Winos in Command!

On my way home tonight, I encountered a road accident. Ambulances were at the scene, where an elderly pedestrian had been knocked over on London Road. There was a big dent in the windscreen of the car involved. The old man was lying in the road surrounded by paramedics. Meanwhile, his fellow winos were directing the traffic, getting the vehicles to take turns using the other side of the road. Police were nowhere to be seen. Quite some time had elapsed since the accident. I had had time to eat a chicken pie in the fish and chip shop. No coppers at all.
     Is this the PM's Big Society in action?

Drunkards of the Dosshouse

On and on they curse,

Foul spiralling rage,

Shrieking 'shut the fuck up!'

'No you shut the fuck up!'

Too slow to tire,

They scream and swear for hours,

Fuelled by demon energy.

Wild fury beyond limit,

Almost tearing their throats;

Desperate to outshout.

A bare hour since they pledged love,

Sharing with the whole street;

No volume control,

Intrusively intimate.

Now flows surging hate,

A foaming malice.

The neighbours wince

And cover young ears.

Is there no end?

Strained prayers ascend,

Yet comes no relief.

Ernest Laing and the meaning of things.

The only one of my lecturers at University who made any lasting impression was Dr Ernest Laing,a Highlander. There were a few Highlanders in the Glasgow University Dept of Natural Philosophy, mostly cold people. I didn't particularly warm to Laing, but I learnt from him, which is unusual at Uni.

     I first encountered him in person at the Staff-Student Committee. For some daft reason, I had volunteered to be First Year Rep. God knows why. I can recall only one meeting of this toothless committee. I tried to persuade the committee of some minor point, details long forgotten. Laing disagreed. I tried again, making the point a different way. Laing reiterated his counter-argument, using exactly the same words. I foolishly continued. Laing continued to repeat his refutation, calmly, logically, using exactly the same words. No matter what I said, he replied in exactly the same words over and over, like the speaking clock, until I fell silent. I have never forgotten this moment of humiliation, or his display of iron will.

     The second occasion he made an impression was at the Demonstrations Day. This was a light-hearted occasion, at which the staff and research students tried to entertain us with physics and a bit of jiggery-pokery. The research students seemed to have a thinly-veiled agenda of taking the mickey out of the staff. They had erected a huge pendulum, which is known as a Foucault pendulum after the French scientist who invented it to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. (Google is your friend). The students played a trick on the assembled profs. They asked them if they really believed in the Laws of Physics. Some poor sap said he did, and was ushered up front. The pendulum was drawn back a long way from the vertical, and the prof was stood with his nose against it. The pendulum was released. Now the laws of physics say that the pendulum can never rise quite so high again, it must progressively lose energy and amplitude of swing due to the effect of friction. So we all knew it could not touch the prof. Nevertheless, when he saw it hurtling toward his face, he leapt out of the way. How we laughed! The smart-arse graduate student then challenged the other staff members to prove they really believed in the Laws of Physics. Perhaps he didn't really want a Ph.D.

An uncomfortable silence ensued. Then Ernie stepped up. We knew he was a hard man, but I admit to being awed. He took his place. Once the pendulum was in motion, he closed his eyes! Crafty old Ernie! He stood his ground with ease. Foolishly the student accused him of cheating. He couldn't stand being robbed of his prey. Ernie calmly explained that there was no need to keep his eyes open to demonstrate that he believed in the Law of Conservation of Energy, he merely had to stand there.

     The third occasion when Ernie impressed me was at a peculiar seminar which he organised. It was given by an odd man in scruffy clothes, who produced a strange telescope of his own devising, which he said allowed him to see creatures moving about on Mars. It was of modest size, and had far too many lenses in it, of very dubious quality. It was obviously a piece of junk. The calm way in which this eccentric fellow explained his mad 'scientific discoveries' made an eerie impression on me. He seemed completely out of touch with reality, yet he did not gibber or rave, but coolly explained his ideas just like other visiting scientists had done at the weekly seminars. We waited for Ernie to explain to this man what a nutter he was. He simply said that he had no way to refute this man's ideas, but that he didn't think his research had enough in common with the work of the department for a meaningful exchange of views to take place, and wished him the best of luck. He obviously had a soft spot for the guy, who was in his own way quite heroic. It was a powerful lesson on the true meaning of science.

