Pathfinders: Nobel efforts (2024)

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

The Nobel Prize awards have been no stranger to controversy over the years, both for awards they should have given but didn’t, like most famous writers and virtually all women, and awards they shouldn’t have given but did. These included the 1949 Medicine prize for the prefrontal lobotomy, the 2019 Literature prize to a Bosnian genocide denialist and Slobodan Milošević fanboy, and most famously, the 1973 Peace prize to Kissinger, the carpet-bomber of Cambodia, which caused two Nobel Committee members to resign in disgust and prompted the equally famous retort from musician Tom Lehrer that satire had become obsolete.

Media pundits were quick to spot certain oddities about last month’s Nobel awards. Feathers had been ruffled earlier when the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute pointed out that ‘We have now over 50 armed conflicts around the world’ and suggested that perhaps nobody deserved the Peace prize this year (tinyurl.com/4c84a9zp). In the event they gave it to Hiroshima survivors, a clear stand-by choice.

The Physics prize went not to physicists but to two computer scientists for their early work in AI and neural networks. Reasonable enough, one might say, given that computer science didn’t exist in 1896 when Alfred Nobel established the prize topics. A mathematics Nobel might have been nearer the ballpark, but there isn’t one of those either, a fact emphatically not due to the popular gossip that it was revenge for Mrs Nobel having an affair with a mathematician (Alf was never married). In fact, Nobel also ignored dozens of other valid research disciplines, which reflects the deep capitalist truth that the rich always get to dictate to the rest of us what is important, just like today’s vainglorious and increasingly deluded ‘effective altruist’ billionaires.

As for the winning computer scientists, you may remember one of them, Geoffrey Hinton, as a well-known poacher-turned-gamekeeper who resigned from Google in 2023 to renounce AI and warn the world that it was about to kill us all. Given that the prize is awarded to those who, in Alf’s own words, ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’, one might have expect a noble prizewinner to refuse to accept the medal and the money, however Geoff appears untroubled by such qualms.

Still, there must be a lot of physicists out there doing vital Nobel-worthy work, surely? Not according to the popular YouTube doyenne of theoretical physics and clunky jokes, Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims (no joke) that ‘physics is dying’ because it’s become an unfalsifiable pseudoscience whose only purpose is to chunter out meaningless papers in support of funding bids to prop up the physics community’s wage bill (tinyurl.com/5n93hdmb). It might be true that they have a vested interest in stringing us along with string theory, loop quantum gravity, multiverses and endless made-up particles, but perhaps Sabine would say that, as she thinks the idea of an elegant Theory of Everything is a romantic mirage, and besides, popular YouTubers also have a certain vested interest in being controversial, don’t they?

AI had a more direct role in clinching the Chemistry prize, through Google DeepMind and its groundbreaking work on protein folding. Proteins do everything that matters in your body, but there are 100,000 of them and nobody understands how they work. Their exact function depends on what shape they fold into, and working this out for just one protein used to be a 3-year PhD in itself. The DeepMind AlphaFold2 programme can now do it in seconds, triggering a revolution in potential new treatments.

The Medicine prize meanwhile was for work in newly discovered microRNA, which is how genes, when sending messenger-RNA ‘photocopies’ to cells with template instructions for building proteins, effectively Tippex out certain instructions and not others.

What’s called the Economics Nobel is really an ersatz 1968 add-on by a Swedish bank and denounced as a ‘false Nobel prize’ by modern relative Peter Nobel, on the grounds that he considers economics a pseudoscience, a conclusion which will not raise socialist eyebrows. This year’s ‘Economics’ prize was for interesting empirical research into the question why some countries are so much richer than others. ‘Culture’ and geography have been mooted, but these researchers, observing that many poor countries were formerly European colonies, opted to look at ‘settler mortality’ statistics. They concluded that where mortality was low, and Europeans were able to settle and farm (Australia, North America), they also imported their existing social, economic and political institutions, giving the colony a massive head-start. Where mortality was high due to malaria and yellow fever (West Africa, Haiti, etc), they instead kept their distance and imposed vicious, extractive regimes including the slave trade. In sum, liberal democratic institutions are enablers of prosperity, not the other way round. Hooray for liberal capitalism then, which has obviously not resulted in a billionaire elite, global poverty, war and climate change.

