Too Big to Know? So What?

The other day someone pointed out an article for me by David Weinberger which appeared in The Atlantic, plugging his new book Too Big to Know. It was a strangely breathless article, but I'm not sure that Weinberger's point is a very interesting one. Essentially, he seems to be saying that we have been developing data sets that are so vast they are beyond what people - with our limited brains and short life-spans - can possibly analyse and understand without the aid of computers. What's more, when we let our computers loose on these huge data sets, the derivation of any new knowledge they come up with (usually by running computer models or simulations on the data) is not accessible to us. To understand why the weather bureau's model predicts a 40% chance of rain in South-East England today would take teams of humans years to calculate by hand using the same rules and the same data. To all intents and purposes, these models might as well be black boxes. Worse than this, there are programs that can derive new mathematical and physical laws and relationships - new knowledge whose creation is forever shrouded in mystery because the cost of understanding how it was discovered is astronomically high for unaided humans. 

While some gasp at the epistemological implications right along with Weinberger, my own reaction is one of puzzlement. After all, isn't this and hasn't it always been how nearly all knowledge comes to us?

At one level, we have been hugely successful at seeing the underlying patterns of the world, without the aid of computers - General and Special Relativity, and the Standard Model reduce everything to a handful of very simple equations and constants. On another level, we have the complexity of chemistry, biology, fluid dynamics, and so on, which, while following the rules of basic physics, have lots of interacting parts that we can only model statistically. That the predictions of some of these statistical models can only be made if they are based on huge data sets and worked out by big, fast computers, doesn't fill me with the same kind of trepidation with which it seems to fill Weinberger. Even the fact that the predictions of many such models are acutely sensitive to their initial conditions is hardly cause for concern (unless you're planning a camping trip and need an accurate weather report).

It's true that the models themselves can be generated or learned by second-order systems and that we do not necessarily have any meaningful way of knowing how they work (something researchers in neural networks have been grappling with for several decades already). But that isn't a particular cause for anxiety either. Such models are in principle analysable, if we should ever want to do that (which, I suggest, removes any hint of scariness). Generally, it is not important to know how a model does its job, as long as we are confident about how it was constructed and have verified its behaviour against the data. If we want to verify their outputs or increase our confidence in what the models are doing, we can always set up a second, third, or nth model to cross-check the first or poll their outputs. (Weather models tend to be run over and over and their results combined, for instance.) The thing is, these models tend to be of systems that do not have the scientific significance of E=mc^2, although they may have ample practical significance for campers and drug companies. 

I used to work in artificial intelligence and I made a particular study of a field called "argumentation". It's all about how and why we find arguments convincing - like a modern Rhetoric. The early pioneers of expert systems understood well the issue this article raises. If you run a system with more than a handful of rules, it quickly gets to the point where you can no longer understand or predict the outputs - not without a disproportionately huge effort to delve into the workings. So they tried to devise schemes for expert system to explain their own reasoning (which boiled down to traces of rule activation - presented with varying degrees of clarity). I worked on some particularly massive rule-based systems and I can attest to the fact that presenting a conclusion is not enough - people need more - but presenting the machine's reasoning is a very difficult task.

However, I believe it is doable. People just haven't put much work into it yet.

There is an example of a massively parallel supercomputer of immense power but which is virtually a black box as far as the question of how it reached its outputs are concerned. In fact there are many such examples. One of the best was Albert Einstein. This processor came up with some astonishing physical laws by a process that nobody understands even a hundred years after they were derived. However, the Einstein processor was able to explain its reasoning and the derivation of its laws in a way that satisfied everyone who was able to understand (and the rest of us have been happy to take their word for it). I've read a few books on relativity now and I must say, the fact that I don't know how Einstein derived it from what was known at the time doesn't bother me at all. The rules are logical, consistent, match the evidence, and (having been shown the way) are derivable by other, similarly-endowed processors.

Certainly machine-derived knowledge raises questions in epistemology and ontology. Does it mean something different to know a physical law derived by a machine, for example, especially where the reasoning processes involved are hidden from us? My argument, already stated, is that it doesn't. In fact, it is similar in all important ways.

The question of how much we can trust machine-derived knowledge is a different kettle of fish. Here, I'm happy to use all the usual methods of improving my confidence - particularly the Gold Standard, empirical testing.

There is a possibility that knowledge could be derived by machine that is so far beyond our human understanding that only other machines of similar capabilities could peer-review it, or understand how to devise and run empirical tests, or interpret the results of such tests. When that day comes, we are put in the position that most of us are in now vis-a-vis the great scientists. Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein and the rest may have been able to understand and devise tests for each others' discoveries in quantum mechanics, but most of humanity could not. To us, it is entirely a matter of trust - even of faith.

It's like the climate change "debate". Here the science is simple enough that any intelligent layman can follow it. You could replicate John Tyndall's experiment that first measured the greenhouse effect in your own kitchen with some pipes and jars and rubber tubing. Yet still, for the majority (especially GOP politicians), it is all incomprehensible scientific mumbo jumbo. They can't grasp the principles. They can't separate out the scientific claims from the denialist obfuscation. They are so far from being able to judge the validity of what the scientific community is telling them, that they can have no confidence in what they are hearing - leaving them free to dismiss it as "scare-mongering" or a left-wing conspiracy to increase government regulation of our lives, or any bizarre rationale they can come up with.

One day, even the brightest of us will probably be in that position, when the machines have taken it all to a new level, way beyond our understanding. Will we look like simple-minded denialists to them when we question what seems to us to be the unfounded gibberish they will be spouting? I think so. Or maybe, being so much cleverer than us, the machines will be rather better than human scientists at explaining what they mean and why they're saying such outrageous things.  

I Know What is Wrong With The World - and there is no way to fix it

I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world in three words:

People Are Stupid.

We like to think we are the pinnacle of evolution (in itself a stupid misconception of how evolution works) and that our vast intelligence separates up from the animals (sorry, stupid mistake, the other animals, I mean), but the fact is that we're not all that bright. We have a few advantages over, say primates, language and better memories for example, but research suggests that when it comes to sheer reasoning ability, we're not all that much brighter than chimps. I don't want to get into an IQ debate here, but let's assume there's some correlation between general intelligence and IQ. The average is around 100 (it varies from group to group and culture to culture - mainly because we're too stupid to devise a sensible test where the average is always 100 for every place and time).

Give or take a couple of standard deviations, most of us - like 96% of us - have that IQ. And it's abysmally low. It's the IQ of the kind of person who reads Murdoch newspapers, the IQ of the kind of person who watches soaps (even if it's the slick US cop show or medical show type and you think it's somehow better than Home and Away), and the kind of person who believes in the supernatural ("well, there has to be something more than this, doesn't there, science can't explain everything").