On the Nature of Science, and the Beginning of Things.

I have been reading with interest Stephen Hawking's book, 'A Brief History of Time'. I was surprised to see it was first published in 1988. It seems like only yesterday when everyone was reading it, except me. Now I have caught up, it seems oddly relevant.

     Is this because not much has happened since in the world of high-energy physics? He seems to think that a great breakthrough might be imminent, starring string theory. It hasn't happened, and doubters are growing. Some of Hawking's remarks suggest an ambivalence, as though he was never convinced.

    A pattern had been established in the quantum theory, where a new piece of exotic maths was developed, and immediately was the key to a great breakthrough in theoretical physics. Some may have wrongly concluded that this was an inevitability, and so string theory would unlock doors just like complex numbers and matrix algebra had done. It hasn't happened. And why should it? You have to be using the right piece of maths.

     Tragically, public understanding of science seems to be in decline, largely as a result of the mischievous efforts of a few noisy persons. The quantum theory, particularly the Uncertainty Principle, gave rise to a new, more accurate and more humble understanding of what science was. You can't measure anything about a fundamental particle without bashing it with another one, affecting its properties. The realisation that measurement was meaningless in the abstract, that it was impossible to separate the observer from the observed, made people think more clearly about what science was all about.

     Hawking neatly summarises the new understanding in the first chapter: “..a scientific theory...is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality...it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.”

     This gives a realistic and rather humble view of what science is. Yet later on he also states: “..our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”

     Isn't there a tension between these two statements? The first one reflects a widely-held understanding (originally due to Karl Popper) of what we really do when we do science. The second may be more peculiar to cosmologists.

     What Hawking doesn't discuss, is what one may call the Hamlet Effect: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” Yet this impacts what actually happens in science as much as in other walks of life, and deeply undermines the objective view expressed in my first quotation from Prof Hawking. People don't want approximate models of restricted applicability, they want to understand the fundamental workings of the universe, and the conflict between this desire and the true understanding runs throughout the book. The history of physics is replete with instances of people declaring it a finished subject, even before the atomic nucleus had been discovered! Why are they obsessed with announcing that they know everything? Ask Hamlet.

     The general public is rarely treated to a realistic view of science, rather it is presented in an absolutist fashion, with disputes and differences of emphasis suppressed. Hawking makes many references to the role of God in the text of his book, often of a tentative nature, but saying things like “this leaves little for God to do”. Yet were he to stick strictly to his definition of science, he should rather have remained silent on the subject of God altogether. How can you “make definite predictions about the results of future observations” concerning the creator of the whole universe? An entity which necessarily would have some kind of existence outside of space and time themselves? If God exists, his properties as a totality are inconceivable to the human mind, almost by definition. In order to critique a concept as a scientific theory, it needs to be well-defined, or else it lacks the qualities of a scientific theory, and hence falls outwith the ambit of science. It is the tragic vanity of some scientists that they do not want to see this, almost seeming unable to grasp the idea that many ideas are simply not a science, and that does not mean they are wrong or inferior. It is impossible to incorporate an idea into science unless it can be subjected to systematic and precise observation. Sneering at other people's unscientific notions is not a part of science, rather it is a manifestation of the Hamlet Effect. Science consists of constructing models and comparing the results of observations with them, and that is all. There is neither necessity nor possibility to incorporate everything into a scientific model.

     Hawking mentioned that a scientific model exists only in our minds. Psychology is beginning to grasp that the human mind has certain in-built patterns of thought, in much the same way that a computer operating system has a limited library of system calls, and all programs runnable on that computer are some combination of this vocabulary. Other analogous situations include the fact that all DNA is some combination of chains of four amino-acids; all written words are a combination of a limited alphabet. What if the true nature of reality cannot be adequately modelled by the limited set of routines available to the human mind? Science would perforce remain incomplete. Why should an evolutionary process comprised of chasing animals about and throwing things at them give rise to a mental process capable of understanding the fundamental laws of nature? If we can do so, isn't that a bit of a miracle?

