Pathfinders: How much does Dark Matter? (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pure science, from a capitalist point of view, is a bit like kissing frogs. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before one turns into a handsome princely profit. Sometimes – rarely – a technical project offers a large and obvious return on investment (ROI), even though the payout might be years or even decades away. With nuclear fusion, for example, the potential ROI is enormous and alluring, but while the boffins swear the idea works in theory, the technical challenges of putting the sun in a box are immense and not always known in advance, which usually means spiralling costs. The €5bn price tag for the experimental Iter fusion plant in southern France has more than quadrupled to €22bn, and now the schedule has been put back a further ten years. This puts European state investors in something of a sunk-cost bind. The risk of fusion never working is not as bad as it working, and China or Russia getting the jump on it. The British state recently managed to Brexit itself out of the Iter project, but Euro-governments generally see no option but to continue shovelling money into it.

Nothing about science is guaranteed. Even if it works, it might never result in any marketable technology. One project that paid off is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, the rarest kind of all-level success story. As is commonly known, protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles, but are made up of combinations of quarks. Such combinations go by the name of hadrons, and smashing them together at super-high speed to see what pops out seemed like a very good idea, from the boffins’ point of view. From a government funding point of view, the ultimate composition of matter promised no ROI that mattered, but since one can never be sure, and because this was leading-edge research, they rolled the dice anyway.

CERN proved to be a smashing success, discovering more than 50 new hadrons, not to mention the Higgs boson in 2012 (tinyurl.com/yeyn92vk). It also unexpectedly spawned a side-bonanza for capitalism that had nothing to do with hadrons, or even physics. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN, came up with the worldwide web, which revolutionised capitalism.

So, CERN has become the poster child for capitalist science in Europe. But the hard questions of physics remain intractable. The ‘standard model’ has gaping holes. Assuming that Einstein’s theory of gravity is correct even at the largest scales, there should be around another 30 percent of ‘stuff’ in the universe to explain why galaxies don’t spin themselves to bits. No current device can detect this ‘dark matter’. Furthermore, nobody can explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, except with a putative ‘dark energy’ which represents 70 percent of ‘stuff’ but also can’t be detected.

Since smashing stuff together seems to work, experimental physicists have proposed an obvious solution – smash even more stuff together even more violently with a vastly bigger installation. They want to build the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a €20bn monster that would make the LHC look like a desktop pinball game (tinyurl.com/mr2vj67j). But this proposal to find fundamental answers raises fundamental questions about what investors are willing to stump up for.

The problem is, if the FCC enthusiasts are saying €20bn now, and if Iter is anything to go by, the actual cost could end up being multiples of this estimate. Euro ministers are choking on their lattes at the idea, and even some physicists are calling it ‘reckless’ and questioning whether ‘bigger, faster, harder’ is the best way to go. The biggest possible Earth-based collider could anyway never achieve more than a fraction of the colossal energies released in cosmic rays, meaning such exotic conditions will always be out of reach. And what if dark matter turns out not to exist, and is instead, like phlogiston, a supposition based on a wrong theory? Then, obviously, the FCC won’t find it. Would the boffins then demand even bigger and more expensive colliders, one after another, until they’ve got one the size of the solar system? Besides, with the climate crisis, pandemics, AI and other more immediate concerns, aren’t there bigger priorities for science budgets right now?

Government money comes from taxes on profits, which the rich get by exploiting us workers. We don’t get any say in how governments spend this cash, but the rich certainly do have an influence. And it’s a moot question how much the nature of reality actually matters to them, especially when the costs keep going up. Will they get tired of stuffing coins into the fruit machine of physics and watching the lemons whizz by?

Workers, meanwhile, have a more pressing concern, to get rid of capitalism and the rule of the rich. But a socialist society will still have to answer the fundamental question, which is how badly we want to know and how hard we are collectively prepared to work to find out. There’s always the possibility that people in socialism will not be willing to construct mega-colliders, despite what physicists say, and will decide to put their creative efforts into other things like space exploration, or undersea cities, or transhumanism, or rewilding the planet, or creating great art. But there’s no doubt that human beings do value the quest for knowledge for its own sake, in any society that claims to be civilised. The specific problem for science in capitalism is that it has to follow capitalism’s skewed money-agenda, where lofty goals may be celebrated, but the decisive factor is usually the bottom line, the factional advantage, and that all-important ROI.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Christmas Crackers (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two of the biggest science news stories of the year, and possibly of the decade, broke in late November. One was the derivation of multi-purpose or ‘pluripotent’ human cells from simple skin (BBC Online, 20 November). Until now, the only known way to extract stem cells, cells which have the capability to turn into any of the 220 cell-types in the human body and thus potentially grow or repair any bodily organ or tissue, was from aborted human embryos. The moral issues around this have mired the science in controversy and, especially in the United States, have all but throttled research. Already a small culture of former skin cells has been grown into heart tissue which has begun beating. The consequences, if this technique works, are hard to exaggerate for many otherwise untreatable conditions, or for those people with little chance of a life-saving transplant, or for those with a successful transplant but facing a lifetime of immuno-suppressants and at risk from the mildest infection.