If you're still reading, it probably means you think you're not one of the stupid people I'm talking about. Well, you're wrong. Here's a little test to show just how stupid you are. 

• Q1 Can you solve world poverty? 
• Q2 Can you stop war? 
• Q3 Can you stop the persecution of minorities?
• Q4 Can you devise an economic system that treats everybody fairly?

The answers to all those questions are "No". I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of other questions that you would have to say no to, too. The fact is, we are all, even the very brightest among us, deeply and unutterably stupid. We can't solve the world's problems because we're too thick. We've been trying throughout recorded history (and presumably long before then) and we have failed. Failed dismally. Failed in a way that should be excruciatingly embarrassing to all of us. Let's face it, we're a bunch of chimps with cars and cell phones and we haven't got a clue.

And that's why there is no way to fix the world; we just haven't got the brains. We might as well give up, go back to the trees and scratch our arses until we're extinct.

Oh, hang on, we can't do that, can we? We stupidly cut down all the trees.

Now how did he get here?

    

There Ought To Be A Law Against It

They should make it illegal to talk crap. I can't think of any other way to stop the flood of bullshit that threatens to drown out all sensible discourse. It should be a crime to say or write anything for public consumption that is provably wrong at the time it was said.

The irritating and most visible manifestation of the untrue rubbish people spout is in advertising. I don't just mean ads that say processed food X is "wholesome" or  indistinguishable from real food, I mean the lying nonsense about the beneficial powers of inert food supplements, or magnetic mattresses, or "quantum energised" crystals. All that New Age quackery, all that techno-babble, all that distortion and half-truth designed to mislead!

It gets beyond mere irritation when you hear garbage spoken by politicians. Many of them (particularly on the right wing) talk about medical issues, about welfare reform, about incentives, about wars on drugs, about the criminal justice system, about education and about tax reform, as if we haven't had a century of psychological studies, sociological studies, criminology, medical science, and anthropology. The evidence is all there if they had the wit to grasp it. Yet they go on, year after year telling us the answer is more police on the streets, stiffer sentences, getting back to the three Rs, sacking civil servants, etc., etc., etc.. I know politicians are just ordinary people with monster egos, and most of them don't have the intelligence to read research reports (from actual scientists, I mean, not from "think tanks"!) but if there were criminal penalties for being caught saying untrue things in public, maybe they would actually start to care about what they say.

And, of course, politicians lying to the public (wilfully or out of ignorance) can do real harm. It can blight lives and hobble whole societies. It can kill. But the people with the real power, who can do most harm, are the corporations and their various mouthpieces. We've seen endless examples of how the tobacco companies lied about the harm they cause, how the oil, coal and gas companies have lied about global warming (and pollution in general), and how the big news media corporations lie to ensure the political outcomes they favour. Yet there are no penalties. The Big Tobacco spokesperson may be responsible for thousands of deaths, but they are not tried for mass murder. The Big Oil CEO who sponsors obfuscatory research that may lead to hundreds dying in floods and droughts, doesn't face jail time, nor do the scientists who take his money and publish his papers. And the Big Pharma PR guys who tell the doctors lies about their products, are not being prosecuted wither, and nor are the doctors who sign their names to academic papers written by those same PR guys.

We live in a world where solid scientific evidence is ignored or actively disparaged, just so that people can sell you things, or feather their nest in some other way. It is a world where religious groups are allowed to teach anti-science courses which are nothing but insupportable nonsense - presumably so that young people aren't exposed to ideas or rational thinking or something equally horrible. There seems to be nothing anyone can do about all this lying and misleading and distortion and outright fraud. Or nothing anyone is willing to do. After all, the lawmakers are among the worst offenders.

Yet if there is anything there should be a law against, this is it.

Review: The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution by Timothy Taylor

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 23rd August, 2010.)

The Artificial Ape is a book with a plausible idea, but that is all it has. If you are looking for a convincing argument that “technology changed the course of human evolution” or even some compelling evidence, this is not the book for you. However, if you like informed speculation about humanity’s prehistoric past and you enjoy surveys and summaries of this immensely long and fascinating period, The Artificial Ape will keep you turning the pages.

Taylor is a well-known and popular archeo-anthropologist and is beginning to make himself a name for controversial speculation. His Prehistory of Sex takes us back 8 million years and The Buried Soul makes some startling claims about how widespread cannibalism and vampirism were in prehistory. The Artificial Ape follows in this tradition.

Taylor’s main contention is that tool use in early hominins was a necessary step to allow us to develop our large brains. In particular, he speculates that the invention of the baby sling must have occurred about two million years ago (although there is no actual evidence). This would have allowed a hairless ape with an upright gait—and thus a restricted pelvic gap—to give birth to increasingly immature babies, ones that could not cling to their mothers and would need to be carried, thus allowing the brain to continue to grow and develop outside the womb. As Taylor puts it, turning ourselves into artificial marsupials.

He makes much of the fact that tool use in hominins began about 2.5 million years ago, long before signs of accelerated skull-size began to be seen in the fossil record (after 2 million years ago). It is a puzzle that stone tools were being made and used before Homo ergaster and then Homo erectus began to develop their larger brains, and it is this puzzle that Taylor’s hypothesis attempts to tackle.

Taylor also points to the fact that an ape with an upright gait has a much shorter intestine than one on all fours. This means that not only meat eating but cooking may have been essential precursors to the development of bipedalism, simply because of the difficulty of finding sufficient nourishment from a vegetarian and raw meat diet with a short gut, at a time when we would have been extremely active and burning calories at a rate rarely seen in humans today.

Interestingly, recent evidence, published after the book was released, pushes the date for tool use and meat eating back to perhaps 3.4 million years—the pre-Homo days of Australipithecus afarensis. This find gives Taylor a 1.4 million year gap to explain before brain sizes begin to increase. But it does provide more time for full bipedalism to evolve after tools for butchering meat are first seen.

Given the paucity of the evidence, much of what Taylor proposes must be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, hominin skulls are quite plentiful across the last two million years, but there are only a dozen or so before that time. The graph of brain capacity against time that he presents is quite compelling but it would not need many new data points in the pre-2 million years’ range for it to look very different. More critically for the argument, there are just three hominin pelvises that have been found covering a period of almost 3.5 million years. While they approximately match the required changes in morphology for an ape specializing increasingly in bipedalism and immature neonates, it is very little to base an argument on.

So the book is disappointing in that, having made its surprising but apparently reasonable claim, it then provides scant evidence and only weak arguments in support of it. It is disappointing in other ways, too. It contains long and frequent digressions into areas of human cultural evolution that are not strongly connected to the main argument and which tend to dilute and confuse the message.

While fascinating in their own right, Taylor’s discussion of neolithic art and culture do not contribute much. Similarly, his extended discussion of why Tasmanian aborigines had apparently “regressed” to a level of tool use and a style of living not far removed from that of chimpanzees, while a very useful antidote to Victorian condemnation of and dismay at their lifestyle (which still persists in a mild form in academic circles today), does not strengthen his argument appreciably.

