Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

December 30, 2018

Genesis 2.0

Filed under: extinction,Film,indigenous,Russia,science — louisproyect @ 9:34 pm

If you knew nothing beforehand about “Genesis 2.0” and sat down after the opening credits had rolled, you’d swear after about 15 minutes that you were watching Warner Herzog’s latest documentary since it incorporates his obsession with obsessional people. In this instance, it is the Yakut hunters who have set out on a hunting trip for dead animals, specifically the tusks of woolly mammoths that have been extinct for around 10,000 years. It would not be far-fetched to call them scavengers rather than hunters.

The Yakuts live in the very north of Siberia. If the word Siberia summons up visions of frigid, desolate and barren tundra, nothing prepares you for the hunting ground they have chosen, the New Siberian Islands to the north of Siberia that would be of little interest to any Russian if it were not the high price paid for the tusks of creatures dead 10,000 years ago and up. Of course, that price is relative since like most indigenous people drawn into the commodity production, they are likely to be the lowest paid.

We learn that woolly mammoth tusks are in high demand because there is now a ban on exporting elephant tusks to China where they are used in carvings purchased by a nouveau riche population that seem little interest in whether a knick-knack on their fireplace mantle might eventually lead to the extinction of the African elephant, the genetic relative of the woolly mammoth as well as the mastodon. In the commodity chain, a Yakut hunter might get a hundred dollars for a tusk that is in relatively good condition. It is then sold in the marketplace in China for up to tens of thousands of dollars to a merchant who then hires artisans to turn it into something looking like this:

This goes for $130,000 at http://mammothtusk.org/

“Genesis 2.0” is narrated by Christian Frei, the Swiss director whose native language is German. If it wasn’t for the offbeat subject, the narrator’s quizzical tone and German accent would convince you that you were listening to Werner Herzog. That being said, Frei is dealing with far more deeply philosophical questions than any I have ever seen in a Herzog film. Since I consider Herzog to be one of the top ten living filmmakers, that’s quite a compliment to Frei whose ambition is to engage with the deepest concerns of the 21st century: what is humanity’s future and what is the future of life in general? Although we do not hear the term “sixth extinction” once in the film, you can’t help but think of it.

Among the men profiled by Frei is Peter Grigoriev, a Yakut who dropped out of college to become a mammoth tusk hunter. His brother Semyon also plays a major role in the documentary even though he is not a hunter. He is a paleontologist and head of the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic in northern Siberia. His dream is to resurrect a woolly mammoth, a task his brother and his fellow hunters make plausible after they stumble across the nearly complete carcass of a baby woolly mammoth that has been so well-preserved under the frozen tundra that its blood pours liquid from its veins.

Like Indiana Jones coming across the lost ark of the covenant, Semyon feels like his lifelong dream has been realized. With samples in hand, he flies to South Korea to connect with Woo Suk Hwang who runs Sooam Biotech, the largest cloning laboratory in the world and most successful. While Woo is mainly interested in pure science, he pays his bills by cloning the pet dogs of wealthy people who are willing to pay the same money to be reconnected with Fido as those willing to shell out for a mammoth tusk carving. We hear from one customer, a woman with a distinctly nasal Queens accent who says she loved her dog more than anybody, including her husband and her mother. In moments like this, you can also be fooled into thinking you are watching a Werner Herzog since the unintended comedy is funnier than any Will Ferrell movie I’ve ever seen.

This is not Semyon’s last stop. Next, he flies to China to meet with the top management of BGI, a genome sequencing laboratory that has Communist Party members and military officers on its board. They are anxious to register the dead baby woolly mammoth’s genome codes with BGI that is aspiring to encompass every single living thing on earth in its electronic archives. Like Woo, BGI pays for their pure science undertakings by the more menial job of testing fetal samples sent to their labs by parents anxious to preempt having a baby with Down’s Syndrome. When Semyon’s colleague questions the morality of such a business, the BGI executive stares blankly at him with a plastic smile on her face.

Let me conclude with something from the press notes that helps pull together the different strands of this remarkable film that opens on January second at the IFC in New York:

There is a kind of gold rush fever in the air, because the prices for this white gold have never been so high. But the thawing permafrost unveils more than just precious ivory. Sometimes the hunters find an almost completely preserved mammoth carcass with fur, liquid blood and muscle tissue on which arctic foxes gnaw.

Such finds are magnets for high-tech Russian and South Korean clone researchers in search of mammoth cells with the greatest possible degree of intact DNA. Their mission could be part of a science-fiction plot. They want to bring the extinct woolly mammoth back to life à la “Jurassic Park”, and resurrect it as a species. And that’s just the beginning. Worldwide, biologists are working on re-inventing life. They want to learn the language of nature and create life following the Lego principle. ( The Lego Principle refers to the concept of connecting first to God and then to one another. Regardless of the shape, size, or color of any LEGO brick, each is designed to do just one thing: connect. LEGO pieces are designed to connect at the top with studs and the bottom with tubes. Following this metaphor, if you can connect to the top with God and to the foundation with others, you then have the ability to shape the world you live in.) The goal of synthetic biology is to produce complete artificial biological systems. Man becomes the Creator.

The resurrection of the mammoth is a first track and manifestation of this next great technological revolution. An exercise. A multi-million dollar game. The new technology may well turn the world as we know it completely on its head…and all of this has its origin in the unstoppably thawing permafrost at the extreme edge of Siberia.

Genesis two point zero.

 

May 23, 2017

Predatory Journals and Predatory Skeptics

Filed under: feminism,religion,science,sociobiology — louisproyect @ 5:26 pm

On the Skeptic Magazine website there’s an article titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies” co-authored by Peter Boghossian, Ed.D. and James Lindsay, Ph.D. that details how they suckered a “peer-reviewed journal” into publishing a bunch of gibberish filled with postmodernist jargon.

The article appeared in Cogent Social Sciences, a division of Taylor and Francis that along with Sage, Springer and Elsevier represent the top-drawer of academic publishing. Or at least has such a reputation. A representative paragraph appears in the Skeptic article:

We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.

The references are as bogus as the rest of the article, including one for the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page is reloaded.

They have to admit that the article was rejected by NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, a Taylor and Francis journal whose editorial board is dominated by Scandinavian academics. An recent article suggests that the journal is strongly influenced by 1970s type feminism: ‘We wouldn’t be boys if we weren’t clever with our hands’ – childhood masculinity in a rural community in Norway.

Considering that is it not included in the top-ranked 115 journals in Gender Studies, being rejected by NORMA indicates a failure to leap a hurdle 6 inches above the ground. As is often (or perhaps universally) the case with being rejected by a Taylor and Francis journal, you get an autoreply inviting you to submit the article to a journal in their open-access Cogent Social Science series that despite the Taylor and Francis imprimatur functions like a predatory journal. Basically, you pony up $1,350 (the hoaxers paid half the normal fee for some reason) and Cogent will be happy to put any crap you write on their website.

Because I have been published in Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, a Taylor and Francis journal, I ended up on some mailing lists that periodically generate mass invitations to the recipients asking them to submit something to open-access predatory journals (Internet-based) as opposed to the far more expensive and exclusive print journals found on JSTOR . For a number of years, University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beal maintained a list of such journals that totaled 1,155 as of December 31, 2016. Beal took down his website in January 2017, providing no comment why. One surmises that he got fed up with being harassed by the conmen operating in this field, including an outfit in India that threatened him with a one billion dollar law suit.

One of the more outrageous predatory journals that solicited an article from me had the gumption to include the name of a professor I knew quite well on its editorial board. When I wrote him to inform him about his name appearing there, he was shocked and wasted no time demanding that they remove it. Typically, the worst of the journals don’t even include a phone number and use a bogus street address for their office. Others are more genuine but don’t really subject an submission to the serious peer review that is typical of academic journals. They also charge hundreds of dollars for the article to be published, a way for them to make a fast buck. Is there much difference between the way they operate and how Cogent Social Science operates?

The hoaxers claim that there is a difference since Cogent is included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Clearly being included in the directory can be a transitory event since 3,776 were deleted from dataset of 12.595 since its inception, including 376 for ethical lapses. Japan is the worst offender apparently.

Why are these journals called predatory? Since I have become acquainted with many tenure-track professors over the years, I can tell you that they are under enormous pressure to accumulate a paper trail of publications—publish or perish, in other words. Some inevitably succumb to the temptation of paying hundreds of dollars for appearing in a journal that is borderline predatory. Does any of this have anything to do with enhancing humanity’s body of knowledge? I can tell you that even for the best journals coming out of an Ivy school, the number of people who read these JSTOR type articles is vanishingly small.

