Welcome to the Machine

Listening to Golem

2010-01-17T22:07:00.000-08:00

This blog "Welcome to the Machine" stops here. It will continue, in a similar style, as the new blog Listening to Golem. This change is purely symbolic in nature and it marks the turning point that brought the previous blog and its initial motivation for existence to a conclusion. "Welcome to the machine" is being edited for publication in book form. "Listening to Golem" will continue what "Welcome to the Machine" would have liked to be, a reflection upon the world of science and its inner rituals.

Napoleon in rags

2009-12-20T07:12:00.000-08:00

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
ain't it hard when you discover that
he really wasn't where it's at
(Bob Dylan, "Like a rolling stone")

There were many spoken and unspoken questions in the past few days over my recent post on NPD. For this reason I will review here some books about narcissism that I've been reading in the past weeks, as a part of the psychotherapy treatment I am undergoing, aimed at containing and hopefully undoing the damage accumulated over the past two years. No more comments on that, my posts covering that length of time spoke more than eloquently about it, and then I am tired of playing Banquo's ghost at conference banquets!

The two "tests" about NPD and narcissistic abuse that I described in my previous post are not my own creation: they are almost literally lifted from a combination of the diagnostic criteria for narcissism, as given in the second and fifth of the books listed here below. There is a broad psychiatric literature on personality disorders, which mostly focuses on the two most serious ones, narcissism and borderline. In addition to the specialized literature, there are several books available for a more general public that address the main characteristics of the narcissistic personality disorder and its effect on other people. The general accepted paradigm is that the narcissists themselves very rarely improve, and mostly the condition becomes more severe with the aging process. Thus, most of the literature about narcissism does not address the person affected by NPD, but focuses instead on the people who happen to be at the receiving end, and who typically are themselves likely to develop very serious psychological problems as a consequence of having skirted the event horizon of a narcissist. There are several very good books aimed at helping the recovery of victims of narcissistic abuse, while there are very few aimed at helping narcissists step out of their solipsistic vision of the universe and begin to relate to other people and eventually learn what it means to put oneself in another person's shoes and to savor the gift of empathy.

There is a notable exception to the lack of literature addressing recovery paths for narcissists, and it is given by the poignant book on narcissism written by the Jungian psychoanalyst Nathan Schwartz Salant, "Narcissism and character transformation". This book is much deeper and interesting than all the others I've been reading on the subject, and it is the only one that takes a compassionate look at the narcissistic character. It is not really meant to be read by the narcissists themselves, rather it is aimed at the psychotherapists or social workers who are engaged in the daring task of trying to treat narcissists. The book presents a path in several steps, which follow the morphemes in the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus as narrated by the Latin poet Ovid.

The fundamental problem of identity in narcissism is explored from the Jungian perspective, in light of concepts of the Self, immanence and transcendence, animus/anima dynamics, archetypal aspects. The profile of the narcissistic character is sketched by Schwartz Salant in wide brushstrokes that highlight the main difficulties that are likely to emerge in the psychoanalytic work: "lacks penetrability", "rejects interpretation", "cannot tolerate criticism", "cannot integrate synthetic approach", "low empathic capacity", "takes pride in having no needs", "lacks sense of history or process", "disturbed masculine and feminine functioning", "potential for positive archetypal constellation". Some of these characterizations, such as lack of empathy and the tendency to rewrite history and situation so as to come out clean, are the same that we are going to encounter again in all the other references on the subject, while some here are more specifically taken from a Jungian point of view and refer more directly to the Jungian approach to psychotherapy. In any case, the book focuses on the main issues, the envy/rage core of the narcissistic person and the mirror transference in the relation to others. The first stage of the transformation process proposed by the book is described in terms of the Ovid retelling of the Greek myth and in particular the role of the nymph Echo. The analysis of the Ovid text is by itself very interesting and worth reading quite independently of any direct interest in the theme of narcissism, with interesting parallels to Neo-Platonic philosophy and anthropological and ethnographic studies. The main point the author is making in this first stage is the need and limitations of the mirroring response in starting a transformative process in the narcissist: "while a meaningful echoing response is necessary, there is reason to doubt its transformative effectiveness even when it exists with great psychic depth". If one has experienced the frustrations of years of continuously attempting to provide this type of supportive response to a narcissist, in the hope of catalyzing a transformative process, one knows exactly how much one has to invest only to see one's efforts destroyed as soon as the fear of confronting the deeper core of the defensive personality structure gets the upper hand and whatever door had momentarily seemed opened to penetration from the outside slams closely shut, leaving you out in the cold to wonder. Using the image of the reflection of the mask in the water as part of the mysteric cults of late antiquity (the fresco of the Villa of the Mysteries of Pompei) the author elaborates more deeply on the theme of the mirroring reflection. As concrete goals of change in this first stage, the author proposes "the change in stage one to a positive masculine functioning, for example to a sense of spirit not involved in power and overriding ambitions". The second stage, according to the author, focuses on the discovery and development of empathy, which he associates mythologically to the emergence of the feminine aspect. All along the emphasis is on how the therapist can use a careful combination of echoing techniques, interspersed with real attempts at reaching the depth of the narcissistic resistance, in a gradual way that would not cause the defensive barriers to immeidately slide shut preventing any further attempts at communication. It is a difficult, frustrating, and immensely slow process, and that is the reason why, almost universally, the psychiatric literature writes off the NPD as incurable and focuses only on helping the recovery of the victims. Schwartz Salant is the only one who does not seem to give up and tries to outline a credible if incredibly complicated path that aims at circumventing the defenses of the narcisistic character and bring about some process of transformation. The discourse is heavily loaded with the methods and language of Jungian analysis, so this book will appeal to people who have a specific literary sensitivity: the use of material from the Classics, Greek and Latin literature, Neo-Platonic philosophy, Eleusian and Dyonisiac mysteries will appeal mostly to people who share this cultural background. It certainly appeals to me for this very reason, and I find it more profoundly rich of useful reflections on the theme of narcissism than many of the more immediate "self help" type of references.

Though I very much like this lucid and deep analysis of narcissism offered by Schwartz Salant (whose other book on the borderline disorder is also extremely interesting), I have to say that for personal reasons, at this particular time I am also looking more closely at all those other books, the ones that address paths of recovery for people who have suffered in a close encounter with a narcissist. These books are typically more of the "self help" type, which I tend to find a bit shallow and not very elaborate. However, I can't deny that there are special situations when this form of very direct and unmediated narrative becomes very relevant and genuinely useful. I will give a brief guided tour of four such books, all published relatively recently, all addressing people caught in destructive relations, be it personal or professional, with narcissists. I will quote some passages from these books, as a way to elaborate on the somewhat blunt and direct comments of my previous post on the topic.

Eleanor Payson's recent book "The wizard of Oz and other narcissists: coping with the one-way relationship in work, love, and family" is one of the best available references directed at victims of narcissists. It follows the typical parabola of this type of human relation from its exciting beginning to its tragic end, using as a guiding metaphor the story of the Wizard of Oz. The story begins when one enters "the illusory world of the narcissist". The warning is clear right from the introduction: "the NPD person's complete self-absorption results in the insidious tendency to devalue those within his or her sphere of influence, either subtly by condescension, or openly with criticism. The inevitable impact on the individual in a relation with an NPD person is a dangerous erosion of self-esteem." I will quote freely sentences from the beginning chapters of this book that characterize the typical dynamics of interacting with a narcissist:

"Somehow you are never included in the picture with the narcissist, and you may find yourself wondering: `who am I if I am not allowed to exist?'"

"By the time you realize that something is wrong, the cumulative effects can range from bruised self-esteem to severe depression"

"From a distance this individual appears rather intriguing, charming, and even charismatic. With a closer look, however, you notice that he is monopolizing the conversation and appears animated and engaging as long as the focus is on him."

"You are increasingly fascinated with his performance and even more so as he selects you to be his exclusive audience."

"As your self-esteem withers and your confidence in knowing your reality diminishes, you gradually concede more power and control to the NPD person."

"The NPD person is not able to recognize, other than superficially, the feelings and needs of others... This is not to say that the NPD individuals don't often shower you with attention, gifts, or favors. Indeed, they often do. But the ultimate goal is always for some kind of return. The giving may be to foster a certain image or an overall feeling of indebtedness in you, such as an IOU note to be called in at some other time. You, of course, would rather believe you received the gift because you are cared for and valued."

"When you are involved with an NPD person, you may continue to tell yourself that things will eventually even out - that you will get your turn and when the time does come, he or she will be there for you, too. ... Then an event in your life focuses the spotlight on you, and you are shocked and disappointed by his or her behavior. ... At this point you are finally ready to look at the destructive impact this type of relationship has had on your life. ... The moment of truth is often a confusing mixture of intense feelings. You might feel outrage, hurt, and betrayal. At the same time you may feel released from the self-doubt that has dominated your thoughts and emotions."

"Socially, the overt NPD type is apt to convey the feeling that you are the audience, there to enjoy his entertaining personality. ... In a deeper relationship the NPD individual will exhaust you in his need for your constant attention and appreciative support, yet his desire to charm you will insidiously give way to sarcasm and competitive tension."

"The most insidious and subtle dynamic underlying all interactions with the NPD individual is his unconscious capacity to turn his lack of boundaries into an asset by causing you to lose the boundaries that define you. ... Sooner or later you find yourself orbiting within his sphere of influence, having lost sight of your own feelings, opinions, preferences, and goals."

Here's some more, which touches just the right chord: "In the circumstance of mutual admiration or an exciting shared goal, you can maintain an observing eye on the potential for the narcissistic dynamic. You will learn to maintain conscious awareness of the intoxication of mutual positive regard due to the fact that it becomes both an idealization and distraction dynamic causing you to forgo your desires and lose your ability for self-care."

"He also induces you into a sense of obligation and disproportionate loyalty"

"This initial phase of the relationship, which is characterized by the NPD person's idealization of you, will be followed by a subtle or not so subtle `turning of the tables'"

That's when one finds oneself suddenly playing the role of Banquo in the Shakespearian play. Macbeth is the ultimate story of the betrayal of friendship and loyalties in the name of a merciless quest for power and supremacy, in the grip of unrelenting tyrannical egos. It's not for me to ravel in this darkness any longer: the raging storm of narcissism tramples everything in its wake, with no regard for the scars it leaves behind ... till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane.

Payson chose the lighter tale of the Wizard of Oz, because this isn't the story of the narcissists, their slaughtering of friendship and caring, their progressive sinking into suspicion and paranoia, as depicted so beautifully in Macbeth. This is the story of the narcissist's victims, who go through the long and painful process of unmasking the illusory grandeur of the Wizard of Oz, disarming his capacity to hurt others by exposing the pitiful core of fear that hides behind curtains of defensive structures, and in that way finally manage to escape the illusory world of Oz back to a safer and well grounded sense of reality.

The main difficulty comes in the fact that NPD people have a great capacity to look well adjusted, charming, even sensitive. They are high achievers, courted, admired. It is very difficult for those who experience the hurtful side of the interpersonal relation to come forward and find understanding. Still quoting Payson: "The deep and severe disturbance of an NPD person is primarily seen in the pain he or she inflicts on others" and also "The NPD person's ability to project his problems onto you is so powerful, you have come to believe you are the one with a problem." This is why it is so important to seek professional help when one is caught into this type of interpersonal dynamics.

Another key problem of the relation with an NPD person is summarized by Payson as: "Unless he can take credit himself for your achievements, he is unlikely to validate it as success."

When one enters the narcissist's inner circle, which one would like to think means a deeper human relation we usually like to call friendship and a closer sharing of experiences and thoughts, one finds in fact a very ambivalent environment. Still quoting Payson: "The chosen few may be lavished with attention and appear as if they can do no wrong. Even these individuals, however, are subject to the tyranny of the NPD person's control and are held hostage to his will."

"The narcissist views others and the world around him as an extension of himself, perhaps as you might view your arm or leg. Because the narcissist can only understand others by absorbing them into his own experience of self, he determines that others should behave and act the way that HE behaves and acts." (emphasis of the author)

"... the narcissist has assessed, with considerable skill, the vulnerabilities of another person. He then effectively manipulates this person until he achieves his desired outcome. ... He has an almost self-righteous attitude that this is his mission in life, as if he were the captain of a ship of fools."

Typically you begin to see the real face of the narcissist when at some point something good seems to be happening in your life. The ability the NPD individual shows, on such occasions, to erode and undermine your feelings from within by carefully planting the seeds of self-doubt shows that, behind the appearance of caring, lies a core of cold envy and rage that only wants to destroy others as the only way to affirm oneself:

"Unconsciously, his/her envy and pain make it impossible to enable you to be happy. Equally evident is his/her inability to share in your joy if you should have good fortune or success. Since the NPD person must always feel `one up' with you `one down', acknowledging your success would threaten his/her defensive need to feel superior."

The theme of narcissism and envy is a deep and important one, that is treated at length in all the serious books on the subject. I will comment more on that later, with an extensive quote from another reference.

There are crucial defining times in a person's life, where it is no longer possible to move gradually from one moment to the next in a gentle reassuring adiabatic continuation of the past into the future, sailing smoothly across the threshold of the present. At such times, the singularity is reached. Those deep transformative moments are frightening, because they are accompanied by a loss of certainties, a need to question the foundations, the solid ground upon which one thought one had been standing all along, until it suddenly revealed itself as made of shifting sands. The edifice crumbles and the ruins await a slow process of reconstruction. It will not result in a restoration of a past order, whose existence has been annihilated, but a free experimenting with new forms, until out of the rubble something finally takes shape. Not an imposing tower of Babel, this time, but something with real substance and consistence. If attended to with sufficient dedication, these moments of crisis can herald the discovery of a deeper level of meaning, the true one that is stifled in the toxic fumes of ego driven conquests, and which can finally emerge only when the leaning tower imprisoning them is eventually toppled, when the Birnam Wood finally begins to walk and comes to give siege to the castle of Dunsinane.

The real question, however, is why we fall prey so easily of the illusions so convincingly orchestrated around us. The simple answer is that they appear to offer a relief from the endless struggle of life, a much desired momentary feeling of safety, a sense that, for once, we may allow ourselves the luxury of just swimming along with the flow. That's the allure of the narcissist, who is able to create this convincing illusion of shared destiny. Only with time one is forced to finally realize that the flow one was happily accepting to be carried by is in fact nothing but the narcissist's all devouring self-centered maelstrom. One can dig deeply into an investigation of cultural and multigenerational patterns, but why we fall for the illusion remains ultimately an unanswered question, one we will continue to drag around with the spoils of our wounded self.

Payson, as well as other of the references I am reviewing here, describes how certain types of early life traumas can essentially evolve in two very different ways in people: one is the narcissistic character disorder. These are the grandiose achievers, who are solely focused on the feelings and needs of their own self, whose strength is the capacity to captivate others and recruit them to serve their own vision, who are incapable of feeling empathy for others, tend to be suspicious of others, demand admiration and approval, and are secretly driven by a suppressed fear of humiliation. Then there is another pattern that similar type of early life experiences can take in people, which is often referred to as the "co-dependent" type. These are people who tend too easily to focus on the needs and feelings of others, have difficulties maintaining a clear sense of their own boundaries in relation to others, give their trust too easily. Needless to say, it is this later category of people that become most easily victims of the narcissists, who take the longest time to realize the truth of what is happening, to see the other person for what he really is, and take concrete steps to limit the hurt and damage.

Payson describes very clearly some of the most common defensive strategies used by the narcissist in conversation, in order to get around your attempts to have a honest and genuine discussion of what is happening. In particular, the "distraction dynamic" is a very effective method employed by the NPD person to defocus the issue and change the subject of conversation abruptly rather than having to be accountable for his own responsibilities, or else the "double message" strategy in which he manages to convey simultaneously completely conflicting messages. I have slammed against this barrier so many times in the past two years that I don't want to say any more about it, except quoting a couple of sentences from Payson:

"At other times, when you are simply sharing your thoughts about a subject of interest, the NPD individual may begin sharing something so unrelated that you wonder if you fell down the rabbit hole in Alice's wonderland."

"If you have co-dependent tendencies, you may find that your impulses compel you to expose yourself all the more by offering support and becoming more vulnerable."

"When you invariably frustrate his exquisite sensitivity to appreciation and admiration, or disappoint his expectation of you as his perfect ideal, he will project his anger and rage and will demonstrate a variety of defensive behaviors to keep you in line."

"One of the most powerful abilities of the NPD person is the way he projects the illusion that his logic is airtight and his analysis well reasoned as he astutely points out your weaknesses and problems. Before you realize it, your back is to the wall, trying to defend yourself against a barrage of mesmerizing attacks. ... As you reflect on your behavior later, you may shrink in shame at your loss of control and the terrible things you said. These episodes of your loss of control only intensify your fear that you are, in fact, the one with the real problem."

Once again, it is important to realize in time that one cannot handle the subtle and continuous twisting of reality that is inherent in the narcissistic dynamic alone, without help from a trained professional mental health care expert who can provide a sane sounding board and reality check and who can help you maintain a clearer sense of where the progressive erosion of reality you experience is really coming from. Otherwise, as Payson says:

"Serious symptoms for you may range from depression to chronic anger to stress-related illnesses, or the use of escape mechanisms such as compulsive of addictive behaviors".

I have now been through two years of this and I know what it means. In the end one has to examine life carefully and ask oneself the most difficult question: was it worth it? With all the nice work done, all the thoughts and ideas I enjoyed, the feeling of purpose, the projects, the new ideas and hopes, the beauty of it all, was it worth all the suffering that followed? The honest answer, I am afraid, is a clear "No".

How does it feel?
How does it feel,
to be on your own
with no direction home,
like a complete unknown,
like a rolling stone?

A somewhat frustrating feature of the existing literature aimed at helping victims of narcissistic abuse is that behind very promising titles such as "Disarming the narcissist" or "Freeing yourself from the narcissist in your life" one typically finds some very good descriptions of all the main aspects of NPD and their hurtful effects on other human beings, which are surely helpful, in the sense that at least those who are going through the impossible experience of interacting with a narcissist are reassured they are not going mad. However, when it comes to what is promised in the title, namely how to stop the downward spiral of pain and anguish, they have little to offer other than generic advice on practicing meditation to help keeping one's cool under the continuous shower of incoherent paranoid ranting and hurtful insinuations of the narcissist, or practice establishing and maintaining boundaries. Well, sure, alright, that much I could guess. The trouble is that narcissism is all about violating boundaries and anyone who is by one's own personal nature less able to resist this type of invasion and destruction of one's inner self will have a very hard time getting out of a seriously self-damaging situation just by an exercise of prana yoga. Discovering from one day to the next that one has been suddenly relegated to the sphere of non-existence after seven years of sharing both work and a (supposedly) close human relation will not be made any less painful by breathing exercises and some lame new age rhetoric.

Despite this very anti-climatic conclusion, the newly published book "Freeing yourself from the narcissist in your life" by Linda Martinez-Lewi contains a lot of material that anyone who has had a close encounter with an NPD person should read. The first half of the book is in fact probably the best available reference that gives the most accurate illustration of the typical dynamics of interpersonal interactions with an NPD individual. If the later part of the book, where it should come to advise on what to do is left wanting, this first part is sufficient to make the book a precious help for anyone caught in such a distressful situation. The case narrative based on the very famous (or infamous) lives of Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, and Ayn Rand serves well the purpose of setting the stage for an in depth analysis of the many forms of defensive barriers that the NPD erects between his inner uncertain self and the external world upon which all the unbearable aspects of his own characters, those based upon the pathological reactions to feelings of shame, are projected out onto other people.

The book gives a quick but well argued analysis of the role of envy in the NPD attitude:

"Envy in the narcissist is skillfully hidden. Yet it burns in his gut. The narcissist conceals his envy from himself. After all, he knows he is the best. Why should he be envious of someone who is his inferior? This envy arises from a deep self-hatred...He is confounded by human warmth, mutual dedication, and affection."

In other words: I am the best hence I cannot possibly be envious of others, therefore it is everybody else who is envious of me. Every time someone criticizes the NPD person or disagrees with him, the narcissists, who is unable to cope with criticism and dissent in any form, concludes immediately that is it a manifestation of envy and jealousy. The resulting pileup of paranoid fears and delusions is another distinctive character of NPD:

"The narcissist has many enemies, real and imagined ... He is suspicious even of the chosen few ... he is paranoid, tormented by anticipated attacks of perceived enemies ... looking for potentially incriminating information."

I think many people dealing with narcissist must be painfully familiar with this type of phenomenon, the continuous obsession of the NPD person about the envy he claims other people must be feeling for him: the endless ranting about jealousies that are invoked to explain just about anything that is not immediately agreeable to the NPD's ego. Often this frantic search for reasons to cast others in the role of enemies easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: there is no better way to alienate other people and turn them eventually into enemies than to wrongfully accuse them of jealousies they never felt and attribute to them second motives and doubt their loyalty and friendship. So, in the author's words, "The narcissist lives in a state of constant suspicion. Friends can suddenly become enemies in his world." This is why the course of life, for most narcissists, progressively isolates them from others, leaving them eventually surrounded only by enemies and sycophants. The powerful projections of envy that emanate from the narcissist are difficult, even for the most evenly balanced person, to handle. One can easily become trapped into the projection, accepting it as real. Where Ockham's razor should come to the rescue (there is either a whole world filled with people whose only motivating drive in life is to envy the narcissist and spend their time scheming against him, or else there is just one person who projects out these feelings attributing them to everybody else), often a silence of complicity descends, whereby people are more easily willing to accept the projection as an unquestioned reality rather than to struggle against the powerful force with which it is imposed. Sometime it is with more subtle ways that the paranoid view of the narcissist gets accepted as real by others. As Martinez-Lewi says, "His confidence and charm draw others into his delusional world."

The book focuses specifically on what is referred to as the "high-level" narcissist, to distinguish it from other forms of NPD, variously terms "covert" or "low-level" in the literature. These are the great performers, those narcissists that typically are "very successful and innovative in their professional lives".

The course of a typical interpersonal interaction with this type of NPD person is described as:

"He becomes energized, electrified, as he basks in the glory of the full attention of the audience. If the focus wavers away from him even for a moment, he skillfully brings it back to himself... `Conversations' with narcissistic personalities are always one-sided: he talks, you listen. There is no give and take, no real interchange, no communion of thought or feeling. You are the captive audience. Narcissists are walking advertisements of themselves... The narcissist takes up a vast amount of psychological space, leaving room only for himself... Those who associate closely with this type of individual often feel that they are leading his life rather than their own and that his life is more valuable than theirs... A successful narcissist deludes others into believing that he is genuinely interested in them. It appears that you are the most important human being that he has ever met... When it becomes evident that you are of no value to him, there is nothing swifter than the narcissistic brush-off, sometimes subtle, often abrupt. What appeared to be a vital link with the narcissist has just been expertly severed."

One of the sad and tragic ironies is described as follows:

"The narcissist has an incredible sense of self-entitlement. Everything is about him... Although he may be a malevolent human being, the narcissist believes that he is a `good person'. Blind to his deceptions and cruelties, he automatically plays the role of victim when he is accused of iniquity."