Some discussion as to why other hominids (the great apes) have not taken the same evolutionary path as humans, despite the strong probability that they were as proficient with tools as our distant ancestors were, would have been worthwhile. It is likely that chimpanzees have been using tools for as long as us, yet it has not led either to bipedalism or to increased brain size. The same problem arises with birds. Modern studies show extremely surprising sophistication of tool use in crows and other species of bird, yet we do not see the same evolutionary tie to tool use that Taylor suggests for ourselves. Birds have not become “artificial avians.” Why not?

And the same problem arises with dolphins, which also use tools. Bird brains also raise the interesting problem for Taylor’s hypothesis that their brains are notoriously small. Claiming that tool use (technology) enables increases in brain size, in the face of a crow’s tiny brain, begs the question as to whether the evolution of technologies and brains is causally linked at all. It would have been useful if Taylor had addressed some of these issues.

The Artificial Ape is a good read. It is full of interesting and provocative ideas and information. Yet, while it is interesting and its main idea is appealing, in the end, it fails to make its case.

The Great Puzzle of Why the Sun Rose This Morning: Part 2

You may remember I wrote a couple of months ago about a strange conundrum regarding time. I mentioned this post on a number of lists I belong to, hoping that someone with a better grasp of physics than I would be able to explain it to me. I got many, many responses but, sadly, not one seemed to understand what the issue was and the great majority assumed I just needed a quick primer in special relativity (and then proceeded to give me one, often in a most garbled and peculiar way.) Most people were genuinely interested and tried to be helpful. However, one idiot, on a list I didn't even post to, became quite abusive and accused me of inventing a load of nonsense about relativity in order to make more sales of my book! (Now, how would that work, exactly?) He also threw in a garbled account of special relativity, just to be sure I understood what a genius he was.

It was quite a depressing experience all round.

I have been reading more on the subject since then and I think I have actually found the answer. Gratifyingly enough, the answer is almost exactly the one I came up with. In the language of relativity it is couched in much different terms, however, but I believe it amounts to the same thing.

The conundrum is this: even though time passes at different rates for different frames of reference, we do not experience objects moving in and out of existence as our relative positions in time change. I gave the example of the Sun, which, having a much larger mass than the Earth, should be aging ever so slightly more slowly. In fact, over the 4.5 billion year life of the solar system. the Earth should be 71 years older than the Sun. So why aren't we in the Sun's future? Why is the Sun here with us in this moment in time?

The answer, I suggested, was that we do, in fact, all move at the same rate through time, which would mean that time dilation is something analagous to the way the frequency of light changes depending on the relative velocity of its source. As it turns out, I shouldn't have been talking about space and time separately but about spacetime. Because, as it happens, we are all moving at exactly the same rate through spacetime. When we use spacetime metrics instead of the metrics of space and time, it appears that everything in the Universe is moving at exactly the same rate. That light has a constant velocity is a corollary of this. Light having no mass, there is no time dimension to its motion in spacetime, it must therefore always appear to be moving through space at the maximum velocity possible. Time dilation, under this view, is simply an effect of the projection onto space and time of a spacetime 'velocity' for objects having significant relative speed or mass (or acceleration). All the space and time components as well as mass/acceleration are traded off against one another to maintain a constant spacetime motion. Time can therefore appear to be 'red shifted', in the terminology I made up, for exactly the same geometrical reasons that light appears to be.

And we're all together here and now in spacetime. That's why the Sun keeps coming up in the morning!

Aren't you glad I got that sorted out?

Review: Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 13th July 2010.)

Why Does E=mc2? is one of those questions that educated non-physicists must have been asking themselves for over a hundred years, ever since Albert Einstein derived the equation back in 1905. Now, in this easy-to-read little book from Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, we have the answer. The authors are both professors of physics at Manchester University, and Brian Cox is also a well-known TV personality—well known enough to warrant a jacket blurb from Stephen Fry.

The book begins with the traditional approach to explaining the slowing of clocks for observers in motion relative to one another, by examining the geometry of a light beam bouncing up and down in a moving vehicle. The authors demonstrate just how easy it is to get to Einstein’s time dilation formula using nothing more than Pythagoras’ Theorem and the knowledge that the speed of light is capped. But they don’t leave it there. In the first half of the book they consider two more approaches that lead us to the same conclusion. 

Along the way, they very cleverly introduce all the ideas we will need to get to the world’s most famous equation, E=mc². What is more, they focus on the most puzzling part: the question of what c, the speed of light, is doing in there. Very early on, they introduce c as a scaling factor so that we can talk about “distances” in spacetime. Later, by various means, they explain why c has to be the maximum speed that anything can travel. It is a small triumph of the book that Cox and Forshaw make the attempt to show the logical necessity of there being a universal speed limit, and that their arguments are presented so clearly.

Yet, as with any book of this size tackling a subject so enormous, it is not long before the authors start asking us to take things on trust, undermining the comprehensibility of their presentation. The first big one is when they introduce Maxwell’s equations and ask us to believe they demand that the rate of propagation of an electromagnetic field be constant for all observers. Then comes the work of mathematician Emmy Noether and her demonstration that invariance leads to the conservation of quantities. 

These, and many others introduced later, are tough ideas and hard to swallow. The authors introduce them to provide alternative ways into the understanding of relativity and that famous equation. It is to their credit that they do not always hide the complexity nor the long history of ideas behind relativity, but it would have been better, perhaps, to have spent a few more pages on some of these notions. It is also to their credit that they make the case, as Feynman and others have done before them, that, at some level, the weirdness of the universe just has to be accepted, and the only test of physical theories that matters a damn is whether they are supported by actual observation and experiment.

And there would have been many pages to spare for additional background and explanation if, near the end, the book had not wandered into obscure and largely unrelated areas as it tackled a broad-brush description of the Standard Model in an attempt to explain what mass is. It was inevitable that some particle physics had to be discussed and that this would lead to discussions of quantum theory. After all, the book’s sub-title is And Why Should We Care? and the reasons given largely involve nuclear power, chemistry, and cosmology—all of which are helped by discussions at a subatomic level. Perhaps also Brian Cox’s involvement at CERN (he heads a project there to upgrade the ATLAS and CMS detectors for the Large Hadron Collider) meant that a discussion of the Higgs particle was inevitable. Nevertheless, this, and the very brief glimpse of general relativity right at the end, seemed to detract from the clarity and force of the earlier exposition.

It is a curious book that tackles several of the most difficult ideas in modern science in the tone of a friendly, almost patronizing, high-school teacher, trying to ensure that the slow kids manage to keep up with the rest of the class. The tone and the endless asides (did you know that the Sun converts 600 million tonnes of hydrogen into helium every second?) can become a bit wearing, but Cox and Forshaw have to be praised for their unwavering insistence that their subject is accessible to anyone at all who will stay with them and think about it.

