Working hard or hardly working?

"Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work." So said Horace, the Roman lyric poet, over two millennia ago and little has changed since. I am currently one to attest to that sentiment as I am in the middle of writing up my PhD thesis and have accordingly developed the peculiar mania that grips many students at this stage in their degree where non-thesis pursuits become shamefully wasteful or even patently corrosive of your time! So, I'm afraid that this week's post from me is just a brief one, and the long-promised 'human machine' edition on stem cells is being pushed back yet again, apologies.

In light of this sudden idiopathic workaholism that overtaken me, it seems appropriate that my post this week be on the subject of how hard scientists work. Coming into science I knew that the pay is generally crap, and it's not particularly glamorous, and you have to look for a new job every three years until you settle down with your own cosy lab somewhere - but at least it's a fairly nice lifestyle, right? Well yes and no. I love the academic lifestyle - it's the right mix of individual freedom and motivating challenges, by which I mean that it isn't too stressful but isn't boring either. That has been my experience (present situation excluded), but a recent report from the University of Nottingham suggests that I may have been one of the lucky ones, or perhaps that things are going to worsen for me! 

The report (available here) looked at the working hours of conservation scientists in several countries by analysing the time and day of 25,000 publication submissions to the journal Biological Conservation. It's true that this is not, perhaps, the most reliable indicator of general working patterns since people tend to put in extra hours in the run-up to publication, but the results are still intriguing nonetheless. The long and the short of their findings are that scientists, basically, work pretty damn hard (well, conservation biologists at least). They observed that 16% of manuscripts were submitted late at night, and 12% were submitted at weekends, and that the proportion of work submitted outside of normal hours has been increasing ~5% each year. This paints a fairly bleak picture for the future if working hours are going to stretch further and further into personal time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study also found significant differences in working habits between different countries. The countries whose scientists seem to work the most unsociable hours are Japan and Mexico, who seem to work late (~30% manuscripts submitted out of hours on weekdays), as well as China and India, who work weekends a lot (up to 40% submitted at weekends). The most relaxed scientists were found in Belgium and Norway, who like their weekends off (~5% submitted on weekends), as well as South Africa and Finland, who go home at 5 (less than 10% submitted after hours on weekdays) - thus explaining Shaun's abrupt move to Helsinki three years ago! British and American scientists were about average in their working habits.

So what makes many scientists so busy, and why do they stick at it for often quite poor salaries? Well the combined research, teaching, reviewing, and administrative duties of senior scientists puts a big strain on their time. The authors of this investigation warn that this can may be having a negative impact on the quality of the science produced, as well as the happiness of the researchers themselves.  Dr Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, who led the study, reflects:

 "We call for academic institutions to remember that good science requires time to read and think and over-stressed scientists are likely to be less productive overall. We also recommend that peer-review activities are included as part of the academic job description and considered in staff performance evaluations. At the end of the day, working on this paper has been an opportunity to reflect about our own behaviour and priorities. Next time I go to Bali, I will spend more time swimming and talking with my wife and less working on manuscripts."

Why so many scientists are willing to put up with the current situation is perhaps the more informative question. People become scientists often because of a burning curiosity that they must fulfil, and the realisation of that goal is its own reward. In many ways, academic science is an indulgence that most other professions wouldn't tolerate. Researchers are, by and large, able to investigate whatever they're interested in, in whatever way they see fit. Clearly, dead-end research is eventually weeded out by funding bodies (*all hail the funding bodies*) but generally it's fairly flexible and if you're interested in something and stick in science then there's a good chance you'll end up working on it. As well as this, there is the feeling that you are contributing to something bigger than yourself. Research never disappears, it will outlive you and become your legacy once you're just a memory. This is the same sensation that artists must get when creating their masterpiece, or writers have as they pen their latest novel. Moreover, if your research is useful then it can have ramifications far beyond anything you could achieve in most other jobs, but even if it's not then you're still helping to take one more step along the path of human progress. This is why people chose to be scientists and work unreasonable hours for a lot less money than an investment banker, and it's why I would always encourage anyone who is interesting in entering science as a career.

