Quantum mechanics and the arrow of time

Before I get started I need to make an important point. Every now and then I hear or read about someone who puts my life into perspective. Recently, I read an article on Lisa Harvey-Smith, a 39 year old, educated in England who is ‘Group Leader’ of astronomy at Australia’s CSIRO. She appeared on an ABC programme called Stargazing Live (last year) with Brian Cox and Julia Zemiro. She won the 2016 Eureka Science Prize for ‘promoting science research in Australia’. She also runs ultra-marathons (up to 24hs) and is an activist for LGBTI people. The point I’m making is that she’s a real scientist, and by comparison, I’m a pretender.

And I make this point because many people who know more about this subject than me will tell you that much of what I have to say is wrong. So why should you even listen to me? Because I have a philosophical point of view on a subject with many philosophical points of view, some of which border on science fiction. For example: interacting parallel universes; and physical reality only becoming manifest when perceived by a conscious observer. I’ve written about both of these philosophical perspectives on other posts, but they indicate how much we don’t know and how difficult it is to reconcile quantum mechanics (QM) with what we actually perceive in our everyday interaction with the world.

I recently read a very good book on this subject by Philip Ball titled Beyond Weird. He gives a history lesson whilst simultaneously discussing the philosophical nuances inherent in QM in the context of experimental evidence. Ball, more than any other author I’ve read in recent times, challenges my perspective, which makes him all the worth while to read. But in so doing, I’m able to delineate with more confidence between the lesser and greater contentious aspects of my viewpoint. In fact, there is one point which I now realise is the most contentious of all, and it is related to time.

Regarding the title of this post, they seem like separate topics, but I’m aware others have made this connection; in particular Richard A Muller in NOW; The Physics of Time, though he didn’t really elaborate. He did, however, elaborate on why entropy does not provide the arrow of time, which is an oft made misconception. And it is one I’ve made myself in the past, but I now fully believe that the cause and effect is the other way round. Entropy increases with time due to probabilities. There is a much higher probability for disorder than order providing the system is in equilibrium. If there is an energy source (like the sun) that keeps a system out of equilibrium then you can have self-organising complexity occurring (such as life).

I’m unsure if QM provides an ‘arrow of time’, as people like to express it, but I do believe it provides an asymmetry, which is best expounded by Roger Penrose’s 3 phases of U, R and C. U is the evolution of the wave function as expressed by Schrodinger’s equation, R is the measurement or observation process (also called decoherence of the wave function) and C is the classical physics world which we generally call reality. These always occur in that sequence, hence the logical temporal connection.

I say ‘always’ yet Ball gives an example whereby physicists in Canada in 2015 ‘reversed the entanglement of photons’ in a crystal, which Ball calls 'recoherence'. But he also describes it as ‘.. the kind of exception that, in the proper sense, proves the rule.’ The ‘rule’, according to Ball, is that decoherence is the loss of quantum information to the environment. This is a specific interpretation by Ball, which has merit and is analogous to entropy (though he doesn’t make that connection) therefore time-directional in the same way that entropy is.

Towards the end of his book, Ball effectively argues that an ‘information’ approach to QM is the most logical approach to take and talks about a ‘reconstruction’ of QM based on principles like the ‘no cloning’ rule (quantum particles can’t be copied so teleportation destroys the original), the 'no-signalling' rule (you can’t transmit information faster than light) and there is ‘no unconditional secure bit commitment’ (which limits quantum encryption). These 3 were called ‘no-go principles’ by Rob Clifton, Jeffrey Bub and Hans Halvorson. To quote Bub from the University of Maryland: ‘[QM] is fundamentally about the representation and manipulation of information, not a theory about the mechanics of nonclassical waves or particles’. In other words, we scrap wave functions and start again with information. Basically, Ball is arguing that QM should be based on a set of principles and not mathematical formulations, especially ones that describe things we can't perceive directly (we only see interference patterns, not waves per se).

Of course, we’ve known right from its original formulation, that we don’t need Schrodinger’s equation or his wave function to perform calculations in QM (I’ll talk about QED later). Heisenberg’s matrices preceded Schrodinger’s equation and gave the same results without a wave function in sight. So how can they be reconciled philosophically, if they are mathematically equivalent but conceptually at odds?

From my limited perspective, it seems to me that Heisenberg’s and Schrodinger’s respective mathematical approaches reflect their philosophical approaches. In fact, I would argue that they approached the subject from 2 different sides, even opposite sides, and came up with the same answer, which, if I’m correct, says a lot.

Basically, Schrodinger approached it from the quantum side or U phase (to use Penrose’s nomenclature) and Heisenberg approached it from the measurement side or R phase. I’m reading another book on the same subject, What is Real? by Adam Becker, which I acquired at the same time as Ball’s book, and they are complementary, in that Becker’s approach is more historical yet also examines the philosophical aspects. Heisenberg was disappointed (pissed off may be more accurate) at Schrodinger’s success, even though Heisenberg’s matrix approach preceded Schrodinger’s wave function.

But it was Heisenberg’s specific interest in the ‘measurement problem' that led him to his famous Uncertainty Principle and a Nobel Prize. Schrodinger’s wave function, using a Fourier transform, also gives the Uncertainty Principle, so mathematically they are still equivalent in their outcomes. But the point is that Schrodinger’s wave function effectively disappears as soon as a measurement is made, and Heisenberg’s matrices with their eigenvalues don’t tell us anything about the evolution of any wave function because they don’t express it mathematically.

Ball makes the point that Schrodinger’s and Heisenberg’s approaches reflect an ontological and epistemological consideration respectively, which he delineates using the shorthand, ‘ontic’ and ‘epistemic’. In this sense, the wave function is an ontic theory (this is what exists) and Heisenberg and Bohr’s interpretation is purely epistemic (this is what we know).

I’m getting off the track but it’s all relevant. About a month ago, I wrote a letter to New Scientist on 'time'. This is an extract:

There is an obvious difference between time in physics - be it governed by relativity, entropy or quantum mechanics - and time experienced psychologically by us. Erwin Schrodinger in his seminal tome, What is Life? made the observation that consciousness exists in a constant present, and I would contend that it's the only thing that does; everything else we perceive has already happened, except quantum mechanics, which prior to a 'measurement' or 'observation', exists in the future as probabilities. An idea alluded to by Sir William Lawrence Bragg, albeit using different imagery: the future are waves and the past are particles – "The advancing sieve of time coagulates waves into particles at the moment ‘now’". So it's not surprising that the concepts of past, present and future are only meaningful to something with consciousness, because only the continuous ‘now’ of consciousness provides a reference.

Those of you who regularly read my blog will notice that this is consistent with a post I wrote earlier.

The letter was never published and New Scientist inform you in advance that they refer letters to ‘experts’ and that they don’t provide explanations if they don’t publish, which is all very fair and reasonable. I expect in this case the expert (possibly Philip Ball, as I referenced his review of Carlo Rovelli’s book) probably said that this is so wrong-headed that it shouldn’t be published. On the other hand, their expert (whoever it was) may have said this insight is so obvious it’s not worth mentioning (but I doubt it).

I expect that both my citing of Erwin Schrodinger and of Sir William Lawrence Bragg would have been considered, if not contentious, then out of date, and that my views are far too simplistic.

So let me address these issues individually. One reads a lot of words (both in science and philosophical essays) on the so-called ‘flow of time’, and whether it’s an illusion or whether it’s only in the mind or whether it’s the wrong metaphor altogether; as if time is a river and we stand in it and watch it go by.

But staying with that metaphor, the place where we are standing remains ‘now’ for ever and always, whilst we watch the future become the past in a series of endless instants. In fact, we never see the future at all, which is why I say that ‘everything we perceive has already happened’. But the idea that this constant now that we all experience is a consequence of consciousness is contentious in itself. We don’t see ourselves as privileged in that sense; we assume that it only seems a privileged position because we witness it. We assume that everything in the Universe rides this wave of now. But, for everything else, the now becomes frozen, especially if ‘now’ represents the decoherence of a quantum wave function into a classical particle. Without consciousness, ‘now’ becomes relative, an objective point in time between a future event and a past event that quickly only becomes perceived as a past event.

Let’s look at light, because it’s the most ubiquitous quantum phenomena that we all witness all the time (when we are awake). The other thing about light is that we can examine it on a cosmic scale. The Magellanic Clouds (galaxies) are approximately 200,000 light years from here and we can see them with the naked eye in Australia, if you can get away from townships on a clear night. So we can literally look 200,000 years into the past. (That is roughly when homo sapiens evolved in Africa, according to one reference I looked up.)

Now, in my previous post I argued that light is effectively in the future until it interacts with matter, so how is that possible if it took the entire history of humanity to arrive at my retina? Well, from the star’s perspective (in the Magellanic Cloud) it’s in the future because it’s going away from it into the future, quite literally. And no one can perceive the light ray until it interacts with something, so it’s always in the future of whatever it interacts with. For the photon itself, it travels in zero time. Light turns time into distance, which is why there is really only spacetime, and if light didn’t do that (because it has a constant velocity) then everything would happen at once. So, as soon as it hits my retina and not before, I can see 200,000 years into the past. That's a quantum event.

Early in his book, Adam Becker (What is Real?) provides a very good metaphor. A traveller arrives at a fork in a path and we don’t know which one he takes until he arrives at his destination. According to QM he took both at once until someone actually meets him and then we learn he only took one. The 2 paths he can take are in the future and the one he actually took is in the past. But wait, you say: in QM a photon or particle can literally take 2 paths at once and create an interference pattern. Actually, the interference pattern is created by the probabilistic outcomes of individual photons or particles, so there is still only one path for each one.

Superposition is a much misunderstood concept. As Ball explains in a foonote: “…superposition is not really ‘two states at once’, but a circumstance in which either state is a possible measurement outcome.”

