Ivan Karamazov and Euclid

Peter Kreeft once commented (in a talk – sorry I can’t give a reference) that he tells his undergraduate students that “if your faith is weak and you don’t want to lose it then don’t read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky”. I can scarcely think of a better recommendation for a book. And as if you need more reason, observe this gem (page 274 of the Penguin paperback):

[Ivan:] … if God really exists and if he really has created the world, then, as we all know, he created it in accordance with the Euclidean geometry, and he created the human mind with the conception of only the three dimensions of space. And yet there have been and there still are mathematicians and philosophers, some of them indeed men of extraordinary genius, who doubt whether the whole universe, or, to put it more wildly, all existence was created only according to Euclidean geometry and they even dare to dream that two parallel lines which, according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I, my dear chap, have come to the conclusion that if I can’t understand even that, then how can I be expected to understand about God?

The Brothers Karamazov was published in 1880. Ivan is referring to the discovery a few decades earlier by Lobachevsky that Euclidean geometry is not unique, and thus it is an empirical matter whether or not parallel lines meet (or are unique) in our universe. This seems like a very minor loose thread in physics, and yet when Einstein pulled on it, 35 years after Ivan’s monologue, he was lead to General Relativity, arguably the greatest achievement of a single physicist since Newton. Gravity is geometry!

This quote came as quite a surprise to me. I hadn’t realised that non-Euclidean geometry had reached popular culture in the 1880′s.

Steve Coogan and the Tabloids

I’m midway through moving from Switzerland to Australia, so it’s a quick post today. The UK is currently dealing with a phone hacking scandal, wherein newspapers have been found to have illegally hacked the voice messages and SMS’s of various people, from celebrities to families of deceased soldiers. I haven’t followed the debacle very closely, but I did note with interest the witness statement of comedian and actor Steve Coogan. Here are some highlights:

In March 1996 a journalist phoned my daughters great-grandmother, who was in her eighties at the time. The reporter pretended to be doing a survey for the council but asked
increasingly personal questions about me and about my daughters
mother. When challenged, the reporter admitted she was from the
Daily Mirror. She insisted that this was the way things were done
and urged the old lady to ‘spill the beans so it would be over with’.
The Mirror had apparently obtained the phone number by copying
the senders address from the back of a letter in the communal
lobby of my flat. …

Over the years. journalists and photographers have frequently
camped outside my house day and night, watching who comes and
goes (the News of the Worlds Paul was one of them). Sometimes I have been alerted to this by generous neighbours knocking on my door to let me know about ‘the men in the cars with cameras’ outside my home. Some of these reporters have gone through the rubbish in my bins, and some have followed me in cars when I left home.

I am bringing civil action in relation to the hacking into my
voicemail. In addition to the hacking evidence, I have seen
evidence in Glenn Mulcaire’s notebook of amounts of money I have withdrawn from cash machines, and details of hotel bills I have paid and the payment method used. lt is a staggering intrusion into my (or for that matter, anyones) privacy.

You can find the entire statement here, and it makes very interesting reading. It says a lot about the British tabloids that The Mirror reported Coogan’s witness statement under the headline “Steve Coogan: ‘I’m not a paragon of virtue. I just do what I want’”. Unbelievable.

This is wrong on a number of levels. Firstly, a number of tabloids have responded that celebrities have used the media to achieve fame, and so have signed away their privacy in exchange for success. This is nonsense. Tabloids do not make movie stars. Movies make movie stars. Acting talent is not purchased at the expense of basic human rights. Further, many of the victims were not celebrities, but grieving parents.

The media is not an optional extra in modern society. They play an important role in democracies, as they are charged with investigating our representatives, drawing on critical journalism to cut through the spin. Even with the Leveson inquiry, it’s hard to see how the situation will change until the newspaper-buying-public votes with its money and sends the message that a newspaper which wastes its credibility on celebrity trivia will be stay on the stand.

Pencil me out!

