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What are the chances of that revisited

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An updated post from September 2015In the book I was writing when this post was written ( Dice World ) I considered the relationship of the arrow of time to entropy, the measure of the disorder in a system that comes out of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy can be calculated by looking at the number of different ways to arrange the components that make up a system. The more ways there are to arrange them, the greater the entropy.

As an example of why this is the case, I was talking about the letters that go together to make up that book, and the very specific arrangement of them required to be that actual book. Assuming that there will be about 500,000 characters including spaces in the book by the time it's finished, then there are 500,000! ways of arranging those characters. That's 500,000 factorial, which is 500,000x499,999x499,998x499,997... - rather a big number.

It's not practical to calculate the number exactly, but there are approximation techniques, and if the large factorial online calculator I found (no longer available in 2025) is correct, then 500,000! is around 1.022801584 x 102632341 - or to put it another way, around 1 with 2,632,341 zeros after it. That's a big number. By comparison there is just one way to arrange the letters to make my book*. So by producing the book I have vastly reduced the entropy. 
This seems to run counter to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy in a closed  should stay the same or increase. But the clue is that get out clause, 'closed system'. The book isn't a closed system - the arrangement of the letters has come out of my head as a result of the consumption by my brain of a fair amount of energy. And it's that energy that makes the reduction in entropy possible.
Good stuff, but it shows that we shouldn't expect a room full of monkeys to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare - or my book - any time soon.
* This is only true if you consider each letter 'a' to be different from each other letter 'a' - imagine, for instance, each letter has a serial number. In that case it is literally true. In reality I could make what appears to be exactly the same book but swap all the letter 'a's with other letter 'a's and it would read exactly the same. And of course the same applies to every other letter. But there are still vastly fewer ways to organize those letters to spell out the same book than there are of producing any pattern whatsoever.
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Fiends in High Places - D. C. Farmer ***

As a big fan of UK-based urban fantasy, I'm always on the lookout for something new: Fiends in High Places promised to deliver that difficult combination of urban fantasy and humour. It has some engaging points - but on the whole doesn't quite make it.

In D. C. Farmer's world there is a small establishment that tries to operate as an immigration control for fae - creatures from other intersecting realities, often with magical abilities. The central character Matt Danmor is thrust into this unseen world when he witnesses an attempt to sacrifice one of those in control of immigration and gradually discovers that he is, himself, not just an ordinary person on the street (after falling in love with the would-be sacrifice's niece).

Unfortunately, the humour is heavy handed. At one point, for example, our hero (accompanied by a sweary talking vulture) travels to an alternate world where shops include Bloops (the apothecary), Harpy Nix, Herods, Starstrucks, Mage & Septres and Dependablehams. A certain amount of groan-inducing humour is tolerable, but it's ladled on way too heavily. This wouldn't be so bad, but there's also far too much description and inner monologue with very little happening - and the first few chapters are leaden in the slowness with which our hero gradually comes to accept what's happening.

This was by no means the worst book of its kind I have read, but it could have been so much better with sharper humour and a less introspection.

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The BBC: after the licence fee ***

It is somehow appropriate that I read this as as result of listening to a podcast where two of the contributors debated whether the BBC was biased. The book stresses both the need for the Beeb to change in the face of a changing media landscape, what that change should be, and how the BBC should be funded.

Like most books comprising a whole list of essays from different contributors there is inevitably both conflict and overlap. And a handful of the contributions were dull corporate speak. Nonetheless there was plenty of genuinely engaging content for anyone who wants the BBC to exist but realises it needs fundamental change.

It was certainly interesting to see how the same problems could result in very different suggested solutions as pros and cons were discussed of subscription and taxation, hybrid or otherwise, and even some genuinely original suggestions like building a BBC AI that would act as the interface to its material. The only major irritation I had as an older person who only watches streamed TV was the tendency to label all older viewers as incapable of moving away from the old TV channels.

As someone who favours subscription for the non-core aspects of the Beeb) - the likes of Strictly, The Traitors and the latest Love Island clone as well as mainstream drama - I do also find it tedious when we see arguments that subscription would be impossible to implement before the late 2030s because not everyone has the internet. Not everyone has a TV aerial (or even a signal) - I’m sorry, but this is a non-argument. We could and should have partial subscription by next year.

If you too care about a better future BBC, it’s worth a read.

