Pathfinders: "We won’t be back" (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

"We won’t be back"

Browsing through the science pages of any newspaper or online journal is to take an entertaining flight of fancy through the world of journalistic prediction. That is not to say, wild stories dreamed up by journalists and fed to a credulous public, but wild stories dreamed up by scientists and fed to a credulous press.

Some of these are just harmless fun, like the evergreen notion of life on other planets, (Galaxy has billions of Earths, BBC Online, 15 February). Harmless fun, and like as not hopeless fantasy, based as it is on the formulation known as the Drake Equation, a well-known exercise in piling unknown suppositions upon each other and arriving at a number. With just over 300 exoplanets now discovered, and all of them gas giants that could kick sand in Jupiter’s face, there is no particular reason to predict thousands of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy, but that doesn’t stop scientists with one eye on the telescope and the other eye on the tabloids. (Our advice, by the way, if there happen to be any alien civilisations reading this column, is to stay the fuck away from this planet until we’ve sorted ourselves out, or we’re likely to be a very bad neighbour.)

Ray Kursweil is another respectable scientist with a penchant for grandstanding, and his prediction that humanity is approaching a technological singularity figures prominently on his site Kursweil.net and is regularly dredged up by newshounds on a sensation-hunt. A singularity is a point beyond which it is not possible to make any prediction whatsoever, and according to him, this event horizon will be reached when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, perhaps 30 years from now.

Since human intelligence has got us where we are today, some might see this as a pretty good thing. However one can’t really blame hacks like Ed Howker of the Independent (4 February) for instinctively conjuring up images of Skynet, Cyberdyne Systems, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the box-office hit Terminator. After all, the work is being developed today and as the director of Michigan’s AI laboratory frankly admits “Our noses are too firmly pressed into our work for us to ask, to really ask, should we be doing what we’re doing?”

One only has to watch state-of-the-art robots whizzing round the lab floor trying not to bang into things to realise that the Terminator isn’t going to kick our front door in just yet. The concept of inorganic evolution – your toaster will inherit the earth – is a pretty old and abused notion. It’s not that we could never build something which could destroy us. After all, look at the weapons industry, or even the car industry. It’s just that, when it comes to Terminating ourselves, we don’t need artificial intelligence to do it for us. We’ve got capitalism. That’s all the prediction you’ll ever need.

Fancy a round of proton smashing?

You have to feel sorry for the nerds at CERN. Not only were their confident predictions about discovering the fabled Higgs Boson drowned last year in a media frenzy about high-energy particle physics being the death of us all.

When they turned the damn thing on, it broke. And now, months and millions later, they still haven’t got it off the starting blocks, and their rivals at the Chicago Fermilab Accelerator are laughing up their labcoat sleeves, predicting that they’re going to find the Higgs first (Race for ‘God particle’ heats up, BBC Online, 17 February).

It’s all getting rather competitive, but then, it’s a nice kind of competition, the kind we’d want to encourage in socialism, rival scientific teams racing to the truth. After all, there’s no money in the Higgs. It won’t change anything. It won’t even prove anything, apart from showing that the standard model of physics still holds up. If the nerds at Fermilab pull it off, CERN will be red-faced, but science will benefit either way. There is such a thing as healthy competition. The mistake of capitalism is to apply it where it does damage.

Socialism would cooperate over what mattered, like world production and distribution, and keep the competition for the fun things, like football and particle physics.

 

How wasps got their sting.

Curious that David Attenborough, who is to natural history TV what David Dimbleby is not to politics, should agree to produce the recent BBC programme Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, just around the same time that New Scientist led with a cover-story specifically refuting the notion of a Tree, and to the rage of Dawkins, Dennett and others, proclaiming that ‘Darwin Was Wrong’ (24 January).

Work in genomics has revolutionised the understanding of evolution, and has called into question what is meant by the word ‘species’. Up to fifty  percent of genes, it is estimated, are not passed along any linear tree of descent at all. They pass horizontally between related and sometimes unrelated hosts, usually in the form of a virus. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is now thought to account not only for some of the most bizarre biological hybrids, but also for such commonplaces as a wasp’s toxic sting. This constant ‘viral rain’ may also account for anything up to ninety percent of the human genome and some of our most basic biological functions,such as placental development, immune-response and gene expression (New Scientist, 28 August 2008). Thus many if not most evolutionary biologists now think the idea of a family ‘tree’ is obsolete. If there are any structures that look like a tree, they are local outgrowths of a general evolutionary ‘web’. But does that make Darwin wrong? Maybe, maybe not. New Scientist, with an apparently airy disregard for the slavering orcs of the Discovery Institute over in creationist Mordor, has gone for the controversial sell.