He gives a very good description of the Schrodinger wave function and its role in QM:

The Schrodinger equation defines and embraces all possible observable states of a quantum system. Before the wave function collapses (whatever that means) there is no reason to attribute any greater degree of reality to any of these possible states than to any other. For remember that quantum mechanics does not imply that the quantum system is actually in one or other of these states but we don’t know which. We can confidently say that it is not in any one of these states, but is properly described by the wavefunction itself, which in some sense ‘permits’ them all as observational outcomes. Where then do they all go, bar one, when the wavefunction collapses? (emphasis in the original)

He was making this point in the context of explaining why the parallel universe or ‘Many World Interpretation’ (which he calls MWI) is so popular and seductive, because in the MWI they do all exist. Ball, by the way, is not a fan of MWI and gives extensive and persuasive arguments against it.

This leads logically to Feynman’s integral path method or his version of QED (quantum electrodynamics) where all paths are allowed, but the phase interaction of the superposed wave functions cancel most of them out. Only a wave function version of QM with its time dependent phases can provide this interaction. Brian Cox gives a very good, succinct exposition of Feynman’s version of QM on Youtube and Freeman Dyson, who worked with Feynman and who originally showed that the independent work of Schwinger, Feynman and Tomonaga were equivalent, which got them all the Nobel Prize (except Dyson), explains that Feynman’s integral method predicts 'future probabilities from a sum over histories'. The point is, as Ball says himself, none of these histories actually happen. I argue that they never happen because they’re all in the future. Certainly, we never see them or measure them, but one of the probability outcomes will be realised when it becomes the past.

Because a specific path is only known once an observation is made, it appears that we are determining the path backwards-in-time, which has been demonstrated experimentally. I feel this is the key to the whole enigma, like the photon coming from the Magellanic Clouds – the path is revealed in retrospect. Until it’s revealed, it’s effectively in our future. Also this is consistent with the asymmetry in time we all experience. The future is many paths (as per QED) but the past is only one.

Ball argues consistently that there is a transition from ‘quantumness’ to classical physics (as per Penrose, though he doesn’t reference Penrose) but he argues that classical physics is a special case of QM (which is the orthodoxy).

His best argument is that decoherence is the loss of quantum information to the environment, which can happen over time, so not necessarily in an instance. He uses the same idea to explain why large objects decohere virtually instantaneously, because they are exposed to such a massive expanse of the environment.

There is much about QM I don’t discuss, like spin states that distinguish bosons from fermions and the role of symmetry and Emmy Noether’s famous theorem that relates symmetry to conservation laws (not only in QM but relativity theory).

I’m trying to understand QM and how it relates to time. Why is it, as Ball himself asks, are there many possibilities that become one? My contention is that this is exactly what distinguishes the future from the past as we experience it. The enigma with QM, as when we look backwards in time through the entire cosmos, is that those many paths only become one when the quantum object (photon or particle) interacts with something, forcing a wave function collapse or decoherence. Is there a backwards-in-time cosmic scale loop as proposed by John Wheeler? Maybe there is. Maybe the arrow of time goes both ways.


Footnote: This video gives a good summary of QM as discussed above; in particular, the presenter discusses the fundamental enigma of the many possibilities becoming one, and the many paths becoming one, only when an observation or measurement is made. He specifically discusses the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, but in effect describes QED.

Addendum 1: Sometimes I can't stop thinking about what I've written. I'm aware that there is a paradox with a light ray from the past intersecting with our future, so I've shown it in a very crude spacetime diagram, with time on the vertical axis and space on the horizontal axis. The Magellanic Clouds and Earth are 200,000 light years apart and there is a light cone which goes at 45 degrees from the source to the Earth 200,000 years into the future. (Actually, the small Magellanic Cloud is 199,000 while the large one is 158,000, which is probably the one you can see with the naked eye, so maybe you need a telescope for this after all.)

It's assuming that the distance between the Magellanic Clouds and Earth doesn't change (for simplicity) which is almost certainly not true. It allows the Earth to be a vertical line on the spacetime diagram with light being at 45 degrees, so they intersect 200,000 light years in the future.

It also suggests that the photon exists in a constant 'now' (until it interacts with something). As I said before, light is unique in that it has zero time, which explains that particular effect. Consciousness is unique in that it provides a reference for ‘now’ all the time. Light is always in the future of whatever it interacts with, when it becomes ‘now’, then becomes frozen in the past, possibly as an image (e.g. a photo) or a dot on a screen. Consciousness never becomes frozen, but it does become blank sometimes.

Addendum 2: This is a Youtube lecture by Carlo Rovelli, who would tell you that virtually everything I've said above is wrong, including what I said about entropy and time.

Addendum 3 (Conclusion): I've since read Carlo Rovelli's latest book, The Order of Time, where he completely dismantles our intuitive concept of time. For one, he says that Einstein has demonstrated that time doesn't flow at the same rate everywhere, but then effectively says that time doesn't flow at all. He points out that in QM, time can flow both ways mathematically, which is the U phase (using Penrose's nomenclature), and that the only time direction comes from entropy, which is contentious, in as much as many physicists believe that entropy is not the cause of time's apparent direction, but a consequence.

He says that there is no objective 'now', yet elsewhere I've read him being quoted as saying 'now' is the edge of the big bang. In his book, he doesn't discuss the age of the Universe at all, yet it has obvious ramifications to this topic.

There are 4 ways of looking at QM (5 if you include multiple worlds, which I'm not). There is the Copenhagen interpretation, which effectively says the only reality is what we measure or observe, and the wave function is simply a mathematical device for making probabilistic predictions prior to that.

There is Bohm's pilot wave theory, which says there was always a path, created by the pilot wave but not known until after our observation.

There is QED, in particular Feynman's sum over integral interpretation, that says there are an infinitude of paths, most of which cancel each other out, that give the most probabilistic outcome. When the outcome is known they all become irrelevant.

There is a so-called transactional interpretation that says the wave function goes both forwards and backwards in time, formulated by John Cramer in the mid 1980s, but foreshadowed by Schrodinger himself in 1941 (John Gribbin. Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution, pp.161-4).

My interpretation effectively captures all of these (except multiple worlds). I don't think there is a pilot wave but I think there is 'one path' that is discovered after the observation. If you take the example I use in the main text; of observing the light from a star in the Magellanic Cloud: when you see it, you instantly look 200,000 light years into the past (or thereabouts). So there is a link between your current 'now' and a 'now' 200,000 years ago. My contention is that this is only possible because there is a backwards in time path from your eyeball to the star.

Addendum 4: Much of what I discuss above was foreshadowed in a post I wrote over 2 years ago; possibly more succinct and more accessible.

Addendum 5: This is a brief interview with Freeman Dyson, which has some relevance to this post. I have to say that Dyson probably comes closest to expressing my own views on QM and classical physics - that they are, in essence, incompatible. By his own admission, these views are not shared by most other physicists (if at all).

An explanation of my tattoos

I have 2 tattoos, one on each arm, which I admit represent the height of pretentiousness. On my left arm I have Euler’s famous identity, which links e, π, i, 0 and 1 in a very simple yet unexpected relationship: e^iπ + 1 = 0

This has no meaning in the physical world, even though we know it’s true (I’ve demonstrated this in another post). For a start, i is not really a number (even though it’s defined by i = √-1) because you can’t have an i number of things. I prefer to think of it as a dimension that’s perpendicular to all other dimensions, because that’s how it’s represented graphically. In fact, mathematically, it’s not Real by definition. You have Real numbers and imaginary numbers and they are described in complex algebra as z = a + ib, where z has a Real component and an imaginary component. Notice that they don’t get mixed up, yet they do in Euler’s identity. Euler’s identity is so weird, for want of a better word, that it has a special status. Richard Feynman called it 'the most remarkable formula in mathematics'.

My point is that Euler’s identity only has meaning in an abstract realm or transcendental realm, which is apt, considering that π and e are called transcendental numbers, which means they can never be calculated in full. They can only exist in a transcendental realm – the Universe can’t contain them. Even God doesn’t know the last digit of π (or e, for that matter).

On my right arm I have Schrodinger’s equally famous equation, which I’ve also expounded upon in depth in another post. John Barrow called it 'the most important equation in mathematical physics': ih(ϑ/ϑt)Ψ = HΨ

This is a poor representation but it’s close enough for my purposes. The tattoo on my arm is a much better rendition. Notice that it also includes the number i because complex algebra is essential to quantum mechanics and this is a seminal equation in QM. It is the complement or opposite of the equation on my left arm, in as much as it only has meaning in the physical world (the same as E =  mc², for example). Outside the Universe it has no meaning at all; whereas Euler’s identity would still be true even if the Universe didn’t exist and there was no one to derive it. To quote John Barrow, quoting Dave Rusin:

Mathematics is the only part of science you could continue to do, if tomorrow the Universe ceased to exist.

Schrodinger derived his equation from a hunch; it’s not derived from anything we know (as Richard Feynman once pointed out). It describes the wave function of a particle that’s not yet 'observed', which makes it truly remarkable, and therefore it can only give us probabilities of finding it. Nevertheless, it’s been found to be very accurate in those probabilities. Schrodinger’s wave function is now incorporated into QED (quantum electrodynamics) which effectively describes everything we can see and touch and is arguably the most successful mathematical theory in physics, comparable only to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In principle, you could have a Schrodinger equation for the entire universe, but you’d probably need a computer the size of the Universe to calculate it.

So on my left arm I have a mathematical connection to a transcendental (or Platonic) realm, and on my right arm I have a mathematical connection to the physical Universe.

But there is more, because Euler’s identity is the solution of an equation called Euler’s equation:  e^iθ = cosθ + isinθ; which becomes Euler’s identity when θ = π. The point is that this equation provides the key ingredient to Schrodinger’s wave function, ψ (psi, pronounced sy), so these equations are linked. The transcendental world is linked to the physical world, arguably without the need of human consciousness to make that link.


