To the End of the Universe

I like to remind myself and others how little I know. It’s one of the reasons I like Quora, where I get to occasionally interact with people who know considerably more than me. One such person is Mark John Fernee, a physicist at the University of Queensland. I’ve learned a lot of science from an approach based on scepticism. For example, I was sceptical about relativity theory: that clocks could really slowly down and why did they slow down for one observer but not another, as demonstrated in the famous twin paradox. In fact, it’s nature’s paradoxes that provide the incentive to try and understand it to the extent that one can. 

 

Another example is quantum mechanics. For a long time, I followed David Bohm’s approach, which was really an attempt to bring QM back down to Earth so-to-speak. I believe that both Schrodinger and Einstein also believed in a ‘hidden-variables’ approach.

 

I finally gave this up when I concluded that QM and classical physics obey different rules: superposition and entanglement are not part of classical physics, either experimentally or mathematically. And I found that special relativity only made sense in the context of general relativity (which I discuss in more detail below).

 

And then you have the combination of special relativity with QM, which, from a mathematical perspective, allows anti-particles to exist. As Fernee points out, because an anti-particle can be represented mathematically by a particle going backwards in time, it ensures that charge is conserved by time’s arrow. In other words, you can turn an electron into a positron, or vice versa, by reversing time, which is why it’s never observed.

 

One of the paradoxes I now struggle with is that, according to special relativity, you can have different ‘nows’ in different parts of the universe. This is why most, if not all physicists, argue that the universe is completely deterministic, if someone’s future can be hypothetically observed by someone else’s motion. I confess I’m very sceptical about this. What they're saying is that the ‘now’ in some other part of the Universe is changed by an observer’s motion locally. Fernee quotes Roger Penrose in response to a question: can we theoretically teleport to some other location in the Universe instantaneously, like we see in science-fiction movies? According to Fernee (quoting Penrose), if you could and then teleport back, you might arrive before you left, because a random movement by you could change the ‘now’ in that distant part of the universe into your past. I’m assuming this can be demonstrated mathematically; it’s a consequence of simultaneity changing depending on the observer, according to special relativity. 

 

I’ve discussed this in other posts. I like to point out that, where there’s a causal relationship, the sequence of events can’t be changed, dependent on an observer’s perspective. Which makes me wonder: does a sequence change, dependent on an observer’s perspective, when they’re not causal? Is it possible that there is a sequence of events independent of any observer?

 

And this leads to another paradox that is hardly ever addressed which is that, despite this proliferation of ‘nows’, dependent on observers’ perspectives, we have an ‘age of the Universe’. I actually raised this with Fernee in a dialogue I had with him, and he referenced a paper by Tamara M. Davis and Charles H. Lineweaver at the University of New South Wales, titled, Expanding Confusion: Common Misconceptions of Cosmological Horizons and the Superluminal Expansion of the Universe. I’ve lost the link, and I can no longer even find the post on Quora, but I downloaded the paper, which is 24 pages long, not including the references.

 

Of course, it’s an academic paper, yet I found it easier to follow and understand than I might have expected. Which is not to say I have a full grasp of it, but I feel I can relay some of its most pertinent points. The paper is dated 13 November 2013, so it seems apt I’m writing about it on 13 Nov, 2021. Firstly, the cosmological model of the Universe the authors discuss, is referred to as ΛCDM cosmology (Lambda-CDM cosmology), where CDM is an acronym for Cold Dark Matter. Lambda (Λ) is the cosmological constant that gives us ‘dark energy’, so the model includes both dark energy and dark matter.

 

As the title suggests, the authors discuss misconceptions found in the literature concerning the horizon problem, and at the end they provide a list of examples, including one by Richard Feynman (1995), 

 

“It makes no sense to worry about the possibility of galaxies receding from us faster than light, whatever that means, since they would never be observable by hypothesis.” 

 

And this one by Paul Davies (1978): 

 

“. . . galaxies several billion light years away seem to be increasing their separation from us at nearly the speed of light. As we probe still farther into space the redshift grows without limit, and the galaxies seem to fade out and become black. When the speed of recession reaches the speed of light we cannot see them at all, for no light can reach us from the region beyond which the expansion is faster than light itself. This limit is called our horizon in space, and separates the regions of the universe of which we can know from the regions beyond about which no information is available, however powerful the instruments we use.” 

