Feline Quanta

In defense of Watson

2011-04-15T07:52:00.004+01:00

Nobel laureate James Watson was attacked yesterday (14 April 2011) whilst giving a lecture at Patras University. Hooded youngsters invaded the lecture theatre crying "racist!". One of them jumped on the stage yielding a stick and attacked elderly Watson. The Nobel laureate escaped unharmed thanks to students and academics who rushed to his rescue.

I condemn this fascist incident which has to do with a twisted and quite insane idea that prevails in Greek Universities with regards to "asylum"; meaning that anyone within University grounds has immunity from the law, including criminal activities such as attacking someone with intent to cause harm, or even kill.

However, and because there will be many in Greece and elsewhere who apart from condeming the attack they might also accuse Watson for racism, let me remind what has happened; and then let me explain my take on this,

Watson had told the Sunday Times a couple of years ago that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really." The world media reacted violently against those comments, the result being that Watson is being branded a racist and widely discredited. His response to the uproar has been: “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

So what did Watson really mean?

An undeniable and mysterious fact has been that during the half century or so in just about every industrial society average IQs have risen dramatically. This cannot be evolutionary. It takes many generations for evolutionary effects to take place and fifty years are simply not enough. So what has gone on? Many candidates: better diet, better education, even television aka the information revolution. All in all, what the findings mean is that Europeans and Americans – let us say predominantly “white people” (although black people in western societies are also included in those measurements) – were more "stupid" fifty years ago. This ‘stupidity” had nothing to do with the color of their skin. It is related to the level of social and economic development in the west. What Watson tried to say was that the same truth applies to Africa today. Africans’ measurements of intelligence (and not intelligence as a "natural" given whatever that may mean) are low not because they are black but because they are poor and uneducated, like us white ones were fifty years ago. His point is very poignant. When smart white people at the IMF and the World Bank develop their smart white policies to cure the ills of Africa, and then expect the Africans, at their present level of socio-economic development, to implement them, they are wasting valuable resources. Measures for Africa must be customized to reflect the situation on the ground. Imagine a World Bank expert on a time machine, flying back to Washington DC at the turn of the 20^th century and expecting to implement modern policies in the all-white America of 1900s. I would dare to guess that our well-meaning time traveler will not be understood – by those white “stupid” folks, who would find it impossible to heed to our time traveler’s advise.

So why Watson did got so misunderstood? Because of two things. Firstly, because of media hysteria on anything that touches upon race and gender. Secondly, because when a scientist speaks to the media must tread very carefully. I have met many scientists in my life who thought that science communication in the media simply means “talking about science”. Well it does not, folks! It means, first and foremost, understanding the difference between a newspaper and a science journal. In the latter you have time to expand, retort, debate. In the former you do not. Elementary, dear Watson...

How to build a knowledge economy in Greece

2011-02-08T19:30:00.002Z

An edited version of this article was published in Odyssey magazine Winter 2011 issue

There is something deeply pathetic about the current state of

Greece

. Perhaps it has to do with the spirit of defeatism that imbues our modern political discourse since the routing of our army in the 1920s. We pretend to be the victims of history, bemoan instead of actively claim, blame others for our mistakes, lie to ourselves and to the rest of the world. This endemic culture of intellectual hypocrisy has led to Greece becoming today little more than a negotiable holiday destination for middle-income tourists. But sun, sand and surf alone will not pay for the mounting debt, or for our pensions, or for our future if we ever hope to have one. We need to re-invent Greece and turn it to a dynamic, high tech, export-oriented economy. Anything short of wholesale economic revolution will perpetuate the looming crisis into the following decades, exclude our young from the abounding opportunities of a globalized economy, further cultivate our tendency for introversion, and render our country and our people historically irrelevant.

Much needs to change. Our state schools serve not the interests of our children but of the heavily-unionized teachers. They produce hordes of ignoramuses destined for a life of unemployment or underemployment. As a result, if you are a bright young mind from a low-income family you have very little chance of climbing up the social ladder, a right that was not refused to our fathers and grandfathers.

Our Universities are a disaster, with a few shining exceptions in various departments here and there. Our research centers struggle to pay salaries and bills. Many of their stymied young scientists have left careers abroad to come to Greece, only to discover that the cleaners get paid more than they. Our brain power is frustrated, underemployed or unemployed, watching from the sidelines. If any of them dare to venture into commercially exploiting their ideas they will come up against the hydra of Greek bureaucracy, the labyrinth of our tax system and the medusa of our labor laws. Only heroes in the mythical sense could grapple with these monsters and defeat them.

So the question is: given the current situation is there a chance in hell that Greece can ever become a high tech export country? A country that will not only learn to exploit its knowledge capital, but will compete for markets with players such as the Americans, the northern Europeans, the Israelis, the Indians, the Koreans, the Chinese and a host of others who shape the future of our world?

I believe there is. The first step will be to raise the importance of the issue in government. We need a minister for science, technology and innovation to carry out the reforms. He (or she) must have a clear and sustained mandate from the Prime Minister. S/he will have the responsibility of drafting legislation that will cover all the other four areas to be discussed. The current ministry of education will have to be absorbed in the new ministry, and focus on executing the reforms in schools and universities. The general-secretariat for research and technology will have to be integrated also in the new ministry and focus on linking research to industry.

School reform will be one of the four areas that the new ministry should lead. State schools need to be redesigned and teachers made to teach. Parents should be given the right to choose the school for their children, based on school evaluation by an independent agency. Schools should have independent governance and the freedom to become competitive by selecting personnel, expand their curriculum, etc. Their state income will be tagged to their evaluation reports, but they may also attract additional income from charities, local government or industry. Science and technology should be given prominence in the curriculum. Teachers should work with students around science projects and not only courseware. They should go out of the classroom more often and observe nature. Connect science and engineering to reality, to real problems, and enthuse young minds with the exhilaration that comes from discovery. The best performing students must be given a chance for quicker progress. Special schools of excellence for the brightest kids should return to existence. These kids should be taken through a more rigorous curriculum that would satisfy their curiosity and abilities. Gifted kids from the countryside should be helped to study in these schools, their boarding paid by special grants.

Secondly, we must devise a new framework to exploit our knowledge capital, starting from the universities. I’m afraid that the decadence and corruption that prevails in Greek Universities are too deeply ingrained to simply go away with half measures. Universities must be evaluated and some of them must close or change ownership (privitaized or taken over by local governments). One should identify centers of excellence in research, save those only, fund them generously, and build state universities anew, with new rules of governance. Central government cannot afford to fund too many universities of high quality, so I suggest that state universities are kept in five main cities only; Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Ioannina and Herakleion. If the various towns and smaller cities want to keep theirs they should find the money to finance them. It may take a generation to get to the level of really having good state universities again, but it’s the only way to go. Have private universities immediately, in order to absorb the unemployed professors, but also to create a competitive environment for higher education.

Education can be both a citizen right and a market commodity; and we can have the best of both worlds. Students who pass university exams should be given a state grant for four years depending on their family’s income – and the right to spend it to the university of their choice, private or public. Rich kids will get no grant, but will be able to get a student loan. Private and State Universities of high quality will attract students and their grants or loans, and thus survive and flourish. The rest can happily perish. Evaluation of Universities, state and private, will be carried out by an independent agency in order to inform students and their families.

But University reform, however radical and revolutionary, will not deliver any substantial results if not linked to the real economy. There are many who think that there is no real industry in Greece. This is not true. There is and our efforts should focus on what we have, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, materials and software. For the next ten years research centers in our Universities and in our research institutions should act solely as R&D departments for our core industries. Researchers will be paid by the government but work in their labs to increase the international competitiveness of the private enterprises. Contracts will guarantee that profits from patents developed in the labs will be shared with the researchers. If the government, or private entrepreneurs, can bring in investment from abroad in other industries, then surely this framework will prove to be a major incentive for foreign investors. Greece cannot fund every research area there is, so we must focus on supporting our industries and create new jobs. Blue-sky research and basic research should be funded by European grants or by exploiting Greece’s membership to international scientific organizations such as ESA, CERN and EMBL.

Thirdly, a legal and administrative system must be designed and applied in order to finance new high tech industries. This system should give incentives to banks, corporations and angel investors, to invest on high-risk ideas. Labor and tax laws must be simplified. High tech start ups must be given tax breaks for the first three years of their operation, and be able to tap in the R&D resources available at the research centers and the Universities. An important catalyst for technological innovation is defence procurment budgets. Greece spends a considerable precentage of it GDP in defence. A part of this could be allocated to innovative research which could find its way, after a few years, into civil application. This is a common practice for many countries and although Greece tried to do likewise in the 80s and 90s, it failed. It is time to assess the reasons for failure and reestablish a strong link between research and national defence.

Fourthly, there must be support for the high tech industries. The government must build partnerships with our industries which will actively promote our products and services abroad, attract investment and scientific talent, and reinforce our presence to strategic markets. Greece must be rebranded. We must reintroduce ourselves to the world as a reinvented country where bright minds and novel ideas are valued and supported.

Lastly, and perhaps the most difficult task of all, we must foster a new scientific culture in our country. Promote scientists and engineers, and encourage kids to choose science, engineering and maths as their favorite subjects. Professional organizations in science and technology must come out of the shells and reach out to society. The outreach program of the Hellenic Society of Physicists is an example which has to emulated and advanced by chemists, mathematicians and engineers. Big Society must support the work of a truly reformist government, and that includes the major charity foundations of Greece which in the past decades seem to be obsessed with funding opera houses, art museums and music halls that appeal to the few and the mostly old. It is of course fantastic to have these buildings but what we need most urgently now is to catch up with the rest of the world and not left behind. We need to invest in new ideas, in people, in innovative start-ups, in high technology.

Will any of this ever happen? My ruminations are based on a fundamental - or fatal, depending on your view - assumption: that the political leadership of Greece will adopt the vision of reinvention and execute it. Let me hope for a moment, against all odds, that they will.

Whatever happened to Dedalus? (and, by the way, Icarus too)

2010-10-06T20:35:00.001+01:00

The failure and opportunity of technological innovation in Greece

Many myths are born in Greece, one of which claims that Greeks rank amongst the cleverest people in the world. And yet, by examining

Greece

’s ranking in the Global Innovation Index[1] you would be hard-pressed not to disagree. The country was at place 42 last year, at the bottom of every other western European country, a fact reflected on the sobering absence of Greek high technology products and services from the world market. More disparagingly, when the crisis hit, the debate about recovery was focused on investing, and improving, the tourism and agricultural sectors; which makes one wonder if our politicians and mainstream journalists live on another planet, or another era.

A favorite explanation for Greece’ lack of marketable hi-tech ideas is that public investment in research and development is very low. Indeed Greece’s public expenditure on RTD, at 0.57% of GDP[2], is one of the lowest in Europe. The key for improvement, politicians will hasten to claim, is more tax money funneled to science and technology. This may be true in the case of large scientific infrastructures or in fascilitating the mobility of scientists, or even for building a European Research Area free of cross-country obstacles - but the notion of public subsidies or grants is at least debatable when it comes to out-of-the-lab technological innovation. Given the current situation in Greece, not only it is mathematically impossible for the Public Purse to subsidize such type of innovation but, as I will argue, the surest way to stifle bright ideas that can immediately create market value is through government subsidies.

But what about the Universities and the research centres? Surely, they ought to be contributing ideas, people, and means - or don't they? Since Greece joined the EU in the early 1980s billions of Euros have been invested in research infrastructure and payrolls, in universities and research institutes. And more billions have poured in through a superfluity of EU-funded research programs. And yet, there is very little to show for it. With the exeption of certain, isolated, departments here and there Greek universities in general have failed both scientifically and socially. They have become playgrounds for organized groups of brain-washed, leftist students who terrorize staff and their fellow students, and vandalize what is public property in the name of academic freedom. Meanwhile, all kinds of byzantine machinations percolate in the background, for teaching positions that rarely target talent and more often than not are cheap rewards for blind loyalty. Greek universities have thus become a waste of taxpayers’ money which undermine the social cohesion of the country. Why? Because kids from poorer families cannot get the standard of higher education that their more well-off peers –whose parents can afford to send them abroad – do. Bright professors and research students who can, have started to flee. Research institutes do not fare any better. Like every other public institution in Greece they are heavily politicized at the expense of good research work.

The private, high-tech sector does not innovate either. Since the 1980s Greece has been de-industrialized whilst failing to claim a position in the global, digital economy. The result is that the majority of so-called “innovative” companies are proposal-making manufacturers that go after EU-subsidies. It is precisely this policy of subsidization that has rendered Greece a follower and not a leader; and here is the reason why.

The key to marketable innovation is risk. New ideas are risky because you never know if they have any value unless you invest in them first and then roll them out into the real word. So the question arises who takes the risk for all this? By introducing a grant or subsidy system, the risk is borne mainly by the state (or the EU). But this is wrong for at least two reasons, one moral another economical. Why should the taxpayer be burdened with the risk for something that, if successful, will profit only certain individuals? Secondly, the only real motivation for doing things right is when by doing things wrong you have something to lose; grant and subsidy takers do not have a strong enough motivation because they simply do not risk their own money and time; on the contrary, their main economical goal becomes the taking of the subsidy; therefore, their success is measured not by the efficacy of the end product but by the approval of their grant application by a bureaucrat who, in turn, risks not his own but the taxpayers’ money in the name of some vague “social good”. Hence, the proliferation of the proposal-making industry and the strangulation of the really good ideas; the latter constantly have to compete against government subsidies and grants, taxation and levies.

And yet there are many people in Greece with very bright ideas. They are the untapped human capital, the best of the best this country has. They are struggling against a well-entrenched system that is indifferent to merit and hostile to business. Potentially, they could be an agent for change and economic growth, if only they were given a chance. The wonderful thing about the digital economy is that you need very little infrastructure. A computer, a modem and access to the Internet is all you need; that, and a good idea.

Greece

may never become the innovation hub of big multinationals but can become a place for innovation start-ups in the creative industries, the media, web applications, industrial and architectural design, smart green technologies, as well as social innovation.

There is a movement of people, young or somewhat less young entrepreneurs, who are willing to take risks. Today, if they want to start a business they must go through a bureaucratic labyrinth and begin to pay taxes and contributions before they make their first euro. This is a serious impediment for someone who aspires to something speculative and risky. Greece cannot afford to lose her brightest entrepreneurs. At the same time, no one expects the Greek socio-political system to change overnight to suit them. And yet this crisis can become, paradoxically, a golden opportunity for those innovators, if only the government would be willing to allow them to mitigate risk outside the system. No subsidies, no grants, no nanny state. In fact, the best recipe would be to have as little state intervention as possible.

This can be achieved, for example, by allowing technological start-ups a two-year tax and social contributions’ break. If you think you have a great idea register your tech company with the tax office on-line and get a VAT Number. This procedure should only take one minute and be done wholly on the web. Then, all you have to do is concentrate on being inventive and profitable. For two years you don’t have to pay tax. If you want to employ someone, you do not have to pay IKA. You can pay him/her cash in hand at a level agreed between the two of you. You don’t have to pay TEVE, the various levies, whatever. If after two years you have managed to prove that your idea can succeed in the real world then start paying your dues to the society that permitted you to realize your dream. If not, stop - or maybe try again another idea.

Let the government do that and all else will follow. Given this tax-free framework for innovative start-ups the private sector will be more willing to invest in risky projects. There is a superb example called “Open Fund” right now, a wholly-private, grassroots initiative, which offers seed money and precious business advice to technological start-ups. One must not lose hope that in the near future a major reformation of Greek state universities will also take place under pressure by Greece’s lenders, as well as the establishment of the first private universities, which may be able to transform the current, ruinous situation of higher education in Greece. World-class education standards, a business-friendly environment and less government, and this country may manage to bootstrap itself out of its perennial debts, and become a place we can all be proud of.

I am not a believer of myths, but I do believe in people and individuals with a vision and the will to take risks. What we need is for the Dedalus spirit of inventiveness to be given a chance. Remember that there came a time that Dedalus had enough of his state sponsor and decided to move on; whereupon he had his greatest idea: to fly. Like Dedalus we have to leave behind the shores of false security and take to the skies. Which is a risky business, because for innovation to take flight you need to test the limits and aim to go beyond. To invent like a Dedalus but to think, and dream, like an Icarus.

An edited version of the article was published in Odyssey magazine (Summer 2010 issue)

[1] he Global Innovation Index is a global index measuring the level of innovation of a country, produced jointly by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and The Manufacturing Institute (MI), the NAM's nonpartisan research affiliate.

[2] Eurostat Newsrelease 8/9/09

Looking for Klingsor

2010-09-06T14:12:00.002+01:00

Imagine falling asleep and entering a vivid dream, so vivid that when you awake you are going to remember it well. In this dream you find yourself in an extraordinary place that looks like the ruins of a majestic city from a distant past. There is no one around, no one to ask for information, just you and the silent ruins; vestiges of buildings, open spaces that could be agoras, or piazzas, or landing pads for flying machines, and carved pathways that could be remnants of streets or dried-up water channels or whatever. Nothing about this place is familiar. It is the city – if, indeed this is a city – of mysteries.

As you walk on, feeling mystified, perplexed and at the same time full of wonder, you come across a familiar object. It sits atop a podium and, wow, it looks like a book! At last, something you recognize; a book! You are indeed a very lucky person. You rush impatiently to pick it up. Holding your breath you open it in the hope for answers. But as your eyes fall on its pages your initial excitement wanes. Alas, the book is written in a totally unintelligible alphabet. The answers you hoped to find are so out of reach. Nevertheless, you being an intelligent and persistent sort of person, not one to give up so easily, you sit down and start going through the book in a most methodical way, in a single-minded quest to decipher the strange alphabet. Your instinct tells you that the book may hold the city’s mystery. That the unintelligible words might speak the story that fills the gaps. If you managed to read the book you will have arrived at an explanation: you will have known where you are and how you got there, who was there before you and, most importantly perhaps, why the city has been ruined. For it is the last part that concerns you, ultimately, the most. Perhaps the city of gaps is not the past, but the future. Then your quest within your dream comes to an abrupt end and you awake.

Quickly, before dreams, ethereal as they are, volatile in their constitution, unreliable in their loyalties, wipe themselves out from memory, you rush and write down what you saw in your mind’s wonderings. Then you read and re-read what you wrote, re-living your dream. You read your story about a story. If only you were not so absolutely certain that you had been dreaming! Your dream was as real as it could get and the more you read about it the more real it becomes. If someone else read what you wrote she would probably be convinced that you were not a dreamer but a story-teller, or a myth-maker, or an archaeologist, or a forensic expert, or – indeed – a truth-seeker of any guise.

In Jorge Volpi’s novel “In search of Klingsor” the coded book is the book of nature. The undecipherable letters are protons and electrons and neutrons, the colorful zoo of elementary particles. The dream is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. As a reader you find yourself dreaming inside Volpi’s story. Your narrator is Gustav Links, a mathematician and an eye-witness to the incredible physics revolution that took place in Germany between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. His nemesis is a young American physicist-cum-intelligence officer by the implausible name Francis Bacon. Sometimes the narrative - your reader’s dream - ebbs so subtly back and forth from Bacon to Links, as if those two characters were in fact one and the same. The curious duality persists throughout the plot. After all, you are in Heisenberg’s bizarre quarters of quantum trickery, where nothing can be pinpointed with accuracy. You must accept the dubious, the uncertainty of reality. Volpi’s heroes are in this sense very real too, the whole entourage, Einstein, Bohr, Von Neuman, Kurt Gödel, an order of legendary modern knights who seek the Ultimate Answer, the Truth, the Holy Grail. Klingsor, the code name for the elusive villain, the one Bacon seeks so passionately, along with the American Government – not to mention the Soviets – is a hero of many: Volpi’s, as well as Wagner’s. Klingsor is a Nordic incarnation of knowledgeable evil, a Lucifer of the Arctic, as well as the codename given to the mysterious man who commanded the German scientific research effort under the Nazis. Another duality, another story-within-a-story, another book-within-a-book, multiplicities mirrored ad infinitum. Take note that a rumor persists to date that Francis Bacon, the establisher of the scientific method, was the alter ego of William Shakespeare, the writer. Could the fictional characters Francis Bacon and Gustav Links be alternate manifestations of the same person? Like the dual nature of light, could one be the wave and the other the particle? They seem to share so many common passions, particularly with women. They bond in a very similar and often tragic way, they emit similar photons of desperation, they tunnel through history without ever touching upon its events, narrowly escaping everything that occurs around them – including bombs - until the final chapter, when Links, accelerated beyond control at the speed of light, hits upon a wall and disintegrates. Not surprisingly perhaps, Bacon disappears instantly too.

Where did Links and Bacon come from? Whence stories? Do they exist outside the novelist’s mind? And if so where? Are they discovered whilst delving into a platonic realm of perfect forms, or are they invented in the same way that the light bulb was? Is the brain function of the scientist similar to that of the poet, when they compose their respective works?

Apparently dissimilar and mutually exclusive, the “two cultures” took divorce several centuries ago. Plato, ironically, would have approved. In the Republic he makes explicit his distaste for poets and instructs for their exclusion from civilized society (grudgingly, presumably for sentimental reasons, he allows only for the occasional reading of Homer). Descartes cements the divorce further by stating that scientists deal with the “material”, the res extensa and poets, writers etc. (and priests, the other class of story-tellers) with the “spiritual” or the “imagined”, the res cogitans.

In the wake of the 21st century the imagined is being recorded in the bright colors of brain scans. The imagined is now also a “thing”, i.e. a rightful member of the class of res extensa. Dreams are scientific objects to be peered upon in the same way that chemical molecules are. Soon, with the further advancement of brain scan technology, dream watchers in University labs will be able to track dreams at the level of neurotransmitter concentrations and electrochemical pulses. But we do not have to wait for this near future. We can safely conclude now that the imaginer (the scientist, or the writer) and the imagined (the theory, or the novel) are all things. In this sense, literature and science have rediscovered each other in a post-modernist, ultra-materialist fashion. This amazing notion also confirms something we always knew, namely that scientists are story-tellers too. The evolutionary theory is the narrative of life on Earth, from its just-chemical past to its multi-cellular, car-driving, Earth-polluting present. Geology tells us a story about the formation of the continents and thus explains their constitution, morphology, oil wells as well as nasty occurrences such as volcanoes and quakes. Cosmology spins a much longer story, about the whole of the Universe, how it came about starting from a hot soup of exploding energy. Science: stories, within stories, dreams within dreams, things about things, brains areas flashing on a screen, dopamine, serotonin, osmosis, the chemical works.

The trouble with this equalizing notion, however, is that it cancels distinctions. The artificial divorce is off – hurrah! - and narratives are re-united; however, as schoolchildren will confirm, novels are not science and science is not a novel. If science and novels were the one and the same, then we would not have airplanes, or telephones, or antibiotics. Earth could look any way you liked. And birds, sometimes, would talk and even prophesize the future. We would be living inside someone’s imagination, without fixed natural laws, where anything could happen anytime. Miracles, i.e. unexplained freaks of haphazard occurrence, would be the bill of every moment. Experience thankfully says otherwise. And brain scans, alas, are furnishing us with little more than triviality. In fact, it is not only trivial but outright wrongful to surmise that narratives of scientists and narratives of writers are substantially equivalent, in the manner that liquid water is essentially the same as ice. A boundary exists, we can be certain of that. But where is the boundary? And what is it made of?

If the dreamscapes of science are different from the dreamscapes of literature, then they must lie in totally different dimensions. There must be a single, quintessential element that differentiates those different categories of dreamscapes beyond doubt.

That element exists. And it is called the experiment.

In the sum total of infinite dreamscapes, there is only a finite number where the experimental method works. There lie the dreamscapes of science. Nowhere else, in no other literary narrative space whatsoever, can you design and execute experiments. Only in the dreamscapes where experiments are meaningful science stories are being made, tested and told.

Writers are not experimentalists, not in the way scientists are. Literature is believed in a different way, without the need to prove that its stories are, indeed, so. Just imagine people walking out of the theatre because they cannot believe that the actors are who they say they are in a play. The suspension of disbelief granted to a good novel, or a good play, is certainly not granted to any scientific theory. In the latter case the opposite is true. Doubt rules the day. Popper suggests that scientific theories must be falsifiable in order to be worth their name. Novels do not have to be. You cannot prove that Links or Bacon never existed. Not only it is impossible to prove Volpi a liar but it is also beside the point.

And yet the dreamscapes of writers and scientists intersect. Both writers and scientists, belonging to the same species of animal, with brains wired in similar fashion and subject to limits set by the senses and known to theorists of knowledge, share a lot. Above all they share the same method of story-telling. Novels and scientific theories go through successive hypotheses, failures, deductions and intuitions. Ultimately however, a novelist is given the Nobel Prize for telling lies that reveal an inner truth, while a scientist for telling truths that reveal the depth of our collective ignorance or - if you prefer - the inner lies that haunts us.