Honourable mention ought this year to go to an Ig Nobel prize winner who, instead of discovering something silly about mammals breathing through their anuses, actually found out something useful about centenarians living in so-called ‘blue zones’ of super-longevity, which is that the blue zones don’t exist, neither do most of the centenarians, and the ‘data’ is almost entirely the result of poor, faked or lost records, and pension fraud by relatives (tinyurl.com/4hzna4ka). Many rich capitalists are obsessed with cheating death and living forever. This finding pisses on their chips and allows hard-pressed workers to enjoy some schadenfreude for once.

Would there be Nobel prizes in socialism? Probably not ones named after someone who got rich by blowing things up, including his own brother. And certainly not cash prizes, of course (there wouldn’t be any money). The concept of ‘prize’ is so integral to the fabric of competitive capitalism (prize and price are the same word in several languages) that some will find it hard to imagine a culture that doesn’t need such incentives in order to do worthwhile research. But socialists, who understand the value of intrinsic motivation, won’t have a problem.

Paddy Shannon

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: The Theory of Everything (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In one lesser-known corner of the BBC website is a section called Ideas, in which is a lovely little 5-minute video featuring theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, on the subject of string theory, a proposed ‘theory of everything’. The video represents elementary ‘particles’ in Pythagorean terms as strings vibrating at different pitches, or musical notes. It’s a nice idea, well presented and accessible. But Kaku also offers a thought-provoking postscript, which is that physics gets simpler the deeper you go.

This rather skates over the awkward detail that string theory only works if space has ten dimensions instead of three. But nonetheless, the basic insight is valid, and not just for sciences.

The same could be said of the world around us. On the surface, it can be baffling, an impenetrable complexity of problems and pressures that seem to contradict each other, with ideas and echo chambers and political speeches swirling and blowing about in all directions to add to the confusion. Small wonder that political activists are tempted to focus on just one small, definable element in all this.

For socialists though, it gets simpler the deeper you go. At lower levels, there are no single issues. Everything is connected. Everything is interdependent. All forces and forms of oppression are interlinked. Drill down, and the more the trace lines converge until you realise that things that seemed to have nothing to do with each other, like for example climate change and violence against women, or big-corporation tax avoidance and what’s on the telly tonight, are in fact aspects of the same phenomenon.

At the very deepest level lies a strange contradiction. And it has to do with possession.

To put this in context, we’re all familiar with the idea of sharing. Humans are great at sharing. Sharing is fun, it saves individual labour and resources, it’s excellent for your mental health, for your relationships and your social life, and it’s been a fantastic collective survival strategy. Anthropologists say that for nine-tenths of the time modern humans have existed – around 300,000 years – communal sharing has been the norm. But in the last fraction of that time something changed. Hoarding arose, also known as private property, because of material scarcity caused by growing populations, or rather, by growing populations outstripping the pace of productive technology. Humans are not devils but we’re not angels either. When there’s enough, we share. When there isn’t, we’re driven to hoard, fight and create hierarchies. In other words, scarcity leads to ‘bad’ behaviours. It led to property societies, and they led to capitalism.

Today technology has more than caught up with material scarcity, and in fact exceeded our wildest dreams. The average person in a developed country has access to information and resources that were unimaginable a few decades ago. The global population is still growing in some areas, but the trend is stabilising or reversing wherever material standards of living have improved. The Food and Agricultural Organisation says there is already enough food to feed everyone in the world, and that’s with its current wasteful big-ag methods and bio-crops.

In short, we have the means for material sufficiency, meaning that we can release ourselves from all the ‘bad behaviours’ imposed on us by scarcity, and do what we always used to do, live communally by sharing the work and the world’s resources. In effect, we can make everything free, and get rid of prices, rents, mortgages, bills and wages, and all the problems that go with them.

We can do this, but we haven’t yet, and that’s the central contradiction. We’ve come to believe, via subliminal or overt messaging, that private property and its money tokens are really the hallmark of true civilisation, that they are an ‘inalienable right’, an integral part of our freedom, as natural as breathing.

