Brian Clegg's Blog, page 43

Review - The China Governess - Margery Allingham

I am a huge fan of Marjory Allingham's Campion books - but even so, I have to say this is probably one to avoid, unless, like me, you want to have read the entire canon. One of Allingham's late contributions, written in the 1960s four decades after the first Campion books, it lacks the joie de vivre of the earlier titles. It's over-long, and very slow - in fact it verges on the dull in places.

That's not to say it's entirely without interest, but what interest there is remains specialist. It's a sociological museum, with its stiff, emotionally retarded upper-middle class characters, who we are supposed to sympathise with, but who mostly repel. By today's standards it is also horribly un-PC about 'mental defectives'. Some readers will, I suspect, be outraged - but you do have to see this as a fascinating uncovering of just how things were in the early 60s. We tend to look back and think of the sixties as being all hippies and free love and rebellion, but we have to remember this was less than 20 years after the end of the Second World War, and the whole point of what happened in the 60s was a reaction to this establishment stiffness.

Perhaps most fascinating is the reaction of older family members to a historical black sheep in their family. Where in the current TV show Who Do You Think You Are there is a kind of horrified delight at, say, finding a murderer in the family's past, here it causes genuine pain and anger. The family's way of dealing with unpleasant things is to pretend they don't exist. Sadly, though Campion does act as a kind of operational fairy godmother to make things happen (eventually), we see very little opportunity for his usual skills - and Lugg is sadly extremely underused.

So, definitely not a book to read as an introduction to Campion - only worth going for if you do want to see just how uptight and sad the upper-middle class was in the early 1960s.

The China Governess is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

Is dark matter disappearing altogether?

A few days ago at a talk, I mentioned in passing that in a few years' time we may no longer think that dark matter exists. (In the unlikely event you've not heard of it, dark matter is a hypothetical kind of stuff that only interacts with ordinary matter through gravity, which is thought to exist because large collections of matter, such as galaxies act as if they have more matter in them than they should have.) A galactic cluster that provides more
gravitational lensing that its ordinary matter
predicts. (Image from Hubble via Wikipedia )After the talk, a handful of teenage physics enthusiasts collared me and said 'Surely you don't think dark matter doesn't exist?' After asking them not to call me Shirley, I admitted I was a dark matter sceptic. But I felt their pain. When I was their age, the steady state theory of cosmology was still an accepted challenger to the big bang, but its star was fading fast. I preferred steady state in part because it seemed to be a more elegant theory and in part because one of its originators was my teenage physics hero, the remarkable Fred Hoyle. I was genuinely upset when steady state was pushed out of consideration. Science may be objective, but it doesn't stop us from having emotional attachments. 
I'd say for the first time since it became widely acknowledged, dark matter is in danger of being replaced as the best accepted theory within a decade. There has been one challenger for a while in the form of MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics), but critics are quick to point out it doesn't explain all the phenomena ascribed to dark matter. (To be fair dark matter isn't 100 per cent either, but that's by the by.) However, there are now at least two other alternatives that explain the behaviour of large collections of matter to some degree without the need for a new type of stuff.
One suggestion is painfully simple - it takes a microscope to those innocent words in the first paragraph 'should have'. The existence of dark matter is based on guestimate of the amount of conventional matter in galaxies and other large collections of space stuff. It is, without doubt, a good guestimate, based on best current knowledge. But the reality is that the calculation has to involve estimation based in part on theory, and that leaves room for error. It only takes a small correction to make dark matter disappear. Again, there are of holes left by making this assumption, but it's a potential line of thought.
The second suggestion is a lot more sophisticated (so some theoreticians may prefer it). The concept of emergent gravity, where gravity is somewhat like thermodynamics in emerging from statistical behaviour, rather than being a true underlying fundamental force, has been put forward by some as a way of providing a mechanism to do away with dark matter. As this semi-technical article by Sabine Hossenfelder shows, there are still significant problems for this explanation, but it is without doubt another strand.
At the moment, then, nothing has knocked dark matter from its 'best accepted theory' perch. But it has never been so strongly challenged. We always need to remember that science is not about black and white, absolute fact, but establishing the best theory we can given the current evidence. Dark matter could recover from its wobble, just as the big bang did with modifications that brought it into line with current data. But there is no doubt that we exist in cosmological (and particle theory) interesting times.

