyrus takes over major math tasks, Ansari suspects.

Power words:

MRI

Short for magnetic resonance imaging, MRI is a method that uses magnets to create pictures of internal organs, especially the brain.

Functional MRI

This type of MRI tracks blood flow in the brain by measuring oxygen levels. The changes in blood flow give scientists hints about which parts of the brain are most active during certain tasks.

Lovecraft and Math

Here is an excellent summary of HPL's math skills and his representation of mathematics as fictional art.

ArsMathematica

Could Lovecraft had been a Clyde Tombaugh?

If only HPL's grnadpa had lived, gotten him math tutors, and Lovecraft had not been so sickly, he might have discovered Yuggoth!

Here are anecdotes of Tombaugh from a recent article.

Posted Online: 2007-05-17

Area residents reflect on connection to Tombaugh

STEPHANIE SZUDA, stephanies@mywebtimes.com, 815-431-4087

Robert Bonebrake, of Streator, jokes about how he traveled all the way to El Paso, Texas, to meet a famous Streatorite. In the 1950s, Bonebrake, then in his 20s, was enrolled in the Army and stationed in Fort Bliss, Texas. He always had an interest in science and technology, citing astronomy as a pertinent interest.

When he heard Clyde Tombaugh was giving a presentation in El Paso, he and a friend made arrangements to attend. After Tombaugh's speech, Bonebrake and his friend were able to speak with Tombaugh one-on-one. While answering the men's questions, Tombaugh mentioned his Streator roots and Bonebrake told him he also was from Streator. The two spent several minutes reminiscing about Streator, but Bonebrake couldn't remember the specifics of the conversation while speaking with The Times recently.

Bonebrake described Tombaugh as personable and dedicated to his work. Before hearing the speech, Bonebrake had never heard of Tombaugh and was unaware he was from Streator.

Dorothy Grubb, on the other hand, heard about him all time. "I got a little bored with it at the beginning," laughed Grubb, of Streator.

Grubb, 94, married Leon Grubb, Tombaugh's cousin, in 1935, when the family was still abuzz with Tombaugh's accomplishments after he discovered Pluto in 1930. "I soon learned it was a fact and was very pleased to be associated with him," Grubb said.

In 1959, Grubb and her husband traveled to Las Cruces, N.M., to visit Tombaugh and recalled one incident when Tombaugh wanted to show his guests his office at New Mexico State University, but was denied access to the building.

Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the communist party of the Soviet Union, was visiting the U.S. and security was, therefore, tightened.

"Clyde was quite embarrassed, but he said, 'Well, rules are rules.'"

Grubb has a large collection of memoirs from Tombaugh's discovery, including clippings from newspapers and books he published. "You wouldn't know he was anyone famous," Grubb said. "He was just a common, everyday, farm boy."

Scott Swanson, of Ottawa, echoed those sentiments. Swanson had a keen interest in astronomy as a child and wrote letters to Tombaugh, probing him on his discoveries.

Tombaugh corresponded with Swanson a few times through letters. Swanson was impressed such a busy man would take the time to write a third-grader, he said. Swanson, who grew up east of Streator near Ransom, still has the letters today.

Sandy Tombaugh is a fairly new addition to the Tombaugh family, so she
doesn't have many memories of Clyde. However, she does have some interesting facts to share.
"He ground the lens himself," Sandy said of Tombaugh's telescope in an e-mail to The Times. "The Smithsonian asked if he would donate it to them for their museum, since he was well into his 80s. He declined, saying that he was still using it!"

Her 8-year-old son, Tyler Tombaugh, was quite distraught at the news of Pluto's demotion in August,she said.

"He said, 'How can they take away 'our' planet, Mom? It just isn't fair!'"

Tyler's connection to Clyde and Pluto are a rarity in the Elk Grove area where he lives, so he has acheived celebrity status in the suburb, Sandy said.

The family plans to make the trip to Streator for the Planet Pluto Expo.

According to an autobiography a reader mailed to The Times, Tombaugh's family farmed near Heenanville until 1922, when they moved to Kansas, Heenanville School was built in about 1882 and originally was known as the West Mackey School.

Many students who attended the school wrote an autobiography in the late 1960s, said George Lukach, of Streator, who also has a copy of Tombaugh's autobiography. Heenanville was a mining town northwest of Streator, he said.