The fact that a tiny few are allowed to be stupendously rich amid a global ocean of poverty and squalor should be astonishing but is treated as normal and unremarkable. The only thing that excites complaint is that some of them don’t pay their taxes. The messaging tells us that the rich ‘create wealth’, and that they deserve their wealth because, unlike us workers, they worked hard for it. It says that we don’t deserve to be equals anyway, we’re shiftless and violent and need to be ruled – just look at all the cop shows on TV!

Where does this messaging come from? From the other side of the class war, the side of the rich. They don’t really create wealth – us workers do that – but they do manufacture a relentless and effective self-justifying propaganda which they drip-feed to us via their politicians and their entertainment media.

Somehow, without us even noticing, the idea of living communally and sharing has been reframed as an impossible utopia advocated by idiots which would never work because of something with no scientific basis known as ‘human nature’. The vast ages of human communal living are systematically airbrushed out of our collective memory. Capitalism, or something like it, is said to have existed forever. If you want an alternative, treat yourself to the ghastly experiment of soviet-style totalitarianism.

And so, from this central contradiction, emerge the myriad contradictions in which everyone today is enmeshed. We submit to the laws of capitalist markets and prices which make our lives a misery. We despair about climate change while accepting the endless race for profits which is ruining the planet. We suffer constant economic insecurity and mental health problems, and assume it’s our own fault. We fight each other in murderous wars on behalf of the rich, and in bitter social wars over race and gender identities. We see everything that humans value, even love and sex, marketed as commodities. We see the hatred, jealousy and rage of the powerless. We see endemic violence against women. We forget our social and hospitable traditions and wallow in nationalist xenophobia and fear of the ‘other’.

And all because we permit the private ownership of things that humans collectively need. Once a desperate expedient in the face of scarcity, hoarding has now outlived its time. Yet in a supreme irony, capitalism destroys food and goods in order to artificially maintain scarcity and keep prices high.

Billionaire Warren Buffet once remarked that there is a class war, and that his side, the rich side, are winning it. And they’ll go on winning it until we, the vast majority of workers, resolve to end it once and for all. It is in the common interest of humanity and the planet to live cooperatively and share communally. We can do that best by organising peacefully and democratically to abolish the ‘right’ of anyone to privately hoard what we all need. That, if you like, is the socialist ‘theory of everything’, and it’s as basic as it gets.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Original Sin (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Original Sin 

In 2012, broadcaster and current affairs pundit Andrew Marr wrote and produced a BBC/Open University documentary series called Andrew Marr’s History of the World, a lively saunter across 70,000 years of human history which helpfully included the invitation to download a free ‘How do they know that?’ booklet from the OU website, in case you wanted to check any of the facts presented (bbc.in/3EwNvF1).

Unfortunately, in the very first episode Marr somewhat marred his own enterprise with the extraordinary claim that homo sapiens drove the Neanderthals to extinction by hunting and eating them. How did Marr and the OU know that? Well, they didn’t, and the booklet didn’t mention it. Indeed the OU’s own published research instead ‘suggests that climate change was the primary factor in the extinction of Homo species, despite their great ecological plasticity and cognitive abilities’ while ‘in the case of Neanderthals, the climate-driven increased extinction risk was probably exacerbated by competition with H. sapiens’ (bit.ly/3JRkiWw).

Why did Marr make this odd and sensational claim? Perhaps in the absence of hard facts, a racy narrative won out instead. But why did the respectable OU let him get away with it? The thing is, it’s part of the ‘Original Sin’ apology for capitalism, the gist of which is that, like it or not, we need to be ruled by powerful elites because we’re all murderous psychos at heart. This view, popularised by Thomas Hobbes and latterly by his fanboy Steven Pinker, is baked into the foundations of capitalist ideology so thoroughly that it is usually the first objection to socialism that people reach for. This is also why anthropology continues to be such a hotly politicised area of study (see pages 14-16 and 20-21 in this issue).