Here is an example: after almost two years of increasingly painful interactions during which I tried in all possible ways to find any kind of explanation for what was happening, the NPD person's statement about himself was "I am coming to the conclusion that I am really far too nice a person while there are sharks all over the place". I would have laughed had I not been too busy crying: one could easily reach a different type of conclusion, at least on the level of human sensitivity involved in making such statements in the given circumstances. One reason why one cannot break through the barrier of the narcissist's defenses is that they served him so well all along:

"High-level narcissists are handsomely rewarded for the very attributes that make them inconsiderate and demanding human beings: self-absorption, aggressiveness, hubris... They are fawned over and admired despite a delusional consciousness that rides high on the winds of self-adoration."

There comes a time in life when one badly needs a wakeup call and that's what Martinez-Lewi provides in the clearest possible terms:

"All relationships with narcissistic individuals are exploitative. Believing that you have a real understanding with one of them is a blind illusion. Whether personal or professional, agreements, contracts, or covenants with narcissists are made to be broken."

" The narcissistic personality values himself alone... he betrays and manipulates everyone who crosses his path."

"The narcissistic personality surrounds himself with individuals who act as extensions of himself. He fuses with those who will protect and expand his grandiose sense of self. When the time comes to discharge a member of the inner circle, he asks himself... who is the replacement? As long as these supporting actors succeed in keeping their star shining brightly, the narcissist showers his blessings on them... These blessings can be removed as quickly and abruptly as they were bestowed if the `master' is displeased or slighted... Regardless of their years of loyalty and sacrifice, these faithful servants are coldly discarded, like trash thrown into a Dumpster... The moment you cease to satisfy his endless ego needs, the narcissist will dispose of you. If you thwart him, he may destroy you."

"The narcissist is incapable of truly caring for someone else. ... In his obsession to win at all costs ... he leaves many lives in disarray and chaos, like bodies strewn on a battlefield. ... A narcissist cannot be loyal to another human being... At some point determined by his wishes and desires, the relationship will come to an end."

"The narcissist is a tyrant who controls the world that he creates. He holds absolute power over his subjects, who have no rights of their own... When the goal is reached, the narcissist raises the bar and changes the rules. He sets up the game so that he always wins and you always lose... In his psychological world one person is interchangeable with another... Those under his control are not free to lead their own lives, to make decisions and mistakes, to use their talents and energies, to have their own dreams. Their only purpose is to assist the narcissist in fulfilling his grandiose vision of himself."

"Often very attractive, narcissists know exactly how to manipulate others... He gives the impression that he understands you intimately and has your best interest at heart... He communicates that `you are the most important person in the world'... He presents himself as a savior who understands your deepest longings."

"Ruthlessness begins with a pervasive insensitivity to the feelings of others. It grows slowly and surely in small, steady, almost imperceptible increments. ... the narcissist is tragically divided between two selves: the outer shell of charm, grandiosity, and supreme self-confidence, and the inner core of emptiness, rage, paranoia, and despair... When ruthlessness runs its natural course towards destruction, it becomes treachery... Acts of treachery cause mortal wounds on the psyche that never heal, wounds that must be endured every day. Treachery tears a hole in our trust in life itself... The narcissist is predatory... he may not actually kill his victims, but he finds undetectable ways to diminish or destroy their lives."

"The narcissist is always in a race that he must win. He competes in every arena. ... The successful narcissist creates an intricate system of positive feedback, in the form of friends, associates, partners, spouses - who perpetually fulfill his endless needs. When the sources of these ego rewards become unavailable or fail him, the narcissist experience intense feelings of emptiness."

"The narcissist expects others to mirror him perfectly... The smallest criticism or oversight is a source of wounding... Narcissist egos are rigid, vulnerable to the subtlest slight. It is ironic that those who are so comfortable inflicting body blows on others cannot tolerate even the mildest criticism or affront."

Again one has surely met many times the narcissist who claims to be a very sensitive person precisely because his ego is so easily wounded by the imperfect mirroring of the people around him or the slightest form of criticism. This more than anything else shows how far remote the NPD person is from the very meaning of the word "sensitivity" and from genuine human feelings. Sensitivity, like empathy, is by definition the capacity one has of feeling the pain of others, not a measure of how reactive and defensive one's ego complex is!

The reason why it is so difficult to come to terms with what is happening and see the truth in time before suffering permanent damage is once again the capacity NPD individuals have to simulate genuine caring. In the words of Martinez-Lewi:

"On the surface, the empathy of the narcissist seems to be genuine... the high-level narcissistic personality appears to care about our deepest and most intimate thoughts and feelings. ... He gives you the impression that you are not alone as long as he is by your side, solving your problems, anticipating your needs. ... In the embrace of an accomplished narcissist, we can easily be deluded. ... Will you be able to wake up, wiggle out, and escape, or will you become another victim of his pseudo-empathy?"

I don't particularly like the general tone of "Why is it always about you?", Sandy Hotchkiss' addition to the psychology literature on narcissism, because of its overtly conservative standpoint and the occasional pseudo-religious lingo. It is probably meant to appeal to a certain type of American public. However, there are interesting parts of the book. The "seven deadly sins of narcissism" are, according to the author: Shamelessness, Magical Thinking, Arrogance, Envy, Entitlement, Exploitation, and Bad Boundaries. In this, the description of the defensive structures of NPD and the resulting dynamics of interpersonal relations matches essentially what one finds in all the other sources. Once again, the advise that is offered to the victims of narcissists does not stretch too far beyond the simple common sense: Know Yourself, Embrace Reality, Set Boundaries, and Cultivate Reciprocal Relations. All very well, this indeed touches precisely on where the problems arise in attempting to develop close human relations with an NPD person: what goes wrong from the start is the negation of self (only the NPD's self is ever allowed to exist), negation of reality (only information that reinforces the narcissistic structure is allowed through, the rest is either twisted and rewritten to fit the need or simply discarded), violation of boundaries and lack of true reciprocity. Indeed, one also knows that the people who fall for the illusion aptly created by the NPD are usually people who have some intrinsic difficulty with the assessment of self-worth and with maintaining a clear sense of their own boundaries. The trouble is that this is a self reinforcing process: narcissists erode other people's self esteem, making them more and more vulnerable to further denial of self, and so on. The coping strategies suggested in the book fall short, in my opinion, of providing a viable suggestion of how to break the cycle once it has been set into motion. They still contain, however, several useful observations that are worth reading. In particular, one of the topics that I found more carefully analyzed in this book than in the other references is in the chapter "Narcissism and aging: the mirror cracks". This details the worsening of narcissistic traits with the aging process with the ultimate sliding down the edge of an indistinct paranoid fog of madness, while all the defensive structures of manipulation and deception progressively crumble, until having alienated all the people who could have offered genuine human affection and support, the narcissist faces the endgame of life in an entrenched state of terrified isolation. On the contrary, the chapter on adolescence is probably the worst one in the book: a shallow collection of politically conservative stereotypes with no special insight.

Wendy Behary's "Disarming the narcissist: surviving and thriving with the self-absorbed" takes the point of view of schema theory (in the sense of Gestalt Psychology not of algebraic geometry!) in describing the narcissistic character disorder and its effect on other people. Again the narcissist-codependent dynamics is analyzed in depth. With respect to the other books, apart from the specific behavioral psychology point of view, it contains an interesting and more elaborate discussion of the origins of narcissism from childhood trauma. Behary distinguishes between two types of children that may evolve into NPD people in their adult life: the "spoiled/dependent child" and the "deprived-dependent". The first is pretty much what is discussed in most other references, the child that is doted upon by parents who hijack his natural development in the service of a projection of their own ambitions, while the second is especially interesting, at least for what I know about the specific case I have been dealing with. I quote directly Behary:

"The most popular proposal for the typical origins of narcissism is that the child grew up feeling conditionally loved, meaning that love was based upon performance. His parents may have expected him to be the best. ... He was not shown how to walk in someone else's shoes, or how to feel the inner emotional life of another person."

The book then focuses on the narcissist-codependent dynamic, by presenting a series of schema that are simultaneously activated in both and that end up determining the painful course of the interaction. I don't know much about the cognitive behavioral approach to psychology, but roughly what schemas describe is patterns of behavior which manifest themselves in a somewhat rigidified form in interpersonal interactions. It seems to be a helpful formalism to identify characteristic traits behind individual pathologies.

At the end of this long excursus on the literature on the subject of narcissists and their victims, comes the final moment of reflection upon it all. Having invested an enormous amount of inner resources in what I mistakenly thought was a shared enterprise, until it became plainly obvious that it was never meant to be, the deeper transformative act can only consist of turning this sense of defeat into a deeper reflection and ultimately a liberation from the chains of illusion. Not only there was no shared dream, despite of all the work, the talking, the gestures, the appearance of connectedness, but this long lasting and powerful illusion slowly drained away all other resources from their natural inclinations, bending them in the service of an imposed and unnatural sense of purpose. In that respect, the shattering of the dream brings about a sense of newly rediscovered freedom to finally develop one's own meaning and vision. If the experience of rejection, of being cast out of the illusory paradise of a tyrannical kingdom of heaven, does not destroy us, we may find ourselves finally in a safe place for the healthy and satisfactory development of our minds and thoughts. It is once again Milton's words from "Paradise Lost" that come knocking at our door: "Here at least/We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built/Here for his envy, will not drive us hence". Lucifer's struggle for existence in Milton is an apt representation of that same struggle, as described over and over in the various books about the victims of narcissism that I have been reading. These verses of Milton began to resonate in my mind long ago, well before I could even tell precisely what it was that seemed amiss, with my consciousness still too heavily encased in denial, and now I finally see so clearly what, some levels deeper in my mind, I must have been seeing all along, and refusing to admit.

You used to be so amused
at Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel?
How does it feel,
to be on your own
with no direction home,
like a complete unknown,
like a rolling stone?

Here comes the flood

2009-12-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
Use up what we used to be.
(Peter Gabriel, "Here comes the flood")

Whose idea was it to get me stuck for three nights in this nowhere out at the dark end of the Paris suburban train line, while all the other people at this conference are experiencing the warmth of some pleasant Parisian nights, right in the middle of the Quartier Latin? Whose? Well, not mine! Anyway, I've got only 27 more hours to go through, only 27, though it feels like an endless time, "ticking away the moments", each sleepless minute of dark cold night stretching like a blanket to cover agonies of thoughts. Only 27 hours to go. Counting.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash

Why am I going through this? One more conference, one more talk to give, one more responsibility. To what? To whom? When am I going to finally hit the bottom and start to climb my way up towards life again? Maybe, possibly, now. 27 hours, I can go through that. And then, will there be a next time? Another lesson to learn all over again? Or does this finally suffice to seal the tombstone over seven years of misplaced illusions?

The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
And as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
Was warm and soaked the crowd.

In the loneliness of these cold winter nights, out in these deserted snows, you cannot even reach for a friendly voice, for some noise of life in the streets, some dim glow of city lights, to guide you through the slow indifferent rolling of the skies. Five hours to dawn, counting, and a meaningless trap that snapped shut around you, bringing you back one more time, one last perhaps, to this same place. Insane, what does that word convey? Only a sound that momentarily breaks the continuum of stillness in the air, and the sweeping force of a rising tide.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
In any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive.

There are disciplines of the mind that teach us how to face the flooding waters of our deeper self that come rushing up - those waves of steel hurling metal at the sky - without being swept away and drowned by their primitive force. The oriental cultures had Zen and Yoga, the Europeans developed Jungian analysis. When Jung, over the course of many years, patiently compiled the calligraphy of his illuminated manuscript of the "Red Book" or Liber Novus, he was the last of the great alchemists who sat through the centuries in the silence of European winter nights, listening to the roar of voices from within. Did they expect to uncover the secrets of nature, or to contain the tidal forces that break us from within? I can turn the question back at myself, because we haven't really moved that far away from our alchemical ancestors, still playing around with our quest for a philosopher's stone, whatever it is that we like to call it these days, quantum gravity and the like. Still apparently fumbling around to make sense of the natural world, while most of the time trying, in fact, to devise a strategy of containment that keeps us going from one day to the next, without being torn apart by our inner tidal waves.

There is a numinous quality to Jung's drawings of the Liber Novus, a rare sense of peace accompanying the threatening deluge of our desperate demons. Liber Novus is now for the first time in print. Back home, I spent the week prior to this difficult trip, immersed in the warm comfort of a true and genuine love, reading through this very private world of Jung's active imaginations, trying to prepare the mind to withstand the coming lonely nights out here with this dance of ghosts and regrets. The discipline of Liber Novus is that of recognizing images, hidden in the powerful surge of despair that wells up inside our bodies and minds. Those images are ritually attended to, as in the miniatures of Liber Novus, transformed by our active intervention, integrated into our thought processes, which alchemically transform a menace into an inner dialog. The process turns us in this way from passive recipients of nightmares to proactive seafarers of the deep waters of the imagination.

Only four hours to dawn. Counting.

The monsters of the ego

2009-11-18T23:12:00.000-08:00

Are you a victim of narcissistic abuse?

No, I have not turned the subject of my blog into a self help recovery group, but unfortunately the scientific profession is populated by narcissists and by their traumatized victims. So the likelihood that, if you work in scientific research you may be either one or the other (or sometimes both) is very high.

Narcissism is classified psychiatrically as a "personality disorder", along with other well known types of illnesses such as the much discussed borderline. Many people suffering from narcissistic disorder are high achievers, driven, focused, successful. Invariably highly self centered and incapable of empathy for other human beings, they often become the perpetrators of abuse, typically in the form of manipulating partners, collaborators, and other close human relations, into acting as "mirrors that clap", whose sole function is to provide a continuous source of validation to the narcissist. These same people are then disregarded entirely whenever they cease to provide the narcissistic feed and dare to commit the unspeakable act of existing as other people, with their own individual rights to existence, dignity, and self-expression. The narcissist, with his insatiable hunger for being always at the center of everyone's attention, for special entitlement to a privileged right to existence, can inflict an infinite amount of pain and anguish on the people who, in one role or another, end up being exposed to his endless demands for self-gratification. As it is well known from the psychological studies of narcissism, the attitude of the narcissist comes in fact from a poor self-image, and unstable sense of self worth, which needs to be continuously validated at the expense of other people.

Here's a few quick hints on how to recognize, before it's too late, if the people in your life whom you feel close to - collaborators and friends for instance - are narcissist abusers and if you are becoming the victim of a relation with a narcissist.

Test 1: Unmask the narcissist. Have you ever observed him engage in five or more of the following behaviors?

- He cuts people off when they are trying to speak, interrupting them continuously in a disruptive and obnoxious manner.

- He pretends to be an expert on things he truly knows nothing about, and insists on being right at all costs even when more knowledgeable people disagree.

- He shows a lack of empathy towards problems of other people, such as a cold and insensitive response to an illness or an accident that you or somebody else close to him suffered.

- He has an extremely low tolerance for criticism.

- He is always seeking approval and admiration, if not adulation, from other people.

- He demands to be loved and admired by everybody but is rarely capable of reciprocating.

- He is distrustful of the motivations of others, suspecting people of envying him and scheming against him.

- He shows a clear disproportion between the importance he attributes to things that happen to him and to the same things when they happen to others.

- He behaves as if other people were identical and interchangeable: behaviors such as telling the same things over and over again in exactly the same way on all occasions, without any care for the specific sensitivities of different audiences.

- He exhibits a tendency to praise and cherish people for a period of time, as long as they serve the purpose of feeding his narcissistic needs and then abruptly dismissing them when they reveal themselves as real people with rights and needs.

- He thinks that special rules apply to him, or that he is above the rules that apply to all others.

- He is unable to sense the pain he inflicts on others.

- He is self-obsessed, continuously thinking and talking about himself.

- He exhibits a tendency to perfectionism and an exaggerated fear of committing mistakes.

- He is workaholic.

- He surrounds himself preferentially with people who please his ego without ever posing a challenge, such as people he can safely perceive as intellectually his inferiors.

- He rejects, if not overtly attacks, people who pose an intellectual challenge or dare to explicitly disagree with any of his statements and pronouncements.

- He uses acts of generosity towards other people to generate in them a sense of dependence and indebtedness, which is then used as an instrument for manipulation and control.

- He wants at all costs to be always "the first of the class".

- He is unable to offer a sincere apology.

If you checked five or more items from this list, then you are dealing with a narcissist and your mental well being may be in serious danger. If you checked close to all of them, then you are dealing with a severe case of "overt maladaptive narcissism" and your life may be in danger too. Seek help!

Test 2: Are you the victim of abuse? If you have just identified one of your close relations as a narcissist, think of whether in the course of your interactions with him you experienced five or more of the following sensations and thoughts.

- You feel physically tense: back ache, stomach ache, fast heart rate, difficulties breathing...

- You never know what to expect: he is seemingly caring and considerate one moment (when in need of your approval) and coldly dismisses you the next moment with no warning and no justification.

- You developed a severely damaged sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

- You underwent a prolonged period of severe depression, possibly with suicidal thoughts.

- You begin to doubt your own existence and your sense of reality.

- You experience lack of sleep for prolonged periods of time.

- You have a sense of not being allowed any room to voice your own thoughts and opinions.

- You feel you have to struggle to be heard.

- You feel that whatever he does to you, he will always blame you for it.

- You experience exaggerated feelings of guilt.

- You are drawn back into trying to relate to him even though you only experience pain in doing so.

- You feel trapped in an impossible situation, unable to find a way out.

- You feel as if you had to fight all the time and are worn out and exhausted.

- You are scared and confused.

Seek help with a mental health care professional! Being a victim of narcissistic abuse can be a severely traumatic life experience, especially if the perpetrator is a person you admire and looked up to as a role model. Especially if your professional life is entangled with this person, getting out of the abusive relation may be extremely challenging. It may seem frightening, and you may be tempted to put up with more abuse, as an attempt to defuse the tension and save what mattered so much to you in the relation, what you thought you were sharing. Beware: there is no such thing as sharing with a narcissist, and you can only learn that the hard and painful way. There is no healthy give-and-take relation with a narcissist, only a manipulative, crippling, subjugating type of giving and a demanding, exploitative, and insensitive type of taking. It is especially difficult to accept this when your interactions with him are both at the personal and at the professional level. How much of yourself, your work, your aspirations, do you have to sacrifice in order to save your life and your psyche from the destructive assaults of your narcissistic abuser? How could I be such a fool? The painful realization often comes with a sense of disbelieve, how could I have not realized he was like that? That's another thing that the psychiatric literature on the subject teaches us very clearly: the narcissistic personality is especially good at that, at being deceptive and manipulative, at simulating genuine affection and caring. Except that, in reality, the narcissist is only capable of caring about himself. He can care about you only as long as he continues to see you only as a mirror, which is usually for the first period of your personal or professional relation. As soon as he begins to perceive that you have a voice of your own and a a right to existence, the troubles start and since then on there is no return, because there is no possibility of a two ways communication, really. It is painful, extremely painful, to come to the conclusion that people who have meant a lot in your personal and professional life can only destroy you and that you should disengage to save your life. It is painful, but the alternative is only to continue to descend along the dark path of self-destruction. Stop! Break the chain that keeps you tied to an abuser in the vain hope to catch once again a glimpse of what things were like when you lived in the illusion he fabricated for you by promising that you'll be journeying together and sharing the joys of intellectual fulfillment.

The mystery of communication

2009-10-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

For the first time in a couple of years at least, I experienced what it is like to do creative work purely for pleasure and enjoyment, without being motivated by rage or by the need to defend a basic right to existence. Just that simple joyous feeling of liking what one is doing, of curiosity and playfulness. The sense that the thing itself in fact does not matter much, that the process of doing, of learning, of sharing thoughts and ideas, is more fulfilling than achieving any specific goal. A very taoist idea: the path is what matters not the goal. Well, it is possible, still possible, it seems. Maybe it requires very special circumstances, like this week of suspended reality, immersed into a world where time flows at a naturally slow pace, where work progresses along with long walks on the beach of a lake that looks like a sea on a surprisingly sunny day amidst bouts of autumn rain, where there is science and there is a lot of room for other forms of culture floating and mixing inside the same bubble of reality. I wonder if for some lucky few it may always be like that, whether there may always be a rich cosmos where the human and the noetic blend harmoniously instead of being at each other's throat, where there is so much to share. For once, it no longer makes me feel like trying to walk my way through a barren landscape. I had nearly convinced myself that I had been running after an illusion for a good part of my life, for seeking this type of experience. I had almost admitted to myself that I had dreamed up a chimera that cannot exist. So for once, finally, I am just writing because I am happy instead of indulging once again in that whole other spectrum of feelings I've been reversing down the pages of this blog, and maybe I'll stop being such a bore, for a time. It is a mystery what makes communication possible between people, what a substratum of shared experiences is needed to establish connections at levels that are deeper than the skin of reality. That is, indeed, what culture is all about: culture is what makes communication possible.

There's a whole spectrum of scientific disciplines that developed around the modern need for a theoretical understanding of communication and information transmission. This is a need that developed historically as soon as the technology for telecommunication became available. The existence of the first long distance telephone networks and the related problems of transmission of signals without loss of information was the first engineering challenge that called for a better understanding of what a message is, of how information is encoded, transmitted, and decoded. This early origin of the theory of information was followed historically by the first global war where science played a major role in determining the outcome and the resulting geopolitical equilibrium for the rest of the century. Within that war, a science of encoding and decoding messages became a crucial part of the arsenal that decided the outcome of battles. And if by 1951 Marshall McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride" had started to teach us how the medium is the message, the process of abstraction of the notion of communication had already been perfected in 1949, when Shannon published his mathematical theory of communication, which is a scientific milestone of the 20th century and quite a beautiful book to read.

The theory of telecommunication engineering merged in this way with the theory of coding and decoding procedures and created an intricate network of overlapping notions: entropy of languages, Kolmogorov complexity, Turing machines, codes from algebro-geometric curves. It is a rich universe of our contemporary scientific culture that I am only slowly beginning to explore. The development of computers and information technology proceeded hand in hand with the mathematical theory, until the more recent develoments paving the way to the jump into a realistic quantum computation technology. So far I only took a glimpse of a vast landscape seen through a keyhole, but finding a keyhole shaped like the state of one's present understanding is all one needs to unlock the door that leads to the next world of learning.

For a pleasurable excursus into the interplay between the development of the mathematical theory of information, coding, and communication, and the cybernetic movement, I have been entertaining myself with the recent book of Triclot "Le moment cybernétique : La constitution de la notion d'information", which I got on my recent Paris trip. A more philosophically oriented work, it consists of an informative excursus from the early days of communication theory and cybernetics, across Turing, the first comparisons between computers and the brain (see von Neumann's Silliman lectures), the role of entropy, the theory of automata, all the way to final reflections upon the impact on society and the political implications of this whole branch of science, on which already Wiener had pronounced himself in very stimulating reflections.

Seeds of the real

2009-10-21T09:59:00.001-07:00

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi.
(Jacques Prévert)

Airport waiting once more. Been in Paris a week, back a week, flying to Chicago today. I had thoughts of calling off the Paris trip all the way until the moment when I finally stepped on the plane. I found Paris unusually warm for October, but familiarly rainy, dead leaves and all. Every day the difficult negotiation of thoughts and feelings, stepping tiptoe over wounds still laying bare, fumbling for a remnant of scrambled mental processes that once had seemed like a coherent frame. A slowly emerging picture of something still possibly existing, ideas, matching formulae, similarities laying hidden amidst differences as wide as the gaping mouth of Chaos in Hesiodean hexameters. Soaked in rain - so much for it to wash away - I walked the familiar places, tried to see friends, tried to feel purpose and meaning in that all. Through the night I read Giordano Bruno, trying to find meaning there too, a search for something that still elicits a sense of connectedness. Focus, I have learned in the experience of the summer months, is what keeps us, if barely, this side of the line dividing existence from nothingness: the focused thought of a well defined scientific problem, stripped bare of everything that is human, and therefore hurtful, about it. It was a good idea, it now seems, not to have called the trip off: running away is never a valuable strategy.