Footnote: A friend of mine wrote a poem about my tattoos.

Addendum: I came across this description by Clifford A Pickover in his opus, The Mαth βook:

Schrodinger's wave equation - which describes reality and events in terms of wave functions and probabilities - may be thought of as the evanescent substrate on which we all exist.

Some notes on religion and God

I’ve written quite a lot about religion on this blog, so I’m not sure I have anything new to say. My main reason for writing is that there is a dichotomy which is rarely explored or even acknowledged. I’m currently reading The Paradox of God And the Science of Omniscience by Clifford A Pickover. He’s written a number of books, but the handful I’ve read relate to mathematics and physics. He’s very good at collecting vignettes on a subject that covers its entire breadth, then putting them into an accessible volume with high quality allusive graphics. This book is completely different, both in content and presentation.

I mention him because his latest book has many references, including biblical quotes I never heard in Sunday School; partly because they don’t show God in a good light, and partly because they’re not fit for children’s ears. For example, in Exodus (4:24-26) God was going to kill Moses, but his wife, Zipporah, quickly circumcised her son and put the blood on Moses’ feet, then said: “Surely, you are a bridegroom of blood to me”; which satisfied God, for reasons that perhaps only God and Zipporah know. Pickover provides 4 different versions to demonstrate that the gist of the story is consistent across translations.

That’s a digression. Pickover also references Karen Armstrong’s A History of God in a completely different context: how God has evolved over the centuries. Armstrong, I note, has effectively disappeared from the parapet after being attacked from both sides of the religious divide. It’s obvious from my reading of her that she was trying to bridge the divide and had the opposite effect. A History of God covers the 3 monotheistic religions chronologically, so it does read like a history, plus she makes references to Hinduism and Buddhism where she thinks it’s apposite, without giving them the same attention and overall coverage. Personally, I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read on the subject, written well before she became a pariah to atheists and fundamentalists alike.

One of the themes, for want of a better word, that ran through Armstrong’s account was that there was almost always a conflict in philosophy, which alludes to the dichotomy I mentioned in my introduction. Basically, there were scholars who argued that God should be explained and revealed by intellectual reasoning, whilst others argued that God could only be understood through a personal mystical revelation. I think this dichotomised approach still applies today. It also highlights a fundamental difference between institutionalised religion and personal religious experience.

I spent a large part of my childhood exposed to institutionalised religion so I have that perspective from which to draw. Reading Pickover’s discussion of Genesis, where he talks about the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’, he points out an obvious paradox that Eve couldn’t have known it was evil when she was seduced by the snake as she had no knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the fruit (others have also pointed out this apparent contradiction). I remember as a young teenager asking how could eating fruit give one knowledge of evil (I was very literal), and I was told that it was a metaphor and I was given to understand that it was really about knowledge of sex. So sex was evil, and I was neurotic enough to believe that.

I digress again. Many years ago I had friends who were Jehovah Witnesses and I enjoyed arguing with them, and I think they enjoyed arguing with me. Now I do it with my Baptist neighbours. Basically, when it comes to arguing intellectually for the existence of God I find I’m an atheist. I was in my teens and still going to Sunday School when it first occurred to me that God could simply be a state of mind and not an existential entity that existed externally. I’ve long argued that God is subjective and, like Don Cupitt, believe that the only religion that matters is the one you’ve worked out for yourself.

Paul Davies is a well known physicist, author, philosopher and astro-biologist, as well as a self-confessed Deist (even Dawkins treats him with respect). Agnosticism and theism, I’ve noticed, is more common among physicists than biologists. I expect there’s 2 reasons for that: biologists have felt under siege by the Church for over a century; and physicists marvel at the mathematical concordance and unexplained serendipity of Nature’s laws. I wrote a post on Davies’ The Mind of God a couple of years ago, which is more about physics than God, but I concluded that the idea of God, as something that evolves, was the only one that made sense to me. If humanity is the only link between the Universe and God, then we are the only reason for God to exist. I’ve made this point before. I think God is a projection, because it is part of our cognitive capacity to imagine a future in a way that no other animal can. This means that we can imagine a future beyond death, which is the real genesis of religion and religious belief. If God is a consequence of us, rather than the other way round, then the problem of evil is automatically resolved - we get the God we deserve.

48hr Flash Fiction Challenge - 2018

 I entered this last year. It's actually called the Sci-Fi London Challenge, and the rules are pretty simple. They give you a title and a piece of dialogue plus an optional clue and you have to write a story in 2,000 words or less (I did it in 1,947). It opens 11am Sat and closes 1pm Mon (hence 48hr flash fiction). That's London time, so in reality it's from 8pm Sat to 10pm Mon Australian Eastern time, but it can easily be written in a day if you've got the bit between your teeth, otherwise you'll probably never do it. What I mean is either something comes to you or it doesn't, and if it doesn't then you're probably wasting your time.

Title: Where the grass still grows
Mandatory dialogue: Did you deliberately set out to make as much mess as possible?
Optional cue: New psychotropic drug creates telepathy/telekinesis

Getting the dialogue in was not a problem, but the title is a bit obscure. I allude to it in a very obtuse sort of way. Don't let a bad title get in the way of a good story, is what I told myself. The optional cue gave me some ideas but I went off in a completely different direction, as I tend to do.

Like last year's entry, this is not true sci-fi, more like Twilight Zone, which is appropriate given when and where I set the story. Personally, I think it's better than my last year's entry, but it's for others to judge.

Now some may think this a bit autobiographical because I grew up in a country town in this era and I was a science nerd in high school. Also we did have an eccentric science teacher who was really good with all kids, the bright ones and the ones who struggled. There was never any after school lab experiments but he did run extra classes for the lower level kids, not the high achievers. I still think that was rather remarkable. He failed me in chemistry in my final year to get my head out of my arse and it worked. But my fictional characters are all pure fiction. In my mind, they don't resemble anyone I know in real life. Characters come into my head like melodies and lyrics come into the heads of songwriters. That's my secret. Now you know.

Short stories need a twist in the tale, and this is no exception, except I didn't know what it was until I got there. In other words, I didn't know how it was going to end, and then it surprised me.

The formatting gets messed up, especially for dialogue, but I make the best of a bad situation. The submission manuscript is double-line spaced and it has proper formatting, with paragraph indentation, like you'd find in a novel. Below is my entry.



Davey lived alone with his mum, Irene to her friends; he had no memory of his father and he had no siblings. His mother never remarried. The favourite topic amongst his school friends was who was best: Elvis or the Beatles?

His best friend at school was Kevin; they were in Form 10. He secretly liked Penny, a girl in the year behind him, and on the rare occasions he had spoken to her, she was nice, but deliberately ignored him when her friends were around, so he avoided her.

 His favourite class was science. The teacher, Mr Robotham, always wore a white lab coat that was stained by experiments gone awry or possibly not; no one asked. He was thin and hawk nosed but was friendly and helpful, both to kids who were bright and kids who struggled.

Mr Robotham liked Davey, who was always asking extra-curricula questions, and he even lent him books, providing he told no one else. Mr Robotham sometimes allowed Davey to stay back after school and perform experiments, which he did most weeks, usually Wednesdays when everyone else was playing sport, and occasionally Kevin would join him.

On this occasion, Davey had assembled a massive apparatus, of tubes, beakers, flasks with stoppers and spaghetti-like hoses joining everything together. When he believed he had everything in order, he put one of the flasks, full of a yellowy liquid, on top of a Bunsen burner and started heating it up.
 Kevin looked a bit worried, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘So what are you making?’
He looked at Kevin with a wicked grin, ‘Let’s find out.’

Kevin watched the liquid boil and stepped back, while Davey put on a pair of safety glasses and watched to see if the liquid went up the tube as he hoped. Mr Robotham always made them wear safety glasses, no matter what they were doing in the lab, so it became second-nature.
Bang! The stopper in the flask went straight up and hit the ceiling and Davey found himself covered in the liquid.
‘Shit’, Kevin said.
Davey looked at his friend, whose eyes seemed to want to depart their sockets, and then down at his clothes covered in yellow goo. ‘Mum’s not going to be happy.’
Kevin couldn’t believe him. ‘Your Mum? Shit, what about Mr Robotham.’
‘I reckon he won’t be too happy either.’
As if to confirm his second-worst fears, Robotham came running into the lab. He must have heard the noise, Davey thought.
Robotham looked at Davey and put his hands on his shoulders, half-kneeling, ‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine. Sorry,’ he said in a small voice; he really wasn’t sure how Mr Robotham was going to react.
Robotham looked around at the aftermath, ‘Did you deliberately set out to make as much mess as possible?’
Davey looked up to him, ‘I’ll clean it up, Sir.’
But Mr Robotham surprised him, ‘No, you go home. Your mother is going to be so angry with me.’
Davey didn’t understand, ‘Why?’
‘Just go home,’ he looked at Kevin, who had been trying his best invisibility impersonation, ‘Both of you, before I change my mind.’

When he got home, his mother was so angry she didn’t say anything at first. But when she found her voice he surprised her, ‘My God, wait till I see Mr Robotham.’
‘It wasn’t his fault.’
‘Wasn’t it now? You go and run a bath. These clothes may be ruined for good.’
They ate their tea in silence and he wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so he went to bed in his room at the back of the house, next to hers. He found it hard to go to sleep.

At some point he woke up and found himself hovering above his bed; his sleeping form, on its back, below him. He could actually see himself breathing, yet he didn’t find it disconcerting; he found he was perfectly calm and he wondered if he had died.

