tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-267416182024-03-12T16:16:20.038-07:00homunculusPostings from the interface of science and culturePhilip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.comBlogger755125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-9796252340785444492023-09-15T09:29:00.001-07:002023-09-15T09:29:37.045-07:00The new Climategate that wasn't<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Climate-change denialists got all excited
last week by an alleged revelation that the top science journals are bullying
climate scientists into presenting the most alarmist versions of their
research, and suppressing anything that doesn’t fit with a “climate catastrophe”
narrative. The problem (this story went) has been exposed by a whistleblower
named Patrick Brown, formerly an academic scientist who now works for a
privately funded environmental research centre.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Sounds bad? Is this another <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy" target="_blank">Climategate</a>?
But it takes very little digging at all before a very different, and extremely
strange, story emerges.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Let’s start this tale with Matt Ridley. In
his <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/08/the-public-isnt-being-told-the-full-truth-about-the-climate/" target="_blank">column</a>
in <i>The Telegraph</i>, he tells us this:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Patrick Brown, the
co-director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California,
has blown the whistle on an open secret about climate science: it’s biased in
favour of alarmism. He published a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06444-3" target="_blank">paper</a>
in <i>Nature</i> magazine on the effect of climate change on wildfires. In it
he told the truth: there was an effect. But not the whole truth: other factors
play a big role in fires too. On Maui, the failure of the electric utility to
manage vegetation along power lines was a probable cause of the devastating
recent fires, but climate change proved a convenient excuse.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">OK, wait – what? So Brown knowingly
suppressed facts relevant to the conclusion his paper reported? Was this some
kind of “gotcha” stunt to show that you can get any old nonsense through peer
review, even at a major journal? Oh no, not at all. In his <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-published" target="_blank">blog</a>
about the issue, Brown tells us this:</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I knew <em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">not</span></em> to try to quantify key
aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the
story that prestigious journals like <em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Nature
</span></em>and its rival,<em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">
Science,</span></em> want to tell. </span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">This
matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in
high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career
success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly
clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate
papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives
come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. </span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">To put
it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the
complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra,
urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However
understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate
science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical
solutions more difficult to achieve. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Oh, people really
don’t know any longer about the myth of Cassandra, do they? Cassandra’s prophecies
were true, but she was fated not to be believed. Anyway, Brown goes on to say:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I
wanted the research to be published in the highest profile venue possible. When
I began the research for this paper in 2020, I was a new assistant professor
needing to maximize my prospects for a successful career.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">So he is telling us that he wanted to get a
paper in <i>Nature</i> to advance his career and he figured that telling this
partial, distorted story was the best way to achieve this aim.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Kinda weird, right? And not exactly the
exposé story Matt Ridley implied. Rather, Brown seems to be admitting to having
committed the unethical practice of keeping certain facts hidden, or simply
unexamined, in order to get on in the academic world.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Well OK – but can you blame him if that’s
the only way to succeed? I mean, it is still weird for him to come out and
admit it, but you can understand the motive, at least – right?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Except… is he correct about this? His
charge – “the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by
what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that
support certain preapproved narratives” – is pretty damned serious: the editors
of <i>Nature</i> and other top journals are curating the scientific message they
put out. You’d imagine Brown would back up that accusation with some solid
evidence. But no, it is all assertion. It seems it’s “obvious” that <i>Nature</i>
editors and those of other distinguished journals are biased because Brown’s
own papers have been previously rejected by said journals. What other reason
could there have been for that, people, than editorial bias?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Still, Brown does cite one bit of evidence
in his favour: he says that some scientists err on the side of using worst-case
climate scenarios. “It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary
hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility,” he says. And here
he points to an <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3" target="_blank">article</a> that (rightly) decries this tendency and calls for more
realistic baselines. Yet that
article was published in – good lord, who’d have thought it? – <i>Nature</i>,
the journal that allegedly always wants you to believe the worst. I’m not sure
this is really helping his case.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Brown apparently knows for sure that his
paper would have been rejected by <i>Nature</i> if he’d included all the
complexities, such as considering the other, non-climate-related factors that
could have influenced changes in the frequency of forest fires. For example, if
the number of fires has increased, perhaps that might be partly due to changes
in patterns of vegetation, or of human activities (like more fires getting
ignited by humans either deliberately or by accident)?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">How does he know that the <i>Nature</i>
editors would have responded negatively to the inclusion of these caveats,
though? The scientific way would, of course, have been to conduct the
experiment: to send the fuller paper, including all those nuances, and see what
happened. But Brown did not need to do that, it seems; he <i>just knew</i>. We
should trust him.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Even Ted Nordhaus, director of the Breakthrough
Institute in California where Brown now works, has admitted that this
counterfactual does not exist. So Brown’s claims are mere hearsay. (Why has
Nordhaus weighed in at all, given that he was not involved in the research?
I’ll come back to that.) </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">On his blog Brown says that he omitted
those caveats from the study because they would just get in the way of a punchy
conclusion that, <i>in his view</i>, would maximize the chances of getting
published in Nature:</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">In my
paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously
relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more
realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract
from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and
thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with <em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Nature</span></em>’s editors and reviewers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The trouble is, these days Nature <a href="https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-023-06444-3/MediaObjects/41586_2023_6444_MOESM2_ESM.pdf" target="_blank">provides</a>
the referees’ reports and authors’ responses to published papers online. And
these contradict this narrative. It turns out the one referee highlighted
precisely some of the issues that Brown and colleagues omitted. He said:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The second aspect
that is a concern is the use of wildfire growth as the key variable. As the authors
acknowledge there are numerous factors that play a confounding role in wildfire
growth that are not directly accounted for in this study (L37-51). Vegetation
type (fuel), ignitions (lightning and people), fire management activities (
direct and indirect suppression, prescribed fire, policies such as fire bans
and forest closures) and fire load.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">And Brown responded that his methods of
analysis couldn’t handle these other factors:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><strong><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-weight: normal;">Accounting for changes in all of these variables and their potential
interactions simultaneously is very difficult. This is precisely why </span></strong><em><b><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">we chose</span></b></em><strong><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-weight: normal;"> to use a methodology
that addresses the much cleaner but more narrow question of what the influence
of warming alone is on the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth.</span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><strong><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-weight: normal;"> </span></strong><b><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">In a very revealing <a href="https://heatmap.news/climate/patrick-brown-nature-climate-scientist#" target="_blank">interview</a> with Brown for the website
HeatMap, Robinson Meyer
pushed further on this issue. If Brown agreed that these were important
considerations, and the referees asked about them, said Meyer, why didn’t he look
into them further? Brown says:</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I think
that, that’s very good that the reviewers brought that up. But like I said
before, doing that is, then, it’s not a <em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Nature</span></em>
paper. It’s too diluted in my opinion to be a <em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Nature </span></em>paper. </span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">This is
what I’m trying to highlight, I guess, from the inside as a researcher doing
this type of research. Reviewers absolutely will ask for good sensitivity
tests, and bringing in caveats, and all that stuff, but it is absolutely your
goal as the researcher to navigate the reviews as best you can. The file even
gets automatically labeled <em><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Rebuttal</span></em>
when you respond to the reviewers. It’s your goal to essentially get the paper
over the finish line. </span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">And you
don’t just acquiesce to reviewers, because you’d never get anything published.
You don’t just say, Oh you’re right, okay, we will go back and do that work for
five years and submit elsewhere. The reality of the situation is you have to go
forward with your publication and get it published. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">On the one hand, this is all honest enough:
peer review is something of a game, where referees tend to want to see
everything addressed and authors take the view that they’d <i>never</i> be
ready to publish if they had to do that, so they generally aim to get away with
doing the minimum needed to push things past the reviewers. That’s fair enough.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">But it is totally at odds with the story
Brown is now trying to tell. On these accounts, Brown did not in fact omit the
confounding factors because he thought they would complicate the kind of
message <i>Nature</i> and its referees would demand. He omitted them because
they were too difficult to include in the study. And far from being pleased by
an incomplete study that supported the narrative Brown had decided the editors
and reviewers would look for, the reviewers – one of them, at least – called for
a more complete analysis. It seems then that the reviewer would have been <i>more</i>
pleased with the <i>more</i> complete study. Brown is admitting that it was <i>he</i>
who tried to push the paper past the finish line in the face of these concerns. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Some climate sceptics have still tried to
make this sound like a shortcoming of the journal and the reviewers: ah look,
they didn’t push very hard for that extra stuff, did they? But this won’t wash
at all. First, the authors were commendably upfront about the limitations of
the study – the paper itself says</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Our
findings, however, must be interpreted narrowly as idealized calculations
because temperature is only one of the dozens of important variables that
influences wildfire behaviour. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">For the referees to pass the paper once it
included this word of caution is entirely reasonable. After all, Brown stands
by it even now:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">You
might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not. On the
contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in
day-to-day wildfire behavior.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">In short, there is not a problem here,
beyond what Brown seems now keen to manufacture. If, as he says, the paper is “less
useful than it could have been”, it is clear who is responsible for that.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Note by the way that, in response to a
Nature news editor (independent from the manuscript handling team) who raised
this issue, Nordhaus (again) said “<span class="css-901oao">The reviewer did not
raise an issue about "vegetation and human ignition pattern changes".
The reviewer raised an issue about holding absolute humidity constant.” As you
can see above, this is clearly untrue. Nordhaus is simply referring to a
different reviewer – despite surely having all of the reviewers’ reports
available to him. I’m going to be charitable and assume he didn’t read them
properly. But you will have to forgive me if I suspect an agenda behind
Nordhaus’s involvement in the whole affair.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><span class="css-901oao"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Talking of agendas: back to Matt Ridley,
who has mentioned none of this in his column. He claims that the episode proves
that “Editors at journals such as <i>Nature</i> seem to prefer publishing
simplistic, negative news and speculation about climate change.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Matt’s
story suggests that the publication of Brown’s paper has exposed the fact that
climate scientists are hiding facts from us that are inconvenient to their
narrative about catastrophic climate change.</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Well, Brown’s
paper<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>is</i> hiding from
us facts that suggests the problem he looked at might not be as bad as it
looks. But is this because he is a climate scientist with the agenda of doing
so? No, it is because he knowingly withheld those facts - seemingly, did
not even bother to investigate them, although to be fair that might be because
he was unable to. But does the publication of his paper suggest that other
scientists were prepared to turn a blind eye to that? No, because one of the
reviewers raised the omission as a problem. Does the publication of the paper
show that indeed there is a bias in the literature whereby papers that present
an unmitigatedly bleak picture of extreme climate change get accepted but those
that are more nuanced get rejected? Evidently it shows nothing of the sort. The
only “evidence” for that is that Brown says so. Matt has not challenged that
assertion, or asked for evidence, but recycles it as fact.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Matt then echoes Brown’s line that
“the problem is all solutions [to climate change] are taboo [in the scientific literature].”
He says:</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">If I
waved a magic wand and gave the world unlimited clean and cheap energy
tomorrow, I expect many climate scientists would be horrified: they would be
out of a job. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">It is hard to know what to say
about this, other than that it is one of the most absurd things Matt has ever
written (yes!). Climate scientists are in fact horrified by what is happening
to the climate. So am I. Like them, I would be beside myself with joy if Matt
were able to do this. (This is one of the reasons why I value work being done
on <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-future-of-fusion-energy/" target="_blank">nuclear fusion</a>, which could ultimately provide a significant, clean source
of power, albeit not soon enough to rescue us from the current climate crisis.)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Frankly, for Matt to say this of
climate scientists is not just absurd but deeply offensive.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">This idea that climate scientists
have to play up global warming to protect their jobs is on the one hand risible
and on the other hand a standard trope of conspiracy theorists: climate
scientists have their self-interest at heart. It is really very peculiar that
Matt and others seem to believe that if climate change ended, there would be no
more climate. For that, folks, is in fact what climate scientists study. There
are so many things left for them to study, so much we don’t know about climate.
I imagine some climate scientists dearly wish they could study things other
than global warming (and of course lots of them do).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">What is ironic to the point of
hilarity about the episode is this: Ridley and others are claiming that this is
a story about how climate science insists of a simplistic narrative that
ignores all nuance, but in order to do that they must create a simplistic story
devoid of all nuance. The fact is that the story is deeply, deeply odd. For Brown’s
version amounts to something like this:</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Climate
science is biased and broken and ignores complexities that don’t fit its
narrative, creating a misleading picture. Meanwhile, I have published a paper
that ignores complexities that don’t fit that conventional narrative and is
therefore misleading. But the paper is in fact good and I’m not at all ashamed
of it, and its conclusions still apply. But also it is also a deliberate
partial falsification. I was forced to do this for career advancement, but only
because I’d decided that was the case – I didn’t bother to submit the paper I
should have written to see if my preconceptions were correct, and in fact I
didn’t even try to do the work that would have required. The fact that <i>Nature</i>
published the paper just shows that they only look for the simplistic
narrative, even though their peer review process asked me to go into the
complexities but I told them that was not possible and they and the referees
accepted my explanation on good faith. So shame on <i>Nature</i> for publishing
this poor work which is in fact also perfectly respectable and useful work,
because I did it, but not as useful as it could have been if I’d done the other
things that needed doing but which I didn’t do because I chose not to or
couldn’t. And it’s all a scandal!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Sorry, it really
doesn’t make any sense, does it? But there you have it.</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-79930192774873271632023-09-04T13:03:00.001-07:002023-09-04T13:03:33.433-07:00Should we colonise space? How not to debate that question.<p><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-size: small;">Software engineer, astrophysicist and human spaceflight enthusiast Peter
Hague has <a href="https://twitter.com/peterrhague/status/1694036488126656794" target="_blank">commented</a> on Twitter about my <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/21/the-big-idea-should-we-colonise-other-planets" target="_blank">Guardian “Big Idea” piece</a> assessing the notion of colonising
other worlds.
I debated whether I should respond, given that Hague’s critique is steeped in
the kind of vituperative ad hominem attacks that seem to characterize a lot of
the discourse coming from advocates of space colonization (something remarked
on by Erika Nesvold, whose excellent book partly inspired my piece). But
perhaps a response will serve to illustrate some of the challenges of debating
the issues. So here goes.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague says: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Ball claims there is “a dismaying irrationality in the answers”, and
then proceeds to quote mine and cherry pick answers without adequately
demonstrating that they are in fact irrational. Or, in fact, being specific
about what he means by irrational. It’s actually important, because whether
some action is rational or not is entirely contingent on what you are trying to
accomplish. Ball’s statement has embedded values, even though he leaves them
unstated – perhaps relying on the Guardian audience to share them. In that
case, ‘irrational’ just becomes a word that can describe more or less anybody
who doesn’t share that worldview. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I have not quoted anything by Hague (unless he believes he is Stephen
Hawking). I had no idea what Hague might or might not have said on the issue. I’ve
simply no idea what he’s talking about there.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The irrationality I have in mind is illustrated by what follows, but
also by the ad hominem aspects mentioned above. One might imagine, for example,
that Hague would start by finding out something about the author of the piece
he is attacking, which would have very quickly revealed that I am not a “Guardian
writer” (unless every single person who has ever written in the Guardian becomes
that by default).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague quotes me thus:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"The timescales just don’t add up. Climate change either will or
won’t become an existential risk well before it’s realistic to imagine a
self-sustaining Martian settlement of millions: we’re talking a century or
more. Speculating about nuclear war post-2123 is science fiction. So the old
environmentalist cliche is right: there is no Planet B, and to suggest
otherwise risks lessening the urgency of preserving Planet A. As for the threat
of a civilisation-ending meteorite impact: one that big is expected only every
several million years, so it’s safe to say there are more urgent worries. The
sun going out? Sure, in 5bn years, and if you think there will still be humans
then, you don’t understand evolution." </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">He then says: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Ironically here Ball vindicates a point I have made myself. A century
probably *is* a timescale for when migration off Earth becomes a significant
contributor to resolving pressure on the biosphere. But this means we need to
get started now, so that we can get to that point in a century. Doing so means
we only need to juggle human and environmental issues for a finite time, and we
don't have to just slowly wind down human civilisation.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Huh? Is anyone suggesting we must “wind down human civilization”? (Well
I guess some might – you can always find someone saying anything. But it is
hardly the default position.) Anyway, I don’t follow this “resolving [presumably
meaning “relieving”] pressure on the biosphere”. Many forecasts suspect that
human population will peak around 2075-2080, and then stabilize. I don’t see
many arguments that off-planet settlement is needed to absorb an excess of
humans – but presumably to make a real difference, we’d need to see a billion
or so decamp on that kind of timescale. Is that likely to happen? I have to say
it seems hard to imagine. At any rate, my point is elsewhere, specifically about
the popular idea that an off-world colony would be a back-up for civilization
on Earth going off the rails. The threats we currently face can’t credibly be
extrapolated to the point where a human settlement on Mars (say) might
plausibly be entirely self-sufficient. And in any event, the argument seems
incoherent. It’s like saying that, because Johnny’s behaviour is wreaking havoc
in his neighbourhood, the solution is to send him to the next town, where
somehow he’ll stop being so antisocial.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague adds: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">His complacency about asteroids is not shared by those who study them,
and the argument about the lifetime of the Sun is not used as an argument for
immediate settlement by anybody I know of, and he doesn't attribute it, so we
can move on from that. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">This is what I mean about rationality. Sure, we are right to want to
monitor asteroids and meteorites because a Tunguska-size blast over a major
population centre could be devastating. And bigger ones would be terrible
indeed. But a blast so great that it poses a truly existential risk to the
planet? I give specific figures for at kind of threat – the chance of it happening
in the next couple of centuries, say, is minuscule. If you’re kept awake at
night because of <i>that</i> fear to humankind, you have an impressive capacity
for displacement. But does Hague address this? He does not; he simply tries to
imply that the issue here is a lack of expertise.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague then quotes me:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"For some, the justification for planetary settlement is not
existential fear but our innate drive to explore. “The settlement of North
America and other continents was a prelude to humanity’s greater challenge: the
space frontier,” reads a 1986 document by the Reagan-appointed US National
Commission of Space, rather clumsily letting slip who it was and was not
speaking for. But at least “Because it would be cool” is an honest answer to
the question: “Why go?”" </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">And he replies: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">This is a low blow. He is cherry picking a forgotten government document
to try and lob a vague accusation of racism around. If he wanted to look
seriously at the argument that there are parellels [sic] between the opening of
the American frontier and the opening of the space frontier, he might address
the work of <a href="https://twitter.com/robert_zubrin">@robert_zubrin</a>, who
has articulated this far better. There is no indication the author has even
heard of Zubrin though, which doesn't speak well to his knowledge of the
argument he believes he is rebutting. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">OK, there’s a fair bit to unpack here. First, there’s the question of
whether you really want to hear from someone whose argument goes like this:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">“Anyone who hasn’t heard of Zubrin is probably not qualified to write on
this issue, and I’m going to totally guess that the author hasn’t heard of
Zubrin, so there you go.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">What’s even more absurd is that, when it was pointed out to Hague on
Twitter that in fact I very much know of Zubrin (as he could have discovered
without too much trouble), he says in effect “Well that proves my point! – he knew
of him but didn’t mention him!” Specifically:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="css-901oao"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">“Then
it’s especially ridiculous that Ball ignores his advocacy in favour of skimming
ancient NASA documents for some hook to launch his fatuous accusation. It’s
possible that he has forgotten who Zubrin is, seeing as his interest in the
subject is clearly surface level.”</span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="css-901oao"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Ah, so OK I knew Zubrin but perhaps forgot about him. Sorry, but Christ
on a bike.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Also, about that “forgotten government document”: someone on Twitter
kindly pointed out that it is on the contrary it is a significant text,
whereupon Hague says <b>“</b></span><span class="css-901oao"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Sorry for dissing the document!
Bear in mind I was 5 when it came out</span></b></span><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">”</span></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">. So how does this work? Should
I be confining myself only to things that were known or published after Hague
grew up?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Moving on, Hague says: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Now he takes a swing at Gerald O'Neill. Or, more correctly, he takes a
swing at Don Davis for his famous illustrations of O'Neill colonies, given that
the dismissal of O'Neills entire work seems to be based entirely off aesthetics
and lifestyle - a lifestyle, by the way, that although it isn't approved of in
the Guardian, migrants literally risk their lives every day for a chance at. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Sorry, what? Let’s come back to the point, yes?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">And my point is that there is a long history of presenting life in space
as utopian, in the case of those famous illustrations at the expense of all
scientific credibility (just cut out a slice of the American natural ecosystem
and plant it in a rotating space colony). I don’t see a response to that here.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Then:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">At last we get to the meat of the objection: </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"If you want to know what to expect from colonies established by
“billionauts” such as Musk or Jeff Bezos, perhaps ask their employees in Amazon
warehouses or the Twitter offices. Many advocates for space settlement are
“neoliberal techno-utopians”, says the astrophysicist Erika Nesvold, who sell
it on a libertarian ticket as an escape from the pesky regulation of
governments. The space industry doesn’t talk much about such things. As Nesvold
discovered when she began quizzing commercial space companies in 2016, ethical
questions such as human rights or environmental protection in space typically
meet with a response of “we’ll worry about that later”. The idea is to get
there first." </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague says:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Ball presents Nesvold as an authority, and not an activist, which is
what she is - and gives her a platform to basically label "bad"
labels on the enterprise</span></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">So anyone who has a view different from his (even when articulated
carefully, calmly and in a deeply informed way, as in Nesvold’s book) is dealt
with not by addressing those arguments but by dismissing said person as a mere “activist”.
You see what I mean about longing to see a more rational debate?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">He says: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It’s not explained why space colonies being libertarian is bad, nor why
they would be run like Amazon warehouses. This is just a collection of boo
words for the particular audience of this paper. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I think Hague is having a lot of trouble distinguishing the piece from
the platform in which is appears, with which he clearly has lots of issues. In
any case, if a powerful person has an ambition to establish an enterprise, I’d
be curious to see how they have run other enterprises in the past. Call me naïve,
but I just have a hunch we might learn something from it. Sure, I can’t speak
for anyone but myself when I say that I’d not want to be living on Mars under
the aegis and whim of a Musk or a Bezos. I just feel governance is an issue
some might like to think about.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague quotes me thus:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"If the notion of a “colonial transporter” gave you a twinge of
unease, you’re not alone. Associations of space exploration with colonialism
have existed ever since it was first mooted in the 17th century. Some advocates
ridicule the comparison: there are surely no indigenous people to witness the
arrival of the first crewed spaceships on Mars. But the analogy gets stronger
when thinking about how commercial incentives might distort rights afforded to
the settlers (Musk has floated the idea of loans to get to Mars City being paid
off by work on arrival), or how colonial powers waged proxy wars in far-off
lands. And if the argument is that these settlements would exist to save us
from catastrophe on Earth, the question of who gets to go becomes more acute.
So far it has been the rich and famous." </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Then he says:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Correctly sensing he may be ridiculed for this argument, Ball tries to
preempt this but then continues to make equally ridiculous arguments, simply
because the word 'colonialism' is bad, and anybody using it must be planning to
become the next East India Company. Reasoning by analogy is not valid. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I’m curious to know what is “ridiculous” here, but there’s no indication,
so it is hard to know what to say. Personally, I think history has things we
can learn from, so it is worth heeding it. I think that’s probably quite a
common view among historians.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hague goes on to quotes me:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the “Columbus” comparison,
however, is that it encourages us to believe that space is just another ocean
to sail, with the lure of virgin lands to draw us. But other worlds are not the
New World; space is harsh beyond any earthly comparison, and it will be
constantly trying to kill you. Quite aside from the cold and airlessness, the
biggest danger is the radiation: streams of charged, high-energy particles,
from which we are shielded by the Earth’s magnetic field. Currently, a crewed
mission to Mars would be prohibited by the permitted radiation limits for
astronauts. We don’t have any solutions to that problem." </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">He says: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In the single point where he makes any kind of technical argument, Ball
immediately fumbles. It is not, primarily, the Earth's magnetic field that
shields us from cosmic rays,</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Well you know what, I think I’ll go with what NASA says <a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3105/earths-magnetosphere-protecting-our-planet-from-harmful-space-energy/" target="_blank">here</a>, as they
actually send people into space.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">…and they are not as lethal as he believes. If they were, every
geomagnetic reversal would be a mass extinction event. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The possibility of mass extinctions associated with geomagnetic
reversals has in fact long been discussed – many palaeo scientists anticipate
that this might happen. But it has been hard to assess, not least because it is
<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-010-9659-6" target="_blank">not clear to what extent</a> the geomagnetic field really does drop to nearly zero
during a reversal.
Some studies suggest that, while the field rearranges, it remains substantial enough
to provide a fair degree of shielding. NASA again: “</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">During a pole reversal, the
magnetic field weakens, but it doesn’t completely disappear. The magnetosphere,
together with Earth’s atmosphere, still continue to protect our planet from
cosmic rays and charged solar particles, though there may be a small amount of
particulate radiation that makes it down to Earth’s surface.</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">” During the
latest reversal 780,000 years ago, the magnetopause may still have existed a
considerable distance from the Earth’s surface. It’s also been <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2004/23/aagb091/aagb091.html" target="_blank">suggested</a> that
the solar wind could itself induce magnetic shielding from cosmic rays in the
absence of a geomagnetic field.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Humanity has, in fact, survived many of them. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The last known geomagnetic reversal was that one 780,000 years ago. The
earliest known Homo sapiens fossils are around 315,000 years old. But whatever.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">What does protect us is the thick atmosphere of this planet, and in that
we see not only is the solution known it is blindingly obvious - mass. A few
metres of rock on a Martian habitat will block the radiation, as will to some
extent the atmosphere of the planet. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Yes, there is talk of building permanent settlements inside caves on
Mars, or in empty lava tubes on the Moon. It’s a good sci-fi scenario:
underground cities that never see the light. I’m not envisaging that those
stories would be very rosy ones, but we can make up whatever we like, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">As for NASAs limits - he does not cite a source so its hard to tell
where he is getting this from, </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Maybe he should read Erika’s book instead of just criticizing it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">but its contingent on travel time, shielding, and risk tolerance. The
danger is not of some horrific case of radiation poisoning - its a small
increase in the lifetime risk of getting cancer. Despite sounding scary,
radiation is not really the top technical hurdle. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Again, I think I’ll go with NASA on this: in terms of health risks, it
is <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-020-00124-6" target="_blank">absolutely seen as one of the major risks</a>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I don’t want to be uncharitable, but it does rather seem as if Hague is
just making confident-sounding sciencey assertions that are out of touch with
the facts, and assuming he’ll sound more authoritative than a “Guardian writer”.
I do think there’s an interesting discussion to be had around, and responses to
be made to, the points raised in my piece. But I’m afraid it’s not to be found
here.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-48396650709804595242022-08-07T12:03:00.002-07:002022-08-07T12:06:20.838-07:00The Spectator's review of The Book of Minds: a response<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">There is a <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-exactly-do-we-mean-by-the-mind-" target="_blank">review</a>
of <i>The Book of Minds</i> in <i>The Spectator</i> by philosopher Jane
O’Grady. I have some thoughts about it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">First, it is always nice to have
a review that engages with the book rather than just describes it. And O’Grady
says some nice things about it. So I’m not unhappy with the review.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But it does, I must say, seem to
me a little odd, and occasionally wrong or misleading.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Odd primarily because it talks
about so little of the book itself. But is more an exegesis on the reviewer’s
thoughts. The review focuses almost entirely on the question of definitions of
mind and what these imply for putative “machine minds”. There is barely any
mention of the substance of the book: the account of how to regard the human
mind, the discussion of the minds of animals and other living things, thoughts
on alien minds, and a chapter on free will. I suspect the reader of the review
would struggle to get any real sense of what the book is about.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In terms of what the review does
cover, there are some misrepresentations both of what the book says and of
thinking in the respective fields.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">O’Grady says that in defining a
mind thus – “For an entity to have a mind, there must be something it is like
to be that entity” – I am reprising philosopher Thomas Nagel, essentially
implying that I am using Nagel’s definition of mind. But I am not. Nagel did
not define mind this way, and I never suggest he did. So the suggestion that I have somehow
misunderstood Nagel in this respect is way off beam.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Besides, I suggest my definition
as a basis to work with and nothing more. I state explicitly that it is neither
scientifically nor philosophically rigorous – because no definition of mind is.