Poor Pret

Image from Wikipedia I always find it amusing when the bosses of large companies demonstrate an impressive lack of understanding of market forces. A few days ago, the HR director of sandwich/coffee chain Pret a Manger told a parliamentary committee 'I would say one in 50 people who apply to our company are British', citing this as a reason they need to continue having access to cheap foreign labour. She also said that she didn't think pay was an issue, despite a starting package of around £16,000 in London, as after a few years you could earn a lot more.

Picking this apart, I've a few issues with this argument. I don't have any evidence for that 'I would say one in 50' (don't you find 'I would say' suspiciously vague?) - is it true at all? Is it only true of central London stores? Or is that a countrywide average? Without data it's impossible to say. But let's take it at face value. What the market is really saying is that the rewards aren't good enough for the job, and they can only maintain that £16,000 starting salary (resulting in £84 million profit in their results for 2015) by employing people for whom an amount it's difficult to live on in any expensive location seems a lot of money because they come from a country where that is a large pay packet (or they're doing the job for other reasons, such as learning a language).

If the supply of cheap labour dried up there's a simple solution. You put up your starting salary until you do get enough people applying. If you have to put it up so much that you don't make a profit, you don't have a viable business model. That's what market forces are about.

Companies like Pret have had it easy to date, because they operate in a 'pile it high, sell it expensive' market. Their staff costs per head are low, but they sell premium products (i.e. ones where a small increase in cost results in a considerable increase in price). The world is changing, and poor Pret feels sorry for itself. I'm afraid I can't join in the sobbing.

Learn from history, don't delete it

Colston Hall (image from Wikipedia )I'm coming towards the end of two years spending two days a week working at Bristol University. I've had a wonderful time, and have come to love this little gem of a city, getting to know it far better than I did before. One thing that has become obvious is the way that some Bristolians are torn apart by their heritage. Because this is a city that was, to some degree, built on two trades that are now abhorrent - the slave trade and tobacco.

As you go around the city, there are names you often encounter: Colston and Wills. The first refers to Edward Colston, a prominent slave trader and the Wills dynasty was behind the eponymous tobacco company, now part of Imperial Tobacco. Such is the negative feeling that there is currently
You don't make the past go away by hiding it - but you can prevent lessons being learned by doing so. History is fundamentally important: I wish it got more priority in schools. There's a reason that Auschwitz was not obliterated. The past should not be forgotten.

There is, of course, a big difference in feel between a former concentration camp and a building that apparently glorifies someone once involved in an occupation that we now despise. However, I don't think it would be right for Bristol to attempt to sanitise itself this way. It's an action driven by guilt, and guilt for something that happened in your city's past is a waste of energy. Instead, I suggest this should be turned  into something positive. We shouldn't be petitioning for Colston and Wills to be forgotten. It would be far better if the city insisted that major buildings bearing such names should be required to have a prominent, permanent exhibition explaining where the money came from, and at what cost.

That's what history is for. Not something to feel guilty about, apologise for and then attempt to erase. It should be brought out, made very visible and used to learn lessons for the future.

Why it isn't easy being green

Yes, please, if Tesla would like to give me one
(Image from Wikipedia )As someone with real concern for the environment, I am convinced that electric cars are the future, and the sooner we can get rid of petrol and diesel, the better. When I was younger, my fantasy car was an Aston Martin - now it's a Tesla.

However, as an official green heretic, I have to point out that, like almost all environmental decisions, it's a bit more complex than it first appears. We need to apply logic as well as emotion. Electric cars (and trains, for that matter) are great in terms of emissions - provided they use electricity that itself is produced in an environmentally friendly fashion. It has been pointed out that in Germany, which has an aggressive 'get rid of petrol cars by 2030' policy, there could be a resultant increase in carbon emissions.

The trouble is that Germany is pretty well incapable of being totally green in its electricity production by 2030, because of its irrational decision to close its nuclear power plants. What about wind and solar? They're coming on - but nowhere near fast enough. In fact, Germany has had to slow down its wind expansion because the existing wind supply is already proving disruptive to the grid because of its irregularity. The more you depend on wind, and to an extent solar, the greater need there is for supply that can be switched in quickly to cover troughs in generation.