Unlike Alan Sokal, who received almost universal acclaim in 1996 except from those postmodernists he spoofed, Boghossian and Lindsay have gotten bad press. Salon notes that in making an amalgam between predatory publishing and gender studies, the authors neglect to mention that Cogent Social Sciences lacks a single editor in the field. They are experts in tourism, criminology, development planning, geography, sport management and communication sciences—hardly fields that qualify them to evaluate an article on gender inequality. The hoaxers made a self-righteous case against gender studies:

Our aim was smaller yet more pointed. We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.3

I am not exactly sure what evidence they are talking about since the endnote pointed to “countless examples documented on the anonymously run Twitter feed @RealPeerReview”. A cursory glance of this Twitter feed will reveal this sort of thing: “Seems that many academics dislike the wonderful Martian movie (and probably @andyweirauthor’s book it’s based on)”. As a rule of thumb, anything that appears on Twitter is hardly worth considering so it is no surprise that the two hoaxers cite it as proving their point.

Since Boghossian has cultivated a career as a professional atheist, it is no surprise that he used Skeptic Magazine as a platform, where Dawkins is considered a leading exemplary.  Boghossian is a featured speaker of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and wrote a book titled “A Manual for Creating Atheists” that repeats the arguments made by Dawkins in his own book “The God Delusion”. His writing partner James Lindsay wrote one of those books himself. Titled “God Doesn’t; We Do: Only Humans Can Solve Human Challenges”, it tries to show that a belief in God is fed by social needs that people do not know how to meet. Since those social needs will exist as long as capitalism exists, I doubt that such books will do much good.

I get a chuckle out of Skeptic Magazine upholding hard scientific values against postmodernist mumbo-jumbo since its editorial board is a virtual hotbed of sociobiologists, including the aforementioned Dawkins, Jared Diamond and the infamous Napoleon Chagnon. Additionally, the hoax got the endorsement of Stephen Pinker, who like Jared Diamond believes that hunting and gathering societies were far more capable of genocide than Adolph Hitler. Why? Because it is in our genes evidently. Survival International summed up the beliefs of of this unsavory crew:

Steven Pinker (‘evolutionary psychologist’)

In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker promotes a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward ‘Brutal Savage’, which pushes the debate on tribal peoples’ rights back over a century and is still used to justify their destruction. Read more about why Pinker’s ‘science’ is wrong.

Napoleon Chagnon (anthropologist)

Steven Pinker would arguably not have been able to reach the conclusions he does about tribal violence without the highly controversial work of a single anthropologist: Napoleon Chagnon studied the Yanomami tribe from the 1960s, calling them ‘The Fierce People’. But are the Yanomami really fierce?

Napoleon Chagnon’s view that the Yanomami are ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’ and that they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’ has been widely discredited. Nonetheless, both Diamond and Pinker’s conclusions about tribal violence rely heavily on his work.

Jared Diamond (geographer)

Jared Diamond’s 2012 book, The World Until Yesterday is ostensibly about what industrialized people (whom he calls ‘modern’) can learn from tribal peoples (he calls them ‘traditional’). His book, however, carries a false and dangerous message – that most tribes engage in constant warfare, both needing and welcoming state intervention to stop their violent behavior. Read more.

As far as Dawkins is concerned, we can assume that he was eager to publicize anything that smacked of hostility to feminism given his track record. In 2011, he got in a flame war with feminists as reported by The Atlantic:

Richard Dawkins made an unexpected appearance in the comments section of biologist PZ Myers’ post at Scienceblogs.com last week. Myers was commenting on Rebecca Watson’s recent experience being propositioned in a hotel elevator by a male attendee of a conference at which Watson had just spoken in Dublin. Dawkins got himself into hot water by commenting in the form of a sarcastic letter to a Muslim woman, pointing out how trivial Watson’s experience in the elevator was compared to the abuses Muslim women deal with on a daily basis. “Stop whining will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and…yawn…don’t tell me again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery,” he wrote. “But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.”

Then in 2014, he Tweeted that women should not get drunk if they want to avoid being raped:

Two years later he was disinvited from a conference organized by skeptics for Tweeting a sexist video:

Finally, with respect to the Sokal hoax. Back in 1996, I was thrilled by the news that those masters of obfuscation and critics of Marxist grand narratives were finally getting their comeuppance and from a volunteer who had gone to Nicaragua with a Tecnica delegation I had helped to organize. It was only a few years later when I discovered the background to the con job he pulled on Social Text that I woke up:

I had never really given much thought to Alan’s relationship to Marxism. I, like most people, just assumed that he had gone through volume one of Capital, etc., in the way that young orthodox Jews learn to read Hebrew. Anybody who describes himself as a “socialist” repeatedly in debates with Andrew Ross et al, clearly MUST have at least familiarity with, if not commitment to, the Marxist intellectual tradition.

I discovered that this is not true at all. Despite Alan’s assertion that he is a socialist, in reality he is a left liberal. I had lunch with him on New Year’s Eve in order to discuss my concerns about his defense of the “Kennewick Man” excavations near the Columbia River in Washington State. Alan had defended the scientists against the American Indian “creationists” in his debate with Andrew Ross and I hadn’t given it too much thought at the time. Now that I had become thoroughly immersed in such questions, his position gnawed away at me like a piece of undigested food.

In the course of our discussion, it was revealed to me that Alan’s defense of science has nothing to do with Marxism or socialism. It is virtually indistinguishable from everyday liberal concepts of the role of scientists in society. He said that bad science would expose itself in a free society, so there would seem to be little risk of running into the sort of horrors that took place in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia. All we have to do is criticize the excesses of archaeologists and everything would come out okay in the end. I sat there sipping my wine in a mood of total shock. Alan’s trust in capitalist society was touching but a bit naïve. After all, this was a free country when anthropologists and archaeologists wrote all sorts of racist nonsense throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Leaving this aside for the moment, I had a completely different analysis of how science is conducted. As a stodgy old Marxist, I had become convinced long ago that the ruling ideas of society are those of the ruling class. Science was not immune.

I asked Alan if he had ever read Richard Lewontin or Richard Levins, co-authors of “The Dialectical Biologist.” No, he had taken the book out of the library, but never read it. This was astonishing to me. How could Alan Sokal have become regarded as some kind of defender of Marxist rectitude when he had utterly no engagement with the main experts in the field. In his new book “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science,” co-authored by physicist Jean Bricmont, there is no index entry for Marx, Lewontin or Levins. In the one chapter that deals with their own views on the science wars, as opposed to the follies of the pomos, they analyze Thomas Kuhn, not the Marxist analysis of what Lewontin and Levins call the “Commoditization of Science.” That is the real issue, not what Lacan thinks of pi.

In point of fact, the Social Text issue that Alan’s spoof appeared in is one of their better efforts. It is available now under the title “Science Wars” and contains first-rate articles by Levins and Lewontin. It turns out that the original Social Text issue was basically a rejoinder to Norman Levitt, Alan Sokal’s ally in the so-called science wars. Alan told Lingua Franca that his spoof was inspired by Levitt’s efforts to expose irrational tendencies in the academy.

Directing his attention to Levitt and co-author Paul Gross’s “Higher Superstitions,” Lewontin writes:

What Gross and Levitt have done is to turn their back on, or deny the existence of, some of the most important questions in the formation of scientific knowledge. They are scornful of ‘metaphor mongers,’ yet Gross’s own field of developmental biology is in the iron grip of a metaphor, the metaphor of ‘development’ To describe the life history of an organism as ‘development’ is to prejudice the entire problematic of the investigation and to guarantee that certain explanations will dominate. ‘Development’ means literally an unrolling or an unfolding, seen also in the Spanish desarollo, or the German Entwicklung (unwinding). It means the making manifest of an already predetermined pattern immanent in the fertilized egg, just as the picture is immanent in an exposed film, which is then ‘developed.’ All that is required is the appropriate triggering of the process and the provision of a milieu that allows it to unfold. This is not mere ‘metaphor mongering’; it reveals the shape of investigation in the field. Genes are everything. The environment is irrelevant except insofar as it allows development. The field then takes as its problematic precisely those life-history events that are indeed specified in the genome: the differentiation of the front end from the back end, and why pigs do not have wings. But it ignores completely the vast field of characters for which there is a constant interplay between genes and environment, and which cannot be understood under the rubric of ‘development,’ Nor are these characters trivial: they certainly include the central nervous system, for which the life history of the nerve connections of the roundworm is a very bad metaphor.

This is the kind of discussion that matters most in the so-called science wars. Instead of shooting fish in a barrel, Alan Sokal should be responding to these arguments. Instead, he has constructed strawmen that are easy to knock down.

