Nesta responded graciously to my complaints about the Longitude Prize 2014, calling me up to discuss the issues and inviting me to come to the launch on Monday at the BBC. It would have been churlish to refuse.
It was a suitably glitzy affair, introduced by the BBC’s Director General Tony Hall and featuring contributions from Martin Rees and Brian Cox. The event doubled as a (very well earned) celebration of the 50th anniversary of Horizon, the BBC’s flagship science documentary programme. The six challenges selected by the Longitude Committee – a truly impressive collection of folks – were as follows:
- Food: how can we ensure everyone has nutritious sustainable food?
- Flight: how can we fly without damaging the environment?
- Paralysis: how can we restore movement to those with paralysis?
- Antibiotics: how can we prevent the rise of resistance to antibiotics?
- Water: how can we ensure everyone has access to safe and clean water?
- Dementia: how can we help people with dementia live independently for longer?
Mostly a fairly predictable selection, then, with a few choices that one might not have anticipated. Which is to say that it is a good and entirely worthy list. The idea now is that, once the winner has been selected from this list, the prize functions as a “challenge prize”, along the lines of the X-Prizes or the challenges promoted by some of the crowd-sourcing companies now in existence, about which I wrote here. Everyone, from multinational companies to garden-shed inventors, will be able to submit their solution, and one of them – if their solution is deemed adequate – will receive the £10m prize money. The criteria for success and for ranking the submissions have yet to be thrashed out, and will of course depend on the challenge.
Martin Rees, who chairs the committee, points out that the prize money is around a thousandth of the annual UK R&D budget, and says one might hope that the results, by stimulating innovative thinking, will have a disproportionately big impact. This seems quite possible, and I do hope he is right. There is surely a role for challenge prizes like this in fostering innovation and problem-solving.
All of the presenters at the BBC event – each of them a regular on Horizon – did a great job of outlining why the challenge they had been assigned was important. These presentations will be fleshed out more fully in a Horizon special tomorrow.
Why, then, did I come away feeling even more vindicated in my criticisms?
It was because the core of my concerns – let’s put behind us the initial publicity which looked as though it had been written by the fictional PR company Perfect Curve, and also the dodgy history with which the prize is framed – are about the whole premise of selecting the final prize challenge by public vote. Much was made of how this will “get the public involved”, how it will democratize science and stimulate wide interest. To object to this aspect of the project could seem elitist, as though to suggest that we should go back to deciding science policy via faceless committees of “experts” behind closed doors.
I’m all for public engagement, and I have much sympathy with Athene Donald, who responded to my criticisms by saying that “scientists should not be arrogant when it comes to public good, thinking they know what's right and what's wrong… Scientists should not pay lip-service to "public engagement with science" and yet not allow the public actually to engage in anything that matters.” Yet this seems to me to be entirely the wrong way to go about making such an attempt at engagement. I feel there is simply a category error here: if popular entertainment can be “democratized”, why not science? Scientists usually go to pains to point out that science is precisely not a democratic process: we don’t have public votes to decide which theories are right. The challenge itself, like science as a whole, should be open to ideas from all comers, judged on merit. Martin Rees pointed out that, unlike art or literary prizes, this one can be judged objectively: one can formulate solid, supportable and perhaps even quantifiable grounds for selecting a winner from the submissions. That is largely true. So why introduce a subjective element into setting up the challenge is in the first place? Why assemble an expert panel to pick the shortlist but not the final winner? This seems to me a sop to public sentiment, likely to end up being patronizing (yes you, the common people, can decide!) rather than empowering.
But my real complaint isn’t about whether the voting procedure is fit for purpose – that is, about the issue of who gets a vote. It is about having a voting procedure at all. I find that deeply objectionable, and the launch further deepened that feeling.
The idea that the needs and dignity of thousands of people with paralysis or dementia have to be placed in a horse race against the needs of billions of people without access to safe water, or the very reasonable desire of wealthier citizens to be able to fly without contributing to global warming should compete with the risks of malnutrition faced by millions in poorer nations because of inadequate food supplies, seems to me to be in bad taste. It feels like – indeed, it is disturbingly close to – asking for a public vote on whether the limited NHS coffers should be used to help people with kidney failure or people with cancer. Choices have to be made, for sure, and they are hard – but for that very reason, we shouldn’t be turning them into a beauty pageant.
As I said to one of the committee in an email after my piece was posted, it feels rather as though we are being asked to vote on which of our family members to save from a fire. The hope, no doubt, is that by introducing the contenders, others (such as rich philanthropists) might be enticed into putting up money for some of the non-victors too. But if that’s so, it is a clumsy and insensitive way to go about it, running the risk of telling people with paralysis or dementia (say) that the public doesn’t actually care that much about them. Given that the prize money is by some measures so small (Martin Rees suggested that big companies would be competing for the prestige, not the cash), is it really not possible to find £10m for each of them? If any of them were solved this way, the payback in terms of money saved from healthcare, economic losses and so forth would repay the investment many, many times over. (There’s another debate to be had about whether some of these problems – food, water, antibiotics, say – are ones that lend themselves to solution at a single stroke of technological genius, given how multi-faceted they are. But I’m willing to believe that the prize might at least elicit some useful contributions.)
The consequences of the “voting” format were made painfully apparent at the event itself. After a rather moving presentation in which a woman with a spinal-column injury explained what a difference an “artificial exoskeleton” had made to her life in enabling her to stand up – simply to address others eye to eye, let alone relieving the pain of constant sitting – another presenter then said “But mine is an even more important challenge!”, or words to that effect. He obviously didn’t intend for a moment to belittle his “opponent” or to sound at all callous – this is simply the dynamic inevitably created by the whole public-voting gambit.
So, despite the title that Prospect chose for my piece, I don’t think the Longitude 2014 Prize is a waste of time. It could have some valuable consequences, and I truly hope it does. But I think that it is, in some ways, worse than a "waste of time". Given how many good intentions and how much good thinking lie behind this project, it is all the more tragic that it has been lumbered with a format that is inappropriate, misconceived and, to my mind, offensive.
[Some version of this is likely to appear soon on the Prospect blog. I also discussed it this morning with Adam Rutherford for BBC radio. But that’s my say on the matter – I don’t want to be constantly sniping from the sidelines, and hope that the prize will now solicit some useful ideas.]
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Friday, May 16, 2014
Computers and creativity
“Can a computer write Shakespeare?” Trevor Cox’s nice Radio 4 programme yesterday was inevitably able only to scratch the surface of that question (which, I should add, was being asked outside of the boring probabilistic sense, explored with characteristic panache in Borges’ The Library of Babel). For my part, I hugely enjoyed discussing with Tom Service the works of the “computer composer” Iamus. Tom had been pretty dismissive when I wrote about that project in the Guardian last year. I was disappointed that he’d only heard the “early work” Hello World!, but it seems the later compositions have not shifted his views much. Yet crucially, this is no reactionary objection to the intrusion of soulless computers into music – on the contrary, Tom thinks that the Iamus team haven’t pushed the technology far enough, and that they are making the mistake of trying to make music that sounds as if humans composed it. That error, he feels, is only compounded by composing for traditional instruments, so that one gets the expressivity of the performer complicating the issue. Why not generate entirely new sounds using electronics, he asked?
I have some sympathy with these suggestions – perhaps Iamus has been too constrained by a stylistic template to create any genuinely new soundscapes. But in a way I feel that is the whole point. I can’t help thinking that here Tom is indulging a prejudice that says if it is composed by a computer then it should sound somehow futuristic and far-out, like the Radiophonic Workshop at their craziest. But why shouldn’t computers be allowed to compose for piano/chamber ensemble/orchestra? We don’t demand that all contemporary human composers abandon these traditional sonic resources. And the Malaga team who devised Iamus specifically set out to see if a computer could be induced to compose music that couldn’t easily be distinguished from that of a human, without being merely a crude pastiche. How could we make the comparison if all we had was a vista of bleeps?
I also think Tom might be being a tad unfair to suggest that it’s entirely the programmers, not Iamus, that is “composing”. Gustavo Diaz-Jerez didn’t give away an awful lot about exactly how the evolutionary algorithm works, but it has become clear to me that the input from the human programmers is very minimal: a musical seed that bears virtually no recognizable relation to the final product. Nor are they assessing or selecting anything on the way. Asserting that, by writing the software, they are the real composers here seems a little like saying that the clever folks who developed Word are the real authors of my books. (I’m damned if they’re going to get any of my pitiful royalties.)
The central issue, however, is something else. Tom seemed to feel that, by using human performers, Iamus was somehow cheating – of course it sounds passionate and committed, because the performers are injecting that into the notes! But wait – has there ever been any music composed for which this is not the case? (Well yes of course, but such experiments – like Varèse’s musique concrete – are the exceptions.) And it is precisely here that we hit the irony. We hear Bach’s Cello Suites and think “What a great genius! What sensitivity! What emotion!” And we too easily forget that, while this is true (my God, how true!), we hardly have the same response when we hear Wendy Carlos doing Switched On Bach on the Moog synthesizer. Even now we may overlook the essential role of the performer, without whom Bach is notation on paper. It only becomes great music when the genius of the composer (in this case) is given sympathetic expression by a skilled interpreter. Why do we give Bach that benefit but feel that all a computer should be allowed is Wendy Carlos?
And it doesn’t stop there. Even Pablo Casals could, in the end, only make acoustic signals. That sounds sacrilegious, I know, but what else is it but vibrations in air – until it falls on the sympathetic ear? It only moves us because we have the resources to be moved: the logical, auditory and emotional resources. It is our minds that turn notes into music, and that is a tremendous skill which sometimes we deny with dismaying insistence (“oh, I don’t know anything about music”). This is what I wanted to get at with my comments on the romanticization of genius. It is tempting to turn the performer into a mere conduit, and ourselves into the passive receiver, and attribute all the creative process to the composer or artist. At worst, this becomes a delusion that we are somehow “communing” with the artist’s mind – as Tom pointed out after the recording, even Beethoven didn’t believe that! Without wishing to deny the artist the primary role, creativity can only be a collaboration. Otherwise, wouldn’t Bach be like a pill that, once swallowed, has the same effect on everyone – the “pharmaceutical model” of music so masterfully dismissed by musicologist John Sloboda?
This is why experiments like Iamus are so interesting. Margaret Boden expressed it better than I did at the end of Trevor’s programme. By removing one “mind” from the equation, they allow us to take apart the pieces of that process and hopefully to thereby understand them better. For, whatever else Iamus can do, its creators evidently don’t claim that it has a “mind” or some kind of autonomous intention. And so the issue becomes that of how we actively construct what we experience out of the materials we are given. That “we” may include the performer too, who is undoubtedly exercising creativity: OK, I have been given these notes, what can I do with them that has some meaning? The performer must find a form. The listener must find one too, and these may or may not overlap, although I suspect that to a considerable degree they do, simply because performer and listener are likely to have built their musical minds from very similar stimuli.
Kandinsky attributed to the artist an almost magical ability to elicit specific emotions from the onlooker. As a synaesthete, he expressed this in musical terms, even though his medium was colour; he surely imagined that music itself could do the same thing. “Colour is the keyboard”, he wrote, “the eyes are hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key after another purposively, to cause vibrations of the soul.” But few other artists have such delusions of absolute control over the effects their compositions will have. Stravinsky more or less denied anything of the sort. They have at best only a crude set of knobs for dialling in the listener’s/viewer’s response, because every mind has been shaped differently. In a cumbersomely mechanistic picture I imagine the artist making a kind of grid that, placed on the audience’s perceptions, depresses different levers depending on who has them where. It’s in the meeting of grid and levers (and in music the performer reshapes the grid a little) that creativity is determined. As computers get better at making interesting and effective grids, we might learn something new about the levers: why certain grids have certain effects, say.
Of course, those levers are connected to the heart, the tear ducts, the limbic and motor systems and so on. That’s where it gets interesting: can a computer create a grid that will make me cry – not as bad, ersatz movie music does, but as Bach does? When, or if, that happens – well, that’s when I really have to start wondering if computers are creative.
I have some sympathy with these suggestions – perhaps Iamus has been too constrained by a stylistic template to create any genuinely new soundscapes. But in a way I feel that is the whole point. I can’t help thinking that here Tom is indulging a prejudice that says if it is composed by a computer then it should sound somehow futuristic and far-out, like the Radiophonic Workshop at their craziest. But why shouldn’t computers be allowed to compose for piano/chamber ensemble/orchestra? We don’t demand that all contemporary human composers abandon these traditional sonic resources. And the Malaga team who devised Iamus specifically set out to see if a computer could be induced to compose music that couldn’t easily be distinguished from that of a human, without being merely a crude pastiche. How could we make the comparison if all we had was a vista of bleeps?
I also think Tom might be being a tad unfair to suggest that it’s entirely the programmers, not Iamus, that is “composing”. Gustavo Diaz-Jerez didn’t give away an awful lot about exactly how the evolutionary algorithm works, but it has become clear to me that the input from the human programmers is very minimal: a musical seed that bears virtually no recognizable relation to the final product. Nor are they assessing or selecting anything on the way. Asserting that, by writing the software, they are the real composers here seems a little like saying that the clever folks who developed Word are the real authors of my books. (I’m damned if they’re going to get any of my pitiful royalties.)
The central issue, however, is something else. Tom seemed to feel that, by using human performers, Iamus was somehow cheating – of course it sounds passionate and committed, because the performers are injecting that into the notes! But wait – has there ever been any music composed for which this is not the case? (Well yes of course, but such experiments – like Varèse’s musique concrete – are the exceptions.) And it is precisely here that we hit the irony. We hear Bach’s Cello Suites and think “What a great genius! What sensitivity! What emotion!” And we too easily forget that, while this is true (my God, how true!), we hardly have the same response when we hear Wendy Carlos doing Switched On Bach on the Moog synthesizer. Even now we may overlook the essential role of the performer, without whom Bach is notation on paper. It only becomes great music when the genius of the composer (in this case) is given sympathetic expression by a skilled interpreter. Why do we give Bach that benefit but feel that all a computer should be allowed is Wendy Carlos?
And it doesn’t stop there. Even Pablo Casals could, in the end, only make acoustic signals. That sounds sacrilegious, I know, but what else is it but vibrations in air – until it falls on the sympathetic ear? It only moves us because we have the resources to be moved: the logical, auditory and emotional resources. It is our minds that turn notes into music, and that is a tremendous skill which sometimes we deny with dismaying insistence (“oh, I don’t know anything about music”). This is what I wanted to get at with my comments on the romanticization of genius. It is tempting to turn the performer into a mere conduit, and ourselves into the passive receiver, and attribute all the creative process to the composer or artist. At worst, this becomes a delusion that we are somehow “communing” with the artist’s mind – as Tom pointed out after the recording, even Beethoven didn’t believe that! Without wishing to deny the artist the primary role, creativity can only be a collaboration. Otherwise, wouldn’t Bach be like a pill that, once swallowed, has the same effect on everyone – the “pharmaceutical model” of music so masterfully dismissed by musicologist John Sloboda?
This is why experiments like Iamus are so interesting. Margaret Boden expressed it better than I did at the end of Trevor’s programme. By removing one “mind” from the equation, they allow us to take apart the pieces of that process and hopefully to thereby understand them better. For, whatever else Iamus can do, its creators evidently don’t claim that it has a “mind” or some kind of autonomous intention. And so the issue becomes that of how we actively construct what we experience out of the materials we are given. That “we” may include the performer too, who is undoubtedly exercising creativity: OK, I have been given these notes, what can I do with them that has some meaning? The performer must find a form. The listener must find one too, and these may or may not overlap, although I suspect that to a considerable degree they do, simply because performer and listener are likely to have built their musical minds from very similar stimuli.
Kandinsky attributed to the artist an almost magical ability to elicit specific emotions from the onlooker. As a synaesthete, he expressed this in musical terms, even though his medium was colour; he surely imagined that music itself could do the same thing. “Colour is the keyboard”, he wrote, “the eyes are hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key after another purposively, to cause vibrations of the soul.” But few other artists have such delusions of absolute control over the effects their compositions will have. Stravinsky more or less denied anything of the sort. They have at best only a crude set of knobs for dialling in the listener’s/viewer’s response, because every mind has been shaped differently. In a cumbersomely mechanistic picture I imagine the artist making a kind of grid that, placed on the audience’s perceptions, depresses different levers depending on who has them where. It’s in the meeting of grid and levers (and in music the performer reshapes the grid a little) that creativity is determined. As computers get better at making interesting and effective grids, we might learn something new about the levers: why certain grids have certain effects, say.
Of course, those levers are connected to the heart, the tear ducts, the limbic and motor systems and so on. That’s where it gets interesting: can a computer create a grid that will make me cry – not as bad, ersatz movie music does, but as Bach does? When, or if, that happens – well, that’s when I really have to start wondering if computers are creative.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
A prize turkey?
I really don’t want to seem curmudgeonly about this. But when I was forwarded the announcement of the forthcoming launch of the Longitude 2014 Prize at the BBC on 19 May, I had to read it several times just to get some rough idea of what this prize is supposed to be all about. Then I followed up on the details, and it just got worse. I won’t totally rule out the possibility that something worthwhile might come of it all, but even if it does (and I’m not optimistic), the marketing is disastrous. It almost seems as though no one really wants to admit the truth of what the project is all about. And so I fear that my piece on the Prospect blog, of which the pre-edited version follows below, is a little cross.
________________________________________________________________________
Ah, the wisdom of crowds. Or is that the madness? I’m not sure any more. Do we trust the crowd to find its collective way to the perfect answer to a challenge? Or do we fear that it will tip into irrational herding behaviour and lose its grip on reality?
