Brian Clegg's Blog, page 59

Fascinating mangling of falsification

I have just read an article (don't ask me why - this is the wonder of Facebook) which tried to defend Mormonism from the worrying details of its origins. The piece included this:

Many intellectuals argue that “negative evidence” is supreme. To understand what they mean by this, consider the hypothesis that “all swans are white.” According to these intellectuals, it doesn’t matter how many white swans you find, you never really prove that “all” swans are white. However, as soon as you find one black swan, you have disproved the theory that “all swans are white.” They conclude that positive evidence doesn’t ever really prove anything, but negative evidence can. And it’s easy to see why they think that way. 

This is the approach that ex-Mormons have taken to their faith. In the face of unsettling information, they disregard all of the positive evidence because they think that a few points of negative evidence is sufficient to end the discussion. And given how logical the above reasoning seems to be, it is no wonder why. But they are still wrong. 

To understand why, consider another example. After first discovering the planet Uranus, astronomers attempted to predict its orbit by using Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of physics. They could observe the orbit of Uranus with their own eyes, but when they used Newton’s mathematical models to predict that orbit, they failed time and again. It made no sense. Newton’s laws had been right about so many things, but astronomers had found a case in which Newton’s laws did not work. So, was Newton wrong? Were his laws not quite as infallible as they had seemed? In light of this “negative evidence,” it would have been easy to conclude just that. 

However, years later, astronomers discovered another planet, Neptune. And as it turns out, when astronomers accounted for the mass of this newly discovered planet, Newton’s laws predicted the orbit of Uranus perfectly. So, as it turned out, it wasn’t that Newton’s laws of physics didn’t work. It was that they didn’t seem to work. And that’s because the astronomers simply didn’t have all the relevant information and context.

There's so much to get your teeth into here, but we'll pick out two key points. First there's the ad hominem attack. 'Many intellectuals argue... According to these intellectuals... and it's easy to see why they think this way.' Implication: intellectuals don't know what they are talking about. Don't listen to them. Note particularly 'According to these intellectuals, it doesn't matter how many white swans you find.' Forget 'According to intellectuals.' It's just true. It doesn't matter how many white swans you find. All swans are not white. Are they arguing otherwise?

However, no one suggests that falsification is usefully applicable to everything. Which is why it's odd that they then give an example where it isn't properly used. All scientific evidence is provisional. The black swan disproves the 'all swans are white' hypothesis, and that is the best data at the time and the only sensible viewpoint. But should it later prove that the 'black swan' was an unusual variant of goose and not a swan at all, the hypothesis could recover. However, the Newton example used in the extract from the article above fails on a number of counts.

First, the orbit of Uranus didn't show that 'Newton's laws of physics don't work' it showed that they didn't apply in that circumstance. There are plenty of other examples (Mercury's orbit, for instance) where they will never apply. As it happened, in the case of Uranus, it was because the astronomers didn't take into account the full situation. But there was nothing wrong with the assertion that Newton's law of gravitation didn't correctly describe the orbit of Uranus in the known solar system of the time. And until other factors were brought in, one possibility was that this was a case (like the orbit of Mercury) where Newton's law wasn't appropriate.

This argument is then used to suggest that yes, there are worrying aspects of the early history of Mormonism that cast its basis into doubt. Until you can show why that negative evidence is misleading - and that isn't happening - you can have all the positive evidence you like (which is what, exactly?) and the negative evidence still stands. Even in the Uranus example, the results showed their was something wrong with the astronomers' assumptions. Falsification remains a powerful tool, and a valuable one in cases like this.

The Sex Life of a Comedian - review

Written by stand-up comedian Dave Thompson, The Sex Life of a Comedian delivers some home truths about the life on the road. It's hard not to believe that the main character Doug Tucker's last minute arrivals at venues, or the way he spends hours crossing the country for underpaid gigs in unpleasant dives, don't have some inspiration in reality. As, I suspect, do the way that the various comedians who come into Tucker's life become huge successes or fail in ways that are little connected to their talent.