December 10, 2016

Hidden Figures; The Man Who Knew Infinity

Filed under: african-american,Film,india,racism,science — louisproyect @ 10:02 pm

When two screeners submitted to NYFCO members for consideration as best film of 2016 happen to deal with racism against people of color who are gifted mathematicians if not outright geniuses, your first reaction might be to consider it a coincidence. But upon further reflection, despite all of the gloom about the election of Donald Trump, the film industry still sees such stories as eminently marketable rather than Rambo retreads. Not only are the films marketable, they are first rate.

“Hidden Figures”, which opens everywhere on January 6th, 2017, tells the story of three African-American women who worked for NASA in the 1950s and who had to deal with both racial oppression and sexism. Of the three, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) receives most of the attention. Now 98, she calculated the launch window for the 1961 Mercury mission. As the daughter of a lumberjack in segregated West Virginia, she had many obstacles to overcome. Although I have little use for President Obama, I thought he exercised good judgement when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

While its venue was in art houses last April, where features generally make a fleeting appearance unlike the Multiplexes that will screen “Hidden Figures”, my readers will certainly want to take advantage of “The Man Who Knew Infinity” now on Amazon streaming. This is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (played by “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel), who grew up poor in Madras, India and demonstrated a mastery of mathematics from an early age. Working as a lowly clerk after the fashion of Bob Cratchit, his supervisor was struck by a notebook of formulas he kept, so much so that he encouraged him to send letters with a sample of his work to universities in England. After Cambridge don G. H. Hardy (played to perfection by Jeremy Irons) reads the material, he invites Ramanujan to come to Trinity College and fulfill his dreams. Like NASA, however, the institution is racist to the core and almost crushes Ramanujan into the dust.

While both films have most of the well-trod inspirational elements you would associate with such tales, they rise above the genre and soar. This is mostly a function of their faithfulness to the historical context, informed to a large extent by the well-researched books they are based on. Written this year, Margot Lee Shatterly’s “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” was sparked by conversations she had with her father, who was an African-American research scientist at the NASA-Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia where the women in “Hidden Figures” worked. As for “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, the source material was a book of the same name written in 1991 by Robert Kanigel, who worked as an engineer before becoming a free-lance writer in 1970. In 1999, he became professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. So clearly, we are dealing with authors who are very much wedded to the stories they write about.

In addition to Katherine Johnson, the other two Black women facing discrimination at NASA are Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). Vaughan was the supervisor of the West Area Computers section at NASA that despite the name consisted of African-American women whose job it was to do tedious calculations and check the mathematics of other employees, almost like fact checkers at the New Yorker Magazine. Known as “computers”, they had to be much more rigorous than those working for a magazine since the lives of astronauts depended on it. The West Area was segregated from the main buildings at in Hampton—separate and unequal. The women could not even use the bathrooms on the main campus or even the water fountains. When Katherine Johnson ended up working with the white scientists, she had to walk a quarter-mile to return to the West Area to go to the bathroom. When Mary Jackson decided to become an engineer to get away from the drudge work of being a human computer, she found out that no college in Virginia would accept a Black person. Undaunted, she took a night class in a high school after winning a legal case to gain such a right.

In some ways, the film will remind you of “The Imitation Game”, which was also about a crash program run by mathematicians and engineers. But unlike “The Imitation Game”, “Hidden Figures” is much more of a human drama since there is a daily battle by the women to be recognized as equals to whites and to men. In the most stirring scene in the film, Katherine Johnson explains to her boss (played capably by Kevin Costner) that she disappears a couple of times a day from her desk in order to go to the bathroom in a segregated area. Appalled by the waste of time and the disrespect to a fellow worker, he goes around NASA and tears down all the signs indicating facilities for the “colored”.

As another coincidence, the film climaxes with the successful orbital flight of John Glenn (Glen Powell) in 1962. Glenn died two days ago at the age of 95. When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate his orbit around Earth, Johnson was called upon to verify the numbers because Glenn refused to fly unless Katherine verified them first.

When Ramanujan arrives at Trinity College, he is met by racism from every quarter. Even his champion G.H. Hardy mixes well-intended paternalism with jibes about sending him back to India if he doesn’t make the grade.

In many ways, Hardy is a more interesting character than Ramanujan because he is constantly being forced to reckon with the disjunction between his prejudices and the reality of the young man in front of him who he finally acknowledges as the Mozart of mathematics—a man who could penetrate to the heart of a math puzzle and solve it as easily as Mozart could write a sonata.

In one scene, Ramanujan is sitting in a lecture that Hardy has pressured him to attend in order to compensate for ostensible deficiencies in his autodidactic training. When a professor asks him why he is not taking notes, he replies that it is not necessary since he understands the material on the blackboard completely. Not believing him, the professor goads him into explaining what the formulas on the blackboard are about. Nonplussed, Ramanujan arises from his seat, goes to the blackboard and provides a sophisticated solution to the problems being posed by the professor. This does not result in congratulations but instead being thrown out of class for his perceived arrogance. Apparently he doesn’t know his place.

Unlike nearly every film I have seen about scientific matters or chess, this is one that makes very clear what made Ramanujan such a genius. He was the first to crack the “partition” problem that the film elucidates.

Take the number four. There are four ways to calculate the number of paths to that number using simple mathematics:

  1. 1+1+1+1
  2. 2+2
  3. 2+1+1
  4. 3+1
  5. 4+0

But what if the number was 3,789,422 instead? Was there any way to use a formula to arrive at the number of ‘partitions’ and bypass manual calculations? This is a problem that has vexed mathematicians forever until Ramanujan solved it. I have no idea what the practical application of such a formula would be but Ramanujan, unlike most men at Trinity College including Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam) who were atheists, was deeply religious and once told Hardy that god gave him the insights to solve such problems. For him, solving math problems and praying complemented each other.

The Wikipedia entry on Ramanujan, who died of TB at the age of 32, is most informative:

During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. His original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, have inspired a vast amount of further research. The Ramanujan Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan.

Deeply religious, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity: “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.”

After seeing both of these films, I could not help but be reminded of one of the main reasons I became a socialist in 1967. When it is such a battle for the women of “Hidden Figures” or Ramanujan to rise to the top, think of all those who were not fortunate to be given a chance. What a waste of humanity when class divisions require a mass of workers to be treated little better than a horse or any other beast of burden. I put it this way in my review of a documentary about Ousmane Sembene, the brilliant Senegalese film director who was thrown out of grade school for assaulting an abusive teacher:

I became a socialist in the 1960s largely on the belief that capitalism held back civilization by preventing a large majority of the world’s population from reaching its maximum potential. If the children of Asia, Africa and Latin America could enjoy the same benefits of those in rich countries, especially a top-notch education and the leisure time to develop innate talents, that could enhance the possibility of a great artist like Picasso or the scientist who could find a cure for cancer emerging out of formerly neglected regions.

Saul Bellow once asked tauntingly “who was the Zulu Tolstoy” in an obvious dismissal of African potential. Considering the career of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, who is the subject of the great documentary “Sembène” that opens on November 6th at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, you would conclude that the potential is enormous, held back only by what Andre Gunder Frank once called the development of underdevelopment.

May 31, 2016

The Lanthanide Series

Filed under: Film,science — louisproyect @ 3:37 pm

In a 1956 lecture titled “The Two Cultures”, C.P. Snow lamented the failure of scientists and those involved with the humanities to understand each other’s world: “Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated; but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

If he had had the occasion to a see a film like “The Lanthanide Series” that opens tomorrow at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, he would have not only made an exception for the director Erin Espelie but urged everybody he’d ever met to see the film as an example of how the two cultures could be bridged.

The title of the film derives from the fifteen metallic chemical elements in Mendeleev’s Periodic Table that begin with atomic number 57 and ends with 71. The first in the series is lanthanum, which is Latin for “to lie hidden”. These elements are also known as the rare earths but as Espelie points out, they are not rare at all. They can be found in abundance but the process to extract them from the surrounding soil and non-valuable compounds is complex and expensive.

For the rare earths that come under Espelie’s scrutiny, each of the Latin names becomes a way of meditating on other possible meanings that transcend the laboratory or factory framework. What “lies hidden” is not only an element that can be used in making glass or electron cathodes but the memories of past love affairs or childhood traumas that are evoked through Espelie’s voice-over narration from a variety of sources, including Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf. Throughout the film, we hear musical accompaniment to her meditations both on science and being human (a term more appropriate than “the humanities”) from Jim Morrison, Meredith Monk and John Cage. All of it is completely spell-binding and amounts to a documentary “art film” that pushes the cinematic envelope in a way that I have not seen in years.