And do we really care? For mad or wise, the crowd is where it’s at. You know, democracy, the voice of the people, all that. So never mind I’m a Celebrity and Strictly Come Dancing – why not let the masses decide science policy?
"I'm thinking of something - Britain's Got Talent, you know, you switch on the TV and you watch the dog jumping over the pole, or whatever it is”, says David Cameron, showing that he has his finger on the pulse – or at least, that he has some vague notion that, you know, these days there’s this sort of interactive voting thing that’s popular with the masses. “Let's actually get the nation engaged on what the biggest problems are in science and in our lives that we need to crack, with a multi-million pound prize to then help us do that."
Oh, you may mock. But there’s some serious thought behind Cameron’s announcement last year of the so-called Longitude 2014 Prize. Longitude? I’ll come back to that. So you see, “It is vital” (according to the announcement of the prize on the Sciencewise website) “that in the 21st Century the challenges set are not simply those framed by academics or business leaders, but rather that the Committee responsible for overseeing the Prize understands the issues, priorities and views of the full range of stakeholders including the general public. This will be consistent with the Government’s commitment to open and transparent policy making.” You don’t get more open than delegating such policy-making to everyone.
So that’s all good. But who is this Sciencewise through which the good news is being channelled? You have to do a bit of digging there. This organization “provides co-funding and specialist advice and support to Government departments and agencies to develop and commission public dialogue activities in emerging areas of science and technology”. It is managed on behalf of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) by Ricardo-AEA in partnership with the British Science Association and the community participation charity, Involve. So wait, who then is Ricardo-AEA? More Googling reveals that it is a private consultancy.
No matter, back to the Sciencewise announcement. “The project” – that’s Longitude 2014 Prize, do pay attention – “has been divided into phases and the current dialogue project is for the first phase, scoping and framing. Framing here refers to setting out how the project to identify challenges will run and what the areas for the challenges will be. By involving the public in this early scoping phase we can be confident that the issues and challenges set by Longitude 14 [ah, that has a nice ring to it] will be consistent with issues that are of public concern… The Longitude 14 prize will serve to inform policy that aims to encourage businesses, universities and others to find a solution to some of the major societal challenges of the day… As the project moves from the scoping to a public debate, voting, and challenge setting phases, a range of tools will be used to ensure the public are engaged and excited by the project.”
Have I landed in a scene from W1A, the glorious spoof on management-speak and corporate-think now infecting the BBC? Or are we really to understand that, after due scoping and framing, the public are going to vote on the question of what businesses, universities and others (which others?) should be spending their money on, with much the same mindset as they watch, you know, dogs jumping over poles or something?
OK, let’s get a little balance. Any initiative that has as its chairman Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and ex-president of the Royal Society, who can smell a rotten egg from fifty paces, can’t be all bad (although one wonders how much direct input Rees has been allowed so far). He will head an “illustrious committee”, managed by the innovation charity Nesta. And we should admit that paternalistic “we know what’s best for you” government doesn’t have a great record for deciding what is important in science innovation either: the UK has a pretty poor track record of capitalizing on the creativity of its scientists. The current decision to pour money into research on the news “wonder material” graphene, pioneered in Manchester, smacks slightly of a panicky determination not to let this history repeat itself.
But if our alternatives are either to delegate decisions to faceless bureaucrats behind closed doors in Whitehall, or to throw the vote open by aping reality TV, we are not doing a lot for the image of democracy in action.
Can we just remember that the original Longitude Prize of 1714, on which this current project is allegedly modelled, was not itself the result of a group vote for the most pressing of technological issues of its time? The difficulty of determining navigation at sea was already widely recognized by the authorities of the time as a serious problem; the “open-source” nature of the prize was all about the solution, not about identifying the problem in the first place. And cracking that problem was primarily about securing naval supremacy and expanding trade and colonial power. If you had asked the population, they might have been more concerned about sanitation, basic healthcare (even the concept is of course anachronistic), or their lack of voting rights on anything at all.
Besides, no one won the Longitude Prize. (In fact, as science historian Rebekah Higgitt has argued, it’s not clear that there was ever really a “prize” as such at all.) Despite Cameron’s claim that it was awarded to the clockmaker John Harrison, he was never officially given that honour. After tireless campaigning to have his achievements recognized, he finally managed to wring the equivalent money out of a reluctant Parliament, but the Board of Longitude stressed that this was a bountiful gesture to acknowledge Harrison’s efforts, not the “prize” itself. Prospective contenders for the reincarnated award might not be encouraged by this history.
What I object to most of all, however, is not the ridiculous language in which this prize has been dressed, not the poor history with which it has been framed, not the paltry million quid or so that is at stake, not even the question of who chooses the objective. It is the whole notion of a competition to find the biggest challenge our technologies face. There is no single grand challenge into which we must pour millions. It’s a whole lot worse than that. The climate is changing, and to solve that alone we will need a whole raft of technological, economic and social measures. Our antibiotics are becoming useless. We lack cures for some of the most widespread and debilitating diseases on the planet. Billions of people lack access to safe drinking water. This is not rocket science (please don't let the decision be that we must get on and populate Mars...) – we know perfectly well what the problems are, and how serious they are. We don’t need to dress them up for a beauty pageant so that we can crown a winner. We should just get on with the job.
________________________________________________________________________
Ah, the wisdom of crowds. Or is that the madness? I’m not sure any more. Do we trust the crowd to find its collective way to the perfect answer to a challenge? Or do we fear that it will tip into irrational herding behaviour and lose its grip on reality?
And do we really care? For mad or wise, the crowd is where it’s at. You know, democracy, the voice of the people, all that. So never mind I’m a Celebrity and Strictly Come Dancing – why not let the masses decide science policy?
"I'm thinking of something - Britain's Got Talent, you know, you switch on the TV and you watch the dog jumping over the pole, or whatever it is”, says David Cameron, showing that he has his finger on the pulse – or at least, that he has some vague notion that, you know, these days there’s this sort of interactive voting thing that’s popular with the masses. “Let's actually get the nation engaged on what the biggest problems are in science and in our lives that we need to crack, with a multi-million pound prize to then help us do that."
Oh, you may mock. But there’s some serious thought behind Cameron’s announcement last year of the so-called Longitude 2014 Prize. Longitude? I’ll come back to that. So you see, “It is vital” (according to the announcement of the prize on the Sciencewise website) “that in the 21st Century the challenges set are not simply those framed by academics or business leaders, but rather that the Committee responsible for overseeing the Prize understands the issues, priorities and views of the full range of stakeholders including the general public. This will be consistent with the Government’s commitment to open and transparent policy making.” You don’t get more open than delegating such policy-making to everyone.
So that’s all good. But who is this Sciencewise through which the good news is being channelled? You have to do a bit of digging there. This organization “provides co-funding and specialist advice and support to Government departments and agencies to develop and commission public dialogue activities in emerging areas of science and technology”. It is managed on behalf of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) by Ricardo-AEA in partnership with the British Science Association and the community participation charity, Involve. So wait, who then is Ricardo-AEA? More Googling reveals that it is a private consultancy.
No matter, back to the Sciencewise announcement. “The project” – that’s Longitude 2014 Prize, do pay attention – “has been divided into phases and the current dialogue project is for the first phase, scoping and framing. Framing here refers to setting out how the project to identify challenges will run and what the areas for the challenges will be. By involving the public in this early scoping phase we can be confident that the issues and challenges set by Longitude 14 [ah, that has a nice ring to it] will be consistent with issues that are of public concern… The Longitude 14 prize will serve to inform policy that aims to encourage businesses, universities and others to find a solution to some of the major societal challenges of the day… As the project moves from the scoping to a public debate, voting, and challenge setting phases, a range of tools will be used to ensure the public are engaged and excited by the project.”
Have I landed in a scene from W1A, the glorious spoof on management-speak and corporate-think now infecting the BBC? Or are we really to understand that, after due scoping and framing, the public are going to vote on the question of what businesses, universities and others (which others?) should be spending their money on, with much the same mindset as they watch, you know, dogs jumping over poles or something?
OK, let’s get a little balance. Any initiative that has as its chairman Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and ex-president of the Royal Society, who can smell a rotten egg from fifty paces, can’t be all bad (although one wonders how much direct input Rees has been allowed so far). He will head an “illustrious committee”, managed by the innovation charity Nesta. And we should admit that paternalistic “we know what’s best for you” government doesn’t have a great record for deciding what is important in science innovation either: the UK has a pretty poor track record of capitalizing on the creativity of its scientists. The current decision to pour money into research on the news “wonder material” graphene, pioneered in Manchester, smacks slightly of a panicky determination not to let this history repeat itself.
But if our alternatives are either to delegate decisions to faceless bureaucrats behind closed doors in Whitehall, or to throw the vote open by aping reality TV, we are not doing a lot for the image of democracy in action.
Can we just remember that the original Longitude Prize of 1714, on which this current project is allegedly modelled, was not itself the result of a group vote for the most pressing of technological issues of its time? The difficulty of determining navigation at sea was already widely recognized by the authorities of the time as a serious problem; the “open-source” nature of the prize was all about the solution, not about identifying the problem in the first place. And cracking that problem was primarily about securing naval supremacy and expanding trade and colonial power. If you had asked the population, they might have been more concerned about sanitation, basic healthcare (even the concept is of course anachronistic), or their lack of voting rights on anything at all.
Besides, no one won the Longitude Prize. (In fact, as science historian Rebekah Higgitt has argued, it’s not clear that there was ever really a “prize” as such at all.) Despite Cameron’s claim that it was awarded to the clockmaker John Harrison, he was never officially given that honour. After tireless campaigning to have his achievements recognized, he finally managed to wring the equivalent money out of a reluctant Parliament, but the Board of Longitude stressed that this was a bountiful gesture to acknowledge Harrison’s efforts, not the “prize” itself. Prospective contenders for the reincarnated award might not be encouraged by this history.
What I object to most of all, however, is not the ridiculous language in which this prize has been dressed, not the poor history with which it has been framed, not the paltry million quid or so that is at stake, not even the question of who chooses the objective. It is the whole notion of a competition to find the biggest challenge our technologies face. There is no single grand challenge into which we must pour millions. It’s a whole lot worse than that. The climate is changing, and to solve that alone we will need a whole raft of technological, economic and social measures. Our antibiotics are becoming useless. We lack cures for some of the most widespread and debilitating diseases on the planet. Billions of people lack access to safe drinking water. This is not rocket science (please don't let the decision be that we must get on and populate Mars...) – we know perfectly well what the problems are, and how serious they are. We don’t need to dress them up for a beauty pageant so that we can crown a winner. We should just get on with the job.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
Instruments: a postscript
How gratifying to see such an interest taken in my discussion with Stephen Curry on the aesthetics of scientific instruments. Kenan Malik has just posted our exchange on his fine blog Pandemonium. I should also say that Rebekah Higgitt has rightly pointed out that most of the objects I showed below were never intended for lab use, but were only ever meant for display – she says that Jim Bennett of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has argued that if an object is in a museum, it has probably never been used. A nice (if not foolproof) rule of thumb! I fully admit that I chose those images for their prettiness, not their potential utility – the little “hour cannon” in particular was an obvious piece of frippery. All the same, the mere fact that scientific instruments were being made for display by the rich and powerful says something interesting about the market that existed then, not to mention about the role that such instruments served – in part they were toys, but also demonstrations of the owner’s taste and authority. Can you imagine an NMR spectrometer made “for display” today? I’m not sure that “executive toy” gadgets are quite the right comparison.
This crossover between scientific instrument and marvellous gadget is explored in the splendid book Devices of Wonder by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (which, curses, I am now itching to find among my piles of books). Automata obviously fall into this category: simultaneously a form of entertainment, a demonstration of the maker’s skill (many were watchmakers), and an embodiment of the Cartesian notion of body as machine. Perhaps it is in this regard that the instruments of science have changed since the seventeenth century: back then, they were inclined as much to be an illustration of a theory as they were a means of testing it. They were – some were – ‘presentation devices’, so that elegance enhanced their persuasive power. There’s more to be said on this – I’d like to examine the issues for the nineteenth century in particular.
This crossover between scientific instrument and marvellous gadget is explored in the splendid book Devices of Wonder by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (which, curses, I am now itching to find among my piles of books). Automata obviously fall into this category: simultaneously a form of entertainment, a demonstration of the maker’s skill (many were watchmakers), and an embodiment of the Cartesian notion of body as machine. Perhaps it is in this regard that the instruments of science have changed since the seventeenth century: back then, they were inclined as much to be an illustration of a theory as they were a means of testing it. They were – some were – ‘presentation devices’, so that elegance enhanced their persuasive power. There’s more to be said on this – I’d like to examine the issues for the nineteenth century in particular.
Monday, May 05, 2014
More objects of desire
In the Guardian online, Stephen Curry has provided a thoughtful response to my brief blog in which I implied that modern scientific instruments are soulless grey boxes in comparison to the gorgeous devices that were enjoyed by the likes of Galileo and Robert Hooke. My comment was something of a gut response to perusing the wonderful website of the Museo Galileo in Florence, where just about every instrument on display is a ravishing creation. That made me realise, however, that even in the nineteenth century many scientific instruments were crafted with an artistry that far exceeds what is strictly necessary. I would happily have them on my mantelpiece. So what happened?
Stephen explains that this lack of obvious aesthetic appeal in much of today’s kit doesn’t preclude researchers like him from having a response to their equipment that can be “immediate and visceral”. He describes the tactile satisfaction that he has derived from working with machines that are engineered with grace and precision. It is a delightful account of how even apparently prosaic devices can elicit a feeling of connection, even affection, for those who use them. I’m very glad to have stimulated an account like this. Anyone who talks of “science as a craft” is a man after my own heart.
Yet I can’t help thinking that my question remains. Galileo’s instruments can be appreciated as objects of wonder and desire by anyone who sees them, not just by those accustomed to their use. Why, I think we must still ask, were they put together not just with care and precision but with an apparent wish to make them beautiful?
And, to turn the question around, why should we care if they were? Would there really be any gain in adorning today’s scientific instruments with wood panelling and mother-of-pearl inlay? What would be the point?
I’m glad Stephen’s article has forced me to think about these things more deeply than I did when I posted my cri de coeur. I should say that there are of course others who are far better placed than I am to provide answers, such as Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and Frank James at the Royal Institution. But these, such as they are, are my thoughts.
First, there is obviously a selection effect at work here of the kind that all historians and curators are familiar with. What tends to get preserved is not a representative cross-section of what is around at any time, but rather, what is deemed to be worth preserving. No doubt there was a host of unremarkable flasks and bottles and crucibles that were destroyed because no one thought them worth holding on to.
Second, there were of course no specialized scientific-instrument manufacturers in the early modern period. When investigators like Galileo and Boyle wanted something made that they could not make themselves, they would go to metalsmiths, carpenters, potters and the like, who inevitably would have brought their own craft aesthetic to the objects they made.
And when specialist manufacturers did begin to appear, such as the instrument-maker Richard Reeve in London, they were catering to a particular clientele that their products reflected. Reeve was making microscopes and so forth for the wealthy dilettantes like Samuel Pepys, who would have expected to be buying something elegant and refined, not coldly functional.
But this touches on the third and perhaps most salient point: what, and who, these instruments were for. Even for Galileo, the scientific experiment was still at least as much a demonstration as it was an exploration: it was a way of showing that your ideas were right. (It has been suggested, albeit somewhat inconclusively, that Galileo may have slightly arranged his figures to suit his ideas, since methods of timing for phenomena like free fall or rolling down a plane were not yet sufficiently accurate to really distinguish between candidate mathematical formulae for describing them.) And in the earliest of the early modern era, during the late Renaissance, scientific instruments were objects of power. They were used by the virtuosi to delight and entertain their noble patrons, and thereby to imply a command of the occult forces of nature. For such a display, it was important that a device be impressive to look at: elegance was the key attribute of the courtly natural philosopher.
And this is, in a sense, still the case: scientific instruments are not made simply to do a job, but employ a particular visual rhetoric with an agenda in mind. OK, homemade instrumentation does often tend to have an improvised Heath Robinson quality, and this is often the kind of instrument that I like best – as I argued here, it can thereby reflect the scientist’s own thought processes. But when an instrument is manufactured, even when it is mass-produced, there is another determinant of its appearance. It has – even the most anonymous of spectrometers – been designed, and that design is geared towards a particular end. For one thing, it becomes susceptible to fashion – we can all distinguish an instrument from the 1950s (chunky, retro-Space Age) from one made in the 1990s (sleek, minimalist). But more importantly, I would submit that, just as the instruments of the seventeenth century obeyed a rhetoric of virtuosic mastery of nature, today they must convey objectivity, the hallmark of modern science. That’s to say, modern instruments don’t just look bland and uninspiring because they are made without love (and they are certainly not make without skill) – they look that way because they are trying to reflect what is deemed to be the proper way to do science. It must be impersonal, free of frippery or excess. A blank casing, functional dials and knobs, sober colours, no decoration: to look otherwise would invite suspicions that it was a toy, not a means of doing good science.
So while I accept Stephen’s assertion that the utilitarian nature of modern scientific instruments doesn’t necessarily preclude their being given satisfying and even elegant designs, I think we need to recognize that there is an aesthetic shaping the way they look that says something about the character of modern scientific research – it has to maintain the correct deportment, which means looking suitably “sciency” and neutral. Does that make the slightest difference to the nature of research itself? It’s not obvious that it will, but I am struck by how my blog seemed to touch a nerve with various other folks, so perhaps some researchers do feel that their equipment is a little too functional to offer much inspiration.
In any case, this is now a good excuse for a little more scientific instrument porn. Oh how indecently I covet these things!
