Sunday 14 February 2010

meshes

This is my favourite among the photographs I've taken so far this year. As always it was the light - strong winter sun, low in the sky - that made it happen, rather than anything that I or the camera did.

It appears here only to test the blog-posting feature of Flickr, not because I propose to use this blog as a gallery


meshes, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

Saturday 13 February 2010

Dirac and Beauty

Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, has been a hero of mine ever since my teens. He was one of a mere handful of scientists whose grasp of theory was so strong he could predict the existence of something unknown in Nature (anti-matter) that was subsequently found exactly as he'd predicted. Recently Freeman Dyson offered a favourable review of a new Dirac biography by Graham Farmelo, in the latest New York Review of books, which contains some very thought-provoking ideas. Toward the end of this review Dyson claims that Dirac left a three-fold legacy to physics: the astounding discoveries of his fertile period 1920-33; a doctrine of mathematical beauty expounded over the remaining 50 years of his career; and a profound distaste for philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics (which I vigorously share).

Here is Dyson on the second phase: "
The second legacy is summarized in a statement that Dirac wrote at the end of his life: 'If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand.'
... The doctrine of mathematical beauty is itself beautiful, and there is no doubt that Dirac believed it to be true. But it does not agree well with the historical facts. During the wonder years when he was making his great discoveries, his thinking was more concerned with practical details and less with abstract beauty. And during the long second half of Dirac's life, when he was preaching the doctrine of mathematical beauty, it did not lead him to important new discoveries."

This touches on an interesting question to which there's no sign of an answer yet, and may never be. Perhaps Dirac's faith in mathematical beauty is actually justified, but science also proceeds in fits and starts as described by Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". A simple and beautiful principle is discovered which triggers many more discoveries that complicate and muddy the picture; then a deeper simple, beautiful principle emerges that clears the board once more; and so ad infinitum. Modern complexity theory shows clearly that very complex behaviours can arise from applying very simple rules (a beautiful illustration is the computer simulation Conway's Game of Life). So the really big question is this: is the reverse true, that every complex behaviour arises from the application of simple underlying rules that we haven't yet discovered. This is the modern form of an old dispute between rationalism and pragmatism, and therefore one of those philosophical disputes that Dirac so hated. Dyson is clearly on the pragmatist side, namely that Nature is at root complex and messy. I veer to the other pole.

Whichever is right, it's a far more interesting problem than those fashionable fairy-tales that purport to be interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the many-worlds hypothesis. Such pretentious cosmological speculations always end up in the same place, namely that there's another
copy of you somewhere else in this universe (perhaps infinitely many). The whiff of incense is overpowering - this is just Heaven by another name, the egoists' inability to face the fact that their personal identity will cease upon death. 


originally posted 11 Feb 2010 12:43 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 11 Feb 2010 13:40 ]

Going Cold on Warming

Ian Katz, in a thoughtful Guardian article (Case for climate-change science) suggests today that climate activists will need to start again and make the case for climate change from from scratch, thanks to recent scandals involving the IPCC and East Anglia University, the unusually cold winter and the failure of Copenhagen talks. I'm sure he's right, but I wish him lots of luck in the attempt, as I don't believe a significant political movement will be mobilised around climate change any time soon.

That isn't because I deny the reality of the Greenhouse Effect - on the contrary I've been a "believer" in it (that's to say one who's aware of and accepts the scientific evidence) for 20 years or more. The problem is that climatic systems are so complex that no current (or foreseeable) climate models are good enough to produce the kind of cast-iron predictions needed in politics to convince people. The adoption of the term "global warming" was the environmentalists first and probably fatal error, linking the effect in the public's mind with things getting warmer soon, and where they live, a sore hostage to fortune. Also
the industrial revolution isn't yet completed globally, and the fact that China and India won't abandon it on the strength of current evidence is hardly surprising.

What we can say for sure about the
Greenhouse Effect is that we have unquestionably raised levels of atmospheric  carbon dioxide to levels not seen for many thousands of years, and have thereby caused more solar energy to be retained in the atmosphere. That makes all climatic processes operate faster, more extremely and more unpredictably, but doesn't leave us with any single politically-exploitable prediction. Drought and flood patterns will shift with dramatic social effects, perhaps triggering mass migrations and wars, but we can't say where and when.