For science and literature, imagination is a shared laboratory, ideas the denizens of scientists’ and novelists’ minds, their continuous mutations and transformations the material that feeds their brains in order to deliver their work. Within that shared laboratory it is not infrequent that they both discover the same, ultimate, truth. Like Klingsor and the Graal, like Physics and the Theory of Everything, like the Volpi’s novel and any novel or scientific theory, a path is plowed where there was none, a way is found in the dark, a story is told, to fill the gaps and offer answers to as yet unanswered questions, to ultimately arrive at the ultimate gap that always waits inside the nucleus of every story. And in that ultimate, nuclear, gap, novelists and scientists alike, shall always find the beginning of yet another story.

Hot chocolate in Mexico City

2010-09-06T14:11:00.002+01:00

Cortez annihilated the Aztec Empire and enthroned himself as the new ruler of what was to be henceforth named New Spain of the Ocean Sea. Faithful to a centuries-long tradition of establishing the victor’s capital upon the ruins of the vanquished he gave instructions for the new imperial capital to be built on the swamplands of Tenochtitlan. The result, the modern megapolis of Mexico City has been slowly sinking under its own weight ever since, a curious testament to Cortez’s ill-informed vision. They say that some day most of the buildings will have become too unsafe to inhabit. Perhaps in the next century Mexico City will become a ghost town abandoned by its populace. As I drink a cup of hot chocolate in a Starbucks in La Zona Rosa I am thinking of Cortez. Throngs of shoppers and passers-by parade in front of my eyes and they look to me like reincarnated Aztecs bidding their time against eternity, or like ghosts going in and out of time. A gay couple canoodles happily at a table nearby oblivious to the underground forces of suction, and more interested in their own. I imagine a Spanish soldier dreaming a nightmare and waking up in the middle of the night, rushing to Cortez, finding the big man sleeping in the company of two young native girls, and crying out to him, let us leave this place now chief, let us go back down to the coast, let us build our city there. I am a coffee drinker really. Chocolate I chose because, originally, it has been a native American drink exported to the so-called Old World. My attempt to an honest tribute is tainted with unfortunate franchise irony. Fat dark clouds seal the last remaining porthole of blueness in the sky and rain begins to fall in abundance. I feel the water entering the underground veins of Mexico City, seeping and uniting with the never-defeated swamp, sapping the foundations, conspiring towards the city’s ultimate demise. Water from the sky, water underneath. Ten thousand years later: a mystery of city abandonment puzzles the visitors from Star Orion. They are descendants of long-forgotten Earth colonists returning to a deserted Earth, a world too hot to be inhabited, too lifeless to be loved. A young cosmonaut wakes up from a dream as the spaceship enters orbit, a nightmare of a serpent god. I get up and without care of getting wet return to my sinking hotel.

Hikikomori

2010-09-06T14:10:00.004+01:00

The girl comes dressed like a character from a video game. She materializes out of thin air. Or, perhaps, she comes in through the air, with the blowing of the wind. She says, pointing at the TV. “Anything on?”

But the girl cannot go through walls. She has tried many times and failed. Bangs her head, hurts her hands as she tries to push her way into the tightly-knit molecules of tar and plaster. In the end she gives up. “OK, what's new?” she huffs and plops on the side of the bed.

The character she impersonates changes every time she visits. One day she may be dressed like something out of Super Mario, or Goemon, or Twin Bee, or Mortal Combat. Dragon Quest makes her look the sexiest. She arrives with a twin blade axe and boots up to her thighs and a bra made of leather imitation plastic. Nothing on TV. “Have you got something to eat?” Leftovers from McDonalds.

The girl fades away.

Static.

The girl returns.

Micrographia

2010-09-06T14:10:00.001+01:00

In the disturbed village of Saint Horribilum, in the northern borders of our empire, the clock that one finds in the rather faceless central square comprises a series of noteworthy technical oddities. Such has been the apparent intent of its makers, to elucidate the vanity of existence, that they have – most strikingly - omitted the dials. Then, they introduced a functionless automaton, a self-negation of a machine that does not work, cannot work, will never work, but nevertheless creates to the beholder the feeling of imminent working. Eyes closed, limps hanging, a diaphanous skeleton which may, if awaken, speak the time. No one lives in the central square since the clock was brought to the village, installed in the church tower and inaugurated by the Emperor’s envoy. The villagers abandoned their homes soon afterwards and all access to the square has been blocked ever since. The visitor (alas, one has to be a believer in miracles to imagine anyone wanting to visit Saint Horribilum) will have to offer considerable bribery and swear secrecy to the gods, in order to be taken to see the notorious clock. One such visitor, probably the only one ever, has written to me recently with his report. There are aspects of the report pertaining to matters of imperial security which I must conceal for obvious reasons. But I am at liberty to disclose one more interesting aspect of the village’s engineering anathema: its cunning resemblance to a miniscule globulin first encountered by the great English polymath Robert Hooke. Perhaps then, the clock is not made of nuts and bolts. Perhaps is not man-made. Perhaps it is an animal.

The Archive

2010-09-06T14:09:00.002+01:00

The Archive is complete. Nothing is missing from it. Its tomes have been catalogued with absolute precision, with meticulous care, and a detailed index has been constructed for all time. There is nothing more to add. To subtract is a capital offence. The task of the Master Archivist is to maintain the order of the Archive; to ensure its completeness; to eternalize its perfection; to preserve its integrity and purity. In fact, his title is misleading. His not truly an Archivist, for he does not archive anything. As said, the Archive is complete. It contains everything that is to be contained. Nothing exists, or is allowed to exist, that is not already there. Therefore, the Archivist is more like a guardian; or a keeper, a watcher, a minder. He exists in order to guarantee that everything remains so forevermore. That nothing will be either lost or added. So that the balance may never be disturbed. If however, as it occasionally happens, a new piece of material is created, by some paradoxical twist of misfortune, then the Archivist must initiate the process of it destruction. He must order a message to be sent to the prefect agent and thereof to the field agents in the area of creation, who in turn will have to make sure the material gets eliminated immediately. You could say that the order of things is incarnated in the watchful preservation of the Archive. The Archive is all there is.

Etherwave Proxima Q

2010-09-06T14:08:00.004+01:00

The technology is rather simple, I am told. A square wooden box, big enough for an average sized human to crouch within, painted blue or green on the outside. It is important that water is somehow present, perhaps a glass of water placed nearby; although the word “water”, written in any language, or even insinuated, would also suffice. One does not have to enter the box. It is however imperative to imagine oneself inside: eyes closed, relaxed, without worries or concerns, as if about to depart on a long and pleasant journey. The box is to be placed in an open space, a field of grass or, preferably, a desert. One does not have to be near it. In fact, the most famous virtuosos of Etherwave Proxima Q usually sit hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles away from their instruments. Sounds are produced spontaneously by the instrument. Players do not produce sounds and cannot make the instrument produce sounds either. They can only modulate, shape and hopefully re-compose the haphazardly-produced sounds into music. Trained players can force sounds into the natural scale by simply thinking about it. And can control pitch by breathing deep, or shallow, increasing or decreasing respectively. Weather permitting (storms are better than windless days, and hurricane season better still), one can tune the instrument into a full-blown orchestra. Recent reports suggest that sunspot activity may affect tonality and polyphonic spectrum. But it is too early for conclusions. The psychic overhead of monitoring the sun’s chaotic patterns while at the same time imagining sounds is too burdensome and one has yet to come with a full-scale piece of solar etherwave worthy of public performance.

The nomadic texts

2010-09-06T14:08:00.001+01:00

It began as a simple translation. The civil servants who still resided idly at the Archives, not having anything better to do with their time, spending their working hours doing no work at all, decided to practice their language skills. They chose a text at random. (No one knows what the initial text was). At first, the text was translated in a language that one of them had a very sketchy, knowledge of. In fact, he had knowledge only of its existence, not of the language itself. Luckily, in the Archives, there was a grammar book written by a dead scholar, a singular world expert in that forgotten language, and the servants used it as a guide. A peculiar characteristic of that language was that verbs migrated. Perhaps because the people who originally spoke that language were migrants too, lost souls wandering the vastness of grassy steppes. Their spoken words travelled up and down their sentences, as if the horizon was nowhere, changing their meaning, as one would have to do if one lived inside an immutable medium. For example, if one intended to say “tomorrow I will meet you at the battlefield,” but changed his mind half way while uttering the sentence, he could simply transpose the verb, and the sentence could read any odd perturbation such as, “the battle is for tomorrow but I will not be there”, or “tomorrow is a fine day to battle”, or “meet me tomorrow and we shall see what happens”, etc.

At first, the civil servants found their game an amusing one. The initial text was made to mean increasingly different things, verbs jumped sentences as if by their own will, and every time they translated back and forth, the text – or should we now set texts – became alive, like a swarm, like a superorganism, a like a nest of nomadic ants seeking a place to entomb their colony. Several days later, the merriness of the civil servants that was to be heard by passers-by, as they played their language game and laughed at the ever more meaningless results, ceased. No one paid attention at the beginning, assuming that the servants had become bored at long last, and had fled the Archives, for there was no reason for them to be there in the first place, the whole Civil Service having been defunct since the island’s disappearance. When they were found, years later, or eons, or tomorrow in the battle, they met.

The Mission Diaries I

2010-09-06T14:07:00.000+01:00

The task that befell the High Office was to assemble a mission to conduct a methodical search for the lost island. It was a decision that many in the High Office dreaded. So when the paper with the order arrived - by official post so that the regular excuses for endless delay would not hold the slightest water - dread gave way to exasperation. A committee was put together hastily, leaves were cancelled, lights were switched on for working deep into the hours of night, and they threw themselves into the Archives in search of potential members for such a mission. They studied the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, the Aineiad; and took notes of a thorough list of skills that a team ought to combine; unmatched mastery in the martial arts, superhuman navigational instinct, indomitable courage, unparalleled engineering genius, and most importantly, formidable psychic powers that could bend space-time at will. The Committee went through the phone book and called a few numbers. In the following days a long line of applicants appeared outside the High Office’s office building, a twisting snake of eagerly-awaiting hopefuls. Centuries later, when word of the island’s whereabouts and the fate of the mission finally reached our world, it became clear that the selection process was erratic, not to put it in any finer words. It was said that among the crew a certain fellow, a borrowed soul from a novel not yet written, a conjurer of dreams, was destined to lead the mission through the most treacherous of waters, and that it was thanks to him that the mission did not lose its way completely, that it managed to circumnavigate the Sea of Emotions and the Spheres of Galactic Apprehension and then ride on the spiral Nebulas of Ignorance, and then…Oh, but their story never ends. And in so far as that dreamer fellow is concerned, the Archives speak mostly of his infamous talent; to enter minds like a worm enters a fruit, to burrow all the way to their nucleus, to see things that no mind could ever see by itself. His name was Cyrus.

1/137.036

2010-09-01T19:21:00.005+01:00

This is the alpha constant, a pure number which determines the structure of atoms in our universe. Had it been more than 4% different it would be impossible to have stable carbon atoms, and therefore there would not be carbon-based life-forms writing blogs and pondering about the mystery of this number.

To get the alpha constant you must multiply the square of the electron charge by 2 pi and then divide the product by the product of the speed of light times the Planck constant. So it is a constant of constants, with the difference that is dimensionless, i.e. id does not have measurement units. If an alien civilization used any other different set of measurement units to describe the same physical constants they would arrive at the same, pure, number.

So why this number? Why this universe so fine-tuned for life? During the long debate about the alpha constant some of the most logical, and at the same time crazy, hypotheses, were (a) that there are infinite number of universes and we just happen to inhabit in the life-friendly one – the “multiple universes hypotheses” and (b) that we inhabit a small part of a much, much, much bigger universe where all kinds of variations of nature’s constants occur – “the multiverse hypothesis”.

In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all; evidence in favour of a multiverse. If their observations stand the test of independent duplication, then we can imagine the multiverse as a giant ocean, lifeless for the most part, where nothing happens, and only after travelling for an endless distance the interuniversal explorer of our imagination may come along a tiny coral reef, mostly dead too but still too interesting not to miss.

For our explorer would observe structure and complexity therein, and if she looked deeper still, she would discover the strangest and most wonderful behaviour of matter and energy, how they bonded together to form carbon-based compounds, that became more complex still, they reproduced themselves, they developed into ecosystems, into life, and at some stage, given enough time and vast amounts of luck, into intelligence.

Aristotle in a chip

2010-07-16T12:17:00.005+01:00

The reemergence of ancient notions in the modern field of bioinformatics

Aristotle, in his zoological opus Historia Animalium (The history of animals), launches into his analysis of the animal kingdom by observing differences and similarities between the species. For example, he observes that bats and birds both have wings, so he surmises that they must be grouped together; like fish and dolphins should. By examining animal anatomy and by comparing features such as number or shape of legs (or absence of legs), wings, types of skin, habitats, etc., Aristotle put together a logically coherent taxonomy of animal life that remained virtually unchallenged until Linnaeus. This idea of comparative anatomy, as systematized by Aristotle, is essentially the study of homology (from the Greek word “hómoios”: “similar”) – i.e. of similarities. The idea flowed naturally from Aristotelian Logic and in particular his theory of syllogisms: is A equals B and C equals B, then A equals C. If one replaces “equal” with “similar”, then homology is the logical corollary of equality.

Ancient Greek, and by consequence Medieval European, homology was explained by ideal archetypes, by timeless blueprints designed by a heavenly architect, and into which the objects of perceived reality were molded. Darwin’s revolutionary idea was to provide a naturalistic explanation to animal homology, thus ushering in the era of the scientific study of life.

One and a half centuries after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species the modern brethren of his Victorian genius spend much of their time, alas not aboard adventurous sailing yachts roaming the southern seas, but in front of computer monitors applying an ever-expanding arsenal of mathematical and computational techniques in the analysis of living organisms.

One of the most significant application areas of bioinformatics – as this contemporary fusion of biology, computer science and mathematics is termed – is in the study of complex molecules, such as proteins.

Proteins, the building blocks of cells, have structures made up from their particular sequence of aminoacids (which are, in turn, the building blocks of proteins); the way these amino acid molecules unfold in three-dimensional space is what determines the function of a protein. So it is very important for biologists to be able to predict the structure of proteins. What we know is that a protein structure is generally determined by the sequence of the gene that codes for it. And here is where the notion of homology reemerges. It is used to predict the function of a gene. If the function of gene A, whose function is known, is homologous to the sequence of gene B, whose function is unknown, one could infer that B may share A’s function. In a technique called homology modeling, this information is used to predict the structure of a protein once the structure of a homologous protein is known.

Caveat Lector: biologists beware! Meddling with mathematicians who are, secretly, Platonic devotees, may one day lead you to the defense of positivist naturalism against subversive philosophical attacks from the musical spheres of perfect, ideal, proteins-out-there. Ancient ideas, as you should know, are very hard to beat.

The Word Machine of Lagado

2010-07-12T19:56:00.003+01:00

Jonathan Swift published the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and since then it has never been out of print. In Book III, Gulliver is abandoned by pirates on the continent of Balnibarbi. After a visit to the flying island of Laputa, he is taken to the Academy of Lagado, where “useless projects” are undertaken. There, he is given a demonstration of a word machine, which is nothing less than a giant mechanical computer used for making sentences and books. The satirical aspect of Swift’s idea is that the machine renders obsolete any study or expertise; an absolute idiot can write a masterpiece by virtue of cranking the machine. In the post-modern context the irony becomes a tenet: all texts are self-produced, they have an transcendental-bibliographical animus which acts like a virus. Human minds are the hosts of this viral propagation and mutation of texts. The writer “thinks” he is the creator but he is merely an empty vessel, a hapless idiot.

The word machine of Lagado has fascinated computer dreamers too. It is the original idea behind Hilbert’s Ur-algorithm – a logical contraption that, should humanity come to an end, can recreate by itself, automatically, the works and knowledge that was lost. The machine that can write any book. The mathematical formula that can prove every theorem. Thanks to Gödel we now know that such a machine, or algorithm, is impossible to construct. But the fascination with the word machine of Lagado is too strong to let go. Like a childhood dream it returns again and again to haunt the adult life with nostalgia. What if there is a way round Godel’s incompleteness theorem? What if there exists, somewhere in an infinite multiverse, a word machine like the one dreamt by Swift? What if our thoughts are written in the pages of its infinite books?

Ida, the “missing” link

2009-05-30T09:54:00.003+01:00

“Ida”, a 47-million-year-old primate skeleton has been unveiled amid much fanfare and a flurry of well-orchestrated media announcements. It coincided with the release of a book and a television documentary, both of which had been prepared under a cloak of secrecy.

For a fact, the fossil is a paleontologist’s dream come true. It belongs to a species named Darwinius Masillae (after Darwin and the place of its discovery Messel, Germany) and it has been exquisitely preserved. Parts of its last meal were found inside its stomach. We thus know that she (for the specimen is probably a female) was an herbivore who feasted on fruits, seeds and leaves. She was overcome by carbon dioxide gas whilst drinking from the Messel lake: the still waters of the lake were often covered by a low lying blanket of the gas as a result of the volcanic forces that formed the lake and which were still active. X-rays revealed a broken wrist which may have contributed her demise. Hampered by her broken wrist, Ida slipped into unconsciousness, was washed into the lake, and sunk to the bottom, where she was preserved for posterity. When she died she was approximately nine months old and she measured almost three feet high.

Ida lived at a critical period in Earth’s history called the Eocene. Earth was just beginning to take the form that we recognize today – the Himalayas were being formed and modern flora and fauna evolved. Following the extinction of dinosaurs, the ancestors of modern mammals, including primates, lived amid vast jungle. Till today, scientists’ most-valued fossils of primates from that era comprised mostly of teeth. It is therefore easy to imagine the scientific excitement about Ida. But is she the common ancestor of humans and apes? Is she really the “missing” link?

Behind the media hubbub lays a bitter scientific trench war with regards to human evolution. Follow the tree of human evolution backwards and when you reach around 6 million years into the past you are going to meet the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. Go further back several more million years and you arrive at a big enigma: when did the earliest “anthropoid” primates (who ended up as apes, monkeys and humans) split from their even earlier ancestors who were lemur-like? The question is paramount to scientists because lemurs and anthropoids differ in many significant ways. For example, lemurs have claws and anthropoids have fingernails.

There are three fractions battling it out with their respective theories. Firstly, the discoverers of Ida who think our ultimate ancestor is their finding, Ida the Darwinius, which belongs to a lemur-look-alike species called “adapids”. Then there are those who support that the ancestral split happened thanks to the “omomyids”, an extinct group that looked like tarsiers; and, lastly, there are those who contend that our great-great-great grandfathers were sweet-looking, wide-eyed primal tarsiers (whose descendants are still around today). The science team behind Ida has received considerable criticism for trying to “steal the show” by claiming that their specimen resolved the matter for ever.

The way scientists build a case for a species being the ancestor of another is by looking at certain anatomical characteristics that are common to the two species to the exclusion of others. Darwinius is linked to anthropoids on the basis of the absence of two common lemur characteristics: a tooth comb (a set of forward-facing incisors) and a grooming claw (a special claw on the foot). Since anthropoids lack such traits too, the scientists surmise that Ida is closely connected to them. And yet, the analysis published in their paper leaves many questions unanswered. Press releases subtly claim that 95% of the evidence points out that the scientists are right. But this claim is ludicrously unscientific. The same percentage of evidence - and more – used to confirm the Ptolemaic theory that the Sun revolved around Earth; and yet the theory was completely wrong. Some critics contend that Darwinius is not an adapid at all, but a convergent subspecies of tarsier. Anyway, whatever species she may turn out to be given a more scholastic analysis, could Ida be the “missing link”?

Although the scientists who studied Darwinius deny making such statements, the promotion machine of History Channel who produced the documentary, and Brown, Little, the publisher who released the relevant book, are making the most out of this angle, calling their respective products “The Link” and the relevant website “Revealing the Link”. Which has exasperated evolutionary biologists the world over. Why? Because it chimes with the agenda of creationists who doubt the colossal corpus of evidence supporting evolution and request to see “missing fossilized links”. Because to think of evolution as an unbreakable chain made of links is woefully untrue. Species evolve from previous species following great numbers of seamless generations of gradually accumulated characteristics. There are no distinct “breaks” and therefore no “links”.

Presumably, the marketing gurus who sold the story to the media transpired that this was an excellent way to transgress the arcane scientific debates of human evolution, extract Ida from the obscurity of science journals and science meetings, and communicate her story to the public. At first glance, this may appear imaginative, commendable even. Moreover, one might argue that using a bad cliché to talk good science is sometimes de rigueur. As Jørn H. Hurum, the scientist at the University of Oslo who acquired the fossil and assembled the team of scientists who studied it, claimed: “Any pop band is doing the same thing. Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

And yet, the sloppiness by which the scientists examined this very significant fossil if only to support their theory, their hurry to meet a publication deadline in order to coincide with History Channel’s premiering of the relevant show, as well as the ridiculous framing of Ida as the “missing link”, put all good intentions into doubt. Perhaps, cynical as it may seem, the scientists who analyzed Ida in such haste, were competing for scarce funding. Funding is undoubtedly a serious issue in today’s economic crisis. One should wonder however, if the backlash which the Ida science team currently receives will do them any good in the long run. The bad precedent of Hwang Woo-suk, the Korean geneticist “superstar” who in 2006 claimed to have cloned a human being - only to be exposed that he was lying - should have taught them a lesson. Hwang was ridiculed, discredited, and following the debacle his research got no further funding.

The only ones who are sure to gain something out of all this are the publishers and television networks who are milking the cash out of the so-called “link”. They are doing so by treating a primate fossil as a spectacle. However, what makes science different from sport, or pop music, or Paris Hilton, is that science matters much more to society in the long term. That, unlike rock stars, scientists may achieve recognition by means of truly valuable scientific discoveries and not by claiming whatever comes. The scientists who unveiled Darwinius should have known that sacrificing good science for the sake of media sensationalism does little service to science and society alike.

Published in the Athens News on May 30th 2009

Eternity

2009-05-15T12:55:00.002+01:00

A conversation with Nikos Prantzos

When trying to convey the feeling of eternity Nikos Prantzos likes to quote an ancient Nordic myth. “In a distant country stands an enormous rock in the shape of a cube, each of its sides measuring one hundred kilometers. Once every ten thousand years a small bird flies over the rock and for a few moments rubs its beak on it. When the rock has disappeared, completely worn away by the rubbing of the beak, one day in eternity will have completed.” Prantzos has calculated how long this will take; 10³⁰ years (1 with 30 zeros following). But as the future of our universe goes, this mind-bending timescale is but a mere moment. Protons, the subatomic particles at the nuclei of every chemical element will disappear in 10³³ years. Black holes, having gulped whatever remaining matter, will evaporate too in 10⁶⁶ years. For an astrophysicist such as Prantzos the cosmological future is eternity raised to the power of eternity many times over.

Born in Volos in 1956 Prantzos is one of the most prominent European astrophysicists. Currently a Director of Research the Astrophysical Institute in Paris and a professor at University Paris VI, he sits on the editorial boards of several significant scientific journals, and consults the European Space Agency. His main scientific interests focus on the evolution of the universe, and he has published pioneering work in the investigation of the natural processes that take place inside stars and galaxies. He is also passionate about communicating his science to the wider public. His popular science book “Voyages in the future” has been awarded the Jean Rostand prize in France, and has been translated in a number of languages, including English and Greek. In it he tackles a major philosophical dilemma that has troubled western thinkers ever since the nineteenth century, when scientists realized that the corollary of thermodynamics was the ultimate “heat death” of the universe. “Twelve years ago”, adds Prantzos, “astronomers discovered that the expansion of the Universe became more rapid in the past few billion years. If this accelerated expansion of the Universe continues in the far future all stars will run out of energy and die. Matter will ultimately decay to elementary particles and radiation, which will be diluted in a vast and cold space.”

So since the universe is destined to end with a pathetic whimper, what could be the meaning of life? If the ultimate future is dark nothingness, why bother with anything? “The vastness of the timescales involved,” says Prantzos, “is such that it leaves plenty of time to us - or to any future civilization - to consider and construct not one but literally millions of interesting futures. Along the way, meaning and purpose will be redefined time and again”.

Of course, in an ever expanding Universe, with temperatures dropping everywhere to nearly absolute zero and matter decaying into elementary particles and diluted radiation, indefinite survival appears impossible. And this is true not only for biological creatures such as us made of flesh and blood, but also of robots made of bolts and nuts. Nevertheless, Prantzos is agnostically optimistic. He contends that one should not forget that our present understanding of the Universe, based on the physics of the 20^th century, is incomplete. “New theories will certainly emerge in the decades and centuries to come, perhaps offering us different and more optimistic perspectives for the far future of intelligence in the Cosmos”.

And if we earthlings don’t manage to figure things out someone else might. Which brings in the centuries-old, and ever-fascinating, question of life and intelligence elsewhere in the Universe.