Stephen explains that this lack of obvious aesthetic appeal in much of today’s kit doesn’t preclude researchers like him from having a response to their equipment that can be “immediate and visceral”. He describes the tactile satisfaction that he has derived from working with machines that are engineered with grace and precision. It is a delightful account of how even apparently prosaic devices can elicit a feeling of connection, even affection, for those who use them. I’m very glad to have stimulated an account like this. Anyone who talks of “science as a craft” is a man after my own heart.
Yet I can’t help thinking that my question remains. Galileo’s instruments can be appreciated as objects of wonder and desire by anyone who sees them, not just by those accustomed to their use. Why, I think we must still ask, were they put together not just with care and precision but with an apparent wish to make them beautiful?
And, to turn the question around, why should we care if they were? Would there really be any gain in adorning today’s scientific instruments with wood panelling and mother-of-pearl inlay? What would be the point?
I’m glad Stephen’s article has forced me to think about these things more deeply than I did when I posted my cri de coeur. I should say that there are of course others who are far better placed than I am to provide answers, such as Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and Frank James at the Royal Institution. But these, such as they are, are my thoughts.
First, there is obviously a selection effect at work here of the kind that all historians and curators are familiar with. What tends to get preserved is not a representative cross-section of what is around at any time, but rather, what is deemed to be worth preserving. No doubt there was a host of unremarkable flasks and bottles and crucibles that were destroyed because no one thought them worth holding on to.
Second, there were of course no specialized scientific-instrument manufacturers in the early modern period. When investigators like Galileo and Boyle wanted something made that they could not make themselves, they would go to metalsmiths, carpenters, potters and the like, who inevitably would have brought their own craft aesthetic to the objects they made.
And when specialist manufacturers did begin to appear, such as the instrument-maker Richard Reeve in London, they were catering to a particular clientele that their products reflected. Reeve was making microscopes and so forth for the wealthy dilettantes like Samuel Pepys, who would have expected to be buying something elegant and refined, not coldly functional.
But this touches on the third and perhaps most salient point: what, and who, these instruments were for. Even for Galileo, the scientific experiment was still at least as much a demonstration as it was an exploration: it was a way of showing that your ideas were right. (It has been suggested, albeit somewhat inconclusively, that Galileo may have slightly arranged his figures to suit his ideas, since methods of timing for phenomena like free fall or rolling down a plane were not yet sufficiently accurate to really distinguish between candidate mathematical formulae for describing them.) And in the earliest of the early modern era, during the late Renaissance, scientific instruments were objects of power. They were used by the virtuosi to delight and entertain their noble patrons, and thereby to imply a command of the occult forces of nature. For such a display, it was important that a device be impressive to look at: elegance was the key attribute of the courtly natural philosopher.
And this is, in a sense, still the case: scientific instruments are not made simply to do a job, but employ a particular visual rhetoric with an agenda in mind. OK, homemade instrumentation does often tend to have an improvised Heath Robinson quality, and this is often the kind of instrument that I like best – as I argued here, it can thereby reflect the scientist’s own thought processes. But when an instrument is manufactured, even when it is mass-produced, there is another determinant of its appearance. It has – even the most anonymous of spectrometers – been designed, and that design is geared towards a particular end. For one thing, it becomes susceptible to fashion – we can all distinguish an instrument from the 1950s (chunky, retro-Space Age) from one made in the 1990s (sleek, minimalist). But more importantly, I would submit that, just as the instruments of the seventeenth century obeyed a rhetoric of virtuosic mastery of nature, today they must convey objectivity, the hallmark of modern science. That’s to say, modern instruments don’t just look bland and uninspiring because they are made without love (and they are certainly not make without skill) – they look that way because they are trying to reflect what is deemed to be the proper way to do science. It must be impersonal, free of frippery or excess. A blank casing, functional dials and knobs, sober colours, no decoration: to look otherwise would invite suspicions that it was a toy, not a means of doing good science.
So while I accept Stephen’s assertion that the utilitarian nature of modern scientific instruments doesn’t necessarily preclude their being given satisfying and even elegant designs, I think we need to recognize that there is an aesthetic shaping the way they look that says something about the character of modern scientific research – it has to maintain the correct deportment, which means looking suitably “sciency” and neutral. Does that make the slightest difference to the nature of research itself? It’s not obvious that it will, but I am struck by how my blog seemed to touch a nerve with various other folks, so perhaps some researchers do feel that their equipment is a little too functional to offer much inspiration.
In any case, this is now a good excuse for a little more scientific instrument porn. Oh how indecently I covet these things!
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Keep it in the family
Here’s my latest Crucible column in Chemistry World.
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When Jenny Pickworth Glusker of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia delivered a talk on the past, present and future of crystallography at the opening ceremony of the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr) in January, she not only described but personified the traditions of the field. For Glusker worked in the laboratory of Dorothy Hodgkin, who was a PhD student of J. Desmond Bernal, who was a protégé of William Bragg – who of course started it all, after Max von Laue’s seminal discovery of X-ray diffraction in 1912.
This sort of scientific genealogy is properly a source of pride to those concerned, but it is more than that. From her mentor a scientist acquires not just a technical training but a culture – a sense of what matters, in terms of the scientific questions one asks, an approach to answering them, and the attitude one adopts in researching them. It is hard, for example, to imagine anyone emerging from under the wing of Bernal with much regard for rigid disciplinary boundaries. A part of that culture is surely also the sense of moral and ethical responsibilities that a good mentor will supply.
This is one reason why Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies and colleagues suggest in a preprint that the trend in science towards large teams is not uncomplicated. That trend has been much remarked on, one implication being that the old mechanisms of rewarding scientific achievement – individual prizes, not least the Nobels – are becoming obsolete. Petersen and colleagues confirm, with a number of metrics, the observation that the number of coauthors on papers is rising across the field in the sciences, and that singleton Nobel prizes are now rather rare.
This poses challenges for attribution of credit (at the same time that such credit is becoming more vital to young researchers), not to mention for the task of simply organizing large teams so that they work efficiently. What has been less remarked is that the potential problems arise not just for team members and leaders, but for the whole scientific community and indeed beyond. As teams get larger, they become less transparent. It is harder to monitor who is doing what, and becomes increasingly necessary to take each contribution on trust.
Petersen and colleagues suggest that this trend could make it easier for misconduct to happen unnoticed, and less likely that there will be channels of mentorship to discourage it in the first place. There are ample examples. Some highly respected scientists have had their reputations tarnished, whether fairly or not, by their apparent failure adequately to scrutinize results falsified by junior colleagues: biologist David Baltimore in the case of Thereza Imanishi-Kari in the late 1980s, and physicist Bertram Batlogg in the case of nanotech fraudster Jan-Hendrik Schön in the early 2000s. Both senior figures were busy people in big labs. But such situations have surely got even harder to manage since those days. Poor management procedures were cited as a reason why the young forensic chemist Annie Dookhan was able to falsify perhaps thousands of drug-test results in the Hinton laboratory in Massachusetts, leading to Dookhan’s prison sentence later last year.
These cases may be extreme, but Petersen and colleagues suggest that it is difficult to maintain chains of responsibility and good conduct in large teams. When things go wrong, for example requiring retraction of a publication, it might be all but impossible to trace the blame. Big teams increase the potential for conflicts of interest, say with researchers peer-reviewing a collaborator’s manuscript, at the same time as making them harder to spot. “In this respect,” the authors say, “we have been witnessing the emergence of a conflict between the scientist and the scientific commons.”
Some of these concerns relate to a sense of values. “Many young scientists have likely been ‘lured’ into postdoctoral traps within large projects”, Petersen and colleagues write. “Are the next crop of scientists trained to be leaders or to just fit into a large production line? And once they enter the tenure track, do the lessons they observed reflect positive scientific values? Or do they reflect a system engaged in productivity at the expense of quality… and pathologically competitive attitudes that run counter to socially beneficial progress?”
Such attitudes may be forced onto young researchers by the prevailing culture. At the IYCr ceremony, a panel of young crystallographers debated the challenges they and their peers face, and in a signed declaration from that event [coming to this site soon…] they say that “Young researchers face problems with long working hours, high pressure and expectations to obtain results and to publish papers quickly and in top journals, job insecurity, and large teaching commitments. These pressures are intensifying, and… they hinder the freedom to explore original and innovative directions or to think about long-term research goals.” They can also motivate misconduct: Dookhan admitted, for example, that she faked results because of “her desire to be seen as a particularly hard working and productive.” Large teams and increasing competition might be an inevitable trend in science, but their consequences for mentorship and ethics need to be faced.
_____________________________________________________________________
When Jenny Pickworth Glusker of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia delivered a talk on the past, present and future of crystallography at the opening ceremony of the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr) in January, she not only described but personified the traditions of the field. For Glusker worked in the laboratory of Dorothy Hodgkin, who was a PhD student of J. Desmond Bernal, who was a protégé of William Bragg – who of course started it all, after Max von Laue’s seminal discovery of X-ray diffraction in 1912.
This sort of scientific genealogy is properly a source of pride to those concerned, but it is more than that. From her mentor a scientist acquires not just a technical training but a culture – a sense of what matters, in terms of the scientific questions one asks, an approach to answering them, and the attitude one adopts in researching them. It is hard, for example, to imagine anyone emerging from under the wing of Bernal with much regard for rigid disciplinary boundaries. A part of that culture is surely also the sense of moral and ethical responsibilities that a good mentor will supply.
This is one reason why Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies and colleagues suggest in a preprint that the trend in science towards large teams is not uncomplicated. That trend has been much remarked on, one implication being that the old mechanisms of rewarding scientific achievement – individual prizes, not least the Nobels – are becoming obsolete. Petersen and colleagues confirm, with a number of metrics, the observation that the number of coauthors on papers is rising across the field in the sciences, and that singleton Nobel prizes are now rather rare.
This poses challenges for attribution of credit (at the same time that such credit is becoming more vital to young researchers), not to mention for the task of simply organizing large teams so that they work efficiently. What has been less remarked is that the potential problems arise not just for team members and leaders, but for the whole scientific community and indeed beyond. As teams get larger, they become less transparent. It is harder to monitor who is doing what, and becomes increasingly necessary to take each contribution on trust.
Petersen and colleagues suggest that this trend could make it easier for misconduct to happen unnoticed, and less likely that there will be channels of mentorship to discourage it in the first place. There are ample examples. Some highly respected scientists have had their reputations tarnished, whether fairly or not, by their apparent failure adequately to scrutinize results falsified by junior colleagues: biologist David Baltimore in the case of Thereza Imanishi-Kari in the late 1980s, and physicist Bertram Batlogg in the case of nanotech fraudster Jan-Hendrik Schön in the early 2000s. Both senior figures were busy people in big labs. But such situations have surely got even harder to manage since those days. Poor management procedures were cited as a reason why the young forensic chemist Annie Dookhan was able to falsify perhaps thousands of drug-test results in the Hinton laboratory in Massachusetts, leading to Dookhan’s prison sentence later last year.
These cases may be extreme, but Petersen and colleagues suggest that it is difficult to maintain chains of responsibility and good conduct in large teams. When things go wrong, for example requiring retraction of a publication, it might be all but impossible to trace the blame. Big teams increase the potential for conflicts of interest, say with researchers peer-reviewing a collaborator’s manuscript, at the same time as making them harder to spot. “In this respect,” the authors say, “we have been witnessing the emergence of a conflict between the scientist and the scientific commons.”
Some of these concerns relate to a sense of values. “Many young scientists have likely been ‘lured’ into postdoctoral traps within large projects”, Petersen and colleagues write. “Are the next crop of scientists trained to be leaders or to just fit into a large production line? And once they enter the tenure track, do the lessons they observed reflect positive scientific values? Or do they reflect a system engaged in productivity at the expense of quality… and pathologically competitive attitudes that run counter to socially beneficial progress?”
Such attitudes may be forced onto young researchers by the prevailing culture. At the IYCr ceremony, a panel of young crystallographers debated the challenges they and their peers face, and in a signed declaration from that event [coming to this site soon…] they say that “Young researchers face problems with long working hours, high pressure and expectations to obtain results and to publish papers quickly and in top journals, job insecurity, and large teaching commitments. These pressures are intensifying, and… they hinder the freedom to explore original and innovative directions or to think about long-term research goals.” They can also motivate misconduct: Dookhan admitted, for example, that she faked results because of “her desire to be seen as a particularly hard working and productive.” Large teams and increasing competition might be an inevitable trend in science, but their consequences for mentorship and ethics need to be faced.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Last of the independents?
Here’s another take on the Lovelock fest at the Science Museum, written for the Prospect blog.
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If there’s one thing mavericks share in common, it’s that they contrive or refuse ever to admit that they’re wrong about anything. By this measure, the title of the new exhibition at the Science Museum in London – Lovelock Unlocked: Scientist, Inventor, Maverick – does James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia hypothesis, a disservice. When I spoke to him on the eve of the opening on 9th April, he admitted almost merrily that his earlier, dire warnings about the impending collapse of the population, and perhaps of civilization, because of global warming were over the top. Things look grim, he says, but not that grim. This is because we now understand that there are natural processes and systems, such as the immense capacity of the oceans to absorb heat, that might buffer us against the worst-case scenarios of the effects of increased amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The fact is, Lovelock explained, it is really no big deal for him to admit to a mistake, for who is going to reprimand him, an independent scientist beholden to no one?
But perhaps Lovelock is also so ready to admit to the occasional error – here more of judgement and foresight rather than science – because time has shown him to be right about a good deal else. And he’s no stranger to accusations that he is wrong, which is where that “maverick” label comes from: by some standards, all this means is that some famous people have disagreed with you. In the early days of the Gaia hypothesis that Lovelock cooked up with microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, evolutionary biologists in particular were queuing up to disagree with him, often in such vituperative terms that the arguments were evidently not about science alone. John Maynard Smith, an architect of neo-Darwinism, denounced Gaia as an “evil religion”, thinking that Lovelock’s talk of “goals” and “purposes” – which seemed unexceptional to him as an engineer – transgressed the central (and perfectly true, as far as all evidence indicates) tenet of evolution that it has no direction or aim. Lovelock delights now in Maynard Smith’s admission that he’d not actually read Lovelock’s books or papers but just relied on second-hand descriptions. But Maynard Smith also told Lovelock in an affable letter in 1993 that neo-Darwinists responded as they did not just because they saw Gaia as “a loose and unjustifiable extension of evolutionary thinking” but because they too “have felt themselves to be a persecuted group.” That is understandable (particularly across the Atlantic), but it also explains the extreme conservatism that still characterizes some neo-Darwinists.
So is Lovelock right or wrong? An exhibition like this invites us to see him as the outsider whose theories have now been vindicated and accepted by the scientific establishment. But the real story is much more interesting than that tired trope. While the objections of the biologists were not without force (even if some were ultimately semantic), the Gaia hypothesis is not really a theory that can be proved or disproved. It is a way of thinking about the issues – in this case, the issues of how our planetary environment came into being and maintains itself. Lovelock was not the first to suggest that these processes might involve interactions between different parts of what we now call the “earth system” – the circulation of the oceans and global air temperatures, say – but no one previously had started to put the whole picture together in an explanation of how the earth “self-regulates” its climate. Inevitably, some parts of that picture were seen clearly, others less so. And in any event, what the Gaia hypothesis consists of has evolved and mutated too much over the years for it to be regarded, like special relativity, as an idea that sprang fully formed from its creator’s mind, ripe for experimental testing.
Yet what really marked out Lovelock’s idea as original was the role he asserted for life on earth – the biosphere – as a literally vital component of how our planet achieves homeostasis (relative stability of climate) in the face of changing circumstances. This was, of course, precisely why he was deemed to be trespassing on the territory of biologists, with neither permission nor the proper training (although Lovelock did begin his career in the Medical Research Council). He argued that biological processes such as plant growth (which withdraws CO2 from the atmosphere) and bacterial dissolution of rocks have a key role in the way chemical elements are cycled between the seas, air, soil and stone, and ice – and in consequence, how climate is determined and changed. There is no real debate now that Lovelock was right about this, although he feels that the acceptance of the earth-sciences community has come only grudgingly and on condition that the disturbingly personified Gaia hypothesis be recast as “earth systems science”.
As an example of how living organisms affect the “inorganic” features of the climate system, in the early 1990s Lovelock teamed up with atmospheric scientists Robert Charlson, Meinrat Andreae and Stephen Warren to develop a hypothesis involving the ‘sulphur cycle’ – reactions and processes involving sulphur compounds. They pointed out that marine plankton give off a sulphur-containing gas called DMS as part of their metabolism, and that this is transformed in the atmosphere to sulphate, which clusters into a sort of dust of tiny salt-like particles that can seed the formation of cloud droplets. Because clouds reflect sunlight, they can alter the climate. In the so-called CLAW hypothesis, the plankton act as a negative-feedback thermostat that regulates a steady climate. If the seas warm, the plankton produce more DMS, there’s more sulphate to feed cloud formation, and so less sunlight gets through and the oceans cool down. It now seems that the idea doesn’t work – all of these things happen to some degree, but the feedbacks are more complex and subtle. Yet even so, this idea illustrates the virtue of the Gaia hypothesis in stimulating an interesting proposal, based on well established principles, that was deemed worth testing carefully (the apparent nail in the coffin came only in 2011).
Ironically – although here I risk drawing more ire from biologists – this aspect makes Gaia not unlike the notion of Darwinian evolution. That’s to say, it describes something that evidently happens in the world, and indeed you really can’t think properly about the process concerned (climate, evolution) except in this light. But that doesn’t mean that the idea explains all that happens, or that what it predicts will always be what you find. Indeed, the essence of the Gaia hypothesis – that all these various influences on climate combine to keep it steady and self-regulating in the way our bodies stabilize their temperature – still lacks any proof, and some earth-systems scientists say that the hypothesis just doesn’t fit with the evidence.