Stranger still, he found he could move simply by will and he could travel through the wall into his mother’s room. He thought, I must be dreaming, so he wondered, in his scientifically minded way, if there was some way he could test that. He lowered himself towards the floor and looked at his mother’s alarm clock; the illuminated hands showed it was 20 past midnight. He thought of trying to wake his mother, but realised it would only scare her, so he went back through the wall to his own body and got very close to his face. He could see everything, all his pimples and the downy moustache that he hadn’t shaved when he’d had his bath. He could see his shoes on the floor, his cupboard; it didn’t feel like a dream, but he didn’t know what to do. Would he be able to return to his body? The idea of entering it by conscious will somehow seemed the wrong thing to do. He felt like he had a ghostly astral body, though he couldn’t see it, so he touched his own hand with the sense of his astral hand. His body shivered and his breathing stuttered and he realised that it was completely the wrong thing to do.

For the first time, he actually felt scared. What if I can’t return? He went back to his mother’s room and noticed that the clock now said 27 past so it seemed to confirm for him that it wasn’t a dream.
He wondered how far he could travel, so he literally went through the roof of his house and looked up to the stars above and down to the tree near their back fence. His mother had a vegetable garden and even some chooks in a yard, and he could see the back veranda and the backyard where the grass still grew. He entered the chook yard and some of them on their roosts seemed to wake as if they knew he was there but otherwise remained inert.

 The stars were especially bright and he noticed that he could see everything in shades but more delineated than he would normally. He noticed that he didn’t feel the cold or the air on his astral body and it occurred to him, that since he could go through walls he must be existing in another dimension. He would normally be able to smell the dew on the grass but he couldn’t. He realised that his only sense was sight for some reason. He couldn’t even hear anything. Again, his scientific mind came to his aid. He thought, I can interact with radiation but not with matter. He knew from his science classes that matter and light interacted but were quite different. One was made of atoms and the other was made of waves. Perhaps that’s what he was now: some astral waveform.
He travelled around above the town like he was some sort of night bird or a superhero. Some superhero, he thought, I can’t even touch anything.

He couldn’t resist the urge to visit the house of his friend, Kevin. He wondered if this ghostly manifestation was a consequence of his botched experiment and if so, did it affect Kevin? He entered Kevin’s house and observed all the appurtenances that he was familiar with: the kitchen table and chairs, the canisters on the shelf, the old white stove, matching fridge and stainless steel sink under the window with floral themed curtains.
It felt wrong to enter Kevin’s parents’ bedroom, but he had little compunction about visiting his friend’s. And there he was fast asleep, with his mouth open and Davey thought he was probably snoring only he couldn’t hear it.

He felt confident that Kevin wasn’t suffering the same disembodied state that he was, and rose back through the roof to survey the town. He now felt the urge to visit Penny’s house, even though it seemed wrong. On the other hand, he wanted her to be his friend and he told himself that she wouldn’t mind. He asked himself, Would I be able to tell her about it later? And he decided he could.
When he entered her bedroom she was sleeping on her side and he felt she looked so peaceful; he was glad he couldn’t wake her even if he wanted to. But it still felt awkward so he didn’t stay. Because it was a country town there was little movement and virtually no traffic until he saw the baker and the milkman getting ready to work. He knew then that dawn wouldn’t be that far off and he decided he needed to go home.

In the morning he had to watch with increasing anxiety as his mother tried to wake him and then become distraught. She called an ambulance and he followed his body to the hospital where he was attached to various machines and doctors and nurses came and examined him. All the while his mother went through moods of stoic patience, angry berating of medical staff and occasionally going to a toilet cubicle where she could cry without anyone seeing her.

Davey, in his extra-dimensional state, didn’t know what to do but wished he could just return to his body and bring everything back to normal. Later in the day his friend Kevin turned up and so did Mr Robotham, but his mother gave him a verbal barrage that Davey could only imagine the content, although he did lip-read some choice words that she usually only reserved for newsreaders on the TV. Robotham thought it best to leave, though he was obviously very upset. Davey wished he could tell them both that it wasn’t their fault. He felt unbelievably guilty for all the anguish he had caused, even though he had no idea how he had done it and wished, beyond everything else, he could restore the balance.

Very late in the day, probably after school, he was surprised to see Penny arrive and he was even more surprised to see her cry. She said something to him which he couldn’t make out, but he was deeply moved. She left some flowers behind, with a card. On it, he read: Dear Davey, Please get well. You are a special friend. All my love, Penny.

Davey followed her out of the hospital and wished above everything else he could communicate with her. When he came up behind her, she seemed to turn her head as if she knew he was there, but kept walking, and he didn’t follow.

His mother stayed and refused to go home. The nurses brought her food in the evening, and when she laid down on seats in the waiting area, one of them put a blanket over her. Davey felt so sad and he went into the room where his body was, all hooked up to the machines, and decided it best to stay with it.

In the morning, Davey woke up to find himself in a hospital bed. Nurses and doctors came running when the machines told them he was awake and his mother came in, her face covered in tears.
He looked at his mother, ‘What’s wrong?’
She came up to the bed and hugged him and sobbed like there was no tomorrow. When she released him she said, ‘Oh Davey, you had us all so worried. We didn’t know what happened to you.’
Davey couldn’t remember anything from when he went to bed in his own house, which was, unbeknownst to him, two nights ago.
Back at school everyone treated him differently. He never did extra-curricular lab experiments again. And Penny suddenly became his newest best friend.

Jordan Peterson: clinical psychologist, provocateur, Jungian philosopher and biblical scholar

I wrote something earlier, based on YouTube videos, but never posted it. Instead I read his book, 12 Rules for Life, and decided to use that as my starting point. I want to say up front that, even if you disagree with him, he makes you think, and for that reason alone he’s worth listening to. Logically, I haven’t attempted to cover the entire book, but mostly the theme of religion and its closely related allies, mythology and psychology.

His discussions of the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, are refreshing in as much as he gives them a cultural context that one can relate to, especially if it was part of your education, which it was for me. In other words, he interprets the mythology of the Bible in a way that, not only makes historical sense, but also cultural sense, given that it’s influenced Western European thought for 2 millennia. I’ve talked before about the religion science divide, which has arguably become more unbridgeable, to extend a badly thought out metaphor.

Peterson blends a mixture of Jungian and Christian philosophies that are purely psychological, yet he includes evolutionary influences where he considers it relevant. In fact, in certain parts of his book (Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping) he talks about the Book of Genesis as if it’s part of our genetic heritage rather than our cultural heritage. I know he knows the difference, but his language and description of the narrative gives the impression that the humans we are today are direct consequences of the events that happened in the Garden of Eden.

Take, for example, this extract from a section titled, The Naked Ape.

Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened… Unlike other mammals, whose delicate abdomens are protected by the amour-like expanse of their backs, they were upright creatures, with the most vulnerable parts of their body presented to the world. And worse was to come. Adam and Eve made themselves loin cloths… Then they promptly skittered off and hid. In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God.

You can see how he’s interwoven biological facts with mythology as if our genetic disposition (to be hairless and upright) is an integral part of our relationship with God, but was somehow irrelevant prior to ‘Adam and Eve having their eyes opened’. I’m not opposed to the idea of interpreting creation myths in a psychological context, but, whether intentional or not, he seems to conflate religious narrative heritage with genetic heritage.

In Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today (which is good advice, by the way); Peterson invokes the Old Testament God as a ‘being’ who ensures discipline and obedience through ‘very tough love’ (my term, not his). He’s saying, in effect, that the Old Testament God reflects reality because life is harsh and full of suffering, and requires a certain self-discipline to navigate and even survive. But my interpretation is less generous. I think the Old Testament God reflects the idea of a ruler who is uncompromising and needs to use severe disciplinary measures to get people to do what he considers is best for them. In the modern world, the idea of worshipping a narcissistic tyrant or respecting someone who rules by fear is anachronistic at best and totalitarian at worst. Some people, and I’ve met them, argue that they agree with me when it comes to a mortal leader but the rules are different for God. Well, God, be it Old Testament or otherwise, is a product of the human psyche, so ‘He’ reflects what people believed in their time to be their ideal ruler.

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient); continues this theme in a lengthy discourse entitled Christianity and its Problems, where, to be fair, he gives a balanced view in a historical context, which, for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave alone. But when he discusses Nietzsche, which he has studied in much more depth than me, he talks about the consequences of the ‘death of God’ which effectively coincided with the turn of the 20th Century and the birth of modern physics (which he doesn’t mention, but I do because it’s relevant). Basically, modern physics has given us all the technological marvels we take for granted and allowed us a lifestyle unheard of in antiquity, so an appeal to God no longer has the psychological power it once had because we now (mostly) believe that cause and effect is not dependent on supernatural or divine forces.

Peterson doesn’t discuss the effects of science, or the products of science, on our collective consciousness at all, but it’s why we are generally much more pragmatic about the reason things go wrong, as opposed to a time (not that long ago) when we were much less dependent on technology for our day to day survival. In fact, we are so dependent that we are unaware of our dependence.

Getting back to Peterson’s discussion, I disagree that nihilism replaced God or that totalitarianism, in the forms of communism and fascism, were the logical consequence of the ‘death’ of the Christian God. I contend that these forms of government arose to replace feudalism, not Christianity, and the loss of feudalism was a consequence of the industrial revolution, which no one foresaw.

To be fair, I agree that the story of Genesis is really about how evil came into the world. It’s a mythological explanation of why every single one of us is susceptible to evil. On that point Peterson and I agree. He gives an account of evil which I hadn’t considered before, where he compares it to the story of Cain and Abel, and I admit that it makes sense. He’s talking about people who become so bitter and inwardly hateful that they seek vengeance against the entire world. One can see how this applies to teenage boys who become mass shooters; a far too frequent occurrence in the US. It reminds me of a commentary in the I Ching that ‘after evil destroys everything else it destroys itself’. And self-destruction is the idea that immediately comes to mind. I went through a period of self-hatred but maybe I was just lucky that it never manifested itself in violence. In fact, I’ve never resorted to violence in any situation. Peterson himself, in one of his videos, talks about his own ‘dark times’.