In the case of Neanderthals, the circumstantial evidence did initially seem damning, with Neanderthals dying out in Europe around 40,000 years ago, just around the time humans from Africa were supposedly first smuggling their bone Neander-bashers through customs. But now new evidence points to H. sapiens already being in Europe around 54,000 years ago, meaning there was a potential overlap of 14,000 years, which in turn hardly suggests wholesale genocidal mayhem (bbc.in/3vrLmGz).

So the hunter-killer scenario, with one species as ruthless restaurateur and the other as regional plat du jour, is almost certainly a caricature. In fact, given the small and sparse populations in early Europe, the two may not even have had much to do with each other, though Neanderthal traces in the human genome do attest to some contact. According to Prof Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, ‘we don’t need to invoke violent causes for [Neanderthals’] demise. There are already two main factors they had to contend with.’ The first of these was rapid climate change: ‘Most of the north Atlantic was switching from bitterly cold to nearly as warm as the present day every few thousand years, sometimes in less than a decade, and so Neanderthals had to deal with an extremely unstable climate in western Europe before modern humans arrived there’ (bit.ly/3KWs171).

The other factor was humans’ competitive success, due to the fact that, as Prof Stringer says, ‘we were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better and we built on that knowledge’.

This is not to say that early humans were eco-friendly hippies. Early modern humans very likely hunted most megafauna to extinction, and certainly deforested huge areas of land, contrary to those romantics who impute mystical communion with and respect for nature to all aboriginal populations. But let’s not allow shameless apologists for capitalism to get away with misrepresenting the past for their own propaganda purposes.

Last year’s models

‘We’ve been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books’ (bbc.in/3MgSTik).

You might think this is a socialist talking about the revolution to abolish capitalism. In fact it’s a scientist referring to the fact that the fundamental W-boson particle appears not to weigh quite what it ought to. It’s only a small difference, but as Prof Brian Cox once observed about a study purporting to show neutrinos travelling slightly faster than the speed of light, to a physicist that’s like saying that you’ve done the sums and found that 2 + 2 don’t quite equal 4. It fractures your whole world like a thunderbolt.

Instead of being horrified at this prospect, physicists are as excited as kids on E-numbers. They have no stake in the current ‘standard model’ of physics because they already know it’s wrong in at least three ways. There’s a whole bunch of anti-matter that should be out there but isn’t. There’s a whole bunch of dark matter and dark energy that shouldn’t be out there but is. And gravity haunts it all like the ghost in the machine, inexplicably analogue in an otherwise digital quantum reality. There are all sorts of theories to account for these problems, and the race is on to find evidence for a winner.

How different from the world of everyday affairs, whose social organisation also has its own ‘standard model’, currently known as capitalism. In this case too, there are all sorts of things systemically wrong with it, and many people can see this, not just socialists. But, unlike physics, some people do have a huge financial stake in the status quo, and that doesn’t just skew the debate, it prevents it taking place. So whereas physicists are looking excitedly for a better and more coherent model that they know must be out there if only they can figure it out, the rich are making sure that no such endeavour is taking place in the social realm.

Which is unfortunate, because whereas in particle physics the most that’s probably at stake is a Nobel prize and some departmental funding, for human society the consequence of not having a constructive debate about the future might be not having any future at all.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: How scientific are scientists? (2009)

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

What is Andrew Marr, a well-known political commentator, doing presenting a BBC2 science programme about Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’? Evidently, having  used up their stock of one biologist the previous month when they trundled  David Attenborough out of retirement, the BBC are now reduced to pilfering  from the politics office. The first thing our ex-Presbyterian Andy does in  his new role of science correspondent is issue a dire warning that we  shouldn’t treat Darwin as a deity or Darwinism as a religion (The Danger of  Worshipping Darwin, BBC Online, 5 March).

Socialists have heard this sort of criticism before, from people who equate any system of organised thought with religion, in wilful disregard of the difference between organised thought and organised fantasy. Scientists do have their heroes, but they don’t worship them as infallible gurus because it is recognised that argument from authority is inferior to argument from evidence. Socialists take the same view of Marx and other revolutionary  thinkers.