Science has firmly established that the laws of physics – and therefore chemistry - are the same everywhere in the Universe. However, even if biology is essentially chemistry, biological evolution depends on many unpredictable conditions: it was the disappearance of dinosaurs following an asteroid hitting Earth 65 million years ago that paved the way to mammals and thereof allowed the ascent of humans. Prantzos points out that evolution from bacteria towards high intelligence, and further on to a technological civilization, looks like an extremely improbable event. He is not the first to doubt the existence of ETs. In 1948, the famous Italian physicist Enrico Fermi highlighted the fact that no convincing trace of an extraterrestrial visit to Earth has ever been found, despite the fact that there are billions of stars much older than the Sun in our Galaxy. Pranztos notes that “Fermi interpreted that absence of evidence as evidence that civilizations undergo a nuclear holocaust just before mastering space travel.” He contends that if there were indeed hundreds of civilizations in our Galaxy, it is improbable that all of them blew up or failed to reach us for some reason. “We should therefore get familiar with the idea that we are probably alone in the Galaxy”, he adds. And yet he remains a supporter of SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) who look for extraterrestrial signals from space. “Despite its small chances of success, the rewards would be enormous if a single such signal is ever detected”, he says.

Aliens may not be in Prantzos mind when he looks at the stars, but space travel is. As a young boy marveling at the night sky over the Pagasitikos Gulf and Mount Pelion, he dreamt of becoming an astronaut. Growing up in the 60s, with the Moon as humanity’s next frontier was inspiring to a whole generation of kids like he, and Prantzos regrets that young people today do not have that same opportunity. Today, although man conquered Moon after travelling 380,000 kilometres from Earth, no astronaut has gone further than 500 kilometres from our planet since 1972. “Progress has been terribly slow both because astronaut security is a more important and funding is considerably less,” he says. “The Cold War and the competition between United States and Soviet Union hastened progress in space matters enormously”.

What appeared an easy feat in the 60s looks much harder today. The harshness of space environment makes problematic all plans for long term exploration of space by humans. The construction of adequate protecting shelters in space will require considerable efforts and resources. Furthermore, access to space is very costly because of the gravitational attraction of our planet. Until today rockets, using chemical propulsion and design principles invented by the Chinese centuries ago, remain humanity’s only means to escape Earth. Prantzos hopes that a new generation of propulsion technologies, such as nuclear, ionic, antimatter, or solar sail pushed by Sun's radiation, will provide alternative and faster ways to visit our nearest worlds, such the Moon and Mars.

Prantzos is particularly fond of manned missions into space and a believer that investing in them is a sound decision for the future of humanity. “The situation of our planet obviously requires all of our attention today”, he says. “We should try to heal the wounds of Mother Earth before embarking to ambitious programs of space travel and colonization of space. However, this does not preclude a reasonable step-by-step, long term program of space exploration. Moon, Mars and the asteroids are the obvious targets of such a program, at least for the 21^st century. All major space agencies have interesting projects for those targets. I don’t think that funding issues are prohibitive. When compared to the cost of the Iraq war, or to the one of the recent financial crisis, the annual cost of a long-term project of human space exploration is substantially smaller”.

Published in the Athens News on May 15th

A traveler’s companion to Mars

2009-05-01T07:35:00.001+01:00

In 1894 a wealthy Bostonian by the name Percival Lowell built an astronomical observatory in Arizona dedicated to learning more about enigmatic Mars. It was the time of canal-building on Earth, with the French having completed Suez a few years earlier and the Americans getting busy on cutting across the Isthmus of Panama. Lowell, saw canals on Mars too. Inspired by Darwin, he imagined life on Mars spawning and evolving over time into intelligent creatures who built planet-wide aqueducts to bring water from the poles to the equatorial deserts. He saw lush areas of cultivation, and he imagined cities and people not very much unlike us. Lowell’s ideas, published in his widely-read book Mars the Abode of Life, culminated humanity’s timeless fascination with the red planet with a profound conclusion: that we are not alone in the universe. Indeed, the intelligent beings who presumably constructed those irrigation marvels were but a relatively small leap across the dark sea of space. H.G Wells, penned The War of the Worlds by borrowing heavily on Lowell’s ideas, if only to illustrate what bad neighbors can do to each other. At the dawn of the 20th century Earth was abuzz with Mars excitement.

Lowell had put together a wonderful theory by drawing on the latest science. Alas, the theory was completely wrong. There are no Martians. Several fly-bys by spacecrafts, beginning with Mariner 4 in 1964, and not a few landings by robotic rovers, have ascertained that. There are no canals either. But there are plenty of fascinating and intriguing features to explore. There are dried riverbeds and meandering streams, wide landforms that resemble lakes, gullies that slope down mountainsides as if sculptured by torrential rains, volcanoes and underwater ice. There are telltale signs aplenty that once upon a time Mars was a completely different world. In fact, many scientists believe that Mars used to be covered with oceans and had an atmosphere and a benign climate similar to Earth’s. Then about 3.5 billion years ago a catastrophic event turned the planet into a cold and barren desert. That is why the quest for Martian life - albeit of a more humble, bacterial nature - has not ceased. It is possible that unicellular organisms still exist, buried deep under the surface. Their discovery would be of tremendous significance, for they would provide conclusive evidence that life is not a local, earthly phenomenon, but ubiquitous, something that might permeate the cosmos.
The list of enigmas that scientists draw each time they push the Mars exploration agenda is long. Our planetary neighbor is similar to Earth in many more interesting ways. Although half its size it has roughly the same land area. Martian days (called “sols”) are only a 37 minutes longer than our 24 hours. A tilted axis of rotation creates seasons; summers, falls, winters and springs follow each other in a year that is twice as long, as Mars takes 699 “sols” to journey once around the Sun. The Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Both planetary siblings have polar icecaps. Why then has the Red Planet met such a disastrous fate? What catastrophe happened all those billion years ago? What can we learn about its climate that can help us understand the climate here on Earth?

Mars may be a must-go destination for other reasons too. On March 31st six volunteers locked themselves inside a hermetically living space in a laboratory in Moscow. For the ensuing 105 days, they will be eating dehydrated food and breathe recycled air. Their communication with the outside world will have a twenty-minute delay. Simulated emergencies (e.g. equipment failure), as well as real ones will keep them on their toes, as will a number of scientific experiments that they will have to perform. Their every move and vital sign will be monitored around the clock. It sounds like the ultimate version of “Big Brother” but is in fact a simulation experiment for a human mission to Mars. If a real mission ever sets off, the astronauts will have to deal with the physiological and psychological aspects of being confined in a tin can hurled into space, bombarded by cosmic radiation, and sailing towards another world at a pace very unlike the zapping speeds sci-fi films have us accustomed to. The trip to Mars may take up to eight long months.

Once those future space pioneers get there however, there will have little to celebrate for. Mars is not a friendly place. Temperatures may vary from -870C at night to a “balmy” -250C in the afternoon. The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and the air pressure less than 1% that of Earth’s. A space suit must be worn when walking about. But walking will be easy because the gravity is only one third that of our world. The sky would look bright pinkish because of the fine reddish dust blown aloft by Martial winds. Dustdevils roam the surface like wandering phantoms and kick up so much dust that visibility often gets close to zero. At sunset, with the winds subsiding, there may be some scattered clouds in the sky, and as our astronauts prepare for their night rest they may momentarily look up to the bright, tinkling stars, and easily recognize the same constellations, with one difference. Somewhere over the horizon a tiny bright blue ball of light will be gleaming: Earth.

There are many who doubt the usefulness, let alone wisdom, of such a risky and costly undertaking as a manned mission to Mars. To sustain a permanent base in Mars would be even more perilous. But as the Moscow experiment shows danger, and discomfort, seem to have a strange appeal to human nature, one not to be underestimated. There will always be people ready to take the challenge, no matter how impossible it may seem. The benefits are almost impossible to estimate. We will never know what there is to gain from landing humans on Mars unless we do it. For now we have at least two good reasons to attempt it. One has to do with pushing the technological envelope of space flight further. For the past sixty years very little progress has been made in space propulsion. A human mission to Mars will require a new generation of rockets and fuels; an eight-month trip is just too long and has to be cut back drastically. New technologies will have to be developed to ensure the safety of the mission. The second reason to send people instead of robots is space colonization, an agenda pushed forward by the Mars Society, a non-profit organization which has already designed the “planetary flag” of Mars, while undertaking some serious scientific work too. Establishing permanent human settlements on Mars will be a step-wise project which may take several centuries, unless an as-yet unimagined innovation comes along and revolutionizes space travel. And if living in a pressurized building and walking around in a spacesuit is not your idea of a good life, there is always terraforming. Scientists believe that given enough knowledge and time, we could pollinate the Martian atmosphere and soil with oxygen-producing organisms which will make Mars a more hospitable planet. For romantics and visionaries, it would be the “unwinding” of the ancient catastrophe and the making of a space Utopia, with canals and all. Perhaps then Lowell, as he peered into his telescope under the Arizona sky, he saw a revelation of the future. Perhaps, in that visionary future, the Martians will be our descendants.

Published in the Athens News on 24th April 2009

The AI Singularity

2009-04-27T15:54:00.001+01:00

The AI Singularity has been defined as a future point in history when machine intelligence will surpass human. A technological transition event of this magnitude has been compared to a cosmological "black hole" with an "event horizon" beyond which it is impossible to know anything.

The idea of the AI fails philosophically because it assumes the following clause: “I am not so smart to know what smarter is”. This clause is implicit in “recognizing” a hyper-intelligence. The acid test of passing through the AI “event horizon” does not suffice in you or I being flabbergasted by the amazing smartness of machines, or human-machine fusion. The acid test is not to be able to comprehend anything! Smartness after the AI Singularity event horizon is defined as so huge that no ordinary human mind can realize that is there. It is similar to asking a chimp to realize how smarter a human is. The chip cannot possibly know that. The question (for the chimp) is meaningless. And equally meaningless would be the question for the human of the future crossing the event horizon of the AI Singularity. For all we know, there might exist today - or have existed for centuries, or millennia – higher intelligences that ours. Perhaps, we live in a “Matrix” world created by smarter than us intelligences. Perhaps we crossed the AI Singularity event horizon many centuries ago, or last year. But we can never possibly know that.

The AI Singularity reduces thus to the “brain-in-a-vat” argument. However, a brain-in-a-vat cannot possibly know that is a brain-in-a-vat because to state that you are a brain-in-a-vat is a self-refuting statement. Therefore, to claim such a thing is nonsense.

The AI Singularity also fails scientifically. In order to have any sensible discussion on intelligence - human, machine or otherwise - we need a theory of intelligence; which we do not currently have. Major questions are looming, the most significant of which is the relationship between a mind and a brain. Until such scientific problems have been clearly defined, researched and reduced to some testable causal explanatory model, we cannot even begin to imagine “machine intelligence”. We can of course (and we do) design and develop machines that perform complex tasks in uncertain environments. But it would be a leap of extreme faith to even compare these machines with “minds”.

The AI Singularity fails sociologically too. It is a version of transhumanism, which is based on a feeble and debatable model of human progress. It ignores an enormous corpus of ideas and data relating to the human psychological and cultural development. It assumes a value system of ever better, faster, stronger, longer, i.e. a series of superlatives which reflect a social system of intense competition. However, not all social systems are ones of competition. Indeed, the most successful ones are of collaboration. In the social context of collaborative reciprocity, superlatives act contrary to the common good. To imagine a society willing to invest resources into building the intelligence of its individual members would be to imagine a society bent on self-annihilation. To put it in simple terms: if I am the smartest person in the world, if I can solve any problem that comes my way, if I can be happy by myself - why should I need you?

The Precautionary Principle

2009-04-27T15:51:00.001+01:00

Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s Environment Commissioner, ignoring the opinion of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), recently [nb. 2008] indicated that the Commission will ban two genetically engineered varieties of corn, because of the potential harm it may cause on certain beneficial insects. At present, only one transgenic crop can be cultivated in Europe: Monsanto’s MON810 insect-resistant maize, which now comprises nearly 2% of maize grown in Europe.

In the on-going debate about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in Europeans’ plates the mantra is the so-called “precautionary principle”; the idea that regulation should prevent or limit actions that raise even conjectural risks, particularly when the scientific evidence is inconclusive. Add to this the widespread feeling in society that science is moving too far ahead becoming more and more incomprehensible – and should therefore be made to slow down, or even stop – and you get a neo-luddite backlash to anything biotechnology has to offer.

But is this the way to go? If the world rejects GMOs, what other options do we have in order to feed ourselves? Traditional farming, through the intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers, is known to be linked to serious health hazards such as cancer, and is using great amounts of fossil fuels which contribute to climate change. Organic farming is often quoted as a valid alternative, but the figures simply do not add up. We are six billion people on this planet, two billion of whom live on the edge of starvation. Put in this wider context organic farming, with all its splendid benefits, begins to look more like a luxury to be afforded by rich westerners only.

GMOs have gotten a bad name. They are considered an environmental risk. Releasing mutated organisms in nature, say their opponents, could spread havoc to natural evolution and cause untold damage to ecosystems. What one usually does not hear is that most traditional plant-breeding techniques are simply imprecise forms of genetic engineering. Cross-fertilization and cross-breeding are the most obvious ones but there is also mutagen breeding, whereby plants are bombarded by X-rays, gamma rays, fast neutrons and a variety of toxic elements in an attempt to induce favorable chromosomal changes and genetic mutations. The difference is that genetic engineering is a more targeted and precise method, which has the potential to avoid large scale environmental contamination.

The second big fear is impact on health. I have often been told that “mutant organisms cause cancer, everyone knows that!” The truth may in fact be the very opposite. Traditional farming causes cancer, and there have been numerous epidemiological studies that confirm this. GMO farming may even prevent cancer, as in the case of the transgenic corn that Dimas wants banned. The particular corn product releases a protein that is toxic to insects but harmless to mammals (such as humans). By preventing the corn to be invaded by insects it protects the product from a very dangerous fungal toxin called Fumonisin, which is a known carcinogen and a cause of neural tube defects in newborns. The transgenic corn has been shown to contain 900 percent fewer fungal toxins than the non-GMO corn variety grown by traditional and organic farmers.

Nevertheless, Europe says no. Maybe because we Europeans suspect that big American-based multinational crop companies, such as Monsanto and Syngenta, want to monopolize the agro-food business, to the detriment of our environment and health, no matter what scientists say. After all, scientists could be on their payroll too. I can agree that one should not trust corporations with the public good, and that government regulations as well as alert and well-informed citizens are society’s best defenses. However, the current market of big monopolies selling traditional - as well as transgenic - crops to farmers may be about to change, and change rapidly too.

Synthetic biology is nowadays taught at undergraduate level, and any biology student can create her own artificial organism on a Petri dish. Techno-optimists, such as physics professor Freeman Dyson, are heralding a new era where “domesticated biotechnology, once it gets to the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that big corporations prefer.” Just imagine that future: you can grow whatever you like in your back yard, creating your own varieties of plants and animals, free from the monopolizing corporations. On the other end of the spectrum, technophobes see this as a nightmare scenario where bioterrorism runs rampant and Earth’s ecology is disrupted beyond control. GMOs is the tip of a great big iceberg that floats to our shores, whether we want it, ban it, or not.

The risk of being wrong

However, let me focus on the infamous precautionary principle. The first, and most obvious perhaps, problem with the precautionary principle is that it takes no account of the cost of non-action. For example, let us say that I have a serious heart problem and my doctor thinks I should be given an artificial heart. Unfortunately, no-one can absolutely guarantee that the artificial heart will not fail, thus resulting in my death. By applying the precautionary principle I should refuse the treatment. However, if I do not get the treatment my death is certain. The principle, in this case, should be overridden. And yet, when one moves away from managing the risk of a certain technology on her own life or well-being, and arrives at decisions by governments or by the European Union, the Precautionary Principle of risk management has increasing appeal to politicians and policy-makers. It is a completely different thing for me to decide what to do with my health than deciding what should be done with everyone else’s health.

In the latter case the appeal of the Precautionary Principle is irresistible to politicians, and policy-makers, as well as various advocates of the public good. They are certain to win favors with society because citizens will tend to support a precautionary policy, because human instinct prevails.

Reality vs. experiments:	Reality, idealistically
Experimental results	- (not harmful)	+ (harmful)
- (not harmful)	True	False negative
+ (harmful)	False positive	True

Evolution has programmed us to avoid false negatives at all costs (an error made when we fail to connect A to B, when A is truly connected to B – for example, I did not flee upon hearing a noise, when in fact the noise was a lion coming to get me!). In the case of GMOs a false negative is when the experiment shows that something is harmless when in fact it is harmful (see table above). By the same token evolution has made us more relaxed with respect to false positives (an error made when A is falsely connected to B, for example I hear something which may be a lion about to attack me, and I flee – but there was no lion). In the case of GMOs a false positive is when the experiment shows that something is harmful when in fact it is harmless (see table above). Our survival has depended over eons upon evaluating false negatives as being more risky than false positives. In other words, since we are not absolutely certain that GMOs are safe, let us ban them.

The Gap

In the case of technology, however, the possibility of false negatives will always be with us. Owing to the intrinsic nature of statistical errors, as well as the philosophical impossibility of knowing for certain the link between cause and effect, there can be no absolute knowledge of experimental consequences. Science is a systematic, logical and experimental method of probing into an “ideal” realm that we hypothesize it exists and is called “reality”. We will never know if “reality” really exists. Therefore, the sum total of all our experiments does not exclude the possibility of a false negative.

In the case of science a false negative is a blessing, as it may falsify a given theory. This is another reason for the usual lack of understanding between science and society. Scientists love false negatives, but society does not. Scientists are usually more ready to take risks with new technologies than citizens.

If we do not wish to return to pre-industrial times, there can be no other way forward than through technology. One may argue that this is a recipe for humankind’s eventual doom. I would, however, like to remind of Malthus and his predictions about an unsustainable world which was not supposed to feed the billions of people. Only technology can beat demographics, as the “green revolution” of intensive farming proved. In a projected world of 9 billion people, everyone should be given an equal chance of economic and social development. We cannot hope to achieve this by banning or over-regulating technological progress. The only thing we can do is develop better channels of communication between science and society, to bridge the gap mentioned above, and prepare society for the changes ahead.

When I see a tree what do I, really, see?

2009-04-27T09:39:00.003+01:00

The question of what comprises an external reality is ancient. The frustrated physicist cries “shut up and measure”; and he is right for all that we can know is only that which we can measure. The rest, we cannot know. The rest is the unknowable. We can only describe the knowable, and so we do through science, and sometimes through art. Optimists amongst us contend that we could also describe the relationship between the knowable and the unknowable. I think that we can do so only as a conjecture. Let’s call it “the objective world conjecture”. Our favorite tool here is logical abstractions; that is; thinking about non-objects. In the abstract, therefore, we can assume that there exists U, the unknown. And the K – the known – is, somehow (via the mysterious chance mechanisms of evolution perhaps), configured within U. This is a conjecture that, alas, we can never prove. The objective world will be forever unknowable. The reason for this should be obvious by the definition we give to U; K is always a subset of U; K+K1 ,where K1 is a new discovery, is also a subset of U and so on, for any Ki, ad infinitum.
From this U-neverland arise the ghosts of our measurements, the contents of our consciousness, and the K-objects of our senses, emotions and feelings. When I look at a tree I see the only thing that can be seen. I call it a “tree” and, if I utter the word in any language, or draw a “tree”, the overwhelming majority of my species will intuitively imagine a “tree”, different in its details but similar in its essence. Our “essential tree” is an object of K made up of things we decide to call “cells” and “atoms” and so on.
Interestingly, as we expand through scientific observation the limits of K into the vast (conjecturally) expanse of U, we arrive at logical paradoxes. The objective world conjecture is paradoxical in itself, since we assume an increasing infinite progression of Knowledge (ΣΚi) which forever remains a subset of U.
The more abstract our reasoning the more paradoxical it becomes. And we thus arrive at the ultimate walls of K. When classical “objects” fade into quantum ghosts, our “K-trees” become U-trees, things of the unknowable; and we are fenced inside the realm of subjectivity, the only reality knowable.

Social Echo and Rational Economics

2009-04-27T09:38:00.001+01:00

In the construction of economic theories, from Plato and Aristotle to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and beyond, assumptions about human nature have taken their toll to the detriment of effective predictability of markets and systems. The need to predict, plan and reason about systemic behaviour, too strong to admit postponement, overrun the obvious lack of knowledge about the human animal. Economics thus framed new ideologies, such as Marxism or capitalism, which in turn guided scientific exploration. An example of ideological framing causing a sociological paradox is eugenics. Since Galton and Darwin, eugenics has been the logical projection of evolutionary theory applied to humans. But although the idea was accepted in the beginning by liberals and leftists, it became an abomination following its corruption by the Nazis. Since the end of WWII whenever it resurfaces it is being slammed down by an almost hysterical reaction from academia and the Press (James Watson being a recent victim of this). And yet the idea persists, albeit dressed in other hides; in socialist-inspired models of egalitarianism, in laws that regulate abortions to the detriment of the middle classes, in genetics research (cloning in particular), and in educational systems. Eugenics makes one huge assumption: that by selecting for higher intelligence humanity will become, in a few generations, less violent, more altruistic and wiser. And yet, the correlation between higher intelligence and the desired attributes of peace, social cohesion and wisdom is a weak one. It smacks of wishful thinking and cultural bias. Human beings are highly intelligent animals, not angels, not creatures that stand apart from the rest. We are apes, and when push comes to shove we act like ones too – regardless of our intelligence, or good manners. War is the most obvious testament to our innate cruelty. If anything, our ingenuity seems to have been invested more in engineering war machines that in anything else.
Recent discoveries in neuroscience promise to shed much-needed light in what constitutes a human being. Deciphering the unconscious circuitry would be a task of monumental proportions dwarfing the Human Genome Project by several degrees of magnitude. Alas, the result - if successful - will be of limited use. As in the case of genes, interactions in the whole seem to play a role more important than the interacting parts alone. The infusion of neuroscience into sociology and economics is a welcome development. Nevertheless, owing to the infancy of neuroscience it should be expected that social framing will once again take the upper hand, leading to new “realistic” economic theories that reason the animal inside us. Once more, experts will reason about social systems forgetting that human activity is diffused and dominated by unconscious, autonomic, neuropsychological systems that enable people to function effectively without always calling upon the brain's scarcest resource– attentional and reasoning circuitry. To reason about non-reason is a paradox that we cannot escape. We can only understand an echo of what the human society is truly all about. The dilemma will always be how much we want to believe in it.

Whence narrative?

2009-04-27T09:37:00.007+01:00

Recently, I happened to be coordinating a public discussion on literature at the National Research Foundation. Being the organizer of the discussion, my objective was to explore, with the aid of an English Literature professor and a writer/critic, fictional narratives as inroads to humanness. Indeed, what could have been more profound than that! Still, my “ulterior” motive was to compare literary narratives to scientific ones.
Psychologists use personal narrative routinely, as a way to explore their patients’ personalities, but I was more interested to see if there was some connection to non-personal narratives, such as the Big Bang Theory, or the Evolutionary Theory. Then the question came from a member of the audience: why does the brain produce narratives? In a way, the question relates – to a higher level – to the structure of memory. And yet, memory has a biological foundation. What could that foundation be?
I am no expert, but the only way that I could have answered the question (“whence narrative?”) would be to point out our “sense of time”. Why do we have a perception of time? Obviously there have been evolutionary reasons for it. The interchange of light and darkness and the resulting circadian rhythm commission us with the sense of “before”, as distinct from “now” and “after”. And yet: of all the things that modern physics tell us about the Universe, of all the quantum paradoxes of electrons being at many places at the same time, the most unimaginable of all is that time does not flow but is still. That time is an “illusion”. This seems not only counter-intuitive (so much of modern physics is) but unimaginable. A universe where time is like length, or width, a dimension upon which points stretch and exist regardless of us being there, of time being still in other words, is a universe without narrative. Therefore, a universe without before, now and after. Our minds are evolved to produce narratives and therefore the only way we can comprehend anything succinctly and effectively is by incorporating it somehow into a narrative. The more explicit the narrative the more comprehendible the object, and vice-versa. Abstraction, the loss of narrative, equates with artistic amnesia, it makes time freeze to a still, space reduced to a point and communication to a silent pause.