One can propose other definitions with equal justification. But the key point
of the book is that thinking about a space of possible minds obviates any
gatekeeping: we do not need to obsess or argue about whether something has a
mind (by some definition) or not (although we can reasonably suppose that some
things do (us) and some don’t (a screwdriver)). Rather, we can ask about the
qualities that then seem to define mind: does this entity have some of them,
and to what degree? We can find a place for machines and organisms of all sorts
in this space, even if we decide that their degree of mindedness is
infinitesimally small. In other words, we avoid the kind of philosophical
tendentiousness in this review.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">O’Grady writes: “To use quiddity
of consciousness as a criterion of mindedness, as Ball does, excludes machines
at the outset.”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">This is simply wrong. My working
definition only excludes today’s machines, which is consistent with what most
people who design and build and theorize about those machines think. I do not
exclude the possibility of conscious machines, but I explain why they will not
simply arise by making today’s AI more powerful along the same lines. It will
require something else, not just a faster deep-learning algorithm trained on
more data. That is the general view today, and it is important to make it
clear. To make a conscious machine – a genuine “machine mind” in my view – is a
tremendous challenge, and we barely know yet how to begin it. But it would be
foolish, given the present state of knowledge, to exclude the possibility, and
I do not.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Of course, one could adopt
another definition of “mind” that will encompass today’s computers too (and
presumably then also smartphones and other devices). That’s fine, except that I
don’t think most AI researchers or computer scientists would regard it as
advisable.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">O’Grady writes: “Nor are
‘internal models of the world’ – another ‘feature of mind’ Ball suggests – open
to outside observation.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But they are. That is precisely
what some of the careful work on animal cognition aiming to do: to go beyond
mere observation of responses by figuring out what kind of reasoning the animal
is using. It is difficult work, and hard to be sure we have made the right
deductions. But it seems to be possible.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">She asks: “And how could any
method at all be used to discern if matter is suffused with mind (panpsychism)?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Indeed – that would be very hard
to prove, and I’m not sure how one could do it. I don’t rule out that some
ingenious method could be devised to test the idea, but it’s not obvious to me
what that might be, and it is one of the shortcomings of the hypothesis: it is
not obviously testable or falsifiable. This does not mean it is wrong, as I
say.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">She asks: “But is the mind,
rather than being any sort of entity, nothing other than what it does
(functionalists’ solution)?” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Well, that’s a possible view. Is
it O’Grady’s? I simply can’t tell – in that paragraph, I can’t figure out if
she is talking about the positions I espouse (and which she quotes), or
challenging them. Can you? At any rate, I mention the functionalist position as
one among others.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">O’Grady writes: “He
misunderstands the Turing Test. ‘Thinking’ and ‘intelligence’ in Turing’s usage
(which is now everyone’s) are not mere <i>faute-de-mieux</i> substitutes but
the real thing. The boundaries of mind have (exactly as Ball urges) been
extended, so that mind-terms which once needed to be used as metaphors, or
placed in inverted commas, are treated as literal.”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">This is untrue. We have no agreed
definition of “thinking” or “intelligence”. Many in AI question whether
“artificial intelligence” is really a good term for the field at all. What
Turing meant by these terms has been debated extensively, and still is. But
you’ll have to search hard to find anyone knowledgeable about AI today who
thinks that today’s algorithms can be said to “think” in the same sense (let
alone in the same way) as we “think”, or to be “intelligent” in the same way as
we are “intelligent”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">O’Grady
writes: “Minds are themselves declared to be kinds of computer.” Yes, and as I
point out in the book, that view has also been strongly criticized.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">She concludes that “Ball gives us
an enjoyable ride through different perspectives on the mind but seems unaware
of how jarringly incommensurate these are, nor that, by enlarging the
parameters of mind, we have simultaneously shrunk them.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I simply don’t understand what she
is trying to say here. I discuss different perspectives on some issues –
biopsychism, say, or consciousness – and try to indicate their strengths and
weaknesses. I’ve truly no idea what O’Grady intends by these “jarringly
incommensurate” differences. I explain that there <i>are</i> differences
between many of these views. I’m totally in the dark about what point is being
made here, and I suspect the reader will be. As for “by enlarging the
parameters of mind, we have simultaneously shrunk them” – well, do you catch
the meaning of that? I’m afraid I don’t.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The basic problem, it seems to
me, is that O’Grady has definite views on what minds are, and what machine
minds can be, and my book does not seem to her to reflect those – or rather,
she cannot find them explicitly stated in the book (although in all honesty I’m
still unclear what O’Grady <i>does</i> think in this regard). And therein lies
the danger – for she seems to be presenting her view as the correct one, even
though a myriad of other views exist. Of course, I anticipated this potential
problem, because the philosophy of mind can be very dogmatic even though (or
perhaps precisely because) it enjoys no consensus view. What I have attempted
to do in my book is to lay out some of the range of thinking in this area, and
to assess strengths and weaknesses as well as to be frank about what we don’t
know or agree about. To do so is inevitably to invite disagreement from anyone
who thinks we already have the answers. Yet again I think this illustrates the
pitfalls of books written by specialists on topics that are still very much
work in progress (and both the science and the philosophy of mind are surely
that). There is no shortage of books claiming to “explain” the mind, and many
have very interesting things to say. But we don’t know which of them, if any,
is correct, or even on the way to being correct. What I have attempted to do
instead is to suggest a framework for thinking about minds, and moreover one
that does not need to be too dogmatic about what a mind is or where it might be
found. I hope readers will read it with that perspective in mind.</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-85524178190600916522022-06-04T14:51:00.001-07:002022-06-04T14:51:55.671-07:00What do we mean when we say that science is political?<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">In <a href="https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/science-is-political?s=r" target="_blank">commenting</a>
on the commonly voiced view that “science is political”, Stuart Ritchie makes
an excellent point: we must ask “And then what?” Stuart lists some of the
reasons why the claim is made, and agrees with all of them (as do I). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Where he and I disagree
is with “then what?” Stuart says “</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I don’t think the people who always tell you that
“science is political” are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun
of it. They want to make one of two points.” Either they are saying “It’s
inevitable; just accept it”, or “It’s actually a <i>good</i> thing.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Now, in fact
Stuart himself effectively agrees that it <i>is</i> inevitable – and given his
list, it is hard to see how he could say otherwise. But he says this doesn’t
mean we just have to shrug and say “This is the best we can do.” I think he is
right, insofar as we can and should seek to eliminate the biases – both
cognitive and ideological – that sneak into efforts to gain objective, reliable
knowledge, in ways that Stuart himself has written admirably about.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">But I fear Stuart
has fallen into that same trap. In wanting to make his point, he is succumbing
to a subjective belief without checking out whether it is so. I believe I am
one of the people <a href="https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/science-is-political/4013986.article" target="_blank">quoted anonymously</a>
(via <i>Chemistry World</i>) as saying that science is political - but do I
really want to make one of those two points? No, I don’t.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Rather, I want us
to recognize <i>and examine</i> the ways in which science becomes political.
One of the most insidious of these is via those who seek to defend the status
quo from allegedly “politicized” tampering. That’s the case for the <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475" target="_blank">article</a>
by chemist Anna Krylov that prompted my piece for Chemistry World, as well as <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c02017" target="_blank">thispiece</a> for the
journal in which Krylov’s article was published. Krylov’s piece is riddled with
ideology, for example in her suggestion that reconsidering and updating
scientific language and the individuals we choose to celebrate when social
mores change is an impulse that comes from “</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">extreme left ideology” and amounts
to “spend[ing] the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting
history.”</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> Her piece has been
applauded by some who imply is that science is being “politicized” if its
institutions implement affirmative-action programs to improve diversity. Such views
assume that the situation we have now is simply the natural order – a totally
apolitical state of affairs that must resist any politicized interference. How
absurd, they say, to suggest, say, that Imperial College London was so named
because the entire South Kensington complex of which it was a part was
constructed from the fruits of an empire built on exploitation! How absurd to
suggest that the fact that Imperial has five Black academics out of a total of
1600 has anything to do with social inequalities with deep historical roots, or
indeed with the message that the very name of the college, or walls bedecked
with image of white men, sends to people of colour who might consider applying
there! Why should we imagine that the race and gender ratios in the sciences
are anything other than the natural optimum for the progress of science? And so
on. I wish people who have such views would expend some effort talking to
students and staff of colour who are affected by this heritage. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I have no doubt
that Stuart will see the absurdity of all that too. My impression is that he
would regard efforts to correct these injustices as ways of making science less
political, in the sense of being less shaped and compromised by the political
and social injustices of the past. If so, I’d agree. Which is precisely why I
felt it was important to call out those who wish to sustain a highly politicized
status quo on the grounds that it is already somehow “apolitical”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The pandemic has
surely shown us how political science sometimes <i>has</i> to be. I suspect few
would argue that scientists have a duty, especially in such extreme
circumstances, to offer their advice to policy-makers. In the UK at least, some
scientists have taken that to mean that they must offer such advice as
objectively and accurately as they can, and accept this as the sole extent of
their formal obligations. But it has become clear that, the moment science
walks onto the political stage, it is inherently political.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">For example,
scientists were asked to provide modelling forecasts of how the pandemic was
likely to play out if various policy options were implemented. They <i>could </i>have
taken the view that their duty extends only to performing such modelling as
accurately and reliably as possible, and conveying the findings clearly and
honestly. This is certainly essential. But as members of the Covid modelling
advisory have explained, they only modelled the scenarios they were asked to
model. This does not – and did not – necessarily provide a scientifically
satisfactory answer to the question the modelling was supposed to address. To
predict the consequences of relaxing restrictions, say, it would be necessarily
also to model the scenario in which they were not relaxed. This was not done,
because it was not asked for. Should the scientists have anyway modelled that
case and published the results with the rest? That might have been seen as a
political act. But to <i>not</i> do so – and more generally, to not model all
reasonable <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>policy options – could
compromise the scientific rigour of the process. That too is a political
decision.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">What is the poor
modeller to do? Damned if they do, damned if they don’t! But this isn’t the
right way to see it. Rather, involvement in the political process comes means
that “the science” is necessarily political – there is no longer an
“objective”, apolitical position.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The same applied
when the news broke of government adviser Dominic Cummings having broken
lockdown rules with his Durham trip in March 2020. On that occasion, the
government chief scientists were questioned by reporters for their views, and
declined to comment on the grounds that they had “no desire to get involved in
politics”. But Cummings’ violation of the rules was not purely a political
matter, for it would obviously have implications for trust in governance and
compliance with lockdown measures. By failing to affirm – as deputy chief
medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam later did – that the rules applied to
everyone, and that by implication Cummings should not have broken them, Chris
Whitty and Patrick Vallance were making a choice with implications for public
health. Their silence was, in other words, political too. Whether it was the
right or wrong decision is another discussion; the point is that they did not
have the luxury of an objective, apolitical position, as they seemed to
believe.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Is it, indeed, really "apolitical" for the science advisers to remain silent in the light of the revelation that the prime minister, via the culture of governance that we now know he encouraged, was essentially playing them for fools all the time they were stressing the importance of observing lockdown rules? Will that silence truly serve the long-term status of the scientific advisory roles? <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Very well then:
this is pandemic science, and hard to imagine it could ever be free from politics.
(That’s to say: some evidently <i>do</i> imagine this, but it is not hard to
see that it is mistaken.) But surely most science is free from politics, or
should be? The mass of the Higgs boson doesn’t depend on your political
ideology!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Indeed not, and
thank goodness. Some who fear the idea that science is political seem to worry
that the Higgs mass might be at risk of being revised to conform to Maoist
principles or some such. But here’s a real question. What if the CERN teams
that tracked down the Higgs boson by 2012 had ceased collaborating with any
Russian scientists on political grounds, slowing down progress to their goal?
An outrageous thought? CERN has indeed just taken such a decision in the wake
of the invasion of Ukraine. Was this right, or should science stay aloof from
politics? The answer is not self-evident; I certainly do not profess to know
what is right in that case. Again, a decision either way is political – because
science happens in societies, and societies are political. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Research on
climate change needs to be conducted as accurately and as free from bias and
political ideology as possible. But what happens if its finding suggest that we
face catastrophe if we do not significantly change our behaviour and energy
economy, and yet political leaders ignore the warnings? Do scientists shrug and
say “well, we did our part of the job as best we could”? One thing they
absolutely must not do, of course, is to change their figures to make them even
more alarming. But everyone knows that the impact of one’s research findings
can be made more or less impactful by how they are presented. Are climate
scientists right if they look for ways to make the dire implications of their
work more evident and perhaps more alarming to the public?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">The same is true
for any scientific issue with political implications – embryo research and
abortion, say, or statisticians speaking to issues of gun regulation. As
climate change has shown, a bare and dispassionate presentation of the facts
doesn’t necessarily have much impact. What then are the scientists to do to
make their voice heard? Obviously, any distortion of facts, no matter in how
noble a cause, ceases to be science. But should a scientist marshal the
evidence to discredit an ideology that habitually traduces them? Again, I don’t
claim to know the answer. But I do know that the question speaks to the broader
responsibilities of science and scientists, beyond the simple (in principle)
duty to get the facts as right as possible.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I don’t imagine
Stuart disagrees with any of this, just as I fully support his suggestion that
we must strive to make the results of scientific research as free from bias
(including political) as possible. But that is the easy part. I don’t mean it
is easy to do – far from it. But it is easy to see what the objective is, and
how we can try to make it “as apolitical as it can be”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">It is all the rest
that is the problem: how the scientific workforce is recruited, selected,
promoted and celebrated; how we choose which scientific problems to work on (I
don’t see how medical science can ever be free from political factors, for
example in the choices of what gets prioritized); how scientists think about
their social responsibilities beyond the narrow confines of the technical
quality of their work – the uses to which it might be put, or how it might be
abused, say; how science plays out within a capitalistic, market-driven
political economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I am not
suggesting that we must shrug and accept that all this stuff is irredeemably
political, far less proclaiming on whether this is a good or bad thing. The
questions “Politics in science: more or less? Good or bad?” don’t seem to me to
be the right ones. We must simply examine how politics impinges on science (and
vice versa), be aware of it and not in denial about it, and think about whether
or not we are happy with the answers, and how to change them if not. My big
fear is that scientists, conducting their research as objectively and
transparently as possible, tell themselves “Ah, <i>now</i> we’re truly
apolitical, and free to just get on with our important work!” I wrote a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/06/serving-reich-physics-philip-ball-review" target="_blank">book</a>
about where, in the worst case, that attitude can lead. It was called <i>Serving
the Reich</i>.</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-44998210099140475022021-12-14T13:44:00.002-08:002021-12-14T13:45:32.600-08:00The long shadow of Covid: a reply to Sunetra Gupta<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">It’s no surprise
that Sunetra Gupta “view[s] the legacy of coronavirus from a different
perspective” to me, as she writes in her letter (see below) in the latest issue
of Prospect in response to my <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-long-soshadow-of-covid-19-coronavirus-essay" target="_blank">article</a>.
But why is this so? Let’s see.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">She says that the
effectiveness of lockdowns and mask-wearing is “very much a matter of debate
(to put it mildly)”.</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">In a sense that is
true: she and others who share her views continue to debate the issue.
Scientific studies seem to present a fairly clear picture, however. For
example, <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30201-7/fulltext" target="_blank">this study</a> of the Italian lockdown, which gradually increased “in space, time and
intensity” concludes that “</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It appears that the less rigid lockdown led to an
insufficient decrease in mobility to reverse an outbreak such as COVID-19. With
a tighter lockdown, mobility decreased enough to bring down transmission
promptly below the level needed to sustain the epidemic.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Or take <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32034-1/fulltext" target="_blank">this study</a> of the effectiveness of lockdowns in France, which concludes that “</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Lockdown
appears to have been successful not only in alleviating the burden on the
intensive care units of the two most severely affected regions of France, but
also in preventing uncontrolled epidemics in other regions.”</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Or check out <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-lockdowns-idUSKBN2842WS" target="_blank">this factcheck</a> from Reuters in November of last year which summarizes the clear
evidence that lockdowns save lives. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32153-X/fulltext" target="_blank">This study</a> of the “scientific consensus on the Covid-19 pandemic” meanwhile
considers the alternative strategy preferred by Gupta: “</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">allowing a
large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the
vulnerable.” It says “Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of
infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will
eventually protect the vulnerable.”</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But would that work? The authors of the study above are quite clear: “This
is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">That view is
echoed by Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and a member of the
Scientific Advisory Group on Emergences, who calls out the fallacy of “focused
protection” in his book with Anjana Ahuja, <i>Spiked</i>.</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">In short, the “focused
protection” strategy it scientifically discredited. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t even make sense even in its own
terms. Simply put: if shielding everyone through lockdowns has resulted in
150,000 deaths in the UK, how then would shielding just a subset of the
population result in fewer? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">And who, in any
case, do we “shield”? Gupta’s mantra of “protecting the vulnerable” is
meaningless when we don’t even know who the vulnerable are. Sure, we know that
older people are at higher risk, as are people with certain health conditions;
given that these include, say, asthma and obesity, already that includes a
substantial proportion of the population. But of course thousands of people
died, and many more are suffering the effects of long Covid, who fall into
neither of these categories. As we come to understand more about variations in
the immune response to Covid, it might gradually become more clear who else is
vulnerable to severe disease and who is not. But at the moment we have very
little idea about that. So were all of us who were not in those first two high-risk
categories supposed to just take our chances and hope for the best?</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Gupta does the usual
Great Barrington trick of emphasizing the problems of lockdown – which everyone
acknowledges – without mentioning the downsides of the alternative. Yes,
lockdowns of course take a terrible toll – on the economy and livelihoods, on
mental health and general well-being. But death, illness and ongoing poor
health from Covid do too. Pandemics are disruptive. Is the disruption greater
when businesses shut down, production declines and supply chains are pared back,
and hospitals have to postpone operations because of lockdowns, or when all
these things happen because the virus is allowed to spread, huge numbers of
people are sick, hospitals are overwhelmed, and people are terrified? Has Gupta
even considered that equation?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">It is hard to
generalize about the economic impacts of different pandemic strategies – except
that one trend does seem clear. Those countries that mounted an effective
response, locking down early and rigorously, generally recovered faster and
suffered less economic damage, as well as fewer deaths.</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Gupta’s comment
about people sitting “at home on their laptops sipping Chablis” is grotesque.
It’s certainly true that the stresses of lockdown fell very unevenly on
society, and that those who are most socioeconomically disadvantaged generally
felt it most keenly – as indeed they were also at greater risk of catching and
dying from Covid. That Gupta feels the answer to this is to mock all those who
advocated for lockdown as comfortable and complacent, rather than facing up to
how the pandemic has exposed the broader inequities of social inequality (which
the present government has done nothing to address), perhaps tells us all we
need to know. In any case, no one wants or likes lockdowns – they are an
emergency measure of last resort, not something craved by the Chablis-sipping
classes for God knows what reason. They cause problems for everyone (apart,
perhaps, for the mega-rich).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">I’m not sure what
Gupta means by saying that SARS-CoV-2 “was never any more virulent than the
other seasonal coronaviruses”. At face value this sounds like the naked misinformation
of “it’s just like the flu” (or indeed just like the kinds of cold that some other
coronaviruses cause). I’m assuming she doesn’t mean this, because that really
would be utter nonsense – but then I’ve no idea what she does mean. Coronaviruses
evidently have a wide range of virulence, from those mild seasonal ones to the
terribly lethal SARS and MERS. SARS-CoV-2 seems to fall somewhere in between
the two – fatally so, for this means that unlike SARS it can easily spread
widely (and asymptomatically), while still being capable of killing millions.
And yes, it can mutate to partly evade infection- and vaccine-induced immunity –
which is one reason why the “herd immunity” approach won’t work, and why, as we
are now seeing, it is a very bad idea to let it spread far and wide.</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">You might expect
that someone who has been so wrong about so many crucial issues during the
pandemic – claiming in April 2020 that we were already getting close to herd
immunity, in May that the pandemic was on its way out, or in July that there wouldn’t
be a second wave – would be somewhat chastened now. But perhaps instead it must
be for the rest of us to heed that past record and stop listening.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><i>Here's the letter from Professor Gupta:</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4mwAuKZSkiWOdyCpBDPrLJ0dtdud4aaz42jC73xq4xyYEutsHCVrRB8RPBl27pallzw5zCaiD7UH4BSHpTL1q4XC8-yINdnZVUr_dOx6OwJANvZa5EiKVpG91-PyMJob1Kv1K6BFG_qlg-KFdU6StpYCt2VDp6RW5C82INp2WA7sXYhZE2Q=s2738" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2738" data-original-width="731" height="768" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4mwAuKZSkiWOdyCpBDPrLJ0dtdud4aaz42jC73xq4xyYEutsHCVrRB8RPBl27pallzw5zCaiD7UH4BSHpTL1q4XC8-yINdnZVUr_dOx6OwJANvZa5EiKVpG91-PyMJob1Kv1K6BFG_qlg-KFdU6StpYCt2VDp6RW5C82INp2WA7sXYhZE2Q=w204-h768" width="204" /></a></i></div><i><br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBJwe_YvHWyQJPcBYyGbY4fq0nxVXXWBom33k-QihbeITvFVqhsUuwW4zUAIFBaI-6ir4qgLqe2PQujk8sdB4rG1_NlZDZL7CyQhDAl83b8BOAS_fp4MyiZCOdjVyBeQ-L7V7qO9AYH9FO78Iv57FIXdTjthkHUXUuciqA8I8agI5C4Is6qw=s909" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="909" data-original-width="718" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBJwe_YvHWyQJPcBYyGbY4fq0nxVXXWBom33k-QihbeITvFVqhsUuwW4zUAIFBaI-6ir4qgLqe2PQujk8sdB4rG1_NlZDZL7CyQhDAl83b8BOAS_fp4MyiZCOdjVyBeQ-L7V7qO9AYH9FO78Iv57FIXdTjthkHUXUuciqA8I8agI5C4Is6qw=w218-h276" width="218" /></a></div><br /></i> <br /><p></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-87450319921903722842021-08-29T13:11:00.001-07:002021-08-29T13:11:57.458-07:00More on the "politicization of science"<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal">Biomedical scientist Andreas Bikfalvi has <a href="https://counterweightsupport.com/2021/08/22/on-the-politicization-of-science-anna-krylov-hit-the-nail-on-the-head/" target="_blank">responded</a>
to my <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c02017" target="_blank">own</a> <a href="https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/science-is-political/4013986.article" target="_blank">responses</a>
to Anna Krylov’s <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475" target="_blank">article</a>
in the <i>Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters</i>. So here is another round of the
debate. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bikfalvi criticizes me mainly for “largely miss[ing] the
points” of Krylov’s piece. He says “Nowhere in Krylov’s viewpoint is the issue
of improving diversity in science discussed.” I find it hard to figure out if
this is disingenuous, or if Bikfalvi is arguing in good faith but simply does
not understand his own terms of reference. Krylov criticizes an “ideology” that
“cancels” Newton for being white, and which calls for “decentering whiteness”,
“decolonizing” the curriculum, and removing from use terms associated with a
racist past or that are deemed to promote racism and colonialism. We can argue
about the rights and wrongs of particular cases in that enterprise; personally
I suspect will not be hard to find examples where that effort has been taken
into rather fanciful territory. Parading such extreme examples in order to
argue a general case is, however, a strategy better suited to the tabloid press
than to serious discourse.*</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But part of the motivation behind such attempts to
reconsider the way we use language – a practice that has always been necessary
and important as social mores and boundaries evolve – is that there are clear
links between the lack of diversity in science (and other areas of academia)
and the unwelcome environment perceived by some people of colour, from ethnic
minorities, or women or LGBTQ people because of the way outmoded or alienating
terms persist in use. (Take, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02288-x" target="_blank">for example</a>,
the continuing technical use of “Causasian” as a racial group, which originated
within a racist assumed racial hierarchy.**) In my article I mentioned the
example of the “dude wall”: a wall covered with images of illustrious alumni of
the past, all of them white men. Bikfalvi, and I believe Krylov, seem to me to
be arguing that the gender and race of those scientists should be irrelevant,
and that this sort of situation is therefore fine. Plenty of women and people
of colour will disagree. So yes, of course these are matters relevant to
diversity and inclusion in science.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So too is the problem of racial or sexual harassment – a
problem <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02024-5" target="_blank">recently shown</a> to be rife in the astronomy community,
although that is by no means unique. Bikfalvi quotes Yves Gingras, who has
criticized the NSF’s policy of potentially withdrawing funding from scientists
found guilty of sexual harassment. (I have to wonder why Bikfalvi does not
explain that this is what he means by “[inappropriate] social behaviour”.) We
must assume that Bikfalvi is, then, unhappy at seeing scientists seriously
penalized for engaging in behaviour that is known to have driven some women out
of their research positions and sometimes out of science altogether. I guess we
must assume that he feels the same way about racial harassment – that, perhaps,
it’s a terrible thing but should not for a moment become a reason why
scientists who perpetrate it should be inhibited from continuing their precious
science. And if science loses some women or people of colour from its ranks as
a result, I suppose that is the price we must pay for genius.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No, please do not tell me this is not an issue about
diversity. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bikfalvi, like Krylov, is in fact deeply policitized in his
comments. Krylov, for example, suggests we have two choices:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest
of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing
science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can
uphold a key principle of democratic society—the free and uncensored exchange
of ideas—and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing
attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To suggest that a call to examine the biases that evidently
exist (as shown in the studies I cited, and many more) in the demographic and
hiring practices of science is to “succumb to extreme left ideology” is absurd
and offensive. Krylov is prepared to offer no middle way: for example, to
re-examine the “scientific idols” of the past, as I did for Peter Debye (and
other physicists working in Nazi Germany) in my book <i>Serving the Reich</i>,
in a way that does not seek to simplistically condemn them with presentist
purism, but instead to honestly and even sympathetically recognize their
personal and political failings. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Similarly, Bikfalvi asks whether I want “want racial
discrimination based on the importation of critical race theory (CRT) in the
medical praxis or… a socially egalitarian evidence-based medicine preserved?”
This invocation of the much contested CRT (which I never mentioned myself) is
itself thoroughly politicized and at odds with his posture of objectivity. Of
course I believe “socially egalitarian evidence-based medicine” would be a good
thing. But sadly, there is unequivocal evidence that medicine today suffers
from racial biases, as for example documented in Angela Saini’s book <i>Superior</i>
– or indeed, as made abundantly clear in the Covid-19 pandemic. This is not
some pernicious trait of medicine – it has the same roots as the racism, bias
and discrimination that exists in our societies generally. I believe it would
be a good thing to acknowledge that, and to tackle it. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bikfalvi’s article (like Krylov’s) is filled with these
false choices. “For instance, should a professor attempt to indoctrinate their
mentees (students and post-docs) and transform them into activists, or should
the professor instead teach them how to think?” Well now, let me think about
that difficult choice! Perhaps we might ask too, for example, “Should
professors teach their students to be Marxists who banish from consideration
any ideas that do not conform to their rigid extreme-left ideology, or should
they teach them to be good scientists?” I genuinely don’t understand how anyone
can expect this mode of debate to be taken seriously; it is, in fact,
profoundly anti-intellectual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bikfalvi then asserts that I “want to imbue science with a
homogeneous political ideology”. I am not sure which ideology he means, but I
suppose I must assume this is the “extreme left ideology” that Krylov seems to
perceive in any effort to re-examine the barriers that exist to improving
diversity in science. It is total nonsense, but a kind of dog-whistle nonsense
attuned to a particular audience, with whom I see it has already resonated. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Let me, though, answer one of these contrived questions
Bikfalvi poses. “Should scientists be judged on their scientific merits alone,
or “cancelled” when failings — as judged by deviance from contemporary moral
values — occur?” No and no. Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For this is of course a ridiculous as well as an ambiguous
question, which evidently doesn’t present two mutually incompatible options. Bikfalvi,
like Krylov, is blurring two separate issues here. In her original article,
Krylov says:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Particularly relevant is Merton’s principle of
universality, which states that claims to truth are evaluated in terms of
universal or impersonal criteria, and not on the basis of race, class, gender,
religion, or nationality. Simply put, we should evaluate, reward, and
acknowledge scientific contributions strictly on the basis of their
intellectual merit and not on the basis of personal traits of the scientists or
a current political agenda.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But the second claim is not Merton’s principle, “simply put”.
It is entirely different. Merton is talking about “claims to truth”; Krylov is
talking not just about evaluating” but “rewarding” scientific contributions –
presumably by naming conventions, memorials, commemorations, icons and
hagiographies, and all the traditional paraphernalia that is surplus to “claims
to truth” but which the scientific community has for some reason chosen to
adorn itself with.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Should we, say, deny that the Stark effect is “true” because
Stark was a Nazi? I won’t dignify a question that silly (which I hope is not
the queston Bikfalvi intended to ask) with an answer. Should we judge Stark as
a person because he supported Hitler and was virulently antisemitic? Yes, I
believe we are justified in doing so. Should we honour Stark by naming a moon
crater after him, on the grounds that he made an important scientific
discovery? I would like to see Bikfalvi’s answer to that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The IAU has <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/astronomists-unknowingly-dedicated-moon-craters-to-nazis-will-the-next-historical-reckoning-be-at-cosmic-level" target="_blank">made its own decision</a>
on the matter, which is: “Oops, no we shouldn’t, but we didn’t realise he was a
Nazi.” Is the IAU’s renaming of Stark crater a “cancelling of Stark”? If so,
Bikfalvi should also be petitioning to have the Lenard Institute at Heidelberg,
named after Stark’s fellow Nazi Philipp Lenard, reinstated. Will he do so? If
anyone were to be calling for Stark’s and Lenard’s Nobel prizes to be
rescinded, or for the “Stark effect” to be expunged from textbooks, that would
be more controversial – and I would not support it, even though it pains me to see
Stark commemorated in that way. What I want is for Stark’s past to be better
known (and not euphemized in the way Krylov did it), so that people don’t again
make the mistake the IAU recognizes it made. And I dislike the way science
fetishizes its individuals with all this naming, which, as I said in my
article, seems to me to run counter to the spirit of science. We have to live
with (and debate) the dilemmas of the past; it seems foolish to create new
dilemmas for the future. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Should Einstein be cancelled because of his disparaging
remarks in his private diary about the Chinese?”, Bikfalvi asks (implicitly, of
me). Well, he could have just taken the trouble to read what I’ve <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/14/albert-einstein-genius-physics-racist-scientist" target="_blank">written</a>
about that question. (Trigger warning: contains nuance.)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The final reference to Savonarola makes me smile, in the way
Krylov’s references to Galileo and Bruno make me smile. Which is to say, I will
smile to avoid screaming at this trivialization of history. More seriously,
such abuse of history to make cheap rhetorical points seems to me an
egregiously common practice in science, and displays a shoddy attitude to
history as an intellectual discipline. I’m sorry if that seems “inappropriate
and patronizing”, but frankly it is kinder than the response such remarks will
get from historians.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">*****************************************************************</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">*Krylov cites the example of an American university
professor suspended for voicing in his class a Chinese expression with a phonic
similarity to a racial slur in English. Frankly I found that example so extreme
– even (as a student of Chinese myself) offensively so – that I wondered if it
was apocryphal. As far as I have been able to ascertain, it is not. (I
contacted the university concerned for more information, but have not been
given a response.) If the information I have found about this incident is
correct, I fully agree that it seems outrageously inappropriate to treat it as
a kind of misconduct.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">**Krylov’s comment on “quantum advantage” is another example
where we seem to be faced with a choice between attributing ignorance or bad
faith. We are invited to imagine poor quantum scientists, having invented a
perfectly innocent term, being petitioned by banner-waving critical race
theorists for having committed the crime of celebrating violence and racism.
But the truth is that those scientists themselves took a look at the political
climate developing under the Trump administration and decided – rightly in my
view – “you know what, perhaps this is not the best time to be bandying about
words like ‘supremacy’.”</p>
<p><style>p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-73149570785373180982021-05-09T11:23:00.001-07:002021-05-09T11:23:53.293-07:00The problematic themes of Modern Myths<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">In her <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/books/review/wonderworks-angus-fletcher-the-modern-myths-philip-ball.html" target="_blank">review</a> of my <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo52584433.html" target="_blank">book</a> <i>The
Modern Myths</i> in the <i>New York Times Review of Books</i>, Sophie Gee asks
why “</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">post-Enlightenment
Anglophone tales are so obsessed with themes of domination, self-reliance,
privilege and supremacy.” Of the “myths of individual power and mastery” that I
consider, and which “still exert a significant hold in the mainstream
imagination and culture”, she asks: “whose voices have they overlooked?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">These are excellent questions. I don’t pretend to have comprehensive
answers, but an interrogation of them is one of the key themes of my book.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">“Themes of domination, self-reliance, privilege and supremacy” are, as I
explain, nowhere more apparent than in the first of the modern myths I consider
in detail: <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>. In many ways this tale was Defoe’s
justification for the then-burgeoning colonialist project: it was written to
appeal to the merchant middle classes whose rising wealth and aspirations often
depended on colonial trade. James Joyce had the measure of Crusoe</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">, calling him </span><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">the
true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday… is the symbol of the subject
races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the
unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the
sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating
taciturnity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">As I write in <i>The Modern Myths</i>, “</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">The microcosmic society that Crusoe constructs on his island can be
read as a miniature version of the sovereignty that, in Defoe’s view, the
British ought to enjoy.” Crusoe is a slave-owner, growing rich from his
plantations; I say that his attitude “fits with the sense of
entitlement and hierarchy that, for Defoe and most of his contemporaries,
rendered European imperialism unproblematic.” His story shows its readers “how
an Englishman responds to adversity: with the mental, moral and intellectual
resources that his superior breeding has conferred on him.” <i>Crusoe</i> is,
in short, an apologia for empire. (Of course, it is much more than that, but
that is one of its key functions not just for its contemporaneous readers but
throughout the nineteenth century too.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Themes of Anglophone
domination and supremacy recur in many of these myths. As I explain, <i>Dracula</i>
is in some ways a supernatural recasting of the late-Victorian invasion
literature: a decadent foreigner comes to England to exploit and prey on its
people, only to be repulsed by the steadfast and noble spirit of a band of
(mostly English) Westerners. Sherlock Holmes and his doughty assistant Watson
pit English decency and ingenuity against innately corrupt foreign criminals.