But maybe it’s right to judge Gaia more by her fertility and productiveness than by some putative test of right or wrong. As Vivienne Westwood, a Lovelock supporter, said at the gala organized to launch the Science Museum’s project, it isn’t a question of whether someone should be regarded as a scientist or an artist, but of whether or not they are imaginative. Scientists might sniff that one can imagine endless false theories, but real imagination in science is about offering a new way to think about a problem.
However, the most interesting parts of this exhibition, as of Lovelock’s new book A Rough Ride to the Future (Allen Lane, 2014) don’t have anything to do with Gaia or climate change. They are about Lovelock the inventor. This is what makes Lovelock’s career not merely productive and interesting but remarkable. He has invented over a hundred useful devices, including the electron capture detector that enabled him to detect small traces of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases in the atmosphere in the late 1960s, leading to a realization that these industrial reagents (used as refrigerants) were gradually accumulating and could, once they reached the frigid stratosphere over the poles, undergo chemical reactions that destroy ozone, the planet’s protective screen against harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Lovelock also claims to have invented the first microwave oven, which he used to defrost hamsters frozen for experiments during his early stint at the Medical Research Council. Several of these contraptions are displayed in the exhibition, and they have a wonderful Heath Robinson quality that belies their precision and artistry – it was the unprecedented sensitivity of the ECD that revealed the tiny but potentially damaging traces of CFCs. Lovelock fashioned all of these instruments himself by hand, many in the private laboratory that he set up in Launceston on the Cornish border, and proceeds from their sales or patents allowed him to become an independent scientist. This practical side of Lovelock’s imagination is not by any means a sideline: it was because he understood the scientific principles that they worked so well, and the positive feedback between making and thinking is very apparent in his work. It’s not necessary for a good scientist to be a good inventor or technician, neither do inventors need to have a strong grasp of scientific theory – witness the sometimes shaky ideas of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. But those who possess both can do and see things that other cannot. That is as true of Lovelock’s scientific heroes Michael Faraday and Alan Turing as it is of the man himself.
At one point, after visiting Lovelock’s home to look at the paper archives, the Science Museum curators were so taken with the creative chaos of his laboratory that they harboured a desire to acquire the whole thing for the project too. But there was a problem with that. “Unfortunately”, project leader Alexandra Johnson told me, “because Jim works by himself and doesn’t have to abide by health and safety regulations, there were too many hazards. There was radiation, mercury, asbestos, Semtex, just about anything you could possibly imagine. There was a particularly dubious cupboard which he used for storing chemicals in, and the lab had been flooded. We opened this cupboard and very quickly shut it again, because we were not quite sure what was going on in there.”
So instead they acquired some selected items, such as the lathe Lovelock used to make his instruments, and the “Mars jar” – a repurposed Kilner jar used to simulate the Martian atmosphere and test the detectors he developed for NASA’s Viking lander missions in the 1970s.
As far as Gaia is concerned, Johnson says that an attraction for the Science Museum is that “it’s still work in progress. There’s still a lot of conversation and dispute and debate happening around it. It is rare that we are able to show this way that scientific ideas get argued and fought over.”
The "Mars jar" in Lovelock Unlocked.
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If there’s one thing mavericks share in common, it’s that they contrive or refuse ever to admit that they’re wrong about anything. By this measure, the title of the new exhibition at the Science Museum in London – Lovelock Unlocked: Scientist, Inventor, Maverick – does James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia hypothesis, a disservice. When I spoke to him on the eve of the opening on 9th April, he admitted almost merrily that his earlier, dire warnings about the impending collapse of the population, and perhaps of civilization, because of global warming were over the top. Things look grim, he says, but not that grim. This is because we now understand that there are natural processes and systems, such as the immense capacity of the oceans to absorb heat, that might buffer us against the worst-case scenarios of the effects of increased amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The fact is, Lovelock explained, it is really no big deal for him to admit to a mistake, for who is going to reprimand him, an independent scientist beholden to no one?
But perhaps Lovelock is also so ready to admit to the occasional error – here more of judgement and foresight rather than science – because time has shown him to be right about a good deal else. And he’s no stranger to accusations that he is wrong, which is where that “maverick” label comes from: by some standards, all this means is that some famous people have disagreed with you. In the early days of the Gaia hypothesis that Lovelock cooked up with microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, evolutionary biologists in particular were queuing up to disagree with him, often in such vituperative terms that the arguments were evidently not about science alone. John Maynard Smith, an architect of neo-Darwinism, denounced Gaia as an “evil religion”, thinking that Lovelock’s talk of “goals” and “purposes” – which seemed unexceptional to him as an engineer – transgressed the central (and perfectly true, as far as all evidence indicates) tenet of evolution that it has no direction or aim. Lovelock delights now in Maynard Smith’s admission that he’d not actually read Lovelock’s books or papers but just relied on second-hand descriptions. But Maynard Smith also told Lovelock in an affable letter in 1993 that neo-Darwinists responded as they did not just because they saw Gaia as “a loose and unjustifiable extension of evolutionary thinking” but because they too “have felt themselves to be a persecuted group.” That is understandable (particularly across the Atlantic), but it also explains the extreme conservatism that still characterizes some neo-Darwinists.
So is Lovelock right or wrong? An exhibition like this invites us to see him as the outsider whose theories have now been vindicated and accepted by the scientific establishment. But the real story is much more interesting than that tired trope. While the objections of the biologists were not without force (even if some were ultimately semantic), the Gaia hypothesis is not really a theory that can be proved or disproved. It is a way of thinking about the issues – in this case, the issues of how our planetary environment came into being and maintains itself. Lovelock was not the first to suggest that these processes might involve interactions between different parts of what we now call the “earth system” – the circulation of the oceans and global air temperatures, say – but no one previously had started to put the whole picture together in an explanation of how the earth “self-regulates” its climate. Inevitably, some parts of that picture were seen clearly, others less so. And in any event, what the Gaia hypothesis consists of has evolved and mutated too much over the years for it to be regarded, like special relativity, as an idea that sprang fully formed from its creator’s mind, ripe for experimental testing.
Yet what really marked out Lovelock’s idea as original was the role he asserted for life on earth – the biosphere – as a literally vital component of how our planet achieves homeostasis (relative stability of climate) in the face of changing circumstances. This was, of course, precisely why he was deemed to be trespassing on the territory of biologists, with neither permission nor the proper training (although Lovelock did begin his career in the Medical Research Council). He argued that biological processes such as plant growth (which withdraws CO2 from the atmosphere) and bacterial dissolution of rocks have a key role in the way chemical elements are cycled between the seas, air, soil and stone, and ice – and in consequence, how climate is determined and changed. There is no real debate now that Lovelock was right about this, although he feels that the acceptance of the earth-sciences community has come only grudgingly and on condition that the disturbingly personified Gaia hypothesis be recast as “earth systems science”.
As an example of how living organisms affect the “inorganic” features of the climate system, in the early 1990s Lovelock teamed up with atmospheric scientists Robert Charlson, Meinrat Andreae and Stephen Warren to develop a hypothesis involving the ‘sulphur cycle’ – reactions and processes involving sulphur compounds. They pointed out that marine plankton give off a sulphur-containing gas called DMS as part of their metabolism, and that this is transformed in the atmosphere to sulphate, which clusters into a sort of dust of tiny salt-like particles that can seed the formation of cloud droplets. Because clouds reflect sunlight, they can alter the climate. In the so-called CLAW hypothesis, the plankton act as a negative-feedback thermostat that regulates a steady climate. If the seas warm, the plankton produce more DMS, there’s more sulphate to feed cloud formation, and so less sunlight gets through and the oceans cool down. It now seems that the idea doesn’t work – all of these things happen to some degree, but the feedbacks are more complex and subtle. Yet even so, this idea illustrates the virtue of the Gaia hypothesis in stimulating an interesting proposal, based on well established principles, that was deemed worth testing carefully (the apparent nail in the coffin came only in 2011).
Ironically – although here I risk drawing more ire from biologists – this aspect makes Gaia not unlike the notion of Darwinian evolution. That’s to say, it describes something that evidently happens in the world, and indeed you really can’t think properly about the process concerned (climate, evolution) except in this light. But that doesn’t mean that the idea explains all that happens, or that what it predicts will always be what you find. Indeed, the essence of the Gaia hypothesis – that all these various influences on climate combine to keep it steady and self-regulating in the way our bodies stabilize their temperature – still lacks any proof, and some earth-systems scientists say that the hypothesis just doesn’t fit with the evidence.
But maybe it’s right to judge Gaia more by her fertility and productiveness than by some putative test of right or wrong. As Vivienne Westwood, a Lovelock supporter, said at the gala organized to launch the Science Museum’s project, it isn’t a question of whether someone should be regarded as a scientist or an artist, but of whether or not they are imaginative. Scientists might sniff that one can imagine endless false theories, but real imagination in science is about offering a new way to think about a problem.
However, the most interesting parts of this exhibition, as of Lovelock’s new book A Rough Ride to the Future (Allen Lane, 2014) don’t have anything to do with Gaia or climate change. They are about Lovelock the inventor. This is what makes Lovelock’s career not merely productive and interesting but remarkable. He has invented over a hundred useful devices, including the electron capture detector that enabled him to detect small traces of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases in the atmosphere in the late 1960s, leading to a realization that these industrial reagents (used as refrigerants) were gradually accumulating and could, once they reached the frigid stratosphere over the poles, undergo chemical reactions that destroy ozone, the planet’s protective screen against harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Lovelock also claims to have invented the first microwave oven, which he used to defrost hamsters frozen for experiments during his early stint at the Medical Research Council. Several of these contraptions are displayed in the exhibition, and they have a wonderful Heath Robinson quality that belies their precision and artistry – it was the unprecedented sensitivity of the ECD that revealed the tiny but potentially damaging traces of CFCs. Lovelock fashioned all of these instruments himself by hand, many in the private laboratory that he set up in Launceston on the Cornish border, and proceeds from their sales or patents allowed him to become an independent scientist. This practical side of Lovelock’s imagination is not by any means a sideline: it was because he understood the scientific principles that they worked so well, and the positive feedback between making and thinking is very apparent in his work. It’s not necessary for a good scientist to be a good inventor or technician, neither do inventors need to have a strong grasp of scientific theory – witness the sometimes shaky ideas of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. But those who possess both can do and see things that other cannot. That is as true of Lovelock’s scientific heroes Michael Faraday and Alan Turing as it is of the man himself.
At one point, after visiting Lovelock’s home to look at the paper archives, the Science Museum curators were so taken with the creative chaos of his laboratory that they harboured a desire to acquire the whole thing for the project too. But there was a problem with that. “Unfortunately”, project leader Alexandra Johnson told me, “because Jim works by himself and doesn’t have to abide by health and safety regulations, there were too many hazards. There was radiation, mercury, asbestos, Semtex, just about anything you could possibly imagine. There was a particularly dubious cupboard which he used for storing chemicals in, and the lab had been flooded. We opened this cupboard and very quickly shut it again, because we were not quite sure what was going on in there.”
So instead they acquired some selected items, such as the lathe Lovelock used to make his instruments, and the “Mars jar” – a repurposed Kilner jar used to simulate the Martian atmosphere and test the detectors he developed for NASA’s Viking lander missions in the 1970s.
As far as Gaia is concerned, Johnson says that an attraction for the Science Museum is that “it’s still work in progress. There’s still a lot of conversation and dispute and debate happening around it. It is rare that we are able to show this way that scientific ideas get argued and fought over.”
The "Mars jar" in Lovelock Unlocked.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Small is... sort of cute
This little story went on the Guardian site on Friday. The technology isn’t new, but it was a very cute way to introduce the commercialization of it.
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It looks much like any other cover of the children’s magazine National Geographic Kids. Cuddly animals: check. Free Sea Turtle poster: check. Story about rescued hippos: check. Only the lack of colour and the slight graininess makes you think it might be something other than the real thing. But the real reason for these imperfections is that this magazine cover is so small that a single human red blood cell would cover most of it. It measures just 11 by 14 thousandths of a millimetre, and is totally invisible to the naked eye.
This is officially the Smallest Magazine Cover in the World, having been certified as such today by the Guinness Book of Records at the US National Science and Engineering Festival in Washington DC. The image is carved out of a lump of plastic using, as a chisel, a tiny silicon needle 100,000 times sharper than the sharpest pencil tip. The contrast reflects the topography of the surface: the higher it is, the lighter it appears.
The technique was developed over the past five years by physicist Armin Knoll and his colleagues at IBM’s research laboratory in the suburb of Ruschlikon in Zurich, Switzerland. The needle, attached to a bendy silicon strip that scans across the sample surface, is electrically heated so that when it is brought close to the specially developed plastic, the material just evaporates. In this way the researchers can remove blobs of material just five nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) across, paring away the surface pixel by pixel like a milling machine.
By reducing the heat, the tip can be used to take a snapshot of the carved structure it has produced. Surrounded by plastic in a valley, the tip radiates away more heat than if it hovers above a peak, and this heat flow therefore traces out the surface contours.
The IBM team first reported the method in 2010, and I saw it in action in Ruschlikon two years ago. It was a strange experience. Because I was once an editor at the science journal Nature, Knoll and his colleagues decided to write out the journal’s logo for me. On the display screen the letters took shape one by one, each perfectly formed in Times New Roman as if by a rather slow printer. It was hard to believe that each of them was about the height of a single bacterium.
IBM has licensed this technology to a start-up company in Zurich called SwissLitho, founded in 2012 by former IBM scientists Philip Paul and Felix Holzner. The company has developed it into a commercial machine that they call the NanoFrazor, costing around half a million euros. McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has bought the first of them. “It’s a cool tool”, says McGill physicist Peter Grutter. He says that, quite apart from the ability to make tiny structures for electronics, part of the attraction is that, unlike other nanopatterning methods, it’s very easy to find where you are on a surface and so to take images of large areas or to go back and overlay a second pattern.
The National Geographic Kids cover was made by Knoll’s team after running a readers’ poll to select their favourite image. Although Holzner expects the instrument to be mainly used as a research tool for universities like McGill, he suspects that novelty applications like this might prove popular too. It could be used to add security tags to artworks, passports and personalized Swiss watches that would be virtually impossible to forge. Some companies have already used other nanopatterning methods to write the entire Bible on a crucifix for especially devout customers, and even to engrave tiny patterns on the surface of chocolate that scatter light to create different colours. It seems that the Swiss reputation for both precision engineering and fancy confectionery is as secure as ever.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
My unexpected internal monologue this week...
[The scene: the foyer of a university theatre. Conference delegates are standing around chatting.]
Look, Michael Frayn is standing over by the coffee on his own! If I don’t go and speak to him, I’ll kick myself afterwards. I mean, I had to stop reading The Tin Men and Towards the End of the Morning in public because I kept embarrassing myself by laughing out loud… And then Copenhagen… Come on, I have to. Don’t know what I’ll say, but anything…
OK, I don’t think that was too great a faux pas to ask what he is working on now. I mean, he said “Nothing!”, but not angrily, and now he’s gone and asked what I am working on! Michael Frayn is interested in that! And I didn’t think he’d even know who I was at all! So yes Michael, I see it as a kind of cultural history and – uh OK, now I get it, this is his very gracious way of deflecting the question, because he doesn’t really want to say what he’s working on. Ah well, keep it going… You see, it’s a book all about the stories we tell when –
That bloke out of the window there looks quite like my neighbour Geoff.
Focus, you fool. You can’t start looking over the shoulder of Michael Frayn, as if you’re hoping to catch the eye of someone else at the meeting who might be more interesting to talk to. This is Michael Frayn! Very funny books! Copenhagen! So, this cultural history that goes back to Plato and –
No, he really looks a lot like my neighbour.
Don’t keep looking, you idiot. Look, you have come to Lincoln for the day. Lincoln is a little town, OK so a city really, with cathedral and all, and the cathedral is fabulous, and the dock front around the campus is nice, but it’s not exactly a place people come to, is it? You have to change at Peterborough, for God’s sake. So you glimpsed a bloke with receding hair and a beard, like 80 percent of all male university lecturers. It’s not actually going to be Geoff, is it? I know he turned out to be in Spain the other week at the same time as you, but is he really going to be strolling through the Lincoln campus just as you glance out of the window? Do you think he is stalking you or something?
So where were we? Oh, Michael is talking to someone else now. Well, I would only have blurted out some silly question about Heisenberg.
[Yes, it was my neighbour Geoff.]
Look, Michael Frayn is standing over by the coffee on his own! If I don’t go and speak to him, I’ll kick myself afterwards. I mean, I had to stop reading The Tin Men and Towards the End of the Morning in public because I kept embarrassing myself by laughing out loud… And then Copenhagen… Come on, I have to. Don’t know what I’ll say, but anything…
OK, I don’t think that was too great a faux pas to ask what he is working on now. I mean, he said “Nothing!”, but not angrily, and now he’s gone and asked what I am working on! Michael Frayn is interested in that! And I didn’t think he’d even know who I was at all! So yes Michael, I see it as a kind of cultural history and – uh OK, now I get it, this is his very gracious way of deflecting the question, because he doesn’t really want to say what he’s working on. Ah well, keep it going… You see, it’s a book all about the stories we tell when –
That bloke out of the window there looks quite like my neighbour Geoff.
Focus, you fool. You can’t start looking over the shoulder of Michael Frayn, as if you’re hoping to catch the eye of someone else at the meeting who might be more interesting to talk to. This is Michael Frayn! Very funny books! Copenhagen! So, this cultural history that goes back to Plato and –
No, he really looks a lot like my neighbour.