There is a comforting quality to the process of learning: reading, thinking, understanding, a very basic type of human pleasure. In a case as clean and well defined as a mathematical concept this process is refined to a degree of elegance and essentiality that confers to it a special esthetic beauty. It makes it all the more comforting in its abstraction, like that type of Zen meditation exercises where one concentrates one's full attention on a detail of an image, making it into an abstract entity, while emptying the mind from all the other turmoils that torment it. How to compute the probability distribution in a random matrix model, one step after the other, a relaxing mental exercise, a Zen koan. For this to work, however, one needs to be able to let go, to forget all that seems - that is in fact - so much more important and compelling. With science we are able to comprehend and act upon the course of nature, but what ultimately remains beyond reach is the possibility of changing the nature of human beings. One simply has to learn when to let go, and then free the mind so that it can savor the pleasure of learning and its therapeutic value.

On my last day in Paris, browsing with friends at an open air book fair, I managed to get hold of a numbered copy of Max Ernst's "Journal d'un astronaute millenaire", one of his lesser known but very interesting collage books published in the sixties. I even manage to negotiate a reasonable price. "L'astronaute millenaire" is but one of the surreal visual stories in this collection, along with "Le rire du poetes", "humanae vitae", "l'enfance de l'art", etc. This late work has a very different style from the longer earlier collage stories, like "Une Semaine de Bonté". Those were long and elaborate narratives, with the dream like quality through which the observer's brain provides consistence and perceives deeper level structures at increasingly longer scales in the juxtaposition of incongruous collage elements. By constast, the millenary astronaut collages consist of still frames: the narratives they compose are short and iconic like collections of situational portraits. So masks mask and unmask each other while millenary astronauts predict the eclipses of the galaxies.

et le peintre arraché à ses songes
comme une dent
se retrouve tout seul devant sa toile inachevée
avec au beau milieu de sa vaisselle brisée
les terrifiants pépins de la réalité.
(Jacques Prévert - Promenade de Picasso)

Welcome to the desert of the real
(The Matrix)

In peace for all mankind

2009-09-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Transumanar significar per verba
non si poria
(Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy, Paradise)

Just went to a public lecture of Buzz Aldrin: moon landing anniversary, Planetary Society fundraising, book promotion event, whatever it was that brought him here. Surely an inspiring character, from the height of Moon-walk to the depth of his personal history of depression and mood disorders. Certainly an occasion for reflection, once more on the theme of hero figures: it is easy to understand how, at the time of the moon landing, the expectations created around the space race made the Apollo 11 astronauts into instant world heros. It was, after all, a great success to be celebrated being able to bring people safely to the surface of the moon and back. A symbol of what modern science and technology can achieve constructively, in stark contrast with the sinister background of the Cold War arms race: in peace for all mankind. Yet the human cost of the hero status bestowed upon the returning astronauts has been enormous: Armstrong all but disappeared from public life and Aldrin returned to it after his own long dark voyage through the underworld of depression and alcoholism. The all too human need to forge other people into symbols, hero figures, myths, is an incredibly aggressive act towards precisely those people one is trying to elevate above the human level. It is not just the people who accept to wipe out their own capacity for independent thought and action and to devalue their own lives by preferring instead to live vicariously through another person that are the victims. The people who are cast (reluctantly or willfully) into the role model attire are also victims of a scheme from which there is no escape except accepting the increasingly dehumanizing effect of being transformed into a symbol. Most people who find themselves in this role too easily lose the capacity for sincere human feelings, for empathy, for understanding, all precious qualities traded in for stylized and shallow adopted behaviors that fit the image of what the need to appear. It is no wonder that people break down when they realized how much they are asked to sacrifice. I am being carried away by a too familiar line of thought once again. In fact, Aldrin's public lecture was entertaining and inspiring. The criticism of the current perspectives for a manned space program very much to the point, with interesting comments on the structural differences between the Apollo and the planned Orion of a seemingly improbable return of NASA to the Moon, on his ideas about the cycler trajectories bringing a spacecraft on a periodic trajectory between the Earth and Mars - a sort of planetary commuter, on his original expertise in orbital rendezvous which is what brought him to the Apollo mission in the first place. Interesting, all of it. I am glad I was able to attend. Forty years down the line from that Moon walk day, heros are still living the life imposed on them by the chains of fame, still an example to us all, still keeping alive the dream of space exploration, and yet, one cannot help sensing also an undercurrent of psychological strain, the erosion that notoriety and its demands cause on our most cherished souls.

In the forty years since the Apollo 11 days, the dreams and expectation of our collective scientific imagination of the future of mankind have slowly moved from outer space to inner space, driven by the sharp comparison between a stagnant space program and the rapid advances of computer and information technology. Just as neural and cognitive science gradually replaced hard core physics as the hip science of choice of the younger generation, the focus of the imagination shifted from the exploration of the cosmos to the exploration of the human mind. In particular, the current of thought that came to be known widely as transhumanism became more and more representative of the new vision of the human future. The basic idea of transhumanism is the transformation of biological human beings into something else, which can range from the milder forms of human/machine blends we are already familiar with through the virtual reality aura created around our physical bodies by the multitude of our electronic accessories that keep us connected, to much more drastic images of future full downloads of human consciousness into machine hardware.

Curiously enough, both transhumanism and space exploration come historically from exactly the same source. Both can be traced back to a group of Russian philosophers and mystics of the late 19th century, the "biocosmists" revolving around the figure of Nikolay Fedorov. Among them was the geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii, whose work on the biosphere may well make him the precursor of all modern environmental science, as well as the father of rocketry and space exploration, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Fedorov and the biocosmisms advocated the achievement of immortality through science, via the modification of the biological human being, and at the same time they advocated space exploration as one of the ultimate goals of the new enhanced humanity.

Tsiolkovsky made the space exploration part of Fedorov dream become a reality. A lone provincial teacher of science in Kaluga, first scorned by the establishment of late Tzarist Russia and then sponsored by the Communist government and made into a national hero, Tsiolkovsky had a deep influence on the making of several Sovient scientists and engineers: Sergei Korolev, Boris Chertok, and the Khrushchev era Soviet cosmonautics. A very nice recent book by James T. Andrews "Red Cosmos" gives a carefully balanced and well argued account of the figure of Tsiolkovsky and his lasting influence on the space era. Most interestingly, Tsiolkovsky resoted to a mixture of technical writings, science popularization, and science fiction to promote his ideas, calculations and technical results about multistage rockets. It was precisely this capacity to address an audience at many levels that made him so successful in attracting a generation of young people to science, who ultimately transformed the dream of space exploration into a reality.

The other side of Fedorov's biocosmist philosophy was slower in developing. If with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 the space race had officially started and it would bring within just a few years robotic probes and human beings in space and eventually to the Moon, the biocosmist vision of a deeply altered (and perfected) human nature lied dormant for a much longer time and only recently has transhumanism emerged again as a strong current of thought.

It is perfectly understandable why, between the time of Fedorov and where we stand today, people steered away for a long time from the idea of an artificially enhanced humanity. The horrors of the Nazi ideology promoting a superior race loomed large on any thought of fiddling with the biological human beings. It was only after the development of cybernetics and the theory of information and communication that an idea of transhumanism emerged once more, this time addressing the problem of human/machine interaction. Wiener's writings on cybernetics purposely blur the boundary between the mechanism and the homeostatic functioning of biological systems. Finally, the accelerated development of computer technology made the human/machine interaction an everyday reality and the transhumanist ideas more and more relevant.

One also sees these days a return of the original biocosmist vision blending transhumanism with space exploration in a very interesting new manifestation. The most interesting science fiction writer of today, the Australian Greg Egan, has developed in his novels and short stories a transhumanism vision of disembodied human consciousness reproduced in an informatic medium as the basic substratum for space exploration. With no need to violate the laws of physics, his transhuman characters can populate space adventures spanning the range of times and distances of the cosmos, promoting the very sound scientific ides that a space faring civilization, or network of civilizations, can only exist if it abandons the biological constraints dictated by an evolutionary process adapted to a planetary environment but not suitable for the cosmos. I recommend Diaspora as a good example of Egan's transhumanist and very scientific form of science fiction.

The Ash Wednesday Supper

2009-09-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

No, I know, this is not Ash Wednesday in the sense of the Christian calendar of festivities, but it is a warm late summer Wednesday night and ashes from forest fires are raining down the skies of Los Angeles. It is the season when the Santa Ana blows a stream of hot air down the Saint Gabriel mountains and the campuses are frantically working to meet their grant proposal deadlines. For many this is a time of reflection, a sort of scientific Yom Kippur, where one is forced to draw a picture of one's own scientific activity over the past year and tries to envision where one is going and why. The harsh reality of Darwinian selection, by which a large pool of highly qualified applicants will be selected against by lack of resources and only a small elite will savor the privilege of supported research, makes the introspection at this time of the year all the more poignant, all the more sincere.

I personally think that forcing people with periodic regularity to perform a long and careful reflection on the status of their research work and aspirations is an excellent idea. One sees too often in other countries (in my own experience, Germany for example illustrates this point rather clearly) how senior scientists are generally no longer, or only very rarely, subjected to a direct scrutiny of their activities. Sure, there are reviewing committees for departments and research institutes but those come infrequently and the confrontation with the evaluation is less direct, since the latter typically focuses more on addressing the performance of entire units and less on specific individuals. It is easier in such circumstances to hide behind inflated egos who too easily convince themselves that whatever they are up to at any given time is of crucial importance to the scientific community, even though this may patently be a self generated delusion. "If I did not believe that what I do is extremely important, I would immediately stop doing it" a German scientist once told me: LOL, as they say in internet youth jargon. Such examples make one wish that more frequent and harsher forms of peer reviewing would provide a good cure for this type of exaggerated and unjustified self aggrandizing. At the same time one would like to have a situation where a society that cares about science would have the mean to support science as a whole, which means supporting essentially all scholars who are actively engaged in scientific research and not just the lucky five to ten percent, as is typically the case with government grants in the US. After all, one does not want to do the opposite mistake either, and neglect something that may perhaps not look sufficiently flashy and promising today, but which may reveal itself as being of real importance tomorrow.

The issue, in a sense, is like the political reflection about anarchy versus the status quo of law and order: do we really need to invent god and police to make sure that people can aggregate into a civilized society? Is it really only the fear of punishment that can move a person to act in a way that is mutually beneficial to all? Isn't there also something that one likes to call reason that people can appeal to? Transplanted in the context of science and the support for research activity: is harsh selection for scarce resources and the fear of losing the means of financing one's own research activities the only way to force people into a critical reflection of their own ideas? Isn't there a better way, which would be compatible with the principle of a more widespread and less elitist support for science, but which at the same time would avoid the excesses of narcissism and indulgence described above? I believe it all boils down, somehow, to an issue of "class consciousness" or of lack thereof. Despite the fact that science is a collaborative enterprise that grows upon itself and self regulates, a lot of scientists seem to be incapable of seeing themselves as a collective, a union, a class with common interest and common needs. No trade union of scientists yet exists, as far as I know (though I was personally tempted to talk the Wobblies into creating one). It is probably too much individualism, too much ego worship, too many ingrained habits of seeing others as rivals, competitors to outrun, to foster one's own delusions of superiority, that make it difficult for many to take the necessary steps towards perceiving us all as a commune. The professional associations of scientists try to bridge that gap by generating, somewhat artificially it often appears, a sense of belonging, but individualism is still the rampant and unchallenged behavior of most. Had there been a bit more "class consciousness" in our midst, perhaps a broader umbrella of public support for research would have been negotiated, while at the same time the excesses of self-indulgence would have been curtailed from within, without the need to resort to god, police, and the NSF to do the chastising for us. That healthy deep moment of reflection that comes to us every year at the seasonal Yom Kippur of science would still be possible, even in the presence of better and more broadly spread funding for scientific research, not because people are forced to reexamine their ideas, but because they feel that it is healthy to do so, for the common good.

The Ash Wednesday Supper, as the reader has certainly not missed, is also the title of the first of the three major philosophical dialogs of Giordano Bruno. Written at the time of his Oxford years (1583-1585) it is deeply critical of the British academic system, in ways one can still see reflected in the attitudes of today. In Oxford Bruno lectured about Copernicus and his then brand new revolutionary work in astronomy, as well as about Renaissance Neoplatonism. He was the first who dropped all the convenient "save the phenomena" paraphrasing used by Copernicus in his writings and went straight for the simple bare statement: the Earth revolves around the Sun. Yet, he was accused by the Oxford academic establishment of not being capable of independent original thought, of simply repeating what others have written in books: Copernicus's astronomical work, and Marsilio Ficino, for the Neoplatonic revival. It appears that already at the time of Giordano Bruno people where incapable of understanding that reading books and being knowledgeable of the interesting work done by other people is not a sign of being incapable of creative and independent thinking. As a response to the unjust accusation laid before him by the Oxford academics, Giordano Bruno promptly composed and published his three major philosophical works: "The Ash Wednesday Supper", where he severely criticized the attitude of his detractors, and the two beautiful and deeply original "Of the infinite, universe, and worlds" and "Of the cause, principle, and one". Then, he promptly left his position in Oxford and resumed his wanderings about the lands of Europe until he was eventually arrested by the Inquisition in 1592, after having been turned down for the chair of mathematics at the University of Padova (which would have granted him immunity from prosecution), which was instead assigned to the other candidate on the "short list", Galileo Galilei. After eight years of trial by the Inquisition, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic, for those very same philosophical claims on the plurality of worlds and the infinite cosmos that he laid out so elegantly in his British writings.

La fantaisie au pouvoir

2009-09-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

SCIENCE AS ANARCHY: FRAGMENTS OF A MANIFESTO

"Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives"
(Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method")

People who swear by quantum physics and pursue its consequences in all domains are no less bound politically than comrades fighting against a multinational agribusiness. They will all be led, sooner or later, to defection and combat.
(The invisible committee, "The coming insurrection")

DESTROY ALL FIGURES OF AUTHORITY.

Authority suffocates the creative drive of science. Trust no one, destroy personality cults, dismember individual mythologies! The bureaucrats are the scientist's worst enemy. They poison the ground where science takes roots. Where bureaucracy is allowed to exist science will die. Bureaucracy cannot be argued with, only destroyed. A more subtle and much more difficult form of authority to confront is that which emerges internally to science: the cults of personality that grow like weed around the nicer achievements of research have the sole effect of suffocating their creative momentum, transforming a fluid and genuinely innovative impetus of ideas into a rigid and oppressive force that prevents new ideas from developing away from an accepted orthodoxy of establishment. There is no room in science for personality cults. Boycott conferences: they are but thinly disguised temples consecrated to the cult of this or that fetish, aimed at reinforcing mob thinking, pledging alliance to one or another master. No gods no masters! Do not allow anybody, on the basis of "reputation" alone to confidently preach others about things they in truth know nothing about: having a valuable specific expertise does not confer to anyone universal authority. Always question anyone's assertions, no matter how loudly and emphatically pronounced. Everybody has equal right to existence and should be guaranteed equal room for expression. The validity of results is decided by careful scrutiny not by appeal to authority principles.

Such are the slogans of our imaginary manifesto of the anarchical scientist, or of the scientific anarchist, you choose. However, having said this, one needs a more careful reflection on why hierarchical structures still survive and thrive within the scientific community. Why do so many scientists fall so easily prey to the temptation of personality cults? Why do they welcome the imposition of authority which is so seemingly extraneous to the functioning of scientific thought? Why do they form gangs that marginalize and attack those members of the community who refuse to accept the proclaimed sainthood of this or that famous name?

Perhaps a good place where to start such a reflection is a little known booklet called "The tacit dimension", which contains the text of the Terry Lectures delivered at Yale in 1966 by physical chemist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi. The booklet has been recently republished by the University of Chicago Press. While I certainly disagree with many of the conclusions of the book and with the overall tone of Polanyi's reflections, it still does contain some very important insights precisely on the problem of structures of authority within the scientific community. The point that Polanyi stresses in his public address is the background of hidden, implicit knowledge, difficult to pin down and describe precisely, which plays a crucial role in the advancement of science. He starts by recalling Plato's Meno paradox, by which it is seemingly impossible to identify precisely the question one wishes to investigate if one does not already know what one is looking for. Formulated in more modern terms than in Plato's original dialog, this refers to that very important component of scientific progress which is not solving a well known problem, but finding the problem one wishes to solve, in such a way that it is interesting, doable, and likely to have a significant impact on science. We all know from the very start of our careers how difficult it is to resolve the tension between finding a problem that is doable *and* interesting *and* that has not yet been solved by someone else. In Polanyi's words, the modern version of Plato's paradox is the following:

It is commonplace that all research must start from a problem. Research can be successful only if the problem is good; it can be original only if the problem is original. But how can one see a problem, any problem, let alone a good problem? For to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars. The problem is good if this intimation is true; it is original if no one else can see the possibilities of the comprehension that we are anticipating. To see a problem that will lead to a great discovery is not just to see something hidden, but to see something of which the rest of humanity cannot have even an inkling. All of this is commonplace; we take it for granted without noticing the clash of self-contradiction entailed in it.
(Michael Polanyi, "The tacit dimension")

I have quoted this text extensively since here I do agree with Polanyi's conclusion that the Meno paradox is the origin and justification for the survival of hierarchical structures of authority within the scientific community. However, while the author welcomes the permanence of such structures I personally, as anarchical scientist and scientific anarchist, call for their prompt and irreversible dismissal. To understand why the problem so clearly outlined in the text above can be seen as the justification for the persistence of power structures, one can again recall the experience that all of us scientists have faced, of how difficult it is to navigate precisely that part of the scientific enterprise: finding one's way through Baudelaire's "forest of symbols" and perceiving hidden structures before they can be organized into precise statements and rigorous arguments. This process is uncertain and frightening: one can easily end up investing an enormous amount of time and energy developing an idea that turns out to be a red herring. One can easily corner oneself into a blind alley by chasing some fleeting ghosts that appear to promise rewarding results only to vanish into one's own scientific twilight. It is no wonder that most people are, more or less openly, scared of this perspective. That is what creates the wish for the savior, the hero that will come to the rescue of the lost voyager, pointing to the right path across the wilderness. It is fear that instills in humans the worship of authority: it was the lurking shadows in our ancestral darkness that generated religions, and it is the uncertainty and dangers of the road that make courageous explorers turn into sheepish followers. Some scientists appear to be especially good at spotting patterns, at sniffing out where the interesting stuff lies buried. They see the hidden connection that escaped detection even though it was under everybody's eyes. Naturally, due to the fears just described, others prefer to group together in the crowded space surrounding the people who appear to know where they are going, so as not to risk losing one's way in the forest. By doing so they sanction and contribute to create a hierarchy structure, a cluster of power and authority bestowed upon a person who is invested with the task of deciding for others. This is extremely dangerous, in my opinion (not in Polanyi's one and that's where we profoundly disagree) because people voluntarily relinquish their own authority over themselves, and in order to justify their own weakness they readily impose their chosen god on all those others who would have happily continued to wander around their own voyage of exploration without delegating it onto anybody else to set the course for everyone.

Instead of blindly delegating to others to make decisions as to what is interesting, new, and relevant, it would be much more useful to try to better understand what it is that gives to certain people a better feeling for the hidden dimension, a better compass to navigate uncharted waters. I come back to precisely this point in the next chapter of my imaginary manifesto.

Before getting to that, I still want to make some remarks on why I consider that figures of authority should have no place in the scientific enterprise and why I think that the latter is in essence a perfect model of a society organized on the basis of anarchist principles. I would like to quote again an interesting passage from the same source:

I would call it the "principle of mutual control"... each scientist is both subject to criticism by all others and encouraged by their appreciation ... This is how "scientific opinion" is formed, which enforces scientific standards and regulates the distribution of professional opportunities. It is clear that only fellow scientists working in closely related fields are competent to exercise direct authority over each other, but their personal fields will form "chains of overlapping neighborhoods" extending over the entire range of science.
(Michael Polanyi, "The tacit dimension")

It is hard not to see in this structure of diffuse and self organizing power, this decentralized form of authority by consent and mutual collaborative criticism
an echo of the anarchist vision of the communes as basic diffuse organizational principle of the society, with the "chains of overlapping neighborhoods" of competence connecting them into a larger organizational form, built from the ground up, from collectives, communes, loose associations, coordinated into an emergent large scale correlational principle which is self regulating and does not need the imposition of nation states, gods or masters. The natural functioning of the scientific community is based on the principle of peer reviewing as the basis for establishing the validity of scientific results, on the anonymous unpaid voluntary work of the large number of referees who donate their time to the purpose of contributing to the collective functioning of the community, to the advancement of what we call science. This is the best historical realization of the self-structuring principle of society that the anarchist movement predicted. It is strictly incompatible with the idea of a proclaimed figure of authority who dictates the canons of truth.

THE WRITTEN WORD AS SANCTUARY.

The only genuinely democratic venue for scientific communication is the written word. Unlike the spoken interactions, which are entirely dominated by relations of dominance and subservience, by prejudices and prevarications, the written communication is non-aggressive, open to everybody equally, and not colored by personal bias. The internet archives are open to anyone to post results and read other people's results: no written paper screams louder than others, none prevents others from speaking, none is allowed a greater room for expression at the expense of all others. Within the context of written communication, nobody can disrupt another person's presentation with continuous interruptions, nobody can use their position of authority to suppress others. Beware of critics of the written word, because they are usually motivated by the fear of losing a dominance position gained through the continuous practice of verbal aggression. The collectivity of books is the best antidote against the cults of personality and the worship of authority figures. The scientific mind thrives in the plurality of opinions, in multitude. Books are our best weapon in the fight for self expression and freedom from the oppression of authority. The broad landscape of human knowledge is humbling, and precisely this humbling effect is what protects us from the monsters of the ego, what makes us free to think and enjoy being part of that multitude of thoughts, each of us a dwarf, collectively a giant. The humbling vision of our own individual place in the vast aggregate that constitutes human knowledge is what sets us free to be truly creative and not driven by narcissism and self indulgence. Truly creative and original thought is such precisely because it feeds on knowledge, on the common heritage of mankind, on the experience of our shared collective mind.

This second installment of my imaginary anarchical scientist's manifesto brings me back to the question of the "tacit dimension" and an attempt to understand that special quality some people seem to have that makes them able to see structure where none is apparent, to have a more developed intuition for where things seem to go, where the hidden spring of water lies in the apparent desert. Instead of leaving this mysterious quality lingering unexplained on the verge of a semi-mystical interpretation, as Michael Polanyi does in his lectures, I would like to put forward a simple explanation and refreshing explanation: this special talent, so envied that people are ready to invest it of an aura of embodiment of divine (and therefore unquestioned) authority, has mostly to do with the degree of connectedness. Once again, those who are able to see farther are those who are able to climb upon the shoulder of giants, which is to say, have the broadest and more diversified knowledge. In other words, instead of worshipping a naive cult of personality of people with an undeniable strong sense of intuition, cultivate within yourself that same capacity by broadening your horizons: reading books, not necessarily immediately relevant to one's own current research topics but bordering on other "overlapping neighborhoods" of the map of scientific knowledge, is the most important activity for a scientist!