Over the late Victorian myths in particular hangs the fear of degeneration
expressed in Max Nordau’s 1892 book. If, as I suggest, myths attain that status
because they are good vehicles for prevailing cultural anxieties, the
Anglophone anxieties of the fin de siècle were partly about the fragility of
empire and the need to assert a pseudo-Darwinian superiority over “lower
races”. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">They were also about
shifts in gender status: <i>Dracula</i>, for example, is pervaded with a terror
of the assertive New Woman, as exemplified by Lucy Westenra, whose wanton
waywardness is not so much induced as revealed by the Count’s bloodsucking
predations. The retribution is brutal: as I explain, her staking by the group
of men who were once her suitors has all the qualities of a retributive gang
rape; it is one of the most disturbing scenes in the novel. <i>Jekyll and Hyde</i>,
meanwhile, seethes with hints of homoerotic and homophobic anxieties (as does <i>Dracula</i>).
Myths acquire that status because of their capacity to express fears that can
barely be articulated. They might assert values of, say, self-reliance,
privilege and innate superiority conferred by race, class and gender (<i>Crusoe</i>,
<i>Holmes</i>) – but Hyde, Moriarty, and poor Lucy remind us that a mere
gossamer veil separates “us” (the bourgeois target audience) from the abyss. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">It is precisely because these
stories have become myths that these purposes can be subverted: the myth can be
seized and reinvented by and for those it overlooks. Thus we see <i>Crusoe</i>
rewritten by Michel Tournier to give Friday real agency (and make him the title
character), or used by J. M Coetzee (<i>Foe</i>) to critique the modern
remnants of colonialism; even by the late nineteenth century, the Frankenstein
narrative was being used in tales sympathetic to the suffering of Black
Americans. Even H. G. Wells’ repulsive aliens in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The War of the Worlds</i> become the victims of apartheid prejudice in
Neill Blomkamp’s <i>District 9</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">The fear in the conformist
America of the 1950s that Batman and Robin might be in a gay relationship was
satirized in the following decade by the high camp of the Adam West TV series,
winking over the heads of the children who could not understand why their
parents were either laughing or squirming at the antics of their heroes. In
today’s <i>Sherlock</i> TV series, Holmes and Moriarty can finally consummate
(even if just in fantasy) their mutual attraction, while Watson can be gently
mocked for his embarrassment at repeatedly being taken for Holmes’ lover. Today,
at last, a Black Batman in a hooded mask can turn American racism’s potent
symbol back on itself. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Here too, though, we
should resist becoming dogmatic about the “message” of a modern myth. Today it
is almost obligatory to take the monster’s side – but the rich ambivalence of
Mary Shelley’s text may be obliterated by a critical insistence that we
consider Victor Frankenstein the real monster. As Lawrence Lipking points out,
some critics are frustrated by students who steadfastly refuse to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankenstein</i> this way: “Despite the
consensus of sophisticated critics,” he writes ironically, “ordinary readers
keep looking at the wrong evidence and coming to the wrong conclusions.” Not
all readings of a myth will be equally useful or illuminating, but probably the
only “wrong” way to read them is to insist on a unique interpretation. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">You’ll find all this
discussed in my book. Modern myths are valorized because they are by their
nature versatile and protean enough to still do valid, even vital cultural
work, sometimes being reimagined to give a voice to those who they originally
ignored, denigrated or obliterated. They can’t be contained by the prejudices
that created them, and their very familiarity and cultural gravity makes an
inversion all the more potent. So yes, we should ask whose voices they
overlooked – and then find out what happens when those voices are entrusted
with the retelling.</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-44735399654138556022021-03-22T10:49:00.000-07:002021-03-22T10:49:29.756-07:00What we have seen: a year of lockdown<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that global calamity
can come in a strange and perplexing form, at the same time apocalyptic and
weirdly domestic. The numbers who have died from the coronavirus, the scenes
and reports from hospitals, mass graves, overwhelmed and decimated communities,
have the shape of eschatological science fiction. But for some of us – the
lucky ones – this meant staying at home with the spring sunshine and the
birdsong, making bread. Everything changed, and seems unlikely to revert, but
we never quite imagined that global transformation would be like what we have
seen.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that the world today
cannot persist with any stability without science, but that science cannot be
its saviour. We have seen scientists come up with the goods as never before:
understanding, tests, data, medical procedures, vaccines. If we look carefully,
what we have seen is that these things are not created overnight but become
possible only with sustained and committed support for basic scientific research.
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that there are no
technological solutions to social crises. Knowledge and know-how count for
little if the social fabric is too thin and patchy to hold them. Social crises,
especially if they involve public health, find and exploit weaknesses, most of
all those that involve inequalities of opportunity, resources, employment,
stability and safety. What we have seen is that things will get worse if these
issues do not get better, locally and globally.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that political
failings too become the flaws along which cracks will open in times of crisis.
Lies, corruption, self-interest, laziness and complacency, and sheer ineptitude
have all created such fissures. Where they are present, it does not matter how
advanced and superior you think your society is. It will crack.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that such failings do
not make much difference to political popularity. They are not reflected in the
polls. What matters much more is who controls the narrative. What we have seen is
that this is a deep problem for the ability of democracy to create good
governance. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that our habit of
mocking former ages for their delusions and superstitions is nothing more than
a projection of our own anxieties and self-deception. We have seen that we are
no less capable of and drawn to denial of what is in front of our noses, what
is undeniable, yet what is inconvenient to our worldview. Our technologies
simply become new places for delusion and fantasy to reside: in radio masts,
medicines and vaccines. Our new technologies create new channels for lies and
deceptions to spread; they create contagion at the speed of light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that powerful parts of
the media are heavily invested in and encourage voices whose entire worldview
is based on behaving as they like, not just disregarding the well-being of
others but being positively contemptuous of any imploration to do so. Such
people will lie incessantly to argue a “rational” case for their position. They
will be invited onto broadcast media and into public debates, and awarded
newspaper columns to put their “controversial” views forth, often by media
editors who share them. What we have seen is that there are powerful sectors of
the media that will prefer to see people die rather than moderate these
libertarian views. What we have seen is that they will always find maverick
scientists to support them.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that we are morally
lost if we allow political and tribal affiliations to take precedence over a
sense of decency, compassion and justice and a demand for competence. We all
have a sense of how we should like our society to be run; we can recognize that
others will have different visions and that we can debate and argue about those
differences. But if in the end our vision is not tethered a moral compass that
values fairness and respect for others, it is a mere posture.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that scientists become
political the moment they take political appointments. They will not thereafter
necessarily be able to separate scientific and technical advice and comment
from its political implications. Scientists should not accept such roles unless
they are willing to recognize this. They will fail in their duty only if they
withhold expert judgement for fear that it will have political ramifications.
What we have seen is that science and scientists too have moral obligations
beyond their professional ones.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that people are
resilient, brave, selfless, compassionate, extraordinary. They will bear
hardship and risk for the sake of others. What we have seen is that some of the
biggest dangers come from underestimating people and their readiness to help,
to heed, and to find creative solutions in the most desperate circumstances.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">What we have seen is that we will change
our lives when it becomes imperative, and that those who insist that such
change to avoid future catastrophe is impossible are wrong. What we have seen
is that we have the social capital, the ingenuity and determination to do
better than we have done so far. But only if we can find the right story, and if
we can learn from what we have seen.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-36726032322922922842021-01-12T06:25:00.000-08:002021-01-12T06:25:08.622-08:00Free will and physics: the next instalment<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">I’m
sorry that I seem to have forced Jerry Coyne to <a href="https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/01/10/philip-ball-says-that-physics-has-nothing-to-do-with-free-will-part-1/" target="_blank">write</a>
about a subject he is avowedly tired of, namely free will. But my <a href="https://physicsworld.com/a/why-free-will-is-beyond-physics/" target="_blank">piece</a> in <i>Physics World</i> inspired him to do so, if only to suggest it is all wrong.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Needless
to say, I don’t agree. I’m happy to say why, although it must be at a
regrettably even greater length, given that just about every paragraph in his
comments is misconceived.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">But
I’ll give you the short version first. If Coyne really is tired of writing
about free will, he could have saved himself a lot of effort. He could have
dropped the simple restatements of the “deterministic” case against free will
(which were my starting point), and cut all the misrepresentations of what I
said, and cut to the chase as follows:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">“I
don’t understand the scientific basis for Ball’s claim, but my hunch is that a
couple of physicists I know would disagree with it. I’ll let readers argue that
out.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">So
that’s the executive summary. Here’s the rest.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">First,
a little flavour of the kind of thing that’s to come. At the start of the
second half of his critique, Coyne says that my attacks on free will [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sic</i> – he means attack on attacks on free
will] are misguided because I “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">do not appreciate
that naturalism (determinism + quantum uncertainty) absolutely destroys the libertarian
notion of free will held by most people.” This is such a peculiar statement,
because my article was suggesting that this notion of naturalism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doesn’t</i> undermine free will. It’s not
that I don’t “appreciate” that argument; it’s that I don’t agree with it. (I’m
not sure quite what the “libertarian notion of free will held by most people”
is precisely, because I haven’t asked them.) Surely Coyne of all people knows
that convincing arguments are not simply made by declaring them correct by fiat?
Isn’t that what he lambasts religious people for doing?</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Now,
let’s get this bit out of the way: “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To say that
psychological and neurological phenomena are different from physical phenomena
is nonsense,” Coyne declares. This is the first of many plain misrepresentations
of what I say. What I say – he even quotes it! – is that psychological and
neurological phenomena are not meaningfully adjudicated by microphysics, by
which I mean theories that begin with (say) subatomic particles. This is not
the same as saying that the neural circuits involved in psychological and
behavioural phenomena are not ultimately composed of such particles. The point
of my article is to explain that distinction. As we’ll see, Coyne later admits
that he doesn’t understand the scientific arguments that underpin the
distinction. Hence my abridged version of his diatribe above.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Incidentally, Coyne alludes to
experiments that allow us to predict “via brain monitoring what someone will do
or choose.” This is presumably a reference to Libet-style experiments,
conducted since the 1980s. As he has written on this topic before, I must
assume that Coyne knows there has been a great deal of debate in the
neurobiological and philosophical literature on whether they pronounce on free
will at all. Only those who believe Coyne is correct about free will will
absolve him of all responsibility for not mentioning that fact. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Coyne
complains that I don’t define free will at the outset (although he seems oddly confident
that whatever definition I choose, it is wrong). I don’t define it because I
think it is a terrible term, which we seem lumbered with for historical
reasons. A key aim of my article is in fact to suggest it is time to jettison
the term and to talk instead about how we (and other creatures) make volitional
decisions. This is an issue for cognitive neurobiology, and others have made an
excellent start on outlining what such an endeavour might look like: for
example <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.2325" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0510" target="_blank">here</a>. I’m
not sure if Coyne knows about this work; he makes no reference to it so perhaps
I should assume he does not.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">But
is there really volitional behaviour at all, or is it all predetermined? That’s
the key. Coyne admits that we can’t predict “with complete accuracy” what
someone will do. Of course, there are lots of situations in life where a great
deal of prediction is possible, sometimes simply on statistical grounds,
sometimes on behavioural ones, and so on. No one disputes that.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">So
what do we mean by “with complete accuracy”? This is very clear. It means that,
if Coyne is right, an all-seeing deity with complete knowledge of the universe
could have predicted yesterday every action I took today, right down to, say,
the precise moments I paused in my typing to sip my tea. It was all
predetermined by the configuration of particles. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">If
that were so, the unavoidable corollary is that everything that currently
exists - including, say, the plot of <i>Bleak Hous</i>e – was already determined in
the first instants of the Big Bang. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Now,
as far as we know, this is not the case. That’s because quantum mechanics seems
to be fundamentally indeterminate: there is an unpredictability about which
outcomes we will see, because all we can predict is probabilities. But that
just adds randomness, not anything that can be construed as will. So we can say
that the plot of <i>Bleak House</i> was determined by the initial conditions of the
Big Bang, plus some unpredictable randomness.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">As
it is unprovable, this is a metaphysical statement. It’s hard to see how we can
advance beyond it one way or another. What I’m suggesting is that, rather than
get stuck in that barren place, we might choose more profitably to talk about
causes. That way, we can actually raises some useful and even answerable
questions about why we do what we do, including why Dickens wrote Bleak House.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">But
Coyne says “Screw cause and effect… as they are nebulous, philosophical, and
irrelevant to determinism.” Well, I could just stop here - because it means
Coyne has said “Oh, your argument that rests on cause and effect? I’m not even
going to think about it.” I’m not sure why he didn’t have the honesty to admit
that, but hey. It’s true that causation is a very thorny philosophical issue
indeed - but it also happens to be at the core of my notion of free will.
Because it seems to me that the only notion of free will that makes much sense
is not “I could have done otherwise” (which is also metaphysical, because you
could never prove it - if your argument depends on working up from the exact
microphysics of the situation, you can never conduct the same experiment twice)
but “I - my mind, me as an organism - caused that to happen. Not the conditions
in the Big Bang plus some randomness, but me.” And then of course we can argue
about what “me” means, and how the mind is constructed, and all the rest of it,
and we’ll find that it’s terribly complicated, but we’re arguing and
constructing hypotheses and testing them <i>in the right place</i>, which is
neuroscience and not microscopic physics.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">So
everything that follows that statement by Coyne that he’s not interested in
debating causation is a sideshow, though it goes on for a very long time.
(Later he returns to causation by saying I have confused notions about it. But
he forgets to say why, or elects not to.) Still, let’s proceed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">“Is
there anything we know about science that tells us that we can “will” ourselves
to behave differently from how we did? The answer is no. We know of nothing
about physics that would lead to that conclusion.” This is a restatement of the
tired old idea that to posit “free will” means evoking some mysterious force
outside of physics. I hope I have made it clear that I don’t do that. But let
me say it again: I don’t believe there is anything operating when I make a
decision beyond (as far as we know them) the fundamental forces of nature
acting between particles. What I am saying is that it is wrong, perhaps even
meaningless, to speak of all those countless interactions as the “cause” of the
behaviour. What caused Dickens to write <i>Bleak House</i>? “Well, in the end, it has
to be the Big Bang plus quantum randomness.” Really, that’s the hill you want
to die on?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">So
when Coyne expresses outrage that I say it is “metaphysical” that “underlying
our behavior are unalterable laws of physics?”, he has created an obvious straw
man. What I in fact said - as careful readers might have noted - is that
arguments that “free will is undermined by the determinism of physical law… claim
too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics [and] are not really scientific
but metaphysical.” This is not the same thing at all - precisely because of my
assertion that we must judge such jurisdiction on the grounds of causation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">But
straw men are about to appear in abundance. Coyne accuses me of one when I say:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">“If
the claim that we never truly make choices is correct, then psychology,
sociology and all studies of human behaviour are verging on pseudoscience.
Efforts to understand our conduct would be null and void because the real
reasons lie in the Big Bang.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">This
is a strawman, he says, “because none of us deny that there can be behavioral
science, and that one can study many aspects of human biology, including
history, using the empirical tools of science: observation, testing,
falsification, and a search for regularities… Although the “laws” of human
behavior, whether collective or instantiated in an individual, may not be
obeyed as strictly as the laws of physics, all of us determinists admit that
it is fruitful to look for such regularities on the macro level—at the same
time we admit that they must comport with and ultimately derive from the laws
of physics.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">I
find the extent of Coyne’s miscomprehension here astonishing. He goes on: how
dare I call behavioural or social sciences pseudoscience, or history “just
making up stories”, or say that behavioural regularities are just “peculiar
coincidences” and nothing to do with evolution!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Now,
there are a few clues that perhaps this is not what I’m saying or believing -
like for example the fact that I wrote an entire book (more than one, actually)
on how ideas from physics about how regularities and patterns arise in complex
systems can be of value in understanding social science and economics. If Coyne
had given a damn about who this chap he was criticising actually was, he might
have discovered that and - who knows? - perhaps experienced a moment of
cognitive dissonance that led him to wonder if he was actually understanding
this article at all. That could have saved him some trouble. Still, onward.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">In
any case, he says, none of us determinists believe all those terrible things
about the behavioural sciences and all the rest! It’s a straw man!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">But
my point is this: Sure, you don’t think those things. You all (I suspect)
recognise the value of the behavioural and social sciences and so forth. But
that’s because you haven’t really examined the implications of your belief.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Here’s
why. If you believe that everything that happens (lets put aside the complication
of quantum indeterminism for now) was preordained in the Big Bang - that the
universe unfolds inexorably from that point as particle hits particle - then
you really cannot sustain a genuine belief in behavioural sciences as true
sciences. Let’s say that a behavioural scientist deduces that people behave a
certain way, Y, in the presence of influence X, and so goes on to conduct an
experiment in which X is withheld from the subjects, to see if their behaviour
changes. And it does! So, there’s a fair case to be made that X is a causal
influence on behaviour. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">But
it’s not really so, is it? What you have to believe is that the conditions in
the Big Bang caused a universe with people in it that are of the nature that
behaviour Y tends statistically to be correlated with condition X. When we say
“X causes Y”, we don’t mean that. There’s no genuine causal relationship
involved; it’s just, as I say, “an enumeration of correlations”. I don’t care
about dictionary definitions of “pseudoscience” (and Coyne only does, it seems,
because he thinks I’m calling behavioural science a pseudoscience and wants to
prove me wrong). But I do know that it is very common in pseudoscience to
mistake correlation for causation. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">I
guess it might be possible to imagine a kind of science that, while it employs
“observation, testability, attempts at falsification, and consensus” while
never rising above the level of documenting correlations, and never imputing
any sort of causal mechanism. But I’m not sure I can think of one. What I am
saying is that, if Coyne’s vision of determinism were true, behavioural
sciences could never talk factually about mechanism and causation - or if they
did, they’d not be speaking any kind of truth, but just a convenient story.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Still,
I guess the best way is to find out. We could ask behavioural and social
scientists if they are content to regard the objects of their studies as
automata blindly carrying out computations – which is what Coyne’s view insists
– or whether (at least sometimes) we should regard them as agents making
genuine decisions. I’m pretty sure I know already the answer many neuroscientists
would give, because some have told me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">At
any rate, the basic point should be clear now: you don’t refute a reductio ad
absurdum by crying “But that’s absurd!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">Well,
on with the cognitive dissonance. Coyne says I “give the game away” by
betraying that I can’t believe in free will after all, because I say:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">“Classical
chaos makes prediction of the future practically impossible, but it is still
deterministic. And while quantum events are not deterministic – as far as we
can currently tell – their apparently fundamental randomness can’t deliver
willed action.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">“In
other words” Coyne says, “physics, which Ball admits has to <i>comport</i> with
everything at a “higher level”, can’t deliver willed action. Thus, if you
construe free will in the libertarian, you-could-have-done-otherwise sense,
then Ball’s arguments show that we don’t have it.” I’m not sure what to make of
this. Does Coyne not realise that, by stating these things at the outset I am
aiming to lay out the case to be addressed, and to avoid some spurious defences
of free will that pin it all on some kind of fundamental indeterminacy? Does he
not realise that, when one starts off presenting an argument by saying “Well,
here’s the thing I’m seeking to challenge”, it is not a very impressive
counter-argument to say “Ah but you just said that very thing, so you must
believe it too!”?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Next. Evolution:
I could have guessed this would be a sticking point! (Actually I did; that’s
why I raised it.) </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I say:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">“What
“caused” the existence of chimpanzees? If we truly believe causes are
reducible, we must ultimately say: conditions in the Big Bang. But it’s not
just that a “cause” worthy of the name would be hard to discern there; it is
fundamentally absent.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">In
response, Coyne says:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">“If
Ball thinks biologists can figure out what “caused” the evolution of chimps,
he’s on shaky ground. He has no idea, nor do we, what evolutionary forces gave
rise to them, nor the specific mutations that had to arise for evolution to
work. We don’t even know what “caused” the evolution of bipedal hominins,
though we can make some guesses. We’re stuck here with plausibility arguments,
though <i>some</i> assertions about evolution can be tested (i.e., chimps and
hominins had a common ancestor; amphibians evolved from fish, and so on). And
yes, that kind of testing doesn’t involve evoking the laws of physics, but so
what?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">It’s
hard to know where to begin with this. What he is talking about in terms of
efforts to understand the evolution of chimps is precisely the same as what I’m
talking about: one might look, for example, at morphological changes in the
fossil record, and if possible at changes in genomics, and how they correlate.
One does comparative genomics. One might frame hypotheses about changes in
habitat and adaptations to them. In other words, I raise the notion of a
“theory of chimp formation” as another reductio ad absurdum. I don’t believe
biology should be aiming for such a thing, or that it is even meaningful.
Rather I think it should be doing precisely what it is: making hypotheses about
how chimps evolved on the basis of the available evidence.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The
issue, though, is whether one regards this as renormalised physics. Coyne does.
I am not sure all his colleagues would agree. I don’t mean that they would say
(as he might), “Well, what we’re doing is just a more useful higher-level
abstraction of the basic physics.” I suspect many would say that thinking about
evolution as coarse-grained physics is of no value to what they do, and so they
(rightly) don’t bother even to give it any thought. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">But this
does NOT mean there is anything except physics operating at the microscopic
level of particles.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">What
does it mean then? That gets to the crux of the matter. What I’m suggesting is
that it means that we shouldn’t be considering causation as only and entirely
top-down. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">That
is the point of the piece. And finally, after much huffing over straw men,
Coyne gets to it. What does he have to say about it?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">It is,
he says, “something I don’t fully understand”. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">OK, so
perhaps it would be best for him to leave it there. Sadly, he does not.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">“As
far as I <i>do </i>understand it”, he says, “it doesn’t show that
macro phenomena result from the laws of physics, both deterministic and
indeterministic, acting at lower levels. To me the concept is almost numinous.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I
don’t even know what this means. “It doesn’t show that macro phenomena result
from the laws of physics acting at lower levels.” Huh? What then does he think
it <i>does</i> show? That there’s some mysterious non-physical force at work?
I’ve really no idea what he is trying to say here.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The
idea of top-down causation, in the forms I’ve seen it, shows in fact that
systems in which there are nothing but the laws of physics acting at lower
levels nevertheless display causation that can’t be ascribed to those lower
levels. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Remember
causation? That thing my argument was based on? Does Coyne agree with the
arguments for the existence of top-down causation in complex systems? If not,
why not? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">But it
seems he doesn’t much care: he’ll “let readers argue this out”. Still, he adds,
“if physicists like Sean Carroll and Brian Greene are not on board with
this—and as far as I know, they aren’t—then I have reason to be skeptical.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Really?
An “argument from authority” – and one moreover that discounts the authority of
Nobel laureates such as Phil Anderson? That’s the basis of his case?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Does
he even know the position of Sean Carroll and Brian Greene on this? Has he
asked them? Is there any evidence that they have considered such arguments?
(Greene doesn’t mention it in his book.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">(By
the way, I don’t think I “denigrate” (=“criticise unfairly”) Greene’s view in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Until the End of Time</i>. I simply disagree
with it. If Coyne had more curiosity, it would have been very easy to discover
that, while I bring up this point in my <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00356-2" target="_blank">review</a>
of Greene’s book, I also had some good things to say about it.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">(And
incidentally, Sean Carroll <i>has</i> written on top-down causation, but not in
a way that is germane here. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big
Picture</i>, he dismisses the need to invoke it in snowflake formation - and I
agree with him there. And in his blog <a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/" target="_blank">here</a>,
he criticises John Searle’s view of consciousness from this perspective. But
Searle believes consciousness is somehow a non-physical entity beyond science.
That has nothing to do with the work I allude to. Where top-down causation
matters is in discussing questions of agency.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Truly,
I had to ask myself, this is it? The reason Coyne thinks my piece is wrong is
because (part from reasserting the same tired old arguments about determinism)
he doesn’t fully understand the science on which they’re based, but he suspects
a couple of his pals might not buy it and so that’s good enough for him?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Oh
well. Onward.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Coyne
says I’m wrong to say that dispelling the idea of free will has no implications
for anything. Actually I don’t say that at all (I think I’m sensing a pattern
here). I say it is rather telling that those who claim to have dispelled free
will seem oddly keen to say we should go on acting as though it really is a
thing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">No we
don’t, Coyne says! We say that because there’s no free will, we should be “less
retributive, more forgiving.” And this is precisely my point. If you don’t
believe in free will, why should you be retributive or forgiving at all? In
that case, none of what we do is our fault, because it was ordained in the Big
Bang (plus randomness). That’s all there is to it. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">This
is what I mean: those who deny free will don’t have the courage of their
convictions. They feel obliged to resurrect it, or the ghost of it, to avoid
having to absolve us of all responsibility. But they don’t seem to know how to
do that, other than with arm-wavy statements like this: “I still think people
are “responsible” for their actions, but the idea of “moral” responsibility is
connected with “you-could-have-chosen-to-do-otherwise.”” So they are responsible
but not morally responsible? Then responsible in what way, exactly? What kind
of responsibility can stem from predeterminism? He doesn’t say.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Why,
if there’s no free will, would we take any action at all to try to change
people’s behaviour? After all, we can’t then have a genuinely causal influence
on what they do. I guess in this case free-will deniers will say to themselves:
“well, I know I’m not really deciding to do this, it’s just my automaton-brain
playing out the 13.8-bn-year stage of the Big Bang, but then again, if I don’t
then I suspect that 13.8-bn-year-old plan will include this person reoffending,
and so I guess I’d better, but all the same I’m <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> choosing this but just telling myself I am because that’s what
brains do, and so I guess I’m stuck with this belief that I personally have a
causal effect on the future, but I don’t, and I must deny it, but there’s
actually no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i> about it because
that concept doesn’t exist either…” Or something. God knows what their
narrative is. Perhaps it’s just “well I still have this gut feeling that that
person is responsible in some way for what they do but I don’t really know what
that means.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">What
Coyne is talking about, I suspect, is the recognition that people vary in the
degree to which they can truly decide on their actions. There are all kinds of
influences that determine this: their past history, their social circumstances,
the specific nature of their brain (part innate, part conditioned), whether
they’ve just eaten… There’s a gradation from volitional to totally
non-volitional (like reflexes). In a fair and just society, we already
recognise this. So we try to make our rules and judgements by considering such
factors, and trying to make a fair assessment of degrees of culpability, and
thinking about what - if we punish someone for their actions - we might hope to
achieve by it. We work at the macro level at which we can think meaningfully
about cause and effect. We don’t argue about physics and the Big Bang. We don’t
do that not because that would be an awfully hard way to reach a judgement
about the situation, or because we lack the computational resources, but
because we know it would be meaningless.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Because
this is by no means the first time I’ve seen smart people transmuted into
abysmal readers, I’m genuinely curious about what makes that happen. I have a
hypothesis, though it would be hard to test. I think they start by reading the
title or headline, thinking “Well I profoundly disagree with that”, and then
let that preconceived judgement prevent them from actually reading the argument
and assessing the rhetorical or logical trajectory of the piece. Instead they
just read each sentence at a time and – without asking “Is this part of the
author’s position, or the position he/she is setting out to attack?”, “Is this
a rhetorical structure?” and so on – just decide for themselves what they think
the sentence means and then consider how they can disagree with it. In Coyne’s
case I fear that situation is compounded by his evident conviction that
dismantling free will is part of his crusade against “religionists.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Sometimes
when I see this happen, I’m forced to wonder how science sustains any discourse
at all. But fortunately, it seems to manage.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I
guess I have been harsh here in some places, but I’m happy to take
responsibility for that. I do think it was me that chose to write this, and not
the Big Bang. And you do too really, don’t you?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">PS If
you read Coyne’s second article and go looking for my piece in <i>Physics Today</i>,
you won’t find it. It was in <i>Physics World</i>. To judge from a glance at his
comments thread, that’s a moot point anyway, as I saw little sign that most
commenters were bothering to look at the article anyway. The one chap who
evidently did, agreed with me.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-58480816829922761852020-12-13T06:08:00.000-08:002020-12-13T06:08:01.321-08:00More on free will, and why quantum mechanics can't help you understand football<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’ve had some stimulating
further discussion with <a href="https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2020/12/11/does-quantum-mechanics-allow-for-free-will/" target="_blank">Philip Goff</a> and <a href="http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2020/07/escaping-flatland-when-determinism.html" target="_blank">Kevin Mitchell </a>on whether quantum mechanics
can illuminate the free-will problem. Kevin has responded to our comments <a href="http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2020/12/does-freedom-bubble-up-from-quantum.html?spref=tw" target="_blank">here</a>;
Philip’s have been on Twitter. Here’s where it all leaves me at this point. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">First, here’s where I
think we all agree:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(1) Events at the
quantum scale can be adequately described by quantum mechanics – for our
purposes, nothing more is needed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(2) There’s no missing
“force of nature” that somehow intervenes in matter as a result of “free will”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(3) The future is not
predetermined, because of quantum randonmess: at any given moment, various
futures are possible.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Kevin’s argument is,
as I understand it, that agents with free will are able to select from these
possible futures.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Philip’s objection is
that this is not how quantum mechanics works: those futures are determined by
the probabilities they can be assigned from the Born rule.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’m sympathetic to
that observation: it isn’t at all clear to me how anything called free will can
somehow intervene in a quantum process, however complex, to “select” one of its
possible futures.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My objection to
Philip’s point was, however, to <a href="https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2020/12/11/does-quantum-mechanics-allow-for-free-will/" target="_blank">the scenario he uses to illustrate it </a>– where
he decides whether or not to water his plant (called Susan). It seems to me to
be ill-posed. I’m averse in general to thought experiments that don’t stack up
in principle, and this seems to me to be one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">To calculate the Born
probabilities for this situation, you would need to know the complete initial
state of the system and the Hamiltonian that determines how its wavefunction
evolves in time. Now, it is no good supposing we can define some generic “state
of Philip confronted with thirsty Susan”. I’m not even sure what that could
mean. How do we know what we need to include in the description to make a good
prediction? What if Philip’s cell phone goes off just before he is about to
water Susan, and calls him away on an emergency? How much of the world must we
include for this calculation? And we’re looking to calculate the probability of
outcome X, which quantum mechanics can enable us to do – so long as we know the
target state X. But what is this? Is it one in which Susan stands in damp soil
and Philip’s watering can is empty? But how do we know that he added the water
of his own free will? What if in the initial state he know someone would shoot
him later if he didn’t add the water? Does that still count as “free will”? I
mean, he could in principle still refuse to water Susan, but it’s not what we
would usually consider “free will”. But perhaps then our initial state needs to
be one in which Philip has no such thought in his head. Had we better have a
list of which thoughts are and aren’t allowed in that initial state? But
whichever initial state we choose, we can never do the experiment anyway to see
if the predictions are borne out, because we could never recreate it exactly.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">My point is that we
should not be talking about scenarios like this in terms of quantum states and
wavefunctions, because that’s not what quantum mechanics is for. We can run an
experiments many times that begins with a photon in a well-defined state and
ends with it in another well defined state as it evolves under a well-defined
Hamiltonian, and quantum mechanics will give us good predictions. But people
are not like photons. Even though fundamentally their components are of course
quantum particles obeying quantum rules, it is not just ludicrous but
meaningless to suppose that somehow we can use quantum theory to make
predictions about them – because the kind of states we care about (does Philip
do this?) are not well defined quantum states, and the trajectories of any such
putative states are not determined by well-defined Hamiltonians. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It seems to me the
distinction here is really between quantum physics as a phenomenon and quantum
mechanics as a theory. I don’t think anyone would dispute that quantum physics
is playing out in a football match. But it seems to me a fundamental mistake to
suppose that the formalism of quantum mechanics can (let alone should) be used
to describe it, because that formalism does not involve the kinds of things
that are descriptors of football matches, and vice versa. (Philip’s “watering a
plant” scenario is of course much closer to a football match than to a Stern-Gerlach
experiment.) It’s not just that the quantum calculations are too complex; the
machinery of calculation is not designed for that situation. Indeed, we are
only just beginning to figure out how to use that machinery to describe the
simplest couplings of quantum systems to their environment, and these are probably
probing the limits not just of what is tractable but what is meaningful.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Does all this
objection, though, negate Philip’s point that free will can’t determine the
outcome of a quantum process, as (ultimately) all processes are? In one sense,
no. But my point is really that the answer to this is not legitimately yes or
no, because I’m not sure the question has any clear meaning. The scenario
Philip is depicting is one in which there is some massively complex
wavefunction evolving in time that describes the whole system – him with
watering can and potted plant – and somehow that evolution is steered by free
will. But – and I think this is where I do agree with Kevin – I don’t believe
this is the right way to describe the causation in the system.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t just mean it is not an operationally
useful way to do that. I think it is fundamentally the wrong way to do it. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Here’s an example of
what I mean. Imagine a tall tower of Jenga bricks. Now imagine it with one of
the bottom brick removed, so that it’s unstable. The tower topples. What caused
it to topple? Well, gravity and the laws of mechanics. Fine.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Now here’s the same
tower, but this time we see what brought it to the state with the bottom brick
removed: a child came along and took the brick. What caused it to fall? You
could say exactly the same: gravity and mechanics. But we’re actually asking a
different question. We’re asking not what caused the tower with the brick
missing to fall, but what caused the tower with the brick still in place to
fall – and the answer is that the child turned it into the unstable version.