After another 50 years or so of increasing global turmoil a generation will arise who do accept the connection and set about dismantling the growth-based industrial economy, if there's anything left to dismantle among the chaos. We're clearly not that generation, though perhaps my grandchildren are.
There's irony in this situation (as always), namely that those who own the most desirable bits of the world, hence with the most to lose, are the strongest climate-change deniers. Their dismay once the penny drops should be a sight to see.

originally posted 9 Feb 2010 11:25 by Dick Pountain

Gates famous at last

Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of the software giant Microsoft, for a while the world's richest man, has finally achieved true fame - he appeared on Jon Stewart's Daily Show last night. (Actually it was his second time on the show, but the first was so long ago that Stewart was not yet the radical chic fame-maker he has become.)

Gates is a fascinating figure, a multi-billionaire capitalist with a canny
business head who is nevertheless entirely unfitted for power in the Society of the Spectacle. However much he spends (or doesn't spend) on his haircut and clothes, he still looks like a physics postgrad, and his performing skills are still those of the seminar room rather than the TV studio. Jon Stewart was visibly awed by Gates (as well he might be), who described his work since retiring from the day-to-day running of Microsoft, the most important part of which is investing his own millions into malaria vaccine research.

Since malaria kills more people than just about anything else in the world, and since Big Pharma finds it unprofitable to pursue, this is an unquestionably philanthropic exercise - but Gates still managed to make it sound boring by nerdy attention to detail. Paradoxically enough, I found this quite refreshing compared to the boastful, predatory boosterism we usually hear from US business moguls. 


originally posted 27 Jan 2010 11:27 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 27 Jan 2010 17:14

Que Sarah, Sarah

I don't usually find the strain of environmentalism espoused in the pages of the Guardian very persuasive, too clearly descended from a long tradition of British Puritanism, principally concerned with feelings of personal moral superiority and showering blame onto unrepentant sinners. I shudder at the sort of new world imagined: soya gruel, donkey carts and hempen tee-shirts with your carbon footprint printed on them... 

However at least one of these columnists, George Monbiot, has recently revealed a new depth and passion in his critique of contemporary capitalism. It appears that public reaction to the recent "Climategate" emails shook Monbiot deeply, revealing the true depth of malevolence among climate-change sceptics, and a desperate desire among the public of affluent nations to delude themselves that business as usual is possible after all.

Personally I'm a climate sceptic of a different kind: I think it's pretty certain that the amount of carbon dioxide we've pumped into the biosphere is having an affect on the world's climate. The climate is a vastly complex web of interacting systems, and the increasing greenhouse effect adds energy to these which must change established patterns, generate more extreme events, and possibly even trigger one of several feed-back processes that lead to even greater instability. However science doesn't understand these systems well enough yet to precisely predict the resulting changes (for example the sea level in 5, 10, 20 years). Basing policy on imprecise predictions merely offers a hostage to those real sceptics who will pounce on every wrong one (like the current cold snap in the UK) to further their case. The public is untutored in statistics, impatient and uncomprehending about scientific cautions over the precision of results, and it seems more and more unlikely that a democratic will to do anything serious about carbon emissions can be aroused. Monbiot seems to have felt this sea-change, and it's added a trenchancy and eloquence to his recent writings, like this from the Guardian 14th Dec 2009:

"A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands."


Stirring stuff, he's now arguing on broader grounds, no longer talking solely about environmental matters but about that whole mindset which Thorstein Veblen characterised as "predatory". Veblen saw a deep division that runs through whole societies as well as through individual psyches, between the "predatory" and the "industrious" instincts. The predatory hunts what it needs from nature and despises drudgery; it admires courage and prowess; believes in luck and the supernatural; loves pomp, ceremony and sport. The industrious makes the pots and tills the land; it bows to economic reality by cooperative labour; believes in causal rather than magical explanations; values diligence and craftsmanship. Veblen saw this deeper division as underlying the classes described by Marx - the predatory caste became kings and aristocrats, generals and priests, capitalists and bankers, shunning toil in favour of ruling the industrious majority by confiscating their surplus product. Such predators invented the Judeo-Christian-Islamic notion of Divine Providence, whereby God gave the Earth to man to exploit as he wishes - an idea which has permitted scientific capitalism to bring us to our current state of unprecedented wealth and freedoms, and unprecedented hazard.