Don’t keep looking, you idiot. Look, you have come to Lincoln for the day. Lincoln is a little town, OK so a city really, with cathedral and all, and the cathedral is fabulous, and the dock front around the campus is nice, but it’s not exactly a place people come to, is it? You have to change at Peterborough, for God’s sake. So you glimpsed a bloke with receding hair and a beard, like 80 percent of all male university lecturers. It’s not actually going to be Geoff, is it? I know he turned out to be in Spain the other week at the same time as you, but is he really going to be strolling through the Lincoln campus just as you glance out of the window? Do you think he is stalking you or something?
So where were we? Oh, Michael is talking to someone else now. Well, I would only have blurted out some silly question about Heisenberg.
[Yes, it was my neighbour Geoff.]
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Criticality and phase transitions in biology
My piece just published in New Scientist on phase transitions in biology has had one of the most difficult gestations I’ve ever encountered. No one’s fault, it is just that it’s a very tough job finding the right way to tell a story like this. For one thing, what I came to realise during the editorial process is that, if you talk about criticality, people outside condensed-matter physics are likely to imagine you’re talking about self-organized criticality, and that they don’t generally know that critical points have a long, long history going way back beyond this. Neither, it seems, is the connection between the notion of criticality, with its scale-free phenomena, and phase transitions well known. The real point of the ideas I discuss in this piece is not that there’s something wonderful about being poised at a critical point, on the edge of order and chaos etc., but that it can be useful for a biological system to situate itself near to some phase transition and to draw on the fluctuations and sensitivity to external conditions that this engenders. It doesn’t have to be a critical transition – I am coupling together here the current discussions of near-critical biology with work on first-order phase transitions in protein hydration, where again the value seems to be that one can draw on large fluctuations to attain a big response to a small stimulus. This latter material didn’t make the final cut in New Scientist, and I can see that it made for an even more complicated story. But I do think that there is important common ground between the two ideas. What’s more, no one previously has made the link to Eigen’s ideas about natural selection coming from a phase transition – a notion that he has set out in full in his immense, dense but fascinating recent book, which I reviewed here.
Anyway, this version is based on my original draft, but with some of the later material mixed in. Hopefully it will give some indication of the bigger picture.
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It’s not the midges that were the problem, says Andrea Cavagna, but the kids. You’d think his efforts to record the movements of midge swarms in the public parks of Rome near sunset would be fraught with risks of being eaten alive by the little beasts – but these were a non-biting variety. Keeping away the children who gathered to watch what these folks were up to with their video cameras, generators and thickets of cabling was another matter. That, and the problem of finding a parking space in central Rome.
It’s not easy, he realised, for a physicist to turn field biologist.
The reason why Cavagna, based at Sapienza University in Rome, and his colleagues went midge-hunting sounds strange, perhaps even bizarre. The researchers wanted to know if midges behave like magnets. More specifically, if they act like magnets close to the point where heat flips them between a magnetic and non-magnetic state: a so-called critical phase transition.
Cavagna is one of a small and diverse group of scientists who have begun to suspect that critical phase transitions play vital roles in a wide variety of biological systems. Not only might they underpin the swarming of midges and the flocking of birds, but they might enable neurons in the brain to encode a picture of our environment, some protein molecules to fold up and bind their target molecules, and cell membranes to attract molecules that trigger cell-to-cell messaging. They might even explain how evolution itself works.
It’s good to be critical
Staying alive might seem to be a question of keeping calm and carrying on in the face of whatever comes along. But it’s often important to be able to respond and adapt to challenges rather than stoically riding them out: if you’re a small creature about to be eaten by a big one, you’d better get out of there. The trick is to keep your options open, maintaining easy access to a wide range of actions. It’s a delicate balance: you need stability, but also responsiveness.
In 2010 two physicists suggested how this might be possible. Thierry Mora (now at the École Normale Superieure in Paris) and Bill Bialek at Princeton University argued that many biological systems, from flocking birds to neural networks, might be “poised close to a critical point”. The idea drew on a well-established notion from statistical physics: the critical phase transition, where a system of many interacting components switches suddenly from one global state of organization to another, typically from an orderly to a disorderly state. The magnetic transition of iron, where it changes from having the magnetic orientation of its atoms random and disorderly to all lined up as the material is cooled, is the classic example. The switch happens abruptly at the so-called critical point – for iron, at a temperature of 1,043 Kelvin.
What have magnets got to do with biology? The point is that the critical transition of a magnet isn’t anything to do with magnetism per se. It is an outcome of the fact that each atom is interacting (here via magnetic forces) with its neighbours, and that they all have to come to some ‘collective decision’ about how to organize themselves. Because of that collective aspect, phase transitions happen all at once when a threshold value of some control parameter such as temperature is surpassed. They occur in all manner of physical systems, from superconductors and the Big Bang to polymer mixtures. So why not in biology?
The proposal of Mora and Bialek didn’t spring from nowhere. It echoes suggestions made in the 1990s that many natural systems, including some in biology (such as mass extinctions), display ‘self-organized criticality' (SOC), meaning that they undergo disruptions and fluctuations at all possible scales of size. The archetypal example of SOC was a pile of sand, which can have avalanches of all sizes as new grains are added at the top of the slope. This wide range of fluctuations scales is just what is found at an ordinary critical point – for example, a magnet at its critical point is a patchwork of domains of all different sizes with different magnetic orientations.
But, says Cavagna, it was never really clear that SOC had a deep connection to the older notion of critical phase transitions. The key feature of SOC is that it is indeed ‘self-organized’, which means that it will return to the critical state after a disturbance like an avalanche. So there’s no actual phase transition at all. “It’s just a point of great instability”, Cavagna says – and not one that is reached, like a true phase transition, by tuning a parameter like temperature. What’s more, says Bialek, “there was a huge amount of ideology about why criticality was a good thing in biology” – but no good argument for why. These two researchers and others are now trying to clarify what advantages criticality might convey on a wide range of biological systems, regardless of whether it is achieved by self-organization, natural selection or something else.
A critical magnet is poised on a knife-edge, where the smallest nudge can tip it into becoming wholly magnetic or non-magnetic. This knife-edge character of traditional (rather than self-organized) critical points means that it is all but impossible for a system to stay there. But the proposal of Mora and Bialek is that biological systems might benefit from operating close to critical points. This could provide access to a wide range of fluctuations involving different configurations of its components. The striking thing about near-criticality is that the rarity of specific, seemingly unlikely configurations is exactly compensated for by the fact that there are many more variants of such states than there are of common ones. “There’s a small number of very common configurations, a large number very rare configurations, and everything in between”, says Mora. “Being close to a critical point means that you're as likely to find yourself in any of these configurations.” As a result, he says, “being critical may confer the necessary flexibility to deal with complex and unpredictable environments.”
Another key feature of a critical system is that it is extremely responsive to disturbances in the environment, which can send rippling effects throughout the whole system. “At the critical point, everything is about to go crazy”, says physicist Jim Sethna of Cornell University. “So you get massively more sensitive behaviour.” That, Sethna says, can help a biological system to adapt very rapidly to change. The sensitivity stems from the long-ranged correlations in the behaviour of the system’s components that develop near criticality: a tweak here has an influence right over there, so that each component can ‘feel’ what all the others are doing.
Crucially, this flexibility and adaptiveness is achieved not by some incredibly complex and fragile set of interactions between the components, but taking advantage of the universal and robust characteristics of all systems made up of many interacting components. If a system evolves to be close to critical, says Sethna, it then has something like a set of general-purpose knobs that can allow it to adapt to environmental changes without having to reconfigure genomes.
Recent work by physicists Amos Maritan and Jayanth Banavar and their coworkers gives a clearer picture of why criticality in particular is useful. They have calculated how a system of agents that can gather information about their environment, and whose fitness depends on their ability to locate the source of environmental stimuli, evolves over time. They found that such a collection of evolving cognitive agents settles naturally into a critical state. “Being poised at criticality provides the system with optimal flexibility and evolutionary advantage to cope with and adapt to a highly variable and complex environment”, says Maritan.
In effect, this critical state allows the system to ‘sense’ what is going on around it: to encode a kind of ‘internal map’ of its environment and circumstances, rather like a river network encoding a map of the surrounding topography. “A key ingredient to the success of a living system is its ability to capture relevant information from the richly varying external world, synthesizing its most prominent features into manageable maps”, says Maritan. If this is indeed a feature of a near-critical state, the activity of neurons would be expected to operate in such a state just as Mora and Bialek proposed, because what our brains ‘show us’ will then be a good approximation to what is really ‘out there’.
There’s now mounting evidence that brains really are organized this way. One signature of criticality would be long-ranged correlations between the ‘spiking’ activity of neurons – something that Bialek and his coworkers have found in their models of neural networks. These correlations mean that the state of each neuron is to some degree encoded in the state of the rest of the network, providing a mechanism for error correction and recovery of lost information.
And it’s not just all theory. Dante Chialvo of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and colleagues have shown that dynamics characteristic of a critical state in the activity of the human brain can account for some of the key features seen in MRI brain imaging, such as the coherent operation of many neurons clustered together in space. And Nir Friedman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his coworkers have found that avalanches in the firing of neurons show the same kind of size–probability relationship as those in self-organized critical sand-piles. It’s not hard to imagine that this apparently general operating principle of neural networks might bring some structure to the mass of data soon to emerge from the large-scale projects recently launched in the US and Europe to map out the connectivity of the human brain.
Superfluid starlings
Responsiveness has an obvious utility to a herd or flock of animals looking out for predators: if a few individuals spot one, the rest of them can gain that information almost at once. And they do – just think of schools of fish darting around in unison to avoid sharks.
It was this sort of flocking behaviour that partly stimulated Mora and Bialek’s proposal in the first place. Theoretical modelling of flocking over the past decade or so has shown that coordinated motion requires each animal simply to respond to its nearest neighbours’ movements by trying to align itself. This is similar to the way magnetic atoms get aligned, and in fact some flocking models are directly analogous to models of magnetism. Mora, Bialek, Cavagna and their collaborators have recently shown that the graceful, orderly motion of flocks, familiar from watching starlings at twilight, is most easily maintained if the flock is close to a critical point. Further from this point, a flock might stay coordinated but loses the ability to respond quickly and coherently to outside disturbances such as predators.
In other words, says Cavagna, flocking isn’t just about orderly motion. Too much of it and you end up regimented like a crystal, slow to respond to anything. The responsiveness comes instead from the correlations between individuals – how one affects another.
Fine in theory. But do real flocks work this way? In a happy confluence of ideas and observations, Cavagna and his coworkers in Rome began their studies of flocking in 2010 just as Mora and Bialek were presenting their ideas on biological criticality. The Italian team found that flocks of starlings have scale-free correlations in the velocity fluctuations of individual birds. In other words, if one bird in the flock changes course, others will tend to do so too almost instantaneously, no matter how far apart they are.
Cavagna and colleagues placed video cameras on top of the National Museum of Rome in the city centre, which overlooks a major roosting site for starlings in winter. They filmed the birds during their flocking displays at dusk, and then used computer-vision methods to turn the footage into records of the three-dimensional movements of individual birds in the flock, which typically contained between a hundred and several thousand birds. They analysed this data to figure out how each bird deviated from the average velocity of the entire flock, and to measure the correlations: how closely these deviations for any pair of birds shadow each other as the distance between the pair increases.
“We found that correlation was very strong”, Cavagna says. In other words, the birds seem to be tuned into one another’s movements even over scales beyond which they can see each other. The influence of one bird is transmitted to others far away through neighbour-to-neighbour interactions, in just the same way as the magnetic poles of atoms of iron in a magnet can ‘speak’ indirectly over long distances close to the critical point.
What’s more, these observations showed that realignment of the birds’ orientation as the flock changes direction spreads much faster than the standard theories of collective movement permit. This behaviour can be explained by adding an extra ingredient to the theory: a ‘symmetry rule’ which reflects the fact that all directions of flight are equivalent. With this included, it turns out that the movement of the flock becomes mathematically equivalent to that of a superfluid such as liquid helium, which can flow essentially without losing any energy through viscous drag. In other words, a flock of birds can be considered a kind of living superfluid.
Midges don’t exhibit the orderly swarming motions of birds and fish. Might they, nevertheless, display the long-ranged correlations expected on the disordered side of a critical phase transition? “Some biologists insisted there is no collective behaviour in midges”, Cavagna says, and he expected his observations to confirm that view. But after painstakingly filming the midges swarming around park landmarks, reflected in the setting sun, he and his coworkers couldn’t avoid the conclusion that there were very strong correlations here too.
“It’s physically exhausting work”, Cavagna says: lugging all the equipment into a park, filming for several hours, then immediately going back to the lab well after dusk to download the data. “Still, at least it was summer, and the Roman parks are lovely.” Filming birds is harder, he says, since they only flock in the cold winter.
But why would evolution tune midges to behave that way, given that predation isn’t an issue for them? Cavagna thinks that this might be looking at the question the wrong way. Perhaps they can’t help being near-critical. The researchers found that the reach of the correlations was always about the same size as the swarm: the bigger the swarm, the longer the correlations. So maybe the swarm size isn't an adaptation, but is a side-effect of some other factor that determines how the midges interact. This factor - the range of neighbouring midge interactions, say - sets the correlation distance for midge motions, so that if the swarm gets bigger than that size, it will automatically shed midges.
Quick drying
The idea that biology makes use of phase transitions and their associated correlations and fluctuations could go far deeper than these large-scale networks and communities, and might be applied even at the level of individual cells and molecules. Protein molecules, for example, often carry out their functions as enzymes by switching from one shape to another. That needs to happen easily when the right signal is given, for example when another molecule binds to the protein to activate it. These conformational changes are, like phase transitions, cooperative, meaning that they involve interactions between all the component parts. Tweak this bit of a protein, and the whole thing tips into a new shape.
Cooperative transitions have also long been thought to govern the way protein chains fold up into their functional shapes in the first place. But recently David Chandler at the University of Berkeley at California and his coworkers have argued that both this process and the way several protein molecules stick together into many-component assemblies could be controlled by a transition that occurs not in the protein itself but in the water that surrounds it. They believe there may be an abrupt ‘drying transition’ in which all the water suddenly exits from the space between two water-repelling parts of proteins. Chandler argues that these drying transitions, which have been seen in computer simulations of some proteins, draw on the strong fluctuations that exist in the water, whereby the water molecules organize themselves into ever-changing regions of high or low density – not unlike a midge swarm, in fact. These fluctuations make it easier for the gap between the protein segments to tip over from a ‘wet’ to a ‘dry’ state, just as they make it easier for a critical magnet to tip over into a magnetic or non-magnetic state. Not all, or even most, proteins seem to fold or aggregate via these drying transitions. But Chandler and colleagues argue that most of them may be fine-tuned by evolution to be close to such a transition, some lying on one side of that boundary and some on the other.
Drying transitions have also been found in computer simulations of the docking of small molecules into the ‘binding cavities’ of the enzymes they activate. Some proteins in thermophilic organisms, which thrive in hot environments, have cavities lined with water-repelling chemical groups that seem poised right on the brink of expelling the water and becoming dry at the organism’s normal working temperature. The docking of the ‘plug’ into its ‘socket’ would be made easier by this ease of emptying. Meanwhile, some protein channels that sit in cell walls and regulate the flow of other molecules or ions in and out are also poised to undergo drying transitions within their conduit pores, so that they can be easily switched from an ‘open’ state (where the water-filled pore lets dissolved substances pass) to a ‘closed’ state (where the pore is dry and denies passage).
Another benefit of being close to a phase transition has been suggested by Sethna and his colleagues. Some biological membranes are patchworks in which different types of lipid molecule are segregated into liquid-like ‘rafts’, phase-separated like immiscible droplets of oil and water. Because these patches have a wide range of fluctuating sizes, rather like the domains of a near-critical magnet, Sethna’s team argued that they are close to a critical phase transition at which the molecules become fully miscible.
They say that the value here is not in the phase transition itself, but in the domain size fluctuations that accompany it. Such fluctuations in immiscible fluids were shown in the 1980s to give rise to a force analogous to the so-called Casimir force that pulls together two closely spaced metal plates in a vacuum. The normal Casimir force is caused by electromagnetic fluctuations in the vacuum, themselves a consequence of quantum physics: because the size of these fluctuations is restricted between the plates, this produces a pressure that draws them together. Likewise, constraints on the ‘near-critical’ fluctuations of lipid patches between protein molecules embedded in the membrane give rise to a ‘critical Casimir’ attraction that might help molecules to bind together and trigger chemical reactions involved in cell signalling. In effect, says Sethna, it means that proteins at the membrane surface can talk to each other via the lipid rafts. “Here again criticality allows the system to access structures over a wide range of scales”, says Mora.
The physics of evolution
Phase transitions and criticality might turn out to be important in the operation of gene networks, which currently seem absurdly baroque and yet somehow generate stable and robust organisms. Bialek and coworkers recently reported an indication of criticality in the gene regulatory network that determines the spatial patterning of the fruit fly embryo – the so-called gap gene network. They found long-ranged correlations in the fluctuations of gene expression levels at well-separated parts of the embryo. It’s possible that these critical-like fluctuations might help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the information transmission in the regulatory network.
Mora and Bialek have suggested that phase transitions in the ‘information space’ that relates a protein’s structure to its shape and function through the collective interactions of its chemical building blocks might account for the appearance of distinct ‘families’ of protein structures. This would imply that the evolution of protein sequences (and hence gene sequences) is significantly constrained by the limited number of ‘stable states’ in sequence space – in other words, that nature’s profusion is regulated by an order even deeper than natural selection.