 

What the authors expound upon in the main body of their text is that there are, in effect, a number of horizons, which makes these statements erroneous at best. To be fair to both Feynman and Davies, the ΛCDM model of the Universe wasn’t known at the time. Dark energy wasn’t officially ‘discovered’ until 1998. Davis and Lineweaver provide diagrams to show these various horizons, which I can’t duplicate here, and if I did, I’d have trouble explicating them. But basically, there is a particle horizon, which is the limit of the observable universe, the Hubble sphere, which is the boundary of the expanding universe (where it equals c) and the event horizon. (To quote the authors: Our event horizon is our past light cone at the end of time, t = ∞ in this case.) There is a logical tendency to think they should all be the same thing, but they’re not, as the authors spend a good portion of their 24 pages expounding upon. To quote again:

 

The particle horizon at any particular time is a sphere around us whose radius equals the distance to the most distant object we can see... Our effective particle horizon is the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

 

Whereas:

 

Hubble sphere is defined to be the distance beyond which the recession velocity exceeds the speed of light, DHS = c/H. As we will see, the Hubble sphere is not an horizon. Redshift does not go to infinity for objects on our Hubble sphere (in general) and for many cosmological models we can see beyond it... The ratio of ∼ 3/1 is the ratio between the radius of the observable universe and the age of the universe, 46 Glyr/13.5 Gyr.

 

What you have to get your head around is that the universe is dynamic, and given the time it takes for light to reach us from the edge of the Universe, both the edge and the objects (we’re observing) have moved on, quite literally. This means we can observe objects over the horizon so-to-speak. But it’s even more complex than that, because the Hubble sphere, which is expanding, can overtake photons that were emitted beyond the horizon but are travelling towards us. According to the authors, we can observe objects that are ‘now’ travelling at superluminal speeds relative to us. 

 

This is how the authors explain it:

 

Light that superluminally receding objects emit propagates towards us with a local peculiar velocity of c, but since the recession velocity at that distance is greater than c, the total velocity of the light is away from us. However, since the radius of the Hubble sphere increases with time, some photons that were initially in a superluminally receding region later find themselves in a subluminally receding region. They can therefore approach us and eventually reach us. The objects that emitted the photons however, have moved to larger distances and so are still receding superluminally. Thus we can observe objects that are receding faster than the speed of light. 

 

One of the most illuminating aspects of their dissertation, for me, was that one needs to use a general relativistic (GR) derivation of the Doppler redshift and not a special relativistic (SR) derivation, which is usually used. They show graphically that the SR and GR derivations diverge, especially for further distances. On the same graph, they show how a non-relativistic Doppler shift, which would be ‘tired light’ (authors’ term) is actually a horizonal line, so nowhere near. The graph, of course, shows these curves against observations of super novae. As they explain it:

 

The general relativistic interpretation of the expansion interprets cosmological redshifts as an indication of velocity since the proper distance between comoving objects increases. However, the velocity is due to the rate of expansion of space, not movement through space, and therefore cannot be calculated with the special relativistic Doppler shift formula. 

 

What they are saying is that there is a distinction between the movement of the objects in space and the movement of space itself. For me, this ends the debate about whether ‘space’ is an entity or just the distance between objects. As much as I admire and respect Viktor T Toth, I’ve always had a problem with his argument that space ‘doesn’t expand’, but only the objects ‘move’ thus creating more space between them. The Hubble sphere, as I understand it, is where space equals c.

 

Later in their paper, Davis and Lineweaver describe how they derived their equation for the GR redshift.

 

For the observed time dilation of supernovae we have to take into account an extra time dilation factor that occurs because the distance to the emitter (and thus the distance light has to propagate to reach us) is increasing.

 

In other words, in calculating the redshift of a ‘comoving galaxy’, they also have to take into account the constant expansion of space in the photon’s journey to the observer. 

 

....the peculiar velocity of a photon, Rχ ̇, is c. Since the velocity of light through comoving coordinates is not constant (χ ̇ = c/R), to calculate comoving distance we cannot simply multiply the speed of light through comoving space by time. We have to integrate over this changing comoving speed of light for the duration of propagation. Thus, the comoving coordinate of a comoving object that emitted the light we now see at time t is attained by integrating.  (χ ̇is the time dependent expansion of space and R is the radial distance). 

 

Notice that in contrast to special relativity, the redshift does not indicate the velocity, it indicates the distance. That is, the redshift tells us not the velocity of the emitter, but where the emitter sits (at rest locally) in the coordinates of the universe. 

 

In other words, when we integrate χ ̇, we get χ, which is distance. The authors provide another equation for determining the velocity.

 

Now, one of the obvious aspects of this whole exercise is that they are calculating a redshift across space that changes over time, so what does time mean in this context?