I wrote a post about evil about 10 years ago, where I looked at the atrocities that people do against others, and conjectured that anyone could be a perpetrator given the right circumstances; that we delude ourselves when we claim we are too morally pure. Again, I think it’s a point where Peterson and I would agree. If you look at historical events where entire groups of people have turned against another group, the person who refuses is the extreme exception; not the norm at all. It takes enormous, unbelievable courage to stand against a violent mob of people who claim to be your brethren. Paradoxically, religion sometimes plays a role.

I rejected the biblical God, so does that make me like Cain? It was Cain’s rejection of God that was his ultimate downfall (according to Peterson). Obviously, I don’t think that at all. I think my rejection of the Old Testament God is simply my rejection of an ideal based on fear and punishment and an afterlife that’s dependent on me pleasing a jealous God. My earliest memories are ones of fear, which I believe I got from my father through some process of osmosis, as he was a psychological wreck as a consequence of his experiences in WW2 and a fearsome presence in anyone’s life. So a fearsome God was someone I could identify with in person and it didn’t endear me to a lifelong belief. I’m not judgemental of my father but I’m definitely judgemental of God.

God is something that exists inside your psyche, not out there. If the God inside you is fearsome, vengeful, jealous, absolutely judgemental; then what sort of person are you going to become? (I notice that I sometimes parrot the author I'm discussing, subconsciously.)

Peterson emphasises the importance of having values, and argues by inference that if you reject God you have to replace it with something else, which may be an ideology. I think we all search for meaning, which I’ve written about elsewhere, but he discusses his own path so to speak:

Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief.

The cornerstone of my own belief came to me at the age of 16 when I read Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague). I realised that the only God I could believe in was a God who didn’t want me to believe in Them. More recently, I referred to this as a God with no ego, which is such a contradiction, but very Buddhist.

I need to say that everyone has to find their own path, their own belief system, and I’m not saying that mine is superior to Peterson’s.

Peterson makes a point that is almost trivial, yet possibly the most important in the book. He mentions, almost in passing, 3 traits: to be honest, generous and reliable. This struck a chord with me, because, despite all my faults, which Peterson would be quick to point out, these 3 personality attributes are what I’ve spent a lifetime trying to perfect and become known for.

It’s a credit to Peterson that he can make you examine your own psyche simply by discussing his own discoveries taken from his own life and his interaction with others, including his practice.

In his Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding; Peterson is at his most contentious. I have to say that I mostly agree with him when he takes on gender issues; I don’t think an anti-male culture is any more helpful that an anti-female culture, and I’ve always argued that. Gender imbalances can go both ways. He laments the fact that his 14 year old son (at the time) believed that it was a known fact that girls do better than boys at school, which is the reverse of the accepted wisdom when I was at school. I’ve heard Peterson say in an interview that there is virtually no statistical difference between girls and boys in intelligence.

On the other hand, we disagree on the issue of humanity’s impact on the planet, where I side with David Attenborough’s publicly expressed concerns regarding population growth. Peterson loves facts and data, and, by all accounts, we are seeing the highest extinction rate in the history of the planet, which is a direct consequence of humanity’s unprecedented success as a species (I’m not saying it’s a global extinction event; it’s the rate of extinction that is unprecedented). I think it’s disingenuous to compare those who are willing to face and voice this ‘truth’ with the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, because they are both ‘anti-human’ (his coinage).

It is in this chapter that he rails against post-modern Marxists, which I won’t go into, because I studied Marxism at university and I concluded that it’s flawed in theory as well as practice. In theory (from my reading of Marx and Engel’s Manifesto) it’s an evolutionary stage that follows on from capitalism by way of a ‘revolution’ (as contradictory as that sounds) by the workers. In other words, capitalism is a stepping stone to communism. In practice, all the capitalist enterprises are taken over by the State, and that’s been a catastrophic failure in every country that experimented with it because it becomes totalitarian by default.

I actually agree pretty much with his arguments against social engineering, even though it exists in some form in all democracies. Take, for example, the social attitudinal changes towards tobacco which have happened in my lifetime. But Peterson is specifically talking about social engineering gender equality, and (according to him) it’s premised on a belief that gender is purely a social construct. As he points out, the fact that some individuals crave a sex-change clearly shows that it’s not. A boy trapped in a girl’s body, or vice versa, does not equate with gender being socially determined (his example).

One of his many ‘scenarios’, based on personal experience, depicts a bloke working on a railway gang who doesn’t fit in and is eventually tormented deliberately. Many people would call this bullying but Peterson tells the story so that we axiomatically conclude it was the bloke’s own fault. Now, I know from my own experience that I’m the one person on the gang who would probably try and help the guy fit in rather than ostracise him. So what does that make me? Too ‘agreeable’ according to Peterson.

Agreeableness, along with ‘neuroticism’ are negative ‘left’ leaning traits. ‘Openness’ is the only positive left leaning trait, according to Peterson (more on that below). ‘Conscientiousness’ is the most positive ‘right’ leaning trait, which I admit I lack. I have all the negative traits in spades. I make up for my lack of conscientiousness with a strong sense of responsibility and the aforementioned self-ascribed reliability. I hate to let people down, which sometimes makes me stressful. Peterson claims that ‘agreeable’ people don’t make good leaders. Well, neither do narcissist psychopaths, yet they seem to be over-represented.

One of his videos that had particular resonance for me was about creativity. He makes the valid claim that our personality traits are genetically determined and they influence us in ways we are not aware of, including our political leanings. The trait of ‘openness’, which is explicitly about openness to new ideas is heavily correlated with creativity. I believe creativity is often misconstrued, because there’s a school of thought that any person can become anything they want to be. I’ve always believed that to be untrue – I only have to look at my own family, because one side was distinctly artistic and the other side was good at sports.

He makes the statement (in another video) that “People, who are high in openness, if they’re not doing something creative, are like dead sticks.” This is something I can certainly identify with - I became depressed when I couldn’t express my creative urges.

In the middle of his book, he compares Socrates to Christ in the way that he faced death. (I bring this up for reasons that will become apparent.) He relates information from a friend of Socrates, Hermogenes, whom I had never heard of. From this, Peterson conjectures that Socrates went to his death willingly, having summed up the alternatives and deciding to be honest and combative with his adversaries, knowing full well the consequences. This certainly fits with what I’ve already learned about Socrates, but it’s also remarkably close to how I portrayed a character whom I’d created in fiction, with no awareness of Socrates’ assumed approach nor Peterson’s interpretation of it.

His Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street; is a self-portrait of his unconditional love for his daughter, though he wouldn’t call it that.

There is a particular passage in Peterson’s book, which is worthy of special mention, because, it’s not only true, it’s inspiring (p.62):

You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.

Stephen Hawking – a true genius (8 Jan 1942 – 14 March 2018)

I would be very remiss if I didn’t write something about Stephen Hawking following his death yesterday, aged 76. He died on pi day, an Americanism because 14 March is 3.14 in American date nomenclature.

My local rag, The AGE, has given him a double spread, as well as front page, so did The Australian. They normally only do that for sporting heroes like Don Bradman. But Hawking is arguably the only household name in physics after Einstein. A man restricted to a wheelchair for most of his life, whom we all remember for his distinctive synthetic voice and witticisms that belied his condition as well as his stellar intellect.

I’ll only mention a few things as others will provide a lot more about his life and his achievements. It’s no small thing that he held the same academic position as Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He jointly won the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics in 1988 with Roger Penrose. He and Penrose had philosophical differences but great mutual respect. Penrose even invited Hawking to provide a counter point of view in one of his books, The Large the Small and the Human Mind (a whole chapter, in fact, along with others).

Hawking radiation is the only thing that can escape from a black hole, and was given that eponymous title, after Hawking mathematically derived its existence by applying the laws of quantum mechanics (in 1974).

My favourite sound byte about Hawking is his postulation that in the beginning there was no time, which he can explain better than me in the video below. Along with James Hartle, he formulated that time was originally ‘imaginary’ and existed as a 4th spatial dimension. I like it because it infers that if the Universe was originally a quantum one (hence the ‘imaginary’ dimension) then time did not exist and it’s an emergent feature of the Universe rather than a prerequisite. Hawking called it the ‘no-boundary’ Universe. Cosmologist, John Barrow, called it ‘a radical theory… proposed by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking for aesthetic reasons’. Barrow quipped that ‘once upon a time there was no time’.



Postscript: I watched a documentary on Hawking, done in 2015, when the oscar-winning movie of his life came out, and they interviewed family members as well as people who worked with him. Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist, who famously won a bet with him (refer below), told of how Hawking manipulated complex equations in his head because he couldn’t write them on a board or on paper like the rest of us would. I remember hearing about that feat decades ago, and it occurred to me that in some respect he shared something with Beethoven. Beethoven composed some of the world’s most famous and uplifting music without ever actually hearing it played. And Stephen Hawking created some of the most significant equations in physics without ever writing them down.

Correction: Kip Thorne won the bet with Hawking, which was whether black holes exist (made in 1974). Whether information is lost or not (in a black hole) is also explained in the link (according to Hawking as not), though I'm not sure all cosmologists agree.

One person’s education is another person’s propaganda

This thought occurred to me after I watched a YouTube interview (below) of Brian Cox in New Zealand. He does a lot of stuff for the BBC (after all he’s British) but he’s also made a few programmes in Australia, including an excellent series on astronomy and an equally excellent one-off special on The Life of A Universe, still available on ABC iview if you live in Australia (highly recommended). He toured here last year, and in the previous year (Aug 2016) he had a famous altercation with former Australian senator, Malcolm Roberts, on a special ‘science’ episode of Q&A.

But getting back to the title and the interview that sparked it, Cox has been quoted as saying: "the greatest danger facing humanity is stupidity", though I would prefer the term ‘ignorance’ because, by definition, it infers the fundamental problem with ignorance is that people are unaware of how ignorant they are. Socrates apparently said that ‘the height of wisdom is to know how ignorant you are’. I came to this conclusion in high school, before I’d even heard of Socrates, whilst studying physics and became aware that real knowledge was paradoxically determinant upon knowing how much you don’t know.