In fact, not only does evolution seem likely to make use of phase transitions – it might actually be one. Chemist Manfred Eigen, who won the 1967 Nobel Prize for his work on fast chemical reactions, has argued that natural selection appears in a system of self-replicating, information-bearing entities as an abrupt phase transition at certain threshold values of the rates of replication and mutation. In other words, it is not just ‘something that happens’ in reproducing systems, but is a physical law that arises from the way information itself is organized. In Eigen’s theory, neutral selection – in which mutations get fixed in a population even though they have no adaptive benefit – injects fluctuations analogous to those at a critical point. These are essential to prevent natural selection from getting ‘stuck’ in minor valleys of the evolutionary landscape – or as a physicist might say, to prevent the system settling into a metastable phase, which is provisionally stable but not the optimal arrangement of the components. That would fit with the recent suggestion of evolutionary biologist John Tyler Bonner at Princeton University that the random fluctuations of neutral evolution could account for the immense variety of forms found in organisms such as diatoms.
Criticality and the critics
“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do something in between physics and biology”, says Bialek. The question is, he says, “can you talk about these things that biologists usually study in the way that physicists do?” He suspected “that there’s some collection of phenomenon that people didn’t realise were related to each other, or some part of the biological world that nobody has looked at from a physicists’ point of view” – in other words, the big question was “whether aspects of particular [biological] models can be derived from some more general principle.” If Bialek and Mora are right, criticality could emerge as one such general principle.
But these ideas have yet to be embraced by most biologists, whose agenda is often now dominated by fine details rather than a search for over-arching principles. Getting these ideas a hearing in biology is likely to be a struggle. “There’s a big difference in culture”, says Sethna. “Biologists tend to be skeptical of anything that involves a lot of math.” In an effort to bridge this ‘two cultures’ divide, in 2010 Bialek spearheaded an interdisciplinary centre called the Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences at the City University of New York, where he is now director. Here physicists can discuss these ideas with neuroscientists, ecologists and other biologists – Cavagna was recruited as a visiting professor last year, and has been collaborating with Bialek and Mora to refine the understanding of critical flocking. But it will take time and patience, both to figure out how widely phase transitions and criticality really are used in biology, and to persuade life scientists that, as Sethna puts it, cells, and perhaps proteins, animals and entire ecosystems, “do a lot of interesting physics.”
Anyway, this version is based on my original draft, but with some of the later material mixed in. Hopefully it will give some indication of the bigger picture.
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It’s not the midges that were the problem, says Andrea Cavagna, but the kids. You’d think his efforts to record the movements of midge swarms in the public parks of Rome near sunset would be fraught with risks of being eaten alive by the little beasts – but these were a non-biting variety. Keeping away the children who gathered to watch what these folks were up to with their video cameras, generators and thickets of cabling was another matter. That, and the problem of finding a parking space in central Rome.
It’s not easy, he realised, for a physicist to turn field biologist.
The reason why Cavagna, based at Sapienza University in Rome, and his colleagues went midge-hunting sounds strange, perhaps even bizarre. The researchers wanted to know if midges behave like magnets. More specifically, if they act like magnets close to the point where heat flips them between a magnetic and non-magnetic state: a so-called critical phase transition.
Cavagna is one of a small and diverse group of scientists who have begun to suspect that critical phase transitions play vital roles in a wide variety of biological systems. Not only might they underpin the swarming of midges and the flocking of birds, but they might enable neurons in the brain to encode a picture of our environment, some protein molecules to fold up and bind their target molecules, and cell membranes to attract molecules that trigger cell-to-cell messaging. They might even explain how evolution itself works.
It’s good to be critical
Staying alive might seem to be a question of keeping calm and carrying on in the face of whatever comes along. But it’s often important to be able to respond and adapt to challenges rather than stoically riding them out: if you’re a small creature about to be eaten by a big one, you’d better get out of there. The trick is to keep your options open, maintaining easy access to a wide range of actions. It’s a delicate balance: you need stability, but also responsiveness.
In 2010 two physicists suggested how this might be possible. Thierry Mora (now at the École Normale Superieure in Paris) and Bill Bialek at Princeton University argued that many biological systems, from flocking birds to neural networks, might be “poised close to a critical point”. The idea drew on a well-established notion from statistical physics: the critical phase transition, where a system of many interacting components switches suddenly from one global state of organization to another, typically from an orderly to a disorderly state. The magnetic transition of iron, where it changes from having the magnetic orientation of its atoms random and disorderly to all lined up as the material is cooled, is the classic example. The switch happens abruptly at the so-called critical point – for iron, at a temperature of 1,043 Kelvin.
What have magnets got to do with biology? The point is that the critical transition of a magnet isn’t anything to do with magnetism per se. It is an outcome of the fact that each atom is interacting (here via magnetic forces) with its neighbours, and that they all have to come to some ‘collective decision’ about how to organize themselves. Because of that collective aspect, phase transitions happen all at once when a threshold value of some control parameter such as temperature is surpassed. They occur in all manner of physical systems, from superconductors and the Big Bang to polymer mixtures. So why not in biology?
The proposal of Mora and Bialek didn’t spring from nowhere. It echoes suggestions made in the 1990s that many natural systems, including some in biology (such as mass extinctions), display ‘self-organized criticality' (SOC), meaning that they undergo disruptions and fluctuations at all possible scales of size. The archetypal example of SOC was a pile of sand, which can have avalanches of all sizes as new grains are added at the top of the slope. This wide range of fluctuations scales is just what is found at an ordinary critical point – for example, a magnet at its critical point is a patchwork of domains of all different sizes with different magnetic orientations.
But, says Cavagna, it was never really clear that SOC had a deep connection to the older notion of critical phase transitions. The key feature of SOC is that it is indeed ‘self-organized’, which means that it will return to the critical state after a disturbance like an avalanche. So there’s no actual phase transition at all. “It’s just a point of great instability”, Cavagna says – and not one that is reached, like a true phase transition, by tuning a parameter like temperature. What’s more, says Bialek, “there was a huge amount of ideology about why criticality was a good thing in biology” – but no good argument for why. These two researchers and others are now trying to clarify what advantages criticality might convey on a wide range of biological systems, regardless of whether it is achieved by self-organization, natural selection or something else.
A critical magnet is poised on a knife-edge, where the smallest nudge can tip it into becoming wholly magnetic or non-magnetic. This knife-edge character of traditional (rather than self-organized) critical points means that it is all but impossible for a system to stay there. But the proposal of Mora and Bialek is that biological systems might benefit from operating close to critical points. This could provide access to a wide range of fluctuations involving different configurations of its components. The striking thing about near-criticality is that the rarity of specific, seemingly unlikely configurations is exactly compensated for by the fact that there are many more variants of such states than there are of common ones. “There’s a small number of very common configurations, a large number very rare configurations, and everything in between”, says Mora. “Being close to a critical point means that you're as likely to find yourself in any of these configurations.” As a result, he says, “being critical may confer the necessary flexibility to deal with complex and unpredictable environments.”
Another key feature of a critical system is that it is extremely responsive to disturbances in the environment, which can send rippling effects throughout the whole system. “At the critical point, everything is about to go crazy”, says physicist Jim Sethna of Cornell University. “So you get massively more sensitive behaviour.” That, Sethna says, can help a biological system to adapt very rapidly to change. The sensitivity stems from the long-ranged correlations in the behaviour of the system’s components that develop near criticality: a tweak here has an influence right over there, so that each component can ‘feel’ what all the others are doing.
Crucially, this flexibility and adaptiveness is achieved not by some incredibly complex and fragile set of interactions between the components, but taking advantage of the universal and robust characteristics of all systems made up of many interacting components. If a system evolves to be close to critical, says Sethna, it then has something like a set of general-purpose knobs that can allow it to adapt to environmental changes without having to reconfigure genomes.
Recent work by physicists Amos Maritan and Jayanth Banavar and their coworkers gives a clearer picture of why criticality in particular is useful. They have calculated how a system of agents that can gather information about their environment, and whose fitness depends on their ability to locate the source of environmental stimuli, evolves over time. They found that such a collection of evolving cognitive agents settles naturally into a critical state. “Being poised at criticality provides the system with optimal flexibility and evolutionary advantage to cope with and adapt to a highly variable and complex environment”, says Maritan.
In effect, this critical state allows the system to ‘sense’ what is going on around it: to encode a kind of ‘internal map’ of its environment and circumstances, rather like a river network encoding a map of the surrounding topography. “A key ingredient to the success of a living system is its ability to capture relevant information from the richly varying external world, synthesizing its most prominent features into manageable maps”, says Maritan. If this is indeed a feature of a near-critical state, the activity of neurons would be expected to operate in such a state just as Mora and Bialek proposed, because what our brains ‘show us’ will then be a good approximation to what is really ‘out there’.
There’s now mounting evidence that brains really are organized this way. One signature of criticality would be long-ranged correlations between the ‘spiking’ activity of neurons – something that Bialek and his coworkers have found in their models of neural networks. These correlations mean that the state of each neuron is to some degree encoded in the state of the rest of the network, providing a mechanism for error correction and recovery of lost information.
And it’s not just all theory. Dante Chialvo of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and colleagues have shown that dynamics characteristic of a critical state in the activity of the human brain can account for some of the key features seen in MRI brain imaging, such as the coherent operation of many neurons clustered together in space. And Nir Friedman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his coworkers have found that avalanches in the firing of neurons show the same kind of size–probability relationship as those in self-organized critical sand-piles. It’s not hard to imagine that this apparently general operating principle of neural networks might bring some structure to the mass of data soon to emerge from the large-scale projects recently launched in the US and Europe to map out the connectivity of the human brain.
Superfluid starlings
Responsiveness has an obvious utility to a herd or flock of animals looking out for predators: if a few individuals spot one, the rest of them can gain that information almost at once. And they do – just think of schools of fish darting around in unison to avoid sharks.
It was this sort of flocking behaviour that partly stimulated Mora and Bialek’s proposal in the first place. Theoretical modelling of flocking over the past decade or so has shown that coordinated motion requires each animal simply to respond to its nearest neighbours’ movements by trying to align itself. This is similar to the way magnetic atoms get aligned, and in fact some flocking models are directly analogous to models of magnetism. Mora, Bialek, Cavagna and their collaborators have recently shown that the graceful, orderly motion of flocks, familiar from watching starlings at twilight, is most easily maintained if the flock is close to a critical point. Further from this point, a flock might stay coordinated but loses the ability to respond quickly and coherently to outside disturbances such as predators.
In other words, says Cavagna, flocking isn’t just about orderly motion. Too much of it and you end up regimented like a crystal, slow to respond to anything. The responsiveness comes instead from the correlations between individuals – how one affects another.
Fine in theory. But do real flocks work this way? In a happy confluence of ideas and observations, Cavagna and his coworkers in Rome began their studies of flocking in 2010 just as Mora and Bialek were presenting their ideas on biological criticality. The Italian team found that flocks of starlings have scale-free correlations in the velocity fluctuations of individual birds. In other words, if one bird in the flock changes course, others will tend to do so too almost instantaneously, no matter how far apart they are.
Cavagna and colleagues placed video cameras on top of the National Museum of Rome in the city centre, which overlooks a major roosting site for starlings in winter. They filmed the birds during their flocking displays at dusk, and then used computer-vision methods to turn the footage into records of the three-dimensional movements of individual birds in the flock, which typically contained between a hundred and several thousand birds. They analysed this data to figure out how each bird deviated from the average velocity of the entire flock, and to measure the correlations: how closely these deviations for any pair of birds shadow each other as the distance between the pair increases.
“We found that correlation was very strong”, Cavagna says. In other words, the birds seem to be tuned into one another’s movements even over scales beyond which they can see each other. The influence of one bird is transmitted to others far away through neighbour-to-neighbour interactions, in just the same way as the magnetic poles of atoms of iron in a magnet can ‘speak’ indirectly over long distances close to the critical point.
What’s more, these observations showed that realignment of the birds’ orientation as the flock changes direction spreads much faster than the standard theories of collective movement permit. This behaviour can be explained by adding an extra ingredient to the theory: a ‘symmetry rule’ which reflects the fact that all directions of flight are equivalent. With this included, it turns out that the movement of the flock becomes mathematically equivalent to that of a superfluid such as liquid helium, which can flow essentially without losing any energy through viscous drag. In other words, a flock of birds can be considered a kind of living superfluid.
Midges don’t exhibit the orderly swarming motions of birds and fish. Might they, nevertheless, display the long-ranged correlations expected on the disordered side of a critical phase transition? “Some biologists insisted there is no collective behaviour in midges”, Cavagna says, and he expected his observations to confirm that view. But after painstakingly filming the midges swarming around park landmarks, reflected in the setting sun, he and his coworkers couldn’t avoid the conclusion that there were very strong correlations here too.
“It’s physically exhausting work”, Cavagna says: lugging all the equipment into a park, filming for several hours, then immediately going back to the lab well after dusk to download the data. “Still, at least it was summer, and the Roman parks are lovely.” Filming birds is harder, he says, since they only flock in the cold winter.
But why would evolution tune midges to behave that way, given that predation isn’t an issue for them? Cavagna thinks that this might be looking at the question the wrong way. Perhaps they can’t help being near-critical. The researchers found that the reach of the correlations was always about the same size as the swarm: the bigger the swarm, the longer the correlations. So maybe the swarm size isn't an adaptation, but is a side-effect of some other factor that determines how the midges interact. This factor - the range of neighbouring midge interactions, say - sets the correlation distance for midge motions, so that if the swarm gets bigger than that size, it will automatically shed midges.
Quick drying
The idea that biology makes use of phase transitions and their associated correlations and fluctuations could go far deeper than these large-scale networks and communities, and might be applied even at the level of individual cells and molecules. Protein molecules, for example, often carry out their functions as enzymes by switching from one shape to another. That needs to happen easily when the right signal is given, for example when another molecule binds to the protein to activate it. These conformational changes are, like phase transitions, cooperative, meaning that they involve interactions between all the component parts. Tweak this bit of a protein, and the whole thing tips into a new shape.
Cooperative transitions have also long been thought to govern the way protein chains fold up into their functional shapes in the first place. But recently David Chandler at the University of Berkeley at California and his coworkers have argued that both this process and the way several protein molecules stick together into many-component assemblies could be controlled by a transition that occurs not in the protein itself but in the water that surrounds it. They believe there may be an abrupt ‘drying transition’ in which all the water suddenly exits from the space between two water-repelling parts of proteins. Chandler argues that these drying transitions, which have been seen in computer simulations of some proteins, draw on the strong fluctuations that exist in the water, whereby the water molecules organize themselves into ever-changing regions of high or low density – not unlike a midge swarm, in fact. These fluctuations make it easier for the gap between the protein segments to tip over from a ‘wet’ to a ‘dry’ state, just as they make it easier for a critical magnet to tip over into a magnetic or non-magnetic state. Not all, or even most, proteins seem to fold or aggregate via these drying transitions. But Chandler and colleagues argue that most of them may be fine-tuned by evolution to be close to such a transition, some lying on one side of that boundary and some on the other.
Drying transitions have also been found in computer simulations of the docking of small molecules into the ‘binding cavities’ of the enzymes they activate. Some proteins in thermophilic organisms, which thrive in hot environments, have cavities lined with water-repelling chemical groups that seem poised right on the brink of expelling the water and becoming dry at the organism’s normal working temperature. The docking of the ‘plug’ into its ‘socket’ would be made easier by this ease of emptying. Meanwhile, some protein channels that sit in cell walls and regulate the flow of other molecules or ions in and out are also poised to undergo drying transitions within their conduit pores, so that they can be easily switched from an ‘open’ state (where the water-filled pore lets dissolved substances pass) to a ‘closed’ state (where the pore is dry and denies passage).
Another benefit of being close to a phase transition has been suggested by Sethna and his colleagues. Some biological membranes are patchworks in which different types of lipid molecule are segregated into liquid-like ‘rafts’, phase-separated like immiscible droplets of oil and water. Because these patches have a wide range of fluctuating sizes, rather like the domains of a near-critical magnet, Sethna’s team argued that they are close to a critical phase transition at which the molecules become fully miscible.
They say that the value here is not in the phase transition itself, but in the domain size fluctuations that accompany it. Such fluctuations in immiscible fluids were shown in the 1980s to give rise to a force analogous to the so-called Casimir force that pulls together two closely spaced metal plates in a vacuum. The normal Casimir force is caused by electromagnetic fluctuations in the vacuum, themselves a consequence of quantum physics: because the size of these fluctuations is restricted between the plates, this produces a pressure that draws them together. Likewise, constraints on the ‘near-critical’ fluctuations of lipid patches between protein molecules embedded in the membrane give rise to a ‘critical Casimir’ attraction that might help molecules to bind together and trigger chemical reactions involved in cell signalling. In effect, says Sethna, it means that proteins at the membrane surface can talk to each other via the lipid rafts. “Here again criticality allows the system to access structures over a wide range of scales”, says Mora.
The physics of evolution
Phase transitions and criticality might turn out to be important in the operation of gene networks, which currently seem absurdly baroque and yet somehow generate stable and robust organisms. Bialek and coworkers recently reported an indication of criticality in the gene regulatory network that determines the spatial patterning of the fruit fly embryo – the so-called gap gene network. They found long-ranged correlations in the fluctuations of gene expression levels at well-separated parts of the embryo. It’s possible that these critical-like fluctuations might help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the information transmission in the regulatory network.
Mora and Bialek have suggested that phase transitions in the ‘information space’ that relates a protein’s structure to its shape and function through the collective interactions of its chemical building blocks might account for the appearance of distinct ‘families’ of protein structures. This would imply that the evolution of protein sequences (and hence gene sequences) is significantly constrained by the limited number of ‘stable states’ in sequence space – in other words, that nature’s profusion is regulated by an order even deeper than natural selection.