As a result of the short-sightedness of their supply policy, if Germany does achieve 100 per cent electric cars by 2030 its carbon emissions will go up, due to the extra emissions from the dirty generation that will need to be used to support it.

I am not saying they should hold back on the electric vehicles - on the contrary, I hope we take a similar view of pushing the move to electric vehicles in the UK. (And reversing the terrible decision to cut short the electrification of GWR's trains before reaching Bristol Temple Meads.) But such a policy needs to go hand-in-hand with a transfer of generation to non-emitting sources - which at the moment almost certainly means having more nuclear in the mix as well as more wind and solar.

No dark ghosts

The nation's favourite TV physicist, Brian Cox, has caused a bit of a ruckus amongst those who like a good ghost. Cox has often, if incorrectly, been represented as saying, as in this letter in the i newspaper, that ghosts don't exist because the Large Hadron Collider 'hasn't found them.'

I ought to stress by the way that many headlines were misleading. The Metro , for example, led with 'The Large Hadron Collider has proved that ghosts don't exist, Brian Cox claims.' It is very difficult to prove something doesn't exist, especially ghosts. To begin with, we need to assume that ghosts are natural rather than supernatural. If the supernatural exists, physics can't help - so as a starting point we need to make this assumption. And even then, as the old saying goes, absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Thankfully, the LHC is not spending any taxpayer money on disproving the existence of ghosts. Instead, Cox was referring to a puzzle that the concept of ghosts presents. If they are natural, then they appear to be some form of insubstantial energy interacting with matter (i.e. us). This immediately rules out, for instance, the dark matter that Mr Wilson mentions in his letter, because dark matter (if it exists) only interacts with ordinary matter via gravity. We see ghosts, which means we need electromagnetic interaction. If ghosts depended on particles like those of dark matter than aren't detectable by the LHC, we also couldn't see them.

Now it's not that there aren't insubstantial energy particles that interact with matter. Photons of light fit that bill. But no existing particles (or, probably more accurately in the minds of physicists, no existing quantum fields) can somehow keep a structure together to make up an insubstantial ghost and at the same time interact with matter. So there has to be something else if ghosts are to exist. And what Cox is point out is that it's surprising that there is no evidence from the LHC supporting the existence of this new stuff. If it interacts with matter in a haunting, it should also be within the range of LHC experiments.

It's not beyond the wit of science to imagine a whole new kind of quantum field/particles that have restrictions that would prevent them appearing in LHC experiments but do allow them to do what ghosts do. Which is why we can't say that the LHC proves ghosts don't exist. However, to require such a major modification of our best model of what stuff is (the standard model of particle physics) would need strong, scientific evidence. And that simply doesn't exist.

The political correctness blues

I'm not a great fan of political correctness (PC) when it comes to some of its current excesses, such as getting all worked up about Mexican restaurants handing out sombreros. However, if there's one man who can single-handedly push me into the PC camp, it's 'journalist' Kelvin MacKenzie. I am proud to say that I have never bought a copy of the Sun newspaper, but my favourite paper, the i , has a daily 'News Matrix' section where it quotes snippets from other papers, and I came across this impressive rant from MacKenzie:

For far too long, the PC brigade have got away with it. Nothing derogatory can be said about multiculturalism, the excesses of "feminism", climate change, the poor and their responsibilities to stand on their own two feet.

I don't know where to start on that sloppy bit of writing. Firstly it's poorly written for something published in a national newspaper. It shouldn't be 'the PC brigade have' but rather 'has'. In the second sentence he misuses a list by grouping together things that simply don't fit together, such as 'the poor and their responsibilities'. But, of course, the real distaste here is for the content.

The bit that stands out is "feminism" - in inverted commas. This is aggressive punctuation, similar to the way I referred to MacKenzie as a 'journalist' in the first paragraph. In my case it was a suggestion that it isn't an appropriate label, and MacKenzie is giving feminism a kicking by using those inverted commas. However, that's just the start. While I do agree that there is a tendency to use PC to avoid sensible criticism of multiculturalism, feminism etc. it is absolutely bizarre to lump a scientific topic like climate change in with cultural movements or a group of people.

I don't think there is enough free speech in this country, and I don't think that being politically correct should ever prevent free speech - but equally, there's nothing politically correct about arguing back when people make a remark you don't agree with. By all means criticise aspects of these things (I say 'aspects' ; as I don't think you can actually make derogatory remarks about climate change, any more than you can about gravity, just about the actions we take to deal with it) - but don't call free speech 'getting away with it'.