In the aforementioned interview, Cox laments the ignorance and misinformation peddled on hot-button topics like climate change and child vaccinations, where real science is dismissed in favour of so-called populous movements. In other words, popular opinion can override scientific evidence in polls, including election polls.

He argues that ‘education’ is the key and is required to counter the ‘propaganda’ of anti-science proponents. It was at that point that I realised that one person’s education is another person’s propaganda, and, for most people, which is which is determined more by their political leanings than their comprehension of the subject at hand. I know from personal experience that you can’t educate someone about a subject if they don’t want to be educated.

The debate with Malcolm Roberts is very revealing. Even when Cox provided data produced by NASA, Roberts claimed it’s been ‘contaminated’. Roberts, along with virtually all climate-change deniers (in Australia) believes that all the data, produced by climate scientists from all over the world, is the product of a global conspiracy. The point is that, for them, any dissemination of said data is ‘propaganda’ and any dissemination of information that challenges human attributed climate change is ‘education’. The significant point in all this is, that no matter the authority, or the source, or the quality of the data, if it disagrees with their point of view, it’s wrong and can’t be countenanced under any circumstance. Roberts repeatedly ended all his assertions with the phrase: ‘and that’s a fact’.

That you have a populist politician challenging an internationally recognised scientist on a scientific topic on a televised science special is an indication of how puerile and imbecilic this debate has become. Roberts, by the way, was elected on just 70 personal votes, which is an indictment of our federal electoral system.

Roberts repeatedly referenced Richard Feynman, who was arguably the greatest and most popular physicist in the post-Einstein era, as if Feynman would support his contention. Cox never called him out on that but I would have. Roberts knew that he could get away with it only because Feynman is no longer with us. The idea that Feynman would support climate change deniers is laughable at best and perverse at worst.

This so-called debate happened just after Brexit and before Trump’s election, but it’s symptomatic of the current world we live in, where people with ‘alternative facts’ are listened to, given time on national television and treated with the same credibility as people who have spent their lives in the service of science.

Cox makes the point (as I have done) in the NZ interview that we (in the West) live in a world that is a product of the enlightenment and a consequence of the greatest scientific discoveries to date. No one who uses a smart phone or a computer or a TV knows the first thing about quantum mechanics (unless they’re a physicist like Cox) yet none of those ‘devices’ would exist without its discovery a hundred years ago. My point is that people (like Roberts) spruik their ignorance as if they have an authority over science whilst using the devices, technology and infrastructure that science has provided them.

Past, Future, Present are all in the mind

In the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 124, February / March 2018) I read a review of a book, Experiencing Time by Simon Prosser, ‘a lecturer in philosophy at St Andrews University,’ (Scotland, presumably). The reviewer was Heather Dyke, who ‘has taught philosophy at Otago, NZ and at the London School of  Economics’.

I haven’t read Prosser’s book, but I was particularly taken by this quote (albeit out of context): "…if no physical system can detect the passage of time, then neither can the human mind". Basically (according to Dyke), Prosser rejects what he calls ‘A-Theory’ that past, present and future is how time manifests itself and, what’s more, is dynamic in as much as past, present and future keep changing all the time (my italics). ‘B-Theory’ simply states that events are temporally related – some events precede other events but there is ‘no objective distinction between past, present and future, and that time is not dynamic’ (Prosser’s position). I can’t do Prosser justice, but I can use my own philosophical position to critique what Dyke presented.

Prosser came up with a thought experiment, which Dyke only partly expounds upon: “a physical device that could detect whether or not time was passing, and thus tell whether or not A-Theory was true”. According to Dyke, Prosser contends that his detector, which uses ‘light... [to] illuminate when it detects the passage of time’, can’t distinguish between A-Theory and B-Theory, because ‘it will illuminate’ in both cases. This apparently leads him to the conclusion that I quoted above: if time can’t be detected by his ‘device’ then ‘neither can the human mind’.

My own position is that both A-Theory and B-Theory are correct, because B-Theory is just A-Theory without consciousness. Consciousness is the 'time-passing detector' that Prosser claims can’t exist. Consciousness is the only phenomenon that exists in a continuous present, as Erwin Schrodinger pointed out in his prescient book, What is Life?. Schrodinger doesn’t claim that this is a unique attribute of consciousness, but I do. I contend that everything else in the Universe either exists in the past or the future. Only consciousness surfs a wave of time which we experience as a constant now. That is why the concepts of past, present and future have no reference without consciousness; and, on that point, Prosser and I might even agree.

I’ve written a few posts on time, and in one I quoted William Lawrence  Bragg:

Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves. The advancing sieve of time coagulates waves into particles at the moment ‘now’.

I’m the only person I know who believes that quantum mechanics and classical physics are complementary rather than different versions of the same reality. Schrodinger’s equation is fundamentally a description of a wave function that only exists in Hilbert space, which theoretically can have up to infinite dimensions. Schrodinger’s equation has been superseded by QED (quantum electrodynamics) but the wave function and its phase change with respect to time and the Born mechanism to convert it into probabilities in the ‘real world’ (not Hilbert space) still apply. Also there is no time in Hilbert space, so ‘time’ in the famous time dependent Schrodinger equation can only exist in the classical physics world.

It is for all these reasons that I argue that they are different worlds that happen to interface at what’s called the ‘decoherence’ of the wave function, when the Schrodinger equation no longer applies. That’s right: Schrodinger’s equation only applies in Hilbert space, not the real world, even though time in the real world determines the phase of the wave function.

But I believe Lawrence Bragg (as distinct from his father, William Henry Bragg) provided a clue. Basically, it all makes sense to me if quantum mechanics is the future and classical physics is the past. The Born rule, that gives us the probability of an ‘event’ occurring in the real world (in the future), is mathematically equivalent to running Schrodinger’s equation both forward and backward in time – a point made by Schrodinger himself. Superposition makes perfect sense in Hilbert space if time doesn’t exist. Feynman’s path integral method assumes all paths are possible but most of them cancel each other out and we are left with the most probable path. He demonstrates this most efficaciously when he explains mirror reflection using quantum mechanics (as expounded in his book, QED).

For a photon of light, time is zero, and light is arguably the most commonly known quantum phenomenon that we witness all the time. We know that light has a finite velocity, otherwise, as someone pointed out (Caspar Henderson in A New Map of Wonders), everything would happen at once. A photon of light could literally see the entire life of the universe in its lifetime, which is zero from its perspective. Light is effectively in the future until it interacts with matter, as Bragg inferred.

Einstein discovered, mathematically, as opposed to empirically, that time is fluid, which means it passes at different rates depending on the observer. It’s gravity that ultimately determines the rate of time, because a particle (any particle) in free fall follows maximum relativistic time (as expounded by Feynman in another book, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces). Any deviation from free fall means that time will slow down, and that’s Einstein’s theories of relativity (both of them) in a nutshell.

Now, you may think that if time ‘flows’ at different rates in different locations then they must all have different ‘nows’ but there is no logical reason for that. Quantum entanglement suggests that now can exist across the Universe, even though Einstein himself never accepted that possibility.

In fact, Einstein argued that the now that we all experience is totally subjective – there is no objective now. I think that the finite age of the Universe, along with quantum entanglement, suggests that he was wrong, but others will work that out in the future, one way or another.

But the now that everyone experiences is a consequence of consciousness, because only consciousness surfs on a constant now.


Addendum 1: Loop quantum gravity theorist, Carlo Rovelli, has defined ‘now’ as the 'edge of the big bang', and that is as good a definition of an 'objective now' as you will find. An objective now can be translated or frozen in time like when you take a photograph or the background cosmic radiation, which is 380,000 years after the big bang (or thereabouts). In other words, objective ‘nows’ are relational as opposed to the present which becomes the past as soon as it arrives, except to sentient creatures like us.

Addendum 2: Roger Penrose, whose comprehension and discussion of quantum mechanics makes my ruminations appear simplistic, uses a metaphor of a mermaid sitting between the sea and the land to represent the relationship between QM and classical physics. He consistently talks about QM in 3 phases: U, R and C. U is the evolution of the wave function (described by Schrodinger’s equation in Hilbert Space). R is the 'decoherence' of the wave function, usually in the form of a measurement or observation. And C is classical physics, or the real world, where the detection takes place. U, R and C represent a sequence, which is consistent with my thesis that, relationally, QM is the future and classical physics is the past.

Addendum 3: Carlo Rovelli (refer Addendum 1) has said that ‘at a fundamental level, time disappears’, which is a well known mathematical conundrum in quantum cosmology (refer Paul Davies in The Goldilocks Enigma). My point would be that if you were looking into the future, you’d expect time to disappear.

My Heroes

Most people have heroes – usually sporting heroes, sometimes war heroes and sometimes political heroes. Well, I have heroes of science and philosophy.

Probably my earliest hero was Albert Einstein. To give a bit of backstory, in my preteens I had already taken an interest in science, but really it was zoology and animals of any description. People (relatives) used to give me books on animals all the time and I spent a lot of time drawing pictures of them as well as reading about them. But one day, and I can remember it vividly, as in where I was (not at home) and who gave it to me, I was given a book on The Atom. I was somewhere between 10 and 12, so it coincided roughly with when I started high school and it set the direction of my inquiring mind for ever.

So when I was 15 or 16, my mind was ripe when I saw a documentary on Albert Einstein on our black and white TV, probably produced by the BBC. I was smitten not only by the man’s genius but also his eccentricities and his obvious disregard for what people thought of his appearance. For example, he didn't wear socks. I also admired his courage for his pacifist stance, even though he famously wrote a letter to Roosevelt advocating the development of an atomic bomb before Germany did. His life was full of contradictions and paradoxes. He was a Jew yet agnostic, he was a pacifist yet came up with the famous equation that allows nuclear fission to occur, and his theories of relativity are paradoxes incarnate: time and space can shrink if you travel fast enough. I remember thinking all these things from watching that programme. And I can remember for the first time someone explaining that Einstein deduced that gravity wasn’t a force but a curve in spacetime. I found that so outlandish that it took many years (decades) before I properly understood it.