 

This is how the authors explain it, just before their conclusion:

 

Throughout this paper we have used proper time, t, as the temporal measure. This is the time that appears in the RW metric and the Friedmann equations. This is a convenient time measure because it is the proper time of comoving observers. Moreover, the homogeneity of the universe is dependent on this choice of time coordinate — if any other time coordinate were chosen (that is not a trivial multiple of t) the density of the universe would be distance dependent. Time can be defined differently, for example to make the SR Doppler shift formula correctly calculate recession velocities from observed redshifts (Page, 1993). However, to do this we would have to sacrifice the homogeneity of the universe and the synchronous proper time of comoving objects.

 

I find it interesting that they adopt a ‘proper time’ for the whole universe. It makes one wonder what ‘now’ really means.

 

Footnote 1: I want to point out that in their acknowledgements, Davis and Lineweaver reference Brian Schmidt, who received a joint Nobel Prize for his work in empirically confirming dark energy, or the cosmological constant (Λ).

Footnote 2: You can download the paper here.

Addendum: This is a video by someone (who knows more than me) and doesn’t give his name. I posted a video by him before, regarding the question: Is gravity a force? His videos on Penrose tiling and the Feigenbaum constant are among the best.

 

In this video, he refutes my claim, arguing that space doesn’t expand. He makes one very compelling point that if space expanded so would atoms and so would we. Victor T Toth makes the exact same point, and I’d have to agree. The size of all atoms is determined by h (Planck's constant), which doesn't change with the expansion of the Universe. I might add that this presenter and Toth disagree on whether gravity is a force or not, so physicists don’t always agree, even in the same field, like cosmology.

 

In the video, he argues that there are 3 types of Doppler shift and contends that they are actually all the same. Most intriguing was the thought experiment that someone in ‘free fall’ wouldn’t see the Doppler shift that another observer would. In other words, it’s observer dependent.

 

But there is a spacetime metric or manifold, which forms the basis of general relativity theory (GR) and this can warp and curve (according to said theory). In fact, there is a phenomenon called ‘frame dragging’, where spacetime is dragged around by a spinning black hole. Light is always c in reference to this spacetime manifold. So when ‘space’ reaches the speed of light at the horizon relative to us, light is still c in that reference frame, even though it is expanding away from us at c or more. Space can travel faster than light, even though massive particles can’t, which is why ‘inflation’, proposed at the birth of the Universe, is possible.

 

Getting back to the Doppler shift the authors cite in their paper, they use a GR Doppler shift, which I believe isn’t covered in the video.

Reality and our perception of it

The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 146, Oct/Nov 2021) has as its theme, ‘Reality’. The cover depicts Alice falling down the rabbit hole, with the notated question, What’s Really Real? I was motivated (inspired is the wrong word) to write a letter to the Editor, after reading an essay by Paul Griffiths, titled, Against Direct Realism. According to the footnote at the end of the article: Dr Paul H. Griffiths has a background in physics and engineering, and a longstanding interest in the philosophy and science of perception. I have a background in engineering and an interest in philosophy and science (physics in particular), but there the similarity ends.

 

Griffiths gives an historical account, mostly last century, concerning problems and points of view on ‘direct realism’ and ‘indirect realism’, using terms like ‘disjunctivism’ and ‘representationalism’, making me wonder if all of philosophy can be reduced to a collection of isms. To be fair to Griffiths, he’s referencing what others have written on this topic, and how it’s led to various schools of thought. I took the easy way out and didn’t address any of that directly, nor reference any of his many citations. Instead, I simply gave my interpretation of the subject based on what I’ve learned from the science, and then provided my own philosophical twist.

 

I’ve covered a lot of this before when I wrote an essay on Kant. Griffiths doesn’t mention Kant, but arguably that’s where this debate began, when he argued that we can never know the ‘thing-in-itself’, but only a perception of it. Just to address that point, I’ve argued that the thing-in-itself varies depending on the scale one observes it at. It also depends on things like what wavelength radiation you might use to probe it. 

 

But, in the context of direct realism or indirect realism, various creatures perceive reality in different ways, which I allude to in my 400 word response. If I was to try and put myself in one of Griffith’s categories, I expect I’m an ‘indirect realist’ because I believe in an independent reality and that my ‘perception’ of it is unique to my species, meaning other species would perceive it differently, either because they have different senses or the senses they have can perceive other parts of the spectrum to mine. For example, some insects and birds can see in the ultra-violet range, and we can see some colours that other primates can’t see.