Of course, it might not work, but if does, it would take the worst kind of Christmas Scrooge to point out that this is rich-country technology to cure rich-country people, and which doesn’t do a whole lot for the several million kids who die every year because their mostly corrupt governments won’t spend one lousy dollar on their healthcare.

The other story concerns a Californian surfer and part-time snowboarding instructor, named Garrett Lisi, whose curious hobby just might make him as famous as Einstein (New Scientist, 17 November). For Garrett, when not surfing in Hawaii, moonlights as a theoretical physicist, and has just come up with an idea that might, from a physicist’s point of view, be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The ‘standard model’ of physics has for the last thirty years or so made reliably accurate predictions about everything from the minutest particle to the largest galaxies, using its two main propositions, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity. The problem has been that these two propositions have never fitted together. While quantum mechanics describes three of the four fundamental forces in nature, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is the odd one out, and can only be understood using relativity. Logic dictates that there must be an underlying law which unites the behaviour of these four forces, and intuition suggests they might even be aspects of the same thing, but despite all kinds of highly elaborate ideas, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, nobody has managed to connect them.

What Garrett has done is to take a known, 8-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points, and map all the 40 known particles in their various ‘identities’ to one or other of those points, uniquely including particles representing gravity. Rotating the pattern then gives known and observed relationships between these particles, but also throws light on new unsuspected relationships. In addition, having 20 points left with no particles to put in them, Lisi has posited the existence of 20 new particles which, tantalisingly, might be found next year when the Large Hadron Collider comes online at CERN in Switzerland. If the LHC finds the missing particles, physics will have found its holy grail, a theory of everything, the greatest advance for thirty years, and Lisi, at the very least, will surf his way to the Nobel Prize. Lisi has even devised a curious video animation which you can watch here: http://tinyurl.com/25DPF9. It doesn’t explain anything very well, but it’s quite fun to watch.

Of course, the theory still might be wrong, but if it isn’t, it would take the most miserable seasonal grouch to point out that the greatest advance in physics for three hundred years still wouldn’t mean a damn thing if we’ve killed our planet off because of our collective inability to spend one lousy brain-cell on our social and planetary healthcare. And several YouTube cynics, after watching Lisi’s bizarre ‘confetti’ video, make precisely this point. One particularly concise offering sums them up: “All I want to do is figure out how to make a living without having to go to work. Is that too much to ask?” Well, too much for theoretical physicists, anyway. Pity they aren’t asking socialists that question.

However, 2007 hasn’t been groundbreaking in every department, and there have been a fair collection of silly stories around this year. Two now sadly untraceable stories seen this year involve, on the one hand, the invention of ‘space money’ for all those space tourists of whom the likes of Richard Branson are rubbing their greedy hands together in anticipation, and the intriguing suggestion that NASA’s proposed crewed moon-base, due to be ready in 2020, won’t use money because internal trading would be seen as divisive in the colony. Extreme efforts to locate this story have turned up nothing, so perhaps it was, after all, a figment of a fevered mind.

On firmer ground, there is the continuing argument over online copyright issues. On the progressive side, the band Radiohead recently released an album online with an invitation to ‘pay what you like’. With some paying nothing, but many paying approximately a ‘fair price’ and one clearly disturbed enthusiast paying over £700, other bands are likely to follow this innovation. As this column has previously noted, the fight to preserve copyright online is viewed by many as a lost cause, and many entertainers now seek to recoup through live appearances and promotions instead of through the music. Elsewhere, a wonderful initiative by a Canadian student resulted in thousands of previously unobtainable and out of copyright musical scores being placed online, for any budding pianist to have a go at. But, like the proverbial turd on a bowling green, an Austrian company has appeared on the scene with an international, and unprecedented lawsuit which, on the mere suspicion that there might somewhere be one manuscript still under copyright, has succeeded in closing down this free resource and depriving musicians everywhere of harmless fun (Link.).