Doomsday Narratives

2009-04-27T09:37:00.006+01:00

When discussing the formation of ideas for the Society of the Future, a most important element of the synthesis is prophecy. Prophecy is an important contributor to the development of the western thought. Although elements of ritualistic foretelling can be found across many cultures, it is in the West that foretelling was historically institutionalized, whether one refers to the Oracle of Delphi, or the Prophets of the Bible. The underlying theme of prophecy is the juxtaposition of teleology with moral conditioning. In other words, do what you must do, for if you do otherwise you will be lost in the whirl of upcoming events. Therefore, prophecy frames the ethical debate of today by stressing the daunting onslaught of a frightful tomorrow. Redemption is offered only if one falls back.
The idea of prophecy has transformed into the idea of predictability, as the western world moved away from a mostly metaphysical explanatory model towards a materialistic one. Science and engineering succeeded in the social arena because they offered consistently predictable results. Indeed, it is in the core of scientific ideology that experimental results must be verified by their idependent repetition. This means that a prediction made by a theory - a mini-prophecy in disguise if you will - must be verified in various labs to hold any water.
Prophecy in the pre-scientific Christian world was dominated by the Book of Revelation, which in turn expressed pre-existing ideas of “telos”, a word meaning both “end” in the temporal sense, as well “end” in the purpose sense. As science takes over, the prophetic narrative transforms and gradually finds its way into science fiction. In turn, science fiction not only nourishes the imagination and aspirations of scientists-to-be (most scientists were sci-fi funs when they were children), but also fuels the media debate whenever ethical issues on science and technology are raised. The latter happens because contemporary media is primarily a narrative-transformation machine that recycles stories and threads of stories by adding sensationalism, in order to attract attention.
I think that there are three distinctive “doomsday stories” that haunt us today. The first I label “the post-apocalyptic primitivism”. It implies an ecological catastrophe. This could happen either as a result of a nuclear war, or change in the climate, or a run-away virus, or a hit by a meteorite, etc. The result is prophesized as a collapse of civilization and the regression of the human race (providing anyone survives) to a primitive state. Post-apocalyptic primitivism is the logical extension of the Book of revelation (or the Nordic myth of the twilight of the gods, if you prefer another context).
The second doomsday narrative for the future I will label the “AI Singularity”. This is the assumed point in the future when machine intelligence surpasses the human one. At this point the narrative is broken suddenly. Nothing can be further predicted. An impenetrable discontinuity appears. The “event horizon” of the AI Singularity implies the end of the power of prediction, the nullification of prophecy and, to my mind, suggests the absolute negation of science.
The third doomsday narrative may be referred to as the “post-human scenario”. This implies a more controlled process for history, where technology fuses with humans and transforms the world and society. Humans become Cyborgs, either as independent units incorporating a variety of mechano-electronic and biochemical paraphernalia, or as interdependent units hooked up in a grid, a kin of super-organism that fuels progress. This third narrative is the most optimistic of the three, mainly because it is inspired by utopian (or dystopian, depending upon your emotional inclination) ideas.
But I must return to these narratives later and analyze each in turn.

Climate, Apocalypse

2009-04-27T09:37:00.005+01:00

Our planet has been warming up since the Industrial Revolution mainly due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, gases that result from the burning of fossil fuels that spur and sustain our economic development. This is a scientific fact that no one doubts. Paleoclimatologists place the current trend in a wider context by comparing past periods of Earth’s history where warming up had occurred due to natural processes. We also know of the Milankovitch 100,000-year cycles that determine the phasing of ice ages with interglacials. According to those cycles we ought to be entering into an ice age. Temperatures ought to be dropping and ice on the polar caps ought to be thickening. Ironically, our pumping of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere seems to compensate for all that.
Science can describe with relative accuracy the past and the processes by which we got where we are today. Logic, and some rather crude computer models that run on computers, predict that if we continue with business-as-usual many nasty things will happen to our environment. Indeed many of those things are happening already. Earth is sick; there can be no question about it. And, very probably - why almost certainly -it has been made sick because of human industrial activity.
Two questions follow:
Question 1: Can we do something about it?
Question 2: Providing we can what should we do?

The Kyoto Protocol, as well as the recent international discussion at Bali for the successor agreement, emphatically answer “Yes” to the first question and “Curb carbon emissions” to the second. There seems to be worldwide consensus on those answers and, with the exception of the US government and a handful of die-hard skeptics, the rest of the world seems willing to bite the bullet and proceed with a more responsible, equitable and collective stewardship of the planet, at a nominal cost. Sounds all right, doesn’t it?
Well it does and perhaps it is. However, I will examine the nature of the two questions posed in order to argue that the climate change debate is not really about climate science, or economics. Inexactness is in the method and nature of both, and one could argue ad nauseum about the merits of different approaches, analyses and the like. Evidently, the issue is not an academic one, although scientists are being involved in an unprecedented way and are being awarded not the Nobel Prize for Physics or Economics but the Nobel Prize for Peace, a distinction usually reserved for politicians or activists.
Additionally, I would argue that the debate is not even a political one. Of course, many heads of state would envy Al Gore and would like a piece of his action and fame. Climate change seems to galvanize electorates across the globe, even when no one really bothers to explain the details to them. But let us leave the cunning politicos aside, for their perfidiousness is well-documented. Even honest, well-wishing politicians fall back on inexact science in order to validate their decisions and by doing so fall into the abyss of folly. Their decisions usually evoke the insurance argument: i.e. curb emissions at a premium now in order to avoid dire consequences in the future. But the insurance argument is a weak one. Its weakness lies firstly in selecting and prioritizing future risks, and secondly in defining the premium. Climate change is not the only thing threatening future generations. If the world wants to buy insurance on its future safety then funds need to be established in order to deal with rogue asteroids, supervolcanic eruptions, supernova explosions in the vicinity of our solar system, pandemics, plume explosions, and – why not – invasion of Earth by an alien civilization. The list of possible threats can go almost forever. And how about that premium? How much does it cost? How can one be certain that forgoing A% of the world’s output is optimal and not A+B%, when the science of prediction is so inexact? If one is talking about the future of the planet shouldn’t one be generous with premiums? If the alternative is life on a scorched planet without wildlife, a barren rock in space, shouldn’t we consider eliminating greenhouse gases altogether as soon as possible? And if this sounds illogical, where is the logic in defining an optimal premium?

All in all, I will argue that the debate on climate change is principally and foremost an emotional one.

Both questions I asked above are scientifically unanswerable because they deal with certainties. The fact that many scientists have become evangelical in their predictions is unassailable evidence of emotionalism blurring their better judgment. Healthy skepticism has been replaced by much-applauded scientific fundamentalism, which is being rewarded the Nobel. There have been reports of “tears” during the Bali meeting. And the manner by which the meeting proceeded reminds one of an operetta. Why so much passion? The emotional charge that permeates all debates on climate needs to be analyzed by sociologists and psychologists. By being “alarmist” and “apocalyptic” cunning politicians join the chorus of scientists-turned-Bible-prophets in a replay of a very old story, namely the herding of the human flock under an ideological banner, this time the banner being “eco-friendly”. The threat is nature’s revenge on the sinful humankind. God has been replaced by mystical natural forces, by a cybernetic Gaia. Often, the high moral ground is being hijacked by atheists who re-discover faith dressed up as computer simulations of looming Apocalypse. The end is at hand ladies and gentlemen! Repent! Shut the factories down! Shun your riches! Be poor in body and mind! Love thy neighbor! And redemption will surely come!

There is obviously a positive side to all this that needs to be mentioned. Al Gore has been explicit about it too. I will rephrase it as the dawning of a new era in international politics where leaders adopt a common, environment-centered, agenda that, ultimately, can lead only to cooperation and peace. In a world that is about to fall apart there is no point fighting. Or isn’t there?
Well, you see, when the debate is so emotionally charged, when logic and the inexactness of scientific argument have been replaced by certainties, feelings can swing either way unpredictably. You could have Al Gore’s fantastic vision of world cooperation and mutual support but, alas, you could also have war and mutual annihilation. And this is precisely the danger that the world faces as we are being herded into taking decisions about the future, eluding ourselves that we are powerful enough to engineer climate by adopting an equitable sharing of greenhouse gas quotas.

Simulation and non-local realism

2009-04-27T09:36:00.008+01:00

Realism is the viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. According to Bell’s theorem any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions – something that Einstein would not swallow) clash with many quantum predictions. In such cases, “spooky action at a distance” is necessarily assumed in order to explain phenomena such as quantum entanglement. This is called non-local realism. A recent paper by Simon Groblacher et al (An experimental test of non-local realism, Nature, Vol. 446, 19th April 2007, pp. 871-5) showed that giving up the concept of non-locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are also abandoned. Let us see how these results may correspond to assumptions made into our simulation-based New Narrative.
I would like to take an example from cosmology, indeed the very simulation of the standard cosmological model. The logic of the simulation goes like this. Assumption 1: The universe maps unto an external reality which, somehow (i.e. via known, or unknown-as-yet, natural laws) maps also unto our coupled media of detection instruments plus consciousness. This may be called “the perceived universe”. It usually depicts an image of the cosmos, galaxies and gas clusters spreading in all directions and in all magnificence. A mathematical model is then developed based on the prevailing cosmological theory that aims to explain the “perceived universe”. This model runs on a computer, which is the external reality substrate of the simulation. In other words, there is, or so we assume, a “reality” of hardware that runs our simulation (assumption 2). The result of the simulation is also an image of the cosmos. Comparing the two images we refine the model further until the two images appear identical. When we achieve an identical pair of images then we conclude that our mathematical model has been a successful one, i.e. a valid description of external reality.
It is obvious that our conclusion may be potentially flawed, on the basis of our two main assumptions. Furthermore, our assumptions call upon the quantum nature of the cosmos which, as the aforementioned paper has demonstrated, seems to reject non-local realism. Thus, we are left with a revision of assumptions about realism.
Which happen to be inherent in the New Narrative, the most poignant revision of reality being the decoherence of Selfhood.
By deconstructing the Self, by rejecting the narcissism of psychoanalysis, by re-introducing a mystical layer of dualism in the nature of consciousness, we arrive at a counterfactual definiteness and in a world not completely deterministic. The result may be a chorus of out-of-tune artwork but it is also a result closer to what our best validated experiments show. If “external reality” is a wonderland of curious objects and events then our revised “inner reality” of the New Narrative is an equally exotic place. But should we take such a phantasmagoric correspondence as a sign of progress? Should we convince ourselves that we have, at last, by entering our self-simulated world, arrived serendipitously at the Holy Grail of “reality”? Ironically perhaps, the very dynamics of decoherence prevent us from answering such questions. When determinism is thrown out of the window, then all one can do is lean onto the ledge and peer outside, in wander and astonishment, to the changing view of a perplexing world beyond our wildest imagination. And that is exactly what the New Narrative tries, and forever fails, to describe.

The Idea Delusion

2009-04-27T09:36:00.007+01:00

Recently, a postgraduate student asked me, as part of his thesis (http://vasilis-thesis.blogspot.com/) , to comment on the following claims by Keynes and Galbraith.
Keynes claimed that: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers (etc), both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” While Galbraith argued that: "Ideas would be powerful only in a static world because they are inherently conservative."
The student’s question was: These statements were said almost 45, and more, years ago. According to your opinion, which of the fore mentioned statements seems valid in the modern world?
My answer was: “I would definitely side with Galbraith. Of course ideas appear to be powerful and they seem to exercise enormous influence in the way we perceive and interpret the phenomena of the world. I believe that Pol Pot is a case in fact, as well as the hapless millions that were killed because of political ideas that he carried inside his head. But were those millions killed because of political ideology, or because this ideology "happened" to take root in Pol Pot's head, who "happened", through an amazing series of coincidences to live long enough and become powerful enough in order to enact those ideas against the poor people of Cambodia? Alas, our world is not shaped by decisions but by happenstance, by the dynamic confluence of sometimes interconnected and sometimes disparate factors, that lead one way or the other, by virtue of systemic forces beyond our control - or comprehension. Only by hindsight do economists and political philosophers apply ideas to the facts and develop their "theories". The feeling of "power" ascribed in their ideas is therefore an illusion, and it has been so not only today but always and forever.”

I would like to expand somewhat on my answer. Firstly, let me point out that I am referring to economic and political philosophy, restricting therefore my tackle of the term “Idea” - at least for now - to these fields.

I believe the ultimate acid test that shows the delusion that I am claiming is very simple. Economic and political theorists develop ideas which explain (or try to explain) the past. Even those theorists who claim that they speak about “today” or the “present” are in fact speaking only about the past; the recent past but the past nevertheless. The “present” is physically and intellectually unattainable as any Zen story will easily convince you. All economic and political theory, every “big idea” – Marxism, anarchism, liberalism, whatever - fails in various degrees when it comes to predicting the future. Why is this so? Why can’t anyone tell us how the world or the economy will be in five, or ten years time or, in fact, tomorrow morning?

Two reasons: Firstly, economic and political theories do not have – not yet anyway – a solid scientific base on the natural sciences. Secondly, economic and political theorists do not really believe that they need such a base in order to develop and debate their ideas. They inherently accept that the economy and the society are governed by non-natural forces and laws and that they are “human-made” – whatever that may mean. Therefore, they strongly contend that their theories and ideas are, or potentially could be, the driving forces of economic and social phenomena. That, for example, “believing” in market economics, “accepting” the theory and developing instruments that support it (e.g. IMF, World Bank, etc.) will surely transform the world into a free market economy. That invading Iraq and installing a western-type democracy will transform Iraq into a western-type democracy. These notions are delusions, of course. It should be very obvious to any rationally thinking person that human beings and societies are not controlled, “closed” environments of deterministic interactions. We are a social class of animals partaking in the evolution of the cosmos whether we want it, think it, or not.
I suggest that the roots of this “Idea Delusion” are Platonic and rest with Plato’s Republic. It is, however, about time, that such a delusion is revised and economists and sociologists begin to approach the workings of society in the same way as natural philosophers and natural scientists do. We need a new paradigm of social and economic theory based on biology and systems theory with predictive powers. Ideologies belong to the past.

Literary Constructivism

2009-04-27T09:36:00.006+01:00

Immanuel Kant held that there is a world of “things in themselves” but owing to the its radical independence from human thought, that is a world we can know nothing about; thus stating the most famous version of constructivism. Thomas Kuhn took the point further by stating that the world described by science is a world partly constituted by cognition, which changes as science changes.
Constructivism as an idea becomes very obscure when one tries to determine the connection of “things in themselves”, e.g. the “reality” of, say, electrons, and the “scientific concept” of an electron. My take of the problem is that science is a human endeavor and therefore inherently and implicitly bound by our brain’s capabilities, however, we do not “imagine” the world. The world exists, it is just not catalogued.
Things become a lot less murky when we shift from science to literature. Here, the author does not pretend to understand “things in themselves”. The literary agenda differs from the scientific one because it is assumed to be human-made. Books and book-worlds are of the imagination and for the imagination. Whenever I read about a flower I know that it is not the flower “out there”, in the “real” garden, but it is an imaginary flower, a rose inside the imagination of the writer given to me to sample and behold in my own imagination. Thus, free of scientific intentions and false pretensions about realities, literature is constructivist by its own nature. The writer constructs her own world. There are no electrons in that world, only thoughts, of electrons, sometimes, perhaps – but words nevertheless.
But, what is the real difference between a literary and a scientific narrative? There is much difference, one would argue. The Big Bang could be described by words, and therefore constitute a narrative in a literary sense, however, that narrative is underpinned by observation, experimentation and – most importantly perhaps – mathematicalization. Yes, math seems to make the big difference. The mathematical correspondence between scientific theories and the ticking of natural events, is the definitive factor that appears to differentiate a scientific narrative from a literary one.
But does it, really? Can’t one “translate” maths into narratives too? I would suggest that it ispossible. Even the most obscure of mathematical entities can be described in words, and indeed it must be described in words if it is to be understood. If one draws a parallel between math and music, then yes music is beyond words, but so is everything else of the Kantian “things in themselves”, and only when music is descriptively articulated (as an “experience”), it becomes part of the communal pool of ideas. Therefore, one arrives at a scientific narrative that is multi-layered and has many subplots, but starts to look like a literary narrative more and more. Could we then take the point one step further and suggest that, as literary criticism is the evolutionary force of literature, guiding it towards new directions, scientific peer review does similar wonders with determining directions of scientific research, shifting paradigms, and revolutionizing theories (i.e. narratives)?

Utopias and Dystopias

2009-04-27T09:35:00.005+01:00

Thomas More published in 1516 the book Utopia, based on the Republic of Plato. The Greek origins of the term, as well as the inspiration are rather telling. The word means the place that does not exist. Plato, in his original work, which is aiming to provide a context for what he defines as “virtue” (αρετή), positions his thesis on the unattainable. True virtue can only be realized in the world of ideas “out there”; not in our coarse world of shadows. The Republic is by definition unattainable. For the mind of Plato’s contemporaries, for his listeners if you will, “utopianism” did not hold the same meaning as it did in the 16th century, or indeed in our present time. In other words, the unattainable did not imply the will to attain; the interpretation must have been more literal, the way mathematics is, or even better perhaps geometry. There is no such thing as a perfect sphere. A perfect (platonic) sphere is unattainable, but that does not mean that having less than perfect spheres in the real world is a let down. The Republic is a “perfect” society (at least according to its writer) in the same sense. That is exactly the difference in the narrative that I am trying to underline: that the utopian of ancient times was a different animal from the utopian of modern times. The modern version is someone who has not given up on the idea of attainment. In fact, rather the contrary: the attainment of a utopia is a goal in itself. This is profoundly evident in the totalitarian dreams and nightmares of fascism, Nazism, as well as Marxists: the Perfect society and the Perfect man (and woman). This is a major shift in understanding utopias between the ancient and the modern, and I could not stress enough the importance and repercussions of this shift. When Aldous Huxley published “Brave New World” in 1932, the foundations of a utopian/dystopian narrative have already been laid. Indeed they have replaced liberal realism – if ever such thing existed. Utopias or dystopias are attainable. Either by action or inaction. Climate change is a point of fact, as well as the idealist-utopian perception of a westernized Middle-East that led President Bush to invade Iraq. The New Narrative at work is aiming to fulfil its unattainable prophecies.

Downloading Consciousness

2009-04-27T09:35:00.004+01:00

Frank Tipler, in his new book “The Physics of Christianity” makes a number of interesting – some would even say amusing - claims with regards the “end of days”, as he sees it. I would like to focus on two of those claims, predictions in fact, which Tipler estimates that will occur by the year 2050. The claims are:

1. Intelligent machines [will exist] more intelligent than humans
2. Human downloads [will exist], effectively invulnerable, and far more capable than human beings

I should go very quickly through the first claim, suggesting that – depending how one measures “intelligence”, computers far outsmart humans even today. The few remaining computational problems that deal mostly with handling uncertainty and comprehending speech I expect to be effectively sorted out sooner that the date Tipler suggests. I see no trouble with that. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an engineering discipline solving an engineering problem, i.e. how to furnish machines with adequate intelligence in order to perform executive tasks in situations and/or environments humans would better not.
The second claim, however, is truly fascinating. To suggest a human download is equivalent to suggesting codification of a person’s person into a digital (or other, but digital should suffice) format. Once a “digital file” of a person exists then downloading, copying, and transmitting the file are trivial problems. But should we really expect downloading human consciousness by the year 2050 – or ever? There are four possible answers to this question. Yes (Tipler or the techno-optimist), No (the absolute negativist), Don’t know (the agnostic crypto-techno-optimist), Cannot know even if it happened (the platonic negativist).
Let us now take these four responses in turn, and in the context of the loosely defined term “consciousness” as the sum total of those facets that when acting together produce the feeling of being “somebody” in the I of each and every one of us.

1. The Techno-optimist (Yes). This view assumes life as an engineering problem and thus falls back to the AI premise of solving it. The big trouble with this view is that if consciousness is indeed an engineering problem (i.e. a tractable, solvable problem), then it is also very likely that it is hard problem indeed. “Hard” is engineering can be defined in relation to the resources one needs in order to solve a problem. Say for example that I would like to build a bridge from here to the moon. Perhaps I could design such a bridge but when I get down to develop the implementation plan I will probably find out that the resources I need are simply not available. Similarly, with consciousness, one may discover that in order to codify consciousness in any meaningful way one might need computing resources unavailable in this universe. This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. For example, if we discover that the brain evokes the feeling of I, by means of complex interactions between individual neurons and groups of neurons (which seems to be a reasonable scenario to expect), then the computational problem becomes exponentially explosive with each interaction. To dynamically “store” such a web of interactions one would need a storage capacity far exceeding the available matter in our universe. But let us not reject the techno-optimist simply on these grounds. What we know today may be overrun tomorrow. So let us for the time try to keep our options open and say that the “Yes” party appears to have a chance of being proven right.

2. The absolute negativist (No). Negativists tend to see the glass half-empty. In the case of Tipler’s claim, the “No” party would suggest that the engineering problem is insurmountable. Further, they would probably take issue with the definition of consciousness, claiming that you cannot even start with solving a problem which you cannot clearly define. I would say that both these arguments fall short. Engineering problems are very often ill-defined and yet solutions are being found. And the “impossibility” of finding adequate memory to code someone’s mind is something that we will have to wait and see if it truly turns out this way. The negativists, in this case, may also include die-hard dualists.

3. The agnostic (crypto-techno-optimist) responds “skeptically” and is a subdivision of the techno-optimist. She is a materialist at heart but no so gun-ho as the true variety of the techno-optimist.

4. The platonic negativist (cannot know even if it happened). Now here is a very interesting position, the true opposite of the techno-optimist. The platonic negativist refuses to buy Tipler’s claim on fundamental grounds. She claims that it is not possible to tell whether such thing will occur. In other words, the engineer of 2050 may be able to demonstrate downloading someone’s consciousness but she, the platonic negativist, will stand up and question the truth of the demonstration. How will she do such a thing? I will have to expand on this premise – which is, in fact, the neo-dualist attack on scientific positivism. Suffice it to say that she will base her antithesis on the following: Any test to confirm that someone’s consciousness has been downloaded will always be inadequate, based on Gödel’s theorem.

Of course, the very essence of the aforementioned debate, i.e. whether or not consciousness can be downloadable, lies at the core of the New Narrative with respect to the revisionist definition of humaneness. But this is a matter that needs to be further discussed.

Science as Religion

2009-04-27T09:34:00.004+01:00

Science and Religion can be easily compared in the context of narrative. Both are narratives (see also “The Book of the Universe”). Religious narratives always interrelate an explanation of the world as well as a set of moral instructions. Within the set of moral instructions we must include ritual, which is by definition a moral instruction too. Science, since Descartes, has excluded itself from advising on rituals or good behavior and has concentrated solely in the business of explanation.
Although much doubt on the explanatory power of Science still exists amongst many of our fellow human beings, I will argue that any well-meaning person with the capability - and courage - of rational thinking ought to ultimately accept Science as the best of all possible explanations of the world. One may even argue that one does not need to “believe” in Science in order to accept its validity; in contrast to a belief system such as Religion. I, on the contrary, will argue that acceptance of Scientific Truth and belief in Religious Truth are not as dissimilar as they appear.
Religion assumes a Higher Intelligence in trying to make sense of the cosmos; this intelligence (a “God”) may be self-conscious (“theism”) or not (“deism”); but without It there can be no complete explanation. Science, based on its methodology and the amazing and self-evident observation that the Universe is so finely tuned for life, has arrived at a very puzzling conclusion: that the Universe is either a product of blind chance (“one of many universes”) or that there is a “fifth element” at work which always “obliges” a Universe to arrive at a life-supporting version. This “fifth element” could be an as yet unknown law of nature that shapes a causelessly-created Universe into an anthropic one. The first hypothesis is supported by the “democrats” and the second one by the “aristocrats” (see “Spontaneous Dichotomy in scientific debate”).
Arguably, both scientific hypotheses require a big amount of belief, at least for now, since none can be proved or disproved. String theory as well as closed-loop quantum theory are trying to suggest feasible experiments in order to examine which one of the two hypotheses is the true one; but until now none has succeeded in doing so. One hopes that they soon will. But if Science and Religion both share a certain degree of belief, what of the moral instructions? If I am to compare the two then I should take issue with the second axis of a religious narrative too, which tells me how -and why - I should behave in a certain way; eat fish and not pork, for example, or face Mecca and bow five times a day, or sacrifice a cock on a full moon, or never to tell lies. Lately (see also “The Book of the Universe") it has been argued by many prominent scientists and philosophers that Science can also do exactly that: teach Humankind a moral code of self-regulation and mutual respect. Science is becoming more and more like Religion.