In an age when most lay people throw up their hands at the mention of relativity or quantum theory, when religious creation stories and New Age mysticism offer a far simpler, less challenging route for the intellectually overwhelmed, it is hugely important that ordinary people see that physics is not just for the egg-heads, that it can be understood, and that there is a grand beauty in what it reveals about our world. Cox and Forshaw have made an important contribution in this area, one that will help school science teachers as much as it will their students.

Time, Relativity, Time Travel, and the Great Puzzle of Why the Sun Rose This Morning

There's something wrong with my notion of time.

I used to think it was all subjective - by which I meant relative to one's frame of reference, as general relativity tells us. I am more than happy to accept all the experimental evidence that says moving very fast, or being near a large mass, will slow down the passage of time relative to an observer outside your frame of reference. There is so much evidence for general relativity that it would be ludicrous not to accept it. Yet a simple observation of my own tells me that there must be more to the story than that.

And this is it: the Sun rose this morning. I know that because I saw it.

The problem is that it should not have done. The Sun should not be there at all. The Sun and the Earth were formed at about the same time, some 4.5 billion years ago. However, the mass of the Sun is about 330,000 times that of the Earth. Relatively speaking, time will run a bit more slowly for the Sun than for the Earth. But, after 4.5 billion years, all those nanosecond differences will add up. Yet Earth and Sun seem to be here together. We have both arrived at today at the same time.

So my notion of time - and/or my notion of what general relativity is saying - must be wrong. In fact, the same goes for special relativity too. I cannot account for why anything moving fast relative to me doesn't just wink out of existence. Because its time is slowed down, I should move into its future, it should move into my past, and we should not be able to perceive each other in our respective presents. After all, I know from experience that I cannot see the future, or the past.

So, okay, the fact that relative gravitational potential, or acceleration, or velocity, affects the rate at which time passes for different 'observers' seems to have nothing to do with the way time is actually passing for us all. I can live with that. In fact, I've seen something very like it somewhere else. The speed of light is quite similar. This is a constant and, all intuition aside, light travels at the same velocity (c) relative to you, whatever speed and direction you are travelling relative to its source. What does happen to light, though, is that its frequency shifts. If you are approaching a source of light very fast, it still hits you at exactly c but its frequency is shifted higher - towards the blue end of the spectrum. If you are racing away from the source, light still catches you at exactly c, but now its freuency is lower - shifted towards the red end of the spectrum.

What if time behaves like light? What if the rate of passage of time is also constant? Then, whatever we were doing in the Universe, time would always affect us the same way. But, accelerations, gravitational fields, and relative velocities lead to us perceiving a shift in something equivalent to the frequency of time. Let's call it time's 'colour'. A high gravitational potential, shifts time's colour towards the red end of its spectrum.

This notion (although it explains my problem with time) is an intuitively difficult one because what we normally think of as time - that thing that measures the intervals between ticks of a clock - isn't really time at all. It is just the colour of time. Real time, the thing that has its colour shifted and which ensures the continued coexistence of everything in the present, must be something else. Maybe we should call it 'persistence' or (to borrow a word from H. G. Wells) 'duration'?

So time is a kind of universal persistence and what I used think was time is just the colour of this persistence.

Am I happy now? No, not really. For a start, shifting the colour of persistence is analogous to shifting the colour of light (and is effected in exactly the same ways). So, by the same analogy, there can be no time travel. Shifting the colour of light does not affect its speed. The rate of persistence will be constant regardless of relativistic effects on its colour. You can age less (or more) than other things in the Universe by manipulating your speed, acceleration, or proximity to mass, but you do not change your place in persistence with respect to the rest of the Universe. That's why fast things do not blink out of existence for me. We are persisting at the same rate, even though we are aging at different rates. (Even dragging the exit of a wormhole around at near light-speed won't do the trick any more, because entrance and exit persist at the same rate, the exit may end up younger than the entrance but they will still be there at the same point in persistence at the end of it all!)

Are there any physicists out there who can tell me why all this is wrong and also explain why I saw the Sun this morning?

Review: Cro-Magnon by Brian Fagan

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 2nd May 2010.)

By any standards, Brian Fagan is a leading authority on archaeology, and, with 46 books on the subject to his credit, he is among the world’s leading popularizers of the field. In Cro-Magnon, he gives us an easily digested round-up of what is known about the pre-history of modern humans in Europe.

Fagan presents an essentially chronological account, starting with the Neanderthals who were already present in Europe when modern humans arrived, and taking a brief detour to look at the evolution of hominins in Africa. From the arrival of Cro-Magnons around 45,000 years ago until the spread of farming in Europe, about 8,000 years ago, the book traces the movements and developing cultures of these people who were the first homo sapiens to settle the continent. It has a good index and an extensive list of further reading in the Notes section.

If you live in Europe, or are of European descent, then the Cro-Magnons were almost certainly your direct ancestors. Fagan digests and presents for us the extremely complex evidence that reveals population movements and social conditions, without burdening us with details or much controversy. This evidence is mostly archaeological—the bones, human and animal, that were left behind, the stone tools, the excavations, and the paintings and carvings. But he also makes much use of climatological data, studies of modern and recent stone-age peoples, and recent genetic studies, again, sparing us the arguments and supplying only the conclusions.

Fagan works in a field that is massively interpretative. Controversies abound—especially in the assessment of purely social, spiritual, or linguistic aspects of ancient peoples. Yet this reviewer thinks it is a strength of his approach that he delivers what he feels is the most likely interpretation, given a broad, eclectic, yet conservative, summary of the data from many disciplines, merely indicating where there may still be some disagreement among experts. It allows him to present an extended and coherent narrative that makes sense of the whole story of Cro-Magnon settlement in Europe.

And the way he tells it, it was a long, hard struggle. Europe, for most of the time that Cro-Magnons carved out a place there, was a bitterly cold, hostile environment, more akin to Northern Siberia or Canada than to the temperate land we know today. Frozen tundra and barren steppes were what greeted those first immigrants. Yet the Neanderthals had survived there for nearly 200,000 years when we arrived. It is typical of Fagan’s non-controversial approach that he doesn’t indulge in lurid speculation about how modern humans drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It was a slow and gradual process that took place over many thousands of years. In Fagan’s view the Neanderthals simply continued to live their lives as they always had, only with Cro-Magnons hunting the same territories, times just grew harder, until their already-marginal existence was gradually pushed beyond the brink.

