Blink

Here's Mateo's film about the eccentricities of the human eye. God I look old...

Angier's introduction to science

The crystal-clear prose of Steinhardt and Turok has been something of a holiday for me: my reviewing has landed me with some pretty grim popularisations lately. For instance, I'm just working on Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible. Which is like Angier, but with Spock ears.

Angier, if you haven't come across her Canon yet, is like this.


The New York Times science journalist Natalie Angier has written an introduction to science. All of it. At once.

No one would consider writing a complete account of the humanities - least of all one that excluded all cultural or historical context. What would be the point? The sciences cope with such distillation a little better because they assume the existence of a shared universe, held together by laws impervious to history.




Angier's journey makes sense. Moving in scalar fashion through this world in the manner of Charles and Ray Eames's 1977 animation Powers of Ten, we ascend from quantum physics to molecular chemistry, to the self-organising systems of biology and ecology, to the interplay of life and non-life that lends the geology of this planet (at least) its dynamism, to arrive, finally, at the big cosmological questions - and back in the lap of physics.

The progression is natural. Angier, quietly professional, doesn't make a fuss about it. To begin with, it seems as though she might avoid that beautiful, familiar pattern and assemble a different sort of canon. Her early chapters (they knock the socks off the later ones) are about what science is like, the mental postures you adopt in order to think scientifically. Not all these postures are pretty.

Angier acutely anatomises the "attack dog stance" that greets new findings. She explains the process of "scientific hazing" that is at once vitally necessary, a gift for Hollywood screenwriters (who are obsessed with outsiders), and a possible contributor to science's not insignificant suicide rate.

Then, just as her book is taking wing, she proceeds to a discussion of the different scientific disciplines - and something goes seriously wrong.

There is a chapter on physics; two on biology; one on geology; and so on. There is little cross-fertilisation. At the same time - and in spite of attempts to root the account in real conversations in real workplaces - all these physicists and biologists and geologists appear to be doing roughly the same job in the same way.

The problem is not that the sciences, reduced to their basics, lose their specificity. On the contrary, each science grew out of a fairly mercenary kernel of odd, often distinctly unscientific practices. That such cantankerous institutions ever managed talk to one another at all is eloquent evidence that a single, objective reality exists.

The problem is rather that Angier can never decide whether she is writing about the practice of science, or about the world as science pictures it. Time and again she dithers, and runs out of space.

To those in the know, Angier's massive, necessary omissions will appear either heinous or gutsy, according to taste. One thing Angier cannot afford to do, however, is waste paper. The chapter on evolutionary biology opens with an 11-page apologia, informative in its way but apparently addressed to the few creationists left. Why?

Evolutionary theory is not the lone voice of truth crying in the wilderness: it is a set of multiple interlocking truths, universally interrogated, acknowledged and applied in industry. The argument is won. Angier's rehash (she defends the fossil record - huzzah!) leaves no room for evolution itself: a rich subject with a fascinating history is reduced to a banner proclaiming that Darwin was right. No Galton. No Oxford School. No cladistics. No Simon Conway Morris.

To be fair, this is not a book for people who necessarily credit the reality of fossils. In fact it is specifically addressed to people who haven't heard of them. Angier's intended audience is not merely the scientifically ignorant, but - this is very different - the scientifically incurious. This is a laudable aim. But to attempt to engage them through a book - a medium that is by its very nature closed to the closed-minded - shows a lack of foresight.

Reading The Canon is like listening to a talented teacher chivvying a hostile fifth form. Angier's charm, her wordplay, her erudition, her delicious prose, her barmy wit, her not-so-off-the-cuff analogies, are all tailored to drag her class as far as the lunch bell without any of them stabbing pencils into their eyes. But there is no class. There is no captive audience.

In reality, what is happening is that something enormous is approaching fast along a dimension we cannot see

Endless Universe: Steinhardt and Turok
—some workpoints:

Setting aside its topical attractions, this is probably the best-written cosmological account I've encountered.

For unexampled clarity, read the description of polarisation on page 208. I wish to God I could have written like that in The Eye.

Paul Seinhardt

The authors inflict not a little serious damage on the Anthropic Principle. To an uninformed agnostic like myself, this is
aesthetically pleasing: the sight of physics running cap in hand to evolutionary biology for its metaphors has not been an edifying one. There are some very good AP-friendly accounts out there, of course. I think the last one I read was by Martin Rees (another able writer). Does AP still inspire a worthwhile literature these days?