The child’s action was the cause.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">When we try to speak
of free will in terms of microphysics, we are confusing these two types of
causal stories. We’re saying, Ah, the child acting is really just like the
tower minus brick falling: physics says that’s the only thing that can happen.
But what physics says that, exactly? Unlike the case of the tower falling, we
can’t actually give an account of the physics behind it. So we just say, Ah,
it’s somehow all there in the particles (why not the quarks? The strings, or
whatever your choice of post-standard-model theory? But no matter), and I can’t
say how this leads to that exactly, but if I had a really big computer that
could calculate all the interactions, and I knew all the initial conditions, I
could predict it, because there’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing
else in the system</i>. But that’s not a causal explanation. It is just a banal
statement that everything is ultimately just atoms and forces. Yes it is – but
at that level the true cause of the event has vanished, rather in the way that,
by the time you have reduced a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica to acoustic
vibrations, the music has vanished.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(This analogy goes
deeper, because in truth the music is not in the acoustic waves at all, but in
the influence they have on the auditory system of people attuned to hearing
this kind of music so that they have the appropriate expectations. There is
music because of the history of the system, including the deep evolutionary
history that gave us pattern-seeking minds. So it makes sense to explain the
effects of the music in terms of violations of expectation, enharmonic shifts
and so on, but not in terms of quantum chromodynamics. You will simply not get
a causal explanation that way, but just an (absurdly, opaquely complicated)
description of underlying events.) </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And you see that this
argument has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, which is why I think quantum
indeterminacy is a bit of a red herring. Free will – or better, volition –
needs to be discussed at the level on which mental processes operate: in terms
of the brain systems involved in decision-making, attention, memory, intention
and so on. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The basic problem,
then, is in the notion that causation always works from the bottom up,
aggregating gradually in a sort of upwards cascade. There is good reason to
suppose that it doesn’t – and that it is especially apt not to in very complex
systems. Looked at this way, the microphysics is irrelevant to the issue, because
the issue itself is not meaningful at the quantum level. At that level, I’m not
sure that the matter of whether “things could have been otherwise” is really
any different from the fact that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">things
only turn out one way</i>. (It could be interesting to pose all this in a Many
Worlds context – but not here, other than to say I think Many Worlds makes the
same mistake of supposing that quantum mechanics can somehow be casually welded
onto decision theory.) Beyond quantum randomness, the notion that “things could
have been otherwise” is a metaphysical one, because you could never prove it
either way. Best, then, to jettison all of that and simply consider how
decision-making works in cognitive and neurological terms. That’s how to make
sense of what we mean by free will.</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-72147520512286030602020-12-11T09:21:00.000-08:002020-12-11T09:21:21.031-08:00Does quantum mechanics rescue free will?<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Philip Goff has challenged Kevin Mitchell’s
<a href="http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2020/07/escaping-flatland-when-determinism.html" target="_blank">interesting supposition</a> that the indeterminacy of quantum physics creates some
“causal slack” within which free will can operate. In essence, Kevin suggests
(as I understand it) that quantum effects create a huge number of possible
outcomes of any sufficiently complex scenario (like human decision-making),
among which higher-level mechanisms of organismic agency can act to select one.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Philip <a href="https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2020/12/11/does-quantum-mechanics-allow-for-free-will/">responds</a> that this won’t do the
trick, because even though quantum mechanics can’t pronounce on which outcome
will be observed for a quantum process with several possible outcomes, it does
pronounce on the probabilities. He gives the example of his decision to water
his dragon tree Susan (excellent name):</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Let’s say the Born rule determines
that there’s a 90% chance my particles will be located in the way they would be
if I watered Susan and a 10% chance they’ll be located in the way that
corresponds to not watering Susan (obviously this is a ludicrously over-simplistic
example, but it serves to make the point). Now imagine someone duplicated me a
million times and waited to see what those million physical duplicates would
decide to do. The physics tells us that approximately 900,000 of the duplicates
will water Susan and approximately 100,000 of them will not. If we ran the
experiment many times, each time creating a million more duplicates and waiting
for them to decide, the physics tells us we would get roughly the same
frequencies each time. But if what happens is totally up to each duplicate – in
the radical incompatibilist sense – then there ought to be no such predictable
frequency.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s a good point, insofar as it needs an
answer. But I think one exists: specifically, Philip’s scenario doesn’t really
have any meaning. In this respect, it suffers from the same defect that applies
to all attempts to reduce questions of human behaviour (such as those that
invoke “free will”, a historically unfortunate term that deserves to have scare
quotes imposed on it) to microphysics. The example Philip chooses is not
“ludicrously over-simplistic” but in fact ill-defined and indeterminate. I
don’t believe we could ever determine what is the configuration of Philip’s
particles that predisposes him to water Susan. It’s not a question of this
being just very, very difficult to ascertain; rather, I don’t see how such a
configuration can be defined at the quantum level. We would presumably need to
exclude all configurations that lead to other outcomes entirely – but how? What
are the quantum variables that correspond to <watering Susan> or <not
watering Susan (but otherwise doing everything else the same, so not cutting
Susan in half either)>? What counts as “watering Susan”? Does a little water
count? Is watering Susan before lunch the same as watering Susan after? This is
not a simple binary issue that can be assigned Born probabilities – and neither
can I see how any other human decision-making process is. (“Oh come on: what
about ‘Either I press a button or I don’t’”? But no, that's not the issue as
far as free will is concerned – it’s ‘Either I decide of my own volition to
press the button, and I do it, and the botton works’ or not. And what then is
the quantum criterion for ‘of my own volition’? How do we know it was that?
What if I was bribed to do it?... and so on.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Obviously such scenarios could go on ad
infinitum, and the reason is that quantum mechanics is the wrong level of
theoretical description for a problem like this. We simply don’t know what the
right variables are: where the joints should be carved in an astronomically
complex wavefunction for many particles that correspond to the macroscopic
descriptions. And again, I don’t think this is (as physicists often insist)
just a problem of lack of computational power; it’s simply a question of trying
to apply a scientific theory in a regime where it isn’t appropriate. The proper
descriptors of whether Philip waters Susan are macroscopic ones, and likewise the
determinants of whether he does so. At the quantum scale they don’t just get intractably
hard to discern, but in fact vanish, because one is no longer speaking at the
right causal level of description.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is, in fact, the same reason why
Schrödinger’s cat is such an unhelpful metaphor. No one has ever given the
vaguest hint at what the wavefunctions of a live and dead cat look like, and I
would argue that is because “live” and “dead” can’t be expressed in
quantum-mechanical terms: they are not well-defined quantum states.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I don’t necessarily argue that this
rescues Kevin’s idea that quantum indeterminacy creates space for free will.
I’m agnostic about that, because I don’t think what we generally mean by free
will (which we might better call volitional behaviour) has any meaning at the
quantum level, and vice versa. It’s best, I think, to explain phenomena at the
conceptual/theoretical level appropriate to it. As Phil Anderson said years
ago, it’s wrong to imagine that just because there’s reducibility of physical
phenomena, this implies a reductive hierarchy of causation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You’ll see very soon in Physics World
why I’m thinking about this…</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-72969448710394264772020-08-25T03:55:00.001-07:002020-08-25T03:55:56.720-07:00Is the UK ready for a Covid winter?To prepare my <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/25/england-second-wave-coronavirus-winter-surge" target="_blank">article</a> for <i>The Guardian</i> on whether the UK is prepared for a Covid winter, I spoke to many experts who gave a great deal of helpful information and advice. Only a small part of that could be fitted into the article, and I thought it would be helpful to put some more of it out there. So here is the longer version of that article.
<br />
<br />
_________________________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
No one knows what Covid-19 holds in the coming months, but no one well-informed takes seriously Boris Johnson’s claim that it could all be back to normal by Christmas. With local outbreaks already prompting lockdowns in Leicester, Manchester and Preston, and cases rising at an alarming rate in Spain and Germany, it’s entirely possible that there will be grim days ahead. The faster spreading of the coronavirus and greater difficulty of maintaining social distancing as the weather gets colder, coupled to a return of schools and a desperate need to get the economy moving again, will increase the challenge of keeping a lid on the threat. So are we ready?
<br />
<br />
The good news is that some of what was lacking in March, and which led to such a disastrous outcome in the UK, is now in place. By no means all of that shortfall can be blamed on the present government; political leaders had for years ignored the warnings of specialists in infectious disease that a pandemic was a near certainty, the frightening lack of preparedness exposed by the 2016 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/what-was-exercise-cygnus-and-what-did-it-find" target="_blank">Cygnus flu simulation</a> was ignored while the nation was in the grip of Brexit-mania, the UK had no industrial infrastructure for generating testing capacity at short notice, and the NHS had been worn ragged by years of austerity. Besides, this was an entirely new virus, and little was known about how it spreads and harms the human body.
<br />
<br />
Significant headway has been made on some of those problems over the summer. The bad news is that it still might not be enough, and the outcome depends on many factors that are still all but impossible to predict. “We’ve got to up our game for the autumn”, says Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, who heads its Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridgeshire. “We’ll be inside more. Universities and schools will be running. There will be a whole bunch of contacts that we don’t have now.”
<br />
<br />
“We can anticipate a lot more infections over the next few months”, says virologist Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham. The prime minister has advised hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, pledging that by the end of October there will be at least half a million tests for the virus conducted every day, and that the NHS will <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53438486" target="_blank">receive</a> £3 bn of extra funding. But as Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers says, much more is likely to be needed in the next month or two to keep Covid-19 under control.
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The nightmare scenario, he says, is a combination of a second surge of Covid-19 with a particularly difficult outbreak of winter flu, alongside the normal pressures that winter puts on health services, while they are trying to restart services put on hold during the crisis period – and all this being faced by an exhausted staff.
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“The NHS would struggle if all of that came together at once”, Hopson says. “We struggle with winter pressures at the best of times, with insufficient bed capacity and community care capacity to deal with the levels of demand that we get”. Covid-19 creates a capacity loss because of the need to keep people infected by virus on separate wards from those who aren’t.
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It’s not all gloom. The situation with personal protective equipment is now a lot better than in March, as is the availability of ventilators for severe cases (which turned out not to be so central anyway). What matters most, however, both for health services and for controlling the virus in the community, is the capacity for testing.
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The lack of testing in the population was what largely hamstrung the response top the first wave – scientists and public health authorities were flying blind, not knowing how widespread the virus was or where it was concentrated. It was lack of testing that created the appalling spread of infection in care homes.
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The situation now is very different. The UK is conducting tests as widely and as fast as most European countries: around <a href="https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/" target="_blank">200,000 each day</a>. Most of these are analysed in the <a href="https://www.lighthouselabs.org.uk/" target="_blank">Lighthouse Labs</a> that were quickly set up for the task; repurposed academic labs throughout the country are also helping. “We’re in a much better position than we were at the start of the pandemic”, says molecular geneticist Andrew Beggs, who leads testing efforts at the University of Birmingham. “The government has massively increased the capacity for testing in a short space of time, and I’m more confident than I was two months ago that we’re got a really good chance of successfully testing people.”
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What we need, says Ball, is “<a href="https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/burden/vpd/surveillance_type/sentinel/en/" target="_blank">sentinel surveillance</a>”: actively going out and working out where infections are occurring, particularly in high-risk populations such as hospitals and care homes, but also schools and universities. The Office for National Statistics is collaborating with other bodies in a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53806117" target="_blank">pilot survey</a> that will test a representative sample of households in the general population – up to 150,000 people a fortnight by October – to gauge the extent of infection.
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Most testing uses swabs to collect samples that detect the presence of the virus, but it’s also possible to get an antibody test that reveals if you have had the virus without knowing it. Test results are almost always returned within 48 hours – much longer than that and they become of little value – and often within a day.
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That’s important for several reasons. It alerts public health services and epidemiologists to dangerous hotspots of infections, so that they can be contained locally. It lets hospital staff know which patients can be safely kept on general wards, and whether they themselves are safe to be at work. Regular testing will be essential for frontline workers such as those operating public transport; at schools and offices it should not only tell people with suspicious symptoms whether they need to self-isolate but reveal whether the colleagues they came into contact with should do so.
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Tests can also show how many people have now had the virus and are likely to have some level of immunity. Ball says that while its currently thought that perhaps 10% of the population have had Covid-19, some antibody results imply that the infection rater may have been much higher – as much as 50%. He suspects that actual number is somewhere in between. The more people have already been infected, the slower the virus might spread – and also, the lower the actual mortality rate is likely to be.
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What’s more, new types of test being developed by British companies such as <a href="https://nanoporetech.com/" target="_blank">Oxford Nanopore</a> and <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/201073/90-minute-covid-19-tests-government-orders/" target="_blank">DNANudge</a> could reduce the waiting time to a few hours, or less, from a procedure as simple as spitting into a cup. They can also be much more portable. “That gives you a lot more options for where you put the testing”, says Birney (who is a consultant for Oxford Nanopore). It could become routine to make a test part of airport flight check-in; commercial centres could have a testing facility where office workers get checked out at the start of the day. These options are still a long way off – and they depend on whether the promising initial results from the new methods stand up, as well as the companies’ unproven ability to scale up production. But “even if one technology doesn’t work our for rapid onsite screening, we have others in the pipeline”, says Beggs.
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Another option is testing for the virus in sewage to keep track of infection levels in different parts of the country. From one test, you’re testing many thousands of people, says Birney. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has s<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53635692" target="_blank">uch a scheme</a> underway, but it’s still too early to know how effective it will be.
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Despite all this good progress, however, Hopson warns that there’s a lot to be done to create the testing regime that the NHS really needs. “Testing is one of the key issues we need to get right to prepare for winter, and there’s a long way to go to get to a fit-for-purpose operation,” he says. Both the number of tests and their speed will need to increase, and Hopson thinks that ideally we will need about a million tests a day by the end of December. “That’s a very tall order”, he says.
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Tests will be crucial in health and care settings, where you need to know fast where a new patient should be put. For care homes, this information is vital to free residents from the need to be confined to the rooms. Epidemiologist Ruth Gilbert of University College London’s Institute of Child Health says that the loss of mobility and social interaction in care settings can accelerate mental and physical deterioration.
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Equally crucially, the system needs to be joined up: a test result needs to go at once into people’s health records accessed by local GPs. And Hopson says there needs to be greater local control – at the moment the testing infrastructure is too nationally based.
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“If you want to manage this risk, there’s a highly complex logistical operation with a complicated delivery chain”, Hopson says. “We need the funding to expand the capacity. We need the tests at volume. We need to set up the capacity close enough to where it’s needed. We need to get the computer systems joined up. It’s such a complex end-to-end process, from scientists developing tests to GP surgeries needing to see the care records, and local authorities, and it needs to operate at speed.”
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It’s vital too that positive tests be followed up by effective contact tracing, so that others who might have been infected can self-isolate. “This is not working as well as it should”, says Hopson. “We’re losing too many people down that chain [of contacts].” The number of people being contacted and made to self-isolate is far lower in the UK than in other countries – and it’s not clear how much they are self-isolating anyway. “There has been no data published on it, and we know it’s not happening”, says Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at University College London.
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This is as much a socioeconomic issue as a medical one. “People who are financially unable to self-isolate for 14 days need to be incentivized to do so”, says Hopson – their lost earnings need to be covered by the government. He points out that some places with high levels of outbreak tend to have higher percentages of ethnic monitory communities where English is not the first language, who are not always keen to interact with the state. This clearly needs sensitive handling – contact tracing must not seem “just a white middle-class operation”, he says.
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Given the amount of preparation still to be done, many were alarmed by the news that Public Health England, the organization that overseas public healthcare within the Department of Health, is to be replaced by a new organization called the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-creates-new-national-institute-for-health-protection" target="_blank">National Institute for Health Protection</a>. This will bring the tasks of PHE under the same authority as NHS Test and Trace and the new pandemic data hub the Joint Biosecurity Centre.
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“The last thing we need is reorganisation on top of this”, said Birney in response to the news, which came as a surprise to many like him who are involved in preparedness. “Even if this was the ultimately best chess move for a future pandemic preparedness, there is no way doing it mid-pandemic is sensible.” More than 200 public-health professionals signed a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/08/17/lettersgrade-predictions-can-trusted-schools-transparent-record/" target="_blank">letter</a> to The Telegraph in which they declared themselves “deeply disturbed by the news of another top-down restructure of the English public health system, particularly mid-pandemic, and without any forewarning for staff.”
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But Hopson is more sanguine, saying that the move won’t involve large-scale restructuring of jobs. “I can see why everybody is jumping up and down”, he says, “but the leaders say to us that this is not a restructure.” Everyone will carry on doing their existing jobs – “it’s just that there’s a new interim team at the top level to link the parts together and create better coordination between them.” Having two different organizations doesn’t make a lot of sense. Putting them under one leadership team seems to us to make good sense.” Gilbert hopes that the new agency will make its data more widely available than PHE did, to help advance the science.
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One of the biggest and most controversial issues for the autumn is the return of schools. While there is a broad consensus that getting pupils back must be a priority, this will inevitably raise the risk of spreading the virus. Although still too little is known about how readily this happens via children, there is s<a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/older-pupils-spread-virus-like-adults-5ts6jr2pp" target="_blank">ome evidence</a> now that secondary-school pupils can catch and pass on the virus much as adults do, and that primary-school children can do so even if they suffer only <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01354-0" target="_blank">mild symptoms</a> – probably about 15-20% of children infected have no symptoms, says Sanjay Patel of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
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There are encouraging signs that schools might not be a big source of infection, though. Sweden left schools open, and <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-schools/swedens-health-agency-says-open-schools-did-not-spur-pandemic-spread-among-children-idUKKCN24G2IS" target="_blank">didn’t see</a> lots of outbreaks or transmission, says Patel. Teachers didn’t have higher rates of infection either – lower than <a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20200625/study-these-are-the-professions-which-are-over-represented-in-swedens-coronavirus-statistics" target="_blank">taxi drivers</a> and supermarket workers.
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“Schools have been working incredibly hard to try to get measures in place for opening in September”, says Patel. They will aim to keep pupils within small contact groups or “bubbles”, but this is much easier at primary than secondary level, where pupils change groups for different subjects and are less inclined to observe distancing rules. “If there’s an outbreak in a school, then sensible decisions need to be made about whether a bubble, a year, or a school needs to be closed”, says Patel.
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He predicts that schooling “will be hugely disrupted for individual children and families, for bubbles and for year groups – there will be closures and outbreaks, and lots of children will be in and out of school.” Children of course get lots of coughs and colds over winter, and “those children will have to be excluded at once until they get a test result back. That means their parents will also have to isolate for that period.” But he hopes that regular seasonal viruses might themselves spread less because of the new measures.
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“We have some really good plans in place for this winter”, he says. “We’ve learnt a lot from the first surge, and there’s absolutely no feeling of panic.”
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But he adds that there’s no zero-risk option either. “The best way of protecting against outbreaks in school is to minimize the amount of infection in the community”, he says. This means compensating for school openings with restrictions elsewhere. At the moment, he says, it seems young people meeting in bars, pose a far higher risk of spreading than schools. So “do we prioritize our ability to go and have a drink in the pub, or the future education of our children?”
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“The government has done a lot wrong, but generally we’re making progress”, says Beggs. “The natural British constitution is to be a bit gloomy about our ability to do things, but if we could share all the achievements we’ve done in a more optimistic way, I think people would be more reassured.”
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Ah, there’s the rub. Beggs is right to warn about the danger of trying to present everything in the worst possible light in order to discredit a government that performed so dismally in the initial outbreak (about which I’ve <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/philip-ball-coronavirus-covid-science-lockdown-vallance-whitty-johnson-death-toll" target="_blank">written elsewhere</a>). This would be unhelpful, as well as unfair to the many authorities, scientists, health professionals and others who have worked so hard to improve the prospects. Yet the fact remains that the good work done on preparedness stands in stark contrast to the very public and very damaging missteps the government has taken and continues to take. The messaging is still confusing, even misleading: ministers (and some chief medical advisers) seem intent, for example, on stressing the low risk that Covid-19 poses to young children returning to school (so stop worrying, parents!), whereas the true danger there is about transmission through the population generally. Announcements of local lockdowns have been woefully mismanaged. The alarm about the reorganization of PHE was deepened by the appointment of Dido Harding – who has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/18/dido-harding-profile-institute-health-protection">no public health experience</a>, a terrible track record with managing the Track and Trace system, and is married to a Conservative peer – as its head. While contracts do have to be awarded swiftly, without the delay of a drawn-out tendering process, in circumstances like these, too many seem to be going to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/10/firm-with-links-to-gove-and-cummings-given-covid-19-contract-without-open-tender" target="_blank">companies with close contacts to government and its advisers</a>. Blunders like the exams fiasco (and the refusal of government to accept blame or consequences) undermine even further public trust in our leaders.
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This issue of trust will be crucial. Imposing local lockdowns to contain hotspots, identifying contacts of people who test positive, and persuading them to self-isolate, would be a challenge at the best of times, and hinges on whether people understand what they are being asked to do and why, and whether they trust those making the rules. <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/08/dangerous-legacy-cummings-affair" target="_blank">Studies have show</a>n that public trust in the government has already been badly eroded, both by the mishandling and poor messaging of the first wave and by what many see as the betrayal of Dominic Cummings’ lockdown breaches. Scientific and public health systems can do all they can to prepare, but in the end so much will depend on leadership and execution. I have been encouraged by what I have heard about the former; about the latter, I fear I remain gloomy.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-21515311274418058252020-08-08T06:14:00.000-07:002020-08-08T06:14:38.638-07:00Music in lockdown
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The images of people in Italian cities singing to one another from their balconies during the lockdowns to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic seem to come now from another, kinder era: before the enormity of the international crisis was fully apparent, before the death toll approached a quarter of a million and the sense of social unity had begun to fragment as politicians and others used the situation to sow and exploit division.
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Here in Britain we considered that footage of balcony serenades to be gloriously Italianate, feeding into a romantic national stereotype (even if it later happened too in Germany, Spain and Switzerland). But there was in truth something universal about this impulse to turn to music in times of crisis and catastrophe. It has happened everywhere as people struggle to cope with the fears and constraints of the pandemic, offering a cathartic release much as Leonard Slatkin, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, turned to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings to express the right sentiment at the usually celebratory Last Night of the Proms following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
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What makes music a good vehicle for this role? “In crises”, German musicologist Gunther Kreuz has said, “music has a very strong function to balance people, and show them there is light at the end of the tunnel.” During the pandemic, he says, there were also initiatives involving small ensembles playing in front of care homed for elderly people. One obvious advantage music has in this respect is that it works very well as a socially distanced medium: a kind of communication and contact that remains effective from a distance.
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But there is more to it than that, some of which surely relates to the global use of music in ritual and worship. Unlike conversation, music is designed to be broadcast to groups: it allows everyone who hears it to feel addressed individually. That can be true to some extent for the spoken word too – the recital of a poem or sacred text, for example. But the deep value of music for promoting a sense of community, sacredness and emotional connection is precisely that it has no words – or perhaps, for those of us listening to the Italian balcony arias without understanding a word, that the words needn’t matter. Because music shares a great deal with spoken language – the rhythmic and pitch variations, the nested and episodic structure of phrases – it seems to carry meaning without actual semantic content. Each of us is free to create the meaning for ourselves.
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At the same time, it penetrates directly to the emotions, in part by a kind of mimicry of human emotional expression but also by stimulating the neural reward pathways that respond to our subconscious anticipation of pattern and regularity. It is this powerful capacity of music for expression of what lies beyond words that led cultural critic Walter Pater to declare that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”. In an age of catastrophe, music becomes more indispensable than ever.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-2443641073433715252020-04-21T01:26:00.000-07:002020-04-21T01:26:22.314-07:00Three colours: YellowJan van Huysum’s <i>Flowers in a Terracotta Vase</i> (1736) is a riot of floral colour, the equal of anything else by the Dutch flower painters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But some of it looks decidedly odd. The leaves spilling out from among the bright blooms don’t look at all healthy, or indeed natural: they are more blue than green.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-9_6vm0b3ApJwqzNlYPn28-Wdyw5dF8ZjHyUCm-4yvAFBUMZIBEFoH3fJg8M8p7yg7Byr2drAn6EaBk4fkL7clb8dKQxvgzaurDHeyQR0c0DZ0JYr7KPk3doU6OD93p3A0Gr-/s1600/Jan_van_Huysum_-_Still_life_of_flowers_in_a_terracotta_vase%252C_before_a_niche_-_1734.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-9_6vm0b3ApJwqzNlYPn28-Wdyw5dF8ZjHyUCm-4yvAFBUMZIBEFoH3fJg8M8p7yg7Byr2drAn6EaBk4fkL7clb8dKQxvgzaurDHeyQR0c0DZ0JYr7KPk3doU6OD93p3A0Gr-/s320/Jan_van_Huysum_-_Still_life_of_flowers_in_a_terracotta_vase%252C_before_a_niche_-_1734.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="450" data-original-height="600" /></a>
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<i>Jan van Huysum,</i> Flowers in a Terracotta Vase <i>(1736)</i>.
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This is neither by intention nor mistake. Simply, the yellow pigment that Huysum mixed with blue to create his greens has faded. It was a common problem noted even at the time: the English chemist and writer Robert Dossie wrote in his <i>Handmaid to the Arts</i> (1758) that “The greens we are forced at present to compound from blue and yellow are seldom secure from flying or changing.”
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Because artists did not then have a particularly vibrant green pigment that approached the colour of fresh vegetation, they often needed to resort to this mixing of primaries. But unless your primary pigments are bright and pure, such a mixture may become a little murky. Among the brightest of yellows were lake colours, meaning that the pigment was made from a water-soluble organic (plant- or animal-based) substance – basically a dye – fixed to the surface of fine particles of a white powder like chalk or ground eggshell. But organic dyes don't last well when exposed to light: the rays break up the colorant molecules, and the colour “flees”. (Even today pigments and dyes that are not colourfast are said to be “fugitive”.)
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Technically these yellows were not exactly lakes, but <i>pinks</i>. Yes, it’s confusing: the word “pink” originally referred not to a pale reddish colour but to a class of pigments similar to lakes but made without the need for an alkali in the recipe. In the seventeenth century there were yellow pinks, green pinks, and light rose-coloured pinks. It is only because the last of these stayed in use for the longest that the term today denotes a hue.
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The colorant used for yellow pinks was typically an extract of weld, broom or buckthorn berries. But one used these materials – as Huysum discovered – at one’s own risk.
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It’s not that artists didn't have alternative, more stable yellows available. But as with any colour, not all yellows are equal. Those that could be made from minerals or inorganic compounds produced artificially might last longer, but some were rather dirty or pale in their tint.
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There was, for example, yellow ochre: a yellowish form of the iron oxide mineral that also came in reds and browns. But if ochre today conjures up a brownish earth colour, that’s because yellow ochre was in truth more like that: fine for tawny hair, but not at all the thing for tulips or satin robes.
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Then there was Naples yellow, as it was known from the seventeenth century: a pigment of rather variable composition but which was generally made from synthetic compounds of tin, antimony and lead. The ancient Egyptians knew how to combine lead with antimony ore to make a yellow, and in fact a natural mineral form of that compound (lead antimonite) was also used as an artists’ material. It could be found on the volcanic slopes of Mount Vesuvius, which is how it came to be associated with Naples. Other recipes for a yellow of similar appearance specified mixing the oxides of lead and tin. The ingredients weren’t always too clear, actually: when Italian medieval painters refer to <i>giallorino</i>, you can’t be sure if they mean a lead-tin or lead-antimony material, and it is unlikely that the painters recognized much distinction. Before modern chemistry clarified matters from the late eighteenth century, names for pigments might refer to hue regardless of composition or origin, or vice versa. It could all be very confusing, and from a name alone you couldn’t always be sure quite what you were getting – or, for the historian today, quite what a painter of long ago was using or referring to.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijUrAbMfH9twzv9Gs3apqyQPtSHXIvcKQ9LeBqxTs5k5J232wgAVjHOTQv_h7QQU4-xW6rJEq8hAe_TKzE-Sm5VVkKYhmnhDcxAl0qXRik9zDstQddG-cuQ8gLUhNkPAqbc26t/s1600/Johannes_Vermeer_-_Het_melkmeisje_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijUrAbMfH9twzv9Gs3apqyQPtSHXIvcKQ9LeBqxTs5k5J232wgAVjHOTQv_h7QQU4-xW6rJEq8hAe_TKzE-Sm5VVkKYhmnhDcxAl0qXRik9zDstQddG-cuQ8gLUhNkPAqbc26t/s320/Johannes_Vermeer_-_Het_melkmeisje_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="286" height="320" data-original-width="1428" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
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<i>The chemise of Jan Vermeer’s</i> The Milkmaid <i>(c.1658-61) is painted with a lead-tin yellow</i>.
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In some respects that’s still true now. A tube of modern “Naples yellow” won’t contain lead (rightly shunned for its toxicity) or antimony, but might be a mixture of titanium white and a chromium-based yellow, blended to mimic the colour of the traditional material. There’s no harm in that – on the contrary, the paint is likely to be not only less poisonous but more stable, not to mention cheaper. But examples like this show how wedded artists’ colours are to the traditions from which they emerged. When you’re talking about vermilion, Indian yellow, Vandyke brown, orpiment, the name is part of the allure, hinting at a deep and rich link to the Old Masters.