Yet, while the absence of detail such as the minutiae of debates about dating and statistical analyses allows Fagan to present the bigger picture with bold strokes, it also leaves you wondering about some of his assertions. He is, for example, very firm on what was men’s work and what was women’s work. How much of that is in the actual evidence, and how much is imported from modern anthropological studies, or even modern prejudices?  And the speculations about whether Neanderthals danced seem fanciful and based on slender evidence (which appears, from what is said, also to be consistent with the hypothesis that they wrestled).

And it isn’t as if there was no room for more detail or more discussion. The book proceeds at the painfully slow pace of a modern TV documentary, with considerable repetition and often tedious dramatizations of life in the late Ice Age. The material in the book could have been presented in perhaps a quarter of the number of pages if not for the slow, repetitious style. 

The book proceeds at a measured pace, to put it kindly, and, while clearly written, the language used is often clichéd and itself repetitive. (There were several points where I thought if I read the words “bestiary” or “tool kit” one more time, I would throw the book down and jump on it.) Which is disappointing because there are sections—like the discussion of Cro-Magnon art near the end—where Fagan writes with fascination and insight. If the whole book had been like that, it would have been such a joy to read. As it was, the book provides a clear, pain-free summary of what is known about the earliest Europeans—it just happens to be a bit slow.

It is a sign of the rate of change in this field that, even as Cro-Magnon comes to press, DNA analysis of a finger bone found in a southern Siberian cave suggests that a third hominin species may have co-existed with Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in that region. How would the presence of another human line affect the conclusions in Cro-Magnon? Only future editions will tell.

Review: Einstein's God by Krista Tippett

This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books, where you can also find other reviews by me.

Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit by Krista Tippett
(Penguin Books, February 2010)

Krista Tippett has spent the past decade interviewing people about religion and spiritual ethics as the host of public radio’s “Speaking of Faith.” Einstein’s God is an edited selection from these interviews in which she discusses the relationship between science and religion with a number of eminent guests: some scientists, some not, some believers, some atheists—all of them leaders in their fields with interesting ideas. It’s an eclectic group of guests, and the conversations cover a very broad range of topics, including Darwin’s relationship to religion, the psychological basis of forgiveness and vengeance, and how God might have room to act within the constraints of modern physics.

Unlike most of what appears in print these days about religion’s interactions with science, Tippett’s book is not about conflict. It is about reconciling the two world-views. Its intentions are to show that scientists—even ones that have no religious belief— feel the same sense of awe and wonder at the world as believers, that even the devoutly religious can and should respect the study of the natural world, and that scientists themselves can be practicing believers and feel no contradiction within themselves.

Tippett is attempting in this book what, for many people on both sides of the religion vs. science “debate,” must seem impossible. She is speaking candidly and respectfully to scientists, theologians, and artists about their spirituality and beliefs, seeking to find the common ground between these extremely different world-views. In the process, whether you feel she succeeds or not, she achieves something just as helpful: She finds the common humanity in all these seekers, and gives us a basis for mutual respect and a sense of fellowship.

Within this framework, some of the interviews work better than others. The first interviewee in the book is the main reason I wanted to read it, physicist Freeman Dyson discussing Einstein’s spirituality. Yet the conversation was dry, if not dull. It covered ground that would be well known to anyone interested in Einstein. The only point of real interest it made was the idea that the feeling Einstein had about the Universe and how it is put together, about the “miraculous” way mathematics is able to describe nature (there being no reason anybody knows why it should), is very close to the religious sense that believers have when they contemplate Creation.

Unfortunately, this interview and the one that follows it with physicist Paul Davies, may have been recorded too early for either Dyson or Davies to be aware of a letter on religion that Einstein wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind in 1954, which became well known only in 2008. In the letter he clearly denies any belief in God—not just the “personal God” he famously rejected— saying, “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends, which are nevertheless pretty childish.” Tippett should have known about this letter and, I think, addressed the complexity it adds to Einstein’s expressed views on religion.

Once we leave Dyson behind, the interviews become more lively and engaging. Also, after the initial discussion about Einstein, the collection moves away from him, specifically, and goes off to explore the interplay between science and religion in other disciplines and through other thinkers. Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon, talks about his notion that human spirituality and religious feeling, human good and evil themselves, are the products of an evolutionary process that has selected and nurtured them. Tippett’s comment that such ideas “might richly inform many religious perspectives” is typical of the hopeful and inclusive attitude she projects throughout the book. Whatever we might think of the likelihood of this happening, it is impossible not to wish with her that it could be so.

High spots for me were the chat with Jana Levin, another world-class physicist, who talked about her novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and about a rationalist world-view that is nevertheless filled with wonder and beauty. Psychologist Michael McCullogh talked about the evolution of forgiveness and its central, everyday role in preserving civilisation. Charles Darwin’s biographer, James Moore, was eloquent in describing the deep reverence of the Great Man for the natural world “undefaced by the hand of man.” And Esther Sternberg, a Canadian immunologist I had not encountered before, was fascinating on the complex connection between health and emotion.

Low spots included Anglican Priest (and one-time physicist) John Polkinghorne who, while decrying “God of the gap” arguments, proceeded to describe a Universe where God excludes himself from all but the most marginal influence through quantum uncertainty and chaotic processes. Polkinghorne appears to be a favorite of Tippett’s, judging by the number of times she mentions him in the book, yet I found his message that God created a self-creating Universe (i.e. He set up the initial rules and conditions but then lets it run more-or-less untended) far less intellectually satisfying (or even honest) than that expressed by V. V. Raman in another interview. Raman, a Hindu, seems able to keep his religious and scientific world-views completely separate and to experience the world in these two, quite different ways without feeling the need to find ways of fitting them together. I also found that the format of the book—essentially a series of transcripts with an overall introduction, introductory remarks before each interview, and break-out comments within (generally to give background to what is being discussed)—was rather tedious and involved a lot of repetition.

Einstein’s God swings between fascinating and infuriating with only a little dull in between. It would almost be impossible for it to do anything else with such interesting and controversial contributors involved. Tippett has attempted to move us away from the often hostile and sterile debate between science and religion, and instead demonstrate how, in the ordinary world of people’s lives, scientists and theologians are asking the same questions of and feeling the same wonder at the world they inhabit, without conflict, and with great humility and respect for the truth. And I think she has made a good job of it. However, her eclectic and inclusive approach may have worked against her to some extent. Suggesting, by their inclusion, that all religions are somehow equivalent and the content of their doctrines does not really matter, reduces them to the status of a mystical or spiritual impulse, whereby they can, indeed, be compared to Einstein’s “religious sense” of the Universe. It’s possible that some believers will be offended by this. But in the end, perhaps Tippett’s point is that it is the urge toward spirituality that is really important for most of us, and whether we satisfy it through scientific study or through religious devotion matters very little.

Saints Alive!

