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The origin of turning dates to around 1300 BCE when the Ancient Egyptians first developed a two-person lathe. One to turn the wood to be machined and one to shape the wood. It looked a great deal like how we start fires today. Joseph Needham who told Ursula LeGuin the story about the Chinese not having a lathe made a case for claiming Taoism destroyed scientific advance and having a lathe in ancient China would refute his theory. -- 14:12, 4 April 2014 User:JohnLloydScharf
"鈞" can be found as a component of 陶鈞 as "potter's wheel", rather than "lathe". However. As we say even in the Lathe page: "Lathes can be used to shape pottery, the best-known design being the Potter's wheel" - so if there were potter's wheels, is that not a kind of lathe...? In Potter's wheel we have: "A potter's wheel may occasionally be referred to as a "potter's lathe""... Additionally, while going from 陶鈞 to 鈞 seems like you could just remove the "pottery" (陶) implication and simply write it as "wheel of heaven", that would be a mistake; simplifying it to "wheel" removes a great deal of nuance and adds incorrect connotations - 鈞 is not 'any wheel', it's not a wheel for going anywhere, but rather spins for the purpose of shaping. Destruction on heaven's "spinning machine which shapes creation" - well, it doesn't sound like it's *not* a lathe.
In the Taoist monk Cheng Xuanying's commentary on this passage, he states that 天鈞 is the principle of natural balance. I found this in a Chinese language source: “天钧者,自然均平之理也”. Rather than literally translating it to a 'thing', be it potter's wheel or lathe, it seems like the truer translation is 'natural equilibrium'. Will look for English language source to use as I'm not a translator myself. Fourday ( talk) 14:43, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
The summary confuses whether the dreams create alternative realities or alter reality. Is it one or the other - or both? Royalcourtier ( talk) 07:12, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Would it be worth mentioning that H. G. Wells wrote a short story on some of the same themes, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"? It's about a man who has the power to alter reality by wishing it. JHobson3 ( talk) 13:01, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
The summary needs work. Some things, like the dream that turns everybody gray, are mentioned twice. Also the long description at the beginning doesn't describe the "real world", just the current world that George has dreamed up. We don't know what the "real world" was because we don't know when George's first dream was. For example, he mentions dreaming his aunt out of existence as a teenager, and that predates the nuclear-holocaust dream 73.137.170.88 ( talk) 04:56, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
The older Wade-Giles version of the name was universal in the West at the time she used it. I use the current form for the first reference. -- GwydionM ( talk) 07:54, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
Where does it say in the book that it is set in 2002? 2604:2000:F64D:FC00:F41D:52E2:A2D3:C2D6 ( talk) 11:13, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
Someone objected to the long-standing mention that she was "the late".
Style says that articles should not "dwell on the death".
It does not. Two words are used.
And it had been like that since 3 June 2019, until someone decided to get extremist about a sensible guideline.-- GwydionM ( talk) 07:06, 27 September 2019 (UTC)
That's somewhat misleading, or at a minimum cryptically compressed -- he comes to the attention of Haber because he's caught taking a mixture of drugs (some technically illegal for him) in order to suppress dreaming, when dreaming is actually a necessary biological function, which can lead to very serious medical/psychological problems if suppressed. Having a severe phobia of dreaming can be a very grave problem by almost any standard. AnonMoos ( talk) 20:47, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
This idea comes from a book called Political Science Fiction by Donald M Hassler. But the author says only that they think it means this, as well as either / or. It was being presented as if it were a proven fact.
And as they say, every Tom, Dick or Harry is called George.
-- GwydionM ( talk) 15:53, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
A very useful addition.
Something else worth having would be a diagram of the shifting of the back-story for the whole cycle. I've done this as an appendix in an on-line article, see Eyes and Illusions in Tolkien and Le Guin. It might also be added as text, if anyone thinks it worth it.
