The Heisenblog Principle

It has come to my attention that a certain colleague, who also apparently recently made an intriguing-sounding movie entitled Cold Blood Canyon, has publicized this blog to many I didn't fully expect to visit. Alas, welcome.

Which got me thinking about Werner Heisenberg. As you may recall, this 20th century German physicist is associated, rightly or wrongly, with the observer effect, which simply states that the act of observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon itself, prompting the epistemological question of whether one can actually see and know something in its "true" or "pure" state. Certainly a broader readership (sic) could potentially lead me to tone down my snarkiest of comments. So can we now know the "true" Portnoy UK Adventure? We shall see.

And speaking of 20th century Germans. I found out today that the synagogue that we now attend was bombed by our friends to the east during WWII. Stepping back, St. John's Wood, where we live, is a lovely neighborhood in the northern corner of central London. Fitting for the spiritual home of cricket, docile (and incomprehensible) as it is, SJW has beautiful streets, nice homes, and wonderful cafes and shops. It is thus all the more jarring to think of the Luftwaffe dropping bombs around here. When I first saw the shul, Liberal Jewish Synagogue, its incoherent architecture was obvious but the explanation wasn't. Now I know that the building, though not destroyed, was rendered structurally unstable and at some point well after the war was almost redone from scratch. But they kept the facade. Hence the classic Greek columns in the front attached to a modern, unattractive brick structure that any graduate of an American middle school would recognize. I'm going to try to dig a little further on this. I wonder what else around here was bombed.