The autobiography gave a timeline of Tombaugh's progressing interest and study in astronomy, dating all the way back to the third grade.

One Heenanville School publication recalled the drawings of solar systems even back in his early education.

The reader highlighted this selection from Tombaugh's writing: "Many times my thoughts have turned to recollections of the Heenanville School. I am happy that the Pluto story has been inspirational to my schoolmates and the younger generation of the community. It was a thrilling adventure to probe the depths of space."

In 1962, a petition to annex the Heenanville School District was granted and the 113 students attended Grand Ridge School the following fall.

The school would have closed regardless of the petition because of decreased enrollment. It was the last public one-room school in La Salle County to go out of existence.

A Special View of Lovecraft's Writings

Clearly there are many interpretations of Lovecraft's stories. One that I often use is that HPL was a wannabe scientist. He is often referred to as a "horror writer". Of course, he was technically a "weird tale" writer.

I think that in many ways Dreams in the Witch House can be seen as an exposition of magic as a form of advanced Reimanian geometry (math).

At the Mountains of Madness could be seen as a dissertation on plate tectonics and its influence of evolution.

The Colour Out of Space could be seen as an alien terraforming project in a small sliver of New England.

In each case, people just got in the way. Whoops!

I think of the introductory scene of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the Earth is wiped out to make room for a new Galactic Highway.

Finds At The Used Book Store: 13 February 2007 Part 3

Chripy recently got a wonderful find at Half Price Book Stores: A $2 copy of Great Untold Stories of Fantasy and Horror, Pyramid Books, 1969, 3rd ed. 1970.

Sam Moskowitz says, "One of the paradoxes of Lovecraft;s admirers is the annoyance they have felt when that talented author was referred to as a majot science fiction writer as well as a master of the supernatural.

"... The paradox rests in the strong efforts some of these same people have made to show tha The Dreams in the Witch-House is as much science-fiction as it is supernatural. ... H P Lovecraft ... in the context of the story referred to Einstein's theories, the space-time continuum, "the elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to identify. The possibility of stepping from the third to the fourth dimension and back again, extra-dimensional geometry was considered, and finally the statement 'the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex whcih obeyed laws unknown to physics...

"The truth was that H P Lovecraft did not believe in the supernatural. Never did and never would to the day of his death and felt that many of his readers didn't and attempted to offer the possibility that there was some scientific rather than supernatural explanation for witchcraft to make his stories more convincing."

Lovecraft, Winslow Upton & Ladd Observatory

[1]


Does the ghost of Lovecraft haunt the observatory? Still in existence, still deeply loved and cherished, the Ladd Observatory was built the year after Lovecraft was born - constructed in 1891.

In a recent article [2] some interesting information has been related.

"Ladd was built to educate Brown students, to perform research and to serve the community. (The building was Providence's official time-keeping facility for years.) The observatory's first director, Prof. Winslow Upton, joined Brown University's faculty in 1884, on the condition that an observatory be built as soon as the funds could be raised. When the money had still not materialized five years later, Upton threatened he would go elsewhere unless immediate progress was made. Luckily for Brown, Herbert W. Ladd, then-governor of Rhode Island, offered to pay to build and equip the building that now bears his name. Because light and air pollution around the growing city of Providence {a top 10 city in those days - CP} soon made real discoveries impossible, Ladd remains a living museum of 19th century astronomy practices, complete with creaking staircases and a pleasantly musty attic smell." [2]

"Some of those rooms, like the one that houses the old transit telescopes, haven't been fully renovated. As the door creaks open, visitors are greeted by a blast of cold air. The lights don't work, but Targan shows groups around anyway, with the aid of a flashlight, pointing out how the telescopes were used to keep time by tracing the stars along the sky's meridian. In the dark, with various strange-looking contraptions covered in dark sheets, the building has a certain haunted house-quality, and indeed, Ladd is said to be haunted by at least one ghost -- that of noted Providence fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. "Did he ever come here?" a visitor asks. "Are you kidding?" Jackson says. "He had a key to the place." As a teenager, Lovecraft displayed a keen interest in the skies, even writing regular articles about astronomy for Providence newspapers. And he enjoyed the run of the observatory, thanks to then-director Winslow Upton, a friend of the Lovecraft family." [2]