Are cliffhanger chapters acceptable?

I'm pleased to say that I have just published the fourth in my Stephen Capel murder mysteries, A Twisted Harmony , and I've done something I never thought I would: at the end of the book, I've tagged on the first chapter of the follow-up novel An End to Innocence, which will be published in the autumn of 2017.

When I read a book and hit one of these 'bonus' chapters at the end, I tend to feel a little cheated. This is because I rarely bother to read them, so it feels like the book is shorter than it appeared to be. And the reason I don't read them is because I don't like books to leave things dangling. Inevitably, reading just the first chapter of a book leaves the reader in suspense, potentially for a long time. (It's that US habit of ending a TV series on a cliffhanger until next season.)

I made the decision to do it this time for two reasons. One is that I already really liked the way the new book was shaping up in my mind, so I wanted to get started on it straight away. And the second is that the new book continues straight on from A Twisted Harmony without any break.

So, in essence, A Twisted Harmony has two endings. You can stop reading at the conventional end of the book, where you get a nice, tied-up-loose-ends finish. Or you can continue to the bonus chapter and get yourself into cliffhanger territory. The choice is the reader's. And that, I hope, makes all the difference.

Go Go Govey

Perhaps because I've always hated team sports (to watch or play), I've never really understood the tribal politics that makes people consider politicians to be either wonderful or entirely terrible, with nothing in between. So I'm rather pleased to be able to totally agree with Michael Gove about something. Let's be clear. Gove made some ludicrous decisions while in charge of education, and acted in a totally unprincipled fashion in the post-Brexit shenanigans. However, I've just read an article by him that I can only give my whole-hearted support to.

In today's Times (I don't usually read it, but Waitrose won't give me a free i ) Gove argues for the removal of charitable status from private schools. As he says, it's absolutely ridiculous that these bastions of privilege don't have to pay VAT, get an 80 per cent exemption from business rates... and apparently taxpayers even subsidise their quasi-military cadet forces. Surely there can be no reason for this to continue?

So come on, Tory-haters. Let's have three cheers for Michael Gove. (Here's the full article, which apparently you can read online if you register.)

Molly Zero review

Revisiting some of the SF favourites from my youth, I've just read Molly Zero by Keith Roberts. This came from the second phase of Roberts' career. He started out with sub-Wyndham SF disaster novels like his The Furies featuring physically impossible giant wasps, but then wowed the literary world with his bucolic alternative history novel, Pavane, set in a modern day Britain where technology was held back to the steam level by a controlling Catholic church.

Molly Zero also feels like an alternative history novel, though it isn't. We meet the eponymous schoolgirl heroine being sent by train from the 'Blocks', where she was brought up, to another location. This could easily have just been another Brave New World derivative, but it's far more. My 1970s copy has a huge plot spoiler in its blurb (as does at least one of the Amazon pages) - I'm not going to do that, but I am about to discuss its main theme.
This book proved a particularly appropriate re-read in 2017 as, despite being a very readable adventure story, it is a fascinating study of a society that decides to withdraw from globalism. What seems at first a straightforward dystopia is, in fact, the playing out of the idea that globalism inevitably leads to rampant consumerism and eventually the attempt of governments or corporations to build empires - which then leads to mass slaughter and untold horrors. In response, British society is cut off from the world and managed by an elite. Molly experiences a number of different versions of isolationism, and though we may dislike them, we are challenged to think what really is the best approach.
So far, so brilliant. There are a few issues, though. Roberts takes the brave decision to write in the second person - so Molly is referred to throughout as 'you'. The idea of this style is to immerse the reader, but I find it really grates on me - though, to be fair, by about 50 pages in I was noticing it less. Some of the situations Molly find herself in feel rather stereotyped (though arguably they are designed to be so by the elite). I think Roberts struggled with Molly's sexuality in a way that wouldn't be an issue for a modern writer. And the ending is odd. I really can't decide whether it's terrible or very clever.
While probably not the equal of Pavane, this is a really interesting and thought-provoking book that manages never to let the message overwhelm the narrative. I'm very glad to have revisited it.
Molly Zero is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com