Letter from the editors: Fulgurite

Abstract

As Gadamer reflects in The Beginning of Knowledge, "Anyone who has ever been a guest in Heidegger's hut in Todtnauberg [to be so lucky!] recalls the saying scratched into a piece of bark and placed above the lintel: ta de panta oiakizei keraunos; 'Lightning steers all' (Heraclitus, Fragment 64)." Fulgurites, sometimes referred to as petrified lightning, are the evidentiary traces of lightning strikes left as mineraloid debris on beaches, or soil, where the strike has occurred with a temperature of at least 1,800 °C (3,270 °F). Today, as markets crash at speeds faster than human thought, Quentin Meillassoux argues that the laws of nature must be considered to be able to change at a moment's notice. As fulgurites are formed in a second's time, like an error in a spreadsheet left to our retrospective perplexity...