Anyone who has ever sworn at a Satnav device will be interested in two conflicting stories, one of which asserts that Satnav is better and safer than using maps (New Scientist, 4 August), the other reporting a litany of building damage and road bridge demolitions resulting from large lorries being sent down totally unsuitable roads by their ‘eye in the sky’ (Link.). It might be wise to see in this perspective the breathless predictions of one robot engineer that humans will be marrying robots within the next 40 years (David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots, publishing date 6 November). Jaded socialists will conclude from the above stories that the human race is going off track in more ways than one.

Lastly, of more interest to those socialists interested in the science/religion debate, the second Beyond Belief conference of concerned scientists has just taken place at La Jolla, California. New Scientist (10 November) takes a surprisingly disparaging view of scientists like Richard Dawkins who refuse to accord respect to religion, and this may of course be due to their high-minded moral impartiality. Or it may be the fact that they have started taking two-page advertisements from the religious Templeton Foundation, that organisation which, as Dawkins has noted, are prepared to pay huge amounts of money to ‘any scientist willing to say something nice about religion’. New Scientist would presumably have no comment to make on what must be the oddest news story of the year (BBC Online, 14 September), in which, after huge protests, the Indian Government withdrew a report to the Supreme Court which dared to claim that a rocky formation lying between the Indian coast and Sri Lanka was not in fact a bridge built by the god Ram and his army of monkeys but was a natural geological feature. Work on the shipping canal project was disrupted for months and the Interior Minister’s resignation was demanded. Who said there’s no fun in fundamentalism?

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

Pathfinders: Gullibility Travels (2009)

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

One has to feel a bit sorry for Graham Mace who, keen to improve his car’s green performance, bought an online ‘hydrofuel conversion kit’ in the hope that it would save 30 per cent on fuel consumption, only to find that it ran on snake oil instead (‘Fuel boost device ‘does not work’’, BBC Online, 19 Oct). After chucking £700 at this miracle device he hadn’t saved so much as a dribble of fuel, at which point a BBC investigation revealed the awful truth. It was a con.

But one wonders at the thinking here. Didn’t it occur to him to wonder why none of his friends knew about this ingenious gadget, why garages or motor suppliers didn’t stock it, or why it wasn’t fitted as standard at the factory? And what possessed him, after shelling out the original £290 with no success, to spend a further £400 on ‘upgrades’ rather than cut his losses? Even if it had worked, he’d have had to drive to Vladivostok and back to make up for the outlay. What on earth was going on?

Consumer programmes regularly trot out the old standard: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. But throw in a bit of seductive science and the consumer just seems to melt like warm butter, effectively separated from their money and common sense in equal measure. New Scientist notes that dodgy online companies think they can sell anything if they put the word ‘quantum’ in their blurb, like the ‘quantum pulse device’ that powers a ‘human generator’ and retails for a mere €420,000 (17 October). Hard to believe that anyone is dumb enough to fall for this supposed immortality machine, but you would only need one or two gullible net-travellers and you’d be made for life, so such stuff is always worth a punt to the scruple-free. If people can’t summon the wit to do a bit of comparative research, one feels that they deserve everything they get (or rather, don’t get) for their money.

Daft pseudo-scientific ideas have been around a long time though. Who hasn’t been assured with huge confidence by someone wearing a copper bracelet that it helps them enormously with their arthritis? But in the first properly controlled trial, at York University, these often expensive jewellery accessories fared no better than placebos (‘Bracelets ‘useless’ in arthritis’, BBC Online, 16 October). What undoubtedly explains the popularity, and durability, of such urban myths is the effect of ‘authority’, whether it comes from one’s peers, one’s elders or one’s newspaper, even though not one of these can be trusted as far as you can throw a grandad or a printing press.

As the Observer reminds us in relation to current fears concerning the rise of racism (18 October), we are horribly suggestible. We know, for instance, that we would rather give wrong answers than right ones if it means fitting in better (Asch conformity experiment, 1951), that the ‘only following orders’ defence at Nuremberg is more than a mere excuse (the Milgram pain-inflicting experiment, 1961, and the Stanford prison experiment, 1971), and that it’s a whole lot easier to start a Nazi party among liberal students than anyone would believe possible (Ron Jones and the ‘Third Wave’ experiment, 1967).

It’s not our fault. We’re a social species, with an outsize brain as mad as it is miraculous, and science is about as natural to us as an abacus to a baboon. Gullibility is only another word for ‘faith’ or ‘conviction’, part of the social glue that binds us. It travels by express while reason has to plod on foot. But that’s all the more reason to make an effort with our reasoning capacity, both in buying products and buying into ideas.