It’s a pity Marr couldn’t direct his uncalled-for advice where it might do some good – at real rather than imaginary religious folly. Someone who does  think he’s an infallible guru has just lately been going round Africa telling the locals that wearing condoms will make their AIDS problem worse, not better (BBC Online, 18 March). Yes folks, the Pope pulls another blinder, advocating ‘fidelity and abstinence’, straight after criticising  his own US division for last year’s record-busting 800 sex-abuse cases, which cost the Catholic Church $436m in 2008 (BBC Online, 14 March). Mind  you, this is the guru who told us recently that Darwinian evolution is consistent with the book of Genesis.

Socialists are opposed to all religious superstitions but don’t often  trouble to condemn them because their advocates seem to do that better themselves. In Tanzania, the latest get-rich-quick scheme is to round up albino humans, murder them, cut them up, and sell their body parts as magic potions promising to make the owner wealthy. Meanwhile in South Africa there is an epidemic of what is called ‘corrective rape’, where lesbian women are gang-raped in order to make them ‘girls’ again. The fact that the women are often murdered afterwards suggests the rapists are not too interested in the ‘corrective’ aspect of it all. Unless they’re thinking of the afterlife.

Someone else keen to send women to an early afterlife is Samira Jassim, aka ‘the Mother of Believers’, who tells us how she recruited 80 female Iraqi suicide-bombers. Her clever trick was to have the women raped by her pious and devout male assistants and then tell the victims they would never get into heaven unless they committed a ‘purifying act’ to expunge their  ‘shame’. What this shows is not only the folly of ignorant belief and the despicable manipulation that ‘gurus’ can exercise, but also that these ‘gurus’ don’t believe this hokum themselves. It has often been observed that the higher one goes in any religious organisation, the less belief there is.

Perhaps, at bottom, religious people don’t really believe, but they force themselves to pretend to. There are signs that this is the case. One piece of evidence was the huge outpouring of obviously genuine grief among Catholics when the last pope shuffled off his mortal coil. Since, according to doctrine, he had gone off to sit on the right hand of God and enjoy perfect bliss, one might have expected them to celebrate. But they don’t, and in fact new research suggests they fight against death harder than  non-believers, demanding every treatment and medication in the book, even when prolonging the agony actually increases their misery (Pious ‘fight  death the hardest’, BBC Online, 17 March). Again, this is the opposite of  what you’d expect if religion was giving these people any real comfort. It seems that the Pope and his ilk aren’t very keen to check out themselves, although they’re often happy enough to speed other people on their way, through murder or murderously bad advice.

So how does Andrew Marr have the effrontery to equate science with religion? It seems utterly daft. But does that mean science is a noble endeavour and a  paragon of value-free rationality?

One man who doesn’t think so is the physicist Lee Smolin. He is scathing about the ‘sociology’ of the science community, which he invokes to explain why physics has languished for the last thirty years in the doldrums of unverifiable string theory rather than investigating any more promising avenues of thought: ‘Good ideas are not taken seriously enough when they come from people of low status in the academic world; conversely, the ideas of high-status people are often taken too seriously’ (The Trouble With Physics, Allen Lane, 2006). For Smolin, the old-boy culture of risk-averse conservatism is so strong that it has brought physics to a crisis where one must ask fundamental questions about what science is.

It is a shame that Smolin, following Popper, carelessly brackets ‘Marxism’ with witchcraft and Intelligent Design. He would be surprised to know that  socialist theory (rather than the state-capitalist parodies of North Korea etc that he has in mind) actually accords very well with the principles of scientific enquiry he himself sets out, and that socialists could help to contextualise the problems besetting physics.

Smolin points out that there are more scientists working today than in the whole history of science, however he doesn’t consider that many of them are doing things which are utterly useless or downright destructive because science, like any industry, has to operate within the priorities and limitations dictated by the capitalist system. He recognises that the scientific method suffers because science is organised hierarchically, but doesn’t see that the same criticism can be applied to all branches of human  activity. He demands democratisation and diversity in physics as if physics alone is the problem and these things are already established in other fields.