You know what? You don't cure cancer with magic. You cure it with medical procedures. You take thousands of scientists, thousands of doctors, and they work on the problen night and day for decades and decades. They train for the best part of a decade, they devote their lives to chipping away at this monstrous problem, they spend their whole careers doing it, just so they can pass a few, precious scraps of new knowledge down to the next generation of scientists and doctors.

And, after decades of intense, worldwide recearch, the results start to come. When I was a child, cancer was a death sentence. If you had it, you asked, "How long have I got?" These days, the rate of curing cancer is about 50%. If you get it you ask, "Can it be fixed?" It's one of the triumphs of our age that we have come so far in fighting this hideous disease.

So it really pisses me off that the Catholic church, has canonised an Asutralian woman because she cured cancer by a miracle. A miracle! Those fat cat bishops, controlling vast fortunes, running an organisation that has only last week scandalised us all by its sexual abuse of small children in Germany, have said that this woman cured cancer by magic!

Magic!

Well, I'm sorry. You don't cure cancer by magic. You cure it by applying brilliant minds and inconceivable amounts of hard work and resources for year after year after year. That's how you do it. You don't cure cancer by magic! And it's an insult to all those men and women who have worked so hard all their lives to even suggest that you do.

If the Catholic bishops really want to do something about cancer, they should give up their silly mumbo-jumbo canonisation rituals, stop talking crap about magic cures, sell some of their staggeringly huge assets, and invest the money in cancer research. That might actually help someone.

The Price of Christmas

I see that a priest in York, England has recommended that his parishioners steal the things they need this Christmas since no-one else is going to help them out. Is conspiracy to commit a mortal sin a sin too? The theology could get tricky. However, the humanity is plain and simple. The plight of the homeless in the UK - while not nearly so bas as that of the homeless in the USA - is heart-wrenching. No decent person can witness it without revolting against the system that creates and sustains it.

And that system is capitalism.

Christmas may be a good time to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The food heaped on our plates, the mostly-unwanted gifts, the treats and indulgences, the lights and the shiny, plastic baubles, all have to be paid for.

In a capitalist society, the payment is made by the consumer - you and me - from money we get by selling our labour to the people who control the capital. They get their money by selling the product of our labour back to us in the form of meals, plastic baubles and so on. The magic of capitalism is that, by this process, capital increases. Somehow value is added by the act of production. Where does it come from?

It comes from various kinds of exploitation, but two in particular: the exploitation of workers, and the exploitation of the environment. Workers are exploited by not paying them anything like the value of their product would suggest they should be paid. The excess goes to the owners of the capital. These days, when workers in the consuming countries ask to be paid more fairly, their jobs, and the exploitation, are moved overseas to places where workers are paid even less and can be more thoroughly exploited. That this leaves people with no source of income because they have lost the ability to sell their labour, might be seen as a bad thing, but for capitalism it is good, it means that labour becomes a plentiful commodity that can now be bought more cheaply. (This is also one of the reasons why capitalists like population growth.) It means that the workers who were once in danger of earning enough that they were no longer so badly exploited, but who lost their jobs, are now forced get new jobs at lower wages and be properly exploited again. To keep capital growing, exploitation of workers has to be increasingly efficient and widespread. It is called 'productivity'.

Even so, you can only take the exploitation of workers so far before the rate of increase declines. For capital to keep on growing you have to keep pumping new wealth into the system. That's where the environment comes in. Along with people's work, the environment is the source of all wealth. Fuels and materials dug from the ground, animals and plants taken or farmed in the seas and on the land, are the raw feedstock of capitalism. To keep capital growing, the people with access to these resources, must keep acquiring them in ever-larger amounts. The consumption of raw materials by our 'primary industries' is nothing less than the consumption of our planet. With increasing speed, capitalism is taking whatever is usable from the world, using it to fuel growth, and dumping the rest as polluting slag - on the land, in the seas, and in the air. What's more, like the exploitation of workers, the exploitation of the environment must also be driven to ever-greater efficiency.

It is clear to everyone who thinks about these things, that capitalism cannot survive forever - or even for very much longer - without finding more things to exploit. The 'global market' has now, pretty much included every possible worker on the planet in capitalism's web of exploitation. There is plenty of of opportunity for growth there still, but the resource - us - is finite. The environment is starting to show signs of breaking down under the strain. Global warming, peak oil, extinctions of fish stocks, and global food shortages, are all signs that we are using up what is there at an unsustainable rate.

Technology has always been capitalism's friend. The need for more efficient exploitation has always driven technological development. The people who control capital - and the people who depend on its products - are in a precarious position just now. It looks as if the environment might collapse, or run out of key materials, before technological fixes have been found for these problems. We need new places to exploit - the asteroids? other planets? - before this one runs dry. We need ways to keep the environment patched up long enough to bring these new resources online. And, we need more efficient ways to exploit labour (global recessions are good for capitalism, but they do carry the risk of revolution.)

Capitalism is great for the owners of capital, it's not bad for many of the rest of us either (as long as we temper its worst excesses with democracy,) but it isn't a free lunch. In the end, we will have to pay the price for all this wealth.

Some, like the homeless, the people on welfare, and the working poor, already pay that price for us. It is by putting a certain proportion of us in such misery that capitalism ensures the low cost of labour and hence adequate returns on investment for the owners of capital. The suffering of the starving and the homeless in our cities is helping to put the lights on our trees, the iPods in our pockets, and the piles of food on our plates this Christmas.

Is it really so bad if they snatch a can of ravioli from a supermarket shelf in their desperation?

“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” (William Blake)

I don't want to get all hard-nosed and cynical about it but why do people insist that you can achieve your dreams if you just believe in yourself and work hard? I know there are some cases where this has happened, but surely there are a thousand cases for every one of those where it hasn't.

I suppose ideas like this can persist because there is no evidence. How do you run a study where one group believes in themselves and works hard and another group doesn't - keeping all other variables matched between the groups? What's more, 'true believers' in the doctrine can always say of a failed case, "Well, she obviously didn't believe in herself enough, or she didn't work hard enough." So it's one of those irrefutable doctrines. And it simply doesn't square with my experience.

Certainly self-belief and hard work can be a big help when it comes to success, but so can blind luck, physical beauty, great talent, and good connections. Beauty? Oh yes. Trust me, I'm a psychologist. I've seen the studies that show that physically attractive people have more friends, more self-confidence, and are more successful. For men, it is also a big advantage to be tall. Tall men rise higher in life. If I hadn't been so tall and handsome, I might have had even less worldly success!

It isn't even a confusion between necessary and sufficient causes. As I say, working hard might help, but it is neither necessary, nor sufficient, for success. Some of the most downtrodden people in the world also have to work the hardest. That's why they're called the 'working classes'.