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One thing is for sure: you won’t find the gorgeous orpiment yellow on the modern painter’s palette (unless perhaps they are consciously, and in this case rather hazardously, using archaic materials). It is a deep, golden yellow, finer than Naples and lead-tin yellows. The name simply means “pigment of gold”, and the material goes back to ancient times: the Egyptians made it by grinding up a rare yellow mineral. But at least by the Middle Ages, the dangers of orpiment were well known. The Italian artist Cennino Cennini says in his handbook, written in the late fourteenth century, that it is “really poisonous”, and advises that you should “beware of soiling your mouth with it.” That’s because it contains arsenic: it is the chemical compound arsenic sulphide. (A different form of the same compound, also found as a natural mineral, furnishes the pigment realgar, the only pure orange colour available to painters until the nineteenth century.)
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgESXzDBQ8AshzoIiMvpprfxb_lFXm3IbvEBzh8eo7ZFnxQAQABiG1RaO9aZoVpxPrsBxyr3pdaNgsmM5Mq0GaazB9yNlKT_B61wvMkjT94qk8ebGFoltJoZKri4ThTmY_rn31h/s1600/orpiment.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgESXzDBQ8AshzoIiMvpprfxb_lFXm3IbvEBzh8eo7ZFnxQAQABiG1RaO9aZoVpxPrsBxyr3pdaNgsmM5Mq0GaazB9yNlKT_B61wvMkjT94qk8ebGFoltJoZKri4ThTmY_rn31h/s320/orpiment.jpg" width="320" height="320" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="800" /></a>
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<i>Natural orpiment (arsenic sulphide)</i>.
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Orpiment was one of those gorgeous but costly pigments imported to Europe from the East, in this case from Asia Minor. (In the early nineteenth century there were also imports from China, so that orpiment was sold in Britain as Chinese Yellow.) Such alluring imports often arrived through the great trading centre of Venice, and orpiment was hard to acquire up in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance – unless, like the German artist Lucas Cranach, who ran a pharmacy, you had specialist connections to exotic materials. Some orpiment was made not from the natural mineral but artificially by the chemical manipulations of alchemists. This type can be spotted on old paintings today by studying the pigment particles under the microscope: those made artificially tend to be more similar in size and have rounded grains. From the eighteenth century it was common to refer to this artificial orpiment as King’s Yellow. Rembrandt evidently had a supplier of the stuff, which has been identified in his <i>Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca</i> (often called <i>The Jewish Bride</i>), painted around 1665.
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If Dutch painters wanted a golden yellow like orpiment without the risk of poisoning, the Age of Empire supplied another option. From the seventeenth century, Dutch paintings (including those of Jan Vermeer) begin to feature a pigment known as Indian Yellow, brought from the subcontinent by the trading ships of Holland. It arrived in the form of balls of dirty yellowish-green, although bright and untarnished in the middle, which bore the acrid tang of urine. What could this stuff be? Might it truly be made from urine in some way? Lurid speculation abounded; some said the key ingredient was the urine of snakes or camels, others that it was made from the urine of animals fed on the yellow Indian spice turmeric.
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The mystery seemed to be solved in the late nineteenth century, when an Indian investigator making enquiries in Calcutta was directed to a village on the outskirts of the city of Monghyr in Bihar province, allegedly the sole source of the yellow material. Here, he reported, he found that a group of cattle owners would feed their livestock only on mango leaves. They collected the cows’ urine and heated it to precipitate a yellow solid which they pressed and dried into lumps.
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The cows (so the story goes) were given no other source of nutrition and so were in poor health. (Mango leaves might also contain mildly toxic substances.) In India such lack of care for cattle was sacrilegious, and legislation effectively banned the production of Indian Yellow from the 1890s.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTJVGwggsBgKgwJ9payVIyEhWY2QJzys-Y7MK6SQ3KcWTYFa8xRMerKHSij9LN00KNSwTuaRZN6BsMyxOI7THGDLuymiha2-BhSpBB3Z5bdTkCo3HTtPv-ojyFc3CUcTlJYz_3/s1600/Abergavenny-Bridge-Monmountshire-WC-Turner-510x341.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTJVGwggsBgKgwJ9payVIyEhWY2QJzys-Y7MK6SQ3KcWTYFa8xRMerKHSij9LN00KNSwTuaRZN6BsMyxOI7THGDLuymiha2-BhSpBB3Z5bdTkCo3HTtPv-ojyFc3CUcTlJYz_3/s320/Abergavenny-Bridge-Monmountshire-WC-Turner-510x341.jpg" width="320" height="214" data-original-width="510" data-original-height="341" /></a>
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<i>J. M. W. Turner was one of the nineteenth-century artists who made much use of Indian yellow.</i>
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There has been debate about how much of this story is true, but the basic outline seems to stand up – the pigment has a complicated chemical make-up but contains salts of compounds produced from substances in mango leaves when they are metabolized in the kidneys.
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While artists were having to rely for brilliant yellows on fugitive plant extracts, deadly arsenic-laden powers and cows’ urine, one might fairly conclude that they would welcome better yellows. So, then, it’s not hard to imagine the excitement of the French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin when at the start of the nineteenth century he found he could make a vibrant yellow material by chemical alteration of a mineral from Siberia called crocoite.
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This stuff was itself red – it was popularly called Siberian red lead, since there was truly lead in it. But in 1797 Vauquelin found there was something else too: a metallic element that no one had seen before, and which he named after the Greek word for colour, <i>chrome</i> or chromium.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVox-5nfIxT1H5DhU2_jK7zh7hmqeIz2ximm5iCe_RFVg5RJe8316qj_9HRvrHU6MvJntzX7fEu5P2RxVjSEVkxKKPzYu0q0yEdktWesDNSQG6w02aNTMPY4ZIRPXPTADTmwpM/s1600/260px-Crocoite_from_the_Dundas_extended_mine%252C_Dundas%252C_Tasmania%252C_Australia.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVox-5nfIxT1H5DhU2_jK7zh7hmqeIz2ximm5iCe_RFVg5RJe8316qj_9HRvrHU6MvJntzX7fEu5P2RxVjSEVkxKKPzYu0q0yEdktWesDNSQG6w02aNTMPY4ZIRPXPTADTmwpM/s320/260px-Crocoite_from_the_Dundas_extended_mine%252C_Dundas%252C_Tasmania%252C_Australia.jpg" width="320" height="217" data-original-width="260" data-original-height="176" /></a>
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<i>“Siberian red lead”, a mineral source of chromium.</i>
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The name was aptly chosen, because Vauquelin soon discovered that chromium could produce compounds with various bright colours. Crocoite is a natural form of lead chromate, and when Vauquelin reconstituted this compound artificially in the laboratory, he found it could take on a bright yellow form. Depending on exactly how he made it, this material could range from a pale primrose yellow to a deeper hue, all the way through to orange. Vauquelin figured by 1804 that these compounds could be artists’ pigments, and they were being used that way even when the French chemist published his scientific report on them five years later.
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The pigment was expensive, and remained so even when deposits of crocoite as a source of chromium were discovered also in France, Scotland and America. Chromium could also supply greens, most notably the pigment that became known as viridian and which was used avidly by the Impressionists and by Paul Cézanne.
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The chromium colours play a major role in the explosion of prismatic colour during the nineteenth century – evident not just in Impressionism and its progeny (Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism and the work of van Gogh) but also in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. After the muted and sometimes downright murky shades of the eighteenth century – think of Joshua Reynolds’ muddy portraits and the brownish foliage of Poussin and Watteau – it was as if the sun had come out and a rainbow arced across the sky. Sunlight itself, the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat declared, held a golden orange-yellow within it.
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For their sun-kissed yellows, the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists did not need to rely on chromium alone. In 1817 the German chemist Friedrich Stromeyer noticed that zinc smelting produced a by-product with a yellow colour in which he discovered another new metallic element, named after the archaic term for zinc ore, cadmia: he called it cadmium. Two years later, while experimenting on the chemistry of this element, he found that it would combine with sulphur to make a particularly brilliant yellow – or, with some modification to the process, orange. By the mid-century, as zinc smelting expanded and more of the byproduct became available, these materials were offered for sale to artists as cadmium yellow and cadmium orange.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_uZ3ifwSBoEtPPBZJ_1KLrCe7TPxegqtZ-HPnYewYGE7pRu3oVFsbfddwWn3pNtibfvEVhYMd-74_eVdOg64K4Gq4lWVCcyzkqavgToKwYs4Nqj2-ZLBY95mMIVU27tYO-IrT/s1600/cadmium+yellow.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_uZ3ifwSBoEtPPBZJ_1KLrCe7TPxegqtZ-HPnYewYGE7pRu3oVFsbfddwWn3pNtibfvEVhYMd-74_eVdOg64K4Gq4lWVCcyzkqavgToKwYs4Nqj2-ZLBY95mMIVU27tYO-IrT/s320/cadmium+yellow.jpg" width="320" height="320" data-original-width="280" data-original-height="280" /></a>
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<i>The artificial pigment cadmium yellow.</i>
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The cadmium colours have always stayed rather expensive, though. Nothing really beats cadmium red, a variant that went on market only around 1910. But it is typically around twice the price of other comparable reds, and the same goes for cadmium yellow. In that respect things have not changed so much since an artist in the Renaissance had to weigh up the worth of acquiring expensive orpiment as opposed to the drabber but much cheaper Naples yellow.
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There’s a lesson in the cadmium pigments that applies to all colours, through all ages: they have often been byproducts of some other chemical process altogether, often discovered serendipitously as chemists and technologists pursue other goals – to make ointments, say, or soap, glass or metals.
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It’s no different now. If you buy a tube labeled “Indian Yellow”, you can be sure no mangos or urine went into its making. Chances are, it will contain a yellow pigment that goes by the unromantic name of PY (pigment yellow) 139 – no mineral or metal salt, but a complicated organic molecule, meaning today that it is carbon-based and resembles molecules found in some living organisms. Chemists will say that it is a “derivative of isoindoline”, but the key point is that at its core is a ring of six carbon atoms joined into a so-called benzene ring.
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That’s a clue to the true heritage of these modern organic pigments. Pure benzene, as well as other molecules closer still in their shape and structure to those of PY139, was first isolated in the early nineteenth century from a substance called coal tar, the black tarry residue left over from the industrial extraction of natural gas from coal for gas lighting. Coal tar has a pungent smell – think of the traditional coal-tar soap, which contained some disinfectant compounds distilled from coal tar. This is because it is full of molecules with benzene rings at the core, which tend to be aromatic. (Chemists use that word simply to signify that benzene rings are present, irrespective of smell itself.) In the mid-nineteenth century, German chemist August Hofmann, the leading expert on aromatic coal-tar compounds, set his young English student William Perkin the challenge of trying to make the anti-malarial drug quinine from coal-tar extracts. Perkin didn’t succeed, but instead he found he had made a rich purple substance that he called aniline mauve and began to sell as a dye. That was the beginning of the synthetic-dye industry, which gave rise to the modern era of industrial chemistry: by the early twentieth century, dye manufacturers were starting to diversify into pharmaceuticals and then plastics.
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This is the world from which PY139 comes, along with a host of other organic pigments that mimic the old traditional colours with safer, cheaper compounds – many of them used also as food colorants, dyes and inks. One of the first offshoots of the aniline dyes was a yellow, simply called aniline yellow and belonging to an important class of colorants called azo dyes; it was sold commercially from 1863. There is a good chance that, when you see yellow plastic products today, they are coloured with azo dyes.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitjwEPUZRUxmksHbrnbUTCvoWT1Kho-T1abFQcDKdQr8jweYOjLmdNXrHH4zo5HIsJhHW6_z68oHl5JDNU71903UmET6qV7d78vwGmM2zHrjsHNzrV9wFOqXaeFDob47w160rk/s1600/azo_yellow.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitjwEPUZRUxmksHbrnbUTCvoWT1Kho-T1abFQcDKdQr8jweYOjLmdNXrHH4zo5HIsJhHW6_z68oHl5JDNU71903UmET6qV7d78vwGmM2zHrjsHNzrV9wFOqXaeFDob47w160rk/s320/azo_yellow.jpg" width="320" height="257" data-original-width="484" data-original-height="388" /></a>
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<i>Winsor and Newton’s azo yellow.</i>
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It seems a deeply unglamorous way to brighten the world today, compared to the age of King’s Yellow, saffron and Indian Yellow. It could feel that what is saved in the purse is sacrificed in the romance. Maybe so. But artists are typically pragmatic people, as eager for novelty as they are attached to tradition. There has never been a time when they have not avidly seized on new sources of colour as soon as those appear, nor when they have not relied on chemistry to generate them. The collaboration of art and science, craft and commerce, chance and design, is as vibrant as ever.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-76761472788252483802020-04-17T02:59:00.000-07:002020-04-17T02:59:14.409-07:00Three colours: BlueThis is the second of theree essays on colour commissioned for the catalogue of a now-cancelled exhibition on colour at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
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In 1954, French artist Yves Klein said that “I believe that in future, people will start painting pictures in one single colour, and nothing else but colour.”
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Klein did not wait for the future – he began painting monochromes in the 1940s. But it was only in the late 1950s that he truly found what he was looking for: a blue so glorious, so lustrous and deep, that it spoke for itself, and said all that Klein wanted to express. “Blue is the invisible becoming visible”, he said.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjB6_Ik3ExE76IVQtCLGs_ARF3uRdzQBNfb0YISfLE4Pf9WNKbhUlF_o5IN-L6uYbWTD0fjIVPwpJBFDO4T5GD0kZnuJPTeHru6MbBmpUAauSBPkAyXw_SwrK0jjX6kVg_uCdt/s1600/Klein.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjB6_Ik3ExE76IVQtCLGs_ARF3uRdzQBNfb0YISfLE4Pf9WNKbhUlF_o5IN-L6uYbWTD0fjIVPwpJBFDO4T5GD0kZnuJPTeHru6MbBmpUAauSBPkAyXw_SwrK0jjX6kVg_uCdt/s320/Klein.jpg" width="273" height="320" data-original-width="622" data-original-height="730" /></a>
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<i>Yves Klein,</i> IKB 79’ <i>(1959)</i>.
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It is not always easy to interpret Klein’s remarks, but I believe this one is not so hard to fathom. Blue has always spoken to something beyond ourselves: it is a colour that draws us into the void, the infinite sky. “Blue is the typical heavenly colour”, said Wassily Kandinsky – and who would doubt it after seeing the ceiling of the Arena Chapel in Padua, painted by Giotto around 1305, a vault coloured like the last moments of a clear Italian twilight? Some cultures don’t even recognize the sky as having a hue at all, as if to acknowledge that no earthly spectrum can contain it. In the ancient Greek theory of colour, blue was a kind of darkness with just a little light added.
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There’s a strong case to be made, then, that shades of midnight have always been the most treasured of artists’ colours. One of the earliest of the complex blue pigments made by chemistry was virtually an ancient industry in itself. The blue-glazed soapstone carvings known now as faience produced in the Middle East were traded throughout Europe by the second millennium BCE. Faience is typically now associated with ancient Egypt, but it was produced in Mesopotamia as long ago as 4500 BC, well before the time of the Pharaohs. It is a kind of glassy blue glaze, made by heating crushed quartz or sand with copper minerals and a small amount of lime or chalk and plant ash. The blue tint comes from copper – it is of the same family as the rich blue copper sulphate crystals of the school chemistry lab, although faience could range from turquoise-green to a deep dusk-blue. These minerals were typically those today called azurite and malachite, both of them forms of the compound copper carbonate. It’s not at all unlikely, although probably impossible to prove, that the manufacture of glass itself from sand and alkaline ash or mineral soda began in experiments with firing faience in a kiln somewhere in Mesopotamia.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqdBPGvWmOtkDA6LY8dCev0ghMvbmz98tvyC8qNkwn868mUil5xXQHWYhpi9Ghrd3VyIRhdaHjvoztEyBYVdNEb4Qk03-z0dEZ_3UXIASR3MFhi8-VPlSR0jRuLY6A0RSFv0HN/s1600/faience.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqdBPGvWmOtkDA6LY8dCev0ghMvbmz98tvyC8qNkwn868mUil5xXQHWYhpi9Ghrd3VyIRhdaHjvoztEyBYVdNEb4Qk03-z0dEZ_3UXIASR3MFhi8-VPlSR0jRuLY6A0RSFv0HN/s320/faience.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="901" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
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<i>Egyptian faience: a statue of Isis and Horus, c. 332-30 BC.</i>
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Similar experimentation might have given rise to the discovery of the trademark blue pigment of the Egyptians, simply known as Egyptian blue or frit. The recipe, at any rate, is almost the same: sand, copper ore, and chalk or limestone. But unlike faience glaze, this material is not glassy but crystalline, meaning that the atoms comprising it form orderly arrays rather than a jumble. Producing the pigment requires some artisanal skill: both the composition and the kiln temperature must be just so, attesting to the fact that Egyptian chemists (as we’d call them today) knew their craft – and that the production of colours was seen as an important social task. After all, painting was far from frivolous: mostly it had a religious significance, and the artists were priests.
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Azurite and malachite make good pigments in their own right – the first more bluish, the second with a green tint. They just need to be ground and mixed with a liquid binder. In the Middle Ages that was generally egg yolk for painting on wooden panels, and egg white (called glair) for manuscript illumination. Good-quality azurite wasn’t cheap, but there were deposits of the mineral throughout Europe. To the English (who had no local sources) it was German blue; the Germans knew it as mountain blue (<i>Bergblau</i>).
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZd1GPlgx2qt61ZbtHrD88viH32FCE1cec7X3VTBHH1yWZ1DVsVSObRLypmN70zxD8aG_c7Antx9Ho3aAyZwnZlHG1TtZ_ICcxSaAUx1qNbMuASZ0fefPEG2drVZkfwww90xH/s1600/1280px-Azurite%252C_Burra_Mine%252C_South_Australia.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZd1GPlgx2qt61ZbtHrD88viH32FCE1cec7X3VTBHH1yWZ1DVsVSObRLypmN70zxD8aG_c7Antx9Ho3aAyZwnZlHG1TtZ_ICcxSaAUx1qNbMuASZ0fefPEG2drVZkfwww90xH/s320/1280px-Azurite%252C_Burra_Mine%252C_South_Australia.jpg" width="320" height="231" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="924" /></a>
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<i>The mineral form of the blue pigment azurite (hydrated copper carbonate).</i>
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A cheaper blue was the plant extract indigo, used as a dye since ancient times. Unlike most organic dyes – those extracted from plants and animals – it doesn’t dissolve in water, but can be dried and ground into a powder like a mineral pigment, and then mixed with standard binding agents (such as oils) to make a paint. It give a dark, sometimes purplish blue, sometimes lightened with lead white. The Italian artist Cennino Cennini, writing in the late fourteenth century, described a “sort of sky blue resembling azurite” made this way from “Baghdad indigo”. As the name suggests – the Latin <i>indicum</i> shares the same root as “India” – the main sources for a medieval artist were in the east, although a form of indigo could also be extracted from the woad plant, grown in Europe.
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But the artist who could find a patron with deep pockets would be inclined towards a finer blue than any of these. When the Italian traveller Marco Polo reached what is today Afghanistan around 1271, he visited a quarry on the remote headwaters of the Oxus River. “Here there is a high mountain”, he wrote, “out of which the best and finest blue is mined.” The region is now called Badakshan, and the blue stone is lapis lazuli, the source of the pigment ultramarine.
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Cennino shows us how deeply ultramarine blue was revered in the Middle Ages, writing that it “is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass” [Cennino Cennini, <i>Il Libro dell’ Arte</i> (The Craftsman’s Handbook) (c.1390), p. 37-8. (Dover, New York, 1960)]. As the name implies, it came from “over the seas” – imported, since around the thirteenth century, at great expense from the Badakshan mines.
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Ultramarine was precious not just because it was a rare import, but because it was extremely laborious to make. Lapis lazuli is veined with the most gorgeous deep blue, but grinding it is typically disappointing: it turns greyish because of the impurities in the mineral. Those have to be separated from the blue material, which is done by kneading the powdered mineral with wax and washing the wax in water – the blue pigment flushes out into the water. This has to be done again and again to purify the pigment fully. The finest grades of ultramarine come out first, and the final flushes give only a low-quality, cheaper product, called ultramarine ash. The best ultramarine cost more than its weight in gold in the Middle Ages, and so it was usually used sparingly. To paint an entire ceiling with the colour, as Giotto did in the Arena Chapel, was lavish in the extreme.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdyjX10QvZ4CcxokYY7VHgWZ4tVayMLV30qbh3TGulEBXvyi9yurlcd7Y0XlmLM0HDJCUdZ0RsfZRnxuHshgHf9WEKQViRAHLcoK0fXGkdPl66TV7TZCTmg8G2EoYZ3M_YD9uS/s1600/Lapis-lazuli_hg.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdyjX10QvZ4CcxokYY7VHgWZ4tVayMLV30qbh3TGulEBXvyi9yurlcd7Y0XlmLM0HDJCUdZ0RsfZRnxuHshgHf9WEKQViRAHLcoK0fXGkdPl66TV7TZCTmg8G2EoYZ3M_YD9uS/s320/Lapis-lazuli_hg.jpg" width="320" height="264" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1320" /></a>
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<i>Lapis lazuli, the source of ultramarine.</i>
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More often the medieval painter would use ultramarine only for the most precious components of a painting. That seems to be the real reason why most altarpieces of this period that depict the Virgin Mary show her with blue robes. For all that art theorists have attempted to explain the symbolic significance of the colour – the hue of humility or virtue, say – it was largely a question of economics. Or, you might say, of making precious materials a devotional offering to God.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF_ykUJ_t_PBkoCa9XxXWW_MUrxoPocTBoyEEDs-WFOfI9qWZHDaCpG106iNIaTgfcDQl8YvVQmKJ5_Rmnc5Qc2go_-t9HtgEmrQiiXk-Un66mYX4RglFn-sRvcF4AjRzEa6L5/s1600/Child-Virgin-Enthroned-Siena-Patrons-panel-wood.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF_ykUJ_t_PBkoCa9XxXWW_MUrxoPocTBoyEEDs-WFOfI9qWZHDaCpG106iNIaTgfcDQl8YvVQmKJ5_Rmnc5Qc2go_-t9HtgEmrQiiXk-Un66mYX4RglFn-sRvcF4AjRzEa6L5/s320/Child-Virgin-Enthroned-Siena-Patrons-panel-wood.jpg" width="320" height="160" data-original-width="1396" data-original-height="700" /></a>
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<i>Duccio’s Maestà altarpiece (1308-11). The Virgin’s robes are painted in ultramarine.</i>
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But materials make their own demands. When, during the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, artists began to use oils rather than egg yolk to bind their pigments, they found that the switch both enalbed and demanded new techniques. The colours dried more slowly and so could be blended into subtle shadows and highlights, enhancing the realism of the work in line with the emerging humanist philosophy. But the artists also had to cope with the fact that some pigments look different when bound in oils; ultramarine was one of them.
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This is largely a matter of physics: light is bent and scattered to different degrees in the two binding agents, and the result is that ultramarine looked more transparent. Painters were then forced to compromise the purity of precious ultramarine by mixing it with a little lead white to keep it strong and opaque. Its mystique waned accordingly, and artists began to feel more free to use a whole range of lighter blues in their works. The art historian Paul Hills says that “Blue by the fifteenth century was moving away from its association with starry night, the vault of the heavens, to the changeful sky of day.”
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You can compare azurite and ultramarine side by side in Titian’s explosion of Renaissance colour, <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> (1523). Here is that starry vault, indeed turning to day before our eyes, and it is painted in ultramarine. So too is Ariadne’s robe, which dominates the scene. But the sea itself, on which we see Theseus’s boat receding from his abandoned lover, is azurite, with its greenish tint.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk0vh124tNGoJK4kqHSmCtCoeAjZwbA-6ldQ6pTuoZmil-5BzTdst9S7XmtjB4roX0WtZcKFleRgwtPFo-MyvfqjQyvMMgOGU-DVZdo46L-nIfuxhOeY918vIeOGXL8JDpjSHm/s1600/300px-Titian_Bacchus_and_Ariadne.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk0vh124tNGoJK4kqHSmCtCoeAjZwbA-6ldQ6pTuoZmil-5BzTdst9S7XmtjB4roX0WtZcKFleRgwtPFo-MyvfqjQyvMMgOGU-DVZdo46L-nIfuxhOeY918vIeOGXL8JDpjSHm/s320/300px-Titian_Bacchus_and_Ariadne.jpg" width="320" height="290" data-original-width="299" data-original-height="271" /></a>
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<i>Titian’s</i> Bacchus and Ariadne <i>(1523). Ariadne’s robe, and the sky, are painted in ultramarine. </i>
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Over the centuries, artists accumulated a few other blues too. Around 1704 a colour-maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach, working in the Berlin laboratory of alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, was attemtping to make a red lake pigment when he found that he had produced something quite different: a deep blue material. He had used a batch of the alkali potash in his recipe, supplied by Dippel – but which was contaminated with animal oil allegedly prepared from blood. The iron used by Diesbach reacted with the material in the oil to make a compound that – unusually for iron – is blue in colour. By 1710 it was being made as an artist’s material, generally known as Prussian blue.
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It wasn’t entirely clear what had gone into this mixture, and so for some years the recipe for making Prussian blue was surrounded by confusion and secrecy. In 1762 one French chemist declared that “Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains Prussian blue, and in must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a profound theory would be necessary to invent it.” But chance was a constant companion in the history of making colours. At any rate, Prussian blue was both attractive and cheap – a tenth of the cost of ultramatine – and it was popular with artists including Thomas Gainsborough and Antoine Watteau. It comprises some of the rich blue Venetian skies of Canaletto.
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Another blue from the Renaissance and Baroque periods went by the name of smalt, which is not so very different from the cobalt-blue glass of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, ground to a powder. Its origins are obscure, but may well come out of glass-making technology; one source attributes the invention to a Bohemian glassmaker of the mid-sixteenth century, although in fact smalt appears in earlier paintings. Cobalt minerals were found in silver mines, where their alleged toxicity (actually cobalt is only poisonous in high doses, and trace amounts are essential for human health) saw them named after “kobolds”, goblin-like creatures said to haunt these subterranean realms and torment miners. Natural cobalt ores such as smaltite were used since antiquity to give glass a rich blue colour, and smalt was produced simply by grinding it up – not too finely, because then the blue becomes too pale as more light is scattered by the particles. As a result of its coarse grains, smalt was a gritty material and not easy to use.
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Some art historians make no distinctions between this “cobalt blue” and those that were given the name in the nineteenth century. But the latter were much finer, richer pigments, made artificially by systematic chemistry. In the late eighteenth century the French government asked the renowned chemist Louis-Jacques Thénard to look for a synthetic substitute for expensive ultramarine. After consulting potters, who used a cobalt-tinted glassy blue glaze, in 1802 Thénard devised a strongly coloured pigment with a similar chemical constitution: technically, the compound cobalt aluminate. Cobalt yielded several other colours besides deep blue. In the 1850s a cobalt-based yellow pigment called aureolin became available in France, followed soon after by a purple pigment called cobalt violet – the first ever pure purple pigment apart from a few rather unstable plant extracts. A sky blue pigment called cerulean blue, a compound of cobalt and tin, was a favourite of some of the post-Impressionists.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4sksnkldIWjCrTeSiga4VMl5rBddU_BH04oj6LjC9w7wyP3W5wgQDZQkdykqAWnW1FjZWybPlaDpPKlSs-jFLQwxEKWYiYp8i125s92OcXjaaQQiuczY5L8iFz9VnY3naA0O2/s1600/Renoir.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4sksnkldIWjCrTeSiga4VMl5rBddU_BH04oj6LjC9w7wyP3W5wgQDZQkdykqAWnW1FjZWybPlaDpPKlSs-jFLQwxEKWYiYp8i125s92OcXjaaQQiuczY5L8iFz9VnY3naA0O2/s320/Renoir.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="960" /></a>
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<i>The water in Renoir’s</i> Boating on the Seine (La Yole) <i>(c.1879) is painted in cobalt blue.</i>
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But what artists craved most of all was ultramarine itself – if only it wasn’t so expensive. Even by the mid-nineteenth century it remained costly, which is why the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti caused much dismay (not to mention added expense) when he upset a big pot of ultramarine paint while working on a mural for Oxford University.
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By Rossetti’s time, however, artists did at last have an alternative – it’s just that several of them had not yet learnt to trust it. As chemical knowledge and prowess burgeoned in the early nineteenth century, bringing new pigments such as cobalt blue onto the market, it seemed within the realms of possibility to try to make ultramarine artificially.
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It was a prize well worth striving for, because pigment manufacture had become big business. The manufacture of colours and paints wasn’t supplying artists; there was now a taste for colour in the world at large, in particular for interior decoration. Factories were set up in the nineteenth century to make and grind pigments. Some sold them in pure form to the artist’s suppliers, who would then mix up paints for their customers from pigment and oil. But some pigment manufacturers, such as Reeves and Winsor & Newton in England, began to provide oil paints ready-made; from the 1840s these were sold in collapsible tin tubes, which could be sealed to prevent paints from drying out and could be conveniently carried for painting out of doors.
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Mindful of the importance of the pigment market, in 1824 the French Society for Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize for the first practical synthesis of ultramarine. It is a complicated compound to make – unusually for such inorganic pigments, the blue colour comes not from a metal but from the presence of the element sulphur in the mineral crystals. This composition of ultramarine was first deduced by two French chemists in 1806, offering clues about what needed to go into a recipe for making it. In 1828, an industrial chemist named Jean-Baptiste Guimet in Toulouse described a way to make the blue material from clay, soda, charcoal, sand and sulphur, and he was awarded the prize (despite a rival claim from Germany). In England this synthetic ultramarine was subsequently widely known as French ultramarine, and Guimet was able to sell it at a tenth of the cost of the natural pigment. By the 1830s there were factories making synthetic ultramartine throughout Europe.
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Artists looked upon this substitute with considerable caution, however. Ultramarine still retained some of its old mystique and majesty, and painters were reluctant to believe that it could be turned out on an industrial scale. Perhaps the synthetic variety was inferior – might it fade or discolour? Actually synthetic ultramarine is (unlike some synthetic pigments) very stable and reliable, but J. M. W. Turner was evidently still wary of it when, in the mid-century, he was about to help himself to the ultramarine on another artist’s palette during one of the “finishing days” at the Royal Academy, where artists put their final touches topaintings already hung for display on the walls. Hearing the cry that this ultramarine was “French”, Turner declined to dab into it.
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But by the end of the century, synthetic ultramarine was a standard ingredient of the palette: small wonder, given that it could be a hundred or even a thousand times cheaper than the natural variety. Synthetic ultramarine is the pigment in Yves Klein’s patented International Klein Blue, which he used for a series of monochrome paintings in the 1950s. But ultramarine never looked like this before – at least, not on the canvas.