For now, I added a brief account on Quora, where I get a lot of reader. See The shifting timelines of the SF novel `The Lathe of Heaven'. -- 08:54, 12 March 2024 GwydionM
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Archives: 1 |
The origin of turning dates to around 1300 BCE when the Ancient Egyptians first developed a two-person lathe. One to turn the wood to be machined and one to shape the wood. It looked a great deal like how we start fires today. Joseph Needham who told Ursula LeGuin the story about the Chinese not having a lathe made a case for claiming Taoism destroyed scientific advance and having a lathe in ancient China would refute his theory. -- 14:12, 4 April 2014 User:JohnLloydScharf
"鈞" can be found as a component of 陶鈞 as "potter's wheel", rather than "lathe". However. As we say even in the Lathe page: "Lathes can be used to shape pottery, the best-known design being the Potter's wheel" - so if there were potter's wheels, is that not a kind of lathe...? In Potter's wheel we have: "A potter's wheel may occasionally be referred to as a "potter's lathe""... Additionally, while going from 陶鈞 to 鈞 seems like you could just remove the "pottery" (陶) implication and simply write it as "wheel of heaven", that would be a mistake; simplifying it to "wheel" removes a great deal of nuance and adds incorrect connotations - 鈞 is not 'any wheel', it's not a wheel for going anywhere, but rather spins for the purpose of shaping. Destruction on heaven's "spinning machine which shapes creation" - well, it doesn't sound like it's *not* a lathe.
In the Taoist monk Cheng Xuanying's commentary on this passage, he states that 天鈞 is the principle of natural balance. I found this in a Chinese language source: “天钧者,自然均平之理也”. Rather than literally translating it to a 'thing', be it potter's wheel or lathe, it seems like the truer translation is 'natural equilibrium'. Will look for English language source to use as I'm not a translator myself. Fourday ( talk) 14:43, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
The summary confuses whether the dreams create alternative realities or alter reality. Is it one or the other - or both? Royalcourtier ( talk) 07:12, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Would it be worth mentioning that H. G. Wells wrote a short story on some of the same themes, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"? It's about a man who has the power to alter reality by wishing it. JHobson3 ( talk) 13:01, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
The summary needs work. Some things, like the dream that turns everybody gray, are mentioned twice. Also the long description at the beginning doesn't describe the "real world", just the current world that George has dreamed up. We don't know what the "real world" was because we don't know when George's first dream was. For example, he mentions dreaming his aunt out of existence as a teenager, and that predates the nuclear-holocaust dream 73.137.170.88 ( talk) 04:56, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
The older Wade-Giles version of the name was universal in the West at the time she used it. I use the current form for the first reference. -- GwydionM ( talk) 07:54, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
Where does it say in the book that it is set in 2002? 2604:2000:F64D:FC00:F41D:52E2:A2D3:C2D6 ( talk) 11:13, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
Someone objected to the long-standing mention that she was "the late".
Style says that articles should not "dwell on the death".
It does not. Two words are used.
And it had been like that since 3 June 2019, until someone decided to get extremist about a sensible guideline.-- GwydionM ( talk) 07:06, 27 September 2019 (UTC)
That's somewhat misleading, or at a minimum cryptically compressed -- he comes to the attention of Haber because he's caught taking a mixture of drugs (some technically illegal for him) in order to suppress dreaming, when dreaming is actually a necessary biological function, which can lead to very serious medical/psychological problems if suppressed. Having a severe phobia of dreaming can be a very grave problem by almost any standard. AnonMoos ( talk) 20:47, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
This idea comes from a book called Political Science Fiction by Donald M Hassler. But the author says only that they think it means this, as well as either / or. It was being presented as if it were a proven fact.
And as they say, every Tom, Dick or Harry is called George.
-- GwydionM ( talk) 15:53, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
A very useful addition.
Something else worth having would be a diagram of the shifting of the back-story for the whole cycle. I've done this as an appendix in an on-line article, see Eyes and Illusions in Tolkien and Le Guin. It might also be added as text, if anyone thinks it worth it.
For now, I added a brief account on Quora, where I get a lot of reader. See The shifting timelines of the SF novel `The Lathe of Heaven'. -- 08:54, 12 March 2024 GwydionM