So, Horace was right, life gives you nothing without hard work, but then if that work is intoxicating enough then life begins to mean nothing without it either. 

Planck: All we need is six numbers to describe the universe

As I'm sure most of the readers of this blog are aware, the Planck data is now out. It turns out I was correct with two out of three of my rumours. I said that the "ISW mystery" was still present, it was. I said that Planck would present ~3\(\sigma\) evidence for non-zero neutrino masses, they did (though, as I suggested in my rumour, only after including information from galaxy clusters Planck has detected). Finally, I said that there would be 2-3\(\sigma\) evidence for some type of "non-Gaussianity", there wasn't. I will duly update my should-I-trust-that-rumour? algorithm in the following way: explicit remarks from Planck members, good rumour; wishful thinking from other theorists, bad rumour.

So what were those results? What big news is there?

The answer is that there isn't anything strikingly new or surprising. I've been trained by years as a theoretical physicist to to dread that sentence and, indeed, many of my colleagues have gone into various states of despair. But, for some reason, I spent the second half of last week in a state of excited wonder. Surprisingly, I loved what I saw on Thursday. It was both stunning and beautiful. This post will be me trying to explain why. (For more details of the actual results see Sesh's post and Peter Woit's list of other blog posts).

The model of cosmology that has been gaining traction over the last decade and a bit is called \(\Lambda\)CDM. This stands for \(\Lambda\) Cold Dark Matter, where the \(\Lambda\) represents the poorly named "dark energy". This model has a few theoretical issues, but it is incredibly simple. What Planck specifically found is that this model fits the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) very well and better than any alternative that they tested.

Why I found what Planck saw to be incredible

As I wrote above, Planck's results last Thursday had me in a state of impressed awe. On the day, I couldn't quite put my finger on why, until I read another cosmologist's tweets marvelling at how everything we were seeing could be described by just six parameters. Then it hit me. For once, cosmology had gotten it right. What Planck measured depends on a significant variety of physical phenomena. If the early universe had more matter, or more radiation than we expected, Planck would have seen it. If the primordial density perturbations had been shaped in a significantly different way to that in which we expected, Planck would have seen it.

Cosmology gets a lot of flak from some directions for the so-called "epicycles" of dark matter and dark energy. I can kind of understand this when people see images like this and are told that we "don't understand" 95% of the energy density of the universe. But what is often missed is that we include the effects of dark matter and dark energy in this \(\Lambda\)CDM model with one, single, parameter each. And once those parameters are fixed, the predictions of all of cosmology are too.

With this firmly in mind, take a look at Planck's most important, headline image below. This (sort of) shows the amplitude of the temperature fluctuations in the CMB as a function of their angular scale. Remember, it takes just six numbers to define what that entire curve should look like. Just six.

Solar Eclipse

Southern Hemisphere view. This eclipse was only visible from New Zealand, Australia, and Chile.

The phenomenology of a fourth spatial dimension.

A hyperdimensional cube, known as a tesseract...

Part of the motivation for this blog was to open up a dialogue between working artists and working scientists. One of the conversations that is starting to develop relates to the (artistic) field of phenomenology and whether it does/doesn't have anything to say when it comes to the more abstruse sciences. Of course phenomenology is the study of the things humans experience (at least according to my rudimentary understanding of it) and scientists are human beings who experience abstruse science so phenomenology must have something to say about science, by definition. But what?

The discussions which began this conversation concerned two online applications that aid in the visualisation of the scales involved in time and space. See this post and this post and the comments in each for a discussion of the apps. In that discussion and in the comments to a later post I expressed a sense of disappointment in what these apps were managing to express. I should clarify that I think the apps are great and interesting, but if one is looking for a phenomenology of science I don't think this is where the most interesting phenomenology is (of course the app creators aren't looking for a phenomenology of science, so they are completely forgiven). The scale of space and time are very ordinary, everyday, Earthly things. The most interesting discoveries science has made, at least in the world of high energy physics, are not well described in such terms - this is almost precisely what makes them so interesting.