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, an exposition of his general theory of relativity, which I took mostly from Richard Feynman’s excellent book, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. Einstein got some things wrong but that does not diminish the man’s stature. Having said that, I think he had a better understanding of quantum mechanics than people give him credit for, and one should remember that he coined the term ‘photon’ to explain the photo-electric effect, which is purely a quantum phenomenon. But I think he was wrong to believe that the world is totally deterministic with no room for free will.

Regarding his famous theories of relativity: the special theory and the general theory; I would argue that you can’t have one without the other. In fact, I’ve long contended (though others may differ) that the paradoxes inherent in the special theory of relativity can only be resolved with the general theory. From my perspective, I found it necessary to come to grips with the general theory before the special theory, even though Einstein published them in the reverse order with a 10 year gap in between.

Of course, heroes have heroes of their own, and Einstein’s heroes were Newton, Maxwell and Faraday; all of whom occupied my mind in my early years learning about physics.

In that golden age of physics, as it’s often called, there were many luminaries: Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Louis de Broglie, Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born. These are the best known involved in the emerging field of quantum mechanics, which also included Einstein. Out of these, I would give special mention to Erwin Schrodinger, not just because of his eponymous equation but because his mind ranged outside his field into biology and the Hindu text, the Vedas (of which I know nothing). In particular, he wrote a short tome called What is Life? which includes a chapter on the mind.

Schrodinger’s equation is all the more remarkable because it was suppositional. As Feynman once said: ‘It can’t be derived from anything we know.’ Yet it's been called 'the most important equation in all of mathematical physics' by John Barrow (amongst others) because it give us the energy levels of electrons in matter, which gives us all of chemistry. The wave function which lies at the heart of Schrodinger's equation and QED (Feynman’s own integral path method of QM) is an enigma in itself. It exists in Hilbert space, an abstract domain of possibly infinite dimensions and it’s disputable whether it has a physical significance or is just a convenient mathematical fiction. It effectively underpins everything we can see and touch, but not gravity apparently. Richard Elwes in his book, Maths 1001, says that ‘The Schrodinger equation is not limited to the wave functions of individual particles, but…  potentially the wave function of the entire universe.’

Alan Turing is a hero of mine, whose life was cut short because he was prosecuted (and persecuted) for being homosexual, yet he was one of the greatest minds, not only of the 20th Century, but in the history of science. He’s most famously known for his pivotal role in deciphering the German enigma code during WW2. The not-so-recent movie (2014), The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, was a travesty in my view, which is not a reflection on Cumberbatch but the producers and writers of the film.

Alan Turing was first a logician and he came up with the concept of the modern computer as a thought experiment to solve a mathematical conundrum, called the ‘halting problem’. Basically he proved that a machine (computer) could not solve algorithmically if a particular problem could be solved by the computer or not. To give an example: the Riemann hypothesis, which states that all complex roots (zeros) of the Zeta function are of the form ½ + ib. I’ve explained this in more detail elsewhere, but it is the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics since 1859, when Riemann proposed it as a method for determining the number of prime numbers up to any given Real number.

The point is that these zeros can be calculated on a computer, and have been in to the trillions, but of course they can’t be computed to infinity unless you have an infinite amount of time. What Turing proved generally (not just for Riemann’s hypothesis) is that you can’t determine in advance if the computer will stop or not. Obviously, if the computer stops the hypothesis is false.

So I would select these 3 as my 20th Century heroes. Now this is purely subjective and therefore I feel compelled to give reasons or criteria for my choices. A hero is someone who inspires you and to whom you may feel an affinity or someone you aspire to emulate. All these men had faults, though Turing, ironically, was possibly the least egotistical of them and the most respectful to the opposite sex. He was quite open about his homosexuality at a time when it was considered a psychiatric illness and a criminal activity. All 3 of them were geniuses beyond question, and they all impacted the 20th Century in ways that most of us are unaware of.

Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin are heroes because they challenged orthodoxy and are still under siege, one might say, by certain elements of the Christian church. It’s what’s been discovered in the 150 years since their time that both illuminates their theories and uncovers even greater mysteries, which is the nature of science that not only includes evolutionary biology but cosmology and quantum mechanics. Science is constantly creating new frontiers by overcoming existing ones. The difference with evolution is that it challenges long held religious tenets. Quantum mechanics is far more weird and counter-intuitive than evolution but no one denies it because it doesn’t challenge the premise that ‘man’ was made in God’s image.

Wallace and Darwin were very respectful of each other, but what I liked about Wallace, in particular, was that he was more of an amateur, an outsider, than Darwin was, but drew the same conclusions. Both men travelled to ‘exotic’ locations (including Australia, it has to be said) and discovered fauna and flora that led them to a theory of evolution by natural selection. We know that there is more to it than that, and it’s not totally resolved as many would have you believe, but I still call evolution a ‘fact’, based on the simple expediency that everything that’s been discovered since their time, that has proved them right, could just as readily have proved them wrong.

I would like to include this quote from Alfred Wallace, which I lifted from Tim Flannery’s book, The Weather Makers (about climate change):

It is among those nations that claim to be the most civilised, those that profess to be guided by a knowledge of laws of nature, those that most glory in the advance of science, that we find the greatest apathy, the greatest recklessness, in continually rendering impure this all-important necessity of life… (from Man’s Place in the Universe, 1903).

It makes me want to read his entire treatise.

As far as mathematicians go, I would include Euler as well as Riemann, whom I’ve already mentioned. Euler’s famous ‘identity’, which I’ve written about elsewhere, is arguably the most famous formula in mathematics and Feynman called it ‘the most remarkable formula in math’ when he discovered it for himself just a month before his 15th birthday. Yes, Feynman was a genius in his own right too. The number e, which is the base of the natural logarithm and gives the rate of compound interest if it’s done continuously, and is the most famous transcendental number after π, was named after Euler and is called Euler’s constant. Euler, by the way is pronounced ‘oiler’. Euler is acknowledged as the most prolific mathematician ever, but his eponymous equation which gives us his famous ‘identity’ is key to Schrodinger’s wave equation, so they are linked.

Riemann’s life was relatively short, but not only did he give us the Riemann Hypothesis, which seems to find its way into innumerable branches of mathematics, he also gave us non-Euclidean geometry which lies at the heart of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, so they are linked as well.

Special mentions need to go to Fermat and Gauss, who is called the greatest mathematician ever and was a mentor to Riemann. Fermat is best known for his famous ‘last theorem’ finally resolved by Andrew Wiles 357 years later. But he’s also known for his work on refraction (of light through glass and water) and his ‘least action’ principle which had a profound influence on the aforementioned Feynman. In fact, it’s Feynman’s employment of the least action principle to explain how gravity works that unlocked the secret to Einstein’s general theory of relativity (for me). Feynman also used this principle in his QED (quantum electrodynamics) and it’s called a Lagrangian, mathematically.

I could keep on going but I’m going to stop with the ancient Greeks, specifically Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These are all connected, because Socrates was a teacher to Plato and Plato was a teacher to Aristotle, whilst Plato’s famous ‘Academy’ was set up using Pythagoras’s quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Aristotle, famously, was teacher to Alexander the Great but also influenced science and philosophy up until the renaissance.

About 3 decades ago I saw a documentary on Pythagoras and Plato which was an epiphany for me and started me on the path to becoming a self-declared mathematical Platonist, which has only strengthened with time. And this leads me in a strange time warp way to Roger Penrose, who is arguably the only living person I might declare a hero, because this is something I believe we share. Penrose is a bit of an iconoclast and I seem to like that in my philosophers. I don’t agree with everything he believes but no one does, or should, when it comes to philosophy. I don’t believe in gurus in any school or forum. Penrose is just as prominent in mathematics as he is in physics and he is a true philosopher. I would put Paul Davies in this category as well, whom I admire and write about often. But Penrose’s 3 worlds philosophy is one that I’ve adopted as my own and I must therefore give him due recognition. And from that perspective, I think Penrose would acknowledge his debt to Pythagoras and Plato.

I wrote a recent post (just prior to Christmas) on Socrates, whom I called ‘the first philosopher’, which I admit is a bit of a stretch depending on many parameters, not least how one defines philosophy. But to put it in perspective, I described philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, because I like to believe that’s what I do. But if anything, I would aspire to be a modern ‘Socratic’ philosopher in that I would like to make people think outside their usual bounds, because I think that’s what Socrates did and it got him into serious trouble because he got young people, in particular, to challenge the status quo.

We live in a time when we are very divided politically and I think it’s more important than ever to learn about opposing views. As a philosopher, you can’t deconstruct your opponents’ arguments if you haven’t read them or heard them. Every weekend I buy 2 newspapers – one that ostensibly represents the political left and one that ostensibly represents the political right. Strange as it may seem, I find I read more of the right-leaning paper than its counterpart, because I want to know what people who have opposing views to mine are thinking and arguing.

At the head of my blog, right from its inception, I wrote a little aphorism which I believe sums up philosophy as it should be. I never expect to change people’s beliefs to mine but I do expect to make them think. I would like to think that’s what Socrates did.

Ursula K Le Guin - 21 October 1929 to 22 January 2018

I need to say something about Ursula Le Guin, as she was an inspiration to a generation of writers of fantasy and science fiction, including nonentities like yours truly and celebrated award-winning masters of their art like Neil Gaiman, who presented her with a Life Time Achievement Award at the 2014 American National Book Awards.