Those famous scientists who, like Feynman, scorn the reading of books have evidently suspicious motives: at the personal level they enjoy having created a niche for a cult of personality, with a court of followers constantly engaged in the pleasing of their personal ego, thus betraying the fundamental spirit of science as a collective. Naturally they fear the one thing that has the power to dethrone them. They fear books and encourage others not to read them simply because books provide a liberating vision of the broad landscape, they restore proportion, they deflate egos. Books provide all people, equally and democratically, with the same opportunity to acquire a broad landscape of knowledge, sufficient to guide their own path, with no further need to hide behind the worshipping of figures of authority to whom decisions of intellectual worthiness are constantly delegated. People who have been cast into this role rarely reject it. More often than not, they adapt to it with complacency because it flatters the ego. Naturally, they begin to fear the loss of this supremacy role. So beware of the motives behind the behavior of people who enjoy a position of authority and have started to fear the true democratic, collective, and anonymous life of the scientific commune.

The true nature of the "hidden dimension" is the dimension of reading, the broadest form of interconnectedness of the human race as a whole and the only real sustaining structure for an ideal society based on a loosely connected network of anarchist communes. The written word is the only form of communication that crosses barriers of time and space, cultural divides, conflicting sociological structures. An enterprise like science, which is by its very nature transcending all divisive aspects and which constitutes the true unifying force of the human race, can only benefit from a form of communication that is also by its very nature inclusive and decentralized, democratic and anti-authoritarian, and which provides us with a diffuse network of knowledge, a safety net which is the only guiding light to find the path of progress hidden within the forest of symbols.

OF SCIENCE AS WAR.

"As a humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs."
(Kurt Vonnegut, "Armageddon in Retrospect")

The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.
(The invisible committee, "The coming insurrection")

Since so much of the interpersonal relations within the scientific community are based on aggression, let us stop pretending that we are a peaceful lot. One may begin to wonder, if the whole point becomes that of perfecting the art of war and confrontation, why not to just go over openly to those who do that for a living. Perhaps, instead of agitating our pacifist banners on the front, while continuing to to think in terms of tactics and battles in our daily practice of human interactions within the community (competition, priority claims, verbal aggression) we should just sell off completely to the military and to the financial sharks of capitalism and start acting out openly the true nature of a scientific community we idealize in words and revile in acts. It is too easy to start feeling that all feelings of love, passion, affection, dedication only weaken our stance, because they only make us more easily vulnerable to attacks, and that rage remains the only successful motivation for the pursuit of scientific discoveries, an all encompassing, all consuming rage. Perhaps what we see happening within the scientific community is just an enactment of a deep truth about the human nature that brings people to choose aggression over cooperation, the same justification that is used over and over to justify the existence of capitalism as an economic system. If this were truly the case, then perhaps the making of the atomic bomb should be regarded as the greatest scientific achievement of mankind, precisely because it gave mankind the means for total self-annihilation. However, there is an alternative to being forever locked in the grip of this war/aggression mentality. There is the possibility of cooperation, of a shared common good, one that transcends the individual egos and their primal needs for recognition.

THE MONSTERS OF THE EGO.

The early days of psychoanalysis tended to depict the ego as the healthy rational mind and the unconscious as the realm of the ``monsters of the id". Far from being the case, the ego is the tyrannical monster that enslaves our creativity, our potentials for invention, and hijacks it at the service of its own infinite narcissism. The unconscious is the realm of the mind that supplies us with dreams, with ideas, with beauty. Narcissism is the worse enemy that stands in the way of the development of durable interpersonal relations based on true mutual understanding, on the capacity for listening and appreciating another person's mind, of sharing knowledge, thoughts, ideas, in other words, of what we usually call progress. The narcissistic needs of the ego are infinitely regressive and they stand in the way of all forms of creativity, but most of all of science, which is by its very nature a very humbling form of self awareness, which confronts us with the magnitude of reality and the insignificance of the personal ego.

The fact that the science functions primarily as a collective enterprise and as a self-correcting process which is de-localized and largely anonymous is important in preventing the monsters of the ego to undermine its achievements. As a simple and concrete example, although I myself blog about my life as a scientist, I am profoundly skeptical of the growing tendency to hijack the nature of scientific discourse away from its natural venue, which is that of peer reviewed professional publishing and divert scientific discussions into the public blog arena. The danger is to create an atmosphere of ideological pressure, where the validity of scientific theories is no longer established by the careful work of that delicate structure of voluntary refereeing process that self-regulates the functioning of science as a collective. Exposing science to blog discussions means to leave it open to statements of authority and personality cults, to the violent impositions of those who are the loudest, the most outrageous, the most vitriolic acrobats of the blogosphere, with no respect for that careful, silent and invisible, but very crucial self-regulatory mechanism which is the essence of the scientific commune.

Blogs play a very important role as grass-root journalism, as a place for the type of political discourse that is otherwise excluded from the business controlled media. I think they contribute essentially to healthy forms of debate within the society, but they may not constitute the best place for scientific debate itself. The difficult self-correcting process by which science improves itself is too delicate a dynamical equilibrium to be given in the hands of those people whose main intent is to show off the size to which their egos (and occasionally other equally irrelevant parts of their anatomy) can be inflated. It may be a good idea to reserve the blogging skills of scientists to create a venue for a healthy, if animated, discussion the sociological, philosophical, and political aspects of the scientific community and keep the discussion of science itself where it belongs, in the natural environment in which it flourishes, the scientific commune and its diffuse, invisible, collective, anti-authoritarian power organization.

I remain reasonably optimistic though about the basic and deeper functioning of the scientific community and its self-correcting mechanisms, and I believe that probably over time those blogs whose sole purpose is to promote one's ego will die out and the ones that have a honest focus on a more balanced discussion of actual scientific information will survive and possibly become integrated into the accepted modes of scientific debate.

"We are not depressed; we're on strike. [...] From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation."
(The invisible committee, "The coming insurrection")

Neuroplasticity and life

2009-09-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

More and more frequently the early stages of the academic career of young scientists are characterized by demands of mobility of unprecedented proportions. Simple examples taken from people among my own friends and colleagues explain easily what I am talking about: a Portuguese studies in England, then works in Germany, Australia, the US, Denmark and Poland; a Turk studies in Israel, Germany, France, then works in Canada, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands; an Indian studies in France and Germany, then works in Canada, France and the US; and so on. You get the point. These are by no means isolated cases. A young scientist can easily expect to tour a dozen countries in the decade that encompasses graduate studies and postdoctoral experiences, the latter covering a period varying between three and seven or eight years depending on circumstances. The strain imposed on people's personal lives by these extreme demands of international mobility is often cited as one of the main factors that causes a good number of postdocs to drop out of the race for academic positions and out of science altogether. Is this accelerated globalization of the scientific community good or bad for science? The extreme Darwinist viewpoint will appeal to the principle of the survival of the fittest, but is jet setting and the capacity for rapid social and intercultural adaptation really a prerequisite for being a good scientist? In the past certainly there have been example of scientists who had to travel just as much to be able to continue with their research: Kepler caught in the heat of the European religious wars is a good example in that respect, but one can on the other hand quote a long list of examples of famous scientists who lived their lives without ever leaving the familiarity of their country, and possibly town, of birth.

Perhaps a more appropriate question to ask is what is the difference, in the first place, between what I would refer to as a sedentary life, meaning one where the environment (linguistic, cultural, personal) one is embedded into does not significantly change over a significant part of a person's life, and a nomadic life, by which I do not necessarily mean the actual nomadic populations of the world, but simply a term indicating a life style where one's surroundings change frequently and drastically (speaking a different language, adapting to a very different culture, changing social and personal connections) over a person's lifetime. This is clearly a very approximate classification, since even people who do not physically move from one place to another can experience their surroundings change dramatically within a very short time, as the collapse of the Soviet block showed, or the events of wars, or even the longer scale but very visible effects of migrations of population and the resulting alteration of the composition of traditional society. I will, however, stick to the simplistic subdivision into the sedentary/nomadic categories referred to the individual lifestyles of people rather than to the larger phenomena affecting the evolution of societies. What is then the difference between the sedentary and the nomadic?

A good way to zoom in on the main issue is by focusing on the neuroscience point of view. A very interesting analysis was recently presented in the book "Brain and Culture" by neuroscientist Bruce Wexler (one more cool MIT Press book). The first part of Wexler's book provides experimental evidence from the field of neural and cognitive science for the mechanism that makes it possible for infants and children (or for the newborns of other animal species) to acquire through sensory stimulation an internal representation of the external world. The neuroplasticity of the brain is what permits the gradual building of this internal image of the world which is what makes it possible for individual to generate appropriate responses to external stimuli. An inhibited form of this early process produces pathologies that severely affect the functioning of adult individuals. The second part of the book details in a similar manner how adult individuals mostly try to modify their surroundings and environment to match that internal representation that was created in their mind during the early years of development and that has subsequently rigidified. The concluding part of the book draws the obvious sociological conclusions on the effects of this lack of further adaptability and clinging to existent internal structures (one might more aptly call them prejudices, often manifesting themselves in the form of rigid stereotypes) as the only available mode of interaction with the external world, blaming them for all sorts of phenomena ranging from the very natural human suffering associated to the experience of bereavement, to the difficult experiences of immigrants, to violent phenomena like communal violence, clashes of cultures, religious wars.

If we wish to remain close to the issue of the seemingly harsh demands on the lives of young scientists imposed by the high mobility of the scientific community, one can see that the analysis proposed by Wexler is certainly relevant, but one should be stressing especially the point he makes that, in the presence of an appropriate amount of stimulation and exposure to diversity and plurality of cultures and of intellectual stimulation, the neuroplasticity phase of the brain, where the internal representation of the world is constructed, can be extended well into a person's early adulthood. If this internal representation of the world is sufficiently rich and diversified, the impact of changing environment, adapting quickly to different languages, cultures, networks of social relations can be greatly facilitated. Not only that, but a high mobility in the student/postdoc stages of career is in turn likely to extend the plasticity of the internal representation even further and help protecting the later phases of life against those undesirable effects of the mismatch between a changing environment and a rigid internal structure that cannot adapt to it. Thus, overall I am inclined to conclude that the high mobility within the scientific community and the demands of rapid and frequent change of surroundings imposed on young scientist is overall a positive factor for the scientific community itself and for society as a whole. What can help young people fulfill these demands without living them as a strenuous experience is to introduce in the lives of young people as early as possible enough elements of diversity and multiculturalism, enough capacity for absorbing quickly what is previously unknown, for appreciating differences between people and cultures, for enjoying new experiences. As Wexler points out at the end of his book, the typical American campus life provides a very good model of an environment where this type of diversity of offered in large supply and where people have a good opportunity, while their internal structures have, in most cases, not yet rigidified, to broaden their image of the world and of how to interact with it without becoming entangled in a web of prejudices and stereotypical images that obscure our broader view of humanity.

Of books and men

2009-09-08T05:44:00.000-07:00

Cave hominem unius libri

For months I have been engaged in a fight to preserve one of the most prominent features of our campus: an excellent, very high quality, scientific bookstore. The administration's hasty decision to close the academic bookstore as part of planned budget cuts reveals something deeper than the general hysteria caused by the current economic crisis. There is a deeper undercurrent, which is very disturbing, and which is ultimately responsible for the seemingly inconceivable decision taken by one of the most famous universities that an academic bookstore is a useless surplus better replaced (so are the current proposals) by a recreation room for undergraduate students. Surprised? I was, of course, but on second thought this is the harvest of dangerous ideological seeds planted long ago, in this very same place (the troublesome legacy of Richard Feynman, if you wish). This academic community has a peculiar composition, being essentially a community of scientists and engineers, with a much reduced presence of humanities and social sciences. That by itself should not constitute a heightened risk of extinction for academic bookstores: after all there is a thriving scientific culture, with excellent publishers that each year produce a wealth of research monographs in every field of pure and applied sciences. The bookstore we used to have, a real dream bookstore for anyone who loves scientific culture, was tangible proof of how lively and healthy the scholarly production is that creates and sustains the current technical and scientific development. However, not all scientists would regard their - our - cultural heritage as something to cherish and protect. There is a dangerous voice, which comes from a fringe component within the scientific community, but which unfortunately tends to express itself in very loud screams, widely heard by media, university administrations, and the population at large, according to which "real men don't read books". Quite apart from the immediately evident fascistic connotation of such statements, even when dressed up in apparently milder forms such as Grothendieck's infamous utterance "we don't read books, we write them", such statements are just simply dangerous as well as dishonest. The ideology behind it is as simplistic and naive as it can possibly be: reading books is bad because one should only think with one's own mind, as if one's own mind would exist in a vacuum, away from the culture that produced our education and scientific training, the historic context in which we and our science exists. Newton knew better when he said that he had been able to see farther than others because he sat on the shoulders of giants. Without acquiring the knowledge of those giants, transmitted to us by what they conveyed to posterity through their written words that we read and learn, we would be not on their shoulders but under their heels. Nobody exists in a vacuum, no matter how gigantically inflated their egos may be! Statements of the "real men don't read book" kind only reveal the sickness of the person expressing them, and nothing at all about books. Actually, books are the greatest invention that the human species ever produced, and the only thing that gave us a concrete possibility of advancing our civilization. It is a way for human beings to talk to one another across the barriers of time and space, voices reaching us from the depths of our history and from the remote corners of the world. It is what gives us the capacity to retain and transmit knowledge, to transcend the isolation of our immediate surroundings and converse with the plurality of views and thoughts that all of us, as a united human species, have been able to produce. Whoever choses to rather live in a solipsistic universe, where the only dialog possible is with oneself, will end up in a much impoverished state of mind. So why do certain scientists, very distinguished ones like Feynman and Grothendieck among them, hide behind such dangerous ideological statements against reading books? Essentially as a macho bullying strategy to protect the ultimate fragility of their overly inflated egos. Because reading books brings one in contact with other people's minds, their thoughts, their ideas, their existence, and the existence of others threatens the solipsistic ego and his fantasies of superiority. I find this type of ideology not only repulsive, but I think it is one of the greatest dangers to science, and the closing of our marvelous scientific bookstore became a sad tangible proof. I am still fighting against all odds to revert this tragic decision, not only because I think that this will affect dramatically our life style on campus and will be detrimental to our research activity, not only because the nearest bookstore of comparable quality is up in SF, but because I do believe in the existence of a culture of science. What science is about is not just playing with riddles of the sphinx to prove one is clever enough to solve them and please one's ego in doing so. Perhaps for some people that is the case, but it would be a very sad state of affairs if that were all there is to it. Science is about creating our world view, about how human beings interact with nature and the universe, about how we share that knowledge and its benefits. It is all about knowledge and the way this grows upon previous knowledge in a long self-correcting process of interaction with all the people involved across cultures and ages. Science belongs to the whole of humanity and the scholarly literature that we write and read is the way in which this knowledge is transmitted and generates new ideas, new advances, other knowledge about the world and ourselves. When people transmit their knowledge to other people through the medium of the written word, a miracle happens that would not have been possible at all were transmission of ideas limited to oral exchanges: a book speaks to whoever cares to read it, regardless of whom the author had imagined its intended recipient to be. I want to stress this point because it is of enormous relevance in two different, but equally important, ways. First of all this makes it possible to generate unexpected cross-fertilization of ideas: a technical book written by a mathematician for mathematicians ends up in the hands of a physicist who finds in it something that unexpectedly fits precisely what s/he had in mind in a completely different context. Without the medium of books this would not happen so easily: mathematicians would generally talk to one another and ideas would have a much harder time percolating outside of closed circles. The second important effect of the universality of the written word is how enormously helpful that can be in the inclusion within the scientific community of traditionally excluded groups of people. While many scientists nowadays would unfortunately still speak very differently to a man or a woman, to a white or a black person (if you don't believe it just go to conferences for a while, until you are totally and genuinely sick), when they write a book, then that speaks in the same way to anybody who reads it. It does not matter if the author is a sexist racist bastard (plenty of those out there, sadly) who thought he was writing a book that would only be read by white males: once the book is written, what speaks to you are the ideas, not the person who wrote them, and the ideas may be beautiful science that speaks to any human being. That is another reason why books are the best way for knowledge to be exchanged between human beings. Ideas are what matters, not people, as those are the ones that will survive. Defending scientific culture and the importance of books is not just about the importance of protecting and sharing our knowledge, but also about generating a scientific community that is inclusive and not exclusive, that is progressive and not marred by latently fascist ideologies or hijacked by egotistic delusions of grandeur. Science is the common heritage of mankind.
Save Our Science: read books!

The Perseid radiant

2009-08-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year when the Earth passes through a shower of fragments of the Swift-Tuttle comet. It is known in some parts of the world as the night of St.Lawrence, but whether some cultures have traditionally seen in it the tears of a saint, or linked it in some way to the myth of Perseus, from the constellation near which the radiant point appears to be located in the night sky, the meteor shower is one of the recurrent markings of our cosmic proximity with other celestial bodies and of the intricate dynamics that govern the many objects comprising our solar system.

I take the occasion to follow a fleeting mental association and report briefly on two theater plays I've recently read, not seen performed unfortunately. The first is the remarkable "Ursa Major" by linguist Robert Bringhurst. The piece is planned for a performance consisting of a vocal polyphony accompanied by dance. The voices speak in Greek, Latin, English, and Cree, one of the main native languages of Canada. The theme revolves around mythologies of the night sky, associated to the Ursa Major constellation, Arcturus, the nymph Callisto, merging with the Cree version of the myth of the bear-woman. The result is beautiful and lyrical, and I regret that it is one of those plays it seems unfortunately hard to imagine being performed frequently. It is also a reminder of how all human cultures have projected their myths hopes and fears upon those irregular configurations of stars in the night sky that we call constellations. The wish to be connected to the cosmos is a strong component of the human spirit and the merging of mythology and astronomical observation served for a long period of human history as the natural outlet for that longing.

The second play I read over dinner last night is "In the matter of J.Robert Oppenheimer", a beautiful and moving play written by Heinar Kipphardt, based on the transcripts of the three weeks long hearings of the committee appointed in 1954 by the Atomic Energy Commission to decide on whether the top-security clearance granted to Oppenheimer should have been discontinued, as in the end it was. The climate of Cold War paranoia, the fear of Communisms and left-wing ideals, the climate of suspicion and intimidation that interpreted the natural moral scruples of so many scientists against developing yet more powerful weapons of mass destruction in the form of the H-bomb as a form of treason and disloyalty to the country, while the hawks like Teller prospered, as portrayed in a very touching and lucid manner in the play. The moral responsibility of science and the impossible position of nuclear physics at the start of the Cold War also are described in a rich and profound manner, which leaves all the ambiguities intact, those of Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Teller himself. The Faustian bargain between science and the military that brought the world on the brink of extinction in dissected in its fundamental historic essence. It is another play one wishes one could see performed frequently, whereas, alas, even finding the published script is difficult these days.
I would certainly be a much more frequent theater goer if this type of plays were the order of the day in our playhouses.

L'automne des automates (ballet mécanique)

2009-08-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

"Aucune morale, ni aucun effort ne sont a priori justifiables devant les sanglantes mathématiques qui ordonnent notre condition." (Albert Camus - Le mythe de Sisyphe)

The Dada artistic movement fully understood the deep connection between automation and the absurd. The mechanism becomes a leading theme in Dadaism, the absurd mechanism and the repetition of mechanical movement. Fernand Leger's famous movie piece Ballet Mécanique exemplifies this combination of the aesthetic of the mechanical modernity with its inevitable marriage to the disquieting poetic of the absurd. The act of repetition is the first step by which one moves into the territory of the absurd. As Camus points out so eloquently in the Myth of Sisyphus, when one goes through the motions of everyday life as a mechanical repetition of acts and engagements that appear more and more devoid of meaning, it is the time when the absurd takes over, when one can no longer avoid perceiving the world as senseless.

"L'absurde nait de la confrontation de l'appel humain avec le silence déraisonnable du monde." (Albert Camus - Le mythe de Sisyphe)

Whoever becomes trapped into this feeling of absurdity send out distress calls at the universe, in search of an answer, a sign, that can restore a sense of meaning, break the vicious circle of the mechanical repetition. The universe, which in such cases really means the other human beings, rarely responds to such calls, trapped as the other people are in their own dance of senseless repetitions. Thus, the ballet mécanique becomes a modern vision of the medieval Totentanz, or Danse Macabre, by which one flirts with the ultimate escape from the realm of absurdity and repetition.

One can see how quickly the act of repetition generates a sense of absurdity by looking at those people who are trapped into repeating the same words and concepts over and over again, always the same, with the same choice of words, on every available occasions. While they may think that they are making their point, whatever that happens to be, more strongly or convincingly argued, in reality they only generate in others a profound and uncanny sense of absurdity, which, if anything, can only harm whatever cause they may be trying to promote. Why the absurd is something so difficult to come to terms with for the human mind is again discussed very cleverly by Camus, though I rephrase it here in slightly different terms. The human mind is naturally trying to make sense of things, to look for order in the natural phenomena, to proceed from a messy chaotic set of data that the senses provide towards few basic principles that organize and explain what we perceive. The absurd is the incomprehensible breaking down of the reliability of life. It is interesting to notice that a sense of the absurd is not necessarily triggered by confrontation with apparently chaotic phenomena. Those, if anything, are more likely to trigger a healthier natural response in a human being, which is the desire to understand, to make sense of the seeming lack of defining principles. It is on the contrary the extreme order of the mechanical repetition that triggers the sense of the absurd, where our skills at making sense of things are useless, because there isn't enough complexity to make sense of and yet what is there is still completely incomprehensible in its devastating simplicity. This is why repetition is the best and quickest way to generate absurdity. This is well known to people who want to use the sense of absurdity for comic effects: jokes are based often on generating a comic sense through the absurdity of repetition. If the absurd can be used easily to provoke laughter, it has a much more tragic side, which Camus correctly identifies as the main reason why one begins to question one's reasons for living, when the absurd engulfs one's entire existence.

We have witnessed in recent months a series of suicides on our campus. One can ascribe them to cases of manic depression that spiraled tragically out of control, but whatever the underlying mental state the acts are usually triggered by the kind of events of life that people find difficult to cope with in all cases, that as in Camus' analysis of suicide as a philosophical problem expose people suddenly to the impossible sense of the absurdity of life in its crudest form. So it is inevitable to reflect on what effective strategies of self-defense people can put in place that would allow them, when faced with such circumstances, to escape from the absurd without at the same time escaping from life altogether. It is not an easy problem, and I don't pretend to be better than Camus at analyzing it or proposing answers, but here are some practical suggestions from my own experience at battling with incomprehensible absurdities, of which I've had quite a share.