As Rhys pointed out in one of those comment threads a huge part of this problem is that many of these discoveries rely heavily on mathematics. And, to a very large degree, to understand the discoveries, you need to have a grasp of the maths. The fact that the very abstract structures and symmetries and patterns that lie hidden in the mathematics are then actually exhibited in the real universe is one of the more wonderful things experienced by a scientist. And that is not easily captured simply through pictures, videos and sounds (or even smells) of the universe.

However, I came across an app today that really does try to bridge this gap. If someone were to be looking for a true phenomenology of the more interesting and wonder inducing aspects of theoretical physics then this is the sort of thing one should be looking for. It is an app that simulates a hyper-dimensional cube. OK, so what on Earth does that mean?

Well, a dot exists in zero dimensions, it has no length, width, nothing. A line exists in one dimension, it has simply a length. A square exists in two dimensions, it has a length and a width. Next, a cube, exists in three dimensions, it has a length, a width and a depth. Now, just imagine there was a fourth spatial dimension. Mathematically this is an easy thing to write down. Then, just as one can form a cube by extending a square into a third dimension, one can form something known as a tesseract by extending a cube into a fourth spatial dimension.

Now, we creatures who exist in just three spatial dimension can't visualise a fourth spatial dimension (I certainly can't). But, just as we can look at a two dimensional surface (a TV screen) and see a projection of a three dimensional object, so can we do the same for an imagined four dimensional object projected onto three (or two) dimensions. And this is precisely what this app does for a four dimensional tesseract. [Edit: Or, as Rhys said in this comment "it shows what a 4D painter would paint on a 3D canvas..."]. And the brilliance is that the app even allows you to manipulate the tesseract, to move it, to spin it (in any of the four dimensions) and while manipulating it you see how that three dimensional projection changes on your two dimensional screen. Here's a video preview...

This app came to my attention as a consequence of minutephysics covering extra spatial dimensions in his latest video - which you should watch for a quick overview of higher dimension. There is even, apparently, a game in construction that requires you to move into and around a fourth spatial dimension to solve puzzles (for example using it to navigate one's way around obstacles and put keys into locks).

I actually think that a phenomenology of abstruse science can go even further and get even more interesting than this. A fourth spatial dimension is one of the simplest ideas I can think of that is not directly understandable from an Earthly perspective, but easily described by maths. It also has the unfortunate position of quite possibly not actually being reality and certainly not yet being testably true reality. However, it is here, with this sort of application/idea that I would think a phenomenology of the interesting bits of high energy physics should start.

Twitter: @just_shaun

The invisible made visible

Last year, I uploaded a post about the Cell Picture Show, where researchers in the visualisation of molecular biology can exhibit some of their most impressive images. This month, Science has released its equivalent in the form of its visualisation challenge. This competition has been running for 9 years, with winners and honourable mentions announced in the categories of photography, illustration, informational graphics, interactive games and video. The examples this year are well worth a look - the image above is taken from the first place entry for informational graphics, entitle The Cosmic Web by Miguel. A. Aragon-Calvo et al. It depicts the overall structure of the Universe if you could see the various levels of organisation, and comes with a handy explanation for non-cosmologists like me. I really can't do it justice with this small image, so I encourage you to go and see the original for yourself! The people's choice winner for photography is entitled The Cliff of a Two-Dimensional World by Babak Anasori et al (below). There's something about this image that I love; the deep red on blue is reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, but in fact is what you see when you image ultrathin sheets of titanium compounds under an electron microscope.

The Science website also has archived records of previous years' winners, which are also well worth a look!

Image rights belong to Science and the original authors. 

On Scale

I recently encountered this "Scale of the Universe" widget: an animation tool that places the human body in the center of a sliding scale of dimensions ranging from the very big—the estimated size of the universe—to the unimaginable small of Quantum foam and string theory. Everything in-between is visualized comparatively: pollen grains set against Ultraviolet light and the width of human hair, mountain ranges against galactic distances.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Cloud Prototype No. 1 (2001), fiberglass and titanium alloy foil

The schema of extreme polarities in size reminded me of the two scientific images—an image of a cell and of an exploding star—I found so striking when thinking about impossible images. In many ways science works with scales that stretch the limits of the imaginable, or by using mathematics and data as forms of abstraction to manage the quantitatively big or the inconceivably small.