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker in residence at the University of Colorado who is also the chief editor at Natural History magazine. As probably the most obvious example of her ability to straddle the two cultures, she has a degree in molecular and cell biology from Cornell University and an MFA in experimental and documentary arts from Duke University.

Throughout the film, there are astonishing examples of her erudition in both disciplines but her ability to synthesize them in a way that leads to a higher understanding. She alludes to Primo Levi, the Jewish chemist who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and who wrote “The Periodic Table”, a collection of 21 tales drawn from his life story, each titled by a different element. In “Cerium”, an element in the Lanthanide Series, he describes how he found some in an Auschwitz laboratory where he was being forced to work. He whittled them down to make lighter-flints that were bartered for food sufficient enough to keep him alive until the allies liberated him in a few days. It is obvious that Primo Levi was another exception to C.P. Snow’s rule and very likely an inspiration for Espelie’s film.

While most of the film is focused on the individual and his or her relationship to the commodities based on rare earth elements ranging from microphones to glass, there is an awareness of their role in a global economy ever-increasingly threatened by war and environmental despoliation. In her review of Europium, she recounts how a truck driver leaving the Mountain Pass Mines in California (the largest producer of the element in the world) pulled up alongside her parked car on the side of the road to see what she was up to—more out of curiosity than anything else. When she told him that the steady procession of enormous trucks away from the mines just like his couldn’t possibly be filled with a relatively scarce output, he was candid enough to admit that they were not loaded with Europium but contaminated radioactive water—the result of an industrial accident of the sort that typifies mining today. Where were the trucks going with the carcinogens? You guessed it. They were being dumped in the Pacific Ocean.

Europium, which is used in cathode ray tubes, is now being mined mostly in China, where lax (or non-existent) environmental regulations have led to ground water contamination that caused a cancer epidemic. It also seems that Afghanistan is a major possible source of this and other rare earth elements. While much of the left harped on the country’s value as a link in Eurasian petroleum pipelines, it is just as likely that the USA was even more interested in the possibilities of extracting elements that are critical in all sorts of high technology from computers to cameras whatever the cost to the Afghan people.

“The Lanthanide Series” is not to be missed.

April 9, 2016

Isaac Newton and “junk science”

Filed under: science — louisproyect @ 2:18 pm

Today’s Washington Post has an article with the rather lurid title “Isaac Newton spent a lot of time on junk ‘science,’ and this manuscript proves it”. It turns out that he was “super into alchemy” as reporter Elahe Izadi puts it:

Sir Isaac Newton — the 17th-century scientist, mathematician and father of physics? Yeah, you know him.

But you may not know Newton was super into alchemy, a medieval “science” that preceded chemistry. Practitioners believed it was possible to transform one metal into another. The ultimate goal was figuring out how to transform lead into gold, and the elusive “Philosophers’ Stone” was a substance theorized to do just that.

A newly discovered manuscript, written in Newton’s hand, underscores his fascination with what’s now considered nothing more than mystical pseudoscience. The document, held in a private collection for decades and bought earlier this year by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, describes how to make an essential ingredient of the Philosophers’ Stone.

This document is one of many handwritten by the English physicist best known for establishing the law of universal gravitation.

“Newton was intensely interested in alchemy almost his whole life,” said James Voelkel, curator of rare books at the foundation’s Othmer Library of Chemical History. “These alchemical manuscripts consist of about a million words he wrote in his own hands.”

Alchemy, also called “chymistry” in England back in the 17th century, preoccupied Newton for decades. Following his death, many of his manuscripts were held by his family until they were auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1936. Dozens of private collectors bought his alchemical manuscripts, which had been labeled “not fit to be printed” when Newton died in 1727. Most of these papers have since been donated to Cambridge, except for a handful like the one acquired by the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

I got a chuckle out of this since it hewed to the standard narrative about alchemy being “junk science”. Just over 10 years ago I reviewed Cliff Conner’s “People’s History of Science” for Swans (http://www.swans.com/library/art12/lproy34.html) that puts alchemy into proper perspective. It is worth reposting here:

Cliff Conner’s A People’s History of Science
by Louis Proyect
Book Review

Conner, Cliff: A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and ‘Low Mechanicks’, Nation Books, New York, 2006, ISBN 1-56025-748-2, 554 pages

(Swans – February 27, 2006)   Cliff Conner’s A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and ‘Low Mechanicks’ does for science what Howard Zinn did for American history. It is an altogether winning attempt to tell the story of the ordinary working person or peasant’s contribution to our knowledge of the natural world. Just as scholars like Zinn remind us that a slave, Crispus Attucks, was the first casualty of the American Revolution, so does Conner show that humble people were on the front lines of the scientific revolution.

Over the course of this 500 page encyclopedic but lively effort, we learn about unsung heroes and heroines, like Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, a seventeenth century Dutch linen draper who began using magnifying lenses to examine fabrics but went on to pioneer the use of microscopy in the scientific laboratory. He was looked down upon by the scientific establishment as “neither a philosopher, a medical man, nor a gentleman… He had been to no university, knew no Latin, French, or English, and little relevant natural history or philosophy.”

In addition to telling their stories, Conner challenges conventional thinking about how science is done. At an early age, we are indoctrinated into thinking that science starts with pure ideas and then descends into the practical world. In reality, many of the greatest breakthroughs in our knowledge of the world were a result of the practical need to solve a pressing problem, some of which were related to mundane matters of trade and bookkeeping.

Perhaps no other example in Conner’s book dramatizes this as perfectly as the rise of numeric symbols, which came out of the “routine economic activities of farmers, artisans and traders.” Specifically, Sumerians devised symbols to keep track of grain. Rather than repeating the symbol for each grain multiple times, they devised a shortcut where the grain symbol would be drawn once, and prefixed with a numeric symbol. This technique was developed in lowly counting rooms rather than in the court hierarchy.

The next big breakthrough, positional numeration, also had common traders as midwives. This technique makes a digit’s value dependent on its relative position in a number. For example, “9” in the number 2,945 means nine hundred but it indicates “90” in 2,495. Imagine how difficult it would be to do simple calculations without such a system. Try adding the Roman numerals MMCMXLV to MMCDXCV without cheating (converting to positional numbers) and you will see how difficult it is. This is not to speak of the daunting task of multiplying them!

The introduction of the place-value system (together with the symbol of zero to hold “empty” columns) is particularly relevant to Conner’s mission in creating a people’s history of science. To begin with, it democratized arithmetic by making it accessible to all levels of society. Secondly, it did not originate with elite mathematicians but with anonymous clerks — perhaps ordinary accounting clerks — in India between the third and fifth centuries AD. Finally, this revolutionary innovation relied not on mathematics journals or other scholarly venues, but was transmitted by merchants pursuing their trade on routes between India and the rest of the world.

It should be noted that in addition to telling the story of how ordinary people contributed to science, Conner’s book is also a valuable contribution to correcting Eurocentric bias. Eurocentric historiography tends to identify civilization as a unique product of Western Europe that diffused around the world, particularly through the colonization of supposedly backward societies like India. Since science is considered one of the major achievements of Western Civilization, it is most helpful to discover that many of its vaunted contributions originated elsewhere. As such, Conner’s history belongs on the bookshelf next to James Blaut’s Colonizer’s Model of the World, Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, and a number of works by Jack Weatherford, the anthropologist who has written about the contributions of Native Americans and, more recently, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. In such works, our understanding of who makes history is radically challenged — for the better.

There is another dimension to the story of positional numeration that keeps getting repeated throughout Conner’s book, namely the resistance of elites to such breakthroughs despite their reputation for welcoming new knowledge and ways of understanding the natural world. There was a struggle to suppress the “Algorists” who advocated positional numbering — in Europe and in some places Arabic numbers were banned from official documents.

The reputation that elite scientists have for being impartial and above superstition is often belied by their conduct during times of great stress, especially as the old order is being challenged by the lower classes. In such times, they tend often to rally around the status quo, even if that means throwing standards of objectivity out the window. One of the more interesting examples is the great European witch-hunting craze of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Despite popular views of scientists resisting beliefs in the supernatural, a wholly new “science” of demonology grew up under the auspices of the same elites who were promoting the scientific revolution. King James VI of Scotland was a leading theorist of demonological science but he was also Francis Bacon’s royal patron. According to Conner, some of the most prominent spokesmen of the Royal Academy, an official scientific society, defended witch-hunting, among them the court scientist Robert Boyle.

What explains this anomaly? As it turns out, elite doctors were in a bitter rivalry with female folk healers at this time. As Francis Bacon put it, “In all times, witches and old women and impostors have had a competition with physicians.” There was a need to stamp out “evil witches” but good witches as well. These included midwives and any other women who were prevented by law from entering medical school in those days.