     Will cosmologists ever really succeed in writing an accurate history of time? I am sceptical. I suspect there are fundamental limitations on what can be detected from within the Solar System. Recent improvements in space technology have revealed how tentative and fluid our knowledge is. The public has been bombarded with enthusiastic propaganda about 'dark matter', a new form of matter postulated by astronomers which gives off no detectable radiation, and does not interact with ordinary matter. A recent space-based telescope of unprecedented sensitivity revealed that huge numbers of dim stars exist that had previously not been suspected. A significant proportion of the “dark matter” was instantaneously transformed into “dim matter”. I won't be surprised if much of the rest of it progressively goes the same way. Yet surely there can be ordinary matter too dim for even the most sensitive detector? Astronomers estimates of this are based on the vaguest of theories.

     Similarly, as the Voyager space probe has reached the edge of the Solar System, it has produced surprises about the nature of the stuff that lies between the stars.

     Isn't there a degree of vanity, never mind over-optimism, in trying to take an inventory of the entire cosmos? Yet without this, cosmology is impractical. Observations of such things as the cosmic background microwave radiation will always be subjected to multi-layered theoretical interpretation. The link between theory and the directly observable is unusually tenuous in cosmology, especially as it is historical rather than contemporary in character. Its deep problems and tentative nature are rarely mentioned in popular accounts which claim that science has somehow done away with God.

     An analogy popular with physicists considers the case of a race of hyper-intelligent ants trapped on the inside of a football. Their science may well conclude that the cosmos is curved, finite and has existed only for a limited time. They may consider the possibility of something outside of it, but will have no way of imagining what it might be, never mind detecting it. Unless someone starts kicking the ball.

Slum Trains of London

I took a journey across London recently, from Stanmore in the North to Richmond-upon-Thames, aiming to arrive for 9 am, a daunting prospect. I boarded the Jubilee Line at Canon's Park. This part of the system was originally not part of the Tube, and is above ground. The electric trains and cables of the Tube are an odd sight in daylight, to those of us unaccustomed.

         I was suffering severely from hayfever, and constantly blowing my nose and sneezing, so the journey wasn't much fun, even though I got a first view of the new Wembley Stadium, which is truly spectacular. Still, the train was surprisingly fast and smooth-running, and not crowded at all. Until we reached Willesden Green. An electronic babe announced we were being held at the station “for the regulation of the train service” and gave an insincere apology. We soon found out what that meant. Hundreds of people came swarming down the steps and piled in. We had been deemed to be having too easy a time of it. Still the train did not move. “Come on, come on,” I muttered under my breath. Only when the train was jammed to bursting did it move off.

         I struggled off at West Hampstead, forcing my way through packed people, and alighted with a sense of relief. Up the steps I went, and looked for the platform for the London Overground. It was not to be seen. I enquired of a West Indian man in uniform, and he told me it was fifty yards up the street. I emerged onto a pavement as crowded as the platform had been, with heavy traffic on the road alongside. The congestion was amazing. I had naively thought West Hampstead would be like suburban Stanmore, but not at all. The hot windless June day meant that fumes lingered, and the air was humid and smelly.

         It was a pleasure to get down onto the platform, which was above ground as its name had implied. I saw a train pull in to the opposite platform. It wasn't like a Tube train at all. It was the same size and shape as a conventional train, and so I thought I might enjoy the rest of the trip.

         When my train finally arrived, I got on and was utterly disappointed. Though bigger than a Tube train, the seating arrangements were the same, with seats up the sides facing inwards, and all full. I was lucky to get to lean against an odd kind of pad on the side. There were lots of things stuck to the ceiling for people to hang onto, and an array of vertical poles. The carriage was obviously new.