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Klein noticed that pigments tend to look richer and more gorgeous as a dry powder than when mixed with a binder – another consequence of how light gets transmitted and refracted – and he sought to capture this appearance in a paint. In 1955 he found his answer in a synthetic fixative resin called Rhodopas M60A, made by the Rhone-Poulenc chemicals company, which could be thinned to act as a binder without impairing the chromatic strength of the pigment. This gave the paint surface a matt, velvety texture. Klein collaborated with Edouard Adam, a Parisian chemical manufacturer and retailer of artists’ materials, to develop a recipe for binding ultramarine in this resin, mixed with other solvents.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtQT8syf_OULz1Gqq4237W-rsihaZOKIvnMPj9xVRTkjkBxYvdEvG9dbiIonI0O9fLpjkeRx0TrSkBlfvEH3dg8mpJ74VMhK2WnXvaY4hjjgBYokjxRKxYJwFDkP3kBkbHjdkt/s1600/Klein_Venus.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtQT8syf_OULz1Gqq4237W-rsihaZOKIvnMPj9xVRTkjkBxYvdEvG9dbiIonI0O9fLpjkeRx0TrSkBlfvEH3dg8mpJ74VMhK2WnXvaY4hjjgBYokjxRKxYJwFDkP3kBkbHjdkt/s320/Klein_Venus.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
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<i>Yves Klein, </i>Venus Bleue <i>(1962).</i>
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Even in the modern era, then, some artists were still depending on chemical assistance and expertise. Despite the profusion of new pigments with complicated and recondite chemical formulations, the intimate relationship of painters to their materials has not been entirely severed.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-4035819750021218012020-04-16T02:38:00.000-07:002020-04-16T02:38:27.565-07:00Three colours: RedThis is the first of three essays on colours that were to be included in the catalogue for an exhibition at the Musé d'Orsay in Paris this year, which has been cancelled. So I'm putting them here for your delectation. Each essay focuses on the pigments developed and used through time for one of the primary colours.
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One hundred thousand years ago, the last Ice Age covered much of northern Europe with glaciers several kilometres thick. Small groups of <i>Homo sapiens</i> coexisted with other, now extinct human ancestors: Neanderthals and Denisovans. Life was nasty, brutish and short. Yet in a cave in what is today South Africa, humans found the time and inclination to mix red paint.
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Their tools have been found in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast: grindstones and hammer-stones for crushing the pigment, and abalone shells for mixing the powder with animal fat and urine to make a paint that would be used to decorate bodies, animal skins and perhaps cave walls. The red colour was made from ochre, a natural, soft, iron-rich mineral chemically similar to rust.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX9piavmYWHzlZUil0BpWeHhPbqIsnj4ylXPLWd3sFcMDBP2Z3OV0Kd2i7ZoXWrDfBm8qTmL4nBzwvhuKeyyj_hLJw2yFYfdkLqJhFNxX7qMwS6dkKFFzUCKGhll8C-G0HrDzZ/s1600/blombosalvarez.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX9piavmYWHzlZUil0BpWeHhPbqIsnj4ylXPLWd3sFcMDBP2Z3OV0Kd2i7ZoXWrDfBm8qTmL4nBzwvhuKeyyj_hLJw2yFYfdkLqJhFNxX7qMwS6dkKFFzUCKGhll8C-G0HrDzZ/s320/blombosalvarez.jpg" width="320" height="148" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="741" /></a>
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<i>A piece of engraved ochre from Blombos cave in South Africa.</i>
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The evolution of complex ways of thinking and socializing seems only to have happened fifty thousand years later – and yet even at the dawn of human culture it seems that the urge to adorn our surroundings and ourselves with colour was deeply felt. It was done in the colours of nature: black charcoal, white chalk and ground bone, and the brownish-red of ochre. It’s no wonder that a word for “red” seems to be one of the earliest colour words to appear in languages across the globe, after those for black and white. The cave paintings made 15-35 millennia ago in Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira attest to the genuine artistry that early humans achieved.
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Red ochre is still on the artist’s palette today: a “dirty” red, some might say, but an honest, humble one, and cheap too. It’s iron that gives the mineral this hue. Like many metals when chemically combined with other elements, it absorbs light within a characteristic band of the visible spectrum, soaking up the blues and greens but reflecting the reds. That red is purer in the colour of blood, where an iron atom sits at the heart of the protein haemoglobin and ferries oxygen around our bodies. The bloody hue is reflected in the technical name for ochre-like minerals: haematite, literally “blood-stone”, which is iron oxide.
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During the Industrial Revolution, chemists perfected a method for making iron oxide artificially, so that the red colour could be more precisely controlled. It was an offshoot of the manufacture of sulphuric acid, an important ingredient for textile bleaching. This red substance was sold to artists as “Mars red”, an echo of the old alchemical term for iron compounds. The planet Mars was long associated with redness. It has that hue even to the naked eye, for its surface is covered with iron oxide minerals.
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But the classic red pigments of the artists don’t rely on iron minerals, the hue of which is not the glorious red of a sunset, or indeed of blood, but of the earth. For many centuries, the primary red of the palette came from the compounds of two other metals: lead and mercury.
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Lead is something of a chameleon metal. By combining the raw metal with various other substances – vinegar, carbon dioxide, air – alchemists and artisans knew since the time of the ancient Egyptians how to obtain white, yellow and red materials. Red lead was the finest of these colours, made by heating “white lead” in air. It was known too in ancient China from at least the fifth century BCE. Roman and Greek painters used it, although the Roman writer Pliny in the first century AD was wary of artists who used bright colours like this too lavishly – the sober artist, he insisted, deployed a more muted palette, with reds of ochre.
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To Pliny, any bright red was called <i>minium</i>, and red lead was a slightly second-rate version: <i>minium secundarium</i>. But by the Middle Ages minium had become more or less synonymous with red lead, which was used extensively in manuscript illumination. That art came to be described by the Latin verb <i>miniare</i>, “to paint in minium”, from which we get the term “miniature”: nothing to do, then, with the Latin <i>minimus</i>, “smallest”. The association today with a diminutive scale comes simply from the constraints of fitting a miniature on the page.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibkyNm3ukk5ajb-ggYv6K0kysazjclO_dzVvsWlPdu2dLQF4IbQC4xeBFyaRfe54LIZxVKKCdTEuj9vpD2YAfagFsH4RbyFPxN4RnFMEiP1gSDnRO1N5798DrERFThdqHQHWug/s1600/red-lead-miniature.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibkyNm3ukk5ajb-ggYv6K0kysazjclO_dzVvsWlPdu2dLQF4IbQC4xeBFyaRfe54LIZxVKKCdTEuj9vpD2YAfagFsH4RbyFPxN4RnFMEiP1gSDnRO1N5798DrERFThdqHQHWug/s320/red-lead-miniature.jpg" width="319" height="320" data-original-width="573" data-original-height="575" /></a>
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<i>A miniature painted in red lead from c.1300.</i>
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Pliny’s best minium was a different red pigment, called cinnabar. This was a natural mineral: chemically, mercury sulphide. It was mined in the ancient world, partly for use as a red colorant but also because the liquid metal mercury could easily be extracted from it by heating. Mercury was thought to have almost miraculous properties: ancient Chinese alchemists in particular used it in medicines.
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By the Middle Ages, alchemists and craftspeople knew how to make mercury sulphide artificially by combining liquid mercury and yellow, pungent sulphur (available naturally in mineral form) in a sealed vessel and heating them. This process, which was described in a craftsman’s manual of around 1122 by the German monk Theophilus, can give a finer quality of red pigment. It was a procedure of great interest to alchemists too, as the Arabic scholars of the eighth and ninth centuries had claimed that mercury and sulphur were the basic ingredients of all metals – so that combining them might be a route to making gold. Theophilus, however, had no such esoteric arts in mind; he just wanted a good red paint.
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“Artificial cinnabar” became known by the name <i>vermilion</i>. The etymology is curious, and shows the confusing and treacherous flux of colour terms in an age when the hue of a substance seemed more significant than vague, pre-scientific notions of what its chemical identity was. It stems from the Latin <i>vermiculum</i> (“little worm”), since a bright red was once extracted from a species of crushed insect: not a paint pigment but a translucent dye of scarlet colour, arising from an organic (carbon-based) substance that the insects produce. Such dyes were also known as <i>kermes</i>, the etymological root of “crimson”. Because the insects that made it could be found on Mediterranean trees as clusters encrusted in a resin and resembling berries, the dyes might also be called granum, meaning grain. From this comes the term “ingrained”, implying a cloth dyed in grain: the dye was tenacious and did not wash out easily.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2-ScXToA9_yd85bF-RsDgS8zUiY78hupO3eiZZWuNqKwTmWpFv23RU-Ujmo53W7KxyEx5qjz7pf7Iy8xvC_sYF6STXgCgSWDK2rwONCvgJifUR9MCyXy-e_PHw-I3BfRrIuzF/s1600/Saint_Jerome.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2-ScXToA9_yd85bF-RsDgS8zUiY78hupO3eiZZWuNqKwTmWpFv23RU-Ujmo53W7KxyEx5qjz7pf7Iy8xvC_sYF6STXgCgSWDK2rwONCvgJifUR9MCyXy-e_PHw-I3BfRrIuzF/s320/Saint_Jerome.jpg" width="152" height="320" data-original-width="512" data-original-height="1080" /></a>
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<i>Vermilion is used abundantly in Masaccio’s </i>Saints Jerome and John the Baptist (<i>c.1428-9), in the National Gallery, London.</i>
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Vermilion is by no means the only close link between the reds of textile dyes and the reds of paint pigments. The former are translucent and dissolve in water, and are generally organic substances extracted from animals or plants – such as cochineal, an extract of New World beetles that became popular with cloth dyers in the sixteenth century. But paint pigments must be opaque and long-lasting, whereas dyes tended to fade as they were washed out or as sunlight broke down the delicate organic molecules.
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Red dyes were associated with majesty, opulence, status and importance: they were the colours used for cardinals’ robes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Painters needed fine reds to render on board and canvas these dignitaries whose portraits they were increasingly commissioned to paint. Red lead and vermilion served well enough in the Middle Ages, but the increased demand for verisimilitude in the Renaissance highlighted the difference between the orange hue of the pigments and the crimson of the dyes.
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One way to capture the quasi-purple magnificence of those dyes was to fix the colorant molecules onto solid, colourless particles that could be dried and mixed with oils like a regular pigment. This process involved some challenging chemistry, but even the ancient Egyptians knew how to do it. The basic idea is to precipitate a fine-grained white solid within a solution of the dye: the dye sticks to the particles, which dry to make a dark red powder. In the Middle Ages this process used the mineral alum, which can be converted to insoluble white aluminium hydroxide. The pigment made this way was called a lake, after the word (<i>lac</i> or <i>lack</i>) for a red resin exuded by insects indigenous to India and southeast Asia.
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One of the best red lakes of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance was made from the dye extracted from the root of the madder plant. As lake manufacture was perfected, artists such as Titan and Tintoretto began to use these pigments mixed with oils, giving a slightly translucent paint that they would apply in many layers for a deep wine-red tint or would wash over a blue to make purple. In this as in much else we can see the constant exchange in materials and knowhow between dyers and pigment-makers.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTNzWBaLMJOn2rgQoEuTl91mPfOTWPkmOkU8uTerzD4NSYAgqyDeki5B40i8M4ifMYIs9UGq-l06TE4YdSNQHorbKzroPVxDZ374sQdkcbKVhkw9bBOTWTyLuuDGl2sdUcwlIT/s1600/Titian_and_workshop_-_The_Vendramin_Family%252C_venerating_a_Relic_of_the_True_Cross_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTNzWBaLMJOn2rgQoEuTl91mPfOTWPkmOkU8uTerzD4NSYAgqyDeki5B40i8M4ifMYIs9UGq-l06TE4YdSNQHorbKzroPVxDZ374sQdkcbKVhkw9bBOTWTyLuuDGl2sdUcwlIT/s320/Titian_and_workshop_-_The_Vendramin_Family%252C_venerating_a_Relic_of_the_True_Cross_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="320" height="228" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1140" /></a>
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<i>There is abundant, rich red lake in Titian’s</i> Portrait of the Vendramin Family <i>(1543-7)</i>.
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A popular source of a luxurious, blood-red lakes in the late Middle Ages was the dye called cochineal, harvested in eastern Europe from a species of beetle that encrusted the perennial knawel plant with a resinous crust. The colour comes from organic compounds made by the insects themselves, which are killed, dried and crushed. According to one estimate, about 70,000 insects were needed to make one pound of this so-called carmine lake. The plant was harvested around midsummer, and if the crop failed, the price of carmine soared. After the discovery of the New World, however, cochineal for dyes and pigments gained a more reliable (if scarcely cheaper) source as an import from the Spanish colonies in the Americas.
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The existence of strong red pigments was vital to the evolution of the palette. According to the art historian Daniel Thompson, the invention of a method to make synthetic vermilion transformed the nature of medieval art:
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“No other scientific invention has had so great and lasting an effect upon painting practice as the invention of this colour… Given abundant vermilion, the standard of intensity in the painter’s palette automatically rises. Equally brilliant blues and greens and yellows were required to go with it… If the Middle Ages had not had this brilliant red, they could hardly have developed the standards of colouring which they upheld; and there would have been less use for the inventions of the other brilliant colours which came on the scene in and after the twelfth century.” (D. V. Thompson, <i>The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting</i>, p.106. Dover, New York, 1956.)
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Aside from the creation of red lakes, rather little about the painter’s reds changed from the Middle Ages until modern times. The Impressionists in the late nineteenth century made avid use of the new yellows, oranges, greens, purples and blues that advances in chemistry had given them, yet their reds were not really any different to those of Raphael and Titian.
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It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that a vibrant and reliable new red entered the repertoire. The discovery of the metal cadmium in 1817 immediately produced new yellow and orange pigments, but a deep red was made from this element only around the 1890s. The yellow and orange are both cadmium sulphide; but to get a red, some of the sulphur in this compound is replaced by the related element selenium. It wasn’t until 1910 that cadmium red became widely available as a commercial colour, and its production became more economical when the chemicals company Bayer modified the method in 1919.
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Cadmium red is a rich, warm colour – it is arguably the painter’s favourite red, except for the price. That was certainly true for Henri Matisse, for who red held a special valence - as his interiors in <i>La Desserte</i> (aka <i>The Red Room</i>, 1908), <i>Red Studio</i> (1911) and <i>Large Red Interior</i> (1948) attest. Of the second of these, art critic John Russell said “It is a crucial moment in the history of painting: colour is on top, and making the most of it.”
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgABtpWfooKKGCeS41ws5G_nx4MHgYacejhSlFfA1e8us8BUYr4VkUgX4FE0U9wSOvYNEN52DrsIOB_z8C7wY5APLkKAetkSSJnIRqc5UrBvjcwhkDn-baNDuPCHgPghzaWHT6K/s1600/matisse_red_studio.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgABtpWfooKKGCeS41ws5G_nx4MHgYacejhSlFfA1e8us8BUYr4VkUgX4FE0U9wSOvYNEN52DrsIOB_z8C7wY5APLkKAetkSSJnIRqc5UrBvjcwhkDn-baNDuPCHgPghzaWHT6K/s320/matisse_red_studio.jpg" width="320" height="265" data-original-width="845" data-original-height="700" /></a>
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<i>Matisse’s</i> The Red Studio<i> (1911) is painted in cadmium red.</i>
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<i>Colour is on top</i>. That was that way in went in the twentieth century, from the strident chromatic statements of the Fauves (Matisse at their head) to the stark primaries of Ellsworth Kelly and the hypnotic maroon colour fields of Mark Rothko (whose experiments with new reds made from synthetic and fugitive dyes did not end well). Colour went from being the artist’s medium to being the subject. In that shifting of the agenda, red led the way.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-40060351008781891462020-02-29T07:12:00.000-08:002020-02-29T07:12:28.390-08:00How you hear the words of songsThis is my latest column for the Italian science magazine <i>Sapere</i>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilsUvvO_LedRbSqLLm_RTnOQ3c_WdTPJscvaY-fRE0PmZXfNSnEI2yG6CkyWEtIm3YFOEsOr-NYbzEj7cltxi67gErqX9R90KcpUHzzcd2MlgCAOrN6y5ua71vnkh6Y63L8h5w/s1600/albouy2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilsUvvO_LedRbSqLLm_RTnOQ3c_WdTPJscvaY-fRE0PmZXfNSnEI2yG6CkyWEtIm3YFOEsOr-NYbzEj7cltxi67gErqX9R90KcpUHzzcd2MlgCAOrN6y5ua71vnkh6Y63L8h5w/s320/albouy2.jpg" width="320" height="188" data-original-width="1318" data-original-height="774" /></a>
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The distinctions between song and spoken word have always been fuzzy. There’s musicality of rhythm and rhyme in poetry, and some researchers think the origins of song merge with those of verse in oral traditions for passing on stories and knowledge. Many musical stylings lie on the continuum between melodic singing and spoken recitation, ranging from the quasi-melodic recitative of traditional opera, the almost pitchless <i>Sprechstimme</i> technique introduced by Schoenberg and Berg in operas such as <i>Pierrot Lunaire</i> and <i>Lulu</i>, the Beat poetics of Tom Waits or the rapid-fire wordplay of rap.
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It’s also well established that the cognitive processing of music and language share resources in the brain. For example, the same distinctive pattern of brain activity appears, in the language-processing region called Broca’s area, when we hear both a violation of linguistic syntax and a violation of the ‘normal’ rules of chord progressions. Yet the brain appears to use quite different parts of the brain to decode speech and sung melody: to a large extent, it categorizes them as different kinds of auditory input, and analyses them in different ways.
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To a first approximation, speech is mostly processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, while melody is sent to the right hemisphere. Philippe Albouy and colleagues, working in the lab of leading music cognitive scientist Robert Zatorre at McGill University in Montreal, have now <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6481/1043">figured out</a> how that processing differs in detail: what the brain seems to be looking for in each case. They asked a professional composer to generate ten new melodies, to each of which they set ten sentences, creating a total of 100 “songs” that a professional singer then recorded unaccompanied.
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They played these recordings to 49 participants while altering the sound to degrade its information. In some cases they scrambled details of timing, so the words sounded slurred or indistinct. In others they filtered the sound to alter the acoustic frequencies (spectra), giving the songs a robotic, “metallic” quality. Participants were played an untreated song followed by the pair of altered versions, and were asked to focus either on the words or the melody.
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For the tunes where timing details were altered, the melodies remained audible but not the words. With spectral manipulation, the reverse was true: people could make out the words but not the tune. So it seems that the speech-processing brain looks for temporal cues to decode the sound, whereas for melody-processing it’s the spectral content that matters more. Albouy and colleagues confirmed, using functional MRI for brain imaging, that the changes caused different activity in the auditory cortex on the left and right of the brain respectively.
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Importantly, this doesn’t mean that the brain sends the signal one way for song and the other for speech. Both sides are working together in both cases, for otherwise we couldn't make out the lyrics of songs or the prosody – the meaningful rise and fall in pitch – of speech. The musical brain is integrated, but delegates roles according to need.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com180tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-15453863103786351322020-01-05T09:27:00.000-08:002020-01-05T09:27:33.753-08:00Was Dracula gay?The mostly rather splendid <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07rxf89">adaptation</a> of Bram Stoker’s <i>Dracula</i> just screened by the BBC prompts me to post here this short edited extract from my forthcoming book <i>The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination</i>.
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The BBC Dracula excited much comment, some of it affronted and outraged, in its portrayal of the Count as bisexual. I thought it might be useful to explain, then, how and why gay sexuality is a central theme in <i>Dracula</i>.
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If you like the sound of this piece, please do feel free to advertise it far and wide. My book, which ranges from Robinson Crusoe to Batman, and which touches on (among other things) zombies, werewolves, superheroes, aliens and UFOs, psychoanalysis, incest and perversion, Judge Dredd, Jane Austen, J. G. Ballard, J. M. Coetzee, and the end of the world, was not deemed terribly interesting (or sciencey enough) by most UK publishers, so forgive me for having to promote it shamelessly from now until publication.
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First and foremost, “the vampire is an erotic creation”, according to the Italian writer Ornella Volta: “The vampire can violate all taboos and achieve what is most forbidden.” Those taboos surely include, inter alia, dominance and submission, rape, sadomasochism, bestiality and homoeroticism. Let’s throw in masturbation and incest too: cultural critic Christopher Frayling sees in the voluptuous nightly visitation of a being who leaves the victim in a swoon and depleted of vital fluids the imprint of erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions; while for Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, writing in 1910, the vampire expressed “infantile incestuous wishes that have been only imperfectly overcome.”
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What makes <i>Dracula</i> so compelling and potent is that its sexual work is done largely unconsciously. If Bram Stoker’s great-nephew and biographer Daniel Farson is to be believed (which is by no means always the case), the author “was unaware of the sexuality inherent in <i>Dracula</i>”. Which is why gothic scholar David Skal is right to suggest that we can read the book today as “the sexual fever-dream of a middle-class Victorian man, a frightened dialogue between demonism and desire.” He calls <i>Dracula</i> “one of the most obsessional texts of all time, a black hole of the imagination”.
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For Frayling, the book “was probably transgressing something – but the critics weren’t quite sure exactly what.” That is probably because the author was not sure either. On the face of things, Stoker was an eminently respectable late Victorian – and we know well enough today not to trust that persona an inch. For what he produced in <i>Dracula</i> was aptly described by English writer and critic Maurice Richardson “a kind of incestuous, necrophilious [sic], oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match”. Which means (I am not being entirely glib here) that it had something for everyone.
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Stoker was born and raised in Dublin to a Protestant family clinging to the lower rungs of the middle classes. Respectability mattered to him; he had the judgemental morality of the socially precarious, for example proclaiming after a visit to America that the hobos and tramps there should be branded and sent to labour colonies to learn what hard work was. His rather shrill worship of “manliness” and conventional views on gender roles look now like aspects of a determined act of self-deception.
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Still, you can’t fault his work ethic. Stoker never seemed to feel that one full-time occupation need preclude others, and so even while he was studying mathematics at Trinity College Dublin he took a job in the civil service, established himself as a theatre critic, and in 1873 accepted the editorship of the Irish Echo, where he was essentially the only member of staff. (Somehow he still got his degree.)
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In 1867 he saw a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals starring the actor Henry Irving. Stoker was smitten, and when Irving, by then actor-manager at the Lyceum Theatre in London, returned to Dublin in 1876, Stoker’s reviews of his production of Hamlet were so effusive that the acutely vain actor invited the young critic to dinner, at which he treated Stoker to a rendition of a melodramatic poem. It’s all too easy (given accounts of his acting technique) to imagine Irving reciting it with self-adoring hamminess, but Stoker attested that he was reduced to “a violent fit of hysterics” (at that time a stereotypically womanly response – he’s not talking about laughter). His devotion was sealed. “Soul had looked into soul!” Stoker wrote. “From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men.” At the end of 1878 Irving asked him to come to London as his front-of-house manager.
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It’s easy to see why Count Dracula is often said to be based on Irving, even though there is not really any compelling reason to think so. For the man truly was a sort of monster (mainly of egotism); he could be charming, but also cruel, haughty and callous. And he drained Stoker dry, treating him like a servant if not indeed a slave, and exploiting his house manager’s blind devotion to make outrageous demands at all times of day and week.
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Buy even if we accept that Stoker’s arrogant, domineering Count Dracula was not formulated as an act of surreptitious revenge on Irving, still he seemed to have hoped the actor might play the role on stage. That never looked likely to happen. After an informal reading of Stoker’s stage treatment of the book at the Lyceum shortly after its publication, Irving was reported to have walked out muttering ”Dreadful!”
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That Stoker not only bore all these demands and rebuffs but sustained his adoration of Irving regardless seems to speak of more than just hero worship. He had a masochistic infatuation with Irving that persisted until the actor died, a feeling stronger than any he showed for his wife and family. Stoker’s friend, the Manx writer Hall Caine, attested that “I have never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.” Stoker’s feeling for Irving, he added, was “the strongest love that man may feel for man.” (There was possibly a homoerotic element too in Stoker’s closeness to Caine. Highly-strung and flamboyant, with a thinning mane and piercing stare, Caine was the “Hommy-Beg” – his Manx nickname – to whom Stoker dedicated <i>Dracula</i>.)
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While studying at Trinity in the early 1870s, Stoker became fixated on the American poet Walt Whitman, who is now widely considered to have had homoerotic (if not necessarily homosexual) relationships. Stoker wrote Whitman an impassioned letter, full of ambiguous remarks about his own sexuality: “How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul.” In the Whitmanesque poem he wrote in 1874, “Too Easily Won”, he speaks of the anguish of being rejected by another man: “His heart when he was sad & lone/Beat like an echo to mine own/But when he knew I loved him well/His ardour fell.” Stoker met Whitman during an American tour with Irving in 1884, and the two men talked warmly.
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Whether all this means we can consider Stoker a repressed homosexual is a complicated question, however. Only in his day were the boundaries of sexuality becoming fixed – indeed, it was then that the word “homosexual” was coined. In the same year Dracula was published, Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds argued that same-sex desire was a common state of affairs with a long history, albeit an “inversion” of the norm. Before this medicalization of sexuality, it simply had no role as a label of identity, and distinctions between mutual affection and sexual desire between men were barely scrutinized.
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Homosexual preference wasn’t seen as incompatible with heterosexual marriage, for the objectives of the two types of relationship were quite different. What a wife might bring to a man who loved men was almost as much a matter of aesthetic balance as of social respectability. Love wasn’t necessary to balance that equation. Just as Oscar Wilde’s marriage can’t simply be considered a sham for the sake of social conformity, no more can Stoker’s. The comparison could hardly be more apt anyway, for both men (whose families were acquainted in Ireland) courted the same woman: the “Irish beauty” Florence Balcombe. She chose Stoker but got little joy from it; the marriage was said to be devoid of passion, and Bram only ever speaks of ‘love’ and ‘loving’ in the context of his male relationships. Poor Florence was left at home to mind the children while her husband worked long nights at the Lyceum. At the end of her life she hinted at regrets that she hadn’t opted for Wilde after all, in spite of what had befallen him.
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But Oscar’s flamboyance seems to have made Bram wary of his acquaintance when the two men lived in London: they remained in uneasy contact, but Stoker never once mentioned Wilde in his letters. He must have watched with horror as Oscar’s public disgrace unfolded in 1895 in the fateful trial against the Earl of Queensberry, provoked by Wilde’s relationship with the earl’s son Lord Alfred Douglas. After Wilde had been convicted, his brother Willie wrote to Stoker saying “poor Oscar was not as bad as people thought him.” It isn’t clear Bram ever replied.
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In many ways Wilde’s <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i> represents his more metaphorical take on the vampire myth. Here again is the corrupt, Byronic aristocrat (Lord Henry Wooton) who saps the life-force from those around him. Wilde’s book is far superior in literary terms, and provides a more nuanced and imaginative perspective on vampirism. He was also much more in conscious control of his material, especially its homoerotic subtext. And this is precisely why <i>Dorian Gray</i> has entered the modern literary canon but is not a modern myth.
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Given what we know of Stoker, we might expect the subliminal eroticism of <i>Dracula</i> to be slanted towards male same-sex relations. In that respect it doesn’t disappoint. Whether or not, as cultural historian Nina Auerbach claims, <i>Dracula</i> “was fed by Wilde’s fall”, the book positively throbs with frantically suppressed homoeroticism. The Count dismisses his predatory “brides” as they prepare to violate Harker with the command “This man belongs to me!” F. W. Murnau, the director of the iconic 1922 film adaptation <i>Nosferatu</i>, was gay himself and seems alert to Stoker’s unconscious subtext when his Dracula figure Graf Orlok licks blood from the finger of his bewildered guest after he cuts himself shaving. (We should be cautious about ascribing explicit intent, however; Murnau used a screenwriter.)
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Yet while Dracula has sometimes been presented as a model of queer identity, it hardly seems a positive portrayal. He embodies everything perceived to be “bad” about homosexuality: all that Stoker may have sensed, feared and loathed in himself. Like vampirism, homosexuality was at that time becoming a deplorable “condition” from which one needed to be rescued.
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The heroes of the novel do their best to show how. Contrasting with the vile lechery of the Count as he looms over Harker, and the young man’s fascinated disgust as he discovers the vampire’s blood-gorged body in the crypt of his castle, the camaraderie among the band of men who vanquish the vampire models Stoker’s own solution to his predicament. As Auerbach says, the book “abounds in overwrought protestations of friendship among the men, who breathlessly testify to each other’s manhood.” Over them all presides the fatherly, Whitman-like figure of Van Helsing, who assures Arthur Holmwood that “I have grown to love you – yes, my dear boy, to love you.” For all his prejudice and dissembling, one can’t help feel for the anguished Stoker here, seemingly so desperate to neutralize and normalize his feelings.
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The homoerotic allure of the vampire had been explored, with far less inhibition and repression, three years before Dracula was published, by the Slavic aristocrat Eric Stenbock. His short story “A True Story of a Vampire” records the recollection by an old woman called Carmela who lives in a castle in Styria – an obvious reference to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s homoerotic vampire novella <i>Carmilla</i> (1872) – of an episode from her youth. A mysterious Hungarian guest called Count Vardalek arrives at the castle and enthralls Carmela’s young brother Gabriel. We can guess well enough from his appearance what the Count has in mind: “He was rather tall with fair wavy hair, rather long, which accentuated a certain effeminacy about his smooth face.”
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Gabriel pines when Vardalek, now welcomed into the family home, has to go away on trips to Trieste. “Vardalek always returned looking much older, wan, and weary. Gabriel would rush to meet him, and kiss him on the mouth. Then he gave a slight shiver: and after a little while began to look quite young again.”
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But Gabriel, previously so healthy, starts to succumb to a mysterious illness. On his deathbed, “Gabriel stretched out his arms spasmodically, and put them round Vardalek's neck. This was the only movement he had made, for some time. Vardalek bent down and kissed him on the lips.” When the boy dies, the Count leaves, never to be seen by the family again.
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A poet as well as an author of fantastical tales, Stenbock was more Wildean than Wilde, and made no bones about it. He conducted many homosexual relationships while studying at Oxford, and he was said to have gone everywhere with a life-sized doll that he called his son. He was said to be eccentric, morbid and perverse – qualities he put to good use in his vampire story.
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The gay subtext of Dracula was pursued in <i>The House of the Vampire</i> (1907) by the writer George Sylvester Viereck. A complex and controversial figure, Viereck met with Adolf Hilter in Germany in the 1930s, and was imprisoned in the United States in 1942 because of his Nazi sympathies – specifically for failing to register as a supporter of National Socialism. His book relates the story of Reginald Clarke, a dissipated Henry Wotton figure who draws young men into a web of corruption. He represents a popular character type of the early twentieth century: a psychic vampire, who absorbs the energy and creativity of his victims. “Your vampires suck blood”, cries one of his victims, “but Reginald, if vampire he be, preys upon the soul.” Viereck’s description of Clarke’s fate leaves little doubt that the character was modeled on Wilde himself:
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“Many years later, when the vultures of misfortune had swooped down upon him, and his name was no longer mentioned without a sneer, he was still remembered in New York drawing rooms as the man who brought to perfection the art of talking.”
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Clarke’s vampirism is portrayed here not as a vile perversion but as the right of a superior being to draw the life force from his inferiors. True to his fascistic leanings, Viereck wrote that “My vampire is the Overman of Nietzsche. He is justified in the pilfering of other men’s brains.” He is a revival of the Byronic vampire, a creature of taste and refinement.
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It’s puzzling why gay men like Stenbock, Wilde and Viereck chose to reiterate the widespread association of homosexuality with the desecration of youthful innocence. Yet the theme of corruption being spread via body fluids during illicit, decadent sexualized embraces, would, in Stoker’s time, have resonated with fears about syphilis. Science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss considers Dracula “the great nineteenth-century syphilis novel”, although Oscar Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellman argues that this was also the real subject of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The disease announced itself with lesions on the body, much like the bodily symptoms of vampirism for which the characters in Dracula search their skin. It has been suggested that Stoker died from syphilis contracted from a prostitute; this seems unlikely, although that is his fate in Aldiss’s metafictional <i>Dracula Unbound</i> (1991).