The aforementioned Robert Boyle, who is considered an exemplar of Baconian science, is a prime example of how “heroes” of the scientific revolution are celebrated at the expense of the commoners who made their work possible.

Robert Boyle was an aristocrat, who inherited a fortune from his landlord father Sir Richard Boyle. The father relied on his aristocratic position to defraud Irish landowners. Boyle was honest about how he gained scientific knowledge: “I freely confess that I learned more of the kinds, distinctions, properties, and consequently of the nature of stones, by conversing with two or three masons, and stone-cutters, than I did from Pliny, or Aristotle and his commentators.”

With his vast fortune, Boyle was able to set up workshops and staffed them with all sorts of craftsmen, from machinists and glassblowers to lens grinders and alchemists (yes, alchemists!). Although Boyle took credit for what happened in his laboratories, recent scholarship concludes that very little of the work was done by Boyle himself. One of the most important inventions was an air pump that was almost certainly constructed by his assistants, despite bearing his name (machine Boyleana).

The presence of an alchemist in Boyle’s laboratory might raise eyebrows for a modern reader who is accustomed to thinking of this in terms of astrology, witchcraft and the other “black arts.” It is to Conner’s credit that he not only puts alchemy into its proper context, but has some positive words to say. Although alchemy is understood today mostly as a means of turning base metals into gold, it originally meant working with metals in general. The roots of both chemistry and alchemy in early metal crafts are evident from historians of science. Arab alchemists discovered sal ammoniac and prepared caustic alkalis. (The word alkali is a variant of al-qili, the Arabic term for sodium carbonate.)

In the spirit of giving credit to those who came before us, Conner makes sure to acknowledge the influence of a number of radical scientists and historians of science who blazed the trail for his study. Some of these men and women were either in or around the Communist Party in the 1930s, when “science for the people” was the watchword of the movement.

One of the most remarkable of these figures was a Soviet physicist named Boris Hessen, who was responsible for challenging the “Great Men of Science” approach in the same manner that Marxist historians of his time would highlight the efforts of working people and peasants in changing society throughout history. One of the major figures that Hessen reevaluated was Isaac Newton, the author of Principia, or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, a work that would seem to embody the idea-descending-from-above paradigm.

Hessen argued that the preconditions of Newton’s theory were not “in the empyrean of abstract thought” (Conner quoting Hessen), but in his social environment, which was shaped by “the disintegration of the feudal economy, the development of merchant capital, of international maritime and of heavy (mining) industry.” Newton was challenged to come up with practical solutions to the pressing commercial problems of the day, including the need to measure longitude at sea. Indeed, the third section of Principia is devoted to the problems of the planet’s movements, gravity and other forces that could help to solve the problem of maritime navigation. As it turned out, it was not Newton’s theory that came to the rescue, but a timepiece produced by an ordinary watchmaker.

It is important to stress that Conner does not discount the obvious importance of a Newton or an Einstein, but simply wants to restore some balance in understanding how knowledge of the natural world has developed. It is a product both of the intellect and of experimentation by practical people. It is also obvious that modern science has become much more shaped by mathematics and abstract theory than was the case in earlier times.

Science has become much more a specialist’s discipline as capitalism has consolidated its rule. When the search for profit becomes the driving force of society, it is only natural that the academy is shaped to satisfy that requirement. Advanced degrees and professional societies become the norm, as does the tendency to give ethics the short shrift. Scientists become all too happy to produce scientific studies showing that tobacco will not cause cancer or that atomic energy is the safest source of electricity.

Conner covers these questions in depth in the final chapter, titled The Scientific-Industrial Complex. In July of 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote that science will usher in a kind of New Millennium in which jobs will be plentiful, a higher standard of living universal and disease conquered. But a month later Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be leveled to the ground. The Cold War would soon be initiated and a Defense Industry would become joined by an umbilical cord to research institutes like MIT, Stanford, and Cornell.

As a long-time socialist, Conner remains undaunted. If capitalism is threatening the world with global warming, toxic pollution of the air, ground and water, and weapons of mass destruction — all facilitated by scientific “advances” — then it will generate oppositional forces as it always has. In Marx’s words, capitalism creates its own gravediggers.

The movement has many constituents. At least one of them is rooted in science itself, namely environmentalism. Using the tools of science (biology, soil chemistry, etc.), people such as Rachel Carsons and Barry Commoner have explained how the forces of production are threatening the survival of humanity and the natural world alike.

Just as was the case during the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, “outsiders” were treated with hostility by the elites, most especially women. In some ways, the antagonism toward Rachel Carsons evokes the witch-hunting of an earlier epoch:

Because “in postwar America, science was god, and science was male,” it was inevitable that the author’s gender would be a conspicuous element of the campaign against Silent Spring. The chemical industry’s flacks portrayed Carson as a hysterical woman whose alarming view of the future could be ignored or, if necessary, suppressed. She was a “bird and bunny lover,” a woman who kept cats and was therefore clearly suspect. She was a romantic “spinster” who was simply overwrought about genetics. In short, Carson was a woman out of control. She had overstepped the bounds of her gender and her science.

Scientists on the payroll of the polluting corporations believed they could dismiss her arguments on the grounds that she was “an outsider who had never been part of the scientific establishment. … Her career path was nontraditional; she had no academic affiliation, no institutional voice.” Most damning in their eyes was that “she deliberately wrote for the public rather than for a narrow scientific audience.” But in spite of the scientific elite’s attempts to marginalize her, this “people’s author” ignited a momentous social movement in defiance of Big Science. “We live in a scientific age,” she declared, “yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself.”

Carson put forward “her own, alternative scientific method: people’s observations and interpretations were as important as those of scientists, and community ethics served as the standard for making decisions about environmental risks.” As for her influence on the practice of science itself, by redirecting interest toward ecology and away from traditional mechanistic and reductionist approaches, Silent Spring had a major impact on the way biological knowledge would henceforth be pursued.

The People’s History of Science is a singular achievement. Not only does it inform the reader about the role of the common man and woman in scientific innovation over the ages, it is also an important guide to further research in the area. With a 25-page bibliography, it invites us to become fellow researchers in an area of vital interest to the left. With the daily challenges to a proper scientific understanding of the world — ranging from nonsense about Intelligent Design to global warming denial — it is incumbent upon us to develop and strengthen our knowledge of the world in the spirit of the words in Bukharin’s introduction to Philosophical Arabesques (reviewed on swans.com recently):

Today’s working-class hero is totally unlike the young ignoramus in Fonvizin, who asked, “Why do I need to know geography, when carriage drivers exist?” [A reference to an 18th century play.] It is the workers’ enemies who are playing the role of ignoramus. It is they who are increasingly turning their backs on the intellect, which refuses to serve their ends. It is they who snatch up stone axes, the swastika, the horoscope. It is they who are starting to read haltingly from the book of history, sounding it out syllable by syllable. It is they who pray to stone goddesses and idols. It is they who have turned their backs on the future, and like Heine’s dog, to which they have fitted a historical muzzle, they now bark with their backsides, while history in turn shows them only its a posteriori. Fine battles are now breaking out amid the grandiose festivities, and conflict envelops all areas.

 

March 21, 2016

How did the universe begin? How will it end?

Filed under: cosmology,science — louisproyect @ 10:09 pm

The last entry in the latest Harper’s Magazine Index, a compendium of interesting factoids featured each month, reminded me that I wanted to say a few words about cosmology:

Percentage of Americans who feel a deep sense of wonder about the universe at least once a week: 46

I am one of those Americans who had such feelings, often twice a day. It has always been with me to some extent but much more so after seeing the documentary on the Hadron Collider titled “Particle Fever” that I reviewed just two years ago. The film can be seen on Amazon streaming, as a DVD from Netflix or for $2.99 on Youtube:

It is entirely possible that my review didn’t exactly represent the purpose of the Hadron Collider but this was about the best I could come up with:

A hadron is a composite of subatomic particles (quarks) that have mostly been identified, except for the one that is at the hub: the boson. It is commonly referred to as the Higgs boson, after the British physicist who theorized its existence back in 1964. Don’t ask me to try to explain this (as if I could) but the boson is viewed as the critical sine qua non for the creation of the universe. As the film barrels along at an exciting pace, we learn that if the experiment fails to prove its existence, some physicists will conclude that reality consists of multiple universes each with its own set of discrete laws of physics. While that sounds like a good plot for a Star Trek episode, some of the physicists interviewed in the film—including uber-physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, who is a multi-universe adherent, fear that it will make the task of a unified theory of matter impossible.

