Shipwreck Detective & Fields
A man who spent a lifetime searching for shipwrecks, without leaving dry land. Also, field theory.
Featured Articles
The Shipwreck Detective
The New Yorker • 4 Nov 2024 • ~7850 words • Archive Link
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure—without leaving dry land.
“He’s not an adventurer,” Pickford’s wife, Rosamund, told me. “He’s a detective.” Other people involved in the shipwreck world—maritime archeologists, divers, treasure hunters—speak of the thrill and addiction of their discoveries. But for Pickford these pangs of elation tend to be private, if not silent: opening an e-mail, taking a phone call, deciphering a centuries-old cargo manifest in a climate-controlled basement somewhere. Pickford enjoys the binary outcomes of his work. The diamonds are in the strong room, or they aren’t. “You get to know whether you’re right or not,” he said. “That doesn’t often happen with history.” The moment that Pickford craves is when the two realms collide—the archive and the artifact—and the years in between suddenly melt away. “I think it’s something fairly embedded in our psyche, actually, this desire,” he said. “It’s connecting with the past, really. It’s all about time.”
Everything in the Universe, from wandering turtles to falling rocks, is surrounded by ‘fields’ that guide and direct movement
Aeon • 4 Nov 2024 • ~5100 words
Everything in the Universe, from wandering turtles to falling rocks, is surrounded by ‘fields’ that guide and direct movement.
So, caught between modern science and our intuitions about teleology, we seem to have only two ways of explaining the apparent goal directedness in some systems: teleology or mechanism. Both are troublesome. Both are inadequate. In recognition of this problem, philosophers of biology and others have, in recent decades, been struggling to find an alternative. We believe we have found it: a third way that reconciles Aristotelian thinking about goal directedness with the mechanistic view of a Newtonian universe. This alternative explains the apparent seeking of all goal-directed entities, from developing acorns and migrating sea turtles to self-driving cars and human intentions. It proposes that a hidden architecture connects these entities. It even explains falling rocks. We call it ‘field theory’.
Recommended Articles
Where There’s Joy in a Terror Bird
New York Times • 4 Nov 2024 • ~2800 words • Archive Link
In Colombia, a fossil-collecting rancher has found a giant, flightless killer from 13 million years ago — and a missing link to the region’s evolutionary history.
As a young boy in the desert, already herding his own goats, Mr. Perdomo tagged along with two long-running research expeditions led by Kyoto University, in Japan, and by Duke University, in North Carolina. During the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Perdomo helped the scientists on their annual visits, and in turn learned their digging and preserving techniques. He kept his growing collection of ancient turtle scutes and curved toxodont teeth under his bed. Every so often, his mother threw out his “rocks.”