However, this is a novel, not a memoir, for which we can assume Thompson is thankful, because Doug Tucker's life is no bed of roses. Admittedly Doug seems to enjoy (with occasional regret and shame) the huge amount of (explicit) sex and drug taking he encounters, but there is a murky unpleasantness to his existence that shades into outright gangland violence. And Doug's luck rarely stays positive for long, while the car crash events that pull his life apart come with painful regularity.

To begin with, as we hear of Doug's extremely colourful sex life, it's hard not to think of this as a modern version of those 1970s 'Confessions of a Window Cleaner' type books. I never read one, but my suspicion is that they would have had the same, rather simplistic narrating style, with a series of sexual escapades (though I doubt if the content of these were as explicitly portrayed as are Doug's). But as the Tucker story develops, I was reminded much more of the books of the once extremely famous Leslie Thomas.

In part it was the period feel - the first part of the book is set in the nineties, but it feels more like the seventies - but mostly it was the similarity to Leslie Thomas's classic story arc of a likeable but weak-willed central character who is manipulated sexually and practically by unpleasant people to produce a trajectory that begins with a degree of success but that ends in a disastrous spiral of destruction. Like the best of Thomas's central characters, Doug Tucker has an element of an innocent, introduced to a dark world that seems first enticing and then destructive. And he has a hint of mystery about him with his rabid dislike of children and frequent reference to his mummy's knife.

I had been warned about the sex scenes, which are definitely not suitable for reading on the train if the person next to you glances at your book (as I experienced), but I found the rampant drug taking more disturbing, while the ending seemed rushed and not entirely satisfactory. I certainly wouldn't buy this if you are easily shocked or looking for a jolly romp, rather than a gut-wrenching story. However, by the time I was a quarter of the way in I had to discover Doug Tucker's fate, and it's a book that I won't forget in quite a while.

The Sex Life of a Comedian is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com, or as a paperback from Lulu.com

I am not a number

I've just read  The End of Average for review, and I couldn't help letting out a little whoop of joy when it totally trashed psychometric testing.

I am talking about mechanisms like the Myers Briggs type profile, along with a whole host of rivals, all used by businesses in recruiting and team building to analyse a personality and assess how an individual will work with others. 
The problems I have always had with the approach are several-fold. It's based primarily on Jungian theory which has little scientific basis. Your personality type is self-determined, so, while it's not surprising it often feels right, that doesn't make it accurate. And I was always doubtful about the cultural norms of the mostly US-devised tests being applied worldwide. Infamously there used to be a question about whether you preferred a gun or something constructive (I can't remember what) - which clearly would have different resonance in the US and Europe. 
Now, though, there are much stronger grounds for concern. The End of Average points out that personality profiles don't reflect the behaviour of individuals, but rather they predict the average behaviour of a group of people, which isn't the same thing. If you are an ENTP like me, it doesn't say how you will behave, but how, on average, people with the same profile will behave. As the book says 'In fact, correlations between personality traits and behaviours that should be related - such as aggression and getting into fights, or extroversion and going to parties - are rarely stronger than 0.3.' The same applies to academic achievement and professional accomplishments. This means your personality traits, as identified by the test should reflect around 9 per cent of your actual behaviour, while getting over 90 per cent wrong.

Underlying this is the relatively recent (if entirely obvious) discovery that we don't have one personality/behaviour but it varies depending on the situation. A teenager, for instance, behaves very differently with a group of peers and with his or her grandmother. That's obvious. So why do we expect a single score on a handful of dimensions to reflect how we will behave in all circumstances? It's bizarre.

I don't expect companies to stop using these tests any time soon. Come on - some still use 'graphology', expecting handwriting to give insights into personality. But employers and academics should at least be thinking twice about what they are testing and why.

Beam up a bug

When I wrote T he God Effect about entanglement around 10 years ago it seemed that many of the remarkable possibilities that emerged from this strangest effect of quantum physics were close to practical applications. As it happens, there's nothing in the book that's gone out of date - but we do keep getting incremental announcements in the field. Most recently we had the more over-the-top media sites telling us 'Scientists teleport bacteria' while the more careful phys.org came up with the confusing sounding 'Physicists propose the first scheme to teleport the memory of an organism.'