Multiple universes each with its own set of discrete laws of physics? That’s pretty difficult to imagine but for someone like myself just about all these theories about the origins of the universe, its certain termination, and fundamental laws of astrophysics such as gravity, etc. are virtually impossible to imagine, let alone understand.

Does any of this have anything to do with Marxism? Says Louis Proyect to Louis Proyect: “I’m glad you asked that question.”

Frederick Engels took a stab at the question of gravity in “Dialectics of Nature” and seemed about as in over his head as me in a fragmentary chapter on “Mechanics and Astronomy”:

Newtonian gravitation. The best that can be said of it is that it does not explain but pictures the present state of planetary motion. The motion is given. Ditto the force of attraction of the sun. With these data, how is the motion to be explained? By the parallelogram of forces, by a tangential force which now becomes a necessary postulate that we must accept. That is to say, assuming the eternal character of the existing state, we need a first impulse, God. But neither is the existing planetary state eternal nor is the motion originally compound, but simple rotation, and the parallelogram of forces applied here is wrong, because it did not merely make evident the unknown magnitude, the x, that had still to be found, that is to say in so far as Newton claimed not merely to put the question but to solve it.

To the displeasure of the scientists involved with Higgs boson research, it has been popularized as the “God Particle” in a 1993 book titled “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” by Leon Lederman, a physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in 1998 with two other men researching neutrinos. Like everything else falling within the rubric of astrophysics, trying to get a handle on neutrinos is nearly impossible for the layman especially when they are described simultaneously as having the dimensions of thousands of galaxies and being massless. What the fuck?

Just by coincidence (or maybe there’s more than just a coincidence), a lot of the breakthroughs on understanding the origins of the universe begin to take place just around the time of the Russian Revolution and its stormy aftermath and largely through the pioneering efforts of Albert Einstein who wrote an essay for the first issue of Monthly Review in 1949 titled “Why Socialism”. In case you’ve never read it, it is good reminder of what the word “socialism” once meant as opposed to the vaporous formulations of Bernie Sanders:

The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

Maybe the people who set up the Marxism Internet Archives understood that Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory was worth including even though few people would be able to understand much of it. This much I am fairly sure about, his work was about understanding time, space, gravity—the building blocks of the universe so to speak—but not so much about how it began.

That is much more the bailiwick of men and women who developed the “big bang” explanation for the origins of the universe. Among the earliest proponents was a Catholic priest named George Lemaître who concluded that the universe was expanding, a theory that was soon supported by Edwin Hubble. It was of some interest that a priest was a pioneer of the “big bang” theory, especially since it was compatible with Catholic doctrine. For Pope Pius XII it validated Catholicism even though Lemaître resented making such a connection and eventually persuaded the Pope to drop the matter.

As the most famous physicist since Einstein, Stephen Hawking—like him—is known by everybody but understood by few. He is notable for synthesizing Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, the field that Nils Bohr developed in the 1920s. Einstein highly respected Bohr but could not embrace a theory that he viewed as incomplete. It probably would not be a stretch to say that Hawking was able to synthesize Einstein and Bohr.

Quantum theory, as I understand it, is mostly focused on subatomic particles but at least one physicist applied to astrophysics. Born in 1930, Hugh Everett split his time between weapons research for the Pentagon and explaining how It All Began. He developed something called the Universal Wavefunction that supported the idea that quantum mechanics could make multiple universes possible, a notion that Nils Bohr found reprehensible when Everett presented it to him in a 1959 visit to Copenhagen. (I should mention that Hawking is another supporter of this idea.)

Discouraged by the reaction that Bohr and others had to his work, Everett abandoned physics and focused on arms research, even hoping to cash in on the Vietnam War. In 1973 he made another career transition into software development and launched a company called DBS where he developed a passion for programming—of all things. The man died of a heart attack in 1982, the result of a life style of smoking, boozing and overeating that made him even more vulnerable to an early death than Christopher Hitchens. His belief in quantum immortality, a thought experiment about as obscure as anything in this field, did not do much good in the end, nor did it do much for his daughter who killed herself in 1996, asking in a suicide note that her ashes be put in a garbage can just like her father had requested in a will. (As an atheist, he thought that’s where one’s remains belonged.)

Everett’s son Mark discovered his dead body. As leader of the rock band Eels, Mark Everett writes songs about death, mental illness and loneliness. After his cousin died while working as a stewardess on the jet that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, he wondered if it might have struck his father’s old office there.

I recommend the BBC documentary on Mark Everett titled “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” in which he performs and interviews his father’s fellow scientists about which a Scientific American blogger wrote:

Visitors to the film’s Web site can read two previously unpublished documents that Everett’s son, EELS singer-guitarist Mark, 45, found among the 25 boxes of his father’s belongings. One of the documents is from an early draft of Everett’s doctoral dissertation, in which he uses the metaphor of an amoeba splitting to explain his many worlds theory. In the other, he responds to cosmologist Bryce DeWitt, who told Everett that his theory was a “beautiful mathematical formula, but I do not feel myself split,” according to Byrne.

Getting back to Hawking, it is worth noting that his political views hew close to Einstein’s even if not as well grounded in historical materialism. In a Reddit session, he gave this reply to a question about technological unemployment:

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Also, like Einstein, Hawking is a critic of Israel—so much so that he honored the BDS movement by pulling out of a conference there in 2013.

As indicated above, I am fascinated by the questions of how the universe began and how it will end even though most of the articles I crosspost to Marxmail sail over my head. I am not sure how much Alan Woods understands about astrophysics but he and his followers are certainly not shy about offering their opinions.

On the In Defense of Marxism website, you can find a three part article by Adam Booth on “The Crisis in Cosmology”. In part one Booth wants to make it clear that Marxists have no truck with any theory that the Pope could embrace, even mistakenly. The “big bang” and some related theories are just too close for comfort as a kind of creation myth:

All of these theories – whether it is the standard SMBBC model [Standard Model of Big Bang Cosmology], the steady-state Universe, or the cyclic Universe – suffer from a similar problem, in that they envisage a closed, finite Universe, a bounded space that exists with nothing outside of it. But how can there be a boundary to the Universe? What is beyond this boundary? Nothing? To talk of an “edge of the Universe” is as nonsensical as to talk of the beginning of time.

Yeah, how can there be a boundary to the Universe? Unless you run into a barrier erected by Thor or something.

Booth identifies the problem as one of a scientist’s allergy to the concept of Infinity:

The Universe can only be understood as a dialectical unity of opposites: an infinity of finite matter that is itself infinitely divisible and transformable. That is to say, there is an infinite amount of matter – matter that is itself finite in size and endlessly changing. All attempts to banish this infinity from cosmology have only led to even greater riddles and confusion, to talk of “singularities” where all the laws of physics break down. But a singularity is nothing but a theoretically infinitesimally small point, which, in turn is simply an inverted infinity. Far from removing infinity from the Universe, therefore, the cosmologists have merely re-introduced it by the back door.

It is hard to argue with this—even if it is just as hard to argue with those who hold the opposite view because when it comes to cosmology, there is very little way to ultimately “prove” anything. You can only operate on the basis of evidence, for which the “big bang” seems to be accumulated aplenty as time goes by.

The other two articles in Booth’s series mostly amount to arguing against the wisdom of synthesizing quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Plus some quotes from Lenin’s polemic against Empirio-Criticism, a work that is mostly of interest to the archivists among us.

His final article claims that many of the scientists involved in cosmology are contributing as much to the social good as cosmetologists. Like Keynesians (!), they are spinning their wheels on the public’s expense:

In this view, the field of modern cosmology has become, at best, a fairly harmless form of Keynesianism – a way of employing and funding a few hundred (or thousand) scientists who would otherwise be out of work. At worst, current cosmological research is a colossal waste of scientific resources which, far from being harmless, is actually damaging the wider credibility of science by dressing up nonsense as serious and important theoretical research.

You get the same sense of ennui from Christy Rodgers who wrote a CounterPunch article titled “Is the World Living or Dead?” on March 4, 2016 that was prompted by the front-page news about scientists finding evidence of gravity waves, a phenomenon that would confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Without quoting Lenin, Rodgers is even more compelling than Booth on the crisis that has befallen physics:

Instead of illuminating ever more of the cosmos, theoretical physics now seems committed to its disappearance in a cloud of unknowing: it proposes that the universe is almost entirely made up of matter we cannot observe and do not understand, and is being torn apart by anti-gravitational energy in quantities unpredicted by any theory, whose source is also unknown. And (according to string theory) the universe is dependent for a unification of its major forces on the existence of infinitesimal extra dimensions that can never be observed or completely described because they are infinitely variable, and generate an infinity of hypothetical universes that can never have any meaningful relation to ours.