To my shock and amazement a few Tuesdays ago, I realised the appalling inefficiency of the humble pencil. The typical pencil is about 15cm long, and its lead is about 2mm thick. I’ve noticed, in my own pencil usage, that when the tip is more than about 0.75mm across that I will sharpen the pencil. This means that the outer 1.25mm of the pencil lead is wasted in the sharpening process. And because it’s the cross-sectional area that matters, this amounts to 86% of the pencil lead. Coupled with the fact that the last 3cm of the pencil is unholdable, that means that about 90% of the lead in a pencil is wasted! Isn’t that shocking!?

I, for one, am outraged. Protests are being organised. Potential slogans are invited. So far, I’ve come up with:

Don’t pencil me in

Lead is dead

Not 2B – that is the answer

Make pencils disappear

That last one is a bit dark.

Book Review: God’s Philosophers by James Hannam

This was an epoch making book for me – it was the first book I read on a Kindle. I think the Kindle is great, especially for quote miners like myself. You can highlight passages, and then with the help of an Applescript (google it), one can download the highlighted passages to note taking software EverNote. Genius. If they handled PDFs and note-taking better, I’d be very tempted to dispense with printing papers altogether.

As for the book, it was very enjoyable reading. The topic of the book is the progress made towards understanding the natural world made during the Middle Ages, which are often portrayed as an intellectual dark age. Here are a couple of notable passages:

• I’ve heard some (usually not historians) claiming that the Medieval universe was small and pokey, obviously the product of small minds and blinkered imaginations. As far back as Boethius in 500 A.D., we see the opposite view: “It is well known and you have seen it demonstrated by astronomers, that beside the extent of the heavens, the circumference of the earth has the size of a point; that is to say, compared to the magnitude of the celestial sphere, it may be thought of as having no extent at all.”
• Similarly, Hannam addresses the idea that the Copernican revolution displaced Earth from its honorable place at the centre of the universe: “Another modern misconception about the medieval Christian worldview is that people thought the central position of the earth meant that it was somehow exalted. In fact, to the medieval mind, the reverse was the case. The universe was a hierarchy and the further from the earth you travelled, the closer to Heaven you came.”
• Why do experiments? Because there are many ways that the universe could have been, and the only way to find out is to go and see. The physical universe is not a logical necessity, and thus its properties cannot be deduced. It’s surprising how long it look for this idea to catch on: “For Aristotle, the iron shackles of logical necessity determined what the laws of nature had to be. They were not just the ones upon which God had deliberately decided, they were the only ones he could have used. Even if God had actually created the world, he would have had no choice about how it turned out.”
• A few years ago, Sydney University hosted a “comedy” debate about who was greater, Einstein or Newton. Physics (somewhat arbitrarily) defended Einstein against the mathematicians. Everyone’s favourite supervisor was heard to disparage the great Sir Isaac by saying that he ascribed gravity to “the occult”. It seems, however, that this was not a reference to witchcraft, but rather just the word associated with action at a distance: “Nowadays, the word ‘occult’ specifically means ‘magical’ or something connected to spiritualism. But it used to have a much wider sense, connoting any force or property that was hidden. Put bluntly, if you cannot see it, it could be classed as occult. Aristotle had little time for the concept and argued that all effects must be material. One thing, he said, can only affect another by touch.”

Oh no! They’re on to us!

Subtitle: Dear Daily Show, please save civilization.

A depressing start to my day. Via Cosmic Variance: “I am generally a fan of the two-party system. Sadly, at the moment in this country, one of the parties is completely crazy.”

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:400760

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

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Equation of the day

From the epochal “A Natural Measure on the Set of All Universes”, by Gary Gibbons, Stephen Hawking and John Stewart, 1987, pg. 748, equation 3.24:

where “junk” is both positive and asymptotically small as z -> infinity.

See, kids. Maths is easy.