- Step 1: Do not try to reason with the absurd. There are events of life, especially hurtful events, that simply do not make any sense. Continuing to torment oneself asking over and over the same questions, why did this happen, why did they do this to me, why did it have to go this way, is just another repetition trap: one goes over the same motions endlessly, the same painful thoughts and unanswered questions. It is the typical situation that makes one feel trapped into an absurd universe with no way to break the vicious circle. The absurd is difficult to accept, especially if one is a scientifically minded person, a scientist or a science student: it flies in the face of everything one practices and believes about the predictability of nature and the fact that we ultimately strive to understand the universe that surrounds us and are not content with letting go of phenomena that appear to be without explanation. This is a remarkable quality of the human spirit but it also puts people at a higher risk of getting trapped in failed attempts at reducing the absurd aspects of life to reason. Accept the existence of the absurd. The culture of the 20th century, a time when people faced much more directly the reality of the absurd than perhaps at any other time in human history, has given us the language and the means to describe and come to terms with the absurd. That's what artists like Duchamp, Ernst, Picabia have been doing all along, allowing us to confront the absurd and comprehend its existence. The first step in order to be able to break the vicious circle of repetition and absurdity that undermines our capacity to cope with the demands of life is then to approach the absurd on its own terms, not on the ground of our desperate need for understanding, as that wounded need only provokes unending pain when confronted directly with the absurd. Approach the absurd like a Dada artist and face the entirety of its frightening grip on human life. The creations of literature and art are there for that purpose, to help people to find the right words and images to describe and ultimately accept the absurd.

- Step 2: Battle the absurd on favorable ground. In order not to feel trapped in an absurd universe without escape, one needs to find ways to reassure oneself that, despite whatever devastation a sudden irruption of the absurd into one's own personal life might have caused, the universe still makes sense. There is still a world out there which is not entirely controlled and dominated by the repetition of absurd and meaningless gestures. One needs to choose carefully where to seek this type of reassurance. It is tempting to look for it in human relations, but often this is not a wise choice, because human relations indeed can be dominated by the absurd. When one has been recently wounded precisely by the absurdity of human relations, seeking comfort in the very same place may in fact backfire: one can easily run into more absurdity and get a reinforcement of one's despair instead of reassurance. The most favorable ground where to engage in a battle with the absurd is science. There is a universe out there which is not dominated by the absurd, and that is the world of science, where indeed the human mind can make sense of things, where phenomena behave in predictable patterns, where theorems can be proved. Science is the only effective medicine against the feeling that the world no longer makes sense. It is not an easy path to follow, because doing science is demanding on mental energies, especially at a time when one is in despair and has very little mental reserve available to draw upon. It requires long hours of concentration, at a time when one's mind is bombarded by endless waves of painful and self-destructive thoughts and recollections. Yet the effort pays: concentrating on science at such times creates a space of safety, a space where things continue to make sense, a corner of reality which is not threatened by the incursions of the absurd. It can be a life saving resort for all those who have access to it in some way.

Leger: Ballet Mécanique

The far rainbow

2009-08-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

One of the most intriguing novels produced by the Strugatsky brothers was, in my opinion, "Far rainbow". First published in 1967, it relates the story of an experiment gone awry. On a planet inhabited by a colony of scientists doing theoretical and experimental research in "zero-physics". By effect of some of these experiments a large destructive wave arises from both poles and advances towards the equatorial regions of the planet where the colonist reside. While in the previous experiments the giant wave had been successfully contained so that its destructive effects died out before it could reach the inhabited areas of the planet, the events depicted in the story relate the chronicle of a later experiment that sets in motion a much larger and destructive wave that cannot be stopped and keeps advancing from the poles towards the equator destroying everything in its wake. The narration zooms in on some of the people involved in the experiments: the experienced Leonid Gorbovsky, already a character in a series of previous Strugatsky stories, the young sympathetic anti-hero Robert Sklyarov, and the mysterious not quite entirely human genius Camill. The story is primarily about the psychological reactions of the various characters faced with a tragic and inescapable fate. Yet the tone of narration is not that of tragedy: there is an undertone of optimism and lightness, even in the face of the impending disaster and the surrounding scenario of destruction.

Interestingly, in the past few weeks I have experienced a recurrent dream, which greets me every few nights with increasingly long and realistic scenarios and takes me right into the heart of the "Far rainbow" story. Night after night, I become part of the community of scientists experimenting with the containment of a giant wave, which in the subsequent re-runs of the dream becomes less and less containable, until, out of control as in the Strugatsky story, it just keeps advancing, engulfing the observation tower and the research facilities. What seems most striking in these dreams is the phase in which the giant wave appears immobile, a high wall of water that remains perfectly still as if frozen into an instantaneous snapshot, confined to that unlikely stillness behind an unspecified containment force. It looks like an improbable colossal architecture, an image of force frozen into a menacing high wall, a strange sense of time itself being denied existence. In some version of the dream I walk on an observation platform just above this frozen giant wave to look closely at its improbable existence. In later dreams this phase of immobility becomes more and more tenuous, improbable. The wave, in all its might, begins to move, to catapult its immensity of fluid momentum against whatever lies in its path. As to make it completely clear that the dreams are indeed connected to the Strugatsky novel, in one of the versions my subconscious carefully inserted several direct references to 1960s Russia in my oneiric exchanges and interactions with other scientists involved in the wave experiment.

Perhaps one of the aspects of the novel that I like the most is the contrast that is artfully created between the Robert/Camill pair of characters. Robert is a somewhat cynical certainly less than heroic fellow who finds himself in the middle of a series of events he is ill equipped to handle. He is full of ambiguities, difficult, at times childish, at times full of insight. Camill is also a difficult character for an entirely different reason. He is different, in a way that is perceptible and yet not immediately identifiable. This difference generates incomprehension from all the people around him, including Robert who just leaves him for dead during a recognition mission to monitor the behavior of the wave. Only towards the end of the novel, when the partial evacuation of the planet has happened and those who were forced to remain behind quietly wait for the final destruction, Camill reappears to reveal his true nature of human/machine blend. There are many other carefully designed subplots in the novel and it certainly makes for one of the best Strugatsky readings. Why it seems to reverberate so much with my inner psyche at this particular time I yet do not know.

The small step on the edge of forever

2009-07-20T07:34:00.001-07:00

It's been forty years since the first time human steps left footprints on another world. The window of human space exploration opened and closed with the Apollo missions. There's much talking now of returning to the Moon, of missions to Mars, but what used to be the visionary future of mankind tastes nowadays more like 1960s nostalgia, another lamppost along the boulevard of broken dreams.

In a flurry of celebrations of the moon landing anniversary, the journal Nature reports how a survey among scientists whom they have recently published reveals a large number of them was motivated to a scientific career by the space race and the moon landing. So is that sufficient a reason for a revamped manned space program? Will it produce a similar effect among the youth of today? Was the Cold War a needed prerequisite to make the space race exciting? Was it a prerequisite to make science a priority in our societies, both east and west of the Iron Curtain? Or was the race to the moon, that "ultimate peaceful competition" the much needed "diversion that prevented the war", as Armstrong suggested in his anniversary speech?

It's one of those rare occasions when one can see Neil Armstrong himself back in from the cold, breaking his usual silence to speak on the 40th anniversary of his first steps on the moon. We're all used to his looks of 1969: it's hard to readjust one's perception to the 79 years old who's speaking today. He was born three months after my father and he was walking on the moon nearly half a century ago.

I think this anniversary can give us the occasion for a much needed reflection on the crucial but delicate and fragile interdependence of science and dreams. The main contribution of the moon landing to science was not the scientific value of the Apollo 11 mission itself (the first and only Apollo mission that had a scientist on board was also the last before the whole program was canceled) but its effect in boosting our capacity to dream. Science feeds upon our dreams, which give us the courage to embrace a vision of the future that is as thin as blurred shapes in the mist, and yet sufficiently motivating to support the enormous effort that is needed to move forward, to accomplish results, one hesitant step at a time. All of science is a small step for man, and only the accumulated effort of this collective enterprise over time can become a giant leap for mankind, the amazing enterprise that brought a species of apes to walk on the moon. In the iconic sequence of Kubrick's 2001, the primitive bone tool becoming an orbiting space station is a beautifully condensed and unforgettable homage to the transformational power of science.

Science needs dreams, but the capacity to dream is fragile. Reality is harsh and makes us too easily cynical and disillusioned, too easily wounded. What the space race did was to nurture the dreams of a generation of scientists, to protect them from the devastating effect of disappointment, of a direct confrontation with the sad reality of the world. Science could appear at its best: "the ultimate peaceful confrontation" between the rival superpowers, with the large collaboration of scientists and engineers that made it possible. All the less pleasant sides of reality were carefully hidden away from view, starting from those Apollo astronauts that went bananas and started talking to God on the surface of the moon and ending with the much more serious military overtones of the space race. Science was showing its best face, the one of collaboration, of beautiful dreams about the future of mankind. In reality beautiful dreams often turn into nightmares before the lights of dawn disperse them, and yet you will have a new generation of scientists only if you allow them the possibility to dream, with a naive trust in the good nature of mankind and a genuine desire to share ideas, thoughts and energy for a common goal. The moon race was about creating an illusion, but one that was likely the most beneficial contributions to science in the decades that followed.

Message in a bottle

2009-07-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

It took me nearly a month to write this post. I started during the conference I was caught into at the beginning of the month, the last one I'll be going to in some time, as I promised during my talk. I also promised to myself no more suffering for some time and, possibly, moving slowly towards a more positive look on life. This requires leaving behind a lot of heavy stones I've been carrying with me around the world for the last year and a half, roughly. That's why I finally made up my mind to turn this post into an open letter to my former collaborators, as a last attempt at communicating the anguish that tormented me, and then I'll let it all go and move on with life wherever that happens to take me. I'll leave this behind as a message in a bottle, left for someone out there to see. I don't harbor any hope any more of it being understood, so just leaving it to float on the waves of information space may be its most appropriate destiny. I have completely given up by now on understanding anything at all about what happened, I simply accept that life can suddenly turn completely incomprehensible and that, once something like that happens, it likely means that, no matter how much efforts one puts into trying to undo the damage, there is generally no way to turn the flow around and save what one would have truly cared to preserve.

I have for many years been working on a series of long term projects. What made it something especially important to me, besides the intellectual interest I had in the work itself, was the fact of sharing a common dream with people I had long cared for. One should not underestimate the importance of this type of human relation in providing the strength, the motivation, and the capacity to keep moving forward when the climb is steepest, when the direction is uncertain, when the work ahead seems overwhelmingly difficult and the goal remote. What is, in those cases, real and comforting, is the act of sharing the path, of not being alone, of giving each other the much needed encouragement and support that makes it possible to stay the course. In the end what is most rewarding, rather than achieving some goal, is the act of sharing ideas, of exploring one another's minds, of thinking one's own thoughts and the thoughts of others as a texture of harmonious polyphony. This is what mattered most, at least to me. It worked beautifully for several years and I truly believed in the fact that we were building something together, that a shared dream could be made real by a joint effort, by a conjunction of hopes.

I had been completely mistaken in my assessment of the situation and now I wonder how I managed to fool myself for so many years into believing this idealistic view. In reality, it seems, I was nothing more than a disposable accessory in what I had believed was our joint dream, and in due time I was notified by my closest friend that I was being disposed of, per request of my other long term collaborator and friend. It's perhaps no surprise that this resulted in over a year of anguish and seriously destructive thoughts.

When a relation of trust breaks down, it is very difficult to maneuver around its carcass. One is caught in between the two conflicting drives: to keep going back to it and try to salvage something from the wreck, at the cost of inflicting more and more pain upon oneself, or just to walk away and never turn back, at the cost of facing the loss in its entirety and possibly developing a lasting incapacity to form new human relations based on trust. Neither provides an acceptable solution and so one gets trapped so easily into an endless repetition of thoughts and actions that perpetuate and propagate the pain.

This is not sustainable in the long run: it either degenerates into senseless acts of violence against oneself and others, or it eventually transforms itself into a reactive force that pushes one forward, one way or another towards a new phase of life, less idealistic perhaps, more cynical and disillusioned, but alive and kicking. Working is of course the best form of healing and even when one feels one has exhausted ones strength and energy almost completely, the only option available is to force oneself to go on and do the creative work, which is the only thing that ultimately proves, to oneself and to others, that one is not defeated.

Where were you when I was burned and broken
While the days slipped by from my window watching
Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless
Because the things you say and the things you do surround me
While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight into the shining sun
(Pink Floyd - "Coming back to life")

A year has passed since I wrote my note [...]
Walked out this morning, don't believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home [...]
Sending out an s.o.s.
(Sting and Police - "Message in a bottle")

Tigers of wrath

2009-06-22T07:21:00.001-07:00

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction

(William Blake)

The tigers of wrath are on the march in the streets of the world. Postelectoral uprising in Tehran is a magnificent and tragic example of the outbursts of long suppressed anger and accumulated frustration against a blind and unyielding system.

Yet what are, more generally, Blakes' tigers of wrath? And the horses of instruction? I tend to see them both as the motivations that drive us on to fight, to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. The horses of instruction carry us along the long and arduous journey of learning, of accumulating the knowledge and strength that is needed to push forward, to keep going, to make progress. It is a hard journey, a day by day fight with hardness. It is endurance. The tigers of wrath are the sudden cry of anger and frustration that makes the burst possible, that carries the greatest momentum. They are the explosion of resentment and primitive fury, the coming of the dies irae.

But why and when is anger called for in what should after all be a peaceful progress towards knowledge? The answer is that, unfortunately, it is almost inevitable, because knowledge is more often than not hijacked by ambitions, envies, jealousies and hysterias against which the only possible response, in order not to succumb to their rising tide, is to unleash one's own tigers of wrath. Anger is what makes it possible for a wounded soul to bounce back and recover strength. Anger is what makes it possible to continue walking when one has reached beyond the limits of exhaustion. Anger is what keeps the world spinning long after its future has eroded. Anger is recovery, so let us open the gates to the tigers of wrath!

I keep fighting on too many fronts, gaining and losing ground in endless fluctuations of strength and willpower. Lately I've given it a serious try at opening up a new direction, a new front in the war that is to say, in part to escape the impossible quagmire I've inadvertedly ended up trapped into with what used to be my main line of research. So now it's a shot at the cosmos, the very early universe of dark energy and the mystery of dark matter in the universe of large structures. Funny as it may seem, I am learning quite a lot, which is the good duty of the horses of instruction to perform, but this all story has been born in the roaring of the tigers of wrath and will bring forever their indelible mark.

The trick to get a model of inflation is that you need to make gravity turn from attractive to repulsive, at some point in the early universe, and then by some regulating mechanism that acts as an internal clock of the cosmos, turn it into its normal attractive self before the universe starts to look at all like anything we know. Dark energy appears to be a related effect of that seemingly unlikely repulsive second nature that gravity can have. The cosmological constant is a likely culprit in turning the effect of gravity upside down, but besides possible models with variable cosmological constant, there are variable gravitational constant models, sometime generated by the presence of a conformally coupled scalar field, that can also provide regimes of negative gravity, and finally there are more exotic geometric models that can yield all of these things combined, like the one I am trying to grind my teeth on these days. As for dark matter, I am mostly wandering about Majorana masses and right handed neutrinos and see-saw mechanisms.

As I learn about cosmology and entertain myself with computer simulations, I also seek to entertain myself with accompanying music, so to speak, by which I really mean the reading of a number of completely unrelated books, which in some vague form resonate with my mind in this stage of early exploration. It is a way for me to concentrate, perhaps not unlike those attractors in dynamical systems that work more efficiently in the presence of a moderate amount of disorder, of background noise.

Among my side readings, near the pile of the actual cosmology and particle physics papers from the archive, there is the recent World Scientific book by James Overduin and Paul Wesson, "The light/dark universe". It is a light/not-so-light book that starts out with the entertaining story of the Olbert paradox of the darkness of the night sky and very quickly moves on to a fairly up-to-date account of the dark matter and dark energy problems. It is fairly technical, and not a generic popular book, which is good if you want to get anything out of reading it. It assumes the reader to be a scientifically trained person, with some knowledge of astrophysical matters, but it does not necessarily assume a deep and extensive background in cosmology, which is also good if this is to be your bedtime entertainment reading. The thing I liked about it is that I quickly encountered there all the things I had been playing with in the model I am exploring: primordial black holes, negative gravity due to coupling with fields, slow roll inflation. It is always nice after having spent a certain amount of time struggling with technical papers and trying a range computations, to is it all again neatly presented in an engaging narrative. It makes one want to make the effort of turning a directory full of messy computation into a readable paper.

Having acquired some familiarity with the main views of the cosmos provided to us by modern cosmology, with its fantastic supply of data from the satellite probes, it is somewhat interesting to take a very long step back in history and return to a time when none of the modern instruments, both theoretical and observational, to investigate the vastity of space were yet available, and still people tried their best, with little more than everyday common sense and a baggage of literary knowledge, to argue about the properties of the universe surrounding us. So I got back to reading Giordan Bruno's "L'infinito, universo e mondi", this time in a French translation I got hold of a few weeks ago in Paris. Seen from the eyes of today's mathematical thinking (yes, I know, one never interprets an author writing four centuries earlier in the modern light, but I am not giving an exegesis of Bruno here, I'm just having fun reading it so I am allowed the licence), Bruno's writings are extremely revealing by stark contrast between what was possible to argue about geometry before a number of major developments in mathematics had taken place, with respect to what we nare naturally inclined to think today.

In his earlier writings, when he was too busy collecting excommunications from the largest number of churches then available in Europe to have any time left for serious philosophy, Giordano Bruno mostly mimicked Ficino's neoplatonist views, and imparted vitriolic criticism of religion and society. It was only later, at the time of his major philosophical production of which "L'infinito, universo e mondi" is the centerpiece, a time when for a brief period he was only fighting against the academics of Oxford and Cambridge, he unfolded all his arguments about the infinite nature of the universe, the plurality of worlds, the fact that stars are other solar systems with other planets and other Earths, the anima mundi. On some things he happened to be right on others possibly not. As I mentioned above, the point, however, is that in reading some of the "arguments" that the characters in his dialogues present one gets a very interesting idea of how our reasonings about geometry have dramatically changed in the intervening centuries. I will give here just a very small and simple example, to illustrate my point.

Right towards the beginning of the first dialog of the "Infinite, universe and worlds" one of the characters, arguing against the finitude of the universe, remarks that

"se uno stendesse la mano oltre quel convesso, che quella
non verrebe essere in loco, e non sarebe in parte alcuna,
e per conseguenza non arebe l'essere."

In this argument there is a clear clash of two notions that became clearly distinguishable only within the context of more modern mathematics: that of a manifold with boundary and of a compact manifold. The argument of Bruno against the finitude of space is an argument about the existence of a boundary, while modern geometry allows for endeless possibilities of compact, finite volume, spaces without boundary (gluing together the opposite sides of a square to form a torus being the simplest example that comes to mind). There is no mystery today in the distinction between these two notions, but in the time of Bruno's writing it seemed that an argument against a boundary would necessarily entail an argument against compactness (or finite volume). One could argue that even today a certain amount of confusion remains, even among scientists: it is not uncommon to find statements in cosmology books on negative curvature (hyperbolic geometry) implying an infinite universe, while one knows very well that there are hyperbolic 3-manifolds that are compact. Even between two slightly different notions of finiteness for manifolds, compactness and finiteness of volume, confusions sometimes arise, while the first implies the latter, but the converse need not hold. So perhaps one should not blame Giordano Bruno for not making these fine distinctions at a time when most of the currently common tools to think of space were not available. It still remains an interesting fact that, while the era of Bruno was often portrayed (most articulately by Koyre') as the transition between the closed cosmos of antiquity to the infinite universe of modernity, in fact the debate on the finitude (today we'd better say compactness) of the universe is still raging in all the now fashionable investigations on the problem of cosmic topology, trying to statistically match circles in the WMAP sky as an indication of the gluing data of the folding up of space into a closed manifold.

Although still inconclusive, results hinting to the possible role of a space known to mathematicians as the Poincare' homology 3-sphere and to cosmologists as the dodecahedral space seem to defy precisely that argument of Bruno on the hand sticking out of the boundary of the universe and meeting...? the void? No hand sticks out anywhere in the Poincare' sphere, as there is no boundary anywhere to cross, and yet the universe folds up into a compact manifold, and not the infinite universe Bruno wished to advocate. His desire for the infinite is rescued by the accelerating expansion perhaps, whereby a spatial universe may be folded up, but its temporal unfolding picks up speed instead of recollapsing to a closed 4-dimensional manifold. It's easy to get carried away along these lines of thought when trying to read Giordano Bruno and cosmology books and papers at the same time, yet it's not for his insight into the prehistory of cosmology that one reads the Nolan philosopher, but for his uncompromising challenge to institutions, dogma, status quo, pretense and hypocrisy. Even if his cosmology does not stand the judgment of time and perhaps the anima mundi does not really exist, Bruno will remain one of the main figures in the history of thought and for that alone we read him still. For whoever wishes to get an excellent critical account of the work of Bruno in the context of the culture of the Renaissance, I highly recommend the famous monograph of Frances Yates, "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition".

As for myself, I am about to trade the lazy sunny afternoons of Southern California with the rains of Germany, an equitable trade for the sake of another conference, a student's thesis defense, some collaborations left dormant from last summer, and a lot of somber thoughts accompanying this trip.

The void has become a familiar concept to any working physicists. We have vacuum bubbles, energy of the void and quantum fluctuations: a crowd of virtual particles streaming in and out of the void. It seems almost surprising how frightening the concept had appeared to our predecessors. It is only in its psychological manifestations that emptiness retains its full capacity to stir our deepest angst, when, as in the image from the dialog of Giordano Bruno, a hand stretches beyond the barrier and instead of meeting with another human hand it only meets with a terrifying void. It is to look away from the chill of that void that I am seeking the emptiness of the early universe, in the time before nucleosynthesis and structure formation. It is to emerge unscathed from this frightening confrontation with that cold void that I now return to science, our "dangerous but irresistible pastime". It is the darkness of these thoughts about the nature of human relations that I seek to replace in my mind with the mysterious but not so scary darkness of matter and energy, more comfortable certainly than the impenetrable barriers of the void. While that icy psychological void will remain forever entrenched where it retreated, beyond the grasp of human comprehension, there is at least a chance that the physical and cosmological void of the early universe will yield answers more willingly to the inquiring mind.

Lost in thought and lost in time
While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted
Outside the rain fell dark and slow
While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime

(Pink Floyd, "Coming back to life" -- The Division Bell)

It's not like I expect that looking at pictures of psychedelic galaxies will suffice to put my mind at peace: it would take a whole other kind of psychedelia to come even close, but I learnt that the practice of computer generated calculations, as opposed to the more familiar habit of abstract thinking of the theorem-proving kind, can have a very soothing effect on the mind. I don't know if this means that Maple, Mathematica and the like should start advertising themselves as an alternative to aromatherapy, but indeed the kind of relaxed attentiveness that is needed to perform this type of small programming and trial and error experimental mathematics has the potential of stirring the mind away from the siege of intrusive thoughts that are too painful to entertain. Regardless of the actual scientific value, in terms of realistic models of the early universe, that I can get out of this simple kitchen table research, this hesitant venturing into the world of cosmology might have at least helped me to gain enough momentum to conjure up the tigers of wrath from inside my previously abased consciousness and unleash them towards what I hope might become a reboot of the system and thus to avoid defeat.

I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life.
I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the waiting had begun
And I headed straight...into the shining sun

(ibid.)

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire? [...]

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? [...]