Yet some people believe it to be true, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Or do they? Maybe the people who insist that, if you follow your dream, you will, one day, succeed, are deliberately ignoring the evidence because they have emotional needs that won't allow them to accept it. Maybe they say these things because they are too naive or too dumb to be aware of the many cases where they are patently false. A lot of people seem to say it (especially in self-help books and autobiographies) because they succeeded and would like to persuade themselves, and us, that it was their mighty moral fibre, the stuff that kept them believing in themselves and working hard despite all the setbacks, that led to their triumphs.

Here's a little quiz:

1. If you are born in America, work hard, and believe in yourself, are you:
a) more likely to become rich and famous than someone similar born in an African village?
b) more likely to become rich and famous if your parents are already rich and famous?
c) more likely to become rich and famous if you are young, beautiful and talented?

I think people who say that self-belief and hard work are all you need to succeed actually mean well. They're probably thinking of a case they've heard about where someone who was immensely talented and, by hard work and belief in themselves (and with some luck, and, probably a bit of help from some well-off and well-connected friends or family members) managed to achieve their dream. And then they've seriously overgeneralised it to apply to the rest of the world. They don't actually want to buoy people up on waves of false hopes just so that those people can come crashing to earth in late middle age and spend their declining years in a state of bitter regret and depression. At least, I hope not.

Help Me Out, America

Calling all Americans. I need your opinion on something.

I've written a book and it's going to be published in February 2010. It's a near-future thriller set in Europe. The background to the tale is that the world is just recovering from a very serious depression brought on by us hitting peak oil. The depression, which lasted fifteen years, was worse than anything experienced yet - millions starved, resource wars were fought, governments toppled.

It's a very minor part of the story but it is mentioned that of all the countries of the world, worst hit was the USA. It's dependence on oil and its strongly consumer-driven economy meant that the effect of peak oil was worse there than anywhere. The economy collapsed. Tens of millions were unemployed and most of them were starving. Riots and civil unrest threatened to turn into civil war as an ineffectual government dickered around with fiscal stimulus. Things looked bad until a strong, right-wing government, with fundamentalist Christian roots was elected and immediately took a firm grip of the situation. (Imagine a strong George W Bush, or a Sarah Palin with brains.) Unfortunately, they use their emergency powers and a mandate from a population scared to death about what is happening, to push through some constitutional changes - abolishing the separation of church and state and ensuring that only candidates affiliated to the official church can run for office.

Over the next couple of decades, the new government does, in fact, stop the country from plunging into chaos, but at enormous cost. Opposition parties are banned, many universities - hotbeds of anti-government sentiment - are closed down under the new blasphemy and insurrection laws. The ones that remain are 're-focused' on theological teaching, with the closure of many 'blasphemous' science departments, especially the biological sciences, geology, astronomy, philosophy, and physics. Theology replaces science teaching in schools. Many, many people are arrested and executed for anti-government and anti-religious crimes and the FBI is turned into a feared and energetic prosecutor of the new laws and policies.

Ironically, although peace returns to the streets and Americans are being returned to work and the homes they had lost, the country's prosperity, without the leading edge science and technology that once powered it, has nose-dived. With GM crops and livestock classed as 'abominations', the (future version of the) Internet strictly censored, and other countries surging ahead in the recovery, America is actually receiving massive food aid shipments from Europe and Asia - a fact the Christian fundamentalists in power are suppressing through their control of all media.

OK.

Here's what I need help with. As an American, does this scenario seem so far fetched, so completely unbelievable, to you that you would have a low opinion of a book in which it occurs?

Letting Marketers Loose on Language

Language evolves. New words are coined; old words change. The end result is the rich and complex lexicon we have today. Some of this growth and change is acceptable and understandable. New words are needed as new concepts arise, as new social activities develop, and as new objects are made. But some of it arises for less acceptable reasons. Sometimes the person who coins a word - and the people who then use it - are ignorant of a word that already exists with the same meaning. Sometimes new words arise from a misunderstanding of an existing word. (Consider the modern use of the word 'showstopper' which has the opposite connotation of the word in its original meaning.) Sometimes a new word arises from laziness (e.g. when people would rather use 'text' as a verb than say, 'send a text message') sometimes from a desire to draw a strained and unwarranted analogy.

In this last category, consider how the suffix '-gate' has entered the language since 'Watergate'. In Australia in the past few weeks we've had a storm-in-a-teacup political scandal the press has dubbed 'utegate' ('ute' being a local contraction of 'utility vehicle' + '-gate' meaning a political scandal). Also consider the experiments underway at MIT to record and analyse the first three years of a child's life in order to track every utterance the child makes along with every utterance it might have heard. This has been called 'the human speechome project' by (a very strained) analogy with the human genome project. It seems that '-ome' is a new suffix which means something like 'scientific endeavour that produces an extremely large and complete data set in some field'.

It is understandable that scientists would want to associate their work with the human genome project. It isn't quite so easy to see why they would coin a word quite so ugly as 'speechome'. It is interesting to look at how we got to this sorry neologism.

The word 'genome', originally meant the 'sum total of genes in a set,' and was coined (in its German form 'genom') in 1920 by German botanist Hans Winkler. It comes from gen, short for 'gene' + om from 'chromosome.' It was Aglicised to 'genome' in 1930.

Looking back, the word 'chromosome' was coined in 1888, also by a German, anatomist Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz. He constructed it from the Greek words khroma, meaning 'colour' + soma meaning 'body.' ('Colour' because chromosomes contain a substance that stains easily for microscopic viewing.)

A recent addition to this family of words is 'proteome'. This is the set of all proteins that can be expressed by an organism's genes in a particular environment, or under any circumstances (more properly the 'complete proteome'). It derives from prote(in) + (gen)ome and was coined by Marc Wilkins in 1994. Notice that the '-ome' suffix has now taken on a life of its own. It is no longer an abbreviation of 'soma' but of 'genome'. It has stared to become like '-gate', a suffix which emphasises a flattering comparison the user wishes to take advantage of, rather than one that contibutes to the interpretation of the word.

And so we come to 'speechome'. This was probably coined by marketing people at MIT within the last couple of years, simply to aggrandise the project which bears its name. Marketing people, like journalists, use language to sell things. They don't care about etymology - or indeed meaning. They have other rhetorical motives for choosing words than to educate or inform. Now that '-ome' is in the hands of marketers and journalists, expect it to move farther and farther away from the sense in which it was originally conceived.

Babies Shame Mothers Into Caring For Them

At last I understand why babies cry.

I've puzzled over this for many, many years. A baby's cry is loud, grating and nerve-wracking. My own sweet little daughter used to bawl so loudly that the woman in the house across the street could hear it. And that should have been a clue. But I was so caught up in the idea that a baby's cry was to alert the mother to its needs - even if every predator for miles also gets the message that a tasty human morsel is there for the eating.

