Russell on Thought

24th June, 2011

“Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the will – tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence, yet bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world and the chief glory of man.”
— Bertrand Russell (Why Men Fight)

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Science Media: The Next Generation

15th May, 2011

Last week I travelled down to sunny Cambridge for the Science Media Next Generation conference at Jesus College. I’m not going to write up all that was said, since that has been done well elsewhere. But I’ll briefly list the main lessons that I took away.

(This is a rather selfish list in that it’s about how the issues relate to me. There was lots interesting discussion and speculation about the future of science & media & science media, as well as some fascinating stuff from Simon Singh on his experience of libel law, and from Adam Wishart on ethics. But on all these topics I don’t have much to add to what others have already said.)

Lesson 1: I am not a science journalist. I suppose that subconsciously I have always secretly suspected this, but it is useful to have it confirmed. My interest in science is in science, much less in the attendant politics. I want to help demystify it, report on exciting developments to people who would otherwise not hear about them, and generally spread the word about how wonderful it is. Meanwhile, a journalist’s job is to “hold scientists to account” and generally “cause mischief”. I don’t wish to sound cynical: plenty of good arguments were made for the importance of these activities, but they had the side-effect of convincing me that that’s not where my future lies.

So what am I? A “science communicator” perhaps. I’d even accept “science curator, guide, navigator or sense-maker”, as John Naughton put it. Actually I’ve often thought of myself as more of a “translator” of technical ideas into everyday language.

Lesson 2: The Science versus Religion debate has gone downhill since the days of Bertrand Russell. Like most of the crowd, I was slightly taken aback that the session on “Impact of Science Journalism on Culture and Society” was entirely devoted to booting around the old, deflated football of the compatibility of science and God.

I do think there are interesting things which can still be said about this, at the sociological and historical levels. But in terms of the metaphyical implications of any particular piece of science (whether that be the human genome or the latest multiverse speculation), I view the whole subject as a black hole best avoided. You can bat such questions back and forth for ever, after which everyone grumpily reverts to their starting positions. Namely, all reasonable people peg their preferred philosophical outlook to whatever the science currently says, while the maniacs deny it outright.

Lesson 3: People, things, and ideas. The most controversial moment of the day was when Andrew Brown declared that “People are more interested in stories about people than they are in stories about things”.

I work in mathematics, which isn’t even about things. It’s about ideas. This puts me at least two steps removed from anything anyone cares about. Like many people present, I think, my immediate reaction was one of defensiveness. On the face of it, the statement is false: as David Adam from Nature pointed out, things such as cosmic background radiation can generate a surprising amount of interest. Andrew replied that this is ultimately a story about people, as it concerns the origins of humanity. This struck me as a bit of a cop-out, since all of science is – by definition – the study of the situation in which we find ourselves, and hence ultimately about us, if you like.

Still, there is food for thought in Andrew’s remark. Some things (or ideas) are of interest for the way they relate to aspects of people’s direct experience. The never-ending stories of scientists finding a gene for obesity or campanology testify to this. Other ideas are interesting for their mind-expansion value: plenty of people derive pleasure from wild and wacky ideas. Dark matter & Higgs boson detection constantly attract headlines, even though they fall completely outside anyone’s daily life. This is – mostly, I think – where mathematics fits in, Grigori Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture being a good recent example.

That example does qualify an interesting story about a person in a much more direct sense, though, since Perelman is such an unusual character.

The most interesting stories of all should, therefore, concern wild theories which also relate to our daily experience. Can mathematics hope to qualify? Yes! It could be argued that the P=?NP question, for example, lives exactly here. (For the hat-trick, all that remains is for it to be resolved by an extraordinarily strange individual.)

Lesson 4: The view from the other side. It was valuable to hear about the science book business from publisher turned writer Christopher Potter and literary agent Peter Tallack (disclaimer: he’s my agent). It’s clear that in all areas, the trend is away from paper towards electronic media. My impression though, is that this is happening faster in the world of journalism than in books. Relatedly, I sense that while journalists are – rightly or wrongly – feeling threatened by bloggers, book-writers have a slightly more secure position. While people might write blogposts for free as a hobby, they’re likely to continue to want money to write books. The upshot was that Peter’s “five reasons to be cheerful” pretty well had their desired effect, and it was certainly nice to end the day on an optimistic note.

Lesson 5: It really is time I got a twitter account. Well on that, at any rate, I can report progress. The only thing now is to work out what to do with it.

Overall, a thought-provoking day, and lovely to meet people including Andy Extance and Stuart Clark. So, many thanks to the organisers & sponsors including Bluesci magazine and the Public Library of Science.

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One hell of a relationship

11th December, 2010

Two great mathematicians of the 20th century, Pavel Alexandrov and Andrey Kolmogorov, were the closest of friends. They were almost certainly more than that too, although we cannot be sure. Understandably, they guarded their privacy closely due to the terrible persecution of homosexuals in Russia at the time.

Alexandrov said [pdf] of their relationship:

“in 1979 this friendship celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and over the whole of this half century there was not only never any breach in it, there was also never any quarrel, in all this time there was never any misunderstanding between us on any question, no matter how important for our lives and our philosophy; even when our opinions on one of these questions differed, we showed complete understanding and sympathy for the views of each other.”