The New Narrative as a Simulation

2009-04-27T09:34:00.003+01:00

The end of WWII may be regarded as a watershed in the political and cultural history of the West. The devastated European hinterland, the hecatombs of the Holocaust, the radioactive emptiness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, demonstrated adequately enough that there were no limits to what human beings can do when it came to war and systematic killing. History, the narrative of human affairs marked by the recurrent outburst of butchery, came to a sudden halt. What caused the halt were the horrors of WWII.
Since then war, and therefore history (the description of wars), became sublimated, in a pseudo-Nietzschenean sense. This pseudo-sublimation is in fact a simulation. Thus, the US and the Soviet Union, instead of continuing after WWII with a nuclear war, they went into “Cold War”, i.e. a non-war, a sublimation of war, a simulated war, a televised war (in Korea, Vietnam, etc.). History became a simulation of history.
The biggest victim of this pseudo-sublimation was the collective rejection of reality, evident in culture and politics. Culture became a simulation of culture and politics a simulation of politics.
By the word simulation I mean the representation of reality in an iconic form, in order to control it. Examples are the edifices of gods or the orthodox icons: the object becomes with time an object of worship, it “attains” a holiness of its own, it becomes a “superobject”.
Naturally, as the simulation becomes better and better it begins to control its creators. The one who worships the icon gets furious at someone who does not – in this case the iconoclast receives the wrath of the icon-worshiper. Another example is simulated war games. The “adversaries” act as if they are truly fighting inside a computer-simulated environment of a war theatre. Very soon, however, the war becomes “real” in the sense that the adversaries “forget” that this is just a simulation and become emotionally involved in the process. They actually “feel” pain. Of course, they do not die when shot at, but the “die” in every other sense; and in a simulation this is just as good as dying for real.
History is simulated not through some supercomputer of course. We are not plugged into some kind of “Matrix”. I will argue, on the definition of the New Narrative that I already have given, that this simulation is the New Narrative. What do I mean by that? The New Narrative began before WWII, but it became the dominant expression of culture soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Derrida has declared “Il n’y a pas des ‘hors texte’”. I understand the sense of the « texte » as the New Narrative, the main characteristics of which are the ubiquity of television, and the impact of advertising on the collective consciousness. Of course, literature, the visual arts and cinema, are also part of the New Narrative. But I believe that it is television and advertising that support the pseudo-sublimation of the animal instincts in us that in any other case would have used nuclear weapons without second thought. Of course, in order for the simulation to work violence must be there too, which explains why there is so much violence in TV, video games, etc.
It is very interesting here to draw a parallel with the Edo period in feudal Japan, following centuries of bloody interstrife. During the Edo period, war was all but outlawed. The sogun kept in Kyoto the heads of the lord families, thereby securing their obedience. The samurai, the warrior class, suddenly out of a business (or way of life), developed the martial arts as a “way of the mind”, incorporating elements of Zen. At the same time the arts flourished, but as a detached approach to life. Zen, is the ultimate simulation. It is nothingness. In the beginning of the 21st century western culture (and with it the rest of the world too), adheres daily to Zen-fascist slogans of the type “Just do it!” (of Nike shoes). It lives for the moment. The future is constructed through computer models that simulate climate change, orbits of threatening meteorites, spreads of epidemics – in other words threats to survival that do not exist in the NOW. Why is that? Why is the world so afraid, when the world environment has never been more secure? Again, the reason is that history is simulated so that we retain the existence of fear, so important in order to feel anything at all, whilst at the same time we inherently trust the system to secure us from “real” mutual obliteration.
I will explore further the results of this phenomenon. Suffice to say for the time being, that post-humanism is the logical consequence of simulated history. Neuro-prostheses, moral relativism and refusal of external realities (ie. the “sinking” of minds into minds) construe the new social reality, ever more distanced from the real. The problem of course with this is that the simulation has created such an environment that it is virtually impossible to distinguish what is real and what is not. The image was fused with the object.

Spontaneous dichotomy in scientific debate

2009-04-27T09:33:00.004+01:00

Scientific debate is the rigorous process by which scientific theories, ideas and explanations are tested by the scientific community. The debate incorporates a variety of instruments, such as peer reviews, conference discussions, duplication of experiments and experimental results and, ultimately, discussion upon the interpretation of experimental results. An important result of scientific debate is the distillation of a scientific paradigm, which finds its way to school and university textbooks as the “most up to date knowledge” on a particular scientific field. However, this result is always partial and always refers to the part of the debate upon which closure has been arrived at. Paradigms are therefore temporary truces in the on-going scientific debate. As truces, they are only compromises. In order to understand the nature of this compromise better, I will argue that within every scientific debate arises a spontaneous dichotomy which can be identified by the labels “aristocratic” and “democratic” – labels alluding to the two political parties of the ancient Athenian democracy. The “aristocratic” party is elitist, skeptical and Platonic. The “democratic” party is populist, rational and Aristotelian. This dichotomy arises from a cardinal requirement on any interpretation of experimental results which aspire to uphold a theory: that the elements of an explanation must be both necessary as well as sufficient in explaining a natural phenomenon. This dual explanatory requirement is at the root of the spontaneous dichotomy. This is because, although almost everyone can agree on the “necessary” part of the explanatum, it is the “sufficient” part that always leaves a door open. Through this door the aristocratic party of the scientific debate will always try to introduce doubt on the finality of the explanatum. At the same time the democratic party will interpret the aristocratic skepticism as a betrayal of scientific integrity and accuse the aristocrats for undermining the edifice of scientific debate. The democratic argument always rests on the well-meaning conviction that one cannot have a rational debate without facts. Since the aristocrats will always adhere to the possibility of a quintessent “missing” element undermining the sufficiency of the explanatum, there can be no closure in the debate. The history of science, so far, has always justified the side of the aristocrats. From the Ptolemaic, to the Copernican to the Newtonian to the Einsteinian, paradigms fall because the aristocrats – who are the “revolutionaries” in this case – always doubt the status quo paradigm and always question its validity.

Universe's Book

2009-04-27T09:33:00.003+01:00

Modern science is a hypertext narrative describing the birth and evolution of the Universe. Its chapters interconnect in multifarious ways with the many branches of scientific enquiry – and this includes the humanities - and many of the chapters are being written even today. Many important details are still missing, but arguably most of the work has already been done. Some, the “Platonists” (see “Spontaneous dichotomy in scientific debate”), would argue that the Scientific Corpus may be totally revised in the future and that indeed we may be very near that tipping point in history. I will argue that this could conceivably happen but it will only affect a small part of the Book of the Universe. It will revise the understanding we have for its beginning, it might even revise the understanding that we have about the origins of life; but it will not re-write the Book of the Universe. The narrative has been written and delivered, what is left to do is editorial work.
It is not therefore surprising that many contemporary philosophers and scientists, notably Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and others, argue that science has already given to the world an excellent explanation of just about everything. They argue, in the name of universal peace and brotherhood that the Book of the Universe is taught across the globe, to everyone, to children of all nations, so that scientific understanding replaces religious belief. Their argument, which I happen to approve, is that religion and irrational belief systems in general, are too dangerous ideas to permeate the nations of a technologically advanced, nuclear-armed world like ours. On the contrary Science, as narrated in the Book of the Universe, unites in a rational and wondrous way all races of the planet, in the common appreciation and respect of nature, so instrumental in establishing some kind of peaceful co-existence and, ultimately, survival.
What interests me about their argument is that I find in it a fine example of the interplay between literature, science and the society of the future. But I will have to return to this point that I am making and expand it further.

The New Narrative

2009-04-27T09:32:00.001+01:00

I need to define what I mean by the word “Narrative”. Since the Lacroix cave paintings - or even earlier perhaps - humanity has felt the compelling need to record itself. Human social evolution has thus been intricately related to descriptions of events, personalities and, most importantly, ideas. These descriptions are narratives by definition, i.e. they follow a specific structure which reflects the way human minds understand the world. Although narratives can be both explicit and implicit, their structure is always relational: ideas, events and personalities are always related to one another and to their time. Even when referring to things past or prophesize things of the future, narratives are always interpreted in the present; this is a very important point which explains why different eras interpret the same narratives in a different way. Narratives are stored in Libraries. By this term I am generalizing on the concept of narrative storage, which takes place in a variety of media. Media are the storages of narratives and every society uses technology to improve on the media. Thus a Library can be made up from a collection of media, such as stone or clay tablets, papyri, scrolls, books, museums, architecture, etc.
Narratives are not just for show. Their role is not decorative. Narratives, once born, define society. They are the steam engine of societal progress, or regress. Because they are the cumulative repositories of ideas narratives are the drivers of change. Whenever great civilizations fell, it was because they somehow lost their Libraries. I mean this in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. Forgetfulness is the loss of narrative, and this is true not only in various well-documented amnesias but also in the case of societies and cultures at large. Examples abound throughout history, but I will only mention here the case of the Mayan civilization which collapsed as soon as the greater part of its narrative was lost.
Having established the definition of Narrative, Library and Media, let us now turn our attention to the definition of the “New Narrative”.
I will claim that the New Narrative was born out of the Internet revolution (complemented by cable TV and satellite communications) in the 1990s and that it differs from all previous narratives of the past because its Libraries are interconnected. The New Narrative by virtue of its genesis created a New Hyper-Library where every other narrative that has survived the test of time is stored somewhere there, as a node within a vast network of interconnectedness enabled by contemporary technology. Our society, like the societies of the past, is also defined by its narrative; in our case our New Narrative of networked media. The most prominent example of how the New Narrative affects societal evolution is advertising. Advertising is a spontaneous synthesis of ideas derived from media archives, the synthesis providing an extension of the New Narrative. A television ad reflects what we believe for ourselves, or what we think that we believe. It compels us to consume because the New Narrative can only survive through the constant maintenance and expansion of its Library; and this can only safely occur in a liberal, free-market world. But one needs to return to the interconnectedness of the New Narrative to liberal politics.

Literature, Science and the Society of the Future

2009-04-27T09:31:00.001+01:00

Thomas S. Kuhn in his landmark opus “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” surmises from the study of contemporary historiography that the big revolutions in science have been changes of World View. I will argue in this short introduction that World Views are expressed through Literary Narratives and are defined by them. In so doing, Literary Narratives compose a vision for the Future. This composition is undertaken by society and its exponents, namely intellectuals, and, in the case of our contemporary society, intellectuals linked through the network of media at large. They, acting as attractors in a large chaotic system, synthesize the aspirations and the fears of the present; interpret the memories of the past – which in themselves are also narratives; and ultimately generate a New Narrative, which is always a blueprint for the Future. This blueprint does not have to be concise. An intrinsic quality of any narrative is that it may be self-contradictory. It may indeed encompass circular arguments of the Gödelean type without any danger of self-destruction. Narratives hold, like minds do, because they do not have to be logically consistent. By containing the seeds of internal dissent they continuously evolve. One may thus consider society as a work in progress, the work being historiography by hindsight and debate by aspiration. Science, as the main drive of societal evolution since the European Renaissance, is the key arbitrator in this narrative process. Technology, the offspring of science, not only empowers societal change but, increasingly since the Industrial revolution and throughout the 20th century, acts as the principal mirror upon which society reflects during the process of self-evaluation and redefinition of itself. The process of the New Narrative is an interactive composition that takes place in the now. The most explicit case of this process, where narrative connects science, technology and the Vision of the Future, is science fiction literature, or any kind of literature that fuses and integrates scientific ideas – which in our times is virtually all literature. I argue “virtually all literature” because I believe that even those who make an effort not to include science and technology in their stories are implicitly partaking in the process of the New Narrative, by assuming a position of self-ascribed “innocence”. You can view them as heroins of Marquis de Sad, partaking in the orgy by default whilst touting their unassailable virginity. Under “Literature” one should also include - apart from novels, plays and poetry - new forms of literary narrative such as films, video and installations, and – in the wider sense of narrative art, the rest of the fine arts too.

Is Earth 6,000 years old?

2009-04-27T09:30:00.001+01:00

Darwin used to be a deeply religious man. He studied theology at Cambridge and as a young man he looked forward to the lifelong service of a cleric. His professional outlook changed dramatically after he embarked in 1831 on a five-year voyage around the world aboard the HMS Beagle. His observations led him to develop the theory of natural selection, the process by which organisms that are best adapted to their environment produce more offspring while those less suited eventually die out. In a stroke of unparalleled genius he obtained the scintillating insight that all living beings are connected through a long lineage that goes back billions of years, to a common ancestor. That indeed all life is one.

For the next twenty years he meticulously crafted and weighted the implications to his theory. One the one hand, evolution tied well with his egalitarian and anti-slavery ideas. It demonstrated in a scientific and rational way that all humans were born equal regardless of race or color of skin. But Darwin was deeply concerned because his insight clashed directly with the biblical description of life. So he decided to keep his work virtually secret, confiding only to a few of his closest friends. Fortuitously, Darwin was a man of his time. In the heart of the Victorian Era, there was much evidence pointing to the uneasy fact that Earth was very much older than the 6,000 years religious scholars estimated to be. Lyell’s geological notions and Malthus’s theory on demographics spurred Darwin on, while torrents of collected fossils poured into England from all corners of the British Empire illustrating that Earth had been through many previous epochs when other, now extinct, creatures lived. Why didn’t the Bible say anything about that? The untimely death of Darwin’s daughter Anne in 1851 at the age of ten threw a devastating blow to Darwin’s religious beliefs. Nine years later he finally decided to publish his seminal book on “The Origin of Species”.

Just as Darwin predicted, the reaction to his ideas from religious believers was a combination of denial and ridicule…which happened mostly on the other side of the Atlantic. By the beginning of the 20th century many States in the US had passed laws that banned the teaching of evolution at schools, a situation which lasted well into the 60s. It was the Soviets putting Sputnik in orbit that prompted President Eisenhower to reexamine the quality of scientific education for young Americans, and therefore insist that science, and indeed evolution, be taught at secondary level. America had to regain its scientific edge in order to win the Cold War, and the Congress agreed that the constitutional separation between Church and State ought to be enforced in the schools. Federal Courts begun to try cases where teachers were persecuted from State School Boards, for teaching evolution. In a series of famous rulings the courts defended science and declared “Creationism” – the notion that Earth and Humans were created by God just like it says in the Book of Genesis – as well its pseudoscientific offshoot “Intelligent Design” to be religion, not science.
And yet, despite all that, recent polls indicate that only 14% of Americans believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. On the contrary, nearly 45% completely trust the Biblical version of Adam and Eve. It seems that no matter what Federal Courts decide and what scientists publically decry, minds are next to impossible to change.
But why is this so important? Because confusion between evidence-based science and faith-based religion can only lead to the detriment of the former. Take, for example, alchemy and chemistry. Both deal with matter and reactions between chemical substances. Their respective laboratories may look strikingly similar to the untrained eye. And yet they differ in something very fundamental. Alchemy is obsessed with the transmutation of metals to gold. After many centuries of trial and error it produced nothing. Chemistry on the other hand, once it separated from faith-based alchemy and adopted the scientific method, managed to produce the wonders of our technological civilization, including medicinal drugs that have saved - and save - millions of lives. Abandoning scientific enquiry, rejecting evidence whenever it clashes with scripture, sanctioning academic liberties on the basis of dogma, and obsessing with “proving” religious notions, can only result in our world returning to the Middle Ages. That’s what is at stake here.

And is not an American problem only. Greece has the lowest public acceptance of evolution in the EU. Thirty per cent of the population accepts the Genesis narrative, and another twenty percent strongly doubt that humans evolved from apes. A few years ago the then General Secretary of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs (sic), when asked about the Ministry’s view on evolution, responded that “evolution is just a theory”, meaning that it has not been proven yet! Evolutionary theory, although included in the school’s textbooks, is almost never taught because it is part of the material that Greek students are examined upon. Elsewhere in Europe the situation is only slightly better, and even in the United Kingdom evolution is seriously challenged by Christian fundamentalists and Islamic hardliners.

So is there a way to reconcile evolution with the Bible? Pope John Paul II in 1996 all but accepted the fossil record and the scientifically calculated age of Planet Earth as true. And yet the Catholic Church remains ambivalent as to the mechanisms that guide the evolution of species. Where most scientists see the mindless hand of chance genetic mutations, Catholics see the guiding spirit of divine providence. The dialogue seems like an impossible discussion between deaf people separated by a thick wall. Recently, and rather amusingly perhaps, it took the form of advertising banners on double-decker buses across London, with Christian fundamentalists defending the doctrine of God-the-Creator and atheists refuting biblical belief as nonsense.
At the heart of the debate lies the irreconcilable contrast between two fundamental narratives of Western civilization: one written by science, the other purportedly by the Word of God. It is the Book of Genesis versus the Origin of Species, the former remaining unchanged through the ages, the later continuously updated as new data come to light - from genetics and fossils - that support the workings of natural selection. You have to believe Genesis to be true, but you do not have to do the same with evolution. You can doubt evolution all you like, for science is the art of skepticism and doubt. The caveat it that science also requires you to be brave enough to accept the evidence, even when it upsets your most deeply-held beliefs.
There are of course people of faith who regard the Bible as an allegory and therefore claim to have no qualms accepting a scientific narrative too. But as Richard Dawkins has poignantly commented, they do not seem to truly appreciate the fact that was so profound to Darwin: that if one accepts evolution one must automatically exclude God from life’s equation. Because evolution explains everything. There are no missing factors or mysteries left. The fundamentalists in Texas understand this well and hence their relentless struggle to eradicate Darwinism from their schools’ curricula. So if you happen to be one who does not believe that Earth is 10,000 years old, and yet you still believe in a biblical God, think again. Unfortunately, you cannot have the cake of science and eat it too.
Published in the Athens News on 27th March 2009

Temnothorax de Condorcet

2009-04-27T09:29:00.002+01:00

How the collective intelligence of social animals can provide a new paradigm for ecological decision-making (notes for a forthcoming lecture at Panteion University)

Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was a pioneer in applying mathematics to the social sciences. His jury theorem states that if each member of a voting group is more likely than not to make a correct decision, the probability that the highest vote of the group is the correct decision increases as the number of members of the group increases. The sum of information available per juror is also proportional to the probability of the correct decision, which means that the more individuals jurors know (or understand) the more likely is that a correct decision will be reached. Democracies are thus theoretically, or potentially, better than dictatorships because they can solve problems better by means of collective decisions. However, as a recent article in the Economist correctly pointed our, human societies are prone to groupthink which neutralizes the benefits of the jury theorem.

Groupthink is typically found in modern parliaments where members vote along party lines, regardless of information available. In societies at large groupthink often manifests as a result of brainwashing by the media. For example, once the financial crisis became headline news terrorists “disappeared”. Terrorists and terrorism, was the mainstay of media output since 9/11, as if the world was at the brink of being blown up by a mad suicide atom-bomber. Groupthink in the western world meant that citizens conditioned their political thinking under the spectre of terrorist threat, mainly coming from so-called Islamo-fascists dreaming of resurrecting the caliphate of the Middle Ages. All that has disappeared now, and replaced with a new enemy of the people: the amoral bankers. The new fear is losing everything, job, savings, home in a black financial hole.

Along with the terrorists global warming has also disappeared from the foreground. Who cares about the melting of arctic ice when there is a meltdown of financial institutions? And so on.

So the question arises how are we, the human race, become able to deal with global problems (poverty, ecology, financial institutions, epidemics, etc.) when we are constantly swayed by the forever trembling cyclopic eye of the media? How can we, the jurors, arrive at the best possible decisions, when information is restricted, or conditioned by groupthink?

A possible answer may come from evolutionary biology. Darwinian sociobiologists studying the behaviour of social animals such as bees and ants, are beginning to understand the way those creatures chose between various options. The ant species Temnothorax albipennis, studied by Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol, establishes a new nest by attenuating information-sharing of best routes amongst scouts. When a suitable place is identified the scouts begin to lead other scouts to the new site. To speed things up, the ants have developed a strategy whereby efficiency is increased by means of leading scouts back to the nest via the quickest route during the phase of migration. Thus, by going to and fro, more scouts become familiar with the route and the speed by which migration takes place increases. This type of dynamic – termed by the researches “reverse tandem runs” – resembles the loading of connections in a network.

Perhaps then, the ants shows us the way too. Human networks may provide the answer to getting over groupthink, and utilizing human collective intelligence and collective decision-making. There are two main characteristics in human networks: firstly, that most individuals have few connections (some friends and family members only) and only a few are highly connected (the “connectors”); secondly, networks are clustered, i.e. they tend to build around specific social groups (e.g. sharing the same profession, or hobby, etc.). If we manage to find strategies in human networks whereby we connectors increase the load of connections by means of increased information, then we may be able to get over the groupthink problem. Connectors have an obvious evolutionary motive to perform this task, namely to safeguard - or increase - their prominence and status in the network. To validate information passed to a network by the connectors, one may use the power of clustering. In clusters, peers are able to perform instant validation of information. This is apparent in readers’ commentary in news websites, as well as wikis.

Collective decisions are complex but so are the problems that currently face humanity. Current global institutions, such the UN, or the IMF, or the G7, are built on 20^th century ideas and technologies. We must now develop new technologies and ideas in order to tap on the collective intelligence of human networks. The democracy of the 21^st century will have to be less representative and more direct, in a totally new way.

Darwin 101 for politicians

2009-04-27T09:28:00.002+01:00

No other idea in human history has had a more profound impact on modern society than the evolutionary theory, independently conceived by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace 150 years ago. In neat, concise, transparent terms, it explains the multiversity of lifeforms that have replenished Earth since billions of years, the shooting of species from other species and, ultimately, the emergence of human beings. Its explanatory power is omnipotent. Evolution occurs because of natural selection. In the ever-changing environment of our planet creates conditions where certain, randomly appearing, traits in a species favor particular individuals over others, who then go on to procreate more often. By procreating they pass those favorable traits to their offspring, and this, over time, changes the whole profile of the species. A new species is thus born. From humble bacteria and viruses to sophisticated, intelligent, car-driving mammals, there has been not a single case in biology that has countered evolutionary theory. On the contrary, evolution has been confirmed again and again, not only by fossil records and discoveries in geology and the past climate of Earth but, more importantly perhaps, by probing into the nexus of life, the cell itself. The discovery of DNA as the principal promulgator of genetic information across generations has confirmed Darwin and Wallace beyond any doubt. We, and the apes, and the fish and the trees and every living thing, are indeed the products of natural selection, the descendants of a common unicellular great-great-grandfather that appeared on Earth some four billion years ago.

It is therefore not at all surprising that such a powerful idea spilled over quickly from the curious observation of amphibious lizards and garrulous birds in the Galapagos Islands and the Amazon forest, and entered the controversial realm of human society. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, was first to coin the term “eugenics” and reinterpret evolutionary theory as political philosophy. Faced with the dilemma of altruism that lead to medicine being supplied to the “poor”, the “feeble-minded” and the “sick”, and therefore ease the propagation of “inferiors”, he suggested that human society should develop towards a world of “superiors” by selectively breeding the best with the best. Being a liberal, Galton proposed that active measures should prune amongst the “poor” for those with talent.

His proposition inspired, several decades later, the instigation of the welfare state in the UK. In the US, a virtually apartheid state in the beginning of the 20^th century, eugenics were taken more literally and several States introduced forced sterilization of mentally-ill patients and others who were deemed “inferior”. Interestingly, Karl Marx was very excited about evolutionary theory. He sent Darwin a copy of his book “Das Kapital”, and wrote to his friends how evolution and class struggle seemed to go hand in hand happily. As species evolved through strife towards perfection so would human society, ultimately arriving at a classless utopia through the uprising of the oppressed workers. And yet later on, in Soviet Union, Darwinism fell quickly out of favor. Orthodox communists of the Stalinist era supported instead the acquisition of new genetic characteristics during one’s lifetime, which could then be passed on to one’s offsprings. This idea is called “Lamarckism” (from the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) and it made more sense to communist visionaries who dreamt of shaping man as the ultimate altruist. Trofim Lysenko, a notorious charlatan agronomist, denounced Darwin with the full support of the Communist Party and applied the flawed Lamarckian theory in Soviet agricultural projects, with disastrous effects.

Evolutionary theory trumps all other explanations about life on Earth. Nevertheless, it is one thing to scientifically and unequivocally explain why bats have wings, or why we have five fingers in each hand instead of six, and totally different why the variation in intelligence, or prowess, or beauty. Implying a genetic cause for such inequalities - as evolutionary theory surely does - smacks of biological determinist: i.e. that you are who you are because you were born like this, and there is nothing you can do about it. Which goes against the liberal ideology of freedom to chose and the right to prosper, as well as the socialist ideal of equality and justice. Thus, Social Darwinism, the idea that competition drives evolution in human societies, ultimately collided with almost every color in the political spectrum of the 20^th century, except perhaps fascism and Nazism which saw in the “survival of the fittest” the foundation of their totalitarian and racist ideologies. Eugenics, originally inspired by a liberal thinker in Victorian England, was corrupted and ultimately led to the crematoria of Auschwitz. That tragic event alone was enough to tarnish Social Darwinism with a terrible reputation which persists to our day.

Enter sociobiology, which many critics consider as Social Darwinism in disguise. Originally inspired to explain complex behavior in the animal world, sociobiology is routinely applied to interpret just about everything, from the dot com and real estate bubbles, to why rich men attract women more and why wealth is relative and never absolute. A new breed of economists, inspired by evolutionary thinking, takes issue with Adam Smith’s original assumption of rational players in the economy. These “behavioral economists” explain the stock markets in terms of instincts genetically inherited from our hominid ancestors that rummaged the ancestral savannas of Africa. Greed that drives markets up is seen as a battle for status amongst players who want to increase their wealth and therefore their chances of mating with a preferred member of the opposite sex. Fear – the factor that swings markets down - as the result of not wanting to lose high status, which in human societies is determined, and defined, by money.

Notable sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, contend that sociobiology is science, not ideology. That, unlike Social Darwinism, it does not say what ought to be done butwhy something happens. Yes, but surely if one has an explanation for social behavior then oneought to be compelled to take action according to that scientific knowledge. If Darwinism explains, for example, murder as a way for hierarchically-low (i.e. poorer or destitute) young males to assert their dominance, then punitive measures should be restructured accordingly. Moreover, critics of sociobiology, such as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, argue that traits such as genre or identity are social constructs and have nothing to do with inherited genes. It is nurture not nature, they say, that carries the day and therefore a socialist utopia of socio-economic equality is ultimately feasible.