"Ladd has its original copper-plated dome, which turns through a system of hand-cranked ropes and pulleys, and the original 15-foot refracting telescope that is controlled by a set of weights and gears, wound up like an grandfather clock. ... Ladd's first floor is an equally interesting and eccentric combination of attic and antique. Gas lamps still sit above the fireplace in the lecture room, where the shelves hold a variety of astronomical ephemera -- scientific journals dated from the 1970s, a globe or two, a Parade Magazine from last summer featuring Mars on the cover, an Edmund Scientific Star and Planet Locator. {as of 2004 -CP}" [2]

So, we're sure HPL haunts the observatory, but why would a professor let a boy have keys to a valuable observatory? After all, at only 15 years old, it was quite a valuable piece of real estate.

Chrispy has wondered for years, and been frustrated at the lack of information on Upton. However, certain anecdotes [3] survive and show the character of Upton. He was not the purely cynical scientist and had an altruistic spirit.

"Winslow Upton (1853-1914), professor of astronomy, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on October 12, 1853. His father was a musician and young Winslow sang and took music lessons. After his graduation from the Phillips School in 1869 at an age his father considered too young for college, he continued his study of music and other academic subjects in Boston for two years before entering Brown in 1871. There he indulged his musical bent by setting the class roll call to music and composing a setting for Chaucer’s Prologue to be sung at the junior burial of books. [3]

"He shared his education with his sister Lucy {women had not yet been accepted to go to college and Brown was on the cutting edge of letting women go to college in the late 1890's - CP} by providing her with the books and outlines of the lectures for Professor Diman’s history course, which he then discussed with her in his letters. At Commencement in 1875 he delivered the valedictory address, Sympathy Essential to True Criticism. [3]

"He was employed for a short time at the Harvard College Observatory, going from there to the observatory of the University of Cincinnati {not far from Chrispy!}, and earning a master’s degree in 1877. From May 1878 to September 1879 he was a member of the staff of the Harvard Observatory, which experience was the inspiration for a skit, The Observatory Pinafore, (obviously a parody on a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta), which included such lines as:

I’m called an astronomer, skillful astronomer,
Though I could never tell why;
But yet an astronomer, happy astronomer,
Modest astronomer, I.
I read the thermometers, break the photometers,
Mend them with paper and wax;
I often lament that so seldom is spent
A fair evening on star parallax. " [3]

"After a short stint in Detroit with the Army Engineer Corps’ Lake Survey, Upton became a computer {a person who does copious quantities of math - CP} at the Naval Observatory in Washington in 1880. He worked with the United States Signal Office from 1881 to 1883. In
May of 1883 he accompanied a group of scientists to Carolina Island in the Pacific to view a solar eclipse, an event which resulted in his writing The Carolina Island Opera. In September of the same year he came to Brown, having been encouraged by President Robinson’s assurance of an
observatory in the near future, to take a position which included teaching mathematics and logic. A few years later he was inclined to leave when the promised observatory had not materialized {see above notes, [2] - CP}" [3]

"Upton took a leave of absence in the academic year 1886-87, during which he spent six months in Germany, two months in England, and visited leading European observatories. He observed
the total solar eclipse of August 19, 1887 from the interior of Russia. He was away again in 1896-97 at the southern station of the Harvard College Observatory in Arequipa, Peru. During this time he conducted a special series of observations from Arica, Chile, and made four ascents of the volcano El Misti, which was the site of recording instruments maintained by Harvard and the highest meteorological station in the world." [3]

"He was appointed the first dean of the University in 1900, but resigned that position a year later. President Faunce, speaking of this time, said, 'For one year he was Dean, and I was brought into contact with him more than ever. But his nervous system was too delicately organized for the position and at the end of the year he wished to give it up. The burden of
every man was his burden, the disappointments of others were his disappointments. The tenderness of his heart was something which only those who came into close touch with him can know.' [3]

"In December 1913, after directing the Christmas music performed by his church choir, he
became ill with pneumonia and died on January 8, 1914." [3]

I think what is telling is the passion that Upton had for people. In 1900, Lovecraft was 10. As Dean he would have had to solicit money - a usual prerequisite to fund projects - and no doubt aquainted himself at least by then with one of the richest men in Providence - Lovecraft's grandfather. Imagine the stories HPL heard from Upton.

