Bitter Grace

I'm holding onto this principally as an illustration of the power of analytical thinking as opposed to recipe thinking, of education in the form of cultivating the ability to use models as thinking tools, to flex and extend then, to generalize and particularize appropriately.


"A 12th-century builder had no concept of gravity and only Roman numerals to work with: He couldn’t multiply or divide. And yet an engineering movement that started in roughly 1135 A.D. proceeded to generate structures more improbable and accomplished than anything built anywhere in the world over the next 700 years. As if to further bewilder historians, their architects had left next to no written records. Any tourist who has stumbled into Chartres soon asks the obvious question: What’s holding this roof up? By the time the question was put to Robert Mark, scholars had pretty much given up looking for an answer. `An insuperable barrier separates their approach to building from ours,' wrote one of the leading historians of Gothic art, before dismissing any hope of figuring it out.

"But then Mark deployed his stress-testing gizmos to investigate Gothic cathedrals. `Robert’s big thing was showing that this technique that came from aerospace could be used for concrete,' says Rob Bork, a former student and current professor of medieval architecture at the University of Iowa. `The work was not only original but essentially unique.' Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic. He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral. There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course, but also the winds. (To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.) He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light. Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.

"The models had their own haunting beauty. They turned art history into science. They generated testable hypotheses. They predicted exactly which stones inside Chartres or any other cathedral might be overstressed by their loads. But the power of Mark’s methods became clearest when he traveled to France to visit cathedrals. The buildings behaved exactly the way his models suggested they should. `There should be cracking in the mortar here,' he would say to some French stonemason at Chartres, and the stonemason would invariably reply, `We repointed that only last year!' For centuries, the damage inside Chartres had been repaired by workers who never understood why certain stones always needed replacing. Now this guy from Princeton could not only tell you why — he could explain the buildings in ways that not even their builders could have done."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/?itid=mc_magnet-opicymi_inline_collection_1


Bonus tidbit:
“`I have a very fine nose for elitism,' said Chris. `And it bothers me. And I was in Princeton. There’s a kind of idea at a place like that: "We’re the smartest and you should just shut up and let us run the world." And this just really bugs me.'”