No quarrels, no misunderstandings, complete understanding and symapthy for 50 years…. that really sets the bar for the rest of us.

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No more news

1st December, 2010

Everyone knows that what appears in the news is rarely the most important information about that world on that day. But why not?

One issue which is often discussed is sensationalism. By having racier, more exciting stories than their rivals, a newspaper or TV channel hopes to attract a bigger audience. And of course it is audience size, rather than accuracy or quality of output, which measures success. So dramatic stories are privileged over dull-but-worthy ones, and everything must be dressed up to seem as spicy as possible.

I exaggerate, perhaps, but the process is well known and much analysed. But there is another, deeper phenomenon, at play: Harrabin’s law. It doesn’t depend on the cynicism of the press, but begins with the observation that news, definitionally, has to be new. So commonplace or ongoing situations are unlikely to be included. Conversely, the more uncommon an event is, the more newsworthy it is. So rather than providing a summary of the state of the world, the news represents a daily freakshow of uncommon occurrences. It is, by its very definition, utterly unrepresentative of people’s wider experience.

I was impressed by this idea, because it gives a simple causal mechanism whereby many important facts about the world go unreported, for the very reason that they are happening all the time. So newsdesks prioritise rarities such as train and plane crashes over the daily carnage on our roads. Serial killers and terrorists get top billing, while domestic violence chunters along below the radar. The Congalese war, which has been raging for over a decade, claiming millions of victims, makes the news so rarely that many people remain unaware even that it is happening. Meanwhile skirmishes in previously peaceful regions are guaranteed headline status. Deaths due to ecstasy are reported; those due to alcohol are not. How could they be? After all, they are happening constantly. But it is in knowing the things which are happening day in day out which gives us a truer picture of the world we live in.

As you might expect, Harrabin’s law has political consequences. Firstly, it distorts people’s perception of risk. The classic example is the person who is terrified of flying, but thinks nothing of driving to work daily. But it isn’t just at the individual level that problems occur. Terrorism is a rarity in the UK, and therefore by Harrabin’s law, it gets reported and discussed a great deal. Hence, governments are under immense pressure to act using any resources necessary. How domestic violence could benefit from the same media exposure! (Of course, if it hardly ever happened, then it would get it.)

The implication seems clear: we don’t need news. What we need is importants. (Of course the two may sometimes coincide.) As for how to bring this revolution about, and how to decide what qualifies as important and what does not… well, I’ll leave that to another day.

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Well Done Simon!

1st April, 2010

Simon Singh has won his appeal against the British Chiropractic Association, who sued him for libel after he wrote that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments”.

The appeal court has decided that this is fair comment, which of course it is. This is excellent news for him, and for all of us. It should mean that scientific debates can now be held robustly and in public, without the fear of libel writs being slapped down left, right, and centre. The libel laws have long been a weapon for well-funded cranks, and it is tremendous news that Simon has stood up to them, and disarmed them.

As Milton said, and their Lordships quoted:

“I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; …. that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.”

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Save the LMS?

10th December, 2008

The London Mathematical Society is a small but important institution which operates out of De Morgan House in London. It publishes a few (very high quality) books and journals, organises and supports conferences and symposia, and has small grants to give out for mathematical activities. The LMS also bestows highly regarded prizes and medals for mathematical research. Its focus is research into pure maths.

There is a firm plan to merge the LMS with the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), no doubt a fine institution, but one about which I must plead ignorance. Its focus is applied – or applicable – areas of maths.

There have been meetings around the country to discuss the proposed New Unified Mathematical Society, with the Presidents of both societies present (but me absent).

I can’t say that I have weighed the arguments carefully myself. But certainly several mathematicians are deeply concerned about this plan. If you have a view, you can follow the debate at their Save the LMS blog.

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Bad Science 1 – Bad Medicine 0

15th September, 2008

The Guardian has won its legal battle against Matthias Rath – a vitamin-magnate who told desperate South Africans that his pills could cure AIDS, while “so-called anti-retroviral… drugs severely damage all cells in the body – including white blood cells – thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic.” Ben Glodacre of Bad Science – who wrote the piece in the Graun that attracted Rath’s unsuccessful lawsuit – is justifiably pleased and proud. Meanwhile Rath is doubtless spitting mad, and hopefully, shortly, bust.

Categories: Bloggery, Crankishness, General Science, Politics | Comments (0) | Permalink

Laws, exclusions, and middles

30th July, 2008

What does Intuitionistic Logic have to do with Kate Moss’ drug use? A Neighborhood of Infinity explains.

Categories: Logic, Maths, Nonsense, Politics | Comments (0) | Permalink

“Education Without Permission”

10th August, 2007

Last week should have been the summer school in Sirince, Turkey, on the subject of Algebra and Model Theory. This school is an annual event, and is financially supported by TUBITAK, the highest research institute of Turkey, the Turkish Mathematical Society, and various universities. You can see photographs of this idyllic event here. However this year it was closed down by the local authorities; one of the reasons given was “Education Without Permission”.

Worse, the event’s organiser, the distinguished mathematician and teacher Ali Nesin, has been arrested, and now faces criminal charges in Turkey. Alexandre Borovik is organising a campaign and a petition against this action here. I encourage everyone to sign it.

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