Book Review: Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

My list of Books I would force everyone to read if I were king of the world has a new entry. It is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, which is also the name of his blog and column in the Guardian. A more accurate title would perhaps be Bad Medical Science, as Dr Goldacre is a GP and medical researcher, and apart from a few necessary deviations into statistics, most of the book concerns medical issues. As such, its appeal is limited to those who own and operate a human body. Here are a few highlights.

Ear candles are bunk. They claim to suction gunk out of your ear and into the candle. But they don’t produce any suction – we can measure that! – and the gunk inside the candle post-burning is there whether you burn the candle in your ear or not.

I’d never realised how much medical progress had been made so recently:

Before 1935 doctors were basically useless. We had morphine for pain relief – a drug with superficial charm, at least – and we could do operations fairly cleanly, although with huge doses of anaesthetics, because we hadn’t yet sorted out well-targeted muscle-relaxant drugs. Then suddenly, between about 1935 and 1975, science poured out an almost constant stream of miracle cures. If you got TB in the 1920s, you died, pale and emaciated, in the style of a romantic poet. If you got TB in the 1970s, then in all likelihood you would live to a ripe old age. You might have to take rifampicin and isoniazid for months on end, and they’re not nice drugs, and the side-effects will make your eyeballs and wee go pink, but if all goes well you will live to see inventions unimaginable in your childhood. …  Almost everything we associate with modern medicine happened in that time: treatments like antibiotics, dialysis, transplants, intensive care, heart surgery, almost every drug you’ve ever heard of, and more. As well as the miracle treat ments, we really were finding those simple, direct, hidden killers that the media still pine for so desperately in their headlines.

Goldacre points out the remarkable differences between what vitamin salesmen say in their books – where they can say what they like – and what they say on the label on the bottle, which is subject to consumer legislation. For example:

The vitamin pill magnate Patrick Holford, for example, makes sweeping and dramatic claims for all kinds of supplements in his ‘Optimum Nutrition’ books; yet these same claims are not to be found on the labels of his own-brand ‘Optimum Nutrition’ range of vitamin pills (which do feature, however, a photograph of his face).

I did have a few reservations about this passage:

It’s only weird and startling when something very, very specific and unlikely happens if you have specifically predicted it beforehand.

There is some truth here, of course. But most of what we have learned in the last 100 years of physics and astronomy wasn’t predicted: quantum mechanics, superconductivity, quasars, pulsars, the acceleration of the universe, the menagerie of particles discovered by the first particle accelerators, neutrino masses. Goldacre isn’t making a mistake here, and clarifies a bit later: “If your hypothesis comes from analysing the data, then there is no sense in analysing the same data again to confirm it”. It’s just a rare overstatement in an otherwise admirably careful book.

Here, in case you ever need it, is the best summary of the way that scientists are viewed by the media you will ever need:

… science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.

For example, the “scientist develops wacky equation to describe something menial” type of article that one sees from time to time are almost always sponsored by some company looking for a way to get their product mentioned in newspaper articles.

Finally, the most disturbing part of the book was the part that wasn’t in the first edition because Goldacre was being sued. It seems like anyone who devotes their time to testing dubious claims by quacks – Goldacre, Simon Singh, James Randi, Penn and Teller, anyone who mentions scientology – must then spend their time and several hundred thousand dollars defending libel suits. In Goldacre’s case, the accuser was Matthias Rath, who convinced much of South Africa to give up on HIV vaccines that could prevent the spread from mother to daughter, and instead buy his vitamin pills. Goldacre won, and published the relevant chapter of the book online. Even if you don’t buy the book, go read the free chapter. It is incredible and terrifying in equal measure. Seriously … go read it now.

Book Review: Stalin – The Court of the Red Tsar

My history education was utterly woeful. I had some smatterings of myth and cliche in primary school – people in the middle ages thought the earth was flat, the early European explorers of Australia found things a bit difficult etc. In high school I had two years of Australian history, which for anyone interested can be summarised in one line: Aboriginals hunter-gather, the British somehow see the south of Wales, Federation (1901), Bodyline (1933) and the Gatting ball (1993). From year 9 we could choose between history and geography, and thus the last time I was in a history class, I was 12 years old. Pathetic.