The debate of nature versus nurture is bound to define political thinking in the current century too. For, if evolution provides us with a scientific insight to human nature, we must rid ourselves of ideology, whether liberal or socialist, and embrace a neutral, scientific perspective on society. The only caveat, alas so common in science, is to distinguish between cause and effect. Are we humans what we are because of our genes? Or are we because of what we think ourselves to be?

published in the Athens News, on Friday 30th January

Going Nuclear

2009-04-27T09:27:00.004+01:00

Living under the specters of global warming, as well as economical and political instability, out planet is evermore hungry for energy. So let’s look at the options. Fossil fuels, a concentrated form of solar energy, come from plants which became fossilized over millions of years and formed oil, coal and gas. In the process, solar energy was concentrated. Burning coal produces twice the energy of burning wood. Oil and gas are about twice the energy density of coal. All fossil fuels, when burned, produce greenhouse gases. Moreover, recent estimations of oil reserves predict an oil crunch in 30 years, if current trends of consumption persist. The discovery of new oil fields will not save us from the inevitable crunch because increased consumption will outstrip any foreseeable new supply. Being addicted to oil means we go turkey in less than a generation, unless we kick the habit now.

Renewables, such as wind and sunlight, are on the other side of the scale, i.e. they are less energy dense than wood by a factor of 10 to 50. The amount of sunlight that falls on a square meter of earth is barely enough to power one 100watt light bulb. To implement solar energy power stations on an industrial scale requires huge amounts of land. Covering every rooftop with solar panels would probably get enough electricity for our indoor supply (approx. less than 10% of national total), and only during daytime. Storing solar energy in batteries so it can be used during nighttime creates the vexing problem of waste managing the highly toxic materials in batteries.

Wind farms do not fare any better. Covering hundreds of acres with 65-meter structures produces unpredictable electricity output that is difficult to integrate in the national grid. Wind not only comes and goes as it pleases, but is stronger on places that need massive investment to connect to the grid (mountains, islands), and mainly blows during seasons of low demand in electricity (autumn and spring). Biofuels, once heralded as the magic bullet to save the planet, has been called by Jean Ziegler, UN’s raporteur on food, “a crime against humanity”. Fermenting double digit percentage points of the world’s food output to produce ethanol has caused steep rises in food prices and consequently hunger, riots and deaths. To conclude, subsidizing so-called “green technologies” makes perfect media sense but very little economic sense.

Let’s now look at nuclear. The energy density for uranium compared to coal is 2 million! That means that one kilogram of uranium gives you 2 million times as much energy as a kilogram of coal. You can run Athens for a week with a lump of uranium you can hold in one hand. The comparison with coal plants is even more flabbergasting. To fuel a 1000 MW coal plant you need massive and endless trainloads of coal feeding it daily. To fuel a 1000 MW nuclear reactor you need an infinitesimal fraction of that input in the form of fuel rods that are mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves. In their four-and-a-half years lifecycle these fuel rods produce zero carbon emissions. By comparison, the same coal plant over the same period will have spewed 3 million tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Resistance to nuclear energy rests on three issues: danger of meltdown and/or explosion, security issues pertaining to theft of atom bomb materials by terrorist organizations and nuclear waste disposal. So could a nuclear reactor explode? What about Chernobyl? The danger for explosion, or meltdown, is directly related to the fraction of radioactive material that takes part in the nuclear reactions in the nuclear plant. There are two types of uranium, U-238 (with 238 neutrons) which makes 99.3 percent of the natural ore and U-235. The former sheds two protons every now and then over a 5 billion year period, and is less harmful than your TV set. The latter is the powerhouse. It can split and create massive amounts of energy. But U-235 constitutes only 0.7 percent of the natural ore. Being so sparse it cannot undergo a natural “chain reaction”. In order to obtain a larger fraction of U-235, natural core uranium is “enriched”. This is extremely difficult. You need a huge factory to do it and various techniques such as running the natural ore through magnetic fields and whipping it in centrifuges. There are different kinds of enrichment. To produce the nice calm chain reactions in a nuclear reactor you need to enrich U-235 from 0.7 to 3 percent. To enrich to bomb-grade material you have to enrich to 90 percent. This takes a lot of time and effort and specially designed reactors that have dual-use, civil and military. A strictly civil-use nuclear plant is inherently safe and cannot explode.Chernobyl did not explode. The cooling system failed and tore apart the reactor casing resulting in radioactive gases released in the atmosphere. It was because soviet-era reactors did not have the safety feature of reactor casing as western reactors did. Since those days, western reactors have become even safer, with automatic shut-off mechanisms for controlled nuclear reactions, should any accident occur. Earthquakes are not a problem for modern construction engineers who can build safe structures able to withstand the most violent tremors.

The fear of proliferation of nuclear fission by-products, such as plutonium, which could be stolen by terrorists and used in terrorist activities, prompted the Carter administration in 1976 to pass a bill forbidding nuclear fuel recycling. However, to build a bomb you need to enrich uranium at 90%, which is a very difficult process. That is why, for example, one should not worry too much that the Iranians will get to it quickly. The stuff enriched in a civil nuclear plant is not even good for a firecracker. As experience has shown, the bad guys got their nuclear technology from Pakistan and North Korea, not by stealing materials from western, or Soviet, civil nuclear plants.

As for waste, there is no such thing as “nuclear waste”. Nearly all the material in a spent fuel rod is recyclable or easily handled. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is harmless, natural, U-238 that can be put back to where it came from. The rest is fissionable U-235 (1%), various fission products that can be used in nuclear medicine (2%), a residue of “minor actinides” (2%) - that includes plutonium (1%) - that can also be recycled. The French have virtually complete recycling. All of France’s nuclear waste from 25 years of producing 75 percent of its electricity is stored beneath the floor of a room at Le Hague. The lifetime output of each French citizen would fit in a beer can.

Nuclear power could be humanity’s greatest hope for the future. Currently, to construct a nuclear plant costs 2,000 to 5,000 USD per KW/h. This means that a 1000 MW reactor would cost anything between 2 and 5 billion USD. If this sounds a lot, remember that the Greek government gave the banks a fat cheque of taxpayers’ money amounting to 35 billion USD. The same money could have bought us all the energy we need for the next century, save the environment, create jobs, rejuvenate the economy, and promote science and Greece’s geopolitical role in Eastern Mediterranean as a power of peace and prosperity. As for the fuel, uranium is ubiquitous and currently costs 59 USD per pound.

The Earth’s core is hot because of uranium’s natural nuclear decay. And because of the small percentage of U-235 in the natural ore, planet Earth is in no danger of exploding into space. We tap this nuclear energy with geothermal plants and call it “geothermal”. However, by simply taking the uranium ore out of the ground and placing it in a nuclear reactor we can multiply the energy efficiency of the same process by millions of times, providing massive amounts of electricity with zero greenhouse emissions. Investing in nuclear plants will not only solve our country’s energy problems and make us energy independent, but will also provide jobs for construction workers and highly skilled scientists and engineers. The majority of the Greek public is currently against nuclear power because they are either misinformed or plainly uninformed. And yet, while neighboring countries are set to construct nuclear plants within the next 20 years, Greece desperately needs visionary politicians to take up the nuclear agenda. The debate must open.

This article was commissioned for the Athens News, published Nov. 28th

The roots (and futility) of conservation

2009-04-27T09:27:00.003+01:00

The modern idea of conservation was born in 19^th century evangelical United States and has its roots in literary - i.e. anti-evolution - Christian ideas about life on Earth and the age of our planet. According to these ideas, life on Earth is static and does not evolve. It was created ex nihilo by an omnipotent designer a few thousand years ago. The last of the designer’s creation, us humans, were bestowed with the obligation of presiding and preserving Earth’s Garden of Life, God’s Creation. Hence, the creation of Yellowstone, the first national natural park of the world, was vociferously argued by Theodore Roosevelt on the basis of Christian duty, thus swinging the republican vote in favor of spending a considerable sum of federal money on the project.

Since then, natural conservation has an aura of sanctity about it. This sanctity has an appeal for many, and brings together very disparate groups of people under one umbrella, namely the “saving of the planet”. Such a premise is misled, unscientific and dangerous.

I have already argued the reasons for being misled. It is unscientific because to try to “preserve” a dynamic system such is life on Earth is simply futile. It is like trying to preserve a sunny day for ever. The difference is one of time scale only. Our “sunny day” is the Pleistocene (plus Holocene – for those who like making the distinction) Era. We, today, see the world in an evolutionary, geological and climatic snapshot of its last 1.8 million years. However, the film reel so-far is 4.5 billion years, or 4,500 million years. “Conservation”, in the sense that is currently dominant, is the unscientific attempt to stop the film of evolution.

That is why conservation can be also dangerous. The current climate debate is an example. The idea that humanity can somehow “stop” the planet getting warmer, and somehow” return” to a pre-industrial time of low CO2 levels, is not only unscientific and futile, but diverts considerable global resources to the wrong kind of project.

So what can the “right” project be? Certainly not to lay waste on Mother Earth by polluting the air, the ground and the sea, and killing every living species! The idea of conservation must undergo serious scientific overhaul. The emphasis should shift from static to dynamic, and should encompass three main action areas:

Increase our understanding on Earth’s systems and their interplay. Instead of studying systems separately, we need a cross-disciplinary approach to include the concurrent study of geological, climatic (i.e. atmospheric and oceanic), space and life feedback systems.

Develop monitoring systems to observe and measure human interference with Earth’s feedback systems.
Develop technologies that can support a comfortable and healthy life for all human beings, which operate in harmony with Earth’s feedback systems.

The current political, and dominant scientific, agenda must change.

The ignorant miracle-workers

2009-04-27T09:26:00.001+01:00

Is science the surest way of arriving at truth? Can we validate its worth beyond anyone’s doubt? Surely, the limits of knowledge have been discussed ad nauseum by the ancients. Aristotle did not approve of Platonic metaphysics, but ask any string theorist what she thinks about the laws of nature and she will tell you maths. Where is maths? Where does it reside, before expressing itself in the motion of bodies or the flow of fluids? Where does music go when the instruments stop their play? Historians of science tell us that once upon the Middle Ages science and magic were twin sisters, Siamese twins living together side by side and forcefully separating not before the time of Descartes. His definition of res extensa was followed by logical positivism a few centuries later; but no one would have given a toss if it wasn’t for the Industrial Revolution. I stand firmly behind this argument: if it wasn’t for the engineering miracles that were produced as a result of scientific discovery, science would have been little more than a pastime for gentlemen and gentle ladies of plenty means and time to spare. Everyone had to bow to the miracles of science because the damn thing worked – and it did so better than prayer. Planes fly after all, not by well-wishing (although I often see many fellow passengers pray during take off) but by engines roaring and good wing design. But do we really know why they fly? I would argue that we do not, not really. We do have a good set of equations available, and a sound theory of aerodynamics that we teach to college students, but this corpus of descriptions sits uncomfortably on top of vast, unwavering void of stark ignorance. At the end of the scientists’ day what remains in the Petri dish, or the computer printout, or the spectrum of a far away galaxy, are unanswered questions followed by more unanswered questions. Some call this a virtue. And why not: there is certainly something alluding to heroism in a person willing to face mysteries whilst remaining agnostic. Heroics apart, however, the bottom line is that working the miracles of science was, and still remains, the biggest mystery of all. The body of knowledge is riddled with holes, curious singularities where our notions precariously stand. I would like to give three ready examples of such “singularities”. First, the Big Bang; and of course all that follows it, which is the whole of physics. Our descriptions of the universe, mathematical as they are, should not be confused with knowledge. Secondly: Life, the origin of. How did it come about? Thirdly: the mind. If you have doubts about those three examples, let me put them in another way. The litmus test of true knowledge is the power of reproduction. If I know something - truly know it, not suppose it - then I can reproduce it, nominally or otherwise. If we knew, or came to know, the nature of the Universe, of Life and of the Mind, we could easily reproduce all three of them. We do not (not “yet” some will say, but I dispute that). What we do (re)produce are similes; or simulations of. Scientists are ignorant miracle-workers performing in the circus of history while the rest of world watches in amazement. How long more will the show last? A good answer would be “when the miracles run out”. And then what? What will follow science? A retro-religious era perhaps?

Cyborgs -1

2009-04-27T09:23:00.005+01:00

Augmenting physical ability by making use of techno-prostheses is as instinctive to primates as the sticks that some chimpanzees use to extract termites from their nests. The whole edifice of technological civilization has been exactly that, to implement knowledge collected on natural processes in order to achieve supernatural ends. It should therefore not come as a surprise that a fusion of machine and body has become ever so prominent in the last few years. The difference is one of interface, or to be more succinct, of intimacy. It is one thing to sit in your car and drive at a hundred miles per hour and a completely different thing to be running at a hundred miles per hour using a pair cyber-legs – or is it? I would argue that although it may “feel” different it is basically one and the same. But I guess the real issue with cyborg technology is not adding a few degrees of extra functionality to our bodies. Simply by wearing a pair of glasses and correcting my shortsightedness I have already done so. The real issued emerges when the human brain is part of the interface, when the intimacy between body and machine reaches the level of our neurons. Deep brain stimulation works miracles with patients suffering with severe symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and yet the ethical repercussions of this “intrusion” send shivers up the backs of ordinary folk. Is this the dawn of a post-human era? Of creatures half-machine and half-human? Where the “self” is modulated by electrical currents and electrodes implanted in the brain? And what would that mean for Free Will? These are too many questions to ask at once, so let me try to unravel each one in turn, in the light of the New Narrative. A central thesis of the New Narrative is the deconstruction of Self. This is something that began in earnest with the introduction of psychoanalytic theory in the mainstream culture. The “discovery of the subconscious” blew the foundations of assumed rationality sky high. It is perhaps rather amazing that it took a century for economists to factor the human subconscious into their theories – but this is, I believe, a fine example of the permeability of the New Narrative, a subject that I shall return to. To return to my current analysis, the result of deconstructing the Self has been that cyber dreams are interpreted as horrors, in the same manner that a room of magic mirrors modulates our reflection to the extend that it becomes another “us” out-there. The rationalists would have no trouble realizing that cyborg technology does not alter a thing. But we are not rationalists, not any more. We are the heroes of a narrative that self-describes our existence using a new code of ethics based on deconstruction. According to this code, we are all post-human, in the sense that our biology has been enhanced by technology, chemically, electrically, mechanically, members of an interconnected hive called the Web, our “collective consciousness”. The questions we therefore ask are completely out of context. When we ask, for example, where is “Free Will” in the case of electrical brain modulation, we are directing the question to our past, not our present, and certainly not to our future. Thus, the question lingers on unanswered, for it is unanswerable. A better question might have been: can we modulate Free Will in order to achieve a more harmonious society?

Our post-scientific era

2009-04-27T09:23:00.004+01:00

Counterknowledge, the corpus of pseudofactual narratives that dominate much of today’s discourse, shocks many in the scientific community. I often talk to scientists who cannot comprehend why intelligent people, some with science degrees, are so gullible that they take homeopathy drugs, read their horoscopes and believe that aliens frequently visit our planet aboard UFOs. Richard Dawkins has been prominent in forging a camp of polemical atheists who, presumably fed up with counterknowledge, have raised their intellectual arms against the resurgence of religion. Meanwhile, creationism gains ground in the west and is the dominant belief in the Muslim world as well as among Muslims living in western countries. I am told that the President of China has been reported claiming that Chinese vessels circumnavigated the world in 1421 and established colonies in South America. Is the world going crazy? It seems to me that the world has entered a post-scientific era. The Enlightment project, still unfinished, is on the defense everywhere. A medieval mentality had returned whereby belief is more important than fact, where connections and patterns between disparate things are put together in order to “prove” the most incredible things. The media, applying the only filter they care for (i.e. ratings) propagate these narratives and thus legitimize them further. The results range from comical to tragic. People in South Africa have been dying of AIDS because their ex-President believed that the disease is not caused by a virus but by social conditions. Scientists have a new social responsibility. They cannot hide in their labs, watch the other way, delegate the issue to politicians. If they do, soon there may be no labs. If the trends of today are left unchecked, then in the not-so-distant future tax money may be diverted to building astrological observatories and laws may be enacted that require the ritualistic blessings of "enlightened" beings in order for society to function. Dawkins has been criticized for causing a “polarization” between science and religion. My opinion is that he has not caused anything of the kind; he has simply shown to the rest of us that such a polarization already exists and we should wake up and do something about it. The future could well be of a world in possession of nuclear technology and the lack of rational thinking. Imagine the Crusaders attacking medieval Jerusalem with atom bombs and you’ll get the picture. This is the definition of a nightmare.

The political anticlimax of climatic change

2009-04-27T09:22:00.001+01:00

Our planet is warming up. Scientists agree that global average temperature is about 0.6oC higher than it was a century ago and that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen by about 30 percent over the past 200 years, mostly because of the burning of fossil fuels. Although the causal link between the increase in greenhouse gases and global warming cannot be unequivocally established, there is widespread consensus amongst scientists that global warming is man-made. There are data that contradict this consensus; for example, satellite measurements of the upper atmosphere where temperatures have remained virtually unchanged and deep ocean temperature measurements which indicate that oceans are in fact cooling. Other factors may be attributing to global warming too, such as atmospheric soot, land-use change, and solar variations, as well as natural processes which we do not understand yet. Scientists, in trying to understand disparate data and thus explain global warming, build so-called models, which are mathematical simulations of measured facts and logical hypotheses. These models are run on powerful computers and their efficacy is tested by means of their predictability. Current climate models are quite sophisticated and most of them predict a rise in global temperatures of around 10C in the next 50 to 100 years.
It is important to understand that although few disagree that global warming is real, the interplay between anthropogenic climate forcings and natural processes is a difficult one to establish. Our planet is an extremely complex system of natural feedback systems in constant interplay and, therefore, in unremitting change. For example, the history of climate on Earth, as revealed by science, shows that 500 million years ago temperatures were 80C higher than today; and levels of carbon dioxide many times higher too. Antarctica glaciated around 30 million years ago, probably due to plate tectonics that caused a restriction in the flow of ocean currents. Temperatures started falling below today’s average around 3 million years ago and the world entered into alternating ice-age cycles, the last one ending 10,000 years ago. Since then we live in what has been called “the long summer”, and it is no coincidence that farming and civilization arose around the same time.

Faced with undoubted scientific facts as well as scientific uncertainties, pressured from environmental groups who see their day, overwhelmed by media hype that feeds upon the theme of climatic apocalypse, western political thinkers have devised policies to avert climate change. The main premise of such policies is to “fix” future climate by reducing the burning of fossil fuels today. The argument for such policies is economic; climate change according to certain economic analyses will be devastating and, therefore, action should be taken today to avert future consequences.

Both the premise and the argument are debatable. Earth’s climate is always changing and the world can only accept change, embrace it and prepare for it. “Fixing” is an engineering term that assumes a deterministic understanding of the system to be fixed; something which does not apply to Earth’s climate. We are simply too ignorant, and too arrogant, to want to fix Earth’s climate by twiddling concentrations of carbon dioxide over the ensuing decades. Suggestions for “positive Geo-engineering” (altering Earth’s climate towards a “preferred” state by disrupting natural processes) reflect the logical extend of such a misled, potentially dangerous, and much criticized, approach.

Although there is widespread scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of climate change, economic analyses on the future impact of climate change are very disparate. For example, the Stern Report to the UK government, which estimated the cost of carbon dioxide at 86$ per ton, has been challenged as too overblown; most economists estimate it between 2 and 12$. Other economists argue that funds spent to fix climate will be withheld from other, more crucial and more urgent causes such as world poverty, tropical diseases or the spread of AIDS.

Proposed climate policies are also under scrutiny. “Market-based” greenhouse gas reduction schemes, such as cap-and-trade, promote the development of a carbon cartel seeking to exploit the system to make profits. Political considerations affect carbon markets and carbon lobbyists are having a field day. The carbon markets can never be truly open, and therefore market forces will be perennially superseded by politics and political corruption. “Green tax” schemes, although more effective, will be extremely unpopular to enforce, not only in the US but also in the EU where petrol prices are already heavily taxed by governments. It is no coincidence that, despite big talk from European leaders, Kyoto targets have not been met by the majority of EU members. Everyone knows that reducing the burning of fossil fuels, or increasing fuel taxes, will adversely affect economic growth and jobs in developed countries, particularly in times of economic downturn and recession; it will also put in peril economic advancement of the energy-hungry developing world. It is a dismal sign of our media-weary times that not one western politician seems brave enough to contradict global groupthink.

And yet the world ought not to remain inactive. Dependence on fossil fuels is politically and economically precarious for the West, as the case of Iran, the deliria of Chavez and the conflict in Georgia amply demonstrate. Continuing global economic development and prosperity needs vast amounts of environmentally-benign energy that must be found and made available to all, without the threat of blackmail by cartels and dictators. The long-term solution will have to come from massive public and private investment in research on renewable forms of energy, such as wind and solar, as well as safer nuclear. Climate change is an unavoidable part of living on a planet with an atmosphere. Future generations will be better prepared to face it - and better off - if we, instead of alluding to ineffective policies, we tap humanity’s greatest asset: our inner world of ideas.

This article was commissioned for the Athens News

A Wh(ITER) elephant?

2009-04-27T09:21:00.004+01:00

Imagine a machine that you can throw in a few grams of hydrogen – which abounds in the Earth’s oceans – crank it a few times, and harvest massive amounts of cheap energy. And all that thanks to fusion, a physical process where the nuclei of two elements (for example deuterium and tritium, which are kinds of hydrogen) fuse together to produce a new element (helium). The new, fused, nucleus is somewhat less than the sum of the two original nuclei, and the residual mass becomes energy (called “thermonuclear”) according to Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2. And that’s all the physics you need to solve Earth’s energy problems!

Fusion sounds too good - and because it is also true - it has led to ITER, the “International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor”, a 10billion dollar megaproject, jointly funded by the EU, Russia, US, Japan, South Korea, China and India. ITER’s long and turbulent history began in 1985 as a political-cum-scientific gesture towards easing Cold War tensions. The West and the Soviet Union, each one having developed their own thermonuclear technologies, decided to put them together for the benefit of all mankind. The Soviet Union collapsed but ITER survived. After much politicking and dramatic bargaining over the ensuing decades, its location has been finally decided: Cadarache, near Marseille.

ITER will take 10 years to construct, and 20 more years to operate. It will build upon experience gained from previous experiments, such as JET (The “Joint European Taurus”), and will test new ideas and designs for a reactor. Although the science is well-known and straight-forward, the engineering is a daunting task evermore. For nuclear fusion to occur elements have to be stripped off their electrons. This state of “electron-less” matter is called “plasma”. The Sun is a fireball of plasma and its radiant energy is theorized to be the result of naturally occurring fusion. Plasma only exists in extremely high temperatures and therefore no material container can contain it. So engineers must develop something “immaterial”; a magnetic field powerful enough to hold plasma at 100 million degrees centigrade. By 2018 the hope to fuse half a gram of hydrogen, sustain the generated plasma for 400 seconds, and produce 500MW of energy. (By comparison, in 1997 JET managed to sustain plasma for half a second only and produce 16.1MW). Commercial thermonuclear reactors are envisaged by 2050.

The promise of ITER is environmentally benign, widely applicable, essentially inexhaustible electricity. Criticism from environmental groups focuses mainly on safety and waste disposal; however safety is inherent in fusion reactors (if plasma cools, even slightly, reactions stop at once) and the only waste is water. Fusion reactors may become radioactive but much less so than commercial nuclear reactors currently in use; and tested technologies to safely manage decommissioning already exist. Indeed, faced with the huge challenge to drastically cut down on greenhouse emissions, thermonuclear energy seems god-sent. Economic growth, which lifts people out of poverty, increases prosperity and guarantees peace, is based on the assumption of cheap, renewable, and widely available, energy resources. Such resources do not exist on our planet. Solar, wind and hyrdo cannot keep pace with the required rates of economic growth. Thermonuclear, with its zero emissions, inherent safety, minimum waste management overheads, and Mega-watt energy output is seen, by ITER’s supporters, as the only real alternative.

Nevertheless, serious scientific skepticism points to the fact that, although the uranium-fission bomb that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has found peaceful use in nuclear reactors, the hydrogen-fusion bomb of 1952 has not. Containing the plasma at 100 million degrees for any economically meaningful period, may be an impossible engineering feat. Furthermore, the prevailing theory that the Sun is a gigantic fusion reactor is currently in dispute because it does not comply with new measurements of solar radiation. NASA is scheduling missions to investigate alternative explanations for the Sun’s mysterious energy cycle.
Could ITER be a White Elephant? A multi-billion megaproject which will result in nothing but water?
Questions such as these have led the US to vacillate in and out of ITER, and Canada to let go for good. The current political climate does not help either. The reasoning behind any “blue-sky” exploration smacks against the “precautionary principle”, an idea dominating contemporary political discourse. In a risk-averse society, playing with an expensive toy full of radioactive plasma may sound like an abomination. And yet we humans have managed to survive thus far by taking risks, by going out there and hoping to discover something new. Stifling potentially vital innovation on the grounds that it is “very difficult” to produce any results, or that it may incur “risk”, may be a far more dangerous proposition.