Improbability drivers
Who would believe - a vegetarian spider and a stingless wasp? Both of these turned out to be true, in a ‘truth is stranger than April fool’ kind of way, as was the story about the Maldives politicians who held a cabinet meeting under water. While this excellent innovation should be made compulsory for all politicians (minus scuba gear) we look forward to a story about a ‘benevolent species of capitalist’ discovered lurking somewhere north of Basingstoke and miraculously still in business.

Wackier still is the theory put forward by two CERN physicists, that the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged by ripples in time returning from some future cataclysm where, oh cripes, they really do find the Higgs boson and nature revolts (‘The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate’, New York Times, 12 October). That’s the thing about quantum theory. It’s so improbable anyway that theoretical physicists, like celebs, can talk any bollocks they like and still get serious media attention. Maybe we should start talking about ‘quantum socialism’ and thereby grab a few headlines.

Time to call time
After the runaway success of Europe-wide anti-smoking legislation, much is now being made about ‘passive drinking’ as states gear up for a similar assault on that other popular working-class pastime.

Despite efforts by the UK government chief advisor on health, Liam Donaldson, to incite a wholesome evangelism among the public by tarring all drinkers as potential wife-beaters or lager louts, the concept of ‘passive drinking’ is just not going to hold its whiskey and water.

Anyone who’s ever been in a pub knows perfectly well that wild-west saloon brawls do not break out as a rule nor do most customers get arrested or fall off buildings pretending to be superheroes.

The fact that more than half the UK’s population ignore the government safety limits on alcohol (Observer, 18 October) may be because a), the limits are too low to be of any practical value and b), the government has banned every other drug for spurious reasons so nobody believes anything they say. The half who stay below the limits are probably lying about it anyway.

It’s not that there isn’t a problem, of course there is. But the bigger problem is a patronising establishment which, not content with screwing workers into the ground, then presumes to lecture us about what’s good for us using dubious arguments they fully intend to ignore themselves. For let’s not be in any doubt, this is not about anti-drinking among the ruling classes. Let them swill their port and champers and snort their coke until they’re cross-eyed and drooling over the chambermaids. This is about controlling the workforce, saving some police and hospital A&E expenses, and cutting absenteeism in the dark satanic wage-mills.

Maybe alcohol is the fifth biggest cause of premature death and disability worldwide (New Scientist, 14 October), but workers know damn well that capitalism is responsible for the other four, and that’s what drives them to drink in the first place. Capitalists think they can save money by forcing puritanical self-denial on workers, but with the stress of exploitation we face, we don’t need temperance, we need to lose our tempers.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders Column: Particles of Faith (2007)

From the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to legend the ancient Greek natural philosopher Democritus was eating a piece of cake one day, and with a knife idly cutting it into sections, when he embarked on a thought experiment. Suppose, he wondered, one had a knife that was infinitely sharp and infinitely thin, how many times could one divide a section of cake until the resulting piece was something so small no knife could ever cut it. Would this piece represent the ultimate building block of all matter? He supposed that it would, and he gave to this hypothetical building block the term 'a-om', meaning 'will not cut', and to posterity he gave the solid beginnings of atomic theory.

Since Rutherford cut the 'uncuttable' and split the atom in 1913 scientists have pursued the quest to find the smallest irreducible particle, and they still haven't managed it. While this may seem only of mild interest to the non-scientific public, what does seem rather astounding is the eye-watering budgets which this continuing, some think Quixotic, quest seems to attract from what are, after all, capitalist governments with more interest in profits than proton colliders.

Great excitement is being stirred up at the moment by the imminent firing up of the biggest and most expensive research installation the world has everseen, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Centre for European Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. While the physics and engineering are state-of-the-art, the concept behind LHC couldn't be more old-fashioned. If you send two particles flying around a long tube in opposite directions and smash them into each other at stupendous speed, you get an explosion of bits and pieces flying off, and some of these bits and pieces might be new particles unknown to physics.

Why does this matter so much to physicists? Because, with its two intractable paradoxes of dark matter (which nobody can find) and dark energy (which nobody can find) forming essential cornerstones supporting the 'standard model' of physics upon which everything from Einstein upwards is based, physics can reasonably be said to be in a new dark age. It is enough to make anybody's head ache.

