Today's Wisdom - Jupiter, Wittgenstein and Vivaldi

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Jupiter is a planet of almost incomprehensible scale, so large that you could fit every other planet in the solar system inside it twice over, and more than 1,300 Earths would pack into its volume. Yet for all its size, Jupiter is not a world you could ever stand on. It is a gas giant made overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium, the very same ingredients as the Sun. This has led astronomers to call it a "failed star," since Jupiter formed from the same swirling cloud that birthed our Sun. It gathered an enormous amount of gas, but never grew massive enough to ignite the nuclear fusion in its core that makes a star shine. Had it been perhaps eighty times heavier, we might have grown up under two suns instead of one.

The planet's most famous feature is a storm that has been raging for centuries. The Great Red Spot is a swirling hurricane with winds howling around its edge, and astronomers have been watching it since at least the 1600s. Curiously, it is shrinking, having measured twice the width of Earth back in 1979 and now closer to 1.3 times. Jupiter also spins faster than any other planet in the solar system, whirling round once every ten hours despite its enormous girth. A day on Jupiter lasts less than half of one of ours. That furious rotation flattens the planet visibly at its poles and helps drive the bands of cloud, coloured cream and orange and brown, that stripe its surface. Beneath them, the pressure is so extreme that scientists believe hydrogen is squeezed into a bizarre metallic liquid form, generating a magnetic field around 20,000 times stronger than Earth's.

As of 2026 the planet has 101 officially recognised moons. Four of them are true worlds in their own right, the Galilean moons spotted by Galileo in 1610, and one of them, Ganymede, is actually larger than the planet Mercury. The most tantalising is Europa, wrapped in a shell of ice beneath which lies a salty ocean thought to hold twice as much water as all of Earth's seas combined, making it one of the likeliest places in the solar system to harbour life. NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, launched in October 2024, is now cruising toward the system and will arrive in 2030 to study that hidden ocean up close. There is a reason to be grateful for our giant neighbour. Jupiter's immense gravity acts something like a cosmic shield, flinging away or swallowing many comets and asteroids that might otherwise strike the inner planets, as the world watched in 1994 when the giant tore comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 to pieces and devoured it. The king of the planets, it seems, is also something of a guardian.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 into one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, a household in which Brahms and Mahler came to play music in its drawing rooms. His father was a steel magnate. The young Ludwig grew up surrounded by both dazzling privilege and profound unhappiness, with three of his brothers dying by suicide. He first trained as an engineer, studying aeronautics in Manchester, and it was through wrestling with the mathematics behind his work that he tumbled into the deeper question of the foundations of logic itself. This led him to Cambridge and to Bertrand Russell, then the most famous philosopher in Britain, who quickly decided this intense, tormented young Austrian was a genius and possibly his own successor. When the First World War broke out, Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army and carried his philosophical notebooks into the trenches.

That book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is one of the strangest masterpieces in the history of thought. It is a slim work of just seventy-five pages built from numbered propositions of almost mathematical austerity. Its central claim is what became known as the "picture theory" of language, the idea that a sentence has meaning because it is a kind of logical picture of a possible state of affairs in the world. From this Wittgenstein drew a radical conclusion, that most of the traditional problems of philosophy were not difficult but meaningless, mere confusions arising from misusing language. Anything that truly mattered most, ethics, God, the meaning of life, lay beyond the reach of what language could sensibly express. The book ends with its famous final line, that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Convinced he had solved every problem of philosophy, Wittgenstein gave it up entirely, believing his work was finished.

Having given away his enormous inherited fortune, he spent years as an elementary school teacher in remote Austrian villages. Then, gradually, he came to believe his celebrated first book had been badly wrong. When he returned to Cambridge in 1929 he began dismantling his own picture theory. He argued instead that language has no single hidden logical essence at all. In his later masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, he introduced the idea of "language games," insisting that the meaning of a word is simply its use in the practical business of everyday life. Philosophy, he now believed, was a kind of therapy, a way of curing us of the knots we tie ourselves in with language. It is almost unheard of for a thinker to produce two philosophies, each of which would reshape the century, and for the second to be a refutation of the first. When he died of cancer in 1951, his reported last words captured a man who had found peace at the end of a ferociously difficult life. Tell them, he said, that I have had a wonderful life.

Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678. Ordained a priest in 1703 at the age of twenty-five, he soon earned the nickname that would follow him through history, "il Prete Rosso," the Red Priest. Yet his career in the pulpit was extraordinarily brief. Within a year or so he stopped saying Mass altogether, blaming a chronic tightness in the chest that was almost certainly asthma, though it freed him to pour all his energy into music instead. He remained a priest in name for the rest of his life, an odd, half-clerical figure whose true devotion was clearly to the violin rather than the altar.

In the same year he was ordained, Vivaldi took a post as violin master at a Venetian orphanage for abandoned and illegitimate girls. The boys there learned a trade and left at fifteen, but the most musically gifted girls were trained into an orchestra and choir of such brilliance that visitors travelled from across the continent to hear them perform. For these young women Vivaldi composed a torrent of music over nearly four decades, and it was them, not the great courts of Europe, who premiered much of his finest work. He was astonishingly prolific, writing around 500 concertos, some 50 operas, and a wealth of sacred music. He effectively perfected the solo concerto, standardising its fast-slow-fast, three-movement shape that composers still follow today. His most famous creation, The Four Seasons of 1725, was revolutionary in a way that is easy to miss now. It was programme music that told a story, with the strings made to imitate birdsong, a barking dog, chattering teeth in the winter cold, and a summer thunderstorm.

By the late 1730s Venetian tastes had moved on, his operas were failing, and the once-celebrated Red Priest found himself out of fashion and short of money. In 1740 he left Venice for Vienna, hoping to win the patronage of the Emperor Charles VI, who admired his work, but the emperor died within months of his arrival. Vivaldi died in poverty in July 1741, and was buried in a simple grave after a modest funeral held without music. Almost immediately his work slid into obscurity, overshadowed by the rising generation, and for nearly two centuries he was remembered mostly as a footnote, notably because Johann Sebastian Bach had admired him enough to transcribe several of his concertos. His resurrection came only in the 1920s, when a vast cache of his manuscripts was rediscovered in Piedmont, igniting the great twentieth-century "Vivaldi renaissance."

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