I'd need a whole book to go into quantum entanglement (:-)), but the summary version is that quantum physics predicts that, for instance, you can get a pair of quantum particles into an entangled state where making a measurement of a property of one (its spin, for instance) will instantly influence the other particle, however far apart they are. And this has been experimentally verified many times since the 1980s. Entanglement can't be used for what seems the obvious application - sending an instantaneous message - as the 'information' transmitted is random. However it can act as a linking mechanism to do things that would otherwise be impossible.

In the case of the impressive-sounding teleportation, the apparent impossibility that entanglement can help with is the so-called 'no cloning theorem.' It was proved reasonably early that it is impossible to make a duplicate of a quantum particle while preserving the original. However, with a mix of entanglement and conventional information transfer, it is possible to transfer a property of a quantum particle to a similar particle elsewhere, in effect making a remote copy of at least one aspect of the particle. In the process, the original particle's properties are altered (so you don't end up with an identical pair) and you never find out what the property's value was.

Despite these provisos, if you could do this for all the significant properties of a particle - or a collection of particles - it would be as if the original particle had been teleported from its original position to the location of the modified particle. In effect, to use the inevitable simile, it would be like putting the particle through a Star Trek transporter. This mechanism in its simplest form is already valuable for applications like quantum computing, but inevitably there was interest in doing it for real - all the significant properties - and with something bigger than a single particle.

It ought to be stressed this is never going to produce a Star Trek transporter, whether as Amazon's latest way to deliver goods or to avoid the rigours of air travel. This is because of the sheer number of particles in an sizeable object, which would take thousands of years to scan and reassemble. If we're talking a product, you don't need an atomic level duplicate - you can just send the instructions for a factory to make it. If we're talking a person, even if you got over the fact that the original 'you' would be disintegrated and only a perfect copy was produced, that timescale is simply impractical.

Over the years we've seen various properties of particles and simple molecules teleported. And it would be fascinating if it were possible to teleport a virus or bacterium. However, it should be stressed that this is not what has happened here. Firstly, nothing has actually happened. It's a proposed mechanism, not an experiment that has been carried out. And secondly we have to be clear what's meant by that 'teleport the memory' headline. In more detail, Tongcang Li at Purdue University and Zhang-qi Yin at Tsinghua University have suggested a way to use electromechanical oscillators and superconducting circuits to teleport the internal quantum state and center-of-mass motion state of a microorganism.

What it essentially means is that they may be able to transfer as a package some of the states of molecules in the bacterium to another organism. As these states are a form of information, they are described as teleporting memories. There are a few provisos, however. To make the system work, the organisms would have to be cryogenically frozen. They would not be alive. And what isn't made clear is how the setup would deal with the reality that any two bacteria are not identical in their molecular makeup. But the  theoretical experiment is interesting in the way it accesses internal properties of the organism for teleportation, rather than expecting it to be stripped down, particle by particle.

You can, in principle, see more in the original paper, but unfortunately it is a pay access.

Whatever happened to Second Life?

I've just read Snow Crash , which features a virtual environment, the Metaverse, so like a super-version of Second Life that I'm almost certain the designers of SL must have been inspired by the book. And reading about it reminded me just how seriously people were taking this online virtual reality environment a few years ago - yet now Second Life appears to have dropped off the radar.

When I first started blogging in the Nature Network, that august publication was arranging seminars in Second Life, companies were holding meetings in it, and people were making fortunes selling Second Life wares. I thought the whole concept of meeting up in a tacky virtual environment was crazy - surely video was far better - yet the media and many big companies were convinced that the hip audience would flock to this kind of thing. But now it's all gone rather quiet.

I've never bothered with Second Life myself, and a straw poll on Facebook got me no response from anyone who uses it seriously, but from what I've read by those who do still frequent it, the main section of the Second Life world has become like a ghost-town after the makers set up an adults only continent - apparently that's still very lively, but obviously its dubious attractions are not why all those big names of science, technology and business were setting up SL presences - and their idea clearly has fallen apart.