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Can scientists speak freely in public?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist who has primarily moved into science communication. I've personally found her helpful (if sometimes critical of popular science writers) and good at highlighting where the science community needs to think more about exactly what they are doing, and whether it is science at all. 
To be balanced, Sabine is vigorous in her commoditisation of her communication. She started with a simple blog (which I think is the best thing she's done, because I don't like watching videos), but now she runs a heavy-duty commercial operation. This is not in itself a bad thing, but I have seen it suggested she is intentionally controversial, as that gets your videos more views. From my viewpoint as a more traditional science communicator, I'm all in favour of anything getting the message of science across and think she's a very useful addition to the field.

In a video entitled I can't believe this really happened (which has already received over 14,000 comments on YouTube) Sabine tells us that in an earlier episode* she judged a physicist's work to be '100 per cent bullshit'. Let's be honest, this isn't polite. It's not how we expect academic discourse to be presented. But this was not an academic forum, it was a YouTube video. The physicist requested Sabine take the video down: when she didn't, he complained to various academics and, according to Sabine, as a result she is 'no longer affiliated with the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy.' Effectively she lost her academic position.

Sabine makes an entirely valid point on the nature of some aspects of theoretical physics: that it is pseudo-science and hasn't followed the scientific method for decades. This is very much the argument made in her excellent book Lost in Math, where she argues persuasively that far too much theoretical physics is, instead, playing around with mathematics that has no link to the physical world from experiment or observations. While some theoretical physicists disagree, this isn't a particularly controversial position. 

Sabine puts the reluctance to break out of the cycle of pointless research to group think. This is by no means a new viewpoint. In his 2000 book A Different Approach to Cosmology (with Burbidge and Narlikar), Fred Hoyle put forward a quasi-steady state alternative to the Big Bang. He illustrated the general attitude of cosmologists with a picture of a flock of geese, all following each other. It's how cosmology, and some aspects of theoretical physics tends to be - following the accepted line and ignoring alternatives, not from green-ink using fringe pseudoscientists, but respected scientists. Hoyle may well have been wrong in his theory, but at least he was offering a challenge. In Kuhnian terms, we definitely need a paradigm shift here.

Interestingly, Sabine mentions how often we get purely speculative headlines in the press from these kind of fields. In my book on The Multiverse (23 October) I do a news search on 'multiverse', omit all those referring to Marvel movies and science fiction, and get a list of headlines, every one of which is arguably just as much bullshit as allegedly is this paper. It's not that we shouldn't talk about multiverses - it's fine to play around with speculative ideas. It can be fun. But we shouldn't treat it as the same type of science as the scientific work that gives us new vaccines or devices based on quantum physics. Here's just a couple of those headlines:

• Aliens from a Parallel Universe May Be All Around Us – And We Don’t Even Know It, Study Suggests (Popular Mechanics) – By definition anything can be happening in a parallel universe we can’t detect, but what does it tell us?

• Could we travel to parallel universes? (Live Science) – No.

• Our reality seems compatible with a quantum multiverse (New Scientist) – It’s also compatible with invisible dragons. It doesn’t mean that either exists.

Should Sabine be so outspoken? Why not. Should she have been disaffiliated - certainly not. Should the scientist whose work she criticised have complained. No. I review a lot of books: just occasionally, an author will complain about a negative review. It's not a good move for them or for the book. The same applies to responding badly to critiques of your pet scientific theories. Grow up, science community. And listen to the criticism, even if it could have been more polite. We need science to be accepted by the public who fund it - and that means being prepared to admit when you've got things wrong.

* Sabine identifies neither the physicist nor the specific video

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The Killer Question - Janice Hallett *****

It's very rare I pause the book I'm reading because another one has come out - but when it's a new Janice Hallett I really have no choice. And it was well worth the interruption.

As we've come to expect from Hallett, the book is made up of forms of communication - in this case texts, WhatsApp group messages and emails, plus transcription of some police recordings. At first sight this is a simple crime setup. We are introduced to Sue and Mal Eastwood who are relatively new at running a pub - central to the story is their pub quiz, where we get introduced to a whole cast of characters in the regular teams before a sinister new team joins and wipes the floor with everyone else. Things are shaken up when a body is discovered nearby.

However, being Hallett, there are also some huge twists along the way. We quickly find out about links to a major kidnapping case in the past involving key characters... and things get more and more twisty from there.