But conceiving scale concretely, as a visual image, can matter a lot in social ways. The first images of the earth from space created a point of view that had not existed before the 1960s, even though they described a concept that had been comprehended for centuries—a post-Copernican universe, in which the Earth is a planet among others. But those images entered the collective social imaginary instantly and viscerally, as something quantitatively new. In an odd way, the Apollo photographs didn’t de-centre the Earth into a universe wider than we can imagine so much as re-center it for our vision. By placing the whole Earth in the center of the frame of television images beamed to one of the first global audiences, those photographs let us see the planet in an entirety new way: as an entity. Many descriptions of these images invoke a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and they have been credited with contributing to a ecological consciousness.

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light - our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.
-Ulf Merbold

Senses of Science

Four months ago I wrote a post about wonder in an attempt to sketch out the aspirational mood of this blog (or at least my sense of it). In six week increments since I’ve metaphorically returned to that mood and tried to make its implications more concrete by mapping out the actual directions that thinking about wonder and new lines of disciplinary mingling have led my own research: first, into the domain of science film, and second, into postulations about this genre within a critical category I called ‘the impossible image.’

So come December, I’ve decided to take the opportunity for reflection provided by the end of a calendar year and circle back to wonder, backlit by a sense of some things I’ve learned from this multi-directional conversation thus far. The hero of this post is an out-and-out iconoclast: the scientist and Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose six-decade career was devoted to the intertwining of science and art on every level. A biologist trained in the Laboratoire d’Anatomie et d’Histologie Comparée at the Sorbonne, Painlevé was an avant-garde photographer and filmmaker who penned countless texts, reviews, polemics, and manifestos; was politically active during and beyond the Second World War; and initiated a scientific film institute dedicated to supporting and disseminating science film well before the nexus of art and science was comprehended as a serious topic.

underwater bricolage: Jean Painlevé with his diving gear
"Everything is the center of the world. I'm forced to be multicentric."

Best of all, Painlevé is a humorist. His mesmerizing films and delicate photographs, chatty texts and sparking interviews give us a way to concretize a subtle quality of the aesthetics of wonder—the significance of pleasure in the strangeness and surprising beauty of the natural world. The mood of his contribution to the history of our topic seems to me perfectly encapsulated in Foucault's riff on discovery and the affects of wonder:

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

 

Leonardo: A Painter at the Court of Milan, for the Twenty-First Century

Study of Arms and Hands, c. 1474

Study of a Woman, c. 1490

Earlier this month, one of those once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions opened in London: Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. It runs at the National Gallery until early February.

This isn't a review, since I haven't seen the show. But it amazes me that an exhibition like this exists, so consider this another 'live stream' post—a placeholder for reflections and mullings on and around Leonardo's unbelievable images, with some suggestions about why we are seeing more of this work; and subject to being updated with new links, reviews and so on.

To state the obvious, it isn't easy to put together an exhibition like this. In fact there has never been, and will never be, a 'complete' Leonardo retrospective in the manner of a Picasso, a Judd, or a Richter survey—those big, bulky exhibitions that cover the full range of a capacious individual's oeuvre, and of which one can say, with a certain admiration, "I am large, I contain multitudes." These kinds of shows are necessarily overwhelming because they cover a multifaceted life. But in this case the reasons are practical: some of these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes are site-specific (painted directly on a wall), and they are universally under bureaucratic lock and key: all Leonardo's work, from the most magnificent painting to the quickest, most fleeting of drawings are owed by institutions and individuals (and the Royal Family). So the problems of red tape for any curator contemplating this kind of mountainous show is unimaginable.

Studies of Water passing Obstacles and falling, c. 1508-9

Three Impossible Images

1.

Marianne Moore, A Jellyfish (1959)

Of course this first one isn’t even an image, but a poem—a lyric. In this digital audio file at the SFMA Poetry Center you can hear Marianne Moore reading it. Listening to this clip is lovely, because it gives you a sense of the witty, self-depreciating charm of the personality behind the language.