“You have made a lot of extra, unpleasant work for the scientists whose work you should be explaining to the general public”, fumes Dawkins et al (New Scientist Letters, 21 February), concerned that this ‘goof’ gives the god squad useful ammunition. Let’s not use the creationists as an excuse to make programmes so science-lite that they misrepresent the state of knowledge. If we, the general public, can cope with hierarchical trees, we can surely cope with HGT and webs. Socialists never had much use for hierarchies anyway.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Round in circles (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Round in circles

Ever since a gaggle of mushroom-intoxicated neolithics first got the idea of piling a big flat stone on top of two uprights people have been having creative ideas about the living spaces of the future. Over the length of social history living spaces have evolved, from medieval all-purpose pens containing bed, hearth, toilet, animals, humans, rats and plague, to the Victorian taxonomic mania for cataloguing and categorising, putting every human function from snoring to shitting to snooker in its own walled chamber. Now things are changing again as central heating and double glazing, as well as a pressure of space and cost, drive a return to more open-plan knock-throughs and multipurpose domestic environments (‘The Story of Our Rooms’, BBC Online, 12 April).

With the high priority now being placed on low-carbon living and low-impact building methods and materials, science is increasingly being designed into planning models. As old structures age and have to be replaced anyway, what if – say the scientists – whole cities could be redesigned to factor in all the known elements necessary to make them virtually self-sustainable?

If one were really to rebuild whole cities from scratch, imagine the energy savings. A city like Los Angeles, a chaotic urban mega-sprawl, is a huge energy sink which forces most people to drive miles to their nearest supermarket, and even more miles to work. Rational planning might have optimised all utilities and transport networks into the very crown joules of ergonomic design. And big cities have their own form of economy of scale, with smaller environmental footprints and higher standard of living per capita than small ones. If one were to pull them down and start again, one could build modular urban centres that were carbon-efficient, pedestrian-friendly, accessible and navigable.

Some planners promote designs for just this (New Scientist, 26 March). Zeitgeist’s Venus Project is another, 3D rendered attempt. The trouble is, even on the page these symmetrical designs look soul-destroying, like laboratory mazes for lobotomised rats. It’s no wonder many Zeitgeist supporters are reportedly in two minds about the idea of self-sufficient circular cities. Somewhere in the debate about efficiency the human element gets left out. What is beautiful about old cities is their riotous and labyrinthine irregularity, forced on them by the constraints of city walls and overbuilding, as well as their elaborate and artistic but ‘inefficient’ construction. The more planned a cityscape is, the more dreary it tends to look and the worse it is to live in. Well-meaning but paternalistic experiments in 1950s urban planning gave rise in the UK to the horrors of high-rises and disaffected concrete council estates, with all their attendant social problems, as Lynsey Hanley documents in her entertaining book Estates: An Intimate History (Granta, 2007).

Could planners ever plan efficiency to look like Venice or Rouen or York? Does the future always have to look like a plastic Thunderbirds set? Nowadays there is the potential of wiki-citizenry to offer collective input so as to avoid planners imposing antiseptic structures on our aesthetic sensibilities. But this just might mean a committee-designed camel instead of a geek-planned horse. Sometimes there is something human and endearing about organic inefficiency. In socialism there will no doubt be plenty of people calling for large-scale ‘social engineering’ projects. Let this be the first salvo fired in opposition to such notions.

A Poor Motivator

Interestingly, given all the hoo-ha about ‘obscene’ bankers’ bonuses, not many ever question the apparently self-evident truism that money is a great motivator. Socialists have always gone against the commonly received wisdom by claiming that, conversely, money is actually a poor motivator and in many cases no motivator at all. As evidence we cite the voluntary sector, so large that it is known as the ‘third sector’ of the economy, but then we might be biased given that we propose a social system composed entirely of volunteers. Support however comes from studies which suggest that not only are external motivators like money decoupled from internal ones like interest, commitment or curiosity, they may indeed be inversely related, so that an excess of one can lead to a deficiency in the other (New Scientist, 9 April). It is perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive to learn that financial rewards actually reduce the incentive to work hard, but “the facts are absolutely clear”, says one long-time researcher. “In virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation”. Next time you hear some know-nothing blather on about how money drives progress, you might point out that the science says otherwise. People are not spurred on by money, they are simply whipped on by fear of poverty.