As someone who write murder mysteries for fun, my starting point when reading a Hallett novel is sheer awe at the cleverness of the way she constructs the book - and that applies here in spades. It should be easy to get lost, or to lack a feeling for the characters when almost everything is down to messaging, but she pulls off making this deeply engaging. Is it her best yet as claimed on the cover? I'm not sure - but it certainly has some of the best twists, and I'd put it in the top three. Whatever, a new Hallett is a joy.

Anyone who enjoys murder mysteries and hasn't experienced one of these books is missing a trick.

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Revisiting a Bacon hunt

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An updated post from September 2015

Roger Bacon is a misty figure in the history of science. Over the years, this thirteenth century friar has been portrayed as a mystic, magician, scientist ahead of his time and second rate collector of other people's ideas. It doesn't help that he often gets confused with his unrelated (as far as we are aware) Elizabethan namesake Francis Bacon. But it is in part because of the messy way that Roger has been reported over the years (even starring in a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) that he is a fascinating subject.

My book on Bacon and his science has an intentionally provocative subtitle. I ought to make it clear that in many ways he clearly wasn't the first scientist. Apart from the impossibility of coming up with a 'first' and the argument that you couldn't have a scientist before the word was coined (a terrible argument to my mind - you might as well say there weren't dinosaurs before the word was coined), Bacon was pretty bad on most of the requirements to call someone a scientist. But he did try most of them. He emphasised the essential contribution of maths long before it was fashionable (Francis wasn't impressed with maths, for instance), Roger went on at great length about the importance of experiment, rather than relying on received wisdom, he risked his life to communicate science and he was a scourge of those who claimed to be magicians (ironic, given that he would later be regarded as one himself). Bacon was pretty bad on scientific matters, but the reason I do give him this tongue-in-cheek label is that I would expect an early person to fit a label to be bad at the role. By the time you get to Galileo and Newton they were far too polished.

But the point of this post isn't to put the case for Bacon, which was never intended to be taken too seriously. Instead it's a chance to share some photos of an attempt to track down Bacon in his main academic home, Oxford. He was in Oxford when the university was just beginning, both as a member of the university and of the Franciscan friary there. I did find a few traces of Bacon - but you might think there'd be a little more.

Admittedly he gets a lane, suitably small and near the sprawling location of the Franciscan friary, mostly now brutalist overpasses and uninspiring modern buildings. According to legend, at some point he had a study in the building that spanned Folly Bridge on the southern approach to the city. The building certainly existed, though there was no reason to link it to Bacon.

But that structure is long gone. It narrowed the bridge to a single track and was totally unsuited to modern traffic. Now the bridge is an uninspiring bit of architecture you could drive over without even realising you were on a bridge.

But surely Oxford could not fail to mark the presence of one of its very rare chances to eclipse Cambridge in the scientific field? There is indeed a plaque to Bacon in Latin and English, reflecting his one-time label of Doctor Mirabilis.

Unfortunately, the siting of the plaque could have been better for a good few years. It was on the side of a multi-storey car park, another of Oxford's delightful replacements for the friary:
However, the car park was demolished in rebuilding the attached shopping centre and for some time I had no idea where the plaque had got to. It has apparently re-appeared inside the new shopping centre as shown below:


Still, there is one place where it feels as if Bacon is being given his due. Oxford's gorgeous natural history museum contains a series of statues of scientific figures, and there, amongst the skeletons, is Roger in all his glory. Of course we've no idea what he looked like, but I think it's right that he should be remembered.

Photos by the author except current Bacon plaque location, by Stephanie Jenkins

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Is this the best of SF? Revisited

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An updated post from August 2015I was interested to note a debacle started by a dated US list of top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. We'll come back to this furore over the suggestion that many of these books were 'shockingly offensive' in a moment, but first a couple of comments about the list itself.

To me it seems a category error to conflate fantasy and science fiction - where most of their SF choices seemed sensible, I wouldn't have included over 50 per cent of the fantasy, which makes me suspect that there should be two separate lists.

If we just concentrate on the SF books, there were inevitably some ridiculous omissions. No John Wyndham, for instance (probably reflecting this being a US list). No Alfred Bester, James Blish, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth or (if you want to be more obscure) no E. F. Russell. However it wasn't a bad list overall - no one will ever agree with everything in such a collection.