What sets science apart from religion is not that it works perfectly, but that it has the capability to be self-correcting. This is also the crucial distinction between capitalism, which is unable to correct its own suicidal blunders because it is in thrall to uncontrollable economic laws serving a powerful elite, and non-market, non-hierarchical socialism, which has no such agenda and which can therefore collectively determine the best course of action based on the available evidence.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: (Pr x Media) = Funding2 (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month the world woke up to the strange headline that a) gravitational waves had almost certainly probably been detected and that therefore… b) wait for it… c) Einstein was a bit clever and… d) his theory of relativity was almost certainly probably right.

Of course the scientists were ecstatic. They had been trying to find these waves for years, and now that they had, they also potentially had a new way of looking at the universe. Maybe.

So, good job and pats on the back all round, but front-page splash material, really? It was like the Higgs all over again, with journalists and readers alike gamely talking it all up while trying not to look too baffled.

On the face of it, not much had really changed. Einstein's theory of relativity had already been corroborated as far back as 1919, and every scrap of observational data since had only served to confirm it, making it one of the most successful theories in the history of science.

In a sense, this was the least desirable outcome, from the point of view of new physics. And new physics is sorely needed, because at the moment the Standard model doesn't make sense. Relativity and quantum mechanics are like the unstoppable force and the immovable object, and the Standard model has them worryingly in collision. The new discovery does nothing to change that.

Still, it is pretty clever to be able to detect a movement just a thousandth of the width of a proton (though some newspapers mistakenly printed 'atom' instead, which is like confusing a football with a football stadium). And, to add spice, it was one of those cases of serendipitous luck that make science a lot more fun to read about.

But how interested are the public by all this? It's not as if relativity is a subject you often hear discussed down the boozer, although maybe it depends on the boozer. And the booze (how can nothing be made of something, how can you bend time, how can you pack 30 suns into a space the size of a city, how do they even know any of this, why am I seeing two of you...?).

To many people, physics is just an advanced form of trainspotting (they might say the same about radical politics). Why should anyone care about it, when surviving in capitalism is already a full-time job? Trouble is, people feel that they ought to care because the media is making a big song and dance about it (unlike radical politics). And likewise, the media make a fuss because the scientists are making a fuss.

It comes down to a simple equation: PR x Media = Funding. Gone are the days when science was done by balding boffins in potting sheds. Instead it's 'Big Science' using 'Big Data' collected by Big Tools with Bloody Big Budgets. Detectors like the LIGO gravity wave sensors are hooked up in a patchwork process known as interferometry, across continents and sometimes across the world or even across space. That's not cheap. Then there are large colliders like the LHC at CERN, or the International Space Station (the most expensive tool ever built by anybody) or the ITER fusion reactor at Cadarache in France. In these cases the budgets are so big that only governments can afford them, and even then, only if they club together. And governments, as everyone knows, are peculiarly sensitive to the prevailing climate of popularity, not only among the voting populace who think they're paying for all this but also, and more importantly, among the capitalist class who are actually footing the bill.

So science, to get its funding, has become something of a beauty contest, which is why savvy scientists now engage PR firms after, and sometimes before, getting their research peer-reviewed, and why the pressure is on to announce results even before there are any results to announce. Physics, in particular that ethereal branch known as cosmology, scores surprisingly well in this beauty contest, not because it's in any way relevant or accessible to most of us, but because it's full of famous and charismatic stars (no pun intended), it sports some preposterously untestable ideas, and it's swathed in an aura of mysticism that, in the post-religion era, seems satisfyingly profound. Geneticists and chemists just don't have that kind of glamour. Though they tend to produce far more useful science, they are the unlovely infantry grunts doing essentially icky and sticky things with test tubes. Physicists are the dashing flyboys, the Brylcreem theorists who will make the human race race faster and faster, and maybe loop the loop. It's still based in fact, but quasi-fetishised, made to mean more than it seems, and to seem more than it means - science goes to Hollywood.

Still, and as a quid pro quo, new Hollywood sci-fi movies are increasingly expected to be 'scientifically correct'.  Nobody ever expected Flash Gordon to flash a PhD, but the product of a more scientifically-engaged public is a more scientifically-critical audience, so now film-makers simply can't get away with putting sound effects into space battles because everybody knows (yawn) that sound doesn't travel in space. Instead, and in a development few would have predicted, recent films like Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian are promoted, despite the varying silliness of their plots, precisely on the grounds of their devotion to the laws of physics, and criticised precisely where that devotion falls short.