I suspect that the question of the origins of the universe will remain insoluble until a deus ex machina appears to tell us mortals How It All Began, maybe Thor riding to earth on a white stallion with a flow chart in hand.

What is more easy to wrap your head around is the idea of it all coming to an end. Scientists generally believe, whatever their particular commitment to quantum mechanics, string theory, the big bang, etc, that the universe came into existence 14 billion years ago or so and that our planet was born about 3.5 billions years ago.

In their 2003 book “The Life and Death of Planet Earth”, paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee see things winding down starting around a billion years from now as the sun begins its inexorable transformation into a “red giant”, a radiating death star that will dry up the oceans and kill everything on earth. Pretty fucking depressing, no?

As it happens, Ward and Brownlee are also the authors of the 2000 “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe”, which makes the case that we are probably the only advanced species in the entire universe, which itself will come to an end around a hundred trillion years from now as the fuel, which makes the stars radiate, runs out. Sort of a “peak hydrogen” hypothesis.

I get sad meditating on the inevitable disappearance of life on earth and the universe itself. But I am even sadder thinking about the likelihood of a “quantum suicide” taking place long before that. Gosh, I’d be happy if homo sapiens can make it to a million years from now, just one/one thousandth of the time before the oceans dry up in the approaching “red giant” scenario.

Then again, I despair of us making it to a thousand years from now, given the indifference that our ruling classes have toward civilization, human life and everything else we hold dear. With the intensity of global rivalries advancing on a daily basis and with the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons, it seems like the likelihood of making it to 2116 is guarded at best.

In 1950, Albert Einstein, who had praised socialism the year before in Monthly Review, warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons in a pithy fashion: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” As was the case 67 years ago, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. As long as we have a billion years or so in front of us, let’s make the best of it.

August 22, 2014

Gunning for Vandana Shiva

Filed under: Ecology,farming,science — louisproyect @ 1:20 pm
The New Yorker, GMOs and Chemical Farming

Gunning for Vandana Shiva

by LOUIS PROYECT

Perhaps nothing symbolizes the decline of the New Yorker magazine more than the hatchet job on Vandana Shiva that appears in the latest issue. Written by Michael Specter, the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress”, the article is a meretricious defense of genetically modified organisms (GMO) relying on one dodgy source after another. This is the same magazine whose reputation was at its apex when Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking articles on DDT appeared in 1962. If DDT was once a symbol of the destructive power of chemicals on the environment, GMO amounts to one of the biggest threats to food production today. It threatens to enrich powerful multinational corporations while turning farmers into indentured servants through the use of patented seeds. Furthermore, it threatens to unleash potentially calamitous results in farmlands through unintended mutations.

Specter represents himself as a defender of science against irrational thinking. Since many activists regard Vandana Shiva as grounded in science, it is essential that he discredit her. For example, he mentions a book jacket that refers to her as “one of India’s leading physicists”. But when he asked her if she ever worked as a physicist, she invited him to “search for the answer on Google”. He asserts that he found nothing and furthermore that no such position was listed in her biography. Not that I would ever take an inflated publicity blurb that seriously to begin with (having read one too many of those for Slavoj Žižek), I wondered what being a physicist would have to do with GMO in the first place. Is a degree in particle physics necessary for understanding the transformation of vast portions of the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone because of fertilizer-enriched algae?

read full article

UPDATE

Wouldn’t you just know it? Bard College hired GMO hustler Michael Specter as a Visiting Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies.

I suppose that makes sense given that Stewart Resnick is on the board of trustees, the agribusiness billionaire who has diverted water from the commoners in Fiji and California to improve his bottom line and buy more politicians. When a college hires a big-time promoter of GMO to lecture on the environment, you just chalk that up to Leon Botstein’s Wizard of Oz con artistry.

 

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April 26, 2012

Guy Robinson Jan. 1928-Oct. 2011

Filed under: philosophy,science — louisproyect @ 5:23 pm

I just learned from Les Schaffer, the technical coordinator of Marxmail, that Guy Robinson died a few months ago. He learned this from Rosa Lichtenstein who received word in turn from Guy Robinson Jr. Rosa has made a number of Guy’s articles available on her website.  Rosa is a well-known and stubborn critic of dialectics as should be obvious from the name of her website and obviously found an affinity with Guy’s mixture of Marx and Wittgenstein:

In my opinion, Guy is one of the few Marxist Philosophers whose work is genuinely worth reading. Indeed, I’d go much further: I cannot praise his book, Philosophy and Mystification (Fordham University Press, 2003), too highly; it seems to me that this is how Marxist Philosophy should be done.

I only encountered Guy’s work in 2005, but I soon saw that he had anticipated several of my own ideas — except he manages to express in two paragraphs what it takes me several pages to say! Unlike the vast majority of work that claims to be Marxist, Guy’s work is a model of clarity. It is no accident, therefore, to see Guy writing in the Wittgensteinian tradition.

I had my own affinities with Guy. Like him, I was a graduate of Bard College. I was also a philosophy major, with 57 credits toward a PhD. Unlike Rosa, I never quite got Guy’s enthusiasm for Wittgenstein. When I was at the New School from 1965 to 1967, mostly trying to avoid being drafted, I got much more out of my seminar on Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” than the one on Wittgenstein’s various writings. The dialectic in Hegel’s philosophy never sounded “unscientific” to me and only prepared me in my postgraduate studies of Marxism in the SWP’s school of hard knocks.

Guy was one of the most genial people I ever got to meet in person as a result of my Internet scribblings. Back in 1998 I attended a talk by Guy at the Brecht Forum in NYC and spoke to him and his son afterwards. Both had been to Nicaragua and worked on a construction brigade. Since my natural inclination is to bond with anybody who was involved with the Sandinista revolution, I made a point of writing up Guy’s talk for Marxmail and PEN-L (this was before the days of blogging). I wrote in part:

Marxism and the Enlightenment

A couple of months ago I attended a talk at NYC’s Brecht Forum on “Philosophy and Marxism” which is relevant to this discussion. The speaker was Guy Robinson, who taught philosophy in British universities for 25 years. He retired in 1982 and moved to Nicaragua where he worked with construction brigades. He now lived in Dublin and his new book “Philosophy and Mystification” had just been published by Routledge.

Robinson’s main point was that modern philosophy evolved in order to meet the needs of the rising bourgeoisie. It aspires to be universal but conceals the very particular and historical needs of the class which was coming to power in the age of Descartes. One of the purposes of Marxism is to make this connection and expose the class bias of bourgeois philosophy.

One of the schools of thought that Marxism vies with in this project is post-structuralism or postmodernism. The pomos are also interested in showing that the claims of universality are specious. Robinson described the pomos in pithy terms, as “hunters of zeitgeists,” who try to capture historical trends as if they were animal specimens to pin on the wall like trophies. In the process of debunking “universality,” the pomos also trash history. This is where Marxists and pomos part company, as well as on the issue of class.

Apparently Guy really liked what I wrote since he not only made a point of looking me up on his occasional visits to New York but also called me out of the blue from Ireland every couple of months.

Guy was always very modest about his writings and even more so about whether he was a Marxist or not. All I can say is that he was a stimulating writer even if I had become skeptical over philosophy as a discipline. When I was first coming around the Trotskyist movement and heard Marx’s observation about “the point is to change it”, I resolved not only to drop out of graduate school but put all the philosophy stuff behind me. That being said, I always had time for Guy Robinson.

In addition to the articles on Rosa’s website, I recommend a visit to Guy’s Philosophical Nuggets, a blog he launched in 2007. You’ll get both aspects of his thought, the one shaped by Marx and the other by Wittgenstein. You’ll also find a fascinating log of his correspondence with Thomas Kuhn that is interesting both for its reflections on science as well as Guy’s considerable charm:

Dear Tom

How could I not respond immediately to such a gracious and enthusiastic reaction to my letter and paper!

Sorry you have had such a tough medical time and hope that’s pretty well behind you.

I’m not surprised that you don’t remember that lunch you gave me in Princeton, (graciously, again as we had only brushed glancingly by one another at that famous Bedford conference in 1960-whatever.) But I have it in my mind that at that lunch you told me that you had been to the same tiny school I went to, Solebury, but only for a year before transferring to Germantown Friends. (We used to play Germantown in Football and always got slaughtered – Well, we only had fifty boys in the whole school.) Am I dreaming all that?