This article was commissioned for the Athens News

Ghost-hunting at Pylos

2009-04-27T09:21:00.003+01:00

Imagine yourself in the countryside during a clear night staring at the countless stars that never failed to inspire poets, science fiction writers and lovers. For those lucky enough to have viewed the sky through a powerful telescope, the splendid beauty and immensity of the cosmos acquire near-religious potency. Astronomers, a race of stellar priests-cum-poets of sorts, use electromagnetic radiation – such as light or radio waves – that is emitted by those distant worlds in order to investigate the mysteries of the universe and to explore the evolution of stars and planets. However, there are parts of the universe that are opaque to optical or radio telescopy. For example the nuclei of stars, or the dense centers of galaxies, or the early universe when light did not yet exist.
The experimental confirmation of the mysterious neutrino particle in 1956 ushered a new era in astronomy - called “neutrino astronomy” - that can boldly go where other astronomies cannot, and see things no optical or radio telescope can.
Neutrinos (not to be confused with neutrons) were first theorized to exist in 1930 by the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli. They are tiny particles which result from nuclear reactions, such as the ones taking place in the Sun or inside a nuclear reactor. Unlike electrons (which are negatively charged) neutrinos have no electric charge and are virtually massless. Thus they pass through matter virtually unhindered. Every second 50 trillion of those ghostly things pass through your body without you noticing it!
The bonus of being like a ghost is that you can travel through anything, anywhere, anytime. Compare that with photons, the particles of light. Photons produced inside the core of the Sun take 40,000 years to reach its outer surface and become visible by our optical telescopes. This is because photons interact with the electromagnetic forces inside the core of the Sun which impede their transmission. Neutrinos, having no charge and interacting with nothing, travel from the core to the surface almost instantly. A similar phenomenon occurs during the final stages in the lifetime of a big star. When such a massive star burns out it implodes and then violently explodes all its matter and energy into space. The phenomenon is called supernova and is one of the most spectacular and amazing events in the universe. In 1987 detection of a massive “neutrino storm” foretold a supernova explosion 18 hours before the light from the explosion arrived at Earth.
Let us return for a moment back to our imaginary telescope. Modern astronomy tells us that all the stars and the galaxies out there, all “ordinary matter” as it is called, accounts only for 4% of the universe. Of the rest, 22% is made up of the mysterious dark matter, and 74% of the even more mysterious dark energy. Dark matter is responsible for the way galaxies are clustered together, it gives the universe its “shape” and it is made up from weakly interacting particles of matter that are still unknown. Neutrinos may account at least for a part of the “missing” dark matter.

With so many cosmic mysteries to solve, the scientific interest in neutrinos is great and since the late fifties many scientists and engineers have tried to develop machines that could detect them. This is no easy feat. For example, if we wanted to block half the typical neutrinos that emanate from our Sun we would need a sphere of water around the sun with a radius of 10 light years!

The coast of Pylos may not hold so much water but it does hold enough for Nestor, an experimental neutrino telescope. The design for Nestor is based on a rigid metal structure that supports arrays of thousands of sensors which detect the faint collisions of neutrinos as they pass through Earth. The structure, more than 10 times higher than the Eiffel Tower, has been immersed in the deep waters outside Pylos, where depths go down to 5 kilometers. So far only 2 of the total 12 floors of the structure have been assembled. The sea water is important because it absorbs most of the light as well as other electromagnetic radiation, allowing only the ever-elusive neutrinos to pass through.

In fact it is the great depth, combined with the close proximity to the shore that Pylos is putting forward as its comparative advantages in competing with the two other European observatories, Antares in France and Nemo in Italy. The prize will be the selected site for KM3Net, the future European infrastructure for neutrino telescopy. At the southern hemisphere, on icy Antarctica, another neutrino telescope – aptly called IceCube - is being built already. Together, IceCube and KM3NeT will view the full sky while searching for neutrino sources, such as gamma ray bursts, supernovae or colliding stars. A final decision for KM3Net is expected within the next two years and the Greek scientists, as well as the Greek Government, are trying to convince their European counterparts for the scientific as well as geographical values of Pylos. Till then, the existing detectors of Nestor will keep on searching for the ethereal passes of the tiny neutrinos, listening deep into the dark waters of the Mediterranean Sea, perhaps the most unlikely and curious place to watch the sky.

This article was commissioned for the Athens News

Big Bang Reloaded

2009-04-27T09:20:00.001+01:00

It is now official: in a somewhat embarrassed statement, scientists recently declared that Earth will not be swallowed up by the tiny black holes that could be created this summer at CERN. Akin to the paranoia of 1910, when the media forewarned on the destruction of the planet due to the gaseous tail of Halley’s comet, the switching-on of the largest-ever experiment in physics has made news mostly by grace of its hypothetical potential to end it all in one big flash. A group of concerned citizens in Hawaii has filed a lawsuit requesting an injunction to stop CERN immediately. So is this the vainglorious return of human hubris to be stopped before it’s too late? Are scientists, like the ever-curious Pandora, about to open the proverbial box and let all hell break loose?

The European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) is a wonder of international collaboration. Situated at the Franco-Swiss border it has been a beacon of scientific excellence since its establishment after the WWII, churning out not only insights into the workings of subatomic nature but also fabulous inventions like the World Wide Web. During the past twenty years CERN has been abuzz with an army of scientists, engineers, technicians and workers putting together the largest, most complex project ever built. It is called the Large Hardon Collider (LHC) and its purpose is to explore the edge of our understanding about nature.
The LHC is a particle smasher in the shape of a hollow ring 27km in length, dug 100m underground. Inside this ring neutrons and protons, the elementary particles that make up the nuclei of atoms, will be accelerated by means of strong magnetic fields. Once they reach 99.99% of the speed of light they will be made to smash into each other. The particle debris that will result will be awash with exotic things scientists are dying to explore; evidence of extra dimensions, mysterious traces of the dark matter that is supposed to pervade the universe, the infamous Higg’s boson which gives mass to everything. The LHC will offer us a glimpse of the universe when it was only one millionth of a second old. In this sense, it is also a time machine which will take us back to the beginning of time.

A tremendous amount of information will come out of LHC, and the next big challenge for scientists will be to record, analyze and, ultimately, make sense of it. To help them, four extremely sophisticated detectors, placed at certain points along the ring, will act like huge cameras taking snapshots of the disintegrating particles. The biggest one - aptly named ATLAS - will have to process data equivalent to 50 billion phone calls made at the same time!
The late physicist Victor Weiss was right to call underground particle colliders the “gothic cathedrals of the 20th century”. The LHC is pushing our technology to its limits, has required the combined craftsmanship and ingenuity of thousands of workers and it has taken decades of collective, single-minded commitment from conception to completion. But there is another aspect in the simile that I find even more inspiring. Like the cathedrals of the medieval past the LHC is the modern temple of worship of the ultimate forces that have created us. Scientists may not call it God but, in essence, is the same: recreating the Big Bang in this magnificent mega-lab will not only enhance our scientific understanding but will also provide the moral justification for our technological civilization. It will demonstrate that technology is not merely utilitarian but, like art, music and literature, it underpins the spiritual fabric that makes life worth living. The 10 billion Euros spent to build LHC are therefore the best - and wisest - investment we taxpayers of the western world have ever made.

So what about those tiny black holes? True, Stephen Hawking has predicted that they will be part of the debris. Buy will they suck up everything around them and start growing fast till they eat up the planet? Virtually impossible, or – to be more scientifically precise – equally probable with a firedragon materializing inside CERN’s cafeteria one late winter evening. Earth is bombarded daily with cosmic rays which are scales of magnitude greater than the energies at LHC, creating billions of tiny black holes every second, and yet we are all still here. If Hawking is right, those pussycat black holes are nothing like their roaring lion cousins that lounge in the centre of galaxies and eat up stars. They live for a fleeting moment and then vanish by radiating away all their energy. At least that is what Hawking is theorizing and, if proven right, he will be snatching one of the Nobel prizes expected to varnish the great discoveries to be made at CERN in the next few years. Stay tuned and fear not. Planet Earth is safe.

Interview with Leonard Susskind

2009-04-27T09:18:00.002+01:00

GZ: What are the big questions in physics today?
LS: The connection between cosmology, gravitation, quantum mechanics and string theory (if it turns out to be the right theory which is probably). For me these are the central questions. Of course there are questions which divide the universe into before year 2000 and after year 2000. There are questions left over from the twentieth century. The questions from the twentieth century are how we understand the pattern of elementary particles and so forth, how we understand what’ s called the Standard Model, how does it fit into something bigger and more complete.
Under 21st century physics I would classify questions that have to do with the structure of universe, as well as the origin of our laws of nature, our laws of physics.

GZ: Could string theory be the “theory of everything” and give all the answers?
LS: I dislike the term “theory of everything” and I would never use it myself and if knew who had said it first I would shoot him. It’s an inflammatory term and all kinds of people correctly say that it is not a theory of everything. It doesn’t explain how the brain works and so it’s a term which I would not use. If it is a theory which can, at some point, explain the origin of the universe and the spectrum of elementary particles and so forth, it remains to be seen. My feeling is that there’s probably only one quantum theory of gravity and string theory appears to be a part of that theory of gravity.
What we are discovering about string theory is very different from what we had expected and hoped for. The original hope of string theory was that it would provide an absolutely unique set of answers to the questions such as: what is the particles’ spectrum, what are the masses of particles. It would have been a very elegant answer, a beautiful mathematical answer and extremely unique. Unique in that we would find that, basically, the world could not be any other way that the way it is. That was the hope. The reality is extremely different. The reality is that the more we study of the theory, the more possible kinds of things we discover it can describe. We discover it’s a theory with a vast number of solutions. We simply find that there are enormous numbers of possible worlds that string theory can describe.

GZ:String theory has often been called a “revolution in physics”...
LS: The word revolution has been tremendously overused. Super and revolution are the most overused words in physics. Everything is a revolution. Is string theory a revolution? We don’t know yet. I think we don’t know what string theory is yet. I think we’ve made very wrong guesses about what string theory will do for us. I think we got it completely wrong. We thought it would give us a unique theory of the elementary particles. Instead it’s giving us perhaps as many as 10500 different possibilities of what the universe could be like. This is very puzzling. What do we make out of it? Do we just randomly pick one of these possible universes? Or all of them are important? What’s going on? My own view for some time now, is that in an inflationary context you could have a patch of this universe, a patch of that, a patch of whatever else is possible. In string theory it looks like 10500 possibilities are possible, each with its own set of particles, set of interactions. My guess is that the universe is just exceedingly big, full of tremendous amount of diversity. All these different possibilities materialize at some place. We simply live where is possible to live, in that part of this giant structure which is not totally hostile or lethal to our existence.

GZ: String theory has captured the public imagination because it refers to hidden dimensions. Of course, science fiction stories have made a lot of hidden dimensions. Why do we need so many extra dimensions to explain nature?
LS: Wish I could give you a simple mathematical explanation, for I’m afraid nobody can explain it simply otherwise. It‘s a very complicated theory which fits together in a consistent way only if the number of dimensions are ten or eleven. Why does physics need them? Elementary particles in the ordinary view of things are point particles. A point can’t have many, many properties. A point is too simple to have properties. However, we know that elementary particles have a lot of properties. They have spin, they have electric charge, they have something called isotopic spin, they have a quantum number called color - it’s not got anything to do with ordinary color - they have generations that they belong to, there are whole catalogs of different kinds of quantum numbers, of different kinds of properties that quarks, electrons, netrinos, or photons have. It sounds unreasonable for a point to have that structure. So the feeling most of us have is that, at some level, if you look deeply enough into things, you‘ll discover that particles aren’t points. That they must have all kinds of internal machinery that gives them these properties. One of those machineries, one of the ingredients into understanding what the quantum numbers of particles are, is the idea of higher dimensions. I‘ll give you an example. The simplest and oldest theory of higher dimensions is called the Kaluza theory. It was invented by Kaluza in 1917. Einstein liked it very much. It postulated one extra dimension, i.e. a particle in the extra dimension could be regarded as a little circular dimension. The idea of Kaluza theory is that the particle can move not only in the usual three directions of space but it can also move around in this extra dimension. Well, the particle which moves around in the extra dimension is different than one that moves differently in the extra dimension. The amount of speed that is going in the extra dimension as well as the direction it goes matter a lot. What is this new option corresponds to? It corresponds to the electric charge of the particle in Kaluza’s theory. So, electric charge becomes motion in another direction, in a new direction. What’s going on now is that these extra directions - all of them - correspond in various kinds of ways to the extra properties that these points have. So I wouldn’t say that we needed the extra dimensions, but we needed the kind of structure, the kind of complexity in space that could explain why these other degrees of freedom are there.

GZ: Skeptics say that string theory will forever remain outside the realm of real science, because it’s not experimentally falsifiable.

LS: I would simply dismiss these people for lack of imagination. There are all these people who are constantly pontificating of what science is and what science isn’t. These people lack of imagination. I also lack of imagination but I have a lot of imagination to know that I lack of imagination. We do not know what people can do in the future. We do not know what the human intelligence is capable of collectively. True, we are in a new course of exploration s studying extremely remote things which are very, very difficult to establish experimentally. But we should not abandon our course.

GZ: Let me take you back to what we discussed before about string theory predicting up to 10500 different possible universes. Is this perhaps an answer to the paradox that we live in a universe so finely-tuned. Is this the answer to the Anthropic principle?
LS: That may be. My view is that the fine-tuning of the universe, particularly with regards to the cosmological constant, is so exceptional that we can no longer ignore it. Nevertheless, we have to ask whether the Anthropic principle is really serious business. Different people mean different things by the anthropic principle. Some give a religious depth to that thing, that the Almighty created the universe for no other purpose than people to live there. That’s one theory to which I don’t subscribe. I think it’s the duty of physicists and scientists to take that theory only as an absolutely last resort, when everything else fails. Other people think it’s part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics that somehow we live in the one place we can.
My view is a little different. It’s similar to asking why we live on a planet which is so finely-tuned. Our planet is at just the right distance from the sun so that we do not get boiled or frozen. That’s a very small window of opportunity, it’s a fine tuning. To find the reason why this is so, you need at least two things: a set of very large alternative possibilities and a cosmology which creates all of these different possibilities. So, it wouldn’t be enough to know that the “planet equation” - whatever it is - has many, many solutions with different values of, say, the “right temperature”. I also want to know that the surrounding universe grew and expanded creating lots of planets. Those two ingredients make sense out of this anthropic idea. One, that the theory, whatever it is, has so many solutions that even though it takes a very fine tuning for life, there will still be enough other solutions, so that statistically there will be one. And that, whatever the cosmology of the universe is, it creates always different possibilities some place.

GZ: How about string theory then. Does it fit your two requirements for an explanation?
LS: I think that string theory provides us with a space of enormous possibilities. By involving so many mechanisms put together in various combinations the number of possible universe is 10500or something. We don’t what the number is, but it’s vast. The other thing we need is something like Linde’s and Lincoln’s theory of eternal inflation, where inflation takes place constantly and spins off different environments. Their ideas seem to me to be very, very reasonable, that the universe expands to something enormously big and it creates patches of all different kinds of what Alan Guth calls “pocket-universes”.

GZ: Could we ever find if that is true?
LS: For the moment it looks impossible because of the horizon problem. Our world has a horizon that we can not see beyond. Presumably these other worlds are behind this horizon. One of the things we’ve learnt from thinking about black holes in the context of string theory, is that at quantum level the horizon is not really a barrier to knowledge. What goes on outside the horizon is also equally well described by the Hawking radiation of the black hole. I suspect that cosmic horizons are scrambled in complicated ways. Cosmic microwave background, which is light Hawking radiation, has this information in it. Can anybody ever extracted it? Certainly not with experimental tools currently available. But as I said never say never. We don’t know what the limits of imagination, or the limits of intelligence, are and that’s something for the future to do. Young smart physicists want to be explorers. They want to explore those things which everybody else says are impossible.

GZ: The LHC is underway and will soon start experiments for the Higgs particle . Will they find it?
LS: I think so. I don’t see any other good alternative.

GZ: So the LHC is money worth spent!
LS: Well, yes, whether we find the Higg’s particle or not. If we find it’s there, that’s wonderful and confirms everything we knew. If it’s not there, it’s even more radical and money will have been even better spent. It will mean that we have been thinking wrong about physics for thirty years now.

GZ: Is time is an illusion?
LS:Space is an illusion. You are an illusion.

GZ:This sounds very Buddhist to me.
LS:Well, physicists don’t think that way because it’s not a useful way to think. We can measure time, just like as we can measure space, just like we can measure electrons. So why pick on time as being an illusion? Everything is an illusion in that view. But it’s not a useful view for a physicist. If you can measure it, if you can describe it, then we regard it as real.

GZ: Let me press this point of illusion a little further. Quantum mechanics introduces the observer into the very fabric in reality. Somehow if you take observers out, if you take consciousness out, “reality” ceases to exist. Does the universe exist when we do not observe it?
LS: I’m not a philosopher and I’m trying not to be philosophical. I’m trying to be more practical. Let’s see...Ask me the question again.

GZ: Is there something that we can call extended reality, a reality outside our perception? Or are we constantly creating reality through our measurements or our observations?
LS: We don’t really know how to understand the world of quantum mechanics. We know how to understand one special set of circumstances, where you can clearly separate the world in observer and system.
But the real world is not like that. We the observers are always part of the system. In the context of the laboratory we can usually make some separations. We cannot make that separation about cosmology of the universe. We are part of it. We influence it. So we do not really understand how to think about a system when we are a part of it, because of quantum mechanics. A very good friend goes so far as to say that he doesn’t think that quantum mechanics is complete because of this. And he thinks underlying the quantum mechanics is something much more deterministic. Most physicists think it’s a screwy idea. My answer is I don’t know.

GZ: When we talk about physics, when we talk about reality, we usually talk about energy, talk about matter, interactions between particles and fields etc. Let me for a moment suggest to you that the universe is not like that at all, the universe is made out of bits and information. Wolfram wrote a book about cellular automata which made quite of sensation. Could you believe in Matrix world? Could the universe be made out of bits, at an elementary level?
LS: Yes I think that it is made out of bits. It is nothing but information .

GZ: Could this notion change our physics?
LS: No, it can explain our physics. With respect to Wolfram, I’ m a physicist who thinks Wolfram’s ideas are interesting. But keep in mind that Wolfram’s ideas have no place for quantum mechanics. And the world is quantum mechanical. Wolfram believes that the world is cellular automata. But he knows that cellular automata are not quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from I don’t know. So I would say, until you can understand why the world is quantum mechanical, to say that it’s made of cellular automata is servicing a point. No quantum mechanics no cigar.

GZ: Einstein once said that the most inexplicable thing about this universe is that we can explain it. Are we now reaching the limits of our cognitive abilities? Do you believe that there are cognitive limitations to the human mind?
LS: Sure there are limitations. The human mind can not have more bits of information than the whole universe has. There are limitations to the human abilities in general. I would have bet anything on that no human being can play six musical instruments at the same time. I would have bet very much that nobody can jump as high as Michael Jordan. It turns out that the ranges of people have in the very, very far parts of the distribution are so amazing that nobody would have guess that they were possible. When people say such things as we’re reaching the limits, what they really mean is that I ´m reaching my limit. When they say they can’t conceive of anybody solving a certain problem what they really mean is that they can conceive of themselves solving this problem. The limits are probably way beyond what we imagine. They always are. The danger in trying to predict the limits of human abilities is always going in the wrong direction. It’s much more likely to underestimate than to overestimate. As long as it’s physically possible, as long as it doesn’t violate the laws of nature, it means there’s a possibility that human beings can do it. Forget individuals. Collectively human beings have such a diversity of different kinds or ways of thinking, they have the flexibility to be able to bend their own way of thinking about new things. We simply don’t know, but I would guess that when we try to estimate these things we ‘re in much more danger of underestimating to what people can do than overestimate it.

GZ: As we expand our knowledge of the cosmos through our physics, if we ever reach points that we don’t really understand and we can not possibly falsify, then are we in a danger that science, physics can regresses to religion?
LS: There is such a danger. So, on one hand there is such a danger and in the other hand I also say that you are also in danger of underestimating what people will be able to do in the future. Will they be able to do experiments that now seem to be so completely out of this world that they seem totally impossible? I‘ll give you two examples. The first is the inflationary theory of the universe. Everybody who saw that the first time said “well, that’s very nice Alan Guth, but your own admission of the inflation of the universe wipes out any evidence of itself. Nobody will ever be able to make science out of it”. That’s what everybody said, including Alan. Nobody expected that within twenty-five years people would figure out how to confirm observationally that the inflation theory was right. But it happened. I’ll give you another example. I can easily imagine people telling Darwin “nice theory Charles, but the only way to confirm it will be to go back a billion years and see what’s going on, and that’s simply impossible”. Well, it took a hundred years to make science out of evolutionary theory. It took a hundred years for people to get enough knowledge about biochemistry and genetics, to watch microorganisms evolve. It took a hundred years but it happened. And as I said the two dangers are, falling into a trap of t faith-based physics, but also giving up because it looks too hard.

GZ: Apart from technological development making life more comfortable what is the role of science in the 21st century? With regards to politics, society and perhaps ideologically. Does science play a role in modern world of religious conflict, fanaticism and lack of rationality?
LS: To a certain extent I think physicists have been the keepers of the truth. A case of point would be the Soviet Union during the dark days when the keepers of the truth were physicists, people like Zakharof and Orlof. They were people who simply believed in the concept of the truth. You know what’s happened to the concept of the truth in American society? It’s been replaced by advertising! All kinds of things which tend to make irrelevant to what’s true and what’s not true. Scientists in general are people who recognize what it means for something to be true. They are people who will question when something it’s not true. And their whole mental make up, their whole ideological basis, has to do with finding the truth. That’s necessary for preserving society.

GZ: So you are not a postmodernist?

LS: Postmodernism has some truth but it has been carried too far. It is true that the way humans think about the laws of nature, the words that we use to explain things, are dependent on culture and so forth. When new scientific ideas come into the front a lot of the argument about them tends to be dominated about the language that we should use to describe them. But, eventually, through some filter, what comes out of the other end is pretty much independent of the specific mentalities of the people who discovered it. And so yes, I believe there is real truth in the bottom of all of it, and it’s also true that the language we use to describe things depends on culture. So, that was a good idea, it was an important idea but it got carried too far when it said that there’s no such thing as objective truth.

This is an edited transcript of an interview with Leonard Susskind (Stanford 13/04/2004)

The God Particle: notes for a debate at Cheltenham Science Festival

2009-04-27T09:17:00.001+01:00

Reductionism and Scientific Ontology
My thesis would be that the central issues of the debate are the epistemology of reductionism and the ontology of modern physics.

First epistemology: The most important correlate of reductionism is that the universe is governed by a set of natural laws. Modern Physics would argue that, knowing these laws is sufficient for knowing the Universe. The discovery of the Higg’s boson at CERN, by completing the last gap in the Standard Model, would seem to triumphantly reconfirm this notion. And yet, there are obvious problems with reductionism, the most obvious one being the irreducibility of biology into physics.
We have a huge epistemological problem here: we cannot explain complex emergent phenomena by reducing them to particles or strings. The problem becomes ever harder when we need to explain agency, for example economics or consciousness.

To Ontology: If we accept that all that is real are particles (or strings) then Science has nothing to say about Religion; like two complete strangers they sit on the opposite banks of a vast ontological abyss.
If however, we accept that the ontology of the universe (i.e. “reality”) includes emergence and agency, then the picture changes dramatically. Immediately, we have moved away from Determinism and have embraced Indeterminism, not as a sign of Ignorance or Epistemological Weakness but as an ontological fact. We can then accept without feeling uncomfortable that emergent phenomena are impossible to predict (i.e. computed in advance) regardless of the computing power available. In this sense, Emergence expresses a universal agency for creativity that is unpredictable and yet at the same time, scientifically comprehensible. Unpredictability is neither mysterious nor metaphysical.

If nature is irreducible, then what?
It is widely accepted today that physics is more “advanced” than biology because it is more “mathematical”. I think it too early to draw this conclusion. In fact, I would bet that the opposite will become apparent in the decades to come. Physics, as it advances beyond reductionism, as it faces through experimentation new levels of reality which are irreducible, will come to the realization that complexity rules not only at large scales but at the fundamental fabric of reality too. Physics, one day, will be more like biology.

The Unifying Theory of Everything as Jehovah-in-disguise
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of monotheism has much to do with the inherent conviction of western scientists that “a unifying theory must exist”. Whether it is strings or not, the idea of an “equation that will describe everything” – or a “fundamental law of nature” - echoes the mathematical mysticism of the Pythagoreans and Plato. But why should there be a unifying principle? Perhaps the universe is governed by a number of driving forces, or not governed by anything at all? Perhaps the universe is evolving by constantly finding new ways to do so. Perhaps we know this already: classical physics may be an emergent phenomenon of quantum physics.

Defining God(s) the Science Way
Finally, as in all discussions about Religion, one must define the word “God”. Since Galileo science has gathered enough evidence to support the claim that a Creator God - although not completely impossible – is probably unlikely. From this, orthodox-cum-reductionist point of scientific view, “The God Particle” is a very ironic way to describe the Higg’s boson!
Nevertheless, a non-reductionist Science would be less opposed to a broad definition of divinity. But do we need such a Science? One that could replace medieval-mindset religions with a new sciento-spiritual ethic? One closer to - as Carl Sagan used to say - an “informed worship” of the natural creativity of the universe? But this might be a topic of a future debate!