 

However, I never mention those terms, or even Kant, in my missive to the Editor. I do, however, mention the significance of space and time, both to reality, and our perception of it. Here is my response:

 

 

Paul Griffith’s essay titled, Against Direct Realism (Issue 146, October/November 2021) discusses both the philosophy and science of ‘perception’, within the last century in particular. There are two parts to this topic: an objective reality and our ability to perceive it. One is obviously dependent on the other, and they need to be addressed in that order.

 

The first part is whether there is an objective reality at all. Donald Hoffman claims that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’, and that there are only ‘conscious agents’. This is similar to the argument that we live in a simulation. There is, of course, one situation where this happens, and that’s when we are dreaming. Our brains create a simulacrum of reality in our minds, which we can not only see but sometimes feel. We’re only aware that it’s not reality when we wake up.

 

There is a major difference between this dream state and ‘real life’ and that is that reality can be fatal – it can kill you. This is key to understanding both aspects of this question. It’s not contentious that our brains have evolved the remarkable ability to model this reality, and that is true in other creatures as well, yet we perceive different things, colour being the most obvious example, which only occurs in some creature’s mind. Birds can see in almost 300 degree vision, and bats and dolphins probably ‘see’ in echo-location, which we can’t even imagine. Not only that, but time passes at different rates for different creatures, which we can mimic with time-lapse or slow-motion cinematography. 

 

But here’s the thing: all these ‘means’ of perception are about keeping us and all these creatures alive. Therefore, the model in our minds must match the external reality with some degree of accuracy, yet it does even better than that, because the model even appears to be external to our heads. What’s more, the model predicts the future, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to catch a ball thrown to you. *

 

There is one core attribute of both reality and its perception that is rarely discussed, and that is space and time. We live in a universe with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, so the models our brains create need to reflect that. The reason we can’t imagine a higher dimensional space, even though we can represent it mathematically, is because we don’t live in one.

 

 

·      * There is a 120 millisecond delay between the action and the perception, and your brain compensates for it.

Natural laws; a misnomer?

I’ve referenced Raymond Tallis before, and I have to say up front that I have a lot of respect for his obvious erudition and the breadth of his intellectual discourse. He is an author and regular columnist in Philosophy Now, with a background in neuroscience. I always read his column, because he’s erudite and provocative. In Issue 144 (June/July 2021) he wrote an essay titled, The Laws of Nature. He didn’t use the term ‘misnomer’ anywhere, but that was the gist of his argument.

Tallis and I have a fundamental disagreement concerning the philosophy of science; and physics, in particular. This will become obvious as I expound on his article. He starts by pointing out how the word ‘law’ has theological connotations, as well as cultural ones. It’s a word normally associated with humanmade rules or edicts, which are necessary just so we can live together. An obvious one is what side of the road to drive on, otherwise we would have carnage and road-rage would be the least of our worries.

 

Science evolved out of a religious epistemology (I know that’s an oxymoron), but the pioneers of physics, like Galileo, Kepler and Newton, were all religious people and, from their perspective, they were uncovering ‘God’s laws’. This even extended to Einstein, who often referred to ‘God’ in a metaphorical sense, and saw himself and his contemporary physicists as uncovering the ‘Old One’s Secrets’. Even Stephen Hawking, a self-declared atheist, coined the phrase, ‘The Mind of God’.

 

So I agree with Tallis on this point that the use of the word, law, in this context, is misleading and carries the baggage of an earlier time, going back to the ancient Greeks (and other cultures) that human affairs were contingent on the whims of the Gods.

 

So Tallis searched around for an alternative term, and came up with ‘habits’, whilst admitting that it’s not ideal and that ‘it will have to punch above its usual weight’. But I think Tallis chose the word because, in human terms, ‘habit’ means something we acquire out of familiarity, and may or may not be the best method, or approach, to a specific situation. The idea that nature follows ‘habits’ implies there is no rhyme or reason behind their efficacy or apparent success. Even the word, 'success', is loaded, yet I think it subverts his point, because they are ‘successful’ in the sense that they ultimately produced a lifeform that can cognise them (more on that below).

 

Tallis makes the point that in nature ‘things just happen’, and the ‘laws’ are our attempt to ‘explain’ them. But, extending this line of thought, he suggests that actually we invent laws to ‘describe’ what nature does, which is why ‘habits’ is a better term.

 

The expectation of finding an explanation of nature’s regularity is the result of extrapolating to the whole of things the belief that every individual thing happens for a reason – that nothing ‘just happens’.