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Aldiss’s book was published when an entirely new sexually transmitted disease had grown to epidemic proportions: AIDS, as an allegory of which vampire mythology seems unnervingly tailored. There is the infection by blood, the enervated state of the victims, and also the suggestion pushed by homophobic media reports that AIDS is associated with perverse sexual behaviour. As is often the way with modern myths, there was already a new version available to explore the metaphor: Anna Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles”, beginning with <i>Interview With a Vampire</i> (1976), and followed by <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> (1985) and <i>The Queen of the Damned</i> (1988). The critical reception and public response was much more positive for the latter two novels than for the first, and perhaps that reflected how society had changed – not just because the strength of the gay rights movement by the early 1980s had created an environment more receptive to the themes, but because the precarious existence of Rice’s vampires seemed to speak to the devastating effects of AIDS in the gay community. “I happened to encounter Interview With a Vampire at the height of the AIDS epidemic”, writes author Audrey Niffenegger,
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“…and it seems in retrospect to be a prescient book. Anna Rice could not have known how her creation would resonate with a world in which blood itself was dangerous, in which male homosexuality and death became closely entwined.”
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Although Rice was comfortable with such interpretations, she denied having any intention of making her Vampire Chronicles a gay allegory But the homoeroticism is plain to see, and the vampires Louis and Lestat live for years like a gay couple with their young adoptive daughter Claudia. That analogy arguably does gay parents no favours, however, since the prospect of Claudia maturing into an adult woman within the body of a perpetually young girl makes for some of the most disturbing – and, it must be said, mythopoeic – material in Interview With the Vampire. “You’re spoiled because you’re an only child”, Lestat tells her, to which she languidly responds, “I suppose we could people the world with vampires, the three of us.” By daring to voice such things, Rice gives the vampire myth a genuinely contemporary infusion, the horror element for once being far less significant than the capacity to provoke unease.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com114tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-1586965937263028012019-12-29T14:41:00.000-08:002019-12-31T03:46:06.510-08:00Rise of the vacuum airshipSorry folks, I had to take the full story down - it violates New Scientist's rights agreement, which was entirely my oversight. The published version of the article is available to NS subscribers <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432611-000-could-vacuum-airships-go-from-steampunk-fantasy-to-21st-century-skies/">here</a>.Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com356tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-20229470323769137642019-11-07T11:47:00.000-08:002019-11-07T11:47:40.389-08:00The City is the CityMy brief from the wonderfully named Dream Adoption Society of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw – for their 2019 exhibition <i>The City is the City</i> (the allusion to China Miéville is intended) – was to express a dream of the utopian city of the future. I’m not sure I did that, but here is what I gave them.
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When trying to imagine the future, I tend to look back to the past. What we can find there are not answers but reasons to be humble.
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It’s one thing to laugh at how wide of the truth the forecasts of a century or so ago were about the warp and weft of life today: all those moonbases, jet packs, flying cars. But it is more useful to think about why they were wrong.
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The finest example, in many respects, of a vision of the future city in the late nineteenth century was supplied by the French author and illustrator Albert Robida in his books <i>The Twentieth Century</i> (1882) and its sequel <i>The Electric Life</i> (1892). Set in the 1950s, the first book shows the life of a Parisian woman called Hélène Colobry as she goes about her life as a recent law graduate; in the second we meet engineer Philoxène Lorris and his son Georges. In a series of glorious illustrations, Robida shows us a world of electric light, interactive televisions (“telephonoscopes”), airborne rocket-shaped cars and dirigibles, all in a style that is the very epitome of steampunk – and not a bit like the way things turned out.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd1gaGiC2nD_9yx3vQjKabi17i6jvI6YkHxgH8xamc8x4QGZuiJWO4ekC4-ZDymccV7lDgXl7lsE0gOPlx6PlcIfcnd7yAz5szZX9vsMl788fYfHpTjFyaJ7SkcSLnXa1oWOR2/s1600/utopia1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd1gaGiC2nD_9yx3vQjKabi17i6jvI6YkHxgH8xamc8x4QGZuiJWO4ekC4-ZDymccV7lDgXl7lsE0gOPlx6PlcIfcnd7yAz5szZX9vsMl788fYfHpTjFyaJ7SkcSLnXa1oWOR2/s320/utopia1.jpg" width="219" height="320" data-original-width="585" data-original-height="854" /></a>
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The Parisians who populate Robida’s world could have stepped straight out of the fin de siècle, all elegant hats and parasols. And while the skies swarm with vehicles, the city below is architecturally recognizable as the Paris of Robida’s time. Our first inclination might be to read this as anachronistic – but wait, isn’t Paris indeed still that way now, with its art nouveau Metro stations and its Haussmann boulevards? So Robida is both “wrong” and “right”: he didn’t anticipate what was coming, but he reminds us that cities, and the entire texture of life, are palimpsests where traces of the past going back decades, centuries, even millennia, coexist with the most up-to-the-minute modernity.
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More than that: the devices of modernity have built into them a visual and conceptual continuity with the past, for how else could we at first have navigated them? The joke has it that a young person, seeing for the first time a real floppy disk, exclaims “Hey, you’ve 3D-printed the Save icon!” I’ve no idea if this was ever actually said, but it is inadvertently eloquent as well as funny.
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Thus forewarned, let us stroll into the utopian city – and discover that, as ever, it reflects our own image, our fantasies and fears, our current, compromised, patchwork technologies. This place is after all where we live here and now, but allowed to have grown and morphed in proportion to our old obsessions and habits, disguised with a veneer of synthetic futures. We have walked a circle and re-entered the present from another direction.
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Utopia is an invention of the Renaissance, and ever since the quasi-theocracies imagined by Thomas More and Francis Bacon it has been bound up with the city and the city-state. In Tommaso Campanella’s <i>The City of the Sun</i> (1623), the philosophical and political foundations of his utopia are inseparable from the fabric of his city with its seven concentric walls: a design that, like the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, represented the construction of the entire (now Copernican) cosmos. The very walls have a pedagogical function, covered with pictures and diagram that illustrate aspects of astronomy, mathematics, natural history and other sciences.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOfMEHTa1yqp5B7O8E_YGSpJq_1Rc4Z9tT7mFKkMqQY8ruJcp9OQF6Lk-HzY8yrITsTctks6pZ1RCJVVETP5KEqRJAAkmD3gdMOxThGmC1wuiYDJOD_ktSlGnHfHvmu9igC8P3/s1600/utopia2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOfMEHTa1yqp5B7O8E_YGSpJq_1Rc4Z9tT7mFKkMqQY8ruJcp9OQF6Lk-HzY8yrITsTctks6pZ1RCJVVETP5KEqRJAAkmD3gdMOxThGmC1wuiYDJOD_ktSlGnHfHvmu9igC8P3/s320/utopia2.jpg" width="320" height="244" data-original-width="797" data-original-height="608" /></a>
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<i>Palmanova in northern Italy has a radial design echoed in Tommaso Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun, reflecting the political ideals of social order and harmony.</i>
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For producing this vision, Campanella suffered 27 years of imprisonment and torture – reminding us that, when they began, utopian cities of the future were not forecasts of what technology might deliver but statements of political intent.
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And, I can hear urban theorists sigh, when was a city ever not a statement of political intent? Cities speak about the societies that build them. The rich man in his high castle, the poor man at his gate – traditionally, real cities have symbolized not the heavens but the hierarchies here on earth. As the brutalist concrete modernism of housing complexes near my home in south London is slowly demolished, I see a failed experiment not just in architecture but also in social philosophy – just, indeed, as was the case when those rectilinear grey hulks of the 1950s and 60s replaced the Victorian slums that stood there before. And no one doubts that the disappearance of the <i>hutongs</i> of Beijing before the march of high-rise, daringly asymmetrical steel and glass makes a statement about what China is determined to leave behind and what it aspires to become.
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So while my instinct, as an avid follower of trends in self-organization, complexity and new materials, is to bring science and technology to bear on the question of utopian urbanism (and I’ll get to that), I am reluctant to say a word on such matters before admitting that this question is primarily bound up with politics and demographics.
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Not that I want first to make predictions about <i>that</i>; at this particular moment in history I would hesitate to forecast the politics of next week. Rather, I want to acknowledge that whatever fantasies (that is all they will be) I spin, they have to build on some kind of social philosophy before we think about the fabric.
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But this is more complicated than it used to be, and the reason why is partly technological. One of the interesting aspects of Robida’s drawings is that his skies above the cityscape are sometimes a dense web of telephone wires. He evidently felt that whatever the twentieth century city would look like, communication and information networks would be important for them.
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Now those wires are disappearing. Why? First, because they began to run underground, in optical fibres able to pack a far greater density of information into a narrow channel, encoded in pulses of light. But ever more now it is because the wires have become virtual: the networks are wireless.
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“Wifi” is like that Save icon: a ghost of past technology condensed into an avatar of modernity. You need to be rather old to see it as anything more than a “dead metaphor”, meaning that it now stands only for itself and its etymological roots have themselves become irrelevant and invisible. Older readers, as the phrase goes, will hear the echo of “hifi”, which the term was coined to imitate: high fidelity, referring to the high-quality reproduction of sound in home audio systems, or more generally, to the superior conveyance of (audio) information. The “wi”, of course, is “wireless”, which harks back to the miracle that was radio. By means that many people considered semi-magical in the 1920s and 30s, sound and information could be broadcast <i>through the air</i> as radio waves rather than along transmission wires.
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This seemed like an occult process, and indeed was initially thought by some to be allied to spiritualism and mediumship: the “ether” that was seen as the material medium of radio waves was suspected of also being a bridge between the living and the dead. When television arrived – so that you could not only hear but even see a person hundreds of miles away – the mystical aura of “wireless” technology only increased.
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What has this to do with the city of the future? It illustrates that new technologies, especially of communication, have <i>psychic</i> implications as well as infrastructural ones. Even with a web of wires as dense as Robida’s, no one would have imagined a future in which you can sit in a coffee shop and, with a slab of glass and silicon held in your hand, tap instantly into more or less the sum total of existing human knowledge: to read in facsimile Isaac Newton’s original <i>Principia</i>, or watch in real time images of a spaceship landing on an asteroid. No one imagined that, thanks to technological innovation, we would in 2018 be producing as much data every two days as we produced throughout all of human existence until 2003.
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And the truly astonishing thing is that <i>this seems normal</i>. More, it is regarded now almost as a human right, so that we are irritated to find ourselves in an unban space where every cubic centimetre of empty space is not animated by this invisible and ever expanding information flow.
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Why in heaven’s name should we be expected to make sense of this situation as well as simply to exploit it? From a perceptual point of view, wifi wrecks spacetime. These ten square centimetres of reality are no longer where I am sitting in (say) Starbucks on Euston Road, but are the living room of my sister in Canberra, with whom I am chatting on Skype. Do you think it is just coincidence that the ways we interact with information technology are often indistinguishable from the symptoms of psychosis (and I’m not just talking about the associated addictions and other dysfunctional behaviours)?
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Add to this now the possibility that even what might seem like the concrete existence of your own immediate environment can be tinkered with, overlain with the metadata of augmented reality. How then are we supposed to police the borders of virtual and real? Is it even clear what the distinction means? But if it is not, then who decides? And who decides where in that space of possibilities “normality” lies?
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So look: a utopian city of the future must recognize that there will be more technologies like this, and also that people will adapt to them without ever quite processing them psychically. One thing Robida’s future citizens are never doing is sitting in their public-transport dirigibles staring at little black tablets in their palm, and frowning at them, laughing or weeping at them, talking to them. To Robida’s readers that would have made no sense at all.
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It’s an easy matter to see how technologies and networks of information have changed our lives and built environments. Ever more people can work from home, for one thing – and the proper way to say this is that the boundaries of work and domesticity have become porous or almost invisible. What is perhaps more striking is how these technologies have been assimilated by, and altered, life in places far removed from the centres of modern development: rural sub-Saharan Africa, the plains of Mongolia. A weather app is handy if you want to know whether to take your umbrella with you in Paris; it is rather more than that if you are a farmer in Kenya.
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It is precisely this importance of information that makes it a currency of political and economic power. Increasingly indices of development include the question of wifi access and screens per capita. Censorship of information technologies has become a significant means not just of social control but of employment in some countries; democracy is struggling (and failing) to keep pace with the tools that exist for manipulating opinion and distorting facts. As professor of communication John Culkin famously said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
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The struggle between, say, the Chinese authorities to censor the web and users’ efforts to evade them are, in an Orwellian sort of way, a metaphor for the tensions that exist in any complex adaptive system that unfolds in a social context. They are a dance between attempts at centralized control and design and the tendency of such systems to grow of their own accord. Both the internet and cities are often presented as exemplars of human constructs that no one designed, although of course the truth is that design and planning simply have limited impact. Christopher Wren’s orderly, utopian vision of London after the Great Fire of 1666 was never realized because of the city’s irrepressible urge to reform itself – with all the attendant chaos – while the embers were scarcely cool.
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Perhaps the central revelation of the scientific study of complex adaptive systems is that this spontaneous growth is not merely chaotic and random, but follows particular law-like regularities – albeit ones quite unlike the geometric designs of Campanella and Wren, and which more closely resemble, and often exactly reproduce, the growth laws of living organisms.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV1h6QEjHYMO9bQ1TDECsOy7VLSRIsFrbF0hYuqC6npN4IsONUYIuriBqMSaDPVqpz0UusFAfGujgvHOmzJlbOqP_oS22h4gWWkVS233xlkov_JHnRKJOpRxc4o5pWwRMdAdeA/s1600/utopia3.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV1h6QEjHYMO9bQ1TDECsOy7VLSRIsFrbF0hYuqC6npN4IsONUYIuriBqMSaDPVqpz0UusFAfGujgvHOmzJlbOqP_oS22h4gWWkVS233xlkov_JHnRKJOpRxc4o5pWwRMdAdeA/s320/utopia3.jpg" width="320" height="242" data-original-width="731" data-original-height="552" /></a>
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<i>The growth and form of cities like London resemble those of natural processes, like fluid flow through porous rock or the spread of a bacterial colony.</i>
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These regularities exist not because the agents responsible for growth – the people who build new roads and houses, say – are so intelligent, but precisely because their intelligence is, in this context at least, so limited. It’s not very clear what kinds of structures intelligent agents create when they are exerting their full cognitive capacities – the question is less studied theoretically – but there is some chance that they might be either too complex for any laws to be apparent at all, or totally random (the two could of course be indistinguishable). But when agents have very constrained cognition – when they act according to rather simple laws – then complex but nonetheless rather predictable and law-like group behaviour emerges. Cities, for example, show so-called scaling laws in which everything ranging from their crime rate to their innovative capacity, and even the speed of walking, varies with size according to a rather simple mathematical relation. They grow in a manner similar to tumours and snowflakes: they look like natural phenomena. Ants, wasps and termites are by no means cognitively sophisticated, but their social structures and even their architecture – their nests and mounds – certainly can be.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho-syUNsoNZhyphenhyphenioMI0g7ytD8v8qiN9VtkFRUGNnQnXC-VJS0oxYe6MT1jIElaWk8fGWOhaXfrtpRmdSubBcyxAvlb7XjnqGaN9oUd4FPYL59w86_HjJHRFLSj1XqQB2wUmkTiv/s1600/utopia4.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho-syUNsoNZhyphenhyphenioMI0g7ytD8v8qiN9VtkFRUGNnQnXC-VJS0oxYe6MT1jIElaWk8fGWOhaXfrtpRmdSubBcyxAvlb7XjnqGaN9oUd4FPYL59w86_HjJHRFLSj1XqQB2wUmkTiv/s320/utopia4.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="562" data-original-height="750" /></a>
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<i>The complex architecture of tunnels in a termite mound, revealed here by taking a plaster cast. Photo: Rupert Soar, Loughborough University.</i>
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This doesn’t mean that humans are cognitively simple too (although who knows where that scale starts and ends?). Rather, our social systems inherently reduce the amount of cognition needed, and perhaps have evolved precisely in order to do so. It’s why we have traditions, conventions, norms and taboos. It’s why we have traffic lanes, speed limits, highways codes. (Traffic is a particularly clear example of complex behaviour, such as waves of stop-start jamming, emerging from agents interacting through simple rules.)
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There is a strong case, then, why a well-designed city of the future would be quite unlike the precisely planned and geometrically ordered city-utopias of the past. Self-organized systems commonly show desirable traits, such as efficiency and economy in use of space and energy, robustness against unpredictable outside disturbances, and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The trick is to find the “rules of engagement” between agents that create such outcomes and do not risk getting trapped in “bad solutions”.
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Another way of saying this, perhaps, is that there is no point in trying to specify what an urban utopia would look like; rather, the important questions are what qualities we would like it to have (and to avoid), and what kinds of constraints and underlying rules would guide it to towards those outcomes. There is no reason to think that either of these things have universal answers for all cultures and all places.
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What surely is clear is that the social ethos and the physical fabric will be intimately connected, as they always have been. What a city looks like both reflects and determines the values of the society it accommodates.
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One piece of futurology that I am tentatively prepared to offer is that the utopian city will be protean. It will be able to change its physical state in ways that bricks and mortar, tarmac and steel never could. These capabilities are already being incorporated into materials at the level of individual buildings and civil-engineering structures. In fact to a limited extent they always have been: historical lime mortars are self-healing in their capacity to reconstitute themselves chemically and cement together cracks. Today, self-repair is being built into construction materials ranging from plastics to asphalt to steel, for example by incorporating cavities that release air-setting glues when broken open.
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It’s a small step towards what have become dubbed “animate materials”, which have some of the qualities of living systems: an ability to grow in response to environmental cues, to heal damage, to alter their composition to suit the circumstances, to sense and alter their surroundings. Trees and bones reshape themselves in response to stress, removing material where it is not needed and reinforcing it where the danger of failure lurks. And they are of course fully biodegradable and renewable.
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For such reasons, natural ecosystems are a flux not just of materials and energy but of information. They even contain information networks: trees, say, communicating via airborne hormones and subterranean root systems. There is no clear distinction between structural fabric, sensors, and communication and information systems: the smartness of the material is built-in, invisible to the eye. This is the direction in which our artificial and built environments are heading, so that they are ever less a tangle of wires and increasingly a seamless interface as bland and cryptic as an iPod. The mechanisms are unseen, often inseparable from the materials from which they are made.
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And this is one reason why we don’t have robot butlers. What a great deal of redundant design would be needed to create such a humanoid avatar; how much effort would have to be expended simply to ensure that it does not trip on the carpet. In a sufficiently smart, adaptive, wireless environment, a mere static cylinder will do instead; shall we call her Alexa? The future’s technology needn’t pay much heed to surface and texture – faux-mahogany Bakelite, smooth, glossy plastic, gleaming steel – because the interface will be on and within us: responding to vision, voice, posture, perhaps sheer thought.
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Which leads to the real question: who will <i>we</i> be?
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Here there is another lesson to be learnt from Robida’s wonderful books. He has very evidently taken the citizens of late nineteenth-century Paris and deposited them in what was then a futuristic-looking world. We might laugh at how transparent a ruse that is now, but we’ve a tendency to do the same. All those images of utopian cities (often in outer space) from the 1950s might have granted to the futuristic citizens a bit of nifty, brightly coloured and stylishly minimalist clothing, but there were the same rosy-cheeked, smiling nuclear families, the dad waving goodbye to the blond-haired kids on his way to work. We even do this with our vision of alien and artificial intelligence, attributing to them all the same motives as ours (for better or worse) but just with fancier tech.
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Yet not only social mores and norms but also the very nature of identity is mutable over time. Arguably this is more true now than ever, so there is no reason to suppose the transformation of identity will be any less rapid in the future.
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Already modernity demands that we adopt multiple identities that surface in different situations, often overlapping and increasingly blurred but defining our views and choices in distinct ways. Traditional social categories that defined identity, such as age, class, and nationality, are becoming less significant, as are distinctions between public and private identity. Old definitions based on class, ethnicity and political affiliation are ceding to new divisions, for example marked by distinctions of urban/rural, well/poorly educated, young/old, connected/off grid. In our fictional dystopias, such divisions are sometimes genetic, perhaps artificially induced and maintained.
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What’s more, identities are being increasingly shaped by active construction, documentation, affiliation and augmentation. The kind of manufactured and curated public profile once reserved for celebrities is now available to billions, at least in principle. We arrange and edit our friendships and our memories, attune our information flows to flatter our preconceptions, and assemble our thoughts, experiences and images into packages that we present as selves.
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We still have no idea what kind of societies will grow from these opportunities for self-definition. If traditional attributes of individual identities become more fragmented, communities might be expected to become less cohesive, and there could be greater marginalization, segregation and extremism. Yet hyperconnectivity can also produce or strengthen group identities in positive ways, offering new opportunities for community-building – which need pay not heed to geography and spatial coordinates.
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The city is a living embodiment of its citizens. They have selected the contours, the technologies, the interfaces that they believe best represent them. That’s why utopian dreams are just another way of looking at ourselves. So be careful what you wish for.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com76tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-58227766773606200032019-09-27T01:06:00.000-07:002019-09-27T01:06:11.549-07:00Just how conceptually economical is the Many Worlds Interpretation?An exchange of messages with Sabine Hossenfelder about the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics has helped me sharpen my view of the arguments around it. (Sabine and I are both sceptics of the MWI.)
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The case for Many Worlds is well rehearsed: it relates to the “measurement problem” and the idea that if you take the “traditional Copenhagen” view of quantum mechanics then you need to add to the Schrödinger equation some kind of “collapse postulate” whereby the wavefunction switches discontinuously from allowing multiple possible outcomes (a superposition) to having just one: that which we observe. In the Many Worlds view postulated by Hugh Everett, there is no need for this “add on” of wavefunction collapse, because all outcomes are realized, in worlds that get disentangled from one another as the measurement proceeds via decoherence. All we need is the Schrödinger equation. The attraction of this idea is thus that it demands no unproven additions to quantum theory as conventionally stated, and it preserves unitarity because of the smooth evolution of the wavefunction at all times. This case is argued again in Sean Carroll’s new book <i>Something Deeply Hidden</i>.
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One key problem for the MWI, however, is that we observe quantum phenomena to be probabilistic. In the MW view, all outcomes occur with probability 1 – they all occur in one world or another – and we know even before the measurement that this will be so. So where do those probabilities come from?
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The standard view now among Everettians is that the probabilities are an illusion caused by the fact that “we” are only ever present on one branch of the quantum multiverse. There are various arguments [<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907">here</a> and <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9906015">here</a>, for example] that purport to show that any rational observer would, under these circumstances, need to assign probabilities to outcomes in just the manner quantum mechanics prescribes (that is, according to the <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-born-rule-has-been-derived-from-simple-physical-principles-20190213/">Born rule</a>) – even though a committed Everettian knows that these are not real probabilities.
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The most obvious problem with this argument is that it destroys the elegance and economy that Everett’s postulate allegedly possesses in the first place. It demands an additional line of reasoning, using postulates about observers and choices, that is not itself derivable (even in principle!) from the Schrödinger equation itself. Plainly speaking, it is an add-on. Moreover, it is one that doesn’t convince everyone: there is no proof that it is correct. It is not even clear that it’s something amenable to proof, imputing as it does various decisions to various “rational observers”.
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What’s more, arguments like this force Everettians to confront what many of them seem strongly disinclined to confront, namely the problem of constructing a rational discourse about multiple selves. There is a philosophical literature around this issue that is never really acknowledged in Everettian arguments. The fact is that it becomes more or less impossible to speak coherently about an individual/observer/self in the Many Worlds, as I discuss in my book <i>Beyond Weird</i>. Sure, one can take a naïve view based on a sort of science-fictional “imagine if the Star Trek transporter malfunctioned” scenario, or witter on (as Everett did) about dividing amoebae. But these scenarios do not stand up to scrutiny and are simply not science. The failure to address issues like this in observer-based rationales for apparent quantum probabilities shows that while many Everettians are happy to think hard about the issues at the quantum level, they are terribly cavalier about the issues at the macroscopic and experiential level (“oh, but that’s not physics, it’s psychology” is the common, slightly silly response).
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So we’re no better off with the MWI than with “wavefunction collapse” in the Copenhagen view? Actually, even to say this would be disingenuous. While some Everettians are still happy to speak about “wavefunction collapse” (because it sounds like a complicated and mysterious thing), many others working on quantum fundamentals don’t any longer use that term at all. That’s because there is now a convincing and indeed tested (or testable) story about most of what is involved in a measurement, which incorporates our understanding of decoherence (sometimes wrongly portrayed as the process that makes MWI itself uniquely tenable). For example, see <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-darwinism-an-idea-to-explain-objective-reality-passes-first-tests-20190722/">here</a>. It’s certainly not the case that all the gaps are filled, but really the only thing that remains substantially unexplained about what used to be called “collapse” is that the outcome of a measurement is unique – that is, a postulate of macroscopic uniqueness. Some (such as Roland Omnès) would be content to see this added to the quantum formalism as a further postulate. It doesn’t, after all, seem a very big deal.
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I don’t quite accept that we should too casually assume it. But one can certainly argue that, if anything at all can be said to be empirically established in science, the uniqueness of outcomes of a measurement qualifies. It has never, ever been shown to be wrong! And here is the ultimate irony about Many Worlds: this one thing we might imagine we can say for sure, from all our experience, about our physical world is that it is unique (and that is not, incidentally, thrown into doubt by any of the cosmological/inflationary multiverse ideas). We are not therefore obliged to accept it, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to do so.
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And yet this is exactly what the MWI denies! It says no, uniqueness is an illusion, and you are required to accept that this is so on the basis of an argument that is itself not accessible to testing! And yet we are also asked to believe that the MWI is “the most falsifiable theory ever invented.” What a deeply peculiar aberration it is. (And yet – this is of course no coincidence – what a great sales hook it has!)
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Sabine’s objection is slightly different, although we basically agree. She says:
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“Many Worlds in and by itself doesn't say anything about whether the parallel worlds "exist" because no theory ever does that. We infer that something exists - in the scientific sense - from observation. It's a trivial consequence of this that the other worlds do not exist in the scientific sense. You can postulate them into existence, but that's an *additional* assumption. As I have pointed out before, saying that they don't exist is likewise an additional assumption that scientists shouldn't make. The bottom line is, you can believe in these worlds the same way that you can believe in God.”
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I have some sympathy with this, but I think I can imagine the Everettian response, which is to say that in science we infer all kinds of things that we can’t observe directly, because of their indirect effects that we can observe. The idea then is that the Many Worlds are inescapably implicit in the Schrödinger equation, and so we are compelled to accept them if we observe that the Schrödinger equation works. The only way we’d not be obliged to accept them is if we had some theory that erases them from the equation. There are various arguments to be had about that line of reasoning, but I think perhaps the most compelling is that there are no other worlds explicitly in any wavefunction ever written. They are simply an interpretation laid on top. Another, equally tenable, interpretation is that the wavefunction enumerates possible outcomes of measurement, and is silent about ontology. In this regard, I totally agree with Sabine: nothing compels us to believe in Many Worlds, and it is not clear how anything could ever compel us.
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In fact, Chad Orzel <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2019/09/17/many-worlds-but-too-much-metaphor/">suggests</a> that the right way to look at the MWI might be as a mathematical formalism that makes no claims about reality consisting of multiple worlds – a kind of quantum book-keeping exercise, a bit like the path integrals of QED. I’m not quite sure what then is gained by looking at it this way relative to the standard quantum formalism – or indeed how it then differs at all – but I could probably accept that view. Certainly, there are situations where one interpretational model can be more useful than others. However, we have to recognize that many advocates of Many Worlds will have none of that sort of thing; they insist on multiple separate universes, multiple copies of “you” and all the rest of it – because their arguments positively require all that.
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Here, then, is the key point: you are <i>not</i> obliged to accept the “other worlds” of the MWI, but I believe you <i>are</i> obliged to reject its claims to economy of postulates. Anything can look simple and elegant if you sweep all the complications under the rug.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-89681863604208273782019-09-05T02:19:00.000-07:002019-09-05T02:19:44.664-07:00Physics and ImaginationThis essay appears in <i>Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination</i>, a <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Entangle-Artistic-Imagination-Ariane-Koek/dp/3775745084">book</a> edited by Ariane Koek and produced for an <a href="http://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/en/exhibition/entangle/31713">exhibition</a> of the same name in Umea, Sweden.
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It would seem perverse, almost rude, not to begin a discussion of imagination in physics with Einstein’s famous quote on the topic, voiced during a newspaper interview with the writer George Viereck in 1929:
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“I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
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For a fridge-magnet inspirational quote to celebrate the value of imagination, you need look no further. But context, as so often with Einstein, is everything. He said this after talking about the 1919 expedition led by the British physicist Arthur Eddington to observe the sky during a total solar eclipse off the coast of Africa. Those observations verified the prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that starlight would be bent by the gravitational field of a massive body like the sun. Einstein told Viereck that “I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.” Viereck – a fascinating figure in his own right, who had previously interviewed (and showed some sympathy for) Adolf Hitler and wrote a psychological and gay-inflected Wildean vampire novel in 1907 – responded to that supremely confident statement by asking: “Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?”
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You could say that Einstein’s reply was a qualified affirmative. And this seems very peculiar, doesn’t it, for a “man of science”?
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The story dovetails with Einstein’s other well-known response to the eclipse experiment. Asked by an assistant (some say a journalist) how he should have felt if the observations had failed to confirm his theory, he is said to have responded “Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”
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Compare that with the statement of another celebrated aphoristic physicist, the American Richard Feynman:
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“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”
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Who is right? Einstein trusting to imagination, intuition and artistry, or Feynman to the brutal judgement of empiricism? If we’re talking about scientific methodology, Feynman is right in spirit but nonetheless displaying the limitations of the physicist’s common “naïve realist” position about science, which assumes that nature delivers uncomplicated, transparent answers when we put to it questions about our physical theories. Yet Einstein’s general relativity was a theory so profoundly motivated and so conceptually satisfying, despite the mind-boggling shift it demanded in conceptions of space and time, that it could not be lightly tossed on the scrapheap of beautiful ideas destroyed by ugly facts.
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So the sensible way to have handled a discrepancy with observed “facts” like those collected by Eddington in his observations of the positions of stars during an eclipse would have been to wonder if the observations were reliable. Indeed, Eddington was later accused of cherry-picking those facts to confirm the theory, perhaps motivated by his Quaker’s desire to bring about international reconciliation after First World War had triggered the ostracising of Germany. (It seems those charges were unfounded.) Nature doesn’t lie, but experimentalists can blunder.
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There’s a deeper reason to valorize Einstein’s claim about imagination in physics. What I feel he is really saying is that imagination precedes knowledge, and indeed establishes the precondition for it. You might say that when the shape of imagination sufficiently fits the world, knowledge results.
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We have never needed more reminding of this. In his unfinished magnum opus <i>Novum Organum</i> the seventeenth-century English philosopher Francis Bacon presented knowledge as the product obtained when raw facts – observations about the world – are fed into a kind of science machine (what we might now call an algorithm) and ground into their essence. It was an almost mechanical process: you first collect all the facts you can, and then refine and distil them into general laws and principles about the way the world works. Bacon never completed his account of how this knowledge-extraction process was meant to work, but at any rate no one in science has ever successfully used such a thing, or even knows what it could comprise.