So what about the moaning article in the New Statesman (pointed out to me by Niki Gamm), which berates this list? One complaint in the article is that most of the SF books are pre-1990s. I think this, to be honest, is entirely reasonable. I struggle to name more modern authors other than Banks and Stephenson who are truly great*. I do wonder if it's because a lot of the best SF is about surprising the reader with really original ideas, most of which had been played out by the 1980s.

The other complaint, the one that makes the books in the opinion of the article's author 'shockingly offensive' is that a lot of them appear sexist. I'm sorry, but to complain about this is revisionist nonsense. You can't apply the standards of the day to the past. You might as well take offence at the sexism, racism and anti-semitism in Dickens and Shakespeare. I'm afraid it shows little imagination in the reader if they can't read a book in the context of the time in which it was written.

You might as well moan that the science and technology in old science fiction is pretty well always wrong. Of course it is. And it certainly can be amusing. For instance, Blish notes that it's impossible for electronics to work near Jupiter because the gravitational pull is so strong it would crush the valves (vacuum tubes). However it would be silly to downgrade the status of a story just because it contains such an issue. It's certainly true that there are some pre-Enlightnment II books that I find it difficult to read now because science, sexism or racism issues are so badly handled - but that doesn't apply to many in that top 100 list on the SF side (I can't comment on the fantasy).

I think it's great that we don't have the same problems with sexism, racism etc. in modern writing as used to be the case. But to arbitrarily dismiss something written before attitudes changed simply because it fits with the values of the present seems a patently naive view.
* My list of good modern authors has been expanded significantly since 2015 as I've got back to reading more SF. But when I think of the top flight modern SF writers, many have only come to prominence since 2015.

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Graphics are great - but don't let them obscure the message

As a writer I have (unsurprisingly) something of a bias towards the written word. I hate getting information from videos because they are so slow at putting stuff across - when I've had to do an online course with videos, I always use the transcript instead if available and get through it in half the time. I'm just not very visually oriented. But that said, I can of course see the benefit of graphics as a way of putting across a piece of information where words can be clumsy.

When I help students and academics with their papers I always ask them to ensure that a figure, or diagram or chart adds something to the text. They should never be there simply because they feel they need one. However, when it comes to packaging it seems that graphic designers sometimes rule the roost and the result can be a mangling of the message.

Take the graphic above. We've got two boxes - one red with a slash through it. That's obviously the 'don't do this' box. And the other is blue with no slash through - obviously the 'do this instead box'. It's a visual convention. Don't flush this down the toilet, throw it into the sea instead. 

Only that's not what it means at all. The right hand box is intended to put across 'if you do what's in the red box, this is what will happen.' Because there are no words, we're in a mess, potentially confused by the visual messaging. I can see packaging design is a visual activity - but designers need to bear in mind how important words are too.

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AI turns to mind reading

When researching my book Brainjacking on the science of human use of story to inform, influence and manipulate, I came across an intriguing article in The Times. 'AI will read your mind sooner than you think' blared the headline on Rhys Blakely's piece. He describes the interpretation of signals from electrodes in the brain, processed by AI to help a disabled person be more independent, which is fascinating. But we are then told 'But what about the rest of us? Would you allow a computer direct access to your thoughts? The question isn't as far fetched as it once was.'

Hype or accurate observation?

Blakely describes an experiment at UC Berkeley where subjects were played music - with the help of AI it was possible for listeners to identify the music from processed brain signals, and even pick out some of the words.

I looked into the detail of this experiment for the book. Firstly, given that introduction, you might think this involved detecting your brain activity using some sort of cap, or even remotely. In reality, the experiment relied on electrodes being inserted into the brain. This isn't something I can imagine anyone doing voluntarily unless it was for a medical intervention (and unsurprisingly, here the electrodes were already there for medical reasons - they weren't inserted to do the experiment).

As an aside, when interviewing Mark Gomes, whose novel Age of Extinction featured workers being fitted with chips in their brains, I asked if he really thought it would be come commonplace for people to have surgically implanted chips for non-medical reasons. He replied 'Yes. Not because people want it—but because some will feel they have no choice. In wealthier countries, it’ll be sold as a lifestyle enhancement: faster cognition, seamless access, performance gains. But in poorer parts of the world, it’ll be about survival. If someone offered you a neural chip and, in return, your family could eat for six months—what would you say? That’s not science fiction. That’s economic reality.' 