Now, research by a UK/Puerto Rican team led by Dr Stuart Semple, has shown that rhesus macaque mothers respond differently to their crying babies depending on who is nearby. If there are other adults around to be irritated and made aggressive by the baby's wailing, the mother is more likely to tend and feed the baby than if no other adults are nearby.

How many times have you seen it - a mother in a supermarket, or on a bus, with a screeching baby and everyone around frowning and tutting and muttering about what a disgrace it is? And the poor mother, cringing under the onslaught of all that social disapproval.

It's so obvious once you're told. My daughter wasn't just crying for attention from her mother, she was crying to get on the nerves of the woman across the street, so that she would put pressure on the child's mother to do something about that damned baby! That's why crying has to be so loud. That's why it has to set your nerves jangling.

Raising a child is exhausting. There comes a time when every woman needs a break from it, just ten minutes to herself! But the child's needs never take a break, and something has to be done about keeping its mother's nose to the grindstone. The baby is already using all the maternal instincts it can exploit to keep itself cared for, so what else can it use when its mother is exhausted? Social pressures, disapproval, the threat of ostracisation, even the threat of violence (particularly from males nearby).

Who's a clever baby?

Surprise, Surprise!

Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, has repeated Stanley Milgram's famous 1960's experiments and found that people are still willing to inflict severe electric shocks on other people just because an 'experimenter' tells them to.

Personally, I'm satisfied that Milgram did a pretty thorough job of investigating this effect and all its various parameters. Of course, it's nice to see replication of the results by others, and this should be encouraged - especially in a field like social psychology. What puzzles me, though, is the headline on the BBC's report of Burger's study: "People 'still willing to torture'." Well, duh! What do you think is going on at Guantanamo Bay? What do you think Mugabe is doing to all the opposition politicians who disappeared recently? What do you think Amnesty keeps banging on about if it isn't the willingness of people everywhere to indulge in torture?

There seems to be a belief, at least among journalists, that human beings will 'evolve' in som spiritual or ethical way and that, over time, we will all become better people. Well I'm sorry guys but evolution doesn't work like that. If not torturing people had survival or reproductive benefits, then it might happen. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Our only hope is that our cultures will evolve - or at least learn. Cultures are probably shaped by the same selection processes that shape species. What's more, cultures can change very quickly - unlike species. Yet here too, the elimination of torture from a society would need to have some beneficial impact on that society to make it stick. That is, a culture without torture would need to survive and even spread more easily than one with torture. As yet I see very little evidence for it.

But we can hope.

One Small Step...

For eight years now, you've been a rogue state. You've held and tortured people without trial. You've invaded and occupied a country with no good cause. You've undermined the authority and effectiveness of the United Nations. You've refused to ratify important, global climate change agreements and have bullied and suppressed scientists who tried to speak out on climate change issues, delaying effective action that is urgently needed. You've allowed religious fundamentalists to dominate your domestic policies on science and education, setting medical research and other fields back many years. You have tied foreign aid to fundamentalist religious agendas concerning contraception and sex education which are known to be ineffective and which have damaged countries you should have been helping. You have created a legal and regulatory environment that has supported and encouraged radical, free market ideologies that have not only helped widen the gap between rich and poor, at home and around the world, but have directly led to the financial crisis that has plunged the world into recession. You have bullied and alienated your friends overseas, and given your enemies many more reasons to hate you.

With the election of Barak Obama, I hope this will stop, and that the USA can be welcomed back into the fold of civilized nations. This election is the first good news I've heard from America since before Bush was elected. Please, please, support the man now that he's got the job. This was just the first, small step. There is a long, long journey of reform ahead.

Magical Thinking

An uncharacteristically brief posting from me today I'm afraid, but I wanted to tell everyone about a great article I just read. It is called Magical Thinking and it is by Matthew Hutson. (Actually, the wrap-up on the last page is a bit lame but the rest is excellent.)

One of the pleasing things about modern psychology is that it seems to have taken on board the task of explaining superstitious and religious thinking. It's about time! Hutson's article does an excellent job of summarising current thinking on the subject.

Sadly, he offers no cure :-(

Focus Fusion: Will It Save Us?

I've been reading a bit lately about focus fusion – a radically new approach to producing power from fusion reactions. The research is spearheaded by Eric J. Lerner and his company Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. (LPP) and has been financed mostly by Government organisations like NASA and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission .

The basic principle is to use Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) to confine a proton-Boron mix (pB11) at extreme temperatures (a couple of million degrees) so that a fusion reaction can take place. The DPF technology has existed for decades but the theoretical work needed to enable a controlled fusion reaction has not existed until very recently. Now, LPP has received a USD600,000 grant from Swedish firm CMEF (the first part of ten million dollars if all goes well) to develop a proof-of-concept reactor.

Focus fusion has none of the major drawbacks the Tokomak programme has laboured under. It doesn't suffer the plasma stability problems Tokomaks do, it does not generate 'hard' radiation like Tokomaks, and it can feed electrons directly into the grid without the need to generate heat to drive turbines. It could potentially generate electricity at a hundredth of the cost of existing power generation techniques. It is also suitable for small-scale, distributed power production (a 5MWatt reactor could fit inside a garage). That means focus fusion reactors could power railway locomotives, lorries, ships and aircraft. What's more, electric cars would vastly outperform petrol (economically). If focus fusion works, we could easily be looking at a completely petrol and coal free world in just a few decades!

Obviously this would be a disaster for the Middle East and for the big petrol and coal companies (and, hopefully, the governments they prop up). It would probably also be a disaster for the major coal-exporting countries like Australia – which is a bit unfortunate since that's where I live. It would also mean the end of renewable energy technologies (I don't suppose anyone will be sad to see the end of wind farms!) and it would, at last, kill off nuclear power as a viable commercial concern.

All-in-all, it would be a miraculous technical breakthrough that would save us from global warming and make electricity virtually free for the whole world. It is estimated that there is enough boron in the world to keep us in power for a billion years and the only wast emission you get from focus fusion is Helium – an inert gas with no greenhouse effect.

Too good to be true? In a world already beset by food riots and the first petrol riots, a world that is just a few decades from a catastrophic climate change tipping point, where the first resource wars have already been fought, for all our sakes, let's hope not.

Thank You NASA

Just congratulations and thank you to NASA for continuing to inspire the world. Their Phoenix spacecraft touched down in the Martian arctic last night (zulu) after a damned-near perfect flight and descent. The ship has travelled 422 million miles and was right on target! The pictures are starting to come in now but it's the science I'm waiting for.

Part of Phoenix's brief is to drill into the Martian permafrost and study the ice below the surface. There are lots of reasons for this. Partly it's to see what resources might be available to later crewed missions, partly it's to look for signs of ancient life, and partly it's just plain old curiosity. This is the first time we've been so far north on Mars (68 degrees) - talk about terra incognita!

So, thanks guys. Outstanding work! And I hope the rest of the mission goes as smoothly.