If this poem is an ‘image,’ it is a drama of the almost-visible, starring a jellyfish. Quite a specific, individual jellyfish, swimming around as they do, and momentarily caught in a small poetic narrative. It is the jellyfish that is both visible and invisible: fluctuating, transparent, ethereal, sometimes translucent and sometimes highly colored, jewel-toned, gem-like, strangely compelling, very beautiful, intensely desirable, and alive.

The first lines of the poem contain so much all-over movement that you sense the liquidity before articulating it. Yet when the “arm/ approaches” everything changes. Suddenly it hits you that there’s no glass barrier, an aquarium or a zoo, to separate the person from the jellyfish, so that that this might actually be an eco-drama: a story of ecological ethics in which the arm is in the ocean with the jellyfish.

And this realization introduces two important other movements. When the arm drops back it registers fear, but also something else. “Abandon[ing] your intent” isn't exactly giving up. There’s a hint of purposeful letting go: a deliberate act of relinquishment, or an instinctive reaction to the liveness of the jellyfish’s quiver.

This poem is a kind of motionless animation. It is a drama in which what is not visible becomes more practically significant than we can see, so that a very attractive ‘thing’ is not removed from its environment.

The smoking CMB evidence of the Big Bang

The centre of the galaxy and a sliver of the CMB anisotropies

I was asked recently how I know that the Big Bang definitely happened. This post will be my attempt to answer that question. I will focus on something called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB for the rest of this post). The CMB is as close to smoking gun evidence of the Big Bang as you can get. In fact, it's such good evidence that it is better than a smoking gun. The figure of speech should no longer be “smoking gun evidence”. It should be “smoking CMB evidence”.

The other reason I am writing about the CMB is that humanity's prediction of its existence and our subsequent measurements of it and its properties are jaw-droppingly stunning pieces of detective work. If you are ever feeling down about human nature and our propensity to do kind of stupid things then just remember what you're about to read and reassure yourself that at times we can be incredible.

What is “The Big Bang”? (A very brief review)

Everywhere we look things are moving away from us and the further away we look the faster things are moving. This means that the distance between any two unbound objects in the observed universe is increasing. Or, in other words, the universe is expanding. As time goes on things will get further apart, the total density of the universe will decrease and the temperature of outer space will go down.

But what happens if we run the clock backwards? Well, naturally, things will get closer together, the total density of the universe will increase and the temperature of outer space will go up. This suggests that at one point far back in time the universe was in a very hot, very dense state that was rapidly expanding. This, and nothing else, is the essence of what the Big Bang model of the universe is.

Of course, we understand how the matter in the universe behaves at the current, low, temperatures. Also, thanks to results from particle accelerators and other experiments we even know how the matter in the universe behaves at quite high temperatures. This means that we can make very definite statements about what the universe should have looked like when it was below those temperatures. But, although we can and should speculate about what the universe might have looked like above these temperatures, we can't yet say anything about those times with certainty.

So, if you let me repeat myself for emphasis, at its heart the Big Bang model is nothing more and nothing less than the idea that the universe was at some point in the past very hot, very dense and rapidly expanding. To work out whether this is what the universe was actually like or not we need to know what the present day consequences of this might be. To answer that question we should take a closer look at what the universe we see now would actually look like at these higher temperatures.

Total Perspective Vortex

[I apologise to all readers of the blog who also take the time to read the comments because you have probably already have seen the following videos. For those who don't read the comments, you're missing out on half of the purpose of the blog.]

Michelle asked in this post what role cinema plays in science. I think this is an interesting question and a smart choice of post from Michelle. Opening a dialogue between science and art isn't easy. We speak very different languages. We sometimes tackle similar questions, but we do the tackling in very different ways. Moving images though are something that exist in both worlds. They may be used very differently, but that's the interesting thing; how are they used differently? How are they used similarly? There are tools such as sculpture and advanced mathematics that probably aren't used in both worlds, but moving images are.

So moving images are a great example for this blog because they give us that first piece of common ground from which to begin a conversation. 