(William Blake -- The Tyger)

The complete works of Giordano Bruno online

Europe after the rain

2009-06-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

When Max Ernst painted the masterpiece "Europe after the rain" World War II was raging across the continent and the bombing of cities became a continuous rain of destruction that left behind landscapes of ruins. The grattage/frottage technique invented by Ernst is especially suitable for the kind of visual effect created by this painting: it literally scrapes and tears shapes off the canvas, in a way that immediately suggests a landscape created by a painful act of destructive force. Two vaguely human figures, seemingly a man and a woman, stand amidst a desolation where the enormous shapes surrounding them suggest memories of their former existence and look upon them like the living pillars of Baudelaire's poem, murmuring confused words. They stand back to back looking upon the desolation, with bird heads and tree limbs, with torn banners, and bodies that merge with the surrounding structures. They survey the destruction, they internalize it in their tattered and twisted bodies, and they prepare for the task of continuing with life, of building upon the ruins.

Slipping from the grand tragedy of mankind all the way down to the insignificant of the personal experience: it's been my first trip back to Europe in several months, the first after the rain, metaphorically intended as an image of the rain of destruction that fell on me during the past months. Are those figures lost in the tortured landscape meant to be us, watching what remains of what we had once managed to build? Or would it rather be them, surveying the successful destruction they provoked? I am lost in the superposition of meanings and I keep wandering across the painting's layers of significance. Outside, a light rain. Late spring Europe, under the rain.

Most of the time I have been reading, following a narrow thread of thoughts that brought me back more than twenty years, to a previous existence where Max Ernst's rain had a more earnest meaning and the best of my time went in the reading of dead languages and the thoughts of heretic philosophers. After all these years I finally managed to get my hands on the text I had always wanted to read: Hermes Trismegistos in the original Greek, which I just bought now in Paris in the excellent edition of Les Belles Lettres. It is amazing how a simple mistake in chronology and attribution of an ancient text could generate one of the most influential phenomena in the cultural history of Europe. The author called Hermes the Thrice Great was a late neoplatonist, writing in the 3rd century from what was the final era of Ptolemaic Egypt. As such, the text is really not so special, in the sense that it falls into a large supply of similar writings, on very similar themes, born of the eclectic melting pot of cultures and religions that characterized late antiquity Egypt. However, when the text first hit Renaissance Europe, it was mistakenly believed to be the work of an ancient Egyptian priest, dating back to a time that preceded, and influenced, Plato. As such, it became the text the entire culture of the Renaissance adopted as their inspiration. From Leonardo da Vinci to Giordano Bruno, the hermetic tradition became the leitmotif guiding the development of philosophy and science in the transition from the middle ages to modern Europe.

Most interesting is the fact that Hermes Trismegistos was in fact the ultimate maker of the modern European scientific tradition, as it is beautifully argued in the writings of Frances Yates collected here in France under the title "Science et tradition Hermetique". Copernicus in his treaty De revolutionibus orbium coelestium quotes Hermes Trismegistos when it comes to supporting the idea of a sun fixed at center stage and a moving Earth. Giordano Bruno quotes him when advancing the statements that stars are other suns with a plurality of worlds (we call them now exoplanets) orbiting around them. Long after the correct dating of the Corpus Hermeticum was finally given by Casaubon in 1614, and the hermetic movement of the Renaissance was officially put to rest, Newton was still quoting Hermes Trismegistos in his writings. The major scientists that shaped the course of modern mathematics and physics kept returning over and over again to the words of this obscure writer of late antiquity. Why is science so much in debt to the hermetic tradition? It does not seem to make sense at first: Hermes Trismegistos and his Renaissance followers were believers in magic, astrology, numerology. They did not seem to have anything much in common with the idea of science as we know it.

I am sinking more and more into the reading of the first volume of the Corpus Hermeticum. My Greek is rusty to say the least, after so many years lying dormant at the back of my mind, so progress is slow and painful, but that's the way the Renaissance philosophers and early scientists must have struggled with it too. After all, to think this Greek was archaic language and not thinly disguised Ellenistic Koine reveals that those early readers' Greek must have been just as bad as my own if not worse. Half a way into the text I begin to get a picture of what might have lead the scientists from Copernicus to Newton to measure themselves against the words of this metaphysical writing. It is an image of the inner process that accompanies the scientific creativity that is being sought in these pages, much like the inner process of dreams, the dreams of Wolfgang Pauli analyzed by C.G.Jung in his "Psychology and Alchemy". And there is the alchemical process indeed, the one of late antiquity and of the hermetic Renaissance alike, the one that also eventually merged into the practice of modern science. At the origin of modern science lies a dream, an inner process of transformation that makes scientific thought possible. We all experience that, the pain and the elation. Hermes Trismegistos became the creator of modern science by lending to its practitioners the words to express that inner drive. We do still need words to describe our inner turmoil, now more than ever. We need it for science to continue, for landscape of ruins to turn again into growth and form. Who is going to give us a new, or an ancient, Hermes Trismegistos for our times?

Must the show go on?

2009-06-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

Must the show go on?
There must be some mistake
I didnt mean to let them
Take away my soul.
Am I too old? Is it too late?
Where has the feeling gone?
Will I remember the songs?
The show must go on.
(Pink Floyd - The Wall)

Heading to Europe in a few hours, after another sleepless night. Why am I going? Conference, soul searching, or overindulgence in painful recollections? There's a sticky opaque gloom of fog covering everything as I walk to the department in the morning to print out my talk. They call them "talks" as if to suggest that there is some kind of communication going on. Heading for the airport: how many nights flying over oceans, over so many years, why? When will it stop? It cannot: like for a beat poet on the road, restlessness becomes a form of addiction. One knows it causes pain and one keeps nonetheless returning to it. There are always excuses: defending one's own work, one's right to exist, always something to defend, a life in the trenches of an endless war. What for? If only one could trust one's fellow human beings, there wouldn't be such a great need for defense and deterrence in interpersonal relations.

Reading on the metro ride to the airport Philip Dick's post-apocalyptic portrait of Edward Teller, rendered as the paranoid Dr.Bluthgeld in the novel "Dr.Bloodmoney", written at the height of the Cold War where those scenarios of rampant paranoia and devastating destruction seemed palpably real. One wonders how much damage the likes of Teller have done to the image of science in the collective consciousness of our civilization. On the other hand, are we really all that different from Dick's Dr.Bluthgeld? With a more diversified range of paranoid thoughts perhaps, but all this fear and defensive attitudes, are they not born of the same fundamental distrust of others? If this is so, then the question is where that originates from? How does an enthusiastic young scientist gets transformed into an embattled, entrenched, callous fighter a few years down the road? How does one become Dr.Bluthgeld? There are in the course of one's scientific life a series of crucial alchemies of human relation whose functioning has an enormous influence on the perception one has of one's own work and of the environment in which it develops: student/supervisor relations, mentors, collaborators. When too many of these become disfunctional one develops a distrust for others and ultimately this starts to make room for subtle paranoid suspicion and intense fears.

The kind of paranoid feelings generated by an unexpected breakdown of trust, by which one begins to feel threatened by enemies and betrayed by friends, has all the qualities of a loss of correlation scale phenomenon, of the type that happens in physical systems near a phase transition. Let me explain better what I mean. An important function of our brain is to recognize patterns of causality, causal correlations between different events. That is an obviously important survival tract in evolutionary terms. The relation of causality typically has an associated scale length: most chains of causality happen on a small scale, our everyday actions influence our immediate surroundings but have scarcely any influence on what happens at a large distance. Distance here does not necessarily mean geographic distance: fast electronic communication can reach the other end of the world instantaneously, but it is still confined to carrying our influence only to nearby sites in the graph of our connectedness to others. Events of longer correlation length are proportionately rare. Ordinarily our perception of causal relations also involves a very clear instinctive appreciation of what is a plausible scale of causal interaction between different events. A paranoid feeling consists of a perception of causality where the associated understanding of correlation lengths has gone missing, so that correlations at all length scales suddenly appear simultaneously possible. This appearance of correlation at all scales is typical of physical systems near a phase transition. Thus, in the more extreme cases of paranoia conspiracies involving a large number of people, international organizations, and dark hidden powers are imagined scheming against a lone subject. This is a typical example of the loss of perception of what is a reasonable causal correlation length. Milder forms of paranoid feelings, where one does not necessarily start dreaming up huge conspiracy theories, follow nonetheless a similar principle, by which events that are only mildly and locally correlated are projected onto larger and larger scales and momentary accidents are upgraded to the status of long term plans. The most difficult thing in such cases is to break the scale invariance and reconstruct a typical correlation size, cooling the system down and away from the phase transition. In human relationship, these phase transitions that generate the paranoid loss of scale phenomena are typically provoked by a sudden and unexpected loss of trust in someone, a close friend for example, whom one had previously relied on. One has to slowly reconstruct trust, something which is in general very difficult to do, in order to move away from the critical point and start to recover a sense of the true scale of phenomena.

I haven't taken these long haul flights in quite some time now, and it gets me to wonder how I was able to do this every two or three weeks for so many years. And now again: the freezing temperature on the plane, cramped legs and aching back, and the ears exploding and imploding in waves of pain. What for? Just for the illusion of maintaining alive a dream that others have so casually destroyed.

Another long train ride on the RER. The train rolls on, lulled by a monotonous voice of metal: what for? what for? what for? Paris comes. Paris goes. At the other end of the line, a generic nowhere hosts a research institute and a psychiatric hospital. As the locals have it, only subtle hints tell the two apart. I drop my bag, lock the door, and get on the train again, back into Paris. Too much loneliness out there, too much room for memory to play its sordid blame games inside the mind, running in endless circles. Back from Paris at midnight and wide awake again at 3am. When was the last time I slept more than two or three hours?

Days on days off the Paris spring isn't so bad and a four days conference in Paris is, not surprisingly, far preferable to a ten days conference in the midwest on at least two counts: less conference, more pleasurable surroundings. It seems, now that I am nearing the time to fly back again, that I can make at least an attempt at answering the "what for?" question that was tormenting me on my way here. To make a first step towards restoring a sense of trust that has gotten destroyed over the past year and also to experiment with sitting in conferences with a different crowd of people, to see whether that will help anesthetize the sore wound left behind by the last attempts. On both counts it seems that the trip was worth it and I am off for a last free day of book shopping. Rain in the background, Paris blues.

The show must go on.

Leben des Galilei

2009-05-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

"Unhappy the land that needs a hero"
(Bertold Brecht - Life of Galileo)

Back in California, I just went to an outdoor performance of Brecht's "Life of Galileo" in the campus olive grove. Brecht's play is a complex take on the delicate mechanisms of scientific research and its difficult relation to the power structures and economic interests that surround the academic environment.

Brecht's Galileo is a profoundly disillusioned character. Far from being the uncompromising hero of principles, he compromises with just about anything, starting from his clever reselling to the Venetian military of the Dutch telescope passed off as his own invention, to his final recanting of Copernican theory in front of the Inquisition under threat of torture. He wants to be able to continue doing his work, and in the name of that he is willing to sacrifice everything, from moral integrity to scruples, to alliances and friendships. Even his daughter's life he carelessly destroys without paying so much attention to it. Brecht's Galileo is the portrait of a real scientist, one who has to find a way to continue doing his work in a difficult environment. His initial tirade about the time wasted in teaching duties as opposed to time dedicated to research cannot help but resonate with anybody who holds an academic position nowadays. Similarly, his quest for funds sounds all too familiar to all those who keep spending a good part of their time writing grant proposals. I am sure this particular audience could not help thinking DoD and Darpa when watching the scene of the telescope scam and the importance of its "military applications" and the resulting generous increase of funds granted to Galileo by his Venetian employers. The accompanying discussion on academic freedom also sounds so very familiar: Brecht knew full well what he was writing about and that wasn't 17th century Italy.

Galileo moves on to wherever he thinks he will be best able to carry out his work, from the republic of Venice to the Medici court of Florence. So do we, move on, in search of a place that offers better working conditions. That's what scientists do, shed all notions of belonging to a place and only belonging to one's work and following it around wherever it appears to find its most fertile ground. Not always this leads to the best decision: Galileo's moving to Florence leaves him more dangerously exposed to the power of the church than at the time when he was a citizen of the Venetian republic. His hope that the scholars of the Medici court will embrace his work is met by a cold and skeptic rebuttal, where invoking the authority of Aristotle the respected council of the court refuses to do as much as to look at the satellites of Jupiter through the telescope. The fortunes of Galileo's work, in Brecht's clever and moving narrative, alternate: after initially gaining the approval of the Vatican academy, the decision of the Inquisition to put the works of Copernicus in the list of indicted books turns the fortunes once again and Galileo is silenced for years. When finally Cardinal Barberini is elected pope, the scientist hopes to find a sympathetic ear in the science inclined new head of the church, only to find himself on the wrong side once again and threatened by the inquisition.

The riddle of the Brecht play is the final recantation of Galileo: its meaning, its impact, its long term consequences. It is clear that, by the time when Galileo faces the choice between remaining faithful to his ideas and facing torture and possibly death at the hands of the Inquisition or continuing to live, silenced and under house arrest, after repudiating the very essence of his work, Galileo has already reached a stage of profound disillusionment towards other human beings, towards people like the new pope Barberini, whom he had seriously trusted would be supportive of his work. He has learned the hard way that nobody is to be trusted and that there are no ideals and nothing worthy of fighting for. At that point, the perspective of a quiet and isolated life, alone with his work, appears perhaps like a more reasonable outcome than the heroic gesture in defense of something he no longer believes worth defending. There are actually many different ways of reading the ending of Brecht's play and the anti-heroic role of Galileo in his decision to recant. This is only one possible interpretation, but one that projected in the context of the everyday practice of science still makes sense. True, nowadays none of us risks ending up like Giordano Bruno: even the Vatican has extinguished its taste for the smell of burned flesh. However, on a smaller but still significant scale, we do experience the sense of loss of trust in people, institutions, environments whom we had grown used to imagine as supportive, only to experience that support being withdrawn at the most crucial times. So Brecht's Galileo is a very relevant figure in portraying the psychological workings of the everyday practice of science, much more than as a rendering of the historic figure.

Screaming metal (de re metallica)

2009-05-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

Metal: iron and steel. Iron curtain and caves of steel, tanks and rockets, the impossible machines of Jean Tinguely and the galore of Japanese manga monster robots, Joe Steel and Soviet workers in metal forges, cityscapes of glass cement and steel, punk nihilism and cyborgs, Fernand Leger's "Ballet Mechanique" and the Crash fantasies of Ballard: the twentieth century thrived in a mythology of metals.

The image of screaming metal is powerfully connected to two intertwined archetypes, that of the rising city (concrete and steel) and that of the half human/half machine warrior that accompanies it. The two most famous embodiments of this mythological figure are the android of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with the background of mountains of steel rising up to the skies in the above ground city as well as metallic Molochs devouring the exploited workers in its viscera, and the more recent cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell, with its background of East Asian futuristic (or not all that futuristic) metropolis with its own abysses of steel. In both cases the warrior figure that is born of the merging of metal and human flesh is a woman warrior, an archetype in itself that is well suited to accompany the vision of the city as both a container, vessel, cradle of humanity and at the same time an advancing powerful tide of metal challenging the skies.

The image of city rising as a scream of metal is intrinsic in the drawings of the futurist architects from Sant'Elia to Tatlin. The scream of the city was at once a "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world", a cry of triumph of modernism and progress, and a scream of anguish of the dispossessed whose world is torn, like the workers of the underground Metropolis, to make room for and to power the wheels of the steel rails of progress.

The scream of metal as the soul of the immense megalopolis evolved with time into a cyberpunk dystopia. At the same time Screaming Metal (the French punk-sci-fi magazine Métal Hurlant of the group "Les Humanoïdes Associés") became Heavy Metal and blended with a musical stream stemming from Led Zeppelin, flowing through punk rock, Iron Maiden, Metallica and all the like. Screaming metal became a musical genre, a loud flurry of Aeolian harmonic progressions, fifth chords and tritones. While in much of the mainstream Heavy Metal movement the archetype of the woman warrior that accompanied since its early futuristic and expressionistic origins the metal scream of the city was transformed into an overtly macho exploitative fantasy, it survived in a more interesting form in some of the cyberpunk genre, to which "Ghost in the Shell" ultimately also belongs.

The archetype of the rising city of steel and glass, from its roots in the early 20th century avant-garde to its recent cyberpunk incarnations, is ultimately a product of the triumph of power engineering that begun with the late 19th century. I submit that the accompanying archetype of the half human and half machine female warrior is similarly related to the accompanying rise of the other main branch of engineering through the same epoch, communication engineering. As Norbert Wiener remarks in the introduction to his beautiful book on time series analysis, the dichotomy between power and communication engineering is only apparent, while in fact they are one and the same thing in the eyes of the unifying mathematical models behind them. The images of Ghost in the Shell present the figure of Major Kusanagi as ultimately a part of a huge network of communication that permeates the city structure, a parallel world of information and cyberspace that lives side by side and is embedded in the infrastructure of the embodied architectural landscape, into which the cyborg conscience can merge and gain instant access to vast reservoirs of information. That's the purest form of a mythologized version of the blending of power and communication engineering that took place during the 20th century and shaped our perception of the urban environment.

Well, why am I indulging in this long reflection upon the screams of metal? Because I am in fact trying to conduct a process of alchemical transmutation of metals, from the dark agony of screaming metal to a music, a song of metal, a symphony of communication networks and information, of power networks and electrification. The metal of despair and the metal of progressive hope are one and the same alchemical substance in the collective consciousness of the modern soul.

I've been spending a good amount of time in the last couple of days reading the short book of Norbert Wiener "Extrapolation, interpolation, and smoothing of stationary time series". It's been an effective way to channel my mind towards kinder and more positive thoughts. This 1949 classic reprinted by MIT press (not in very good quality printing unfortunately, several lines here and there in the text are unreadable) is a mathematics book of a kind that defies any sort of standard classification. The writing style of Wiener is unique in its capacity of storytelling: I don't mean, mind it, the kind of extremely annoying practice of resorting to anecdotes and such trivia which in my opinion are capable of spoiling completely the pleasure of reading a book, not at all. Wiener is telling a story of time series, of ergodic theory, of Fourier analysis and filters, of mathematics and engineering. It challenges the generally accepted ways in which research mathematics is written: there are no stated propositions and accompanying proofs, just a narrative that flows easily, intertwining explanations, formulae and computations, motivation and commentaries. It's hard to claim that time series analysis can make a page turner but in the hands of Wiener that can happen too. There is something in it that can only be described as a poetic quality, and after the long reflection I have just been writing about, I feel inclined to view the Fourier analysis and linear filters that Wiener is talking about as that song and music of metals, of communication engineering.

The future past

2009-05-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

I must admit that I watched it. Hollywood as it may be, I can't deny that in the emotional state I am in these days it is perhaps not a bad idea to be forced to look back at the person I have been some 27 years ago. I was no scientist then, only dreaming of becoming one, while right now I am trying to figure out if there's anything left to dream of in it.

The child is grown,
the dream is gone
and I have become comfortably numb.
(Pink Floyd "The Wall" - "Comfortably numb")

One does not need a deep psychological insight to understand why Star Trek appeals to teenagers, nor why the character of half-human science officer Spock appeals especially to kids who are passionate about science and who are, at the same time, struggling with difficult emotional states. There is no shortage of troublesome teenagers, back then as now: the violent emotions, brawls and fist fights, the antisocial behavior, the complete refusal to recognize any form of authority. Been there, done that. Fewer among them combine all this with a passion for science, even though science is at heart a refusal of authority and of social conventions. Science can also become a most powerful source of self-fulfilling and stabilizing effects, capable of overcoming the unbalance of emotions that accompanies all those other impulses. It is not a surprise that, for such people as I used to be, the inner struggle of the Spock character for the control of emotion via the discipline of science would inevitably resonate.

The "Spock technique" worked for me ever since I first got the idea, just about 27 years ago, at the time of my first exposure to the now more than 40 year old first Star Trek series. It is remarkably simple and effective: one tames the emotional storms of anger and despair by channeling their full strength into a different direction, into the focused attention and inquisitive curiosity that is required in the apprenticeship of the hard sciences. It worked rather well ever since, but the path of science is a steep climb and at every step up the mountain performing the same task and obtaining the same effect becomes more laborious. That's why the story character feels to right, because under the continuous struggle to maintain control, not to slip, especially in the presence of his fellow travelers of the galaxy, there is a growing tension that every so often explodes violently, as in this movie plot and in all those other similar episodes in the old series that the new movie keeps referring to.

Now I've got that feeling once again.
I can't explain, you would not understand:
this is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

While it is easy to charm and inspire a young person, the grownup self becomes too cynically aware of the tricks behind the scenes, too critical and detached, too demanding of high quality and depth to satisfy the same desire for wonder. There is no more cheap thrill to be had with a few special effects and a bit of rhetoric that sounds vaguely like scientific jargon. This is another reason why achieving the same miracle of alchemical transformation, which transmutes powerful emotions into the crystal clarity of scientific thought, becomes more and more difficult with time. There are no more easy catalysts available to ignite the reaction and the philosopher's stone has become far too philosophical and much heavier a stone to carry over the years.

I hear you're feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain
Get you on your feet again.

The plot of the new movie is just as weak as any old Star Trek episode was: alternate histories, time travel, black holes, arch-villains armed with scimitars, the whole paraphernalia of pulp sci-fi. Nonetheless it does manage to give those same old characters a new coat of paint that makes them palatable for the sensitivity of 2009 that is by now ill at ease with the inevitable portrait of American society of the late 1960s which transpires from the original series. Transported in modern day sensitivity, the characters acquire a darker side: no longer the "future perfect" the original series had been trying to portray, while at the same time slipping every so often into all the unspoken prejudices of the time. The new version indulges on the less than perfect human (and semi-human) nature: all of the characters now looking all the more rebels and misfits, just as I liked to imagine, with the Spock character more than ever caught between worlds, out of place in all of them, unable to master his emotions, ill equipped to handle his own capacity for love. There is little room for psychology in an action plot, but Spock's struggle for maintaining control after witnessing the destruction of his own world does still resonate. I rarely indulge in Hollywood pastimes, but hitchhiking such an easy ride back into the tunnel of time was an irresistible call. No improbable black holes and strange forms of matter needed, no high-tech effects, just the tenuous flow of memory.

The movie itself ends with an encounter between a later and a former self; barring the paradoxes of time travel, the story is also a self-referential look at the dream of the past in the light of the disillusionment of a future of changed histories and widespread destruction, where the only purpose left becomes that of reconstructing the reality of a memory, reproducing within the new reality the same initial conditions of the original story. That's what I am visiting my own former self for, indeed, reconstructing a broken dream. I have been returning to that old dream theater and that long buried part of myself every time my life takes a turn where the balance becomes precarious and the ascent becomes steeper and slippery.

Can you stand up?
I do believe it's working, good.
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on it's time to go.

If one needs the discipline of science as an antidote to the darkness and as a resolution of a continuing inner struggle, then it is inevitable to look into the vast landscape of research for some strong emotional catalysts that will make it possible to stir that inner turbulence and redraw its course towards a creative outcome preventing the descent into a grim and self-destructive one. One needs a driving force of sufficient magnitude to power the slow and difficult ascent out of the darkness and into the light. Keep going through the show is most of the time already a struggle in itself, getting through each day, doing what needs to be done, coming out on top every night with some tangible progress in one's hands, something to cling on to as a proof that there is forward motion still, and that the climb, slow and painful as in may be, is still ongoing. The need for a motivation that is sufficiently powerful at the emotional level is the weak link in the iron chain securing the way to successful and rewarding scientific achievements, because it makes all the delicate and difficult construction that one slowly builds around it step by step into a very vulnerable structure, and changing course in the middle of a climb is both difficult and unwise. Yet, there is no other way: the force that tames the inner tide has to be of equal magnitude.