A household filled with women, a veritable matriarchy at the time, Upton would have been sympathetic to the precocious child who was already translating Latin, knew the classics, read Scientific American with a passion, and had the financing to be anything he wished. HPL would ahve been into the violin by then, another (musical) touchstone. By winter 1902, all young Howard could think about was astronomy. [4]

I believe we can make some assumptions. Upton was compassionate, gregarious, and perhaps saw a kindred soul in a precocious child. Himself a prodigy, held off from attending college, dominated by a strong male figure, how could Upton miss the cues?

One thing I've learned about HPL is that he was a cautious, deliberate spin doctor when he wrote letters and stories., revelaing only what he wished to reveal. The reality is that Howard was a typical geeky child who worshiped the then-in-vogue Scientist-Explorers. In his house, a living breathing Victorian Adventurer appeared and Howard fell deeply into idolatry - at least until the chemist Appleton appeared in the midst.

Still, it was astronomy that was a passion, and Upton left his greatest legacy embedded into the bosom of H. P. Lovecraft.

1 Chrispy now owns this eldritch postcard. Complete with a 1 cent stamp :) it is dated July 9, 1909 when Lovecraft would have neared his nineteenth birthday and was deep in the realization that he would never be a true astronomer. Between 1908 and 1914, HPL discontinued writing his astronomy columns and most writing of any kind. He wrote one letter to the Providence Sunday Journal on a minor stir he noted. Some pasers-by began to idly speculate that an "aeroplane" was on the horizon. HPL, flabbergasted, lectured the crows that it was merely the planet Venus. So appalled, he wrote the newspaper and lamblasted the ignorance of the public. Collected Essays, Vol. 3, Science, Joshi, 2005, Hippocampus, pp. 99,100

2 Article on the web. http://physics.brown.edu/ physics/ newspages/ Projo-Ladd-Article.html

3 The above quotes appear in Encyclopedia Brunoniana by Martha Mitchell, copyright ©1993 by the Brown University Library and are used only to elucidate the scholarly thesis I present.

4 A Dreamer and a Visionary, Joshi, p. 44

Was Lovecraft Robbed at Gun Point?

At the HPLblog, no detail is too obscure for us to notice. In fact, obscurianta is our game!

This morning, Chrispy was nosing through a copy of Penguin's H. P. Lovecraft: The Dreams of the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, and flipped through From Beyond.

From Beyond is the classic case of one of HPL's stories being a philosophical treatise disguised as fiction. It is all about Riemannian geometry and quantum reality. Not bad for Lovecraft - a guy who struggled with mathematics. Joshi reports that HPL cribbed portions from the 1919 Hugh Elliot monograph Modern Science and Materialism.

However, there is this curious sentence, "...I felt a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver that I always carried after dark sicne the night I was hed up in East Providence."

It detracts from the entire paragraph - the next blog post will deconstruct this paragraph.

The sly footnote by textual critic par excellence, S. T. Joshi, caught my attention. He relates (p. 406, n7) that the sentence about carrying a revolver was added after the first draft of the story. Even Joshi is unsure if Lovecraft was robbed at gun point, but he does note that to get to his pal C. M. Eddy's house, he had to cross a seedy part of Providence.

It brings up an interesting point. Did HPL carry a revolver in early 1920? Would he have used it? Could he have the fortitude to kill another man if confronted? He wrote a great deal about violence, but one always suspects that for all the raging about emigrants, for all his prejudices, that HPL was a man of peace - an elitist, Edwardian, Archie Bunker - who really had a heart of gold.

Bubble-Congeries

There was probably not a fan in 1932 who understood what Lovecraft wrote when he babbled about bubble-congeries. It was another allusion to quantum mechanics.

Paul Dirac theorized that a vacuum was actually filled with particles in negative energy states (Proc. R. Soc. London A, 126, 360, 1930) thus giving rise to the concept of the "physical vacuum" which is not empty at all. Lovecraft would have seen an excerpt probably in Scientific American. He was a lifelong devotee of science magazines, and his fiction is always a dissertation of blending nihilistic cosmology and horror.

Lovecraft would have never mastered the math, but he grasped the philosophical points for the most part.

For more brain-splittig description read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation

Lovecraft on Quantum Physics

"She had told Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space beyond and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river." The Dreams of the Witch House.