         As we progressed, more and more people squeezed in. An electronic babe relentlessly exhorted us to “move up the carriage and make use of all available space.” Some of the standees were reading books and newspapers, even though it was swaying a lot. I don't know how they managed it, must be long practice. I looked out the window and was disappointed by the slow speed, a mere fraction of that of the Jubilee Line train. I was astonished to see Wembley Stadium. It seemed we hadn't gone far at all.

         Gradually it dawned on me that the unpleasant conditions were intentional. This carriage had been designed with the expectation that the majority of passengers would not get a seat. A kind of moving slum.

PS I have found an article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Overground

Some highlights from it:-
"The most recent figures released by the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR), ...showed that it had achieved 95.9% of the Public Performance Measure (PPM) target for punctuality and reliability set by the ORR. This was above the average PPM for all London and the South East railway companies."

"In the spring 2010 National Passenger Survey, conducted by Passenger Focus, London Overground received the lowest overall satisfaction rating of any UK train operating company, at 72%."

It may be that the Overground is the quickest and best way to get where you are going, in spite of the planned discomfort. My trip back in the afternoon, at a non-peak time, was comfortable, though still slow.

Giant Waves and Sea Serpents

Anecdotal ephemera are usually not the business of science. It normally deals with repeatable phenomena. This is not always understood by the public, and tragically not by all scientists, some of whom have been tempted to make themselves foolish by publicly dismissing things such as monster waves and huge sea serpents, not to mention alien spacecraft and the fairies.

Technological breakthroughs have allowed some ephemera to be brought under meaningful study. For generations, old seadogs have been trying to tell scientists of the danger of ships being overwhelmed by giant waves. They have been pooh-poohed by sneering savants, whose theories, based on the normal probability distribution, told them that such waves were vanishingly rare. The surprising rate of ships disappearing was attributed to human error and crime.

A recent U.S. orbital satellite, equipped with powerful radar to measure wave sizes, has revealed that the seamen were right. Dangerously large waves are hundreds of times more common than theory had predicted. As the physicists scramble to repair their theories, the naval architects are left scratching their heads. The risk to shipping is much greater than expected. If an excessively large wave comes along, the ship is supported by wave crests at bow and stern, but not in the middle. Its back breaks, and it sinks very quickly, often without distress signal or survivors.

From ancient times, seamen have told tales of  ferocious sea serpents which wrapped themselves around ships and pulled them over. Very large ocean-going fishing boats, with huge deep-sea nets, have in recent years landed giant squid. They have found a complete baby one, and the tentacle of an adult. Extrapolating from the tentacle, the adult is much greater in total length than a blue whale. These creatures usually stay at great depth, and rarely venture to the surface to grapple with ships. When they have done so, the survivors have been mocked, and told to stop talking nonsense. Yet we now know they were telling the truth. The tentacles would seem snake-like to someone who couldn't see the squid's submerged body. Such attacks are now very rare, possibly because modern ocean-going ships are too big and fast for the squid to catch.

Some people claim to have seen fairies. I recently heard someone sneering at this, saying he 'preferred to take a more scientific approach'. Was he doing so? He could not have been more wrong. Science has nothing to say about fairies. How can we establish that there are no fairies in someone's garden, if we don't know how to develop a fairy detector? Fairy theory has not advanced to the point where we have the vaguest idea how to do this. The problem is more fundamental than that of the giant waves. So the whole topic remains outside the realm of science, and that is that. I myself am sceptical about fairies, and suspect that they are figments of over-active imagination. I do not pretend that my hunch on this owes anything to science. It is merely a hunch.

It's a sad fact that many confuse dogmatic scepticism with 'being scientific', their own conservative prejudices with rationality. It has held up the advance of science on many occasions.  Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, allegedly said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it".

The Queen, by God!

God save the Queen!

With every shop festooned,

She seems in not much danger.

Red, white and blue,

Will for the Euro also do,

I might suppose.

Or can't they get enough

Of Jube-jube-jubilee?

People stand for hours,

To catch the merest glimpse.

What do they see

They can't see on TV?

Somehow that's not enough,

If you can't hold out, that's tough;

A great endurance test,

The strong outstay the rest.

Two days off with pay,

So dour republic go away;

I'm pleased enough to say,

God bless Her Majesty!