 

The word ‘regularity’ is apt and is one that physicists often use, because that is what we have learned about nature on all scales, and it is why it is predictable to the degree that it is. There is, of course, a missing element in all this, and that is the role of mathematics. I’m not surprised that Tallis doesn’t mention the word (even once as best I can recall), because he believes that physicists have a tendency to ‘mistake the map for the territory’ when they invoke mathematics as having a pivotal role in our epistemology. In another essay, he once argued that the only reason mathematics has a place in physics is because we need to measure things, or quantify them, in order to make predictions that can be verified. However, the very laws (or habits) that are the subject of his essay, are completely dependent on mathematics to be comprehensible at all.

 

In closing, Tallis makes a very good argument: there is a gap between the ‘habits’ that nature follows and the humanmade ‘laws’ in our science that we use to describe these habits. He makes the point that we are forever trying to close this gap as we discover more about nature’s habits. And he’s right, because it appears that no matter how much we learn, there are always more of nature’s secrets to decipher. Every theory we’ve devised thus far has limits and we’ve even reached a point where our theory for the very large appears irreconcilable (mathematically) with our theory for the very small. But the point I’d make is that mathematics not only gives us our best description of reality, it also delineates the limitations of any particular theory. Consequently, I contend there will always be a gap.

 

Physicists say that the best we can do is provide a model and that model is always mathematical. Hawking made this point in his book, The Grand Design. So the model describes the laws, or habits, to the extent that we understand them at the time, and that it gets updated as we learn more.

 

Tallis mentions the well-known example of Newton’s ‘laws’ being surpassed by Einstein’s. But here’s the thing: the ‘inverse square law’ still applies and that’s not surprising, as it’s dependent on the Universe existing in 3 spatial dimensions. So we not only have a ‘law’ that carries over, but we have an explanation for it. But here’s another thing: the 3 spatial dimensions in combination with the single dimension of time is probably the only combination of dimensions that would allow for a universe to be habitable. Cosmologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, John D Barrow, expounds on this in some detail in his book, The Constants of Nature. (As a side note, planets can only remain in stable orbits over astronomical time periods in 3 dimensions of space.) So where I depart philosophically from Tallis is that there are fundamental parameters in the Universe’s very structure that determine the consequences of something existing that can understand that structure. 

 

Nevertheless, I agree with Tallis to the extent that I think the term, 'law', is a misnomer, and I think a better word is ‘principle’. If one goes back to Einstein’s theory of gravity replacing Newton’s, it introduces a fundamental principle called the 'principle of least action', which I think was pointed out by Emmy Noether, not Einstein. As it turns out, the principle of least action also ‘explains’ or ‘describes’ optical refraction, as well as forming the basis of Richard Feynman’s path integral method for QED (quantum electrodynamics). The principle of least action, naturally, has a mathematical formulation called the Lagrangian.

 

Speaking of Emmy Noether, she derived a famous mathematical theorem (called Noether’s theorem) that is a fundamental ‘principle’ in physics, describing the intrinsic relationship between symmetries and conservation laws. It’s hard to avoid the term, 'law', in this context because it appears to be truly fundamental based on everything we know.

 

So, is this a case of confusing the map with the terrain? Maybe. The Universe doesn’t exist in numbers – it exists as a process constrained by critical parameters, all of which can only be deciphered by mathematics. To give just one example: Planck’s constant, h, determines the size of atoms which form the basis of everything you see and touch.

Other relevant posts: the-lagrangian-possibly-most.html

                                   the-universes-natural-units_9.html

Monty Hall Paradox explained

This is a well known problem based on a 1960s US television game show called Let’s Make a Deal. How closely it resembles that particular show, I don’t know, but it’s not relevant, because it’s easy to imagine. The show’s host’s stage-name was Monty Hall, hence the name of the puzzle.

 

In 1975, an American statistician and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Steve Selvin, published a short article on the Monty Hall Paradox in The American Statistician, which he saw as a curiosity for a very select group who would appreciate its quirkiness and counter-intuitive answer. He received some criticism, which he easily countered.

 

Another totally unrelated (weekly) periodical, Parade magazine, with a circulation in the tens of millions, had a column called Ask Marilyn, who specialised in solving mathematical puzzles, brain teasers and logical conundrums sent to her by readers. She was Marilyn vos Savant, and entered the Guinness Book of Records in the 1980s as the woman with the highest recorded IQ (185). I obtained all this information from Jim Al-Khalili’s book, Paradox; The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics.

 

Someone sent Marilyn the Monty Hall puzzle and she came up with the same counter-intuitive answer as Selvin, but she created an uproar and was ridiculed by mathematicians and academics across the country. Al-Khalili publishes a sample of the responses, at least one of which borders on misogynistic. Notwithstanding, she gave a more comprehensive exposition in a later issue of Parade, emphasising a couple of points I’ll come to later.