Of course, Lovecraft is alluding to Riemannian (as opposed to Euclidean) geometry and playfully merges it with pentacles and witches drawings of qaabalist sketches. Hathorne is clearly an allusion not just to the real judge, but to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his witch & "black man"* tales.

This is parody, but as I read this passage, it excited me to realize how often Lovecraft was prescient. Years afterward, Feynman would come up with eerie glyphs to illustrate quantum interactions.
















Richard Feynman was a 20th century physicist who developed a "thought diagram" still used today to calculate rates for electromagnetic and weak particle processes. The diagrams provide a convenient shorthand for the calculations. They are a code physicists use to talk to one another about their calculations.

In Feynman diagrams Left-to-right in the diagram represents time; a process begins on the left and ends on the right. Every line in the diagram represents a particle; the three types of particles in the simplest theory (QED) are:

straight line, arrow to the right - electron
straight line, arrow to the left - positron
wavy line - photon
Up and down indicates motion
Any point where three lines meet represents an electromagnetic interactio

The most interesting is when an electron and a positron meet and annihilate (disappear), producing a photon.

* A "black man" is an image of the devil, i.e. Satan, and has nothing to do with race. Despite Lovecraft's elitist racism, this usage is consistent with seventeenth century understanding of witchcraft and is often used in Cotton Mather and transcripts of the Salem Vuillage trials.

Astronomer Lovecraft: The Real Deal

Lovecraft as a teen was deadly serious about astronomy. His math skills were weak - and would get worse - but his intuitiveness and studiousness was quite astounding.

In his Pawtuxett Valley Gleaner article of September 26, 1906: "...such an occulation happens ... when the moon, a large crescent, hides the star called "X2 Sagittarii" .... these occulations are among the most important occurences in astronomy, as they are the means of finding out that the moon has no dense atmosphere."

Lovecraft devoured everything he could get in the library, his star books, Scientific American , and what Dr. Winslow Upton (of Brown U. and the Ladd Observatory) loaned him.

____
* Occulation of a star on 25th of this month, an interesting phenomenon, Collected Essays: Volume 3: Science, Joshi, Hippocampus.

____

Interestingly, this week at science news astronomers report that they used the transit of a star passing behind Charon to determine its size and other physical properties just as Lovecraft knew scientists did with the moon.

"In the Jan. 5 Nature, two teams report that Charon's radius is 606 kilometers. Combined with Hubble Space Telescope measurements of Charon's mass, the new size estimate reveals that the moon has a density 1.71 times that of water—and about one-third the density of Earth.

"The lack of a substantial atmosphere supports the theory that Charon was released when an object struck Pluto. Scientists have similarly proposed that Earth's moon formed when a giant object struck the young Earth. "

Deconstructing From Beyond: Part 1

Blogs, by their nature, are to be hors d'oeuvres and not feasts. There is so much to savor in Lovecraft's writing of this passage, we will take it ... in ...slow ... sensual ... ^ bites ^!

I first show how Lovecraft, the poet, actually uses a very stylistic method to his prose. There is a great deal of parallelism, and though he was bitterly against modernistic poetry, he does write a mean prose-poem. However, as we progress into sentences in this paragraph, we will find that Lovecraft's prose lays it on thick, very thick. He is prone to lists and he piles it on with ...and ... and ... and!

I looked about the immense attic room
with the sloping south wall,
dimly lit by rays
which the every day eye cannot see.


We start:

"I looked about the immense attic room
with the sloping south wall ..."

The first sentence phrase could easily have been Poe until he got to "the sloping wall". That is all Lovecraft. All HPL embracing non-Euclidean space. Lovecraft is eternally obsessed with this phenomenon and explores it unceasingly. It is the essential part of his cosmicism.

In Dreams of the Witch House(1932), a concluding pericope states, “When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space ... {held a terrible horror}.”

Earlier, in Dagon (1917), Lovecraft writes, “the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined.”

And that Dagonish statement became this, in Call of Cthulhu (1926 ), “..he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles ... the geometry of this dream-place was abnormal, non-Euclidean...”.

Next we look at:

"... dimly lit by rays
which the every day eye cannot see."