Either Einstein's general relativity is wrong or quantum mechanics is wrong, but they have both passed every known test and fulfilled every known prediction. The essential problem is that of the four known forces, three, the electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, are mediated by particles. The fourth, gravity, is apparently not.

Gravity is the black sheep of the family in other ways too, being thirty orders of magnitude weaker than the other forces (think of fridge magnets), and uniquely exerting the same force on all objects regardless of weight (keeping both you and an ant on the ground). What possible Unifying Principle can be behind all this? To which the physicists reply: we have no idea, but give us billions of dollars and let us smash things up, there must be some more particles out there somewhere.

But why does this matter so much to the rest of us? The answer, perhaps shockingly, is that it doesn't matter a damn. If the arguments between the handfuls of people worldwide who really understand the various brands of string or quantum gravity theory are ever resolved, nobody else will understand the answer anyway. What will, ahem, 'normal' people get out of it? Nothing, in all probability.

Bear in mind that nobody is arguing for investment on the promise of profits from by-product technology, as we saw from the space race with such things as digital watches and vastly better computers, and even Velcro. There is no known military application. There is no suggestion of being able to harness or use the energy involved for practical purposes. To be sure, government investors are being kept on the hook with tantalising talk of 'quantum computers', a concept which might reduce super computers from filing cabinet to fingernail size, despite the fact that the physics is hotly disputed, it is a paper-only theory and no experiment has provided even proof of principle never mind an actual demonstration of viability. But there must be an angle here somewhere, surely? Hard-nosed governments know better than to throw away billions on vague guesswork. Don't they?

No, they don't. Capitalists, and the governments who mediate their interests, don't invest in horizon science because they believe it will go anywhere, but because they can't be entirely sure that it won't. It's a modern form of Pascal's wager, which proposed that the risk of being wrong if one worshipped God and he didn't exist was as nothing to the risk if one didn't and he did. If anything ever came of this atom-smashing malarkey in Switzerland, what capitalist wouldn't want a piece of the quantum action? And if nothing comes of it, well then, they've all lost money equally.

What all this does of course is to play into the hands of a small handful of physicists who want big toys and who can invent impenetrable arguments which capitalists can't fathom and don't dare ignore. Moreover, these same physicists are in a position, with lofty talk of understanding 'where the universe came from and where it's going', to browbeat the rest of us with a quest that is so transcendently awesome that all other quests for knowledge or human improvement appear to pale into insignificance. Quite simply, and with the entire history of scientific enquiry and endeavour stacked up against us, we don't dare ask the question 'what does it matter?'

That it matters, in some profound philosophical sense, is of course unarguable. But the question we, as socialists and as scientifically-minded members of the modern age, should be asking is, does it matter now? In a world already half-destroyed by the consequences of a steam-age political system, is this really what we should be spending our time and effort looking into? Aren't there more pressing things for science to be doing?

This is all pure heresy, of course. But in a recent New Scientist review of Oliver James' book Affluenza, which describes western capitalist populations' unhappy love affair with consumerism, the reviewer constantly demands more evidence and better research before accepting the validity, albeit intuitively acknowledged, of much of what James has to say about the meaningless of a life lived for material gain alone. A cynic might conclude that when scientists are not interested in the debate, they demand impossible amounts of evidence while making no useful suggestions about what evidence would satisfy them or what methodologies would be acceptable. When the debate concerns their own fascinations, however, they rely heavily on funders being willing to speculate wildly, without any evidence nor any guarantee of success.

Democritus is referred to as a 'natural philosopher'. The term 'scientist' was not coined until 833, at which point the deep-seated respect for the 'polymath' who was good at lots of things was replaced by a new Enlightenment-age adoration of the person who did just one thing. 'Scientist' describes what a person doesn;t do as well as what they do, a single-tasking paradigm which tries to exclude the real world and its values, from the simple and 'pure' mono-dimensional thought-process.

We need scientists to join the rest of us in the real world, and help us do the research and find the evidence we need to prove to the world that a non-market economy can work better than what we have, or conversely, prove that it can't. But it seems they are too busy chasing bucks and bits of quanta, all in the Nobel cause of selfless enquiry.

Another ancient story has it that Archimedes, he who expressed such delight in flooding his bathroom, was so absorbed in mathematical calculations that he ignored, in the middle of the battle for Syracuse, an invading Roman centurion who was demanding his attention with extreme prejudice. The Roman, evidently miffed at the other's lack of social graces, shoved his sword in the mathematician and killed him. Which just goes to show, if you don't pay attention to the world around you, things can get very sticky.

Paddy Shannon