In fact, not only does evolution seem likely to make use of phase transitions – it might actually be one. Chemist Manfred Eigen, who won the 1967 Nobel Prize for his work on fast chemical reactions, has argued that natural selection appears in a system of self-replicating, information-bearing entities as an abrupt phase transition at certain threshold values of the rates of replication and mutation. In other words, it is not just ‘something that happens’ in reproducing systems, but is a physical law that arises from the way information itself is organized. In Eigen’s theory, neutral selection – in which mutations get fixed in a population even though they have no adaptive benefit – injects fluctuations analogous to those at a critical point. These are essential to prevent natural selection from getting ‘stuck’ in minor valleys of the evolutionary landscape – or as a physicist might say, to prevent the system settling into a metastable phase, which is provisionally stable but not the optimal arrangement of the components. That would fit with the recent suggestion of evolutionary biologist John Tyler Bonner at Princeton University that the random fluctuations of neutral evolution could account for the immense variety of forms found in organisms such as diatoms.
Criticality and the critics
“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do something in between physics and biology”, says Bialek. The question is, he says, “can you talk about these things that biologists usually study in the way that physicists do?” He suspected “that there’s some collection of phenomenon that people didn’t realise were related to each other, or some part of the biological world that nobody has looked at from a physicists’ point of view” – in other words, the big question was “whether aspects of particular [biological] models can be derived from some more general principle.” If Bialek and Mora are right, criticality could emerge as one such general principle.
But these ideas have yet to be embraced by most biologists, whose agenda is often now dominated by fine details rather than a search for over-arching principles. Getting these ideas a hearing in biology is likely to be a struggle. “There’s a big difference in culture”, says Sethna. “Biologists tend to be skeptical of anything that involves a lot of math.” In an effort to bridge this ‘two cultures’ divide, in 2010 Bialek spearheaded an interdisciplinary centre called the Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences at the City University of New York, where he is now director. Here physicists can discuss these ideas with neuroscientists, ecologists and other biologists – Cavagna was recruited as a visiting professor last year, and has been collaborating with Bialek and Mora to refine the understanding of critical flocking. But it will take time and patience, both to figure out how widely phase transitions and criticality really are used in biology, and to persuade life scientists that, as Sethna puts it, cells, and perhaps proteins, animals and entire ecosystems, “do a lot of interesting physics.”
Friday, April 25, 2014
Theatre of the Invisible
I gave this talk yesterday at the meeting Performing Science: Dialogues Across Cultures at the University of Lincoln. It seemed brief enough to put up here.
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The actor David Garrick had a set-piece during his performances of Hamlet, the role for which he was most famous, that electrified London theatre audiences in the eighteenth century. It came when the ghost enters at the start of the play. According to the St. James Chronicle in 1772, “As no Writer in any Age penned a Ghost like Shakespeare, so, in our Time, no Actor ever saw a Ghost like Garrick.” The German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote that “His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak.”
Garrick is shown in the midst of this tour-de-force in a contemporaneous print (Figure 1). Doesn’t it seem here as if his hair is actually rising from his scalp? And in fact, it really is. But not even Garrick could raise his hair at will. He achieved the spine-tingling effect (which goes by the splendid name of horripilation) with the aid of a London wig-maker named Perkins, who created a mechanical wig powered by hydraulics.
Figure 1 David Garrick as Hamlet, on seeing his father’s ghost in Act I. Mezzotint after a painting by Benjamin Wilson, 1756.
This wasn’t just a cheap trick. Garrick’s approach to what was then seen as naturalistic performance was informed by a Cartesian view of human physiology, in which the body was regarded as a kind of hydraulic mechanism driven by fluids called animal spirits that were pumped around the organs and limbs. Within this view, an artificial hydraulic wig was little different from the way real horripilation was thought to work by a rush of fluids to the head. Like all emotion, it was simply a matter of biomechanics.
But there is another defence of Garrick’s potentially absurd ‘fright wig’: he needed all the help he could get, because he’d set himself the task of conjuring the illusion of the ghost by gesture alone. Whereas previously the dead king was generally played by an actor, Garrick insisted that he should be invisible: a disembodied voice whose presence was seen only by the actors. But theatrical invisibility is a difficult trick – as film makers later discovered, it needs visible signifiers to sustain the illusion.
Garrick’s choice represented a decision not just about staging but about what the ghost in Hamlet – on which the plot of course turns – truly means. It is a statement about how the entire play should be interpreted. Because we’re then forced to ask: is this a real spirit, or just a figment of Hamlet’s tortured mind?
Partly this is a question about the significance of ghosts in Shakespeare’s time. But I want to locate this issue of the visibility of his ghosts within a wider debate about appearance, illusion and spectacle in theatre. Because it is my contention that, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in particular, science – and particularly optical science – became strongly linked to theatre, stage magic and the advent of cinema, in ways that were as much thematic as they were instrumental.
Ghosts were a common, even clichéd sight on the Elizabethan stage. They served as narrators, popping up to fill in a bit of back-story. As such, they were no cause for alarm in either implication or appearance, being represented by a sort of Jack-in-the-box puppet, or else by an actor with whitened face, dressed in clothes made of furry leather. They were a device borrowed from the plays of Seneca, which supplied a model for the revival of tragedy during the Renaissance. The Senecan ghost typically appeared in the prologue, calling for an act of revenge that motivated the play’s tragic plot.
But the ghost in Hamlet is no glove puppet. He’s made to sound hardly less terrible to the audience than he is to Hamlet and his friends: the sight “harrows me with fear and wonder”, gasps Horatio. That’s what Shakespeare did to the theatrical ghost: he made it real, humanized, haunting and disquieting. His spirits are really spooky, and in some ways they represent a supernatural stage presence that has never been equalled.
The Senecan ghost is merely a “bit of dramatic machinery”. But ghosts in Shakespeare, and in some of the Jacobean plays that came after, leave the audience guessing. Indeed, they leave the characters guessing: what sort of apparition is this? This is a question about what ghosts meant in the popular superstition of the time. The answer wasn’t simple, but we can at least say that it was determined largely by your religion. Catholics believed that the souls of the dead reside for a time in Purgatory before being admitted (if they warrant it) to heaven. This gave souls a period in which to haunt the living. But Protestants rejected the idea of Purgatory – which makes it puzzling how a dead soul can feature in what is undoubtedly a Protestant play. Might, then, the ghost be a demon masquerading as the king, to provoke Hamlet into acts of slaughter and, indirectly, Ophelia into sinful suicide?
This was the choice, it seems: ghosts were either dead souls, or they were demons – or maybe angels. All were real entities; as the Shakespeare scholar Robert Hunter West has said, when these plays were first performed “Englishmen were seriously aware in a way that we are not of an invisible world about them.” Around this time there was a vigorous debate about the meaning and status of ghosts, and several learned books were published that attempted to provide them with a taxonomy.
One of the most influential was by the theologian Noel Taillepied, called A Treatise of Ghosts. Taillepied claimed that the souls of the departed may be returned to earth by God to deliver a message. Shakespearian ghosts indeed do always have motives and messages to impart, and sometimes only the intended recipients can see them, or at least hear them. The notion of a ghost who, like Banquo in Macbeth, haunts the guilty party alone was well established in folk tradition. If we are inclined to attribute this now to the fevered imaginings of a guilty conscience, we shouldn’t imagine that Shakespeare was in contrast blindly literal – the powers of invocation and agency attributed to the imagination in the late Renaissance leave no clear distinction between a ghost being a projection of the mind and an objective phenomenon.
Ghosts didn’t, as one might expect, go out of fashion with the alleged rationalism of the Enlightenment. Certainly in popular superstition they remained as present as ever, as the famous Cock Lane Ghost of London in the mid-eighteenth century attested. That case ended in a prosecution for fraud, after investigation by a committee that included Samuel Johnson. But Johnson himself remained a firm believer in ghosts, even if not in this particular one.
What changes in our perceptions of the spirit world is not the question of whether it exists but of what it means. In the nineteenth century, the rise of spiritualism saw ghosts become sources not so much of terror as of consolation: mediums offered the opportunity to speak with the souls of the departed loved ones. And what is most striking in this period, certainly for the purposes of this meeting, is how ideas about invisible beings and unseen spirit worlds co-evolve with the development of science and technology, and also with the traditions of the theatre.
For one thing, spiritualist séances were undoubtedly pieces of theatre in themselves, designed to astonish and confound their audiences and prepared with a great deal of stagecraft (Figure 2). Here is an account by William Crookes, one of the many scientists who tried to subject spiritualism to scientific investigation, of a séance conducted in 1871 by the famous medium Douglas Home:
"At first we had rough manifestations, chairs knocked about, the table floated 6 inches from the ground and then dashed down, loud and unpleasant noises bawling in our ears and altogether phenomena of a low class. After a time it was suggested that we should sing, and as the only thing known to all the company, we struck up ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. The chairs, tables and things on it kept up a sort of anvil accompaniment to this. After that D. D. Home gave us a solo – rather a sacred piece – and almost before a dozen words were uttered Mr Herne was carried right up, floated across the table and dropped with a crash of pictures and ornaments at the other end of the room. My brother Walter, who was holding one hand, stuck to him as long as he could, but he says Herne was dragged out of his hand as he went across the table."
The group was subsequently treated to accordions playing themselves, floating lights, books dashed about and disembodied hands stroking their faces. The effect must surely have been overwhelming – both exciting and frightening, and doubtless calculated to inhibit objective assessment.
Figure 2 Victorian séances involved many strange goings-on that relied on carefully prepared and executed illusionistic trickery.
And as Crookes’ case shows, many scientists were taken in by all this – not simply because they were credulous, but because they surely wanted to believe. And also because some of them felt that they had more reason than ever to do so. The invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and 40s showed that it was possible to send messages instantly over immense distances, even spanning the Atlantic once the cables had been laid in the 1860s. With the appearance of the telephone a decade later, it became possible to hear voices directly over such a distance. And in the 1890s, the development of radio broadcasting by Marconi and Oliver Lodge meant that these signals didn’t even need a wire to convey them – they could be sent through the invisible ether. Many scientists figured that, if it was possible to hear the voice of someone who wasn’t physically present, it was not so hard to imagine that one might also hear the voices of those who were not even alive. Spiritualism was even sometimes called celestial telegraphy, and wireless broadcasting led people to suspect that the ether was a vast, invisible sea filled with all manner of voices, coming from who knew where. Rudyard Kipling made this analogy in his 1902 short story “Wireless”, in which some early radio hams pick up random messages from ships offshore while in the same building a man feverish from consumption acts as a human receiver for snatches of poetry by Keats that he picks up from some unknown and perhaps long dead source.
These speculations got another boost from the discovery of X-rays in 1895 (Figure 3) – an invisible form of radiation like light, but of a shorter wavelength. Perhaps thoughts might be transferred from person to person, or from the dead to the living, by similar invisible rays sent through the ether?
Figure 3 The X-ray image taken by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife’s hand, c.1895.
And as this image shows, the technology of photography, devised in the 1830s, could make these invisible rays visible – this is the rather spooky image taken by the discoverer of X-rays, Wilhelm Rontgen, of his wife’s hand, and when she saw it she is said to have exclaimed “I have seen my death!” From its earliest days, photography seemed to be as much about revealing the invisible as documenting the visible. Because the surface of glass plates used to hold the emulsion could preserve faint images of an earlier exposure, some early photographers found that ghostly figures sometimes appeared in their images when the plates were reused. It was soon decided that these were spirits, and ghost photography because a lucrative business in the late nineteenth century. One of the first entrepreneurs of this business was an American named William Mumler, who set up a ‘spirit photography’ business in Boston and New York (Figure 4).
Figure 4 Abraham Lincoln’s shade consoling his widow, in a “spirit photograph” taken by William Mumler. The Lincolns were enthusiasts of Spiritualism, and were said to have conducted séances in the White House.
Even when scientists explained how such double exposures were easy to fake, it did little to diminish the popularity of the genre, for in its mysterious ability to capture the instant and to solidify intangible light photography seemed virtually a supernatural medium itself. Didn’t it, after all, convey a weird kind of immortality – and paradoxically, by doing so, remind the sitter that death awaits us all?
It’s quite natural that one of the first uses of photography would be to make invisible beings visible. For optical technology has always been closely allied with magic, and also with the theatre. It was long thought capable of revealing what went otherwise unseen, particularly spirits, souls and demons. The camera obscura, the forerunner of the photographic camera, in which natural scenes are projected through a small opening into a darkened space (Figure 5), was known since at least the eleventh century, and was popularized in the sixteenth century manual of natural magic by the Italian Giambattista della Porta (who was also a popular dramatist). By the early seventeenth century mountebanks were using such devices to astonish audiences.
Figure 5 The camera obscura, as depicted in Athanasius Kircher’s Great Art of Light and Shadow (1646).
Looking-glasses that produce figures “at a distance in the air” also featured in the magic lantern, an early form of projector that became a stalwart device of optical natural magic. It was described by the Jesuit inventor and mystical philosopher Athanasius Kircher in 1646: light is passed through an image painted onto glass and then through a lens before falling onto a screen (Figure 6). By the time Kircher was writing, magic lanterns were becoming commercialized. The Danish mathematician Thomas Walgensten traveled across Europe selling these lanterns and using them purportedly to summon ghosts.
Figure 6 The magic lantern, as shown by Kircher.
The magical stage spectacles of the late eighteenth century straddled this ambiguous boundary. The German illusionist Johann Georg Schröpfer held séances in his Leipzig coffee shop in which he used the magic lantern, projected onto smoke, to summon ghosts. Schröpfer’s performances were perhaps the first ‘entertainment séances’, and his techniques were copied by the German Paul Philidor, whose popular public displays in the early 1790s were unashamedly eye-catching and became known as “phantasmagoria” (Figure 7). Subsequently, Étienne Gaspard Robertson used magic-lantern back-projection in his “Fantascope” shows, in which, by mounting the device on wheels, he could make the projection grow rapidly larger or smaller so that ghouls and demons might seem to rush upon the terrified audience.
Figure 7 An advertising bill for the Phantasmagoria show of Paul Philidor in 1801.
Robertson explicit sought to scare his public with visions of ghosts and devils (Figure 8): he was in effect producing the first horror films. He was in fact a professor of physics with a special interest in optics, who realised the commercial potential of optical trickery when he attended one of Philidor’s extravaganzas. And although he made no pretence of possessing magical abilities, he exploited his specialist knowledge while artfully keeping his audiences guessing about what they were seeing.
Figure 8 The light show of Étienne Gaspard Robertson amazes and terrifies an audience in the early nineteenth century.
The most famous illusionistic ghost of the stage also comes from this collusion of science demonstration and pure theatre. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London put on magic and séance shows to show how paranormal activities could be faked. One of the lecturers was the chemist and science popularizer John Henry Pepper, who later set up his own “Theatre of Popular Science and Entertainment” at the Egyptian Hall in London. Pepper collaborated with the engineer Henry Dircks in the late 1850s to create a technique for projecting the reflection of a hidden actor onto a huge, slanted sheet of glass: a semi-transparent apparition perfect for depicting ghosts (Figure 9). Plays featuring ‘Pepper’s ghost’, including Hamlet, Macbeth and A Christmas Carol, became sensations throughout Europe and the US.
Figure 9 Pepper’s ghost.
The Egyptian Hall was the centre of theatrical magic and scientific illusion in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous residency was that of John Nevil Maskelyne, a watchmaker who began the foremost dynasty of British stage magicians (and who was, incidentally, the inventor of the pay toilet) (Figure 10). In 1905 Maskelyne and a group of other British magicians founded the Magic Circle, dedicated to the art of stage magic and illusion. Like many of these stage magicians, Maskelyne was also a debunker of spiritualists and mystics claiming special powers.
Figure 10 A playbill for the illusion and magic show of John Nevil Maskelyne in the late nineteenth century.
This role of illusionism is clear from Albert Allis Hopkins’ now classic 1898 manual of magic, in which the American amateur magician Henry Ridgely Evans proclaimed that “Science has laughed away sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy.” Hopkins shows how stage magicians of the Victorian era made avid use of the newest scientific discoveries. He said that X-rays, discovered only two years before the book was published, “are now competing with the most noted mediums in the domain of the marvellous.” Hopkins describes a trick in which a man dining alone is suddenly cast into darkness, whereupon he vanishes and the audience sees, seated across the table, a glowing skeleton, lit up by a hidden X-ray generator (Figure 11).
Figure 11 A glowing, macabre dinner guest is conjured up using X-rays (from the generator on the right) to stimulate luminescence from a skeleton painted in a phosphorescent material, as depicted in Albert Hopkins’ 1898 book of stage magic.
The elaborate illusionism of the theatrical light-show found a new home in the early days of cinematography. In the late 1880s Thomas Edison began to create a kind of electrical magic lantern called the Kinetoscope that projected a series of still images in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement. In 1894 he opened a Kinetoscope parlour in New York, where for a few cents one could watch the first motion pictures, each lasting a minute or so. Meanwhile, the Lumière brothers turned the magic lantern into a portable, manually operated movie projector called the Cinématographe that threw the image onto a screen. A Parisian audience watched the first public screening in 1895.
In the audience for that premiere was the Frenchman George Méliès, who had developed his own form of illusionistic magic at the Paris theatre he owned. He promptly bought a movie camera and started making films himself. Many of these used his existing stage tricks, supplemented by the new illusionistic possibilities that cinematography offered. He made 78 films in 1896 alone, and over 500 during the next two decades. Several of them were ghost films, sometimes aimed more at slapstick than chills (Figure 12).
Figure 12 A scene from George Méliès’ comedy The Apparition, or Mr Jones’ Experience with a Ghost (1903).