Of course, Lovecraft has in mind the electromagnetic spectrum which he also alludes to in Colour Out of Space. Ultra-violet radiation, x-rays, microwave radiation and other invisible frequencies are all manifestations of the frequencies of light our rods and cones cannot pick up. Of course, our skin feels the IR and we sunburn under UV, and our bones are x-rayed, we can hear radio (once it amplifies and energizes a speaker), so all these frequencies interact with us. The rays Lovecraft's protagonist discovers opens us to ... the ... Beyond. '`'`shudder`'`'

Still, all that said and done - Hello, Ambrose Bierce!

Ambrose Bierce puts it this way in Damned Thing, “... with colours. At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as 'actinic' rays. They represent colours--integral colours in the composition of light--which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real ‘chromatic scale.' I am not mad; there are colours that we cannot see.” {my emphasis}

That is a lot to absorb, so let's stop there. If you have any comments along the way, please! post!

Next: Sentence Two!

Lovecraft and Mathematics

Before we tackle From Beyond, we need to pause and discuss Lovecraft and his complex relationship to mathematics. How did someone with poor math skills write such incredible scienti-fiction based on eerie quantum mathematical principles?

In the Dreams of the Witch House, HPL makes explicit references to Reimannian mathematics. However, he alludes to his poor performance in mathematics with the reference, “As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology...”. [1, p. 306].

Elsewhere we see a statement he made in 1931 [2, pp.63,64], “...I was not bad – except for mathematics, which repelled and exhausted me ... it was algebra that formed the bugbear ... the whole thing disappointed me bitterly .. of course advanced astronomy is simply a mass of mathematics ... it was clear I hadn't the brains to be an astronomer and that was a pill I couldn't swallow with equanimity.”

In The Thing on the Doorstep we read, “Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham ... {and matriculated at} sixteen and {he} completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences.”

Lovecraft was accurate, he did struggle and fail. A 1992 study [3] clearly shows not only what was his problem as a child but most children today. The study set out to answer the perplexing question: Why do very intelligent children do well in humanities but even our brightest so so terribly in mathematics and science?

The results came back quickly. The young brain learns humanities by association and mathematics by logical memorization. These are very different parts of the brain. When a big gap in attendance – like illness or the usual 3 month summer vacation – occurs the humanity subject is quickly recalled and progress made. But the lack of applied work during the time gap erases huge portions of the accumulated mathematical building blocks which have to be relearned. Thus, in those few months back in school that the math is relearned, the humanities has moved ahead by leaps. Math never catches up.

However, good students who took summer math camps and studied even lightly during those time gaps outperformed the other students and sometimes by enormous amounts. Nations in which students had shorter breaks tended to have exceptional mathematical and foundational skills and constantly score years ahead of American students.

As long as Lovecraft had excellent tutors drawn from the Brown University elite and good health he did well. After 1904, there was no money for tutors and his health continued to plague him. Susan often kept him home and he even missed most or all of whole years. There was no way he could succeed. He quit high school.

Yet, as an adult autodidact, he tackled the philosophical aspects of mathematics with a vengeance and wrestled with Einsteinan and quantum physics. In some cases, he was more comfortable with quantum philosophy than even Einstein – who refused to accept critical and fundamental aspects of the uncertainty principle.

Lovecraft could intuitively guess at ramifications of the non-classical model and so we will see in From Beyond, that time, space, and multi-dimensionality are used as a basis for his story. However, he could no more work out a wave equation than flap his arms and fly to the moon.
I leave you with an amusing anecdote. In 1920, his Aunt Gamwell was called upon to substitute teach the 7th grade and the math portion was proportioned out (on the hush) to HPL. He states [4, pp.67ff], “...but then arose the grim specter – the hated, damned thing – arithmetic! Fancy ... a person out of schoolbooks since the '90's ... most of the methods are new to me ... the text-book is a crime ... but natheless {sic} the principles of mathematics are ... unvarying ... and brains were made to use ... i still remember enough to do {the word problems} detest them as I do! {I corrected} papers covered in everything from vulgar fractions to cube root ... much as I loathe arithmetical pursuits, I'd have been ashamed in my grammar school days to turn in such work.”


1 H. P. Lovecraft: The Dreams of the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, Penguin, 2004.
2 H.P. Lovecraft In His Time: A Dreamer and A Visionary.
3 http://www.udel.edu/PR/UpDate/93/1/21.html
4 Letters to Alfred Galpin