I'm still not convinced - this is arguably a lot worse than selling a kidney, say, for money.

Back with the real life mind-reading experiment, I was able to access the original paper and from that the audio files produced from brain signals. Here's a challenge for you. This clip is supposed to enable you to recognise the piece of music. And this clip apparently makes  it possible to distinguish some of the lyrics. 

In all honesty, I have not been able to do either, even though I know what's the answers should be. In giving talks on Brainjacking, I've played the clips to my audiences... and no one has ever succeeded in identifying either the song or the words. (If you want to see how you did, scroll down to the bottom of the page for the correct answers.)

I am not suggesting the experimenters were in any way fraudulent, but is it really possible that they have got this right when hundreds of people have failed to come to an answer? I might not be reproducing the experiment under the lab conditions, but I think playing the clips as part of a talk, is a reasonable failed attempt to reproduce the result.

Arguably, the problem, as far as I can tell from the paper (and please don't access it yet if you intend to try the experiment as the song is identified early on), is that the experimenters did not ask even a small number of people, let alone a large sample, to perform the recognition test. Instead their recognition analysis appears to have been based on spectrographic similarities. (Apologies if I missed an actual test with people, but there is far more information on the original sources and processing than on the testing.)

Equally, it's hard not to take the way that the experiment was portrayed in the newspaper as hype. Blakely was just as capable as I was of trying out the actual sound files and seeing if the results made any sense - but there is no suggestion in his piece that there was a problem with this. I will, though, agree firmly with the last sentence of his article. 'And don't let anybody drill a hole in your head.' Certainly for non-medical reasons.

Image by Alex Shuper from Unsplash+

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Scroll down...vvvvvvvvFurther...vvvvvvvNearly there...vvvvvvv
The music was Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 - included below for those not familiar with it - and the alleged recovered partial vocals were 'all', 'was' and 'just a brick'.

Appealing to Authority revisited

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An updated post from August 2015Recently I was berated on Facebook for appealing to authority. As it may not be obvious to everyone why this was a put down (as the picture makes clear it was), I thought it might be worth looking at the problem with authority in science - and why I wasn't actually falling for this failing.

Arguably the biggest issue with Ancient Greek science, an approach that spread its way through most of the medieval period, was the dependence on authority. Just as we still do in law cases, most classical natural philosophy was decided by argument rather than by experiment or analysis. If someone repeatedly won the argument on a topic they were regarded as an authority and in some cases - Aristotle is the most obvious example - considered a source of wisdom on pretty well everything as a result. Hence the infamous suggestion that women had fewer teeth than men because Aristotle said it was so, and no one bothered to check. (Actually I am sure plenty did check and found it to be wrong, but because they weren't Aristotle, they were ignored.)

This reverence for the word of Aristotle was shattered in science itself by the likes of Galileo and Newton, and thereafter it should not be good enough just to be an authority figure to be assumed correct on any topic. But it tends to still happen outside of science. A good example today of when we make a mistaken appeal to authority is when, for instance, we think that a Nobel Prize winning scientist has more weight outside their specialist field than do other people. There is no reason, for instance, to give weight to Linus Pauling's beliefs on the medical benefits of vitamin C, because it wasn't his area of expertise - but still people do.

However, this is quite different from preferring people with expertise as sources within their subject of expertise to a random person on the street. That is not an appeal to authority, it is just common sense. I'm not a scientist, I'm a writer with a very rusty physics degree, and a very slightly less rusty operational research masters. As such, I would never dream of putting forward my own theories in science. But if I want to describe a physical theory or idea, I will give more weight to the word of a well-established physicist than I would to the next person who sends me their new physics theory by email.

I get sent quite a lot of these off-the-wall physics theories. I would not use those in one of my books, except to raise an eyebrow at it. Instead I put across ideas coming from well-established physicists (if I'm writing about physics - not if I'm writing about psychology). This is not an appeal to authority, it's the only sensible thing to do as I can't possibly test out or check their theories myself. However, if I used Richard Feynman's viewpoint to provide expertise on music or Niels Bohr on literature, then I would indeed be incorrectly appealing to authority. Which would be wrong (as anyone who knows what Feynman's taste in music was would probably agree).

In the case that started this piece off, I had referenced another famous physicist George Gamow on a physics matter, so this was not the case. It's easily done, but we shouldn't confuse a flag that we are accessing expertise with an appeal to authority.
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