 

Now, when I first came across this puzzle, I, like many others, couldn’t understand how she could possibly be right. Let me explain.

 

Imagine a game show where there is just a contestant and the host, and there are 3 doors. Behind one of the doors is the key to a brand-new car, and behind the other 2 doors are goats (pictures of goats). The host asks the contestant to select a door. After they’ve made their selection, the host opens one of the other 2 doors revealing a goat. Then he makes an offer to the contestant, saying they can change their mind and choose the other door if they wish. In the original scenario, the host offers the contestant money to change their mind, upping the stakes.

 

Now, if you were a contestant, you might think the host is trying to trick you out of winning the car (assuming the host knows where the car is). But, since you don’t know where the car is, you now have a 1 in 2 chance of winning the car, whereas before you had a 1 in 3 chance. So changing doors won’t make any difference to your odds.

 

But both Selvin and vos Savant argued that if you change doors you double your chances. How can that be?

 

I found a solution on the internet by the Institute of Mathematics, giving a detail history and a solution using Bayes’ Theorem, which is difficult to follow if you’re not familiar with it. The post also provides an exposition listing 5 assumptions. In common with Al-Khalili, the author (Clive Rix from the University of Leicester), shows how the problem is similar to one posed by Martin Gardner, who had a regular column in Scientific American, involving 3 prisoners, one of whom would be pardoned. I won’t go into it, but you can look it up, if you’re interested, by following the link I provided.

 

What’s important is that there are 2 assumptions that change everything. And I didn’t appreciate this until I read Al-Khalili’s account. Nevertheless, I found it necessary to come up with my own solution.

 

The 2 key assumptions are that the host knows which door hides the car, and the host never picks the car.

 

So I will describe 3 scenarios:

 

1)    The assumptions don’t apply.

2)    We apply assumption No1.

3)    We apply assumptions 1 & 2.

 

In all 3 scenarios, the contestant chooses first.

 

In scenario 1: the contestant has a 1 in 3 chance of selecting the car. If the contest is run a number of times (say, 100 or so), the contestant will choose the car 1/3 of the times, and the host will choose the car 1/3 of the time, and 1/3 of the time it’s not chosen by either of them.

 

Scenario 2: the host knows where the car is, but he lets the contestant choose first. In 1/3 of cases the contestant chooses the car, but now in 2/3 of cases, the host can choose the car.

 

Scenario 3: the host knows where the car is and never chooses the car. Again, the contestant chooses first and has a 1 in 3 chance of winning. But the host knows where the car is, and in 1/3 of cases it's like scenario 1. However, in 2/3 of cases he chooses the door which doesn’t have the car, so the car must be behind the other door. Therefore, if the contestant changes doors they double their chances from 1 in 3 to 2 in 3.

Will the 21st Century be a turning point in human history?

 The short answer, I believe, is Yes, but whether it will be positive or negative is up for conjecture. If history is any guide, I’d have to say things don’t look particularly promising. There have been a number of things I’ve read recently, and viewed on TV, from various sources that have made me reflect on this, and it’s hard to know where to start. 

Maybe I’ll start with something I wrote on Facebook recently, which was the seed for this rumination.

 

Humanity has always had both the capacity and inclination for self-destruction. It is our Achilles heel. One can't help but think that the 21st Century is our turning point, one way or the other.

 

There are lots of examples, the Roman Empire being one of the most cited, but also the ancient Egyptians and the Mayans, not to mention Easter Island. Curiously, I’ve just started watching Foundation, on Apple TV, based on Isaac Asimov’s famous books, which is premised on the fall of a future galactic empire founded and run by humanity.

 

But there is another TV series by the BBC called Capital, very contemporary, which I’ve also just started watching, and seems to encapsulate our current situation. I’ve only watched one episode, which centres on a single street in England, but is rendered as a microcosm of global politics and social dilemmas. 

There is the corporate middle manager whose ambition and greed is only outdone by his wife, who mentally spends his money before he’s even earned it. There is the refugee from Zimbabwe who is working illegally, therefore exploited by an ‘agent’, while she faces imminent deportation even though she fears death on arrival. Something that refugees in Australia can readily identify with. There is the Pakistani corner shopkeeper, who is a diligent neighbour, with 2 sons, one who has become religiously conservative and the other who has started, but not completed, 3 university degrees (I can identify with that). He’s the target of a stalker, covertly photographing him and his family. Like everyone else in the street, he’s receiving postcards with the ominous warning, We Want What You Have. In other words, there is an undercurrent of class envy which could fester into something more sinister. Another of the recipients is an elderly woman, whose son and daughter have all but abandoned her, and who is facing terminal illness, but she’s inherited the sin of living in a capitally inflated home.