There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying.

So I am searching once more, looking back in time, inspecting the dark line of the horizon for traces of another source of light. It's a difficult time to be marooned into this limbo, into this dense fog. It's time "to explore strange new worlds" looking for a new direction once again, "to boldly go where no one has gone before".

Hello?
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone at home?

The voyage of Planck

2009-05-14T05:49:00.000-07:00

I flew down to Florida last night, and I am missing the big party my Caltech-JPL colleagues are having since 3 am this morning to accompany the launch of Herschel-Planck: I am watching it live on the ESA webpage, but I'll miss out on all the fun back in California.

There are big expectations for the Planck mission among cosmologists: it is the third and last of a series of satellites whose data revolutionized the field in the past decade. The first was COBE, NASA's Cosmic Bakground Explorer, launched in 1989. In that year the eyes of the world (and mine) were on other events, but it soon became clear that cosmology was entering a new phase when the significance of the microwave background radiation data of four years of COBE observations began to be unraveled. The images of fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background entered our collective consciousness.

The launch in June 2001 of the WMAP satellite, the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced a map of the microwave background in much finer resolution. The age of the universe, the riddles of dark matter and dark energy, the age of reionization from the polarization spectrum of the CMB, the amplitude of fluctuations and the problem of structure formation: all that came to characterize the main challenges and successes of modern cosmology came from the refined view of the microwave background provided by these satellites.

And Planck? ESA stepped in for this third installment, which just successfully lauched from the Kourou spaceport in the French Guiana. Data will start to come in soon! An improved view of the polarization spectrum of the CMB, a higher resolution in spherical harmonics for the temperature spectrum are among the major improvements expected over WMAP: the new data will test models of inflationary cosmology. The latter in turn depend (for the shape of the potential of the scalar field that runs the inflation) on particle physics models, so the cosmological data will in part also be read as data about particle physics models. Theoretical cosmologists have been exploring a range of possible deviations from the usual Einstein-Hilbert action of general relativity, ranging from conformal gravity, non-minimal couplings with other fields (such as the Higgs field), modified gravity, all waiting to be confronted with the cosmological data, in search of a match that would shed light on the darkness of energy and matter.

ESA broadcast
Planck homepage
JPL
Caltech PMA division

Big Sur

2009-05-11T12:23:00.001-07:00

I spent a day traveling across the Big Sur just some ten days ago, the coastal highway winding up and down the steep side of the mountain, opening and closing sudden vistas of thousand feet deep gorges, roaring waves, high rocks climbing out of the ocean like prehistoric monsters, hidden shores and creeks, sun and high ocean winds.

Jack Kerouac went mad at the Big Sur. It's a distinctive sign of the great writers, being able to choose the right places where to go mad: the likes of me end up going mad in places like Tennessee.

Kerouac's fatal encounter with the Big Sur begins with a good proposition about life, which I could not agree with more: after promising to himself "no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it... no more ... be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self imposed agony ... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated". With these thoughts he withdraws to a cabin in the woods at the Big Sur and spends night after night on the shore listening to the waves, writing their unlikely broken chant, which will become the poem "Sea". Nights and days in the solitude of the Big Sur gorges, under the high bridge of that same coastal road I've so recently seen, seem at first an idyllic return to a restored contact with nature, a poetic communion with the wind and the waves and the fog of the ocean. California, so beautiful and so tragic! The harmony transforms itself into darker and darker tones, until on the run from the Big Sur, he is back into his desperate San Francisco life. In the touching moment when, coming back from his retreat in the wilderness, he hears that his beloved cat Tyke has died, one can see how it is events of this kind, events sad but otherwise inevitable in the course of life, that at crucial times can crack our last resources of resilience. There by his friends of the City Lights bookstore, that same City Lights bookstore of San Francisco I've been visiting so often in these past months, Jack Kerouac back from the Big Sur rewrites once more the path of his life and stirs its course once again towards its ultimate self-destructive goal. Lacrimae rerum: the narration oscillates between "the backs and forths and pains of me in City and Sur, all piled up rationally now like a big construction". In his madness days he lives love as a desperate agony ("Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions") but even this refuge is illusory as it is the getting drunk night after night, until the final delirium at the Big Sur, accompanied by the voice of the waves. "Masks explode before my eyes when I close them, when I look at the moon it waves, moves, when I look at my hands and feet they creep". His capacity to relate to others deteriorates: "so I keep coming back but it's all an insane revolving automatic directionless circle of anxiety, back and forth, around and around, till they're really by now so perturbed by my increasing silent departures and creepy returns."

After a botched attempt to see someone at the local psychological counseling service (sorry, only students and faculty of the university, no visitors) and another botched attempt at sitting in a talk at the conference I am supposedly attending, while spending the rest of the time wandering around a place that is more familiar than I would like it to be, I found in a heap of garbage left over by the post graduation campus exodus a very nice particle physics book someone must have decided to get rid of. I collected it out of the dust. It was in very good conditions, save for some wear at the bottom of the page and occasional small pencil marks, so I decided to keep it. It's the first volume of Gottfried and Weisskopf's "Concepts of particle physics" (which sells new on Amazon at 150 bucks). It's a curious book, though not a recent one, based on series of lectures given by the authors in the early 1980s at students spending the summer working at CERN. With in mind an audience with a minimum background of quantum mechanics, no quantum field theory required, the book gives a guided tour to the world of particle physics from isospin to the electroweak theory, CP violation, quarks and the standard model, and the questions of grand unification. It's not a textbook but it is well beyond a popularization book. It is a good summary of the long quest for understanding the subatomic world.

If I were inclined to view the world in the light of Jungian synchronicity, I would attach some special relevance to this random event: at the time when I touched the lowest point of the present journey, I stumble upon this "objet trouvé", this book emerging from the refuse, intact, like a phoenix from the ashes. It is inevitable to project onto it the voice of an inner call, a hand outstretched in the darkness, the opening of a door in the wall. It might not be such a bad idea to try and follow this dim light for a while, down the wells of silence and of the infinitesimal world of particle physics and maybe I'll even try to keep on going with that strange particle physics/cosmology paper I've been on and off trying to write.

What am I doing here?

2009-05-07T00:06:00.001-07:00

What am I doing here? In the middle of the night, in this deserted country music outpost in the south of the midwest, attending a conference dedicated to a mathematical object that does not exist, contemplating a kaleidoscope of broken glass: the fragments of what used to be a promising long term research and collaboration project. Rorschach blots of unfinished thoughts, of unfulfilled desires drifting between inner and outer darkness. I'll do my act, "a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more" and, otherwise, I will simply be counting the passing of the days, "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow". If I had been waiting for this time in the hope of restoring that puzzle of broken shards, of finding a way back to a special place of the mind that for so long had been like a lighthouse in the storm, I am forced to realize now that even that refuge might well have vanished, swallowed by an unquiet sea with little care for transient ships in search of a beam of light.

Is despair an acceptable motivation to work? Cynically, if that does it why not? But does it really produce anything worthy of a second look? What motivates one to work in scientific research is a difficult question to answer. If an answer exists it is surely not a universal one. We might all have different perspectives on what drives us on. Ideally, there is a desire of understanding, a basic sense of curiosity and wonder, which is the very reason why science came to exist as a product of the human mind. Yet, this is a highly idealized vision, which rarely accounts for the whole of the forces that stir our daily course of activity. In a first approximation, one can either work for a reason or against it: both are powerful drives at the emotional level, and one should not underestimate the role that the emotional involvement plays. The role of emotional life in the workings of the mind, even when applied to something seemingly detached and objective as the most abstract of sciences is far greater than one would at first be inclined to believe.

Love and hate are the two most powerful human emotions and only one or the other can catalyze and focus enough inner resources to overcome the steep potential barrier one needs to climb in order to make any, even small, progress on the way of research. Yet, they do not quite play symmetric roles and they are not interchangeable. When the driving force is a constructive one, the accompanying feeling is one of enthusiasm, hope, any progress achieved brings pleasure. When the only remaining motivation is destructive in nature, the overall color is that of despair, there is no good feeling attached to whatever is eventually achieved, at best a sense of relief, but most importantly, the quality of work drops.

Where things go wrong is in the difficult alchemy of transforming an idea into a final product, the technical work involved in the fine tuning of details, which is not accessory but crucial to scientific practice. While positive emotions, even strongly felt ones, can be effectively used to focus attention and generally tend to improve one's capacity for concentration, strongly felt negative emotions destabilize the mind: trying to do the necessary delicate work of putting together a well crafted piece of work in science when one's motivation is mostly of this darker color is like trying to build a house of cards on top of a surface that keeps shaking violently every few seconds.

To use a well known mythological image, the doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and unmarked. So it is easy to slip from a constructive to a negative motivation, but from there to travel backward to a more positive view of things is typically a lot more difficult.

Bruce Chatwin's last book "What am I doing here" is a collection of scattered essays and memoirs, ranging from being stuck in Benin during a military coup, to following the Indira Gandhi election campaign, to paying a visit to a creepy fringe sect headed by a psychedelic guru in the Boston area, to walking across the mountains of Nepal, or following Herzog in Ghana on the set of Cobra Verde. In addition, there are beautifully written essays, on Melnikov, Malraux, and other real life or literary encounters. The collection is the ultimate portrait of displacement: "man's real home is not a house, but the road, and life itself is a journey to be walked on foot". The illusion of belonging is vanquished in a very understated but most effective way throughout the pages of this book, as it was in Chatwin's life itself. The main message one brings home from reading the best Chatwin books like this one is that there is no "special place" one can return to, and the very idea is merely illusory. Life is portrayed as a whirlpool of random encounters and adventures in improbable places. There is nothing structured about how events follow one another, how geographic locations alternate in a frantic dance of dislocation. Each person or event is a cameo where the wit and skills of the narrator draw a minute and intricate calligraphy of descriptions and observations, generating a cascade of thoughts and reflections. They look like those small vortices and fractal-like islands that emerge in the middle of a turbulent flow, creating an illusory impression of structure.

Reclaiming the dark side of the moon

2009-05-06T02:44:00.000-07:00

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
(Pink Floyd, "Brain damage" - The dark side of the moon)

With the memorable Pink Floyd album, the "dark side of the moon" came to signify a locus of the imagination, a powerful visual representation of all those altered states of mind that are considered unacceptable by our society. Exile on the dark side of the moon is the destiny of those who step beyond the threshold of what conventions decree to be the acceptable norm.

The dark side of the moon is of course a licentia poetica: there is a far side of the moon but not a dark side. Calling it "dark", in addition to being the far side hidden from view of the earth, contributes to increase the tragic sense of an ultimate destination of no return, far away hidden from view and from the light itself, an image reinforced by the "lock the door and throw away the key" lines in the song.

You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.

The dark side of the moon is such a powerful image because it is as much tragic as it is empowering: it's a place where the undesirable states of mind our society tries to hide away can reside, once again as in Milton's "Paradise Lost", it is hell as a refuge for the cast out, a place where "at least we shall be free". Reclaiming the dark side of the moon means turning the perspective of exile from rejection into liberation as the heroic Lucifer of "Paradise Lost" does in his fall, which becomes his escape from the tyranny of heaven, his liberation and self-assertion.

Reclaiming the dark side of the moon is a broad appeal for coming out of the bipolar closet. I live and work in the community of scientists, which just as much as artists, writers, musicians, and other people whose work is largely based on inventiveness and creativity, have an incidence of bipolar disorder in much larger numbers than the general population. To attach rough estimates to these claims, while in the general population the incidence is about 1 in 100 (the same as for other major psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia), in the "creative professions" like art and science the incidence of bipolar disorder is estimated to be between 10 and 30 percent. Surprisingly, there is a thick veil of denial over all this. Not only people rarely talk openly about their own experiences with mood disorder and altered states of mind, but a lot of "normal" people in the profession have not even ever heard of the existence of a major psychiatric condition variously referred to as "manic-depression" or "bipolar disorder" or "cyclothymia" in its milder form, even though in fact several among their closest friends, collaborators, colleagues might in fact be suffering from the condition.

Coming out of the closet about bipolar scientists is important for a better way of living within the community, more open and understanding, with less desperate efforts to hide away during the "bad phases" in order to appear always in control of things: no more pretenses keeping up the illusion that there is a "normal" behavior we all conform to. It is far more difficult for scientists than it is for artists to admit openly to their bipolar disorders: the romantic "Sturm und Drang" image of the artistic temperament, excessive as it may be, created in the collective imagination an association between artistic creativity and mood disorder, which people are, by now, readily willing to accept. For scientists it is a tougher task to come out of the closet: there is, on the contrary, an expectation of total rational control, of perfectly tuned clockwork in the scientific mind, which people (even other scientists) find difficult to reconcile with the notion of mood swings and flights of the mind to the dark side of the moon, even though there is no shortage of cases of famous scientists notoriously affected by the condition (George Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Norbert Wiener... the list is long and very distinguished).

The dark side of the moon is a beautiful image precisely because it can be seen as highly symbolic of the collusion of scientific creativity and manic-depressive temperament. It evokes on the one hand the Apollo 16 and its iconic photographs of the far side of the moon: a symbol of the capacity of the scientific enterprise to reach "where no man had gone before", and at the same time it is also the "dark side" in the Pink Floyd sense, which made that flight possible. Science needs the extra burst of creativity that manic-depression confers to those who have the curse and the blessing to partake of this muse, and yet the scientific community is not ready to recognize its existence.

Reclaiming the dark side of the moon means coming out of the bipolar closet, spreading awareness of the existence, along with the "norms" of those other ones, so many of us, who are different, who feel things on a different scale of magnitude, who can descend the depths and climb the heights of those mountains of the moon where the mind and the Apollo spaceships fly.
How many people have at least a vague, if generally misinformed, idea of what schizophrenia is? I bet even the least attentive layperson knows of its existence. Yet try to find out how many people in the general population have ever heard even of the existence of bipolar disorder. The reason is quite self-evident: a condition like schizophrenia can hardly be hidden, while even some of the most severe forms of manic-depression often arise among so called "high-achievers" who can more easily hide their condition. It's a mistake to hide, because manic-depression has consequences, in the way one relates to others, leaving behind a trail of broken friendships, incomprehension, all things that could be easily avoided by being more directly open about discussing it. It also involves dangers to oneself, both in the form of higher suicide risk during depressive phases, a blurred perception of risk during the manic ones, a higher risk of substance abuse, and all that. Letting others in on the dark secret face of creativity is a first step to help oneself and others. There is a beautiful book about manic-depression, written by two leading expert psychiatrists (one of them, Kay Redfield Jamison, openly admitting to suffer herself from the condition).The book is a thousand pages, give or take a few, but I highly recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in understanding what this is really all about. I am not fond of going straight for pharmacology as a treatment for mood disorders, I personally much prefer Jungian psychotherapy (at least that worked very well for me in the past), but a lot of information is given in the book which I think should be known to all those people, "norms" or "diffs" as they may be, who work in the creative professions of arts and science, and who will inevitably come often enough into contact with people with bipolar disorder.

And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Science frictions and the ronin

2009-03-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door:
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before.
(The Eagles, "Hotel California")

Back in California (and still those voices calling from far away wake you up in the middle of the night just to hear them say...welcome to the Hotel California...) after a conference trip to the East Coast that was very much revealing, both of the fact that I am still moved by the beauty of the type of science that has been driving me on for so long, and at the same time of how little I can cope with the society of people that surrounds it.

I've had for a long time, years perhaps, a recurrent vision. Not a dream really, more of the kind of hypnagogic impressions that ambush people on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness and haunt them with their more than real quality. In this vision, which varies in length and intensity but not in content, I am standing in the middle of an open space at the top of a hill, surrounded by dense forest growth as far as the eye can see. No trace of human presence is detectable anywhere. There is snow on the ground, a heavy snowfall covering hills and conifer trees in pale blue frost. The sky is overcast and the light so dim that it can only be dusk or dawn. I am standing there holding a sword, one of those long and heavy swords medieval knights used to wield in battle, but I have no horse and no armor, just a sword whose metal feels cold and smells an unpleasant metal smell at the contact with the sweaty skin of hand. The snow also smells, the acre smell of blood, where the sword touched animal flesh. They come, often one at a time, sometime in pairs, or small groups. Mostly they circle around me out there, just barely out of sight, where the terrain of the hill bends and the forest swallows it. I hear them and smell them though I mostly don't see them. They are and are not wolves. They are an archaic creature that will one day evolve into a wolf. They are archetypal beasts, Ur-wolves, an ancient memory imprint living inside the collective brain of the human species, and they are hungry. And yet, they wait, because that is their winning strategy. One on one, the sword wins over the Ur-wolf's fury. Already when they attack in small groups of two or three at a time, the fight is much more challenging. I fight them back each time, inflict wounds on their flesh, leave dark red spot of acre blood smell on the snow, and I know that in their strategy of waiting, in their continuos series of small attacks aimed at wearing out the fighter, they have already won. All they have to do is wait until weariness will do the job for them. They do not need to come out in force for an all out battle, they only need to keep up the pressure, not relenting it, until that continuous pressure will be the killer and they only need to show up in the end to claim the remains, when it is safe to do so.

The moral of the story is rather clear even before making the full transition from sleep back into the world of the living and out of this complacent state of reverie.

So I began wondering, as I walked around the crowded sidewalks of south Berkeley amidst second hand books sellers, incense burning, and hippies playing guitars with otherworldly looks and semeiotics textbooks at their feet, on the strange and compelling analogies between the practices of science and those of the martial arts. I have been for a brief period of a few years in my teens a trainee in one of the major brands of Asian martial arts, judo, and occasionally of some less refined Western combat sports like boxing, and then for a much longer portion of my life I have been a trainee and practitioner of two of the main sciences: mathematics and theoretical physics.

So I will violate my usual habit of reserving this blog to discussions of issues, either book commentaries or reflections upon life, that are somewhat directly linked to science and its narratives (including some carefully chosen science fiction) and will venture this time into a completely different territory, by reviewing here a book that has apparently nothing to do with the theme of science, a book about martial arts. My justification for doing so is that I had never become as clearly aware of the striking similarities between the practices of science and those of the traditional (as well as the non-traditional) martial arts, until I stumbled, in one of the bookstores here, upon an intriguing and very unusual book about martial arts, Daniele Bolelli's "On the warrior's path". I'll come to describe why the book is so remarkable (or at least why I find it so), but first let me dwell a bit more into the comparison between science and the combat training codified into the form usually referred to as "martial arts". A first striking similarity lies in the fact that both activities are borne out of many years of intense training, both have schools and styles, and honorable masters of the art. One learns techniques, katas or forms. The seminar rooms are the dojo of science, conferences its combat competitions. Sure one usually does not see blood and teeth flying out of people's mouths as in the recently fashionable all out fight shows of the martial arts practitioners, but one can often see the scars of this other form of parring all the same. Most of all, martial arts, with both their physical and philosophical aspects, are all about handling situations of conflict, as well as about conquering fear and, as such, they can provide a very useful supporting structure to the life of scientists (apart from doing something to keep their bodies from falling apart with too much inactivity and too many hours spend behind a computer screen). A good part of the everyday practice of science is in fact also engaged in resolving situations of conflict: there are conflicts of a more noble nature, namely the continuous struggle to bring the puzzling unknown to a satisfactory solution that improves our understanding of the endless mysteries of the universe that surrounds us, as well as the not so noble conflicts generated by the functioning of the community of scientists with its all too human, or more appropriately ape-like structure of dominance and aggression. Fighting is part of everyday practice, not in the more direct physical sense perhaps, though I often dream of bringing some of the enormous and disruptive tensions created by the interpersonal frictions between practitioners of the enlightened and noble scientific enterprise down to the level where they truly belong, where they could be resolved with sweat and blood, punches and high kicks Hong Kong movie style. I believe people would be more honest to one another and to themselves if that were the case. Despite such thoughts, which I occasionally indulge in (at certain times more frequently than at others), I am generally a non-violent person, so I think that it would, if possible, be preferable to avoid situations of conflict, and certainly not seek them out. Thus, one aspect of Bolelli's book I particularly like is the discussion of how martial arts train people not only in the techniques of fighting, but also in learning how to avoid fighting. I began to ask myself, in relation to my recurrent vision of fending off the ancient carnivores with a sword, how many of those wolves were really necessary, and how many among them might in fact have been avoided altogether, their attacks fended off not by the blade, but by a more subtle strategy aimed at avoiding the confrontation in the first place. Part of the wisdom of martial arts is not entering into a confrontation unless one is reasonably sure of coming out of it in one piece, and especially not to take on many more opponents at any given time than one can simultaneously handle. This is of course the message of my fighting-off-the-wolves vision: I do more and more frequently find myself in the position of having to handle a fight against too many things at the same time and when the next one comes along, as if following the hunting strategy of the wolves, I find I have exhausted the resources needed to handle one more challenge.

Bolelli's book has other very interesting aspects. In his description of the different psychological types of the warrior, I see that the one and only one that fits me perfectly is "the ronin", the name originally reserved to the unattached samurai, the lonely warrior who do not serve a master nor a cause. There are a couple of beautiful sentences in his description of the ronin that strike a deep chord: "a nomadic warrior who doesn't stop in any place long enough to grow roots" and "the chaos of his spirit is the sun illuminating his life as well as the curse that can ruin him" and "the ronin is the meteor of the warrior tradition... a mushroom spore fallen on earth from outer space". I see myself, he sees himself. The other warrior figures described in the book (the samurai, the ninja, the shaolin monk, the hermit, and the tribal warrior) do not quite have the same immediate appeal and brightness of the ronin description.

It is clear in reading the book that the later chapters have been written at a different time from the bulk of the book consisting of the first eight chapters translated into English from an earlier Italian version and expanded. In the later part what I find most interesting, though I connected better to the earlier part of the book, are the chapter dedicated to Bruce Lee's anarchist view of martial arts and its relation to early Taoism and historical Buddhism at the origin of Zen. I also enjoyed the last and more personal chapter, where the author reveals his reasons for choosing the path of the warrior, his bipolar disorder (welcome to the club, pal) and the welcoming effects of the combat sports in dealing with the emotional rollercoaster of mood disorders. The references to Nietzsche give a fairly romanticized vision of the German philosopher, but they do get the point across well enough.

Our dark materials

2009-03-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

I was spending my time in the doldrums
I was caught in a cauldron of hate
I felt persecuted and paralysed
I thought that everything else would just wait
(Pink Floyd, "Lost for words")

There's another trip coming up, another attempt to fight for survival, and so I revert once more to this unpleasant use of blog posts as a "message in a bottle" tossed out into the deep sea of the world wide web. It is really not all that surprising to read in the news of last desperate messages left out on some web site by would be victims or assassins prior to their last bloody journeys. Reversing personal anguish on the web has become a modern version of the vox clamans in deserto: a cry of despair sent out into a wilderness where no one will hear. The paradoxical nature of the world wide web as being at the same time the busiest and most highly frequented "place" (or perhaps entity) in the world and yet so dispersed in its nature as to make sure that most of the huge body of written and visual material uploaded every minute will hardly ever be seen by anybody is what makes the allure of the internet post: it is easy to imagine flowing at the heart of a mighty river of information and human activity and yet most likely be completely alone and unseen. Sometime only after some concrete real life event the existence of a long trail of prior virtual shadows is uncovered, dug out from the depth of the virtual ocean and displayed for human eyes to see. Do not worry, imaginary reader, mermaid of the electronic abyss, I am not planning any crime: no splatter, no gruesome act of retaliation against anybody. I think not. I merely observe how easy it is to enter this fictional universe of communication without an emissary or a receiver. The medium is the message, or perhaps a version of Marshall McLuhan for our electronic age would assert that the disembodied message becomes medium, signifier, receiver and emitter at the same time, in a solipsistic game of recreation of the whole process of communication without anything being communicated at all, creating an absolute and irresistible esthetic of loneliness.