Neil Turok

Most accounts that claim to capture the 'special excitements ' of this or that scientific discipline degenerate pretty quickly into special pleading. Steinhardt and Turok manage it well. Anyone know of any others?

Electric Beeches

I thought I'd crosspost this post, prompted by Caspar, from Heliophage, partly just to check that I could (and apparently I can, though I can't see how to edit the picture size), partly to show willing and partly because Edward Carpenter sounds like someone of whom we should know more. (Lord this interface is slow with my old mac...)

Over the holiday I read Richard Mabey's Beechcombings (Amazon UK), a fascinating and enjoyable book about which I may well have more to say, but which I currently wish simply to digest and to put into the context of some other current reading.

However, this passage from Edward Carpenter (mystical socialist and, wikilegedly, the man who introduced the sandal into Britain) that he quotes in a chapter called "Electric Beeches" struck such a chord of recognition with me that I thought I'd share it here, along with the passage in Eating the Sun it reminded me of:

It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early spring. Suddenly I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and upturned fingertips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged into the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky, and full of the most amazing activity.

-- Pagan and Christian Creeds, 1904

Now reverse the polarity:

Think of a beech tree in winter, its leaves lost, its architecture revealed in dark lines against cold grey cloud. Do what Robin Hill used to urge his children to do to cultivate the artist’s eye—take away the tree’s established “common sense” context by turning round, bending over and looking at it upside down through your legs. Its growth looks less like something pushed from the earth than it does something drawn from the sky. Its limbs, branches and twigs spread into the air like ink into blotting paper or cracks spreading through glass, embodying something between desire and transubstantiation.

The tree’s form tells the truth. The tree grows into the air because it grows out of the air. The bulk of the tree is not made from the soil beneath it—indeed, the soil is in large part made by the tree. Both soil and tree are made from carbon drawn from the sky above. Trees are built from sun and wind and rain. The land is just a place to stand.

-- Eating the Sun, 2007

"No longer a separable organism" strikes a strong chord with me, and "ramifying into space" always seems like a good idea. Most crucially, "Sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky", as Carpenter had it, is more or less what photosynthesis does, and as such what I set out to celebrate. But it does it by pumping celestial energies into the earth, not vice versa. As in electric circuits of a more mundane sort, the earth is the sink, not the source.

Beech tree picture from Treehugger, under a creative commons license. And while we're at it here are some more beeches from talented people on Flickr

Draughts, anyone?

Gilbert Chin's piece in this week's Science is amusing, though the experiment is less clever than it appears at first. Check out the stunning truism in the last line...

'Problems that appear fiendishly challenging at first glance can seem childishly simple if viewed from the perspective of another. The capacity to infer the mental states of others--theory of mind--is known to develop at approximately the same age in children raised in different cultures, but the ease with which adults access these mind-reading abilities has been suggested to vary across countries, from the collectivism of East Asia to the individualism of the United States.

'Wu and Keysar use a two-player game based on a 4-by-4 array of pigeonholes containing mundane objects, some of which are visible to both players and some only to the second. Directions (to move an object) that are completely unambiguous from the vantage point of the first player can, in fact, cause the second player to hesitate in choosing between two identical objects (only one of which is visible to the first player). They find, by tracking visual gaze and reaching movements, that Chinese reacted more quickly than Americans (non-Asians) and were almost never distracted by the second object that they could see but that their playing partner could not. These results favor the proposal that cultures with greater emphasis on interdependence induce a greater readiness to adopt or acknowledge the perspective of the other.'

This reminds me of something Suzie, Mateo's wife, mentioned the other day. Her German students reckon the Germans have no national stereotype. That this perfectly expresses their national stereotype went straight over their heads, much to the amusement of her Japanese students, for whom the Japanese national stereotype is an amusement, sport and obsession.

The Ratio Club

Anyone know anything about the Ratio Club?

It was a dining club that sprang from a conference on animal behaviour held by the Society of Experimental Biology in Cambridge in 1949. I first came across it researching primate visual behaviour, although the emphasis of the club's discussions tended much more towards cybernetics. Turing was a member.

The Wikipedia entry says Owen Holland (A machine ethologist! Eat your heart out, Kevin Warwick!) is doing a book about it, but there's no sign of it yet.

Incidentally, a couple of clicks away from Holland's webpage I found this 30Mb movie from Cornell's Human Motion Lab. A strangely moving demonstration that if you want to do something right (in this case, walking), evolution has probably done it first.