My first contributions to Michelle's questions were the following two films. They are the best examples I know of that properly show how insignificant the Earth is. Watch them in high definition.

The first film, above, is a film of the dark matter particles in the Millenium Simulation. This is what we expect the universe should look like if we could see the dark matter in it. As stated in the wikipedia link, each individual particle in this simulation (i.e. pinprick of light in the film) has a mass one billion times the mass of the sun. Not only that, but the total volume of the simulation is much less than the total volume of the observed universe. Keep that in perspective when watching... this video shows only a small fraction of the total volume of the universe and each dot in the video is much bigger than an entire galaxy! (don't forget that one galaxy will itself be 100,000 light years wide - this is so big that in one human lifetime light could only travel 0.1% of its width - and that is just one galaxy, something just big enough [edited from the original - "not big enough"] to be seen in this video.)

The film above is the real world equivalent. This film shows the locations of individual galaxies in the observed universe as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. SDSS has only mapped a fraction of the sky and can only see galaxies that are within a certain distance of us. So you see less of the universe, but at a finer resolution. In each galaxy in this video there will be billions and billions of stars just like our sun. This website helps if you find it hard to visualise what the number one billion actually means.

As the conversation develops I will hopefully find time to explain the scientific gains from both SDSS and the Millenium Simulation as well as what a scientist gains from watching the films themselves. But for now, let's just treat these as eye candy for the weekend as we wait for James' next proper post, due to arrive on Monday.

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Wonder

One of the later Platonic dialogues contains an exchange between Socrates and a contemplative youth named Theatetetus, who admits to an occasional sense of overwhelming confusion at the messiness of the world. “I wonder exceedingly as to why in the world these things are,” he says, “and sometimes in looking at them I truly get dizzy.” Socrates responds to this description of the contradictions “that fight against themselves in our soul” with this remark:

I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

The Platonic dialogues were written in vernacular language and intended for a non-specialist audience. They are books about experience that activate the old Latin sense of vulgate as a specialist text that has been translated into the common tongue and put into general circulation—a clarification of the original, yet one that does not seek to reduce its complexity or meaning.

A grounding motivation for this blog is the uniting perception that there are few active vernaculars between contemporary domains of specialist research. You might be legitimately un-surprised to hear that the study of culture—aesthetics, art history, literary studies—doesn't speak much to the hard sciences—cosmology, biochemistry, computational engineering. But these divisions, and the frustrating incommunicability that comes with them, are pervasive: film scholarship doesn't speak enough to poetry, musicology, or the history of science, while the study of the literary Middle Ages might not have enough to say to a history of Enlightenment political novel. As a humanistic scholar of a contemporary period, I will probably never teach Shakespeare.

But a concern with communication isn’t exactly new, even in living memory. Some of the most compelling poetry of the American twentieth century took this problem seriously enough to make comprehensibility its motivating question. “What common language to unravel?” asks William Carlos Williams, thinking of language as the basis for community. Marianne Moore, one of my favorite poets, summarizes the social necessary of building paths of access with the concisely caustic reminder that “we do not admire what we cannot understand.”

Specialist knowledge that neglects to nurture a vocabulary to transmit what it does in comprehensible ways makes itself vulnerable on a number of levels, particularly to the specters of obsolescence and utilitarianism. And too much hermeticism can cut off the routes by which non-specialists might encounter the processes and outcomes of specialized research with the openness and many pleasures of discovery.

Yet few people speak jargonistic lingo out of a desire to be cryptic. Work in the trenches and on the ground has to be efficient, and keyword shorthands are also enablers of communication, through a kind of quick-fire sign language between participants in a field. So the question of accessibility doesn’t have an easy or a self-evident solution—indeed, even broaching the problem of access requires first acknowledging that the very desire to speak across and beyond disciplines challenges a by-now centuries old separation of research domains.

Most importantly, "inter"disciplinarity can’t imply simply a facile gesture at dissolving the disciplinary specificity that gives our work context. It might even require an initial hardening of those differences in order to clarify what boundaries, exactly, are being traversed. How precisely do the words ‘time’ and ‘life’ resonate differently between cosmology, biology, and aesthetics? What is the status and value of ‘contingency’ in each of these fields? In light of the above, are there justifications for keeping things separated out?