Perhaps the most terrifying manifestation of Divine Providence nowadays is Sarah Palin (wherever she spoke during the 2008 presidential elections, redneck audiences chanted "Drill, baby, drill!") and it's not entirely inconceivable that she could become the next president of the USA, should Obama stumble very badly. Were that to happen then Monbiot's finishing flourish - "This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands" - would gain a whole new resonance...  


originally posted 13 Jan 2010 16:39 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 14 Jan 2010 14:32 ]

The Avatar Effect

Took young grandson to see James Cameron's "Avatar" in 3D today, through the blinding snow. Was expecting to be bored, except perhaps by the special effects, but was totally gripped all the way through. The special effects were indeed staggering, probing a whole new level of virtual realism, but the story line surprised by not being so crypto-fascist as most American sci-fi blockbusters have been  (StarWars, Dune, Starship Troopers, Armageddon, Independence Day etc. etc). Sure it's simplistic, melodramatic, romantic - just as popular story telling has to be. The surprise is that it over-simplifies in an anti-corporate, anti-imperialist direction for a change.

The US Right is furious - this is a product of Murdoch's Fox don't forget - with lots of websites telling people not to go and see it (some chance). One of the milder comments is "Cameron needs to stop making anti American films. The United States invades foreign countries when necessary" [from  www.topix.com]. But what's quite amusing is to watch
leftish British commentators desperately trying to think of reasons to hate the movie anyway:

"Avatar is overlong, dramatically two-dimensional, smug and simplistic" - Philip French, Observer

"Even more tedious than the film's plot is the ideology enshrining it. In punctilious compliance with liberal pieties" - David Cox, Guardian

Several critics sought to belittle the film by comparing it to "A Man Called Horse" and "Dances With Wolves", but it owes at least as much (which is not very much) to "Seven Samurai" and "Viva Zapata". Avatar is indeed smug and simplistic, but then propaganda always was and always will be. Of course the British Left has entirely forgotten how to do propaganda, being so far up itself with political correctness and post-modern pseudo-radicalism. Avatar might indoctrinate a whole generation of under-16s that American militarism is the problem, which is certainly simplistic. But ever since Star Wars, blockbuster movies have been indoctrinating them that American militarism is the solution, and I know which I prefer... 


originally posted 21 Dec 2009 22:05 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 22 Dec 2009 05:08 ]

Don't be a Tourist


A most obstinate fact that faces any would-be critic of modern Western society is that social changes over the last half-century that constitute the so-called  "consumer society" have been accompanied by a considerable levelling of social (and to lesser extent economic) barriers between classes. We live in a more demotic culture than ever before: MPs and television presenters sport regional accents; air travel is no longer the preserve of the upper classes; a wide swathe of social classes aspire to consume luxury goods and services once the preserve of an elite (fuelled until recently by cheap credit). Deference toward social hierarchies and institutions has been vastly reduced. This is a real effect, not mere smokescreen, even if it hasn't so far been accompanied by equivalent reform to democratic institutions.

There's been a corresponding increase in snobberies of various sorts whose purpose is to maintain signs of social superiority in the face of this
levelling down. Perhaps the most obvious one concerns food - contrasting those wretches who shovel down "junk food" with one's own consumption of scarce and organically-grown products. Wine snobbery (both against beer consumers, and in terms of superior wine knowledge) is another. Air travel has its own snobbery, that unseemly craving for an "upgrade", the disparaging jokes about "turning right" at the doorway. But one that really fascinates me, as a keen photographer, is that surrounding cameras.

It's considered naff in many photographic circles to use point-and-shoot digital cameras because the great unwashed use them, because they work so well and so easily that they de-skill an arcane art, and because of the unattractive stance they provoke  - holding the camera away from the body and gawking at the LCD rather than peering intently through a viewfinder like a pro. The alternative is the single-lens reflex DSLR used by almost all professionals, which thereby aquires a certain cachet. These are large, heavy, expensive and complicated, but those very properties begin to undermine them as status symbols: learning to use one demands time and patience, a nerdish enthusiasm that's very unwelcome in cool circles. This poses a dilemma, but one which Olympus has now brilliantly attacked with its TV and cinema ad campaign for the new digital E-P1 Pen model.

This camera is almost as small as a point-and-shoot compact but has interchangeable lenses like a DSLR. It's easy to use and to carry but most important it has a cool retro look redolent of San Tropez in the '60s. Kevin Spacey is the chosen presenter, and the slogan is.... "Don't be a tourist!"

This slogan plays off yet another of the new  snobberies, that about travel. So many people can afford to visit so many places around the world that it's essential to distinguish oneself from them: they are tourists, I'm a traveller, out to broaden my mind.  Olympus's agency cleverly piggy-backs on this snobbery to sell a camera that's otherwise rather unremarkable. Carrying one will soon be compulsory on the smart beaches, replacing the pastel-coloured Canon Ixus on a neck-string... 


originally posted 26 Dec 2009 21:15 by Dick Pountain

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...