Capitalist Priorities 

‘Owing to unfavourable economic conditions the search for the ultimate explanation of life, the universe and everything has been suspended.’ Perhaps this is pitching it a bit strong, but with the Large Hadron Collider due to close for a year for extensive repairs you would have thought that this was precisely not the time to be shutting down its nearest and dearest rival, the Fermilab Tevatron. The Tevatron, named because it can accelerate protons up to energies approaching a trillion electron volts or 1 TeV, is supposedly obsolete now because the LHC can manage energies up to 7 TeV. Of course that’s in theory. In reality the LHC has only once reached half this energy, has already broken down twice and now is due for another extended pit-stop. Most notably, of course, it hasn’t found anything, unlike the Tevatron which last month announced the discovery, to within 3 orders of certainty, of a new particle that may be evidence of a ‘fifth force’ of nature (‘Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle’, BBC Online, 7 April). Meanwhile the famous Higgs, as well as mythical dark matter ‘neutralinos’ could be lurking out there in any eV range, so even with two colliders operating it would be like two explorerers searching for penguins, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south. Keeping the Tevatron going would cost a measly $35m – peanuts by their standards – and there’s no engineering problem, but the beancounters have given it the thumbs down. Any socialist comment on capitalist priorities at this point would be as redundant as a Chicago physicist.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Higgs Story in the Making (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Higgs Story in the Making

Last month’s big science news, perhaps the news of the decade, was the Higgs discovery, or rather the discovery of a new particle of some sort which may or may not be the Higgs or some relative, close friend, neighbour or chat-room acquaintance thereof. Ask anyone on the street what the significance of this is and they will cheerfully tell you they’ve no idea. The physicists are none too sure either. Their jubilation is due to a twofold success story, the one of theory, the other of experimental ingenuity. Theorists can dream up all sorts of exotic ideas, but testing them is quite another matter. The Large Hadron Collider and its two detectors CMS and ATLAS are probably the most complex machines ever built by humans. They would be a triumph of engineering even if they hadn’t found anything. The discovery doesn’t push back the boundaries of the unknown, nor even positively confirm what is known. Like a man found at a crime scene holding the murder weapon, the particle may look guilty as hell, but so far the evidence is all circumstantial and other interpretations are possible. Even if it cries ‘Fair cop, guv, I’m the one wot done it’, it’s just one gangland boss in a whole shadowy organisation, behind which lurk the elusive grandmasters gravity, supersymmetry (maybe) and who knows what else? The Higgs does not so much expand our collective knowledge as confirm the majestic scale of our ignorance.

Socialists spend a lot of time talking about what capitalism does badly, but it behoves us to acknowledge too when capitalism does something well. Science has been a galloping success and its expansion shows no sign of slowing down but instead is accelerating. It is sobering to reflect that Einstein in his prime had no idea that galaxies existed. The fact that the universe itself, like science, is also expanding and that this expansion is accelerating is a fact now probably known to most schoolchildren, yet it was not known when Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power, and the Nobel prize for this discovery was awarded just last year.

This is one of the most contradictory and confusing aspects of capitalism. It is not just averagely good or bad at doing things, it is amazingly good and bad at doing things. When the history of this epoch comes to be written, perhaps by future socialist scholars, people will scratch their heads over the triumphant success of experimental high energy physics on the one hand, and the utter failure of society to make any progress over climate change on the other. How is it that we could explore, with an unprecedented level of cooperation, cost, accuracy and dedication, the fundamental nature of matter, while managing to overlook the fact that our collective laboratory was burning down around us? Why did we pour such ingenuity into, say, fat research while ignoring mass starvation, or epidemiology while doing nothing to stop the epidemics of easily preventable diseases?

It’s all about the money, obviously. Some might wonder why 111 states, with their eye always on the accounts, ever came to pay £6bn for an experiment which shows no obvious prospect of producing a financial return, especially when these same states show no similar cooperation over climate control. But that is to forget the casino nature of the system. Capitalism backs science like a gambler backs horses, expecting losses but hoping for a few big wins. Nobody has any idea whether or how the Higgs might represent a win in money terms. It may do or it may not. The Caderache fusion reactor (Pathfinders, May 2012) will probably cost three or four times this amount, and may produce nothing. Roughly $150bn has so far been lofted into orbit in support of the International Space Station, with again no certainty of a payoff.