And why not indeed? If only film-makers would apply the same rigorous standards to their history films, perhaps today's voting public would be a bit better informed about the world they live in, how it got that way, and what they should really be angry about. We've had politically correct, and now we've got scientifically correct. Maybe next cinema-goers should be demanding historically correct. And who knows? Unlike the detection of gravitational waves, that could well be a development that ends up rocking everybody's boat.

PJS

Einstein and common sense (1979)

From the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Watch out, all you believers in common sense. Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879 and it is interesting to consider the effect of the scientific revolution caused by his theories on the "common sense" view of the world. 

In 1905 (while working in a patent office), Einstein published his first paper on Special Relativity ("On the electrodynamics of moving bodies"—Annalen der Physik). From two beautifully simple axioms (the principle of relativity and the constancy of the velocity of light), Einstein was able to come up with some startling results. One of the best known is the prediction that moving clocks run slow. To quote his original example: "Thence we conclude that a balance clock at the equator must go more slowly by a very small amount than a precisely similar clock situated at one of the poles under otherwise identical conditions". 

Another prediction that violates "common sense" is that the relative velocity of two observers moving directly away from each other, is not equal to the sum of their velocities. For example, if two spaceships move off from the earth in opposite directions at half the speed of light (relative to the earth) then their relative velocity will not be equal to the velocity of light (the answer predicted by classical physics and "common sense") but only 80 per cent of it. The original reactions to these apparently nonsensical theories were mainly hostile. W.P. Magie in his Presidential Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science dismissed relativity theory, saying: 

"I do not believe there is any man living who can assert with truth that he can conceive of time which is a function of velocity or is willing to go to the stake for the conviction that his "now" is another man's future or yet another man's past."

The hostile reception to his theories meant that Einstein had to work for another four years in the patent office before he got a job as a physicist. 

The first experimental tests of relativity theory (Kaufman, Annalen der Physik 1906) were not compatible with Einstein's theory and favoured rival theories. But Einstein was not unduly worried: 

"In my opinion both theories have a rather small probability because their fundamental assumptions concerning the mass of moving electrons are not explained in terms of theoretical systems which embrace a greater complex of phenomena." (Mach, Einstein and the Search for Reality by G. Holton, p 651/2). 

In other words, Einstein was convinced of the correctness of his theories not because of the empirical "facts" but because of subjective factors such as the simplicity and beauty of the equations. Of course, later experiments revealed flaws in the earlier ones, and gave results compatible with relativity However, the opposition to the theory continued and even when Einstein won a Nobel Prize in 1921 it was only partly for his theory and partly for same comparatively minor work. 

There was also some more fanatical opposition, particularly in Germany and largely on political grounds (partly because he was a Jew and partly because be was thought to be attacking the great German philosophers like Kant). In 1934, twenty five years after the publication of his first paper on relativity, a book was published in Germany called 100 Authors Against Einstein. Typical of the relativity "sensible" attack was that by Professor Strehl: 

"The theory of Einstein is for me a functional deformation of reality, his framework of references, variable space and time coordinates, invariant velocity of light (in spite of variable limiting value) is not to my taste." (Die Naturwissenschaften II (1931) p 234/6). 

The relevant point is that "common sense" is based on generalisation of everyday experience in which bodies move very much more slowly than light, and that therefore the effects of special relativity are negligibly small. Attempts to extrapolate these laws to velocities approaching that of light (300,000 kms per sec) give results which are qualitatively wrong. To physicists working with particles moving with velocities within a fraction of a percent of the velocity of light, the effects of special relativity are so common that the laws of relativity become part of their "common sense". 

An analogy between relativity and socialism should not be taken too literally, but what should be remembered is that the history of science is full of revolutions which violated the prevailing "common sense" view of human nature (humans are innately greedy, aggressive and so on) because this view is based on generalisations made in capitalist society. The extrapolation of this view of human nature to a qualitatively different society — socialism — is therefore completely unscientific. Those people who reject socialism on these grounds are making just as big a mistake as those philosophers who rejected relativity because it violated the internal infallibility of Kant. 

Tony Weidberg