Still keeping to the personal: Who am I? Not sure how to answer. Brief CV: after Solebury, I went to Bard at the time of Mary McCarthy (The Groves of Academe gives a distorted account of those times and my teacher.) It was a pretty interesting place, though. My introduction to philosophy was via Aristotle, and his conception of philosophy’s business, I am coming to see has kept me away from the disastrous ‘theorizing’ conception of philosophy that has held pretty much sway since Descartes. (I’m working on getting clear about that question of philosophy’s business in the process of trying to bring out in an introduction to what has always been there implicit in the scanty few pieces I have published and now want to collect. I certainly don’t think that my second paragraph gives a knock-down argument against Realism. -As you can imagine, I don’t believe in those – But it’s something to think about.

Guy’s articles on Rosa Lichstenstein’s website:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/making_materialism_historical.htm

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Robinson_Essay_Two_Introduction.htm

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Robinson_Essay_Three_The_Concept_Of_Nature.htm

They are all collected here (foot of the page):

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/other_material.htm

Rosa adds that she will be posting his unpublished book Philosophy and Demystification over the next few months.

June 21, 2011

Some mind-blowin’ shit

Filed under: Film,science — louisproyect @ 2:09 am

Handout/GETTY IMAGES – A large flare was detected erupting from the surface of the sun on June 7.

As the sun awakens, the power grid stands vulnerable

By , Monday, June 20, 3:33 PM

The sun is waking up.

And on June 7, it woke up Michael Hesse. At 5:49 a.m., the solar scientist received an alert on his smartphone. NASA spacecraft had seen a burst of X-rays spinning out from a sunspot. The burst was a solar flare — and a “notably large one” at that, Hesse said later.

The sun has been quiet for years, at the nadir of its activity cycle. But since February, our star has been spitting out flares and plasma like an angry dragon. It’s Hesse’s job to watch these eruptions.

If a big one were headed our way, Hesse needed to know, and fast, so he could alert the electric power industry to brace for a geomagnetic storm that could knock some of the North American power grid offline.

Hesse gathered his team at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where he is chief of the Space Weather Laboratory, and fed the latest data from four sun-staring satellites into powerful computers.

At 7:49 Hesse got his answer. An animated chart traced the predicted path of a huge arc of plasma — hot gas — hurtling through the inner solar system. But only the tail of the plume would lick Earth, arriving June 9 and driving a dazzling display of the northern lights from Alaska through Maine.

While a video of the eruption captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory showed an enormous plume spraying from the sun, this solar tantrum would not be the big one — it would not be the 1859 event all over again.

Sept. 1 of that year saw the largest solar flare on record, witnessed by British astronomer Richard Carrington. While tracing features of the sun’s surface, which Carrington had projected via telescope onto paper, he saw a sudden flash emerge from a dark spot. Although such sunspots had sparked curiosity for centuries — Galileo famously drew them, too, in the early 1600s — Carrington had no idea what the flash could mean.

Within hours, telegraph operators found out. Their long strands of wire acted as antennas for this huge wave of solar energy. As this tsunami sped by, transmitters heated up, and several burst into flames. Observers in Miami and Havana gaped skyward at eerie green and yellow displays, the northern lights pushed far south.

A knockout punch

Such a “Carrington event” will happen again someday, but our wired civilization will suffer losses far greater than a few telegraph shacks.

Communications satellites will be knocked offline. Financial transactions, timed and transmitted via those satellite, will fail, causing millions or billions in losses. The GPS system will go wonky. Astronauts on the space station will huddle in a shielded module, as they have done three times in the past decade due to “space weather,” the scientific term for all of the sun’s freaky activity. Flights between North America and Asia, over the North Pole, will have to be rerouted, as they were in April during a weak solar storm at a cost to the airlines of $100,000 a flight. And oil pipelines, particularly in Alaska and Canada, will suffer corrosion as they, like power lines, conduct electricity from the solar storm.

But the biggest impact will be on the modern marvel known as the power grid. And experts warn that the grid is not ready. In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences stated that an 1859-level storm could knock out power in parts of the northeastern and northwestern United States for months, even years. Report co-author John Kappenmann estimated that about 135 million Americans would be forced to revert to a pre-electric lifestyle or relocate. Water systems would fail. Food would spoil. Thousands could die. The financial cost: Up to $2 trillion, one-seventh the annual U.S. gross domestic product.

Utilities say they’re studying the issue, with an eye toward understanding how to protect the grid by powering down sections of it during an hours-long solar storm.

Their efforts are motivated, in part, by the sun’s increasingly frequent outbursts. Every 11 to 12 years, solar activity ramps up. After a quiet season, the sun is now spitting out flares again, with activity expected to peak in 2013 and 2014, said Dean Pesnell, a solar scientist at Goddard.

“The sun is not partisan, it doesn’t listen to diplomacy, and sanctions don’t work,” said Peter Huessy, president of GeoStrategic Analysis. Huessy wants Congress to enact rules that would force power companies to better protect the power grid. “The sun has its own clock. And we don’t know what that clock is, except for once every hundred years or so, it has a coronary.”

full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/science/as-the-sun-awakens-the-power-grid-stands-vulnerable/2011/06/09/AGwc8DdH_story.html

Final minute of “Knowing”, a sci-fi movie starring Nicholas Cage

May 31, 2010

The Snake Charmer

Filed under: science,swans — louisproyect @ 3:47 pm

The Snake Charmer: a Life and Death in the Pursuit of Knowledge, by Jamie James, Hyperion Books, 2008, ISBN-13: 978-1-4013-0213-9, 260 pages.

(Swans – May 31, 2010)   Last January, while idly channel-surfing on my television set, I stumbled across a show titled Venom in Vegas that featured snake expert Donald Schultz spending 10 days in a glass box with 100 venomous and constrictor snakes. Schultz is from South Africa, where he competes with fellow snake handler and countryman Austin Stevens for publicity.

In 1986 Stevens pulled off a similar stunt in the name of generating awareness about gorillas, an endangered species. He set a Guinness World record by spending 107 days and nights in a cage with 36 of the most dangerous African snakes. On the 96th day, he was bitten by a cobra, but refused to leave the cage after being treated with anti-venom.

Of course the most notorious of these snake handlers was the Australian Steve Irwin who died in 2006 after being stung in the heart by an aptly named stingray. Unlike Schultz and Stevens, Austin handled all sorts of poisonous creatures, including the ocean-dwelling stingray.

After finding my curiosity jogged by Schultz’s stunt (an excerpt is here), I decided to read a book about the late Joe Slowinski that came out in 2008. Titled The Snake Charmer: a Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge and written by Jamie James, it tells the rather sad story of a legitimate scientist — rather than a showman — who was bitten by a many-banded krait in September 2001 during an expedition in Burma, just before the WTC attacks. The many-banded krait’s venom is rated 16 times more powerful than a cobra’s. Slowinski died right around the time the buildings collapsed.

Although I am by no means fixated on poisonous snakes, I do find myself drawn to exceptional human beings, particularly those with tragic flaws. That described Joe Slowinski to a T. A July 13, 2008 review of James’s book accentuated the dark side:

No matter how hard James tries to make Slowinski sound roguishly charming, how often he mentions his “disarming, gap-toothed smile,” how earnestly he swears in the epilogue that he sorely feels the loss of someone he never met, I could not help reading between the lines: intentionally or not, he makes his subject sound like a Class A jerk.

It isn’t Slowinski’s redneck genius persona — meeting academy donors in a baggy T-shirt, smuggling reptiles without permits, kicking down his own door to impress a date when he forgets his keys. That was just snake shtick. Nor is it his earlier “starving graduate student my work is everything” ethos, even when he shouts at his not-well-off father for offering to buy him a table so they don’t have to eat while sitting on the stairs. Nor is it the poses James puts him in: the boy Hercules, age 5, brandishing a rat snake “as thick as his own little arm,” or the carnival man dazzling Burmese villagers just before his death, the sun “glinting penny-bright” on his goatee as he “free-handled the dangerous serpent they called ngan taw kyar (‘royal tiger snake’) with cool bravado.”

Rather, it’s his ruthlessness. His toying with snakes while drunk, terrifying friends. His treatment of his only long-term girlfriend, whom he dumps over the phone. His theft of the prize specimens of a Brazilian herpetologist; caught with her snakes dead in his freezer, he blames the language barrier, claiming he thought she’d granted permission. And the coup de grace is his final, fatal blunder. Relying on bribes and half-truths, he smuggles an expedition of 16 scientists and 130 porters into one of the most remote and malarial corners of the world without official permission or a doctor — just a first-aid kit so meager it wouldn’t have served a Boy Scout camp-out.

While all of reviewer Donald G. McNeil Jr.’s points are true, he leaves out the more admirable sides of Joe Slowinski, not the least of which is a dedication to the pursuit of knowledge. In an era of creationist obfuscation and backwardness, it is necessary to pay tribute to Slowinski as someone totally dedicated to evolutionary science.

full: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/lproy61.html

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