 

Also, on TV recently, I watched a programme on (Australia’s) ABC 4 Corners, called The Pandora Papers, which is about tax havens for the ultra wealthy and powerful, and really identified an ‘alternative universe’, as one commentator described it, that the rest of us are largely unaware of. The programme showed how, in Australia, unidentified foreign investors are driving the price of homes beyond the reach of ordinary citizens who live here. There have been other programmes about corruption in the food industry in Europe, which goes beyond the borders of Europe.

 

I’ve read other stories in newspapers, and what they all have in common is inequality. Curiously, Philosophy Now (Issue 145 Aug/Sep 2021) had as its theme, existentialism, but included an article called The Stoic’s Lacuna by Alex Richardson, a History teacher at Croydon, UK. Its relevance to this topic was a reference to the Greek stoic, Epictetus, who said, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” In other words, accept one’s lot in life and stop whinging.

 

Richardson’s essay extends into the modern day by referencing Katherine Birbalsingh (given the sobriquet, Britain’s strictest headmistress), Dr Michael Sugrue and Jordan Peterson as ‘modern day stoics’, who all advocate in varying degrees, that inequality is the natural order of things. Birbalsingh may be the most liberal of them, when she says, “Of course the world is run by an old boys’ network, and of course it’s not fair.” I admit I know nothing about her outside Richardson’s essay, but he puts her in the same sentence, therefore category, as former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, who effectively argues that a person’s day-to-day struggle with paying off a mortgage and generally making ends meet is completely disconnected from ‘political management of the economy’. 

 

Peterson is someone I’m more familiar with, who effectively argues that inequality is an evolutionary consequence of the survival of the fittest, not only in the natural world but in human affairs. People, especially males, get to the top of the heap, where they are especially attractive to females, who copulate and subsequently procreate with them to ensure the survival of both parties’ genes. As it happens, this exact scenario is played out by one of the families represented in the aforementioned TV show, Capital.

 

Richardson believes that Peterson is a ‘follower’ of the ‘Pareto Principle’, expressed in the Bible (both Mark and Matthew): “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as Richardson puts it, “wealth and power naturally accumulate in the hands of a few exceptional individuals at the top” (my emphasis).

 

But, according to Richardson, Dr Michael Sugrue is the most blunt and dispassionate, when he said in a popular lecture on Aurelius that ‘Stoicism teaches us that the social structure is “not our problem” and that, “if God, or nature, or whatever is controlling the world makes you a slave then be a good slave.”'

 

The common thread in all these admonitions, is that they are made by people who see themselves among the privileged elite, who would never contemplate that what they advocate for others could befall them.

 

I think inequality drives injustice, corruption and an upside down economy. To give an example, Italy. It’s well known that there is both social and wealth disparity between the north of Italy, which is the capital of supercars and high fashion, and the south of Italy, which is the home of agriculture and the country’s food bowl. But this dichotomy is worldwide. The production of food, which is essential, is one of the lowest paid occupations in the world.

 

Now, let’s add another factor, called climate change. I don’t find it altogether anomalous that climate change has a dichotomous effect on humanity. It’s the consequence of all the ‘progress’ we’ve made since the industrial revolution, and it’s a juggernaut that can’t be stopped. Yet it will affect the poorer nations first. As the Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, recently said, ‘Pacific Islanders don’t want to be the canary in the coalmine for climate change’. If one looks at Italy again, one could argue that supercars have contributed to climate change and the agriculture sector will bear the consequences.

 

I recently did an online course provided by New Scientist, called Greener Living, which was ostensibly about climate change, its causes and its effects on future generations. According to the people running the course, it will require enormous changes to the way we live, including what we eat.

 

In the 25-26 September issue of the Weekend Australian Magazine (a Murdoch publication, btw) there was an interview with 33 year old Anika Molesworth, a scientist who also runs a farm near Broken Hill in NSW. She says that modelling for 2050 (based on nothing changing) would see 30% decrease in rainfall and 2 months of days above 40C, which would make the property effectively inoperable. But she also claims we have the means at our disposal to change this outcome, and she’s a founding director of Farmers for Climate Action. She’s frustrated by the missed opportunities in our country for renewable energy; we have a government that is stubbornly resistant to changes to the status quo.