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Yet Bacon’s vision threatens to return in an age of Big Data – especially in the life sciences, where the availability of information about, say, genome sequences or correlations between genes and traits has outstripped our ability to create theoretical frameworks to make sense of it. There’s a feeling afoot not only that data is intrinsically good but that knowledge has no option but to fall out of it, once the mass of information about the world is large enough.
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Physicists have received advance warning of the limitations of that belief. They have their own knowledge machines: sophisticated telescopes and particle detectors, say, and most prominently the Large Hadron Collider and other particle colliders capable of generating eye-watering quantities of data about the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the world. But they already know how little all this data will help without new ideas: without imagination.
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For example? There are some good reasons to believe that if physics is going to penetrate still further into the deep laws of nature, it needs a theoretical idea called supersymmetry. So far, all we know about the particles and forces of nature is described by a framework called the Standard Model, which contains all the ingredients seemingly needed to explain everything seen in experiments in particle physics to date. But we know that there’s more to the universe than this, for many reasons. For one thing, the current theory of gravity – Einstein’s general relativity – is incompatible with the theory of quantum mechanics used to describe atoms and their fundamental particles. Supersymmetry – a putative connection between two currently distinct classes of particle – looks like a promising next step to a deeper physics. Yet so far, the LHC’s high-energy collisions have offered no sign that it’s true.
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What’s more, there’s nothing in the Standard Model that seems to account for the “dark matter” that astrophysicists need to invoke to explain what they see in the cosmos. This mysterious substance is believed to pervade the universe, invisibly, being felt by ordinary matter only through its gravitational influence. Without something like dark matter, it is hard to make sense of the observed forms and motions of galaxies: how they rotate without shedding stars like a water sprinkler. The reasons to believe in dark matter – and moreover to believe it exceeds the mass of ordinary visible matter by a factor of about five – are very strong. Yet countless efforts to spot what it consists of have failed to offer any clues. Huge quantities of data constrain the choices, but no evidence supports any of the theories proposed to explain dark matter.
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These are – there is no avoiding the issue – failures of imagination. Supersymmetry and dark matter are wholly imagined theories or entities, but the collective imagination of physicists has not yet made them vivid enough to be revealed or disproved. It is possible that this is because they are imaginary in the more literary sense: they exist only in our minds. And they are not alone; dark energy (which causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate) and string theory (one candidate for a theory that would unite gravity and quantum mechanics) are other components of the physicist’s imaginarium waiting to be verified and explained or to be dismissed as unicorns, as the ether, as the philosopher’s stone.
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A single observation – one experiment revealing a discrepancy with a definite theoretical prediction, or one sighting of a new kind of particle – could change the situation. Maybe it will. But it is equally possible that we will need ultimately to concede defeat, and to extent the imagination of physics into new territory: for example to accept, as some are already arguing, that what we call “dark matter” is a symptom of another physical principle (a modification to the theory of gravity, say) and not a true substance.
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There’s nothing embarrassing or damning in all this. It’s not that physics itself is failing. The situation is just business as usual in science: to have mysteries awaiting explanation, even ones of this magnitude, is a sign of health, nor sickness. For individual physicists whose reputations hang (or seem to) on the validity of a particular idea, that’s scant comfort. But for the rest of us it’s nothing short of exhilarating to see such deep and broad questions remaining open.
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The real point is that imagination in physics is what the paths to the future, to new knowledge, are built from. Actual knowledge – things we can accept as “true”, in the sense that they offer tried and tested ways of predicting how the world behaves – has been assembled into an edifice as wonderful and as robust as the Gothic cathedrals of stone, the medieval representations of the physical and spiritual universe. But at the point where knowledge runs out, only imagination can take us further. I think this is what Einstein was driving at.
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The invitation is often to suppose that this imagination operates only at the borders of physical theory: at, you might say, the cliff-face of physics that tends to dominate its public image, where we find exotica like string theory, black holes, cosmology and the Higgs boson. But physics, perhaps more than any other science, has a subtle, fractal-like texture in which gaps in knowledge appear everywhere, at all scales. Imagination was needed to start to understand that strange state of matter made of grains: powders and sand, part fluid and part solid. It is currently blossoming in a field known as topological materials, in which the electrical and magnetic properties are controlled by the abstract mathematical shapes that describe the way electrons are distributed, with twists akin to those in the famous one-sided Möbius strip. It was imagination that prompted physicists and engineers to make structures capable of acting as ‘invisibility shields’ that manipulate and guide light in hitherto inconceivable ways. In all these cases, as in science more broadly, the role if the imagination is not so much to guide us towards answers as to formulate interesting and fruitful new questions.
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What does this imagination consist of? We’d do well to give that question more attention. I would suggest that it is, among other things, a way of seeing possibilities: a rehearsal of potential worlds. That’s what justifies Einstein’s comparison to the work of the artist: imagination, as Shakespeare put it, “bodies forth the forms of things unknown.” The scientist’s theories, as much as the poet’s pen, “turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” That name could be “general relativity” – why not?
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What’s the source, though? Many ideas in fundamental physics grow from what might seem the rather arid soil of mathematics. Supersymmetry and string theory are predicated in particular on the conviction that the deepest principles of the physical world are governed by <i>symmetry</i>. What this word means at the level of fundamental theory might seem less apparent to the outsider than what it implies in, say, the shape of a Grecian urn or the pattern of wallpaper, but at root it is not so very difference: symmetry is about an equivalence of parts and their ability to be transformed one into another, as a left hand becomes a right through the mirror reflection of the looking glass.
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Well, it might seem arid, this mathematics. But imagination is as vital here as it is in art. What mathematicians value most in their colleagues is not an ability to churn out airtight proofs of abstract theorems but a kind of creativity that perceives links between disparate ideas, an almost metaphorical way of making connections in which intuition is the architect and proof can come later. Both mathematicians and theoretical physicists commonly speak of having a sense that they are right about an idea long before they can prove it; that proof is “just the engineering” needed to persuade others that the idea will hold up.
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Let’s be cautious, though, about making “engineering” the prosaic, plodding part of science though. The common perception is that theorists do the dreaming and experimentalists just build the apparatus for putting dreams to the test. That’s just wrong. For one thing, it’s typically experiment that drives theory, not the other was around: it’s only when we have new instruments for examining the world that we discover gaps in our understanding, demanding explanation. What’s more, experiment too is fuelled by imagination. No one tries to see something unprecedented – farther out into space (which means, because light’s speed is finite, farther back in time), or into the world of single atoms, or into the spectrum of radiation outside the band of light our eyes can register – unless they have conjured up images of what <i>might</i> be there. Sure, you need some existing theory to guide your experimental goals, to show potentially fruitful directions for your gaze; but no one sails into uncharted territory if they think all they’ll find is more of the same, or nothing at all. “If you can’t imagine something marvellous, you are not going to find it”, says physics Nobel laureate Duncan Haldane. “The barrier to discovering what can be done is actually imagination.” And the power and artistry of the experimenter’s imagination comes not just from dreaming of what there is to be found in <i>terra incognita</i>, but also from devising a means to travel there.
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When I speak of dreams, I don’t just mean it metaphorically, nor just in the sense of waking reverie. To judge from the testimony of scientists themselves, dreams can function as sources of inspiration. True, we should be a little wary of that; the notion of receiving insight in a dream became a romantic trope in the nineteenth century, and careful historical analysis often reveals some hard and very deliberate graft, as well as a very gradual process of understanding, behind scientific advances that were recast retrospectively as dream-revelations. But it happens. Several contemporary physicists have attested to insights that came to them in dreams, as the conscious mind that has been long pondering a problem loosens its bonds on the margins of sleep and admits a little more of the illogic on which imagination thrives.
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All the same, we shouldn’t think that the physicist’s imagination always works in the abstract, in the realm of pure thought. Very often, it takes visual form: finding the right symbolic representation of a problem, such as Feynman’s famous “diagrams” for studying questions in the field of quantum electrodynamics (in essence, the theory of how light and matter interact), can unlock the mind in ways that more abstract algebraic mathematics or calculus can’t. Pen and paper can be the fuel of the imagination. As Cambridge physicist Michael Cates (incumbent of the chair previously held by Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton) has said, “I need a piece of paper in front of me and I’m pushing symbols around on the page… so there’s this interaction between processing in your head and moving symbols around.” Never underestimate the traditional blackboard as a tactile, erasable aid to the imagination. The productivity of such aids is no surprise. Ask a child to think of a story, and it’s ne easy matter. Give them a doll’s house full of figurines, and they’re away.
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Yet whether it is theoretical or experimental, this imagination in science (as in art) is not idle fantasy. It is a condensation of experience: it takes what you know and plays with it. I do mean “plays”: imagination is nothing if not ludic. But it is also the very stuff of thought. One interpretation of cognition, in the context of artificial intelligence, is that it is largely about figuring out the possible consequences of actions we might make in the world: an “inner rehearsal” of imaginary future scenarios. Imagination in science extends that process beyond the self to the world: given that we know <i>this</i>, mightn’t things also be arranged like <i>that</i>?
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It’s much more than a guess, then, and as Shakespeare hints, has almost the power of an invocation. Truly, the scientific imagination can invoke into being something that was not there before. Isaac Newton was cautious about his “force of gravity”, knowing that he risked (and indeed incurred from his arch-rival Gottfried Leibniz) accusations of occultism. Yet all the same this “force” became – and remains – a ‘thing’ in physics, even if we can regard it as a figure of speech, a convenient conceptual tool that general relativity invites us to regard otherwise as curvature of spacetime. It’s a process entirely analogous to the way Shakespeare goes on to speak, in <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>, of how correlation leads us to imagine causation:
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Such tricks hath strong imagination,
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That if it would but apprehend some joy,
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It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
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In this way we’re reminded that imagination shares the same etymological root as “magic” – which, in the age just before the time of Isaac Newton, did not necessarily mean superstitious agency but the “hidden forces” by which natural magicians comprehended and claimed to manipulate nature. In that regard Newton wasn’t, as John Maynard Keynes claimed, the “last of the magicians”, in the sense of his having a belief in occult forces (such as gravity, acting invisibly across space). No, if <i>that</i> was Newton’s “magic” then today’s physicists share a conviction in it, for any model in physics awards imagination this role of employing imagined causative agencies – things we might not perceive directly but which manifest through their effects, such as dark matter, dark energy, or the Higgs field – to explain what we see.
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Now, though, physics places demands on the imagination as never before. I’m struck by how dark matter and dark energy, say, commandeer known concepts (mass, energy) that may or may not turn out to be appropriate. Even more challenging are efforts to provide some physical picture of quantum mechanics, the kind of physics generally used to describe atoms and fundamental particles. These objects don’t seem to conform to our intuitions derived from the everyday world of rocks and stones, tennis balls and space rockets. They can, for example, sometimes display behaviour we associate not with particles but with waves. They appear to be able to influence one another instantaneously over long distances; they are said to exist “in several states or places at once.”
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Yet these descriptions are attempts – often clumsy, sometimes misleading – to make quantum mechanics fit into the forms of our conventional “classical” imagination. Arguments and misperceptions follow, or a disheartening decision to draw a veil over quantum improprieties by calling them “weird”. We can and should do better, but this will require a reshaping, an expansion, of our imaginative faculties. We have to develop a kind of intuition that is not constrained by our daily experience – because if there’s one thing we can be sure about in quantum mechanics, it’s that it demands the possibility of phenomena that lie outside this experience.
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To venture into unknown territory, where imagination is at a premium, is a risk. To put it bluntly, your imagination is more likely to lead you astray than toward the truth. It is no magical guarantor of insight. Will you take that risk? Mathematical physicist Jon Keating has put the problem succinctly: “[How can we] encourage people to make them feel more comfortable with the failure that comes with most creative and imaginative ideas?” Unless we get better at that, educationally or institutionally, science will suffer.
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And it’s very possible that physicists won’t alone accomplish the feats of imagination needed to crack their hardest problems. They may need to find inspiration from philosophy, art, literature, aesthetics. Imagination doesn’t recognize categories and boundaries – it is a power that aims to encircle the world.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-63843515881444706302019-08-13T13:31:00.000-07:002019-08-13T13:31:00.293-07:00Still trying to kill the catSome discussion stemming from Erwin Schrödinger’s birthday prompts me to set out briefly why his cat is widely misunderstood and is actually of rather limited value in truly getting to grips with the conundrums of quantum mechanics.
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Schrödinger formulated the thought experiment during correspondence with Einstein in which they articulated what they found objectionable in the view of QM formulated by Niels Bohr and his circle (the “Copenhagen interpretation”, which should probably always be given scare quotes since it never corresponded to a unique, clearly adduced position). In that view, one couldn’t speak about the properties of quantum objects until they were measured. Einstein and Schrödinger considered this absurd, and in 1935 Schrödinger enlisted his cat to explain why. Famously, he imagined a situation in which the property of some quantum object, placed in a superposition of states, determines the fate of a cat in a closed box, hidden from the observer until it is opened. In his original exposition he spoke of how, according to Bohr’s view, the wavefunction of the system would, before being observed, “express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
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This is (even back then) more careful wording than the thought experiment is usually afforded today, talking specifically about the wavefunction and not about the cat. Even so, a key problem with Schrödinger’s cat if taken literally as a thought experiment is that it refers to no well defined property. In principle, Schrödinger could have talked instead about a macroscopic instrument with a pointer that could indicate one of two states. But he wanted an example that was not simply hard to intuit – a pointer in a superposition of two states, say – but was semantically absurd. “Live” and “dead” are not simply two different states of being, but are mutually exclusive. Then the absurdity is all the more apparent.
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But in doing so, Schrödinger undermined his scenario as an actual experiment. There is not even a single classical measurement, let alone a quantum state one can write down, that defines “live” or “dead”. Of course, it is not hard to find out if a cat is alive or dead – but it is very hard to identify a single variable whose measurement will allow you to fix a well defined instant where the cat goes from live to dead. Certainly, no one has the slightest idea how to write down a wavefunction for a live or dead cat, and it seems unlikely that we could even imagine what they might look like or what would distinguish them.
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This is then not, at any rate, an experiment devised (as is often said) to probe the issue of the quantum-classical boundary. Schrödinger gives no indication that he was thinking about that, except for the fact that he wanted a macroscopic example in order to make the absurdity apparent. It’s now clear how hard it would be to think of a way of keeping a cat sufficiently isolated from the environment to avoid (near-instantaneous) decoherence – the process by which “quantumness” generally becomes “classical” – while being able to sustain it in principle in a living state.
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Ignoring all this, popular accounts typically take the thought experiment as a literal one rather than as a metaphor. As a rule, they then go on to (1) misunderstand the nature of superpositions as being “in two states at once”, and (2) misrepresent the Copenhagen interpretation as making ontological statements about a quantum system before measurement, and thereby tell us merrily that, if Bohr and colleagues are right, “the cat is both alive and dead at the same time!”
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My suspicion is that, precisely because it is so evocative, Schrödinger’s thought experiment does not merely suffer from these misunderstandings but invites them. And that is why I would be very happy to see it retired.
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Of course, there is more discussion of all these things in my book <i>Beyond Weird</i>.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-23469566359493091182019-04-25T10:11:00.000-07:002019-04-25T10:11:30.467-07:00A Place That Exists Only In Moonlight: a Q&A with Katie PatersonI have a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01240-4">Q&A with Katie Paterson</a> in the 25 April issue of <i>Nature</i>. There was a lot in Katie’s comments that I didn’t have room for there, so here is the extended interview. The exhibition is wonderful, though sadly it only runs for a couple more weeks. This is science-inspired art at its finest.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivims3OHze1_7Bjdpu5MKTNkCp3qdXs-Ygqbi2OLUYrMkAXPdYQWpnjKcvdLYqZY4T0SPgbxN67AGsa64wXmqZj5hy_Q-nacLacHGw3M_z7O1moHZ7newdl2oZpPvdp60gHGZG/s1600/d41586-019-01240-4_16659372.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivims3OHze1_7Bjdpu5MKTNkCp3qdXs-Ygqbi2OLUYrMkAXPdYQWpnjKcvdLYqZY4T0SPgbxN67AGsa64wXmqZj5hy_Q-nacLacHGw3M_z7O1moHZ7newdl2oZpPvdp60gHGZG/s320/d41586-019-01240-4_16659372.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="600" /></a>
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Scottish artist Katie Paterson is one of the most scientifically engaged of contemporary artists. Her work has been described as “combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and coolly minimalist presentation.” It makes use of meteorites, astronomical observations, fossils and experiments in sound and light to foster a human engagement with scales in time and space that far exceed our everyday experience.
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Many of her works have astronomical themes. <i>All the Dead Stars</i> depicts, on a sheet of black etched steel, the location of around 27,000 stars that are no longer visible. For the <i>Dying Star Letters</i> (2011-) she wrote letters of condolence for every star newly recorded has having “died” – a task that got ever more challenging with advances in observing technologies. And <i>History of Darkness</i> (2010-) is an ongoing archive of slides of totally dark areas of the universe at different epochs and locations.
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For <i>Future Library</i> (2014-2114), 100 writers including Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell will write stories (one is commissioned each year since 2014) that will be kept in sealed storage until 2114, when they will be printed on paper made from 1,000 trees being planted in a forest in Norway. Paterson has said of the project that “it questions the present tendency to think in short bursts of time, making decisions only for us living now.”
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<b>Some of your works speak to concerns about degradation of the environment and the onset of the Anthropocene – <i>Future Library</i>, for example, and the <i>Vatnajökull</i> project (2007-8) that relays the live sound of meltwater flowing within an Icelandic glacier to listeners who dial in on mobile phones. Do you think that what can seem like an overwhelming problem of environmental change on scales that are hard to contemplate can be made tangible and intelligible through art?</b>
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<i>Future Library</i> has a circular ecology built into it: words become enmeshed in growing trees, which, fed by water and light, a century later will become books. It’s a gathering, and the trees spell out time. The artwork is made with simple materials, people, nature and words, and its connected to feelings and senses. The phone call I set up to the glacier was an intimate one-to-one experience; listening to a graveyard of ice. The crisis of global warming does not feel intimate when it’s screeching at us through screens and graphs – yet of course it is. Our planet is disappearing. Humans understand suffering, the cycle of birth and dying. We need a contemporary approach to what Stephen Hawking called ‘Cathedral thinking’: far-reaching vision that is humanly relatable.
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<b>David Mitchell sees an optimistic message in <i>Future Library</i> (as well as an exercise in trust): it is, he says, “a vote of confidence in the future. Its fruition is predicated upon the ongoing existence of Northern Europe, of libraries, of Norwegian spruces, of books and of readers.” How confident are you that the books will be made?</b>
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We have put many methods in place to ensure that the books will be made. Each tree is marked on a computerized system, and the foresters take great care. We are investigating the likely methods of making ink in 100 years’ time. The city of Oslo has taken this artwork to their heart, and even the king and queen of Norway are involved. We have a Trust whose mandate is to “compassionately sustain the artwork for its 100 year duration.” Yes, <i>Future Library</i> is an exercise in trust. This year’s author Han Kang described the project as having an undercurrent of love flowing through it. It concerns me, and certainly says something about our moment in time, that we even question whether it will be possible to make books in just 100 years. We have clearly reached a crisis.
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<b>You have said “Time runs through everything I make.” Your work deals with the scales of distance and time that astronomers and geologists have to consider routinely, but which far exceed human intuition. How can we cope with that?</b>
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I find professions that routinely deal with long timescales fascinating. For the foresters in <i>Future Library</i>, 100 years is normal. Geologists work across time periods where major extinctions become plots on a map. Astronomers work with spans of time that go beyond everything that has ever lived. However, this routineness may blur the immensity of the concepts at hand. All the same, we can unearth materials fallen from space and comprehend that they go back far beyond humanity’s time on earth. Our technologies are advanced enough to look to a time beyond the Earth’s existence, approaching the Big Bang. Humans have devised and created these images, yet they exceed our capacity to understand them.
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For me the route to a different kind of understanding of time is through the imagination. That’s the space that provides the most freedom and openness. My art attempts to deal directly with concepts that I can’t get to otherwise. Perhaps mathematical languages enable something similar. My journey in astronomy has been a search for connection: understanding that we are not separate from the universe, but are intrinsically linked.
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<b>Your work <i>Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight</i> (2008) does exactly what it says on the tin. The bulb was created in collaboration with engineers at OSRAM. Can you explain how it was made?</b>
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I approached Dieter Lang, innovation manager and lighting engineer at OSRAM, and asked him to adapt the methods they use to make ‘daylight bulbs’ to recreate moonlight. I wanted to create a whole lifetime of moonlight – a bulb that lasts the length of an average human life. Dieter took light measurements under a full moon in the countryside outside Munich. I’d always imagined the futility of trying to recreate something as ineffable as moonlight, yet I was happy with the result – the light bulbs burn very brightly, a yellowy-blue tinged light, which changes according to your distance to it, just like the moon.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6WbG86a-UWNCI7J3VHfa3GBtm2kpuafHs_793Cl_zq8co6n8Vnv5i9XcHx6P36vs-TI1LRHWGC__ATtsnkM9eOWr-tsYUVPjB17wI5mGZ4VUaCgNl8T-rHSvPrW2lGjMDPWkW/s1600/Katie_Paterson_Lightbulb_to_Simulate_Moonlight_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6WbG86a-UWNCI7J3VHfa3GBtm2kpuafHs_793Cl_zq8co6n8Vnv5i9XcHx6P36vs-TI1LRHWGC__ATtsnkM9eOWr-tsYUVPjB17wI5mGZ4VUaCgNl8T-rHSvPrW2lGjMDPWkW/s320/Katie_Paterson_Lightbulb_to_Simulate_Moonlight_3.jpg" width="252" height="320" data-original-width="1258" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
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<b>Do you see projects like the “dead stars” works or <i>History of Darkness</i> as attempts to connect us to the vastness of deep space and time? Or might they in fact suggest the futility of trying to keep track of all that has happened in the observable cosmos?</b>
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It oscillates somewhere in between. History of Darkness has futility written into it, capturing infinite darkness from across space and time. Each slide could contain millions of worlds, and learning that these images refer to places beyond human life and even the Earth may expand our relationship to these phenomena, and enhance the sense of our fallibility. <i>All the Dead Stars</i> was made in 2009. I’d like to update it in years to come – it might become an expanse of white dots, as telescopes become even more powerful and abundant.
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I’m always drawn to the idea of the universe as deep wilderness. No matter how extensive our research and advanced technologies become, we can never ever truly access the great beyond. I read that our ‘cosmic horizon’ is around 42 billion light years away. What lies beyond, whether finite or infinite, will forever remain outside our understanding. Creating artwork is as much my own way of grappling with the “divine incommensurability” of our position in the universe, as much as an attempt to communicate it with others.
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<b>In <i>Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) </i>(2007), you encoded Beethoven’s sonata in Morse code, broadcast it to the surface of the moon in radio waves, and reconstructed the partial score from the reflections. That evidently required some powerful technology. And in 2014 an ESA mission to the Space Shuttle enabled your project of returning a fragment of meteorite to earth orbit. How do these collaborations with scientific institutions come about? </b>
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<i>Earth-Moon-Earth</i> was created with “moon bouncer” radio enthusiasts: underground groups of people sending messages to each other via the moon. I simply wrote them letters. While studying at the Slade [art school in London] I wandered into the Rock & Ice Physics Laboratory next door [in University College London]. They allowed me to play my glacial ice records in their walk-in freezers. That was when I found out quite how easy it was to approach others in different fields. With the moonlight bulb I simply called round a number of lighting companies till I came across the right person. The map of the dead stars involved hundreds of researchers. Some scientists are far more involved than others, from sharing data (NASA gave me the recipe for the scent of Saturn’s moon) to developing the artworks very closely with myself and my studio. [Astronomers] Richard Ellis and Steve Fossey have played an enormous role. I tend to approach people who are experts in niche fields, such as type 2a supernova, and I ask to draw on their specialization. It’s their passion, so they are generally receptive. This can be a chance to share their knowledge in a way that they haven’t been asked to before, that will become manifest in an artwork engaging with totally different audiences. Of course there can be bafflement, but so far it’s been overwhelmingly positive.
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Recently, for the first time researchers from came to me. I received a message from a group of scientists working on a mission proposal to NASA, inviting me to join their team as a ‘space-artist/co-investigator’ inquiring into cosmic dust. I’m extremely happy about this, not only for the creative potential but because the scientists have shown genuine concern that an artist might have something of value to contribute to their research. The group understands that art can be a way to share their knowledge through a different, more experiential, channel.
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<b>Your concepts clearly draw on – and indeed derive from – new scientific discoveries and techniques. For example, <i>The Cosmic Spectrum</i> (2019) is a large rotating colour wheel on which segments show the “average colour” of the Universe (as perceived by the human eye) from the Big Bang until the present, partly using data from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. How do you stay abreast of the latest scientific developments, and what do you tend to look for in them? </b>
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I discovered [astronomer] Ivan Baldry’s work on the cosmic spectrum several years ago. Many of my ideas sit on the back burner for years and manifest themselves at later stages. I don’t feel on top of scientific developments, but sometimes just one experience has enough potency to carry projects through years later.
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I’m drawn to current investigations into the sunsets on Mars caught by NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover – but equally by botanical records from bygone eras, or the ray of light in a Florentine cathedral that marks the solstice built centuries ago. Sometimes just looking at titles on the shelves of science libraries can be enough to evoke compelling images. My inspirations have been wide and varied: from looking through telescopes to extremely distant galaxies, to tending a moss garden in a Zen monastery (a universe in itself). I’ve always drawn inspiration from artists, writers, musicians and thinkers whose work has a cosmic dimension: for example, raku ceramicists molding ‘the cosmos in a tea bowl’.
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<b>Some of your works exist only as the ongoing collection of ideas in the book <i>A Place That Exists Only in Moonlight </i>(2019). Occasionally they find a striking resonance with concepts that, for a cosmologist or physicist say, might almost seem like a thought experiment or research proposal: “A reset button for the universe pressed only once”, say, or “The speed of light slowed to absolute stillness”. Do you ever find that the scientists you collaborate with or encounter are inspired by your ideas into asking new questions or conducting new investigations themselves?</b>
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<i>A Place that Exists Only in Moonlight</i> arose out of a period of heavy production. I wanted to find a ‘lighter’ approach, which is the creative core of everything for me; just the ideas themselves. The book contains artworks to exist in the mind, many of which refer to suns, stars, moons, planets, earthly and cosmic matter. The cover is printed with cosmic dust: a mixture of moondust, dust from Mars, shooting stars, ancient meteorites and asteroids. I wanted the reader to be able to hold and touch the material the words describe, while taking them in. The Ideas are like thought experiments, Zen koans, <i>Gedankenexperiment</i>. In a way that’s true of all my artworks. What time is it on Venus? What texts will be read by unborn people? Is it possible to plant a forest using saplings from the oldest tree on earth, can we make ink to be read only under moonlight? I’m always curious. I will post copies of the book to everyone I have worked with, and I would be very happy indeed if they chose to conduct new investigations themselves.
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A Place That Exists Only in Moonlight, <i>an exhibition that pairs Paterson’s works with studies of light, sky and landscapes by J. M. W. Turner, is at the Turner Gallery in Margate, UK, until 6 May.</i>
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-27444644747435293412019-04-15T14:57:00.001-07:002019-04-15T14:57:39.219-07:00Out of the ashes of Notre Dame<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HAy79b_uIJcdh0qT_yXyfr9EIwAwO5-lunJiqSKmav4X_3qWiLmXhVSLsBSnJnqOgp879OaijKvAuLl0aXSfQxli8rvWXBCyGf1S6MjU4H9PpA6jQ4tYdgPqjNA35Ggc_XW2/s1600/28816059-rose-window-of-notre-dame-cathedral-in-paris.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HAy79b_uIJcdh0qT_yXyfr9EIwAwO5-lunJiqSKmav4X_3qWiLmXhVSLsBSnJnqOgp879OaijKvAuLl0aXSfQxli8rvWXBCyGf1S6MjU4H9PpA6jQ4tYdgPqjNA35Ggc_XW2/s320/28816059-rose-window-of-notre-dame-cathedral-in-paris.jpg" width="320" height="320" data-original-width="1300" data-original-height="1300" /></a>
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There is no positive spin to put on the fire that has gutted Notre Dame Cathedral, and it could sound idiotic to think otherwise. This was one of the masterpieces of the Gothic era, a place where – as Napoleon allegedly said of Chartres – an atheist would feel uneasy (although this atheist instead felt moved and inspired). I don’t yet know the extent of the damage, but it is hard to imagine that the thirteenth-century northern rose window will have survived the inferno, or that the west front of the building, which has been called “one of the supreme architectural achievements of all time”, will emerge intact. Even if the building is eventually restored – and I am sure it will be – one might wonder what will be the point of a twenty-first-century facsimile, bereft of the spirit and philosophy that motivated the original construction.
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And yet… The Gothic cathedrals already undermine notions of “authenticity”. In past ages, they weren’t seen as buildings that had to be maintained in some “pristine” state at all costs. Ever since they were erected, they were modified and redesigned, sometimes with very little care for their integrity. This happened at Notre Dame in the seventeenth century, when the flame of Gothic had long gone out. There was a fashion for plonking grotesque, kitsch marble sculptures in place of medieval statuary, which was indeed the fate of Notre Dame’s high altar. The vandalism went on through the eighteenth century – and that was even before the Revolutionaries did their worst, melting down metal bells, grilles and reliquaries and then using the cathedral as a kind of warehouse. The Gothic revival of Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century had better intentions but not always better taste.
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This was ever the way, even in the Middle Ages: bishops would decide that their cathedral had become old-fashioned, and would commission some new extension or renovation that as often as not ended up as a jarring clash of styles. The notion of conservation and a “respect for the old” simply didn’t exist.
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And that’s even before we consider the ravages of unintentional damage. Many of the wonders of Gothic architecture only came about as a result of fire in the first place. That is how we got Chartres: thanks to a fire in 1194 that destroyed the building commissioned in the 1020s (after the cathedral before that was burnt down). The conflagration was devastating to the morale of the local people: according to a document written in 1210, they “considered as the totality of their misfortune the fact that they, unhappy wretches, in justice for their own sins, had lost the palace of the Blessed Virgin, the special glory of the city, the showpiece of the entire region, the incomparable house of prayer”. Yet look what they got in its place.
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And <i>they</i> had no hesitation in putting a positive spin on it. Another early thirteenth-century account asserted that this was God’s will – or the Virgin’s – all along: “She therefore permitted the old and inadequate church to become the victim of the flames, thus making room for the present basilica, which has no equal throughout the entire world.”
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And so it went on throughout the Middle Ages and beyond: the astonishing edifices of the Gothic masters fell or burnt down, got neglected or half-dismembered, were subjected to undignified “improvement”, were ransacked or, later, bombed. Chartres has had catastrophic fires too: no one seems now too bothered that the original roof and allegedly wonderful timberwork beneath it were consumed by flames in 1836, or that the replacement we see today was originally intended only to be temporary.
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What happened today at Notre Dame is truly a tragedy. But we shouldn’t forget that these magnificent buildings have always been works in progress, always in flux. Perhaps, in mourning what was lost, we can see it as an opportunity to marvel again at the worldview that produced it: at the ambition, the imagination, the profound union of technical skill and philosophical and spiritual conviction. And we can consider it a worthy challenge to see if we can find some way of matching and honouring that vision.
Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.com13