Given this genealogy of cinema, it is no surprise that marvels soon took over. Films of ghostly and supernatural phenomena weren’t simply an early genre of cinema – they were its natural subject, for the motion picture should properly be seen not so much as “celluloid theatre” but as celluloid magic. Jacques Derrida seemed to discern this when in 1982 he called cinema “the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms.”
What ought we to conclude from all of this?
First, that the first marriage of science and theatre happened in the arena of the magical and the illusory, and in particular in the disputed area where science and folk belief have vied for authority over the invisible.
Second, that science and technology have long had a performative aspect that was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and which involved a delicate interplay between explanation, mystification and spectacle, of the kind that I sense still persists in the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
Third, cinema should perhaps be a stronger part of this discourse, in the sense that its relationship to theatre, particularly in terms of its genesis, becomes much clearer once we acknowledge the close associations with optical technologies and illusionism.
And finally, I think, we should be reminded here of the role of imagination, which, both in science and in theatre, is needed to span the gulf of what isn’t known or cannot be expressed. Imagination is rarely spoken of today in science, but in a famous 1870 essay “Scientific Use of the Imagination”, John Tyndall argued that via the imagination “we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of our senses.” It is in its capacity to permit and depict imaginative leaps that theatre can help to illuminate and perhaps even extend some of the meanings of science.
The actor David Garrick had a set-piece during his performances of Hamlet, the role for which he was most famous, that electrified London theatre audiences in the eighteenth century. It came when the ghost enters at the start of the play. According to the St. James Chronicle in 1772, “As no Writer in any Age penned a Ghost like Shakespeare, so, in our Time, no Actor ever saw a Ghost like Garrick.” The German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote that “His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak.”
Garrick is shown in the midst of this tour-de-force in a contemporaneous print (Figure 1). Doesn’t it seem here as if his hair is actually rising from his scalp? And in fact, it really is. But not even Garrick could raise his hair at will. He achieved the spine-tingling effect (which goes by the splendid name of horripilation) with the aid of a London wig-maker named Perkins, who created a mechanical wig powered by hydraulics.
Figure 1 David Garrick as Hamlet, on seeing his father’s ghost in Act I. Mezzotint after a painting by Benjamin Wilson, 1756.
This wasn’t just a cheap trick. Garrick’s approach to what was then seen as naturalistic performance was informed by a Cartesian view of human physiology, in which the body was regarded as a kind of hydraulic mechanism driven by fluids called animal spirits that were pumped around the organs and limbs. Within this view, an artificial hydraulic wig was little different from the way real horripilation was thought to work by a rush of fluids to the head. Like all emotion, it was simply a matter of biomechanics.
But there is another defence of Garrick’s potentially absurd ‘fright wig’: he needed all the help he could get, because he’d set himself the task of conjuring the illusion of the ghost by gesture alone. Whereas previously the dead king was generally played by an actor, Garrick insisted that he should be invisible: a disembodied voice whose presence was seen only by the actors. But theatrical invisibility is a difficult trick – as film makers later discovered, it needs visible signifiers to sustain the illusion.
Garrick’s choice represented a decision not just about staging but about what the ghost in Hamlet – on which the plot of course turns – truly means. It is a statement about how the entire play should be interpreted. Because we’re then forced to ask: is this a real spirit, or just a figment of Hamlet’s tortured mind?
Partly this is a question about the significance of ghosts in Shakespeare’s time. But I want to locate this issue of the visibility of his ghosts within a wider debate about appearance, illusion and spectacle in theatre. Because it is my contention that, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in particular, science – and particularly optical science – became strongly linked to theatre, stage magic and the advent of cinema, in ways that were as much thematic as they were instrumental.
Ghosts were a common, even clichéd sight on the Elizabethan stage. They served as narrators, popping up to fill in a bit of back-story. As such, they were no cause for alarm in either implication or appearance, being represented by a sort of Jack-in-the-box puppet, or else by an actor with whitened face, dressed in clothes made of furry leather. They were a device borrowed from the plays of Seneca, which supplied a model for the revival of tragedy during the Renaissance. The Senecan ghost typically appeared in the prologue, calling for an act of revenge that motivated the play’s tragic plot.
But the ghost in Hamlet is no glove puppet. He’s made to sound hardly less terrible to the audience than he is to Hamlet and his friends: the sight “harrows me with fear and wonder”, gasps Horatio. That’s what Shakespeare did to the theatrical ghost: he made it real, humanized, haunting and disquieting. His spirits are really spooky, and in some ways they represent a supernatural stage presence that has never been equalled.
The Senecan ghost is merely a “bit of dramatic machinery”. But ghosts in Shakespeare, and in some of the Jacobean plays that came after, leave the audience guessing. Indeed, they leave the characters guessing: what sort of apparition is this? This is a question about what ghosts meant in the popular superstition of the time. The answer wasn’t simple, but we can at least say that it was determined largely by your religion. Catholics believed that the souls of the dead reside for a time in Purgatory before being admitted (if they warrant it) to heaven. This gave souls a period in which to haunt the living. But Protestants rejected the idea of Purgatory – which makes it puzzling how a dead soul can feature in what is undoubtedly a Protestant play. Might, then, the ghost be a demon masquerading as the king, to provoke Hamlet into acts of slaughter and, indirectly, Ophelia into sinful suicide?
This was the choice, it seems: ghosts were either dead souls, or they were demons – or maybe angels. All were real entities; as the Shakespeare scholar Robert Hunter West has said, when these plays were first performed “Englishmen were seriously aware in a way that we are not of an invisible world about them.” Around this time there was a vigorous debate about the meaning and status of ghosts, and several learned books were published that attempted to provide them with a taxonomy.
One of the most influential was by the theologian Noel Taillepied, called A Treatise of Ghosts. Taillepied claimed that the souls of the departed may be returned to earth by God to deliver a message. Shakespearian ghosts indeed do always have motives and messages to impart, and sometimes only the intended recipients can see them, or at least hear them. The notion of a ghost who, like Banquo in Macbeth, haunts the guilty party alone was well established in folk tradition. If we are inclined to attribute this now to the fevered imaginings of a guilty conscience, we shouldn’t imagine that Shakespeare was in contrast blindly literal – the powers of invocation and agency attributed to the imagination in the late Renaissance leave no clear distinction between a ghost being a projection of the mind and an objective phenomenon.
Ghosts didn’t, as one might expect, go out of fashion with the alleged rationalism of the Enlightenment. Certainly in popular superstition they remained as present as ever, as the famous Cock Lane Ghost of London in the mid-eighteenth century attested. That case ended in a prosecution for fraud, after investigation by a committee that included Samuel Johnson. But Johnson himself remained a firm believer in ghosts, even if not in this particular one.
What changes in our perceptions of the spirit world is not the question of whether it exists but of what it means. In the nineteenth century, the rise of spiritualism saw ghosts become sources not so much of terror as of consolation: mediums offered the opportunity to speak with the souls of the departed loved ones. And what is most striking in this period, certainly for the purposes of this meeting, is how ideas about invisible beings and unseen spirit worlds co-evolve with the development of science and technology, and also with the traditions of the theatre.
For one thing, spiritualist séances were undoubtedly pieces of theatre in themselves, designed to astonish and confound their audiences and prepared with a great deal of stagecraft (Figure 2). Here is an account by William Crookes, one of the many scientists who tried to subject spiritualism to scientific investigation, of a séance conducted in 1871 by the famous medium Douglas Home:
"At first we had rough manifestations, chairs knocked about, the table floated 6 inches from the ground and then dashed down, loud and unpleasant noises bawling in our ears and altogether phenomena of a low class. After a time it was suggested that we should sing, and as the only thing known to all the company, we struck up ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. The chairs, tables and things on it kept up a sort of anvil accompaniment to this. After that D. D. Home gave us a solo – rather a sacred piece – and almost before a dozen words were uttered Mr Herne was carried right up, floated across the table and dropped with a crash of pictures and ornaments at the other end of the room. My brother Walter, who was holding one hand, stuck to him as long as he could, but he says Herne was dragged out of his hand as he went across the table."
The group was subsequently treated to accordions playing themselves, floating lights, books dashed about and disembodied hands stroking their faces. The effect must surely have been overwhelming – both exciting and frightening, and doubtless calculated to inhibit objective assessment.
Figure 2 Victorian séances involved many strange goings-on that relied on carefully prepared and executed illusionistic trickery.
And as Crookes’ case shows, many scientists were taken in by all this – not simply because they were credulous, but because they surely wanted to believe. And also because some of them felt that they had more reason than ever to do so. The invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and 40s showed that it was possible to send messages instantly over immense distances, even spanning the Atlantic once the cables had been laid in the 1860s. With the appearance of the telephone a decade later, it became possible to hear voices directly over such a distance. And in the 1890s, the development of radio broadcasting by Marconi and Oliver Lodge meant that these signals didn’t even need a wire to convey them – they could be sent through the invisible ether. Many scientists figured that, if it was possible to hear the voice of someone who wasn’t physically present, it was not so hard to imagine that one might also hear the voices of those who were not even alive. Spiritualism was even sometimes called celestial telegraphy, and wireless broadcasting led people to suspect that the ether was a vast, invisible sea filled with all manner of voices, coming from who knew where. Rudyard Kipling made this analogy in his 1902 short story “Wireless”, in which some early radio hams pick up random messages from ships offshore while in the same building a man feverish from consumption acts as a human receiver for snatches of poetry by Keats that he picks up from some unknown and perhaps long dead source.
These speculations got another boost from the discovery of X-rays in 1895 (Figure 3) – an invisible form of radiation like light, but of a shorter wavelength. Perhaps thoughts might be transferred from person to person, or from the dead to the living, by similar invisible rays sent through the ether?
Figure 3 The X-ray image taken by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife’s hand, c.1895.
And as this image shows, the technology of photography, devised in the 1830s, could make these invisible rays visible – this is the rather spooky image taken by the discoverer of X-rays, Wilhelm Rontgen, of his wife’s hand, and when she saw it she is said to have exclaimed “I have seen my death!” From its earliest days, photography seemed to be as much about revealing the invisible as documenting the visible. Because the surface of glass plates used to hold the emulsion could preserve faint images of an earlier exposure, some early photographers found that ghostly figures sometimes appeared in their images when the plates were reused. It was soon decided that these were spirits, and ghost photography because a lucrative business in the late nineteenth century. One of the first entrepreneurs of this business was an American named William Mumler, who set up a ‘spirit photography’ business in Boston and New York (Figure 4).
Figure 4 Abraham Lincoln’s shade consoling his widow, in a “spirit photograph” taken by William Mumler. The Lincolns were enthusiasts of Spiritualism, and were said to have conducted séances in the White House.
Even when scientists explained how such double exposures were easy to fake, it did little to diminish the popularity of the genre, for in its mysterious ability to capture the instant and to solidify intangible light photography seemed virtually a supernatural medium itself. Didn’t it, after all, convey a weird kind of immortality – and paradoxically, by doing so, remind the sitter that death awaits us all?
It’s quite natural that one of the first uses of photography would be to make invisible beings visible. For optical technology has always been closely allied with magic, and also with the theatre. It was long thought capable of revealing what went otherwise unseen, particularly spirits, souls and demons. The camera obscura, the forerunner of the photographic camera, in which natural scenes are projected through a small opening into a darkened space (Figure 5), was known since at least the eleventh century, and was popularized in the sixteenth century manual of natural magic by the Italian Giambattista della Porta (who was also a popular dramatist). By the early seventeenth century mountebanks were using such devices to astonish audiences.
Figure 5 The camera obscura, as depicted in Athanasius Kircher’s Great Art of Light and Shadow (1646).
Looking-glasses that produce figures “at a distance in the air” also featured in the magic lantern, an early form of projector that became a stalwart device of optical natural magic. It was described by the Jesuit inventor and mystical philosopher Athanasius Kircher in 1646: light is passed through an image painted onto glass and then through a lens before falling onto a screen (Figure 6). By the time Kircher was writing, magic lanterns were becoming commercialized. The Danish mathematician Thomas Walgensten traveled across Europe selling these lanterns and using them purportedly to summon ghosts.
Figure 6 The magic lantern, as shown by Kircher.
The magical stage spectacles of the late eighteenth century straddled this ambiguous boundary. The German illusionist Johann Georg Schröpfer held séances in his Leipzig coffee shop in which he used the magic lantern, projected onto smoke, to summon ghosts. Schröpfer’s performances were perhaps the first ‘entertainment séances’, and his techniques were copied by the German Paul Philidor, whose popular public displays in the early 1790s were unashamedly eye-catching and became known as “phantasmagoria” (Figure 7). Subsequently, Étienne Gaspard Robertson used magic-lantern back-projection in his “Fantascope” shows, in which, by mounting the device on wheels, he could make the projection grow rapidly larger or smaller so that ghouls and demons might seem to rush upon the terrified audience.
Figure 7 An advertising bill for the Phantasmagoria show of Paul Philidor in 1801.
Robertson explicit sought to scare his public with visions of ghosts and devils (Figure 8): he was in effect producing the first horror films. He was in fact a professor of physics with a special interest in optics, who realised the commercial potential of optical trickery when he attended one of Philidor’s extravaganzas. And although he made no pretence of possessing magical abilities, he exploited his specialist knowledge while artfully keeping his audiences guessing about what they were seeing.
Figure 8 The light show of Étienne Gaspard Robertson amazes and terrifies an audience in the early nineteenth century.
The most famous illusionistic ghost of the stage also comes from this collusion of science demonstration and pure theatre. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London put on magic and séance shows to show how paranormal activities could be faked. One of the lecturers was the chemist and science popularizer John Henry Pepper, who later set up his own “Theatre of Popular Science and Entertainment” at the Egyptian Hall in London. Pepper collaborated with the engineer Henry Dircks in the late 1850s to create a technique for projecting the reflection of a hidden actor onto a huge, slanted sheet of glass: a semi-transparent apparition perfect for depicting ghosts (Figure 9). Plays featuring ‘Pepper’s ghost’, including Hamlet, Macbeth and A Christmas Carol, became sensations throughout Europe and the US.
Figure 9 Pepper’s ghost.
The Egyptian Hall was the centre of theatrical magic and scientific illusion in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous residency was that of John Nevil Maskelyne, a watchmaker who began the foremost dynasty of British stage magicians (and who was, incidentally, the inventor of the pay toilet) (Figure 10). In 1905 Maskelyne and a group of other British magicians founded the Magic Circle, dedicated to the art of stage magic and illusion. Like many of these stage magicians, Maskelyne was also a debunker of spiritualists and mystics claiming special powers.
Figure 10 A playbill for the illusion and magic show of John Nevil Maskelyne in the late nineteenth century.
This role of illusionism is clear from Albert Allis Hopkins’ now classic 1898 manual of magic, in which the American amateur magician Henry Ridgely Evans proclaimed that “Science has laughed away sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy.” Hopkins shows how stage magicians of the Victorian era made avid use of the newest scientific discoveries. He said that X-rays, discovered only two years before the book was published, “are now competing with the most noted mediums in the domain of the marvellous.” Hopkins describes a trick in which a man dining alone is suddenly cast into darkness, whereupon he vanishes and the audience sees, seated across the table, a glowing skeleton, lit up by a hidden X-ray generator (Figure 11).
Figure 11 A glowing, macabre dinner guest is conjured up using X-rays (from the generator on the right) to stimulate luminescence from a skeleton painted in a phosphorescent material, as depicted in Albert Hopkins’ 1898 book of stage magic.
The elaborate illusionism of the theatrical light-show found a new home in the early days of cinematography. In the late 1880s Thomas Edison began to create a kind of electrical magic lantern called the Kinetoscope that projected a series of still images in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement. In 1894 he opened a Kinetoscope parlour in New York, where for a few cents one could watch the first motion pictures, each lasting a minute or so. Meanwhile, the Lumière brothers turned the magic lantern into a portable, manually operated movie projector called the Cinématographe that threw the image onto a screen. A Parisian audience watched the first public screening in 1895.
In the audience for that premiere was the Frenchman George Méliès, who had developed his own form of illusionistic magic at the Paris theatre he owned. He promptly bought a movie camera and started making films himself. Many of these used his existing stage tricks, supplemented by the new illusionistic possibilities that cinematography offered. He made 78 films in 1896 alone, and over 500 during the next two decades. Several of them were ghost films, sometimes aimed more at slapstick than chills (Figure 12).
Figure 12 A scene from George Méliès’ comedy The Apparition, or Mr Jones’ Experience with a Ghost (1903).
Given this genealogy of cinema, it is no surprise that marvels soon took over. Films of ghostly and supernatural phenomena weren’t simply an early genre of cinema – they were its natural subject, for the motion picture should properly be seen not so much as “celluloid theatre” but as celluloid magic. Jacques Derrida seemed to discern this when in 1982 he called cinema “the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms.”
What ought we to conclude from all of this?
First, that the first marriage of science and theatre happened in the arena of the magical and the illusory, and in particular in the disputed area where science and folk belief have vied for authority over the invisible.
Second, that science and technology have long had a performative aspect that was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and which involved a delicate interplay between explanation, mystification and spectacle, of the kind that I sense still persists in the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
Third, cinema should perhaps be a stronger part of this discourse, in the sense that its relationship to theatre, particularly in terms of its genesis, becomes much clearer once we acknowledge the close associations with optical technologies and illusionism.
And finally, I think, we should be reminded here of the role of imagination, which, both in science and in theatre, is needed to span the gulf of what isn’t known or cannot be expressed. Imagination is rarely spoken of today in science, but in a famous 1870 essay “Scientific Use of the Imagination”, John Tyndall argued that via the imagination “we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of our senses.” It is in its capacity to permit and depict imaginative leaps that theatre can help to illuminate and perhaps even extend some of the meanings of science.
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