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.