 

I made an allusion before to the well known meme of evolution as the survival of the fittest, but much of evolution has occurred through symbiosis. Your body is an entire ecosystem to organisms that thrive in order for you to live, largely without your cognisance. I know from a working lifetime in engineering that successful projects are the result of people collaborating and working together. Environments, including our political environments, where people are antagonistic and work against each other, achieve little except blame and finger-pointing. A perfect example of that is the current political climate in America.

 

If we don’t want to self-destruct, we need to work together, punish corruption that erodes the wealth and agency of ordinary people, adopt sustainable economic models, not dependent on infinite consumerism and keeping people in debt for their entire productive lives. If we stick to the mantra that inequality is the ‘natural order’, we will fail and it will ultimately be catastrophic, worse than the Roman Empire, the Egyptian empire or the Mayan empire, because it will be global.

Tips on writing sex scenes

 Yes, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, or tongue in someone else’s cheek to borrow a well-worn witticism. This arose from reading an interview by Benjamin Law (Aussie writer) of Pulitzer-prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who briefly discussed writing sex scenes. He gives this advice: 

Not being utterly male-centred, if you happen to be a man or masculine. Not being too vulgar. Don’t be too florid. And humour always helps.

 

Many years ago (over a decade) I attended a writers’ convention, where there are always a lot of panel discussions, and there was one on ‘How to write sex scenes’, which was appropriately entertaining and unsurprisingly well attended.

 

Even longer ago, when I attempted to write my first novel, with utterly no experience or tuition, just blindly diving in the deep end, there was the possibility of a sex scene and I chickened out. The entire opus was terrible, but over about 3 years and 3 drafts I taught myself to write. I sent it to a scrip-assessor, who was honest and unflattering. But one of the things I remember is that she criticised me for avoiding the sex scene. I was determined to fix that in subsequent attempts. I still have a hard copy of that manuscript, by the way, to remind myself of how badly I can write.

 

But there are a couple of things I remember from that particular panel discussion (including a husband and wife team on the panel). Someone asked for a definition of pornography, and someone answered: the difference between erotica and pornography is that one you don’t admit to reading (or watching, as is more often the case). So, it’s totally subjective.

 

The first editor (a woman) of ELVENE, took offense at the first sex scene. I promptly sent the manuscript to 2 women friends for second and third opinions. Anyway, I think that you’ll invariably offend someone, and the only sure way to avoid that is to have all the sex happen off the page. Some writers do that, and sometimes I do it myself. Why? I think it depends on where it sits in the story, and is it really necessary to describe every sexual encounter between 2 characters, who start doing it regularly?

 

The other thing I remember from that panel is someone explaining how important it was to describe it from one of the character’s points of view. If you describe it from the POV of a ‘third party’, you risk throwing the reader out of the story. I contend that the entire story should be told from a character’s POV, though you can change characters, even within the same scene. The obvious analogy is with dialogue. You rarely change POV in dialogue, though it’s not a hard and fast rule. In other words, the reader’s perspective invariably involves speaking and listening from just one POV, as if they were in the conversation. The POV could be male or female - it’s irrelevant - but it’s usually the protagonist. I take the same approach to sex scenes. It’s risky for a man to take a woman’s POV in a sex scene, but I’ve done it many times. 

 

I often take the POV of the ‘active’ partner, and the reader learns what the other partner is experiencing second-hand so to speak. It generally means that the orgasm is described from the other partner’s perspective which makes it a lot easier. If they come in unison, I make sure the other one comes fractionally first.

 

I don’t write overlong sex scenes, because they become boring. Mine are generally a page long, including all the carryon that happens beforehand, which is not intentional, just happenstance. I wrote a review of Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel, Walkaway, a novel (full title) which has a number of heavy sex scenes which I did find boring, but that probably says more about me than the author. I’m sure there are readers who find my sex scenes ‘heavy’ and possibly boring as well. 

 

I have some rules of my own. They are an interlude yet they should always serve the story. They tell us something about the characters and they invariably have consequences, which are often positive, but not necessarily so. There is always a psychological component and my approach is that you can’t separate the psychological from the physical. They change the character and they change the dynamic of a relationship. Some of my characters appear celibate, but you find them in real life too.

 

I take the approach that fiction is a combination of fantasy and reality and the mixture varies from genre to genre and even author to author. So, in this context, the physical is fantasy and the psychological is reality.

 

One should never say ‘never’, but I couldn’t imagine writing a rape scene or someone being tortured, though I’ve seen such scenes on Scan-noir TV. However, I’ve written scenes involving sexual exploitation, to both men and women, and, in those cases, they were central to the story.

 

Lastly, I often have to tell people that I’m not in the story. I don’t describe my personal sex-life, and I expect that goes for other writers too.