Circling around these questions returns me wonder. Socrates’ response to Theatetetus is powerful because it is truly pedagogical. He validates the confusion of a questioning, striving mind as an authentic and necessary grappling with difficulty. And he acknowledges that wonder, while a conscious and cognized reaction, is often expressed in muteness and inarticulateness. At the same time he calls it a “feeling”—a gripping emotion whose very nature is to be at once virtually incommunicable and profoundly readable. To turn to Shakespearean eloquence, “there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.”

Wonder is an emotion grounded in a condition of receptivity: in the sense of amazement that can hit you in an encounter with beauty, skill, or a fundamental mystery—regeneration, birth, creativity, persistence. Its ineloquence does not imply passivity, but quite the opposite: wonder is a motivating feeling that impels action, movement, and research, because it lights a person up with restlessness and curiosity. In the oddest of ways, wonder unites art and science in a shared contemplation of nature.

And this pragmatic value of curiosity has been described, with a certain eloquence—by another philosopher who turned his gaze to practical problems of living—as an issue for our contemporaneity:

I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is a decadence, of a lack of writers, of the sterility of thought, of a gloomy future lacking in prospects.

On the contrary, I believe that there is a plethora. What we are suffering from is not a void but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening. There is an overabundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time. And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know. […]

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to know; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” Rather, we must increase the possibility for movement backward and forward. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling-down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of those various networks.

(Michael Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," in Ethics, alt. translation here)

Foucault seems to describe abundance and narrowness as potentially connected—as no more that two sides of the same coin, perhaps differentiated only by your point of view. And he makes an un-romantically optimistic claim for the future with the quite simple injunction to do something.

While I don’t know exactly what will come from this blog it does represent a hope for dialogue. I’ve recently become interested in the new common grounds between once distinct fields created by the pervasion of new media, and I'll explore some of that here. I’ll describe art and scholarship I’m mulling over, and will adjust my topics in response to both James and Shaun. And perhaps over time all this will include many more points of disciplinary and practical reference, because of the geographically unconstrained sphere of address made possible by the simple fact of cyberspace.

The London riots

The London riots have reminded me why I helped create and now contribute to this blog. They also motivated me to write the following.

There are people in society doing incredible things. Right now, in Geneva, there is a physics experiment going on (the LHC at CERN) that is so incredible that physicists all around the world will stop whatever they are doing at the merest hint of a rumour from the scientists involved. At the LHC they are literally looking for completely new types of matter. And not just types of matter that aren't here to play with on Earth, or the solar system, but types of matter that are not present as stable particles anywhere in the observable universe. Also, at the moment, in an orbit around Earth, there is a satellite that is measuring the light that lingers in the universe from the end of the big bang. This light has existed, travelling freely, for 14 billion years and it is not a stretch of the truth to say that it really is a photograph of the big bang. This is incredible and it is, right now, being done by humanity.

A huge proportion of society, will, on the occasional, dark, starry, night look at the stars and feel a sense of wonder – so they do care. However, most people don't feel any sense of participation in this incredible stuff humanity is doing. They might know of the LHC and CERN, but they feel so infinitely detached from it that they certainly won't relate to it. But, ultimately, these experiments are an undertaking by all of Europe. The scientists might be doing the hard labour, but the capital was provided by the European taxpayer. These are the public's experiments as much as they are the scientists' experiments.

The people rioting in London are no exception. They will care too. But all they can see is a society where the purpose is to accumulate wealth. What a crappy society that looks like. Until you start a family, where's the point, the purpose, the thing in life worth caring about? Why not riot? At least it gets you in the news.

While it isn't true that if everyone in London knew about the LHC that the riots wouldn't have occurred I do believe that if people cared about the goals of their society and saw them as something to fight for that the probability of stuff like this happening would diminish, whatever the other circumstances.

So, I see this blog as a small scale skirmish in that fight. That is, the fight that first aims to make society fully aware of how incredible it actually is, and secondly aims to make society want to contribute to doing more of this incredible stuff.

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