Tensors VS Tension

Tullio Levi-Civita (29 March 1873 — 29 December 1941); was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity.He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus

In 1900 he and Ricci-Curbastro published the theory of tensors which Albert Einstein used as a resource to master the tensor calculus, a critical tool in Einstein's development of the theory of general relativity. Levi-Civita's series of papers were also discussed in his 1915–1917 correspondence with Einstein. The correspondence was initiated by Levi-Civita, as he found mathematical errors in Einstein's use of tensor calculus to explain theory of relativity. It's evident from these letters that, after numerous letters, the two men had grown to respect each other. In one of the letters, regarding Levi-Civita's new work,

Einstein wrote:

"I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot".

C Cattani and M De Maria, Geniality and rigor: the Einstein – Levi-Civita correspondence (1915–1917), Riv. Stor. Sci. (2) 4 (1) (1996), 1–22; as cited in MacTutor archive..

Political tourism in the Negev and Bedouin tribes

[..] Every foreign visitor relied implicitly on a specific fantasy of an "authentic voice" from the absent [Bedouin] local community. In this process, ordinary people from Bedouin towns, were fashioned by these various flows of political activist: once as an essential Bedouin, once as a heroic active anti-Israeli resister, once as the passive victim of a humanitarian case.... and, sometimes, as a bit of all these. Ali, a Bedouin truck driver, was not even aware of being so many things!

[..] all those claims are sometimes produced "outside" and projected on contingent situation which actually are used instrumentally. They may reflect a specific political agenda or some psychologic need of the "humanitarian" tourist visiting the Negev.

These claims, pre-packaged and then projected (or injected) into the local comunities created and amplified, by becoming increasingly dislocated into a global "infoscape", they enhance a meta-conflict where symbols tend to refer only to other symbols. Or, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, "reality is never directly itself".

Adapted from a seminar of Dr. Alexander Koensler