Event Information The God Particle: Is Science the New Religion? Town Hall, June 4th 2008, 4.15-5.30pm
What would scientific proof for a ‘theory of everything’ mean for religion? The world’s largest particle accelerator switches on in Switzerland this year. It will hunt for the Higgs boson, often called the ‘God Particle’ for its importance in confirming our most fundamental theories of matter. In an international panel facilitated by physicist Jim Al-Khalili , former Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries, CERN particle physicist Albert de Roeck and Greek journalistGeorge Zarkadakis debate whether science could ever address the ultimate questions of reality. In association with the British Council (South East Europe) Beautiful Science project

Interview with Christof Koch

2009-04-27T09:16:00.001+01:00

GZ: How would you define the problem of consciousness?

CK: The problem is very difficult to define. We are conscious right now, when you ´re talking to me you are conscious, you can hear things, you can see things, you can remember things, that´ s what we mean by consciousness. It becomes very difficult to define it in more rigorous ways. There is an objective aspect, a feeling aspect, the feeling of being hungry, the feeling of seeing something, of seeing a bird, the feeling of remembering something, because of our conscious sensations. There are many things going in our body that don´ t involve consciousness. I can move my eyes, I can drive a car, I can climb, I can run, all those things bypass consciousness. Where’s the difference in between? To define it right now is not possible. However it is not necessary to define everything rigorously in order to advance. Historically, definitions only happen by hindsight. If you see the history of biology - genes for example - even today it’s not easy to define what’s a gene.

GZ: I see parallels between the difficulty of defining life and consciousness. Is there another parallel between the two that we should be aware of.
CK: Depending on which philosophers you believe the problem of life was one of the big problems in early 20th century. People saw no way that chemistry and physics could allow the transmission of information from one generation to next. People said we know chemistry, we know physics, we know there’s no way that all the information that makes you up, your eye color, your height, can be just chemistry. What people didn’t realize was the ability of one dimensional change in macromolecules. They just didn’t know about this so they said well, we probably need new principles. So the lesson here is that we want to be cautious about what’s consciousness is. Many people say we need some fundamental new laws, but perhaps they are wrong, and consciousness can be explained when we discover the neural mechanism that evokes it.

GZ:Why is consciousness necessary for life?
CK: It is very difficult to speculate its functions. I mean why do you have only two arms rather than four arms? You can suggest various reasons but it’s difficult to confirm. Human psychology seems to need consciousness. Say there is an earthquake or a fire, you know we have to do something we have never done before, we have to quickly get out, we have to leave the building etc. That’s an unplanned contingency, so that’s what I think we need consciousness for. However for most things that you typically do you do without consciousness.

GZ:You are studying vision. Why so? Why not the hearing system or some other body system?
CK: It’s a tactical decision. I´ m a vision scientist, it’s my own personal interest. Also in vision we’ve learned to do things that are very difficult to do with any other body system, to manipulate the relationship between physical world and its subjective interpretation in a very precise way. We can use these techniques to manipulate the relationship between subjective person and physical stimulus, in order to track the footprints of consciousness in the brain.

GZ:The Holy Grail for neuroscientists is to identify the neural correlate of consciousness. What exactly is that?
CK: It is the minimal set of neural mechanisms that are sufficient for consciousness in a person. Once we have the neural correlate of consciousness we can track what happens in diseases like schizophrenia and autism that intervene with consciousness, what happens in a newborn baby, how do we know that a newborn baby is conscious, or what happens in patients in a coma. Once we have the neural correlate we can begin to tackle these questions in a rigorous way.

GZ: Do you think that the so called “hard problem” will fade away?
CK: Practically speaking, methologically speaking, conceptually speaking, intellectually speaking, it may turn out to be an easy problem. Because of the really difficult problem is that the brain is by far the most complex system in the known universe. We are missing many basic aspects. We don’t understand how very complicated networks of tens of thousands of millions neurons interact with each other. Once you understand this network, you say “oh that’s how it happened!”

GZ: Roger Penrose is suggesting what he calls “platonic realism” and says that consciousness is somehow a fundamental property of the universe and that through quantum effects it is being picked up from the brains and therefore we have qualia. What is your opinion?
CK: Even if you assume quantum gravity to be relevant to the brain it doesn’t really make answer why quantum gravity should solve the hard problem. By involving yet another physical law, not just electromagnetism or chemistry, you introduce just another set of physical laws that do little to solve the mystery. Once you understand the brain as a classical device, then from the energies and the time scales involved, there’ s no evidence of any short of quantum superposition. I will stick with studying the brain as a classical rather than as a quantum system.

GZ:Why so many scientists are having a hard time accepting the fact that the brain can be explained?
CK: It depends who you talk to. Biologists, physicists which are not much involved are generally skeptical, but not the neuroscientists that deal with the problem of consciousness. Anyway, I think there are many people on the planet who don’ t want to hear about this kind of research because they are afraid of the picture of humans that may emerge.

GZ: What is like working with Francis Crick?
CK: I continue to work with him. It’s very intense. He’s 87 years old and he’s never seized to stop wondering, he’s never lost his curiosity and he is a person who, more than anybody else, questions every assumption, even his own assumptions.

GZ: You do rock climbing. How do you combine consciousness and rock climbing?

CK: Rock climbing is very intense and you have to focus when you do it. So it’s a bit like science, if you do it you are totally absorbed into it, because you cannot afford to do anything else.

GZ: Are you an optimist?
CK: Of course I am an optimist.

GZ: You think is possible for science to enlighten people or is it a luxury only for an elite?
CK: In the long term science is going to make people healthier, safer and happier, living longer lives, no question about that. This has been happening for the last 2.000 years and I see no reason why shouldn’t continue in the future.

GZ: So why most people read their horoscopes?
CK: You got to ask them if they really believe in the horoscopes. Also many people believe in superstitions, but I don’t think that these things affect dramatically the way we generally think, which is, basically, rational.

(This is an edited transcript of an interview of Christof Koch, taken by George Zarkadakis on April 2004, in Tucson, AZ)

Interview with Steven Pinker

2009-04-27T09:14:00.001+01:00

GZ: When did language appear?

SP: All human societies have a complex language and no one has ever discovered a tribe in a remote area that lacks language. Thus, it seems likely that it was present in the common ancestors of all humans before the diversion lead to different races and continental groups. So language must have developed at least 60.000 years ago, because that was when, by estimate, the Australian Aborigines first arrived in Australia. It could of course have been earlier than this. A recently discovered gene has been implicated in the disorders of speech and language. This gene has diverged from the corresponding gene in chimpanzees about 200.000 years ago. This must have been one of the genetic events that lead to modern human language. The development of language may have been even earlier than that, because people lacking that gene don’t lack language all together, they are just slower when using it.

GZ: How can a mutant gene “separate” humans from other apes, by means of impeding language? It sounds like a paradox.
SP: The effect of the gene is to delay acquisition of language, to make speech more laboure-intensive and in children easier than in adults. It causes one to make grammatical errors in speech and have difficulties in judgment about grammaticality of sentences, and some difficulties in comprehending complex sentences. It also has some affect in control of the speech muscles, but also when blowing out a candle or sucking on a straw. So, it has a number of effects, as most genes do, but the most dramatic effects are concentrated at speech and language. It ties into the theory in a couple of ways. One is that studies have showed that is a “turn” (διακόπτης) gene that has gone under modifications in humans compared to the similar gene in chimpanzees and other mammals and moreover these changes have been the result of natural selection rather than random processes.

GZ: Why did language develop?
SP: Language allows us to communicate and allows us to negotiate agreements and therefore allows altruism to flourish amongst humans. Biologists tell us that that cooperation among non relatives can only evolve, if there are complex promises which produce a beneficial result and when there is a way to express and accomplish those promises. Language provides such a tool, facilitating social cohesion and organization in humans. Also it’s a way to transfer technology and know-how. You can share experience with your children, you can exchange for other information with other people in your group and so it multiplies the benefit of any kind of technological discovery and lowers the cost. You can acquire some of the necessary skills from other people by having them explaining to you. So, I ´ve always thought that language evolved in tandem with general intelligence, as the ability to figure out how the world works and apply the technology, social cooperation and language. Each one of them makes the other two that much more valuable.

GZ: What systems in the brain "produce" language?
SP: Language is a complicated system because it involves a number of components that have to work together. There is the production of language, the control of speech muscles and of course comprehension. So, I think the language system in the brain has to tie together a number of different systems. Most of my research for the last 15 years have contrasted regular morphology, that is for forms like cat-cats, dog-dogs or past tense forms like walk-walked and wait-wait, which are completely predictable and I argue are generated in the mind by a mental algorithm. In contrast irregular forms like bring-brought in the past tense or foot-feet for the plural, are idiosyncratic and have to be retrieved from memory. Now these are the principal systems of language, for expressing combinations of concepts and words and for communicating familiar simple concepts. And they are likely to have a correspondence of systems of the brain that sub serve more general purposes. For example, reading memory is related to vision in general and the algorithm for combining bits of symbols into complex words, or words into phrases. Sentences probably relates to systems for planning and coordination.

GZ: Most research on language and the brain is done on western languages and mostly English. Would you expect differences in results for, say, the Chinese?
SP: I would not expect dramatic differences. I ´ve done some research on a language very close to English, German, which is interesting because they diverged about 600 years ago. By looking the similarities and differences between German and English we construct some of the steps that lead the languages to become different. But then I ´ve also done some research on a language that’s very much unlike English, the Hebrew, which is not an Indo-European language and we found that more or less the same patterns occurred in terms of the logic of the language. Other people have looked at patterns of language loss found on brain damage in Italian. I don’t think that anyone has done it for Chinese yet but I expect it to come out quite similarly.

GZ: How do we acquire language?
SP: My first research work was a detailed theory of how children acquire language. Well, it’s not enough for children to just to listen to the sounds. I think the child has to first of all make a guess to what the parents are intending to say. They do so by means of intuitive psychology. The child correlates the sound signal from ears with the guess of what the parent is saying. It tries to figure out rules that correlate to the meaning encapsulated in the sound. The child has a brain circuitry that tries to analyze the continuous speech sound into words, words into categories like nouns and verbs, and that creates rules that order nouns and verbs and subjective objects in a way that systematically relates to what they mean.

GZ: Some people suggest that certain animals have a kind of language. Do you agree?
SP: I don’t if anyone could successfully argue that animals can have the ability of language. They are neurologically very different than humans.

GZ: What about the songs of the whales or the clicks of dolphins. They suggest some kind of communication through sounds.
SP: Yes, it is certainly communication by sound but not language. Take birds, as another example. There is no way that a particular set of bird sounds maps on to a particular meaning. They seem rather to calls that show of the virtuosity of the singer, mostly used during sexual selection. But they have no meaning.

GZ: What is the future of language in today’s world where English gains dominance over other languages?
SP: I am afraid the situation is very poor. We’re seeing the extinction of languages spoken by indigenous groups in Russia, in Australia and in U.S. In South America languages are becoming extinct at a faster rate than species do. Larger languages, of hundreds of thousands, or millions of speakers, have nothing to fear. English will become increasingly a second language but it’s hard to make predictions because there are two forces working to different directions. On one hand there is the value of having a common language for international activities, science, business and English has become the language of science. On the other hand there’s simply large numbers of people who speak to each other in a different than English language. On top of that there’s the fact that language is a batch of ethnic identity and people are emotionally attached in their language. So even as global media like MTV and CNN spread English there’s also now an attempt for local versions of MTV in the local language. Which of these two trends will be more powerful it’s hard to predict.

(This is an edited transcript of an interview of Steven Pinker, taken by George Zarkadakis on April 2004 in Tucson, AZ)

21st Century Eugenics - 1

2009-04-27T09:13:00.005+01:00

Synopsis for a Café Scientifique delivered in Thessaloniki)

Eugenics was a liberal vision because, at the time of Sir Francis Galton, it was radical and against the Victorian class system. By going beyond the class structure, eugenics envisioned a future world of enhanced humans irrespective of class background. It was a truly egalitarian vision inspired by Darwinism and aiming for a balance between nature and nurture.
Following the destruction of the European class system after the carnage of WW1, egalitarian ideas were split between the Left focusing more on the “nurture” side of the argument and the Right corrupting the “nature” side and replacing it with “race”. Liberalism – expressed in the few remaining parliamentary democracies - found itself in the uneasy middle, a follower rather than a leader, a defender of its hijacked ideology.
The extreme Left in Soviet Union and the extreme Right in Nazi Germany were responsible for genocide; the former in “re-education gulags” the latter in “concentration camps”. It was thus that eugenics got a bad name, particularly from the Nazi atrocities which were linked to eugenics during the Nuremberg Trial. The line of the defence for the Nazi criminals was that they did little else compared to what the Americans were doing in their own country by means of forceful sterlization programs. The irony is, of course, that the Nazis while exterminating the Jews were aiming to destroy not an "inferior" race but an antagonistic one, a people who despite their small number had contributed immensely in the European civilisation. Race was a pretext; and this is why a big number of European Christians eagerly joined the Nazis in the slaughter.
Egalitarianism was redefined by the European Left after the war as in direct opposition to eugenics – conveniently forgetting the millions that were dying in Siberia.
But the idea has refused to disappear, because it bods with the fundamental value system of most human beings, i.e. the enhancement of our abilities. In the 21st century eugenics is not used as a term anymore (in order not to elicit negative reactions), but the idea is there, alive and well, manifesting both in technologies that intervene in the genetic make-up of the unborn (“designer babies”), as well as in technologies that may enhance already born humans. How many of us would refuse to becoming cleverer, stronger, healthier, younger and more sexually potent?

The dilemmas of enhancement
There are at least three major moral and political dilemmas that I would like to discuss. The first has to do with the control of the eugenics technologies. Should one support the liberal, free-market economics model, where private companies sell the technologies to the consumers? Or should one involve the State? And to what degree? The dilemma is obvious. If we follow a free-market approach we may arrive at a new class system, where the ultra rich will be able to use the expensive technology to enhance themselves and their offspring. We may end up with a superhuman class, the “GenRich” as it is often called. If we make eugenics a state-controlled commodity, then we uneasily reproduce a totalitarian scenario for the future. One must not forget that the Nazi party was a socialist one.
The second dilemma that I would like to discuss has to do with the technologies themselves. Both pre-natal genetic interventionism and post-natal enhancement (genetic or otherwise) have merits that need to be discussed. For example, in the case of post-natal enhancement how much down the road to becoming cyborgs we go? Finally, the third issue for discussion would be our motivation for human enhancement. One may argue that this is obvious: self-interest. One wants to be an enhanced person because it improves his or her competitiveness in the world. It is precisely the meaning of competitiveness that needs to be discussed. In a planet heading for an environmental tipping point competitiveness may not be the correct strategy, but collaboration. Altruism should be enhanced at the expense of selfishness. But, assuming a genetic disposition for those two social traits, how much does it matter which trait to select for? Is human behaviour governed by genetics? Or is it a result of framing the right game, as many game theorists would argue? And if so, what other reasons we may have for human enhancement? Colonizing another planet may be one of them. For example if humans are ever going to survive on Mars they will have to genetically change; the gravity of the planet is less and its atmosphere (even after terraforming) thinner. Is Eugenics the correct strategy for space colonization?

What banged?

2009-04-27T09:13:00.004+01:00

Until recently scientists and priests seemed to be in awkward agreement. Genesis started with a bang! It happened 13.7 billion years ago; and questions like “what caused it?” or “what was there before?” were considered a scientific no-man’s land where no decent, career-minding, physicist dared to venture. After all science is about things that can be measured. How could one measure something before it happened?

This was precisely the subject of the public lecture given by Cambridge physicist Neil Turok on April 17th at the Athens Concert Hall. The daring title was “what banged?” and it aimed to introduce a radical new cosmological theory. Turok, together with Paul Steinhardt of Princeton, have named their theory “the ekpyrotic universe” and explain it in their trade book “Endless Universe” (published in Greece by Avgo Books, http://www.avgobooks.com/). According to the pair of authors, there have been countless Big Bangs, followed by long terms of space-time expansion, an endless cycle of universal birth and re-birth. “Only by positing an endless universe can we explain the mysteries of the cosmos,” said Turok like a modern-day Brahman.

Cosmic Puzzles
And there are mysteries aplenty to keep cosmologists on their toes. Following the observational confirmation of the Big Bang theory in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson, scientists had to explain how the universe was so uniform (same average density of matter and energy wherever you chose to turn your telescope). They thus hypothesized something that happened during the first critical moments of the Big Bang, a force field that guaranteed thermal equilibrium across the universe as well as uniformity of matter and energy (think of an electric heater trying to heat up uniformly a room that keeps expanding, and you will understand the difficulty cosmologists were facing). The force field was called "inflationary field".

In summary, the traditional viewpoint holds that a tiny fraction of time after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded with an amazing rate, doubling itself in size every billionth of a billionth of a second. The cause of this incredible expansion - named “inflation” - was first suggested by Alan Guth, now at MIT. Inflation worked on the early universe only for a very short while and then died out, allowing for a much slower expansion afterwards. It was an elegant, albeit ad hoc, hypothesis that seemed to satisfy observation data - until two new observational puzzles arrived to upset it.

The first puzzle is the so-called “dark matter” that accounts for 25% of the cosmos (“normal” matter, the stuff of stars, galaxies, you and me, accounts for only 5%). No one knows what dark matter is, but we do know it is out there, in the same way that we know there is water in a glass even if transparent (light bends when travelling through it). The second weirdness is “dark energy”; it accounts for 70% of the universe, and a few billion years ago started to accelerate the universe’s rate of expansion. The inflationary hypothesis had to be urgently overhauled in order to account for both.

Getting rid of Inflation
Turok and Steinhardt had both worked as theorists on the inflationary model of the Big Bang, but became increasingly disillusioned with its ad hoc character; until they decided to apply the mathematics of string theory to the early universe and see what happens. When they did so all puzzles and weirdness disappeared! No need for an invented inflationary field! Dark matter and dark energy were acounted for and made perfect sense! It was an incredible eureka moment! All you had to hypothesize was that we live in a universe of normal matter that hovers parallel to another universe of dark matter. Between the two parallel universes flows dark energy, pulling and pushing them apart. When the two universes collide a Big Bang occurs; all matter and energy becomes light and a new pair of twin universes is born; the “normal matter universe” expands and cools by pulling away from its “dark matter” twin sister and then, when expansion arrives at its maximum, dark energy pulls the two universes back for another collision - and the whole cycle starts anew.

Ekpyrotic Strings
To understand better the ekpyrotic universe hypothesis you have to understand strings. Since the early 20th century physicists have two wonderful theories to explain everything: the relativity theory of Einstein that deals with gravity and explains natural phenomena from a multi-molecular scale upwards to planets and galaxies and clusters of galaxies – and quantum theory, which explains what happens at a submolecular and subatomic scale. The problem is that scientists cannot reconcile – or “unify” - the two theories together. This is extremely annoying because it suggests that nature is operating different laws at macroscopic and microscopic levels, which is absurd. String theory, rich in exotic mathematics and developed during the past twenty years, comes to the rescue! It suggests that nature is built by tiny, dimensionless strings, objects that look like rubber bands. Depending on the oscillations and twists of those tiny strings, the cosmos behaves in a quantum or relativistic way.

According to string theory our universe can be seen as a three dimensional membrane where space-time is stretched and pulled by dark energy. Think of space-time as the arena and planets and galaxies as the objects inside it. String theory suggests that the sun and Earth spring into existence from within the fundamental geometry of space-time. In other words, everything is the physical realization of mathematical entities. The world is a shadow show of maths-at-work in a multi-dimensional background! Plato, had he been among the audience of Athens Concert Hall that night, would have felt vindicated.

Complexity begets complexity
What I find exceptionally thrilling with string cosmologies such as the Ekpyrotic Universe is that instead of assuming material nothingness as the primal cause of the Universe they presuppose mathematical complexity. Indeed, the mathematical complexity of the vacuum assumed by the ekpyrotic theory - and its parent M theory – is (at least for the time being) enormous, to an extent as yet unimaginable. But we do not need to see the whole mathematical picture in order to appreciate that, the very idea whereby a complex universe - such as the one we inhabit - manifests out of complex mathematical-geometrical entities offers a new and deep insight. Could these complex mathematical-geometrical entities be the natural laws? Could the laws of nature resemble abstract, immaterial casts into which planets, starts and creatures and minds are molded? If that is the true nature of reality, I somehow feel that it makes far more sense than silly ideas such as the Copenhagen Interpenetration, or the Multiple Worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

LISA will test
Turok and Steinhardt applied string mathematics to the early universe and found that the theory works perfectly. But how can they be sure? One must always judge the efficacy of a beautiful scientific idea by the means that can be tested. Can we do so in this case? Surely the only way to tell if the ekpyrotic theory is correct is to peer into the moment of Big Bang itself, to go behind the primal afterglow as sensed by W-MAP. But can we measure anything before radiation was born? According to Turok we can! We can measure gravitational waves, the ripples of cosmic turbulence that travel across space-time, like waves on the surface of a pond when a stone has been tossed. And that is exactly what is going to happen in 2018 when spacecraft LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), a joint venture of NASA and the European Space Agency, will aim to detect and confirm the existence of gravitational waves. If Turok is right there should be no gravitational waves from the Big Bang.

He certainly believes in his theory, so much that he made a wager with a very famous wager-man who also happens to be Neil’s friend as well as his colleague-down-the-corridor at Cambridge University. “I betted Stephen Hawking I’m right”, he said smiling, to the general applause of the Athenian audience.

(This article commissioned was published in “The Athens News”)

Saltations

2009-04-27T09:12:00.002+01:00

Complexity theory studies non-linear emergent phenomena whereby networked interactions produce self-organization at ever higher levels. At certain threshold values of network interactivity certain “jumps” occur – called “saltations” – and the system changes behaviour.
Despite the many advocates of complexity theory, the idea is facing many obstacles and often fails to inspire those that it should, people such as evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, or political scientists. I believe that there are two main reasons for this. The first is cultural. Complexity theory is not being taught, at least not adequately enough, to young students of biology or political science. Their University departments are populated by professors who made their names and careers by following deterministic paths of thinking. As a systems engineer, I was surprised to discover the level of scepticism that complexity theory faces in scientific circles. The culture of engineering is of course different from the culture of science, which may also explain the second reason for the evident mistrust. Engineering is happy when things work. Science is only happy when there is an explanation of why things work. In this sense, complexity theory appears to be “mysterious”. It lacks a fundamental law. In the eyes of a scientist it may just be an alternative, clever mathematical way of describing something very trivial and adequately understood, for example the motion statistics of gas particles, or macroscopic quantum phenomena such as magnetization.
And yet, a fundamental law may indeed exist behind saltations: a variant of the second law of thermodynamics, yet to be discovered. If this is proven to b e true, we may be able to explain, inter alia, evolution. Why did life “jump” from bacteria to uni-cellar eukaryotes, and then to multi-cellar organisms? What determined the threshold of biological complexity in order for new life forms, ever more complex, to emerge?
The work of microbiologist Carl Woese is of particular importance here. Woese sees bacteria in terms of networked communities rather than individual cells, and interprets their evolutionary history as driven by non-linear self-organization.
A worldview based on complexity opens an entirely novel interpretation of natural phenomena. By using computer models to simulate phenomena of emergence we may be doing something a lot more: introducing into the cosmos computations that create new levels of complexity, a genesis of numbers that may lead in the re-programming of life.

Redefining humaness

2009-04-27T09:11:00.001+01:00

During 2005 and 2006, I was national facilitator for Greece, in the European project «Meeting of Minds. European Citizens Deliberation on Brain Sciences», a pioneering project in science governance, first of its kind in Europe, where citizens from 9 countries discussed the impact of brain sciences in society. Their recommendations will be taken into consideration in the drawing of research policy of the European Union with respect to brain sciences. For more information:www.meetingmindseurope.org. During the project I was the intermediary between the world of experts (neuroscientists, pharmaceutical company executives, patients organizations, EU and national policy-makers, etc.) and the world of lay people (the citizens). This I was both in Greece on a local-national level, as well as in Brussels, at a European-international level. The subject of the deliberations was "neuroethics", i.e. how should society manage the knowledge and technologies that are coming forward from the study of the brain. What struck me most from being part of the debating process, indeed facilitating and guiding the debate, were the apparent contradictions that always seemed to crop up. For example, even as most people agreed that there was something "wrong" with artificially modulating the human brain (by chemical or electrical means), very few had an issue with smart drugs that would increase human intelligence. I realized that the cardinal reason for these contradictions came from conflicting and very often confused perceptions as to what exactly constitutes a "human being". This very confused perception was similar to the one pervading other contemporary sciento-ethical debates, most notably the stem cells and human cloning debate.
A brief bibliographic research that I conducted convinced me that, although there has been much work during the past few years concerning the ethics of science, as well as the apparent "transformation" of humanness (e.g. transhumanism), no concise work exists that addresses the main issue: i.e. what does it mean to be human today, in view of the scientific corpus from biology, genetics and neuroscience.
Part of this blog will be essays focusing on the re-definition of humanness in the 21st century