I can't say I'm sad - it always seemed more a collective delusion than a sensible way forward. I'd love to hear from anyone who was an SL fan or involved in corporate use of it, like that at Nature. Do let us know the whys and wherefores - and whether you still think it was a good idea.

Snow Crash - Review

I've enjoyed several of Neal Stephenson's books, but find many of them far too long, suffering from bestselling author bloatitis, so I thought it would be interesting to get hold of a copy of his classic, Snow Crash - and I'm very glad I did.

Although not a pastiche, it depends heavily on four classics of science fiction. The obvious one is William Gibson's Neuromancer, because of the net-based cyberpunk aspects that are central to Snow Crash. (The snow crash of the title is nothing to do with skiing and everything to do with computers crashing.) However, the pace and glitteriness owes a huge amount to Alfred Bester's Tiger Tiger (that's the UK title - it was originally The Stars my Destination), while the corporate-run world has a distinct feel of Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator at Law,  though interestingly here it's a world without any laws whatsoever. And finally there's a touch of Samuel Delaney's Babel-17, where a language is capable of doing more than simply describe things. In Delaney's book, the language is so specific that if you name something, you can construct it given only that name - here, language is capable of re-programming the human brain.

These influences, though, are only for those who are interested. If you like the kind of science fiction that hits you between the eyes and flings you into a high-octane cyber-world, particularly if you have an IT background, this is a masterpiece. Once you get over the odd name of the hero/protagonist (he's called Hiro Protagonist. Really) it is a joy to read. And despite being over two decades old, the technology really doesn't grate. Okay, Stephenson set it too early for the level of virtual reality capability, and there are too many references to video tapes, but otherwise it could have been written yesterday. What's particularly remarkable is that it is all about the internet (if not named as such) at a time when the internet wasn't widely known. This was written in 1992, yet when Microsoft launched Windows 95, it wasn't considered necessary to give any thought to the internet. That's how quickly things have changed.

As you might expect from Stephenson, there are some dramatic set-piece fights and rather a lot of violence, virtual and actual, but it also features erudite and quite lengthy library exposition of the precursor myths to many modern religions and some mind-boggling (if far-fetched) ideas about language, the nature of the Babel event and of speaking in tongues. There's also a strong female character, though today's readers might raise an eyebrow about a relationship between a 15-year-old girl and a thirty-something mass murderer. Oh, and I love the rat things.

If you find some of Stephenson's more recent books overblown, this is the one to go back to. Nicely done indeed.

Snow Crash is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

Sometimes doing this job gives you a warm glow

I'm the first to admit that, if you can make a living doing it*, being a writer is not a bad gig. You don't have to set the alarm in the morning. It's part of your job to read interesting stuff and mooch about being creative. Admittedly the writing part is a bit of a faff, but, hey, everyone has downsides to their job. But there is one aspect of it that can be particularly pleasant - when someone says one of your books has inspired them.

According to the incomparable Cumbria Crack (I never get my news anywhere else**) Keswick student James Firth, who has won a science bursary, wants to study astrophysics and has a long term aim of following Tim Peake into space. And, it seems, 'James has a fascination in astrophysics having poured through books by Stephen Hawking and Brian Clegg. He now aims to study astrophysics at university.'

I wish James every success and am genuinely delighted to have played a small part in helping inspire his fascination with science.

* This is not the easy part. Note that, according to an ALCS/ Queen Mary University study, the median professional author income from writing in the UK in 2013 was around £10,000.

** Okay, not entirely true.

Does celebrity make you real?

This morning I spotted an email from my local theatre that was too good not to share, as it appeared to be selling off a comedian.

As you do, when I tweeted about this I included the Twitter address (handle? ID? none of them work well) of the comedian in question, Ross Noble, and I noticed that, like a fair number of famousish people,  (presumably the ones that aren't rich enough to buy the person who already has, in this case, @rossnoble) he has resorted to putting 'real' in front of his name, making him @realrossnoble.

There are plenty of others - David Mitchell (the comedian, not the novelist) is @RealDMitchell, for instance. I assume this has happened because someone else called Ross Noble, David Mitchell (still not the novelist) etc. has already snapped up the simple form, like my @brianclegg.