Ursula Le Guin was something of an oddity in that she was a famously successful author in the fantasy and sci-fi genre when it was dominated by male authors, well before J.K. Rowling came on the scene.

Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are possibly her best known works along with the Earthsea quartet, which is my personal favourite.

Below is the speech by Neil Gaiman, who describes her influence on his own writing, and Ursula's 'thank you' speech, where she laments the state of publishing and its corrosive effect on artistic freedom, as she sees it.

It is fair to say that she had an influence on my own writing, and perhaps I am lucky to have avoided the corporate publishing machine, if they have the influence over one's creative work as she infers.

I like this quote attributed to her:
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Science, humanities and politics

I was reading recently in New Scientist (20 Jan., 2018) about the divide between humanities and science, which most of us don’t even think about. In an unrelated article in The Weekend Australian Review (6-7 Jan., 2018) there was a review of a biography by Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, whose subject is arguably the greatest polymath known to Western civilisation, and who clearly straddled that divide with consummate ease. One suspects that said divide didn’t really exist in Leonardo’s day and one wonders what changed.

Specialisation is one answer, but it’s not sufficient I would suggest. When trying to think of a more modern example, Isaac Asimov came to mind, though being a Sci-Fi writer myself, that’s not surprising. As well as being a very prolific writer (more than 500 books) he was professor of biochemistry at Boston University.

I’m no Asimov in either field, yet to some extent I believe I straddle this so-called divide without excelling in either science or arts. I can remember reading A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson, which was an extraordinary compiled history of the 20th Century that focused on the ideas and the people who produced them rather than the politics or the many conflicts that we tend to associate with that century. The reason I mention this outstanding and well written tome is that I was struck by Watson’s ability to discuss art and science with equal erudition and acumen. Watson, from memory, was more of a journalist than a scholar, but this diverse scholasticism, for want of a better phrase, I thought a most unusual trait in the modern world.

As anyone who reads this blog has probably deduced, my primary ambition as a youth was to become a physicist. As someone who can look back over many decades of life, I’m not especially disappointed that I didn’t realise that ambition. My other youthful ambition was to become a writer of fiction and once again I’m not especially disappointed that I didn’t succeed. I can’t complain as I was able to make a decent living in the engineering and construction industry in a non-technical capacity. It allowed me to work on diverse projects and interact with very clever people on a professional level.

But this post is not about me, even though I’m trying to understand why I don’t perceive this divide (in quite the same way others do) that clearly delineates our society. We have technical people who make all the stuff we take for granted and then we have artistic people who make all the stuff that entertains us, which is so ubiquitous we tend to take that for granted as well. Of course, I haven’t mentioned the legions of sportspeople who become our heroes in whatever country we live in. They don’t fit into the categories of humanities and science yet they dominate our consciousness when they take to the field.

The other point that can’t be ignored is the politicisation of both humanities and science in the modern world. Artists are often, but not always, associated with left wing politics. People are often unaware that there is a genetic disposition to our political inclinations. I’m unusual in my family for leaning to the left, but I’m also unusual in having artistic proclivities that I inherited from my mother’s side. Artists have often in the past been associated with a bohemian lifestyle but also with being more open and tolerant of difference. One should remember that homosexuals have long been accepted in theatre in a way they weren’t in society at large, even when it was criminalised.

This is not to say that all artists are left wing, as they clearly aren’t, but it’s interesting that the left side of politics seems to be more generous towards the arts (at least in Australia) than their oppositional counterparts. But politics doesn’t explain the humanities science divide. Science has become politicised recently with the issue of climate change. According to the political right, climate change is a conspiracy and fraudulent propaganda by scientists to keep themselves in jobs. This came to a head in 2016 in Australia when, under a Turnbull Liberal government (still in office), a prominent, world-wide respected climatologist at CSIRO (John Church) was sacked and his department eviscerated on the excuse that the Paris Accord had found the answer to climate change and no more research was necessary – we needed solutions not more research. It should be pointed out that, subjected to international outrage, the sackings were reduced from over 100 to more like 30, but John Church still lost his job. This, in spite of the fact that “CSIRO has long led the world in modelling Southern Hemisphere climate.” (Peter Boyer, Independent Australia, 20 May 2016).

What I like to point out is that the politicisation of climate change is largely by non-scientists and not scientists. As far as most scientists are concerned science itself is largely politically neutral. Now I know many people will dispute this very viewpoint because science is generally seen as a tool to provide technological solutions which are to the benefit of society at large. And one might qualify that by specifying Western society, though Asia is also adopting technologies at an accelerated rate. In other words, science is politically driven to the extent that politicians decide what technologies would benefit us most. And I agree that, as far as most politicians are concerned, science is simply a tool in the service of economics.

But my point is that, contrary to the polemic of right wing politicians, all climatologists are not left wing political conspirators. Scientists studying climate change could be of any political persuasion. As far as they are concerned nature doesn’t have a political agenda, only humans do.

To take another couple of examples where the politics is on the opposite side yet equally anti-science. Genetically engineered crops are demonised by many people on the political left, who conflate science and technology with corporate greed. Likewise anti-vaccination activists are also associated with the political left. What all these anti-science proponents have in common is their collective ignorance of science. They all see science as a conspiratorial propaganda machine whilst never considering the role science has played in giving them the historically unprecedented lifestyle that they take for granted.

I’ve never talked about my job (what I do for a living) on this blog before, but I’m going to because it’s relevant in an oblique way. I’m a project planner on generally very high tech, complex manufacturing and infrastructure projects. There are 2 parts to my job: planning for the future (in the context of the project); and predicting the future. It should be obvious that you can’t do one without the other. I like to think I’m good at my job because over a period of decades I’ve become better at predicting the future in that particular context; it’s a combination of science and experience. Of course, my predictions are not always well received but I’ve found that integrity is more valuable in the long term than acquiescence.

The relevance of this professional vanity to the subject at hand is that science is very good at predicting natural events and this is the specific nature of the issue of climate change. The process of democracy, which we see as underpinning both our governments and our societies at large, effectively undermines scientific predictions when they are negative. Politicians know that it’s suicide at the polls to say anything negative which is why they only do so when it’s already happened.

To return to the New Scientist article that initiated this meditation, it’s actually a book review (Being Ecological by Timothy Morton) reviewed by Ben Collyer (which I haven’t read). According to Morton, as related by Collyer, it’s the divide between humanities and science that is part of the problem in that people are ignorant of the science that’s telling us the damage we are doing on a global scale. Collyer also reviews Our Oldest Task: Making Sense of Our Place in Nature by Eric T Freyfogle (not read by me either) and Collyer intermingles them in his discussion. Basically, since the emergence of agriculture and the dominant religions we see ourselves as separate from nature. This is a point that Jeremy Lent also makes in The Patterning Instinct (which I have read).

We call this the Anthropocene era and we are increasingly insulating ourselves from the natural world though technology, which I find a paradox. Why a paradox? Because technology is born out of science, and science, by definition and in practice, is the study of the natural world in all its manifestations. We are on an economically driven treadmill that delegates science to technological inventions whose prime purpose is to feed consumerism by promising us lives of unprecedented affluence. This is explored in recent books, Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari (which I recently reviewed) and Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman (which I’ve read but not reviewed). I would argue that we are making the wrong types of sacrifices in order to secure our future. A future that ignores the rest of nature or is premised on the unacknowledged belief that we are independent of nature cannot be sustained indefinitely. The collapse of civilisations in the past are testament to this folly.

Why is there something rather than nothing (in 400 words)

This is another ‘Question of the Month’ from Philosophy Now (Issue 123, December 2017 / January 2018). My 8^th submission, with 6 from 7 previously published. I think this is my best yet, so I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t get a guernsey. It depends on the other submissions – after all, it’s a competition and they only select 12 or less.

I’ve written on this topic before in a more lengthy post, but enforced brevity and succinctness sharpens one’s focus.



This is arguably the most fundamental question in philosophy. I once heard a respected philosopher (in a debate) say it was the ‘wrong question’, without proffering a ‘right question’. I thought this was a cop-out, not to mention a not-so-subtle evasion. But there are two major aspects to this question, and most attempted answers only address one. We inhabit a universe we believe to be around 14 billion years old, and proto-human consciousness only existed about 6 million years ago, with homo sapiens arriving on the scene only very recently – roughly 200,000 years ago. But here’s the thing: without a conscious entity to perceive the Universe, there might as well be nothing.

Einstein famously said: “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible.” Many scientists, if not most, believe that the Universe and our status within it is a freak accident. Paul Davies in his erudite book, The Goldilocks Enigma, calls this interpretation, the ‘absurd universe’. The standard scientific answer to this enigma is that there are a multitude, possibly an infinite number of universes. If this is the case, then there are an infinite number of you and me. The multiverse hypothesis says that all possibilities are equally valid, which doesn’t explain anything, except to say that the freak accident of our existence can only be understood within an endless sea of all possible existences.

A number of physicists and cosmologists have pointed out that there are constants pertaining to fundamental physical laws that permit complex life forms to evolve. Even small variances in these numbers, either up or down, could have made the Universe lifeless. And as cosmologist, John Barrow, has pointed out, the Universe needs to be of the mind-boggling scale we observe to allow time for complex life - meaning us - to evolve. In light of these deductions, Brandon Carter coined and defined two anthropic principles. The weak anthropic principle says that only a universe that contains observers can be observed (which is a tautology). The strong anthropic principle says that only a universe that permits observers to emerge can exist. To be self-realised, a universe requires consciousness, otherwise it’s effectively non-existent; in the same way that a lost manuscript by Shakespeare would be non-existent.



Postscript: I must say that I find it a touch ironic that the most popular 'scientific' answer to this question is that there is an infinite amount of everything. Which may be right, yet we may never know.

Addendum: This was published in Issue 125, April/May 2018 of Philosophy Now. To give due credit, they did some useful edits (to the sequence of presentation rather than the content), most of which I've adopted.