While you are wasting your time on your enemies
Engulfed in a fever of spite
Beyond your tunnel vision reality fades
Like shadows into the night
(ibid.)

There's going to be finally a DVD release of the movie "Dark Matter", shot in 2007, briefly out in selected movie theaters in the US and quickly withdrawn from circulation, despite having won the Sloan price at the Sundance film festival. The accusation: having "humanized" the figure of the main character, Liu Xing, a Chinese graduate student of cosmology in the US, who ends up committing an act of violence against fellow members of the same department. The story is (very loosely) based on real events happened in a university in the midwest, in a completely different context and field of science, sometime back in the 1980s, if I remember correctly. Never mind, since the story is certainly fictional in all its aspect, except for the very real portrait of the tragic combined effect of the enormous psychological pressure that is so common among people doing research in cutting edge branches of science, together with the feeling of alienation caused by being uprooted from one's own culture and environment, as again people working in science so commonly experience. When, as it is often the case with foreign graduate students in the US (the movie argues, especially students from China) one adds to this volatile mixture the additional pressure caused by overt or thinly disguised racial discrimination, it may reach well beyond the limits of a person's resilience and endurance and ignite a tragic and violent ending as the one described in the events portrayed in the movie plot. The same sort of observations could of course apply to other forms of discrimination, such as gender discrimination, instead of a racially motivated one: added to the combination of all the other factors, it could prove just as explosive. It is convenient to believe that the people who are driven to commit such unspeakable acts of violence are just monsters: who else would unload a gun onto innocent fellow students or colleagues? It is perhaps out of understandable respect for the families of the victims of such campus shootings that hardly anything is ever said about the perpetrators other than condemning the senseless violence of the act. Yet, it would be better if the unspeakable would sometime be spoken. Understanding what chain of events may lead an ordinarily normally functional, sometimes even very bright, individual to commit a hideous crime is important, more important than hiding behind a convenient accusation of madness or intrinsic evil. Anybody can be pushed to the limit under suitable circumstances: each one of us, men and women, of whatever ethnicity, age, and social extraction could become that senseless killer of the campus shooting. The right chain of events has to come along for such a thing to happen, a deadly combination of fear, frustration, isolation, and sense of abandonment, of being betrayed by the people one most closely trusted. The feeling has to last long enough and be reinforced by a nearly continuous chain of events for a long lasting stretch of time, of the order of months if not years, so as to wear out all the natural regulatory mechanisms of self defense and resilience every individual possesses. Such chain of events do happen, and in environment where pressure is high and continuous, and people are more often displaced and uprooted, they are more likely to happen. I think a movie like Dark Matter helps us understand what it means to slowly slip past the boundary dividing the sane from the insane, joining madness and despair. It is by no means an apology of crime perpetrators, but it makes people understand why such crimes may happen and what are the wheels that turn beyond the surface of a person's life, and wind up the charge of an explosive mixture of unexpressed feelings and fears. A desperate act of violence is a fruit that ripens on a plant rooted in societal rejection of certain groups of individuals combined at the same time with the expectation, often self imposed, that such individuals ought to perform far better than all those surrounding them in order to make up for the bias in the other people's perception. Humiliation, isolation, rejection, demands: the tension is sufficiently contradictory and painful to make one's mind explode.

To martyr yourself to caution
Is not going to help at all
because there'll be no safety in numbers
When the right one walks out of the door
(ibid.)

The rampage killing portrayed in the Dark Matter movie is primarily an act of self violence: the perpetrator kills what he had once loved and that by which he felt betrayed. Is this way of presenting the story condescending? Is it trying to create sympathy for a murderer? Yes and no: it primarily seems to be attempting to comprehend what appears at first incomprehensible. In the way the story is constructed in the movie, things do indeed make a whole lot of sense, perhaps,
some may argue, too much sense, to the point of appearing to justify, not only explain, the character's conduct. In the movie Liu Xing is a hard working brilliant and very promising young scientist. As such, he is quickly spotted and nurtured by the leading senior scientist in the field. This process of initiation and acceptance into the community already portrays very well some of the aspects of the sociological functioning of this community, the almost tribal primitive structure barely hidden behind the clean surface of the heroic quest to explore the frontiers of science. The role of the dominant male in the monkey tribe (a theme I keep returning to frequently in my own reflections upon the functioning of the scientific enterprise) is quite clearly visible from the beginning of the story, even in the early phase where the future looks bright and full of promise. Liu Xing joins into the research group: he is sharing a dream, an exciting research project that promises to unravel some of the most intriguing mysteries of contemporary science: the problem of dark matter in cosmology. He invests in this shared dream all his emotional and intellectual capacities. He internalizes it, binds with it: his science becoming the hard essence of his own life. Things slowly begin to take a turn when, in his quest, his own results and approaches begin to question the paradigm established and maintained by his mentor. Here is where once again the movie hits on another quite essential target in its very well crafted critique of the functioning of the scientific community. Again this has to do with the hidden monkeys behind the human clothing. Liu Xing falls out of favor in the community for having dared to challenge the authority instead of blindly following it. In his place, another young Chinese researcher in the same group is chosen as the new favorite of the boss. He, unlike Liu Xing, plays along, never challenges, only praises, and while Liu Xing is more and more pushed to the margin, excluded from what was previously a joint dream, his antagonist rises. It is the emotional aspects that come to dominate the story at that point: Liu Xing's attitude towards his mentor had, up to that point, been dominated by true love and admiration. His challenge of the accepted paradigm was well within the honest manifestations of this love for both his mentor and the topic of their joint research. It is only as a reaction to his perceived exclusion from that very same joint dream that this love begins to turn sour. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion is the most powerful weapon that tightly knit communities can brandish. This has been seen in action every so often in religious contexts (excommunication, apostasy) or in political contexts (party expulsions, maoist style self-criticism). Perhaps this movie is the first attempt I've come across that shows how this dynamics plays itself out in the context of the scientific community. The process of exclusion can have devastating effects in an ambient like science where, on a highly specialized field, the community of experts is very small: once someone is cast out there is really nowhere else to go. The process of retraining for a scientist is an extremely long and painful process: being able to work at a respectable professional level in any field of science can easily require ten years of training. Being forced out of one's established field of expertise is something that can well trigger the kind of desperate reaction portrayed in the movie.

Can you see your days blighted by darkness?
Is it true you beat your fists on the floor?
Stuck in a world of isolation
While the ivy grows over the door
(ibid.)

Not all cases of "campus shooting" arise as described in Dark Matter. In fact, this is perhaps the most serious criticism that one can make of the movie, that it risks portraying as typical a case that is in fact quite exceptional. Often in real life the perpetrators of such crimes are not bright young scientists cornered into despair by the cruelty of the sociological functioning of the scientific community, but more likely failing students with more frustration than real talent. Conversely, not all cases of young scientists whose life is devastated by their inability to fit into the tribal structure of the scientific community end up in murder and suicide. Yet some do, and this movie does dare to talk about those people in a way that is human. I think it is not a mistake to openly discuss such possibilities: at least it should help raising awareness or what is a very real risk. One should not underestimate the effects of prolonged periods of high intensity and stressful work of the type that is involved in scientific research. There are ideas, beautiful ideas, and behind the ideas there are human beings, who have an enormous emotional baggage they carry with them as they try to develop those ideas. Research work requires long stretches of intense concentration. Nothing comes easy. There is a misguided widespread belief in the stroke of genius that solves everything in a single "eureka" cry. That makes no sense: science is a struggle, a continuous fight where advancement is only made one small step at the time, one after the other, slowly, painfully, always painfully. There are moments of joy too, of course, we do like, love, the act of doing science, but it is precisely this emotional roller coaster involved in the process that makes it enormously difficult to cope with the stress that accompanies it. The issue of recognition is a minefield: it helps to gain recognition within the community, it temporarily makes the burden easier to carry, but it easily becomes a trap because its workings are more volatile than the stock market and if one comes to rely on recognition as a source of strength the fall out of favor, when it eventually comes, may be much harder to take. That's how the sociology of the community comes to have nearly infinite power of inflicting deep wounds. Human beings have a wonderful mechanism of resilience, a homeostatic control system whose main purpose is to prevent us from killing ourselves and come up, at any given time and in any possible circumstance, with new motivations to keep on living. As all mechanism, the homeostasis of resilience can also occasionally break down. The typical way in which this can happen is through accumulation. As in the story of Liu Xing in Dark Matter, the accumulation of events finally breaks the homeostasis and the resilience mechanism fails. Too much emotional and intellectual investment goes astray, leaving behind a feeling of not having anywhere left to go both mentally and physically. It is nice that the movie will soon be available again, this time in DVD form. It will give an occasion for thought, both for the people who are in the position of Liu Xing's mentor in the movie, who will hopefully pause to reflect on the devastating effects that their role in the scientific community can occasionally have, as well as of course for all those who are or will find themselves at some point during their scientific career in the shoes of Liu Xing. These will hopefully reflect on how to build safety mechanisms preventing them from investing the totality of their lives, intellects and emotions into a dream whose course is ultimately controlled by others, who wield the levers of inclusion and exclusion and pull them at their whim and fancy.

So I open my door to my enemies
And I ask: Could we wipe the slate clean?
But they tell me to please go fuck myself:
You know you just can't win.
(ibid.)

Atom and void: the greek tragedy of the modern world

2009-03-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

It is hard not to be fascinated by the figure of J.Robert Oppenheimer, despite the facts that rivers of ink, a huge number of popular books, several movies and recently a splendid opera have been dedicated to various aspects of his life. Mostly these recollections focus, of course, on his role as the head of the Manhattan project that ushered the world into the atomic era while causing about 250,000 Japanese civilians to either disappear into instant oblivion or else to undergo a slower death in the agony of radiation burns. Certainly the enormity of the impact of the atomic bomb on human civilization ("the gadget and its impact on civilization" was the title of a seminar that took place at Los Alamos shortly before the Trinity test), combined with the remarkable parabola of ascent to power and later descent into disgrace of Oppenheimer, make his personal story comparable to that of the tragic figures of the classic past: Oedipus Rex, Antigone, an apt comparison for a person who was a fine scholar of the classics in addition to a brilliant physicist. It is also the many contradictions implicit in the figure of Oppenheimer that make him so interesting: the Communist leaning, poet loving, dreamer, as well as the practical, almost cynical and immensely efficient administrator of the biggest Army sponsored weapons project in history. How can these so different aspects coexist in seeming harmony inside the same mind? They obviously can, to some extent, in many people: we can be poetic and cynical at the same time, compassionate and cruel, sensitive and tough. Yet in Oppenheimer's story this all happened in extreme degrees. He guided the project leading to the use of the atomic bomb, during and beyond the supposed race against German scientists, and yet he was later an advocate of disarmament and transparency in matters related to atomic weapons: "Follies can occur... whenever the men who know the facts can find no one to talk to about them, when the facts are too secret for discussion, and thus for thought". Yet, in 1953, shortly before his clearance was rescinded and his downfall began (courtesy of hard-core nuclear blaster Edward Teller), when Oppenheimer delivered his long awaited public lectures in England, he carefully chose not to speak about atomic weapons, the politics of disarmament and the Cold War. He delivered instead a set of scholarly lectures on the history of ideas in modern physics, fully displays his power of intellect, and consciously steering clear of the tragedy of life and history that was engulfing him. Passion and detachment, sensitivity joined with practical realism. He knew how to be cruel, as physicists attempting to give talks in his presence could often experience, and yet he knew how to be sensitive and kind. It is again a quality that many other people can exhibit, but it reached in this case some kind of essential form. Learning Sanskrit for the sole purpose of enjoying the reading of the Bhagavad-Gita in its original form and handling the task of assigning roles and coordinating efficiently the work of a large crowd of egocentric, individualistic, and generally megalomaniac scientists involved in the Manhattan project may seem like completely incompatible occupations and yet they do show a common trait that can make them coexist in a single mind: they both need an enormous drive and capacity to attain one's goals at the cost of an enormous investment of skills and energy. Oppenheimer lacked neither. This is all that concurs to make the figure of Oppenheimer the tragic figure par excellence of the modern world. It is instructive to read the text of those 1953 lectures, available together with another later series of lectures delivered in Canada in 1962. They are collected in the volume "Atom and Void" published by Princeton University Press in 1989, now out of print, but still available in second hand bookstore (I just got a copy from a Berkeley bookstore) or else one may be able to find it in some other language translation (for instance, I believe the French edition, published with the title "La science et le bon sens" is still in print), though not reading it in the original language might spoil the main feature of the book. There is in fact nothing really in the lectures themselves that will surprise anyone as far as the discussion of the history of science goes, but the writing style is very remarkable: it is the writing of a humanist who knows his way with language like scientists normally do not possess. I don't want to fall into the cheap "two cultures" trap here, but it is a sad state of affairs that the capacity to express oneself beautifully with the written language fails so often there where it would be most necessary, namely in writing about the nature of the universe and in a setting where clarity of expression can make the whole difference. I think one should read the Oppenheimer lectures to learn how to write about science in a way that fully takes advantage of the beautiful sophistication of the written language and of its subtleties of meaning.

Nights over Earth

2009-03-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

Night flight, red eye from California to the Midwest. An orange glow on dry prairie grass, rusty metal and torn concrete: a ride at dawn from Detroit to the heart of the Great Lakes region, the suffering heart of the continent, amidst harsh winter ice, ailing steel factories and struggling automotive industries. Large blue skies over the frozen plain, then coffee round the corner, then talks and the usual merry-go-round of the academic "let's pretend that we like what we are doing". The social structure of science, the one by which we are all more or less forced, some willingly and happily, some (like me) kicking and screaming, to go around for the usual frantic show of talks in this or that place, is essentially based on the concept of territoriality, not in the geographic sense, but in the sense of creating and maintaining certain spheres of influence. Like animals mark their territory with piss, scientists mark it with talks, either defining their sphere of action by selecting who speaks in their (as opposed to others') seminars and who goes to their (as opposed to others') conferences, as well as by where one agrees to give talks. It replaces the exchange of olfactive signals, a powerpoint instead of urine based detection of boundaries: the same attention in avoiding stepping into somebody else's territory and the same occasional skirmishes that follow the voluntary or involuntary probing of the permeability of these seemingly invisible but in fact very clearly marked boundaries. Everything is handled with the likes of courtesy and civilized manners, of course, but the tension is visible underneath and the meaning unmistakable. Why is this the case, why is it needed? The fierce competition for meagre resources is of course partly to blame for the development of well marked territoriality: just as in certain kinds of animal groups a marking of an individual as belonging to a well defined group ensures that it will partake of resources the group will be able to secure, maintaining well defined boundaries between spheres of influence of various individuals in science and definitely recognizable marks of belonging to one or another of these community is an evolutionary strategy of adaptation to the harsh selection imposed by the scarce resources (fundings, positions, recognition) available in the environment. Then why is it bad? Well, for once, because it has nothing to do with science: if making or accepting an invitation ends up being largely motivated by asserting one's belonging to a certain sphere of influence or trying to generate one, we might as well simply replace all that with some odor essences to wear that will produce the same effect, without the need for a the long and painful process of preparing and delivering lectures. Of course, in nature also the kind of display that accompanies the assertion of territoriality is expensive in energetic terms: colored feathers and asses, guttural sounds and screeches, flapping wings and inflated necks, so why not the similarly expensive cost of spending several days preparing slides for a one hour presentation? We are as much the process of evolutionary selection as all these other phenomena. Those scientists who do not wish, for whatever reason, to play this game end up selected against by the environment, in terms of funding, positions, and all that, and they risk dropping out of the race. Those who survive, the ones selected favorably for survival by the environment, are those who have the most colorful asses and wave them accompanied by the loudest screeches, that is to say, the alpha males. It may not have anything to do with the science we do, but it has a lot to do with the science of which we are part of the observed experiment, the science of evolution. Another incontrovertible piece of evidence for its marvelous predictive power, in fact. Once again, like every single time I go to a conference or give a talk (and that's a lot of times), I cannot help thinking of Huxley's "Ape and Essence", which I reviewed in this blog some time ago. "The aims are ape chosen, only the means are man's": I'd rather say, with respect to the social practice of science, that it is the aims that are man's, namely the science itself, but the means are definitely still the ones of the social apes, the baboon tribes; and what Huxley's says about Reason can indeed be said about science: "Papio's procurer, bursar to baboons, Reason comes running, eager to ratify."

Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes;
all men are merciful and all are murderers. [...]
Only in the knowledge of his own Essence
has any man ceased to be many monkeys
(Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence)

(The images in this blog entry are from Detroit City Poems by Estimmel and from Darby Sawchuk's
Travel Photography)

The equanimy of the cyborg

2009-01-15T23:27:00.000-08:00

The science fiction literature is permeated by the recurrent theme of the "evil computer": in its most sophisticated and interesting forms it appears in incarnations such as the famous Hal-9000 computer of "2001: a space odyssey", while the range of dystopian visions encompasses nearly everything from Dick's "Vulcan hammer", to the many cheap Star Trek episodes with evil computer controlling the lives of various planetary civilizations waiting for their individuality to be rescued by passer by interstellar battlecruisers. In truth it is hard to tell why this luddite image of fascistic machine came to dominate the genre: a very nice analysis of this phenomenon can be found, for example, in the book "The cybernetic imagination in science fiction" that I reviewed some time ago in this blog. It is a pity that computers are almost universally assigned the villain role in this kind of literature. In fact, there is a much more benign form of narrative figure to be associated to the sentient machine, which is far closer to today's reality and tomorrow's likely developments than the dictator's role.

What I refer to here is the unique capacity of the "sentient machine" to be devoid of prejudice. One can see how that increasingly comes to play a crucial role in today's society. Personally, whenever I have a choice between conducting a transaction, be it of an economic type or a simple search for information, if I am given the choice between conducting that through a human being or a machine, I most certainly and without hesitation choose the machine. Why? Well, for a very simple reason. A machine does not look at your skin color, your gender, your age, your apparent social class, ethnicity, accent, place of origin and all that before interacting with you. It does not filter its reaction to your request through this thick and impenetrable filter of perviously existing categories. A machines receives a question and produces an answer and the answer it is likely to produce is completely independent on all these other factors, which instead invariably color an answer to the very same question, as simple and objective as it may be, presented to a human being.

In my professional work as a scientist, google is my best friend and most reliable source of information. I invariably noticed over and over again how I get a lot more information, more efficiently and reliably, by asking my questions to google than by asking them to the supposed experts in the field. Google sends me quickly and precisely to the point in these people's papers where what I need is discussed, while any attempt at asking a direct question to the people behind the science gets so distorted by the endless amount of stereotypical thinking and cultural prejudices these people harbor in their minds that it becomes essentially impossible to get at the answer in any effective way.

I think it is high time to start portraying the sentient machine in our literary texts for what it really is, a step forward from the quagmire of human ugliness and prejudices, a pure state of thought where thought and knowledge is what really matters and no room for stereotyping is allowed to interfere. It is time to launch an appeal to all science fiction writers to ditch the "fascistic machine" theme once and for all, and replace it with the "equanimous cyborg" theme, whereby the sentient machine finally allows mankind to transcend its heavy baggage of repression (fascistic that one yes, not the machine) prejudice, discrimination.

There are indeed works of fiction where sentient computers are portrayed in a more interesting way than as enslavers of the human race. For example, in Lem's "Golem XIV" a generation of sentient machines arising from military research refuses to continue serving warfare research and start philosophizing. In a series of lectures delivered to a human audience, the mahine called Golem XiV attempts to explain its role as a bridge between human intelligence and levels far beyond its reach, a veritable Nietzschean "bridge between the beast and the super-human". There is a very interesting book of commentaries to Lem's Golem, written by the German philosopher Bernd Gräfrath, "Lems Golem: Parerga und Paralipomena" which gives a detailed analysis of several philosophical themes arising in the Golem lectures.

"Golem XIV" is an intriguing book like most of Lem's production, but it still remains far from the point of view I wish to advocate here. As far as I know, the theme of human-machines communication as a way to circumvent and transcend human prejudice and facilitate communication between human beings through the intervention of the non-human has never been really developed in the fictional literature, although it is already widely present and playing an increasingly important role in present day society.

The Algernon-Gordon effect

2008-12-26T15:34:00.001-08:00

Who will remember to lay those flowers for Algernon?

The moving science-fiction story of the experiment
that artificially rises the intellectual capacities of
both the underachieving young man named Charlie
Gordon and the laboratory rat Algernon is manifestly
a metaphor of well known degenerative neurological
disorders. In the story, the rat and the human being
are subjected to an experimental surgical treatment
that will drastically increase their mental abilities.

The story is written in the form of a series of diary
entries filled by Charlie Gordon, at first barely able
to read and write, and slowly progressing, as the effects
of the treatment begin to take place, to a sophisticated
intelligence.

The parabola of ascent reaches its peak
when Charlie, having become a scientist himself,
discovers what he labels the "Algernon-Gordon effect",
namely that the enhancement process eventually
reverts, and moreover, that the higher the mental
capacity grew, the faster and the more devastating
the final collapse will be. Upset both by the discovery
and by being treated as a laboratory animal by those
who are now his colleagues and who performed
the original brain altering procedure, Charlie runs
away from the scientific conference that was supposed
to announce the successful experiment to the world,
and escapes together with the rat Algernon, whom
he has grown to consider a friend.

Unable to reconcile his previous and current life,
and aware of the impending reversal of the transformation,
Charlie embarks on a voyage of self discovery. Soon enough
Algernon begins to deteriorate, turning aggressive and
confused, and eventually dies. Charlie also begins his
decline, which constitutes the most interesting and touching
part of the novel.

Charlie's shock at discovering that he is no longer able to read a
paper in German that he quoted in one of his own papers, because
he no longer understand the many languages he was fluent in
at the height of his intellectual peak, is something one can easily
identify with. It resonates deeply with anyone who has seen the
effect of neglecting languages learnt in one's youth and suddenly
discovering one is no longer able to speak them.
There is a deeply felt sense of fear that accompanies
any such event, where one realizes that it is possible to
lose important parts of what we are.

This is the ultimate reason why degenerative neurological
conditions like Alzheimer disease evoke such fear (in a recent
survey most people described this illness as "more frightening
than cancer"): we identify whom we are with what we know
and remember. The loss of cognitive abilities and memory
are perceived by most as one and the same thing as the irreparable
loss of oneself.

In the final stage of the story Charlie Gordon no longer remembers
anything about his experience and shows up, once again illiterate,
at the school for retarded people where he once took classes,
unable to remember that the young woman who had been his
teacher at the school in the beginning of the story, had in the
meantime become his friend and his loved one in the time of his
heightened intellectual capacities. When Charlie is finally confined
to an institution, the last entries in his diary, once again written
in broken language, ask people to remember to bring flowers on
the grave of Algernon. The ascending and descending of linguistic
faculties of Charlie Gordon, evident in the changing style in which
the story is told, are