It's fine, obviously, to modify your name to be both memorable and still clearly like to your name - much better, certainly than @rossnoble99 or @nobleross. But I do wonder if stars of stage and screen are the best people to apply the word 'real' to themselves? It's not that I'm suggesting that they are fictional, but my suspicion is that they have a weaker grasp on reality than most of us (with the exception of politicians and royalty of course (I wonder who has @realqueen?)).

So perhaps celebrities should consider an alternative to the 'real' prefix. How about @unrealrossnoble or @famousrossnoble or just plain @rossnobleyouveheardof. That way, they wouldn't be making unnatural claims.

I don't really get music

Another group I enjoyed singling with in my youth -
Nonessence (clearly hip and fashion-conscious)It may be a matter of having slightly different mental structures or something, but I struggle to understand the importance most people seem to place on music.

This might seem odd, as I've always loved performing with smallish groups of singers, mostly notably Selwyn College Chapel Choir, and I often play music when doing admin tasks (I can never write with music on). I've even enjoyed a few of the concerts I've attended, though if I'm honest, by about 2/3 of the way through a gig I've usually had enough and am getting a bit bored. But what I can't understand, as evidenced by the outpouring after the death of David Bowie, is the way so many people say that music changed their life or was central to it.

I'm not doing down Bowie - I think he was brilliant, creative and a one-off. But I don't understand how music can do anything to your life, or how a musician can be a hero or role model. I read, for instance, Suzanne Moore in the Guardian saying 'What he gave to me is forever mine because he formed me... He was my lodestar...' For me, music is just another type of entertainment, and if I have to give something my whole concentration as an audience member, as opposed to a performer, I'd rather it were a book or a film.

I ought to stress this isn't an attack on those who do put music at the centre of their lives, as so many seem to. But I honestly don't get it - I don't feel anything like they seem to. My loss, I'm sure, but just emphasising, I guess that all brains are not wired the same.

Pilgrim's Progress - The Extra Mile review

There's something rather appealing about the concept of pilgrimage, whether or not you have a religious faith. It's a bit like a combination of the pleasures of walking and trainspotting (and I don't mean that as an insult) - there's both the exertion that is usually involved and the feeling of ticking off achievements, a medieval equivalent of a bucket list.

In The Extra Mile, Peter Stanford sets out to take in a number of centres of pilgrimage in the UK, without indulging in the actual act of being a pilgrim himself. Even though several times he is drawn into the experience, he undertakes this as an observer rather than a participant. These are mostly Christian sites, but he also takes in the pagan/Druidic possibilities of Stonehenge and Glastonbury.

I came on this book by accident - I think it was an Amazon recommendation when I was looking at something else - and I am pleased that I did. Stanford gives accounts of what he experiences, from the lively celebrations at Glastonbury to more contemplative island retreats like Iona and Lindisfarne. For me, the most interesting was probably Holy Well in North Wales, the most complete of the medieval pilgrimage shrines and a fascinating piece of architecture whatever you think of the supposed properties of the water.

I'm not sure whether it helps or not that Stanford comes across as a cool, detached observer. I assumed from his slightly fussy writing style that he was retired, but he apparently had young children at the time of his trip (mid 2000's), so was probably younger than he sounds. He is often a little sceptical of what is going on, especially where the events clearly bear little connection to the origins of the site, but never mocks the participants and is not truly critical of anything. He also occasionally admits that the spirituality of his Catholic upbringing had crept in unbidden.

If, like me, you have an interest in medieval British culture, or you want to know more about British religious traditions, which certainly extend far beyond the typical modern establishments, it is genuinely interesting. If you're a Brother Cadfael fan, you'll even discover some of the real history behind the St Winifred story that appears in the series of books. I'm not sure that The Extra Mile works hugely well as a travel book, though, and it lacks the warmth and humour of writers like Bill Bryson. But it certainly highlights several locations that won't be as well known as Stonehenge and that might be worthy of a visit.

As a book, then, it could have been more engaging, but for an insight into both early British religious practices and how they have extended into the present and have been adapted to modern ways it is definitely worth a read.

The Extra Mile is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.