I’ve been trying to catch up for a while now, and decided that a few choice biographies of twentieth century figures would be a good place to start. (Please recommend some in the comments!). Thus I came to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 700 page biography of Josef Stalin.

The book was enjoyable though not easy reading. That last remark requires further clarification: I usually read popular science, and occasionally a novel. Such books can be read quickly, and only become difficult when they lack lucidity or encounter particularly complex material. The difficulty with Stalin was not the difficulty of the material but its gravity. One feels that passages such as the following should be read more than once,

They did not even specify the names but simply assigned quotas of deaths by the thousands. … The aim was ‘to finish off once and for all’ the Enemies and those impossible to educate to socialism, so as to accelerate the erasing of class barriers and therefore the bringing of paradise for the masses. The final solution was a slaughter that made sense in terms of the faith and idealism of Bolshevism which was a religion based on the systematic destruction of classes. … On 20 July [1937], Yezhov and his deputy Mikhail Frinovsky proposed Order No. 00447 to the Politburo: that between 5 and 15 August, the regions were to receive quotas for two categories: Category One – to be shot. Category Two – to be deported. They suggested that 72,950 should be shot and 259,450 arrested … The quotas were soon fulfilled by the regions who therefore asked for bigger numbers… the original arrest quota ballooned to 767,397 arrests and 386,798 executions, families destroyed, children orphaned, under Order No. 00447.

Book Review: The Decisive Moment, by Jonah Lehrer

I’ve hit something of a purple patch with books of late, so its time for some brief book reviews. Most of these will concern topics outside my area of expertise, and so I can’t offer anything like a rigorous critique.

My first book is “The Decisive Moment”, by Jonah Lehrer. I blasted through this book in a few evenings back at the hotel during a conference. It made very enjoyable reading. In particular, the author makes very good use of narrative – one is enticed into each chapter with a variety of case studies. Chapter six’s account of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, for example, makes for compulsive reading.

The theme of the book that most resonated with me was the importance of emotion to rationality. Emotions are often thought of as irrational – we see this in expressions like “I let my emotions get the better of me” and the connotations of objectivity attached to the adjective “dispassionate”. I think this goes back at least to Plato. Lehrer, however, shows that emotions do have an important role to play in decision making. They allow for fast, unconscious decisions to be made and implemented. Those who due to brain injuries have seemingly lost the ability to form emotions find that even the smallest decisions – chicken or beef? – paralyse them like Buridan’s ass. Conscious thought can actually lead to worse decisions, as in the case of would-be jam experts (page 138). Those who simply tasted a selection of jams and reported which ones they liked best broadly agreed with the opinions of food experts. Those asked to analyse their impressions via written questionnaires suddenly preferred inferior jams. It’s a beautiful little parable, and Lehrer’s discussion of such examples is both nuanced and insightful.

The book is both practical and philosophical, ranging from how to make better decisions to the most contrived ethical conundrums. Experimental findings and anecdotes are weaved seamlessly. I read the book over a year ago, but looking back over it now makes me want to read it again.

Goodies, Baddies and Experts

Thomas Caldwell has written an interesting opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled “Making stupidity a virtue in Hollywood is dumb“. His thesis is that Hollywood has a habit of making experts into the baddies:

Consider the family-friendly blockbuster Mr. Popper’s Penguins. The hero is a wealthy real estate agent who wants to keep the penguins his late father left him so he can bond with his children. The bad guy is an experienced and knowledgeable zookeeper who wants to remove the penguins to care for them properly. In Hollywood, experts like the zookeeper have secret agendas while average dads just want to rediscover family values. We are living in an era in which expressions such as ”over-educated” are used to mock those who have conducted years of research in a specific area and words such as ”intellectual” and ”academic” are terms of abuse.

A few thoughts.