What is certain is that poor people don’t pay, no matter how much research you put in, no matter what experiments you do. Putting food in a hungry child’s mouth is never going to make any sense in capitalism. That horse simply won’t run. Climate control, similarly, is a loser. Collective rationality just doesn’t come into it. Expecting capitalist states to agree to climate control is like expecting trees in a forest not to try to outgrow each other. Whoever cheats will gain an advantage, so everyone must cheat. Even though everyone ultimately exhausts themselves in the effort, nobody can afford to be left behind in the race.

So while we should acknowledge the amazing success of science within capitalism we have to recognise its political context. Its achievements are those which capitalism wants, its agenda that which capitalism writes. Those who support science can sometimes fall into the habit of reifying it as an ideal, as a ‘value-free’ quest for knowledge which transcends all other considerations. For them, the portrait of the astronomer peering through his telescope and writing his notes can never be anything other than a noble vision.  But we are not living in a noble vision and science does not exist in a bubble. Outside the quiet observatory the world is immersed in chaos and murder. For all its monumental achievements, science can never really be true science while it is forced to flow down the channels money cuts for it. And human society will never be truly scientific, no matter how far it pursues the secret facts of nature, while it continues to ignore the salient facts of life.

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Users: 1 –  Software Mafia: 0

Ongoing tribulations with capitalism’s attempts to commodify the unquantifiable: knowledge. Now in a major blow to the software industry the European Union has ruled that software companies have no right to prevent customers from reselling old second-hand titles (New Scientist, 14 July). Up to now the software mafia have insisted that knowledge is a hitherto unique type of commodity, where you don’t buy the thing itself but instead buy a licence to use it. Since this militates against most people’s conception of common sense in capitalism, it was widely misunderstood or disregarded. How, people wondered, could you pay for something and still not own it? The new ruling throws out this bizarre anomaly, but it does more than that, for who is to say who’s bought what from whom in the second-hand market? The worst fears of the industry will now be realised, to the delight of users, as we all go around ‘selling’ each other our software for a notional penny. Which we may never get round to paying. It’s nice to see, for a change, capitalism’s efforts to create artificial scarcity being given the bum’s rush.

Paddy Shannon

Science facts and science fiction (2012)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Several news stories compete for our attention this month. The Higgs boson discovery, the revelation by religious scholars in Louisiana that the Loch Ness Monster is real and therefore proof that the Theory of Evolution is wrong (The Herald, Scotland, 24 June) and, of course, the BIG story: the marriage break-up of world famous Scientologist, Tom Cruise.

Which to choose? It’s a toss-up between the Higgs boson and Tom Cruise. (Unfortunately we can’t offer marriage guidance on this column, so we’ll have to stick to the Scientology aspect of the story.)

Can these phenomenal stories be explained in simply? Our thanks are due to the Guardian’s G2 ‘Shortcuts’ column for the following: “The Higgs Boson is an elementary scalar particle first posited in 1962, as a potential by-product of the mechanism by which a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field – the so-called Higgs field – gives mass to elementary particles. More specifically, in the standard model of particle physics, the existence of the Higgs Boson explains how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry takes place in nature”.

Got that? Good. That should get you through even the most challenging pub discussion on the subject. Now we can move on to the advanced stuff, the minefield of theology and metaphysics that must be overcome before attempting to understand Scientology (or Tom Cruise, for that matter).

First let www.scientology.org explain why man is a spirit: “Ask someone to close their eyes and get a picture of a cat, and they will get a mental image picture of a cat. Ask them who is looking at the picture of the cat and they will respond ‘I am’. That which is looking at the cat is you, a spirit. One is a spirit, who has a mind and occupies a body. You are you in a body”.

All clear so far? Now here’s a quote attributed to sci-fi writer and founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion”. Yes, it’s all beginning to fall into place.

Having got that sorted we’re ready to consider Scientology’s theory of human origins. We’ve learnt from the born-again brigade that evolution is only a theory. But according to Scientology even the stuff about Adam and Eve and the talking serpent is a bit dubious too.

What really happened is that 75 million years ago an intergalactic ruler called Xenu herded the populations of 76 planets together, dropped them into volcanoes, and vaporised them with nuclear bombs. The souls of the victims were then forced to watch a 3D movie for 36 days which implanted all sorts of misleading data into their memories. We are descended from them.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but we only get 500 words in this column. It’s covered in great detail on the internet though.

It’s almost as bizarre as believing in a virgin birth, the raising of the dead and the turning of water into wine. You couldn’t make it up, could you? Unless you were a sci-fi writer. Who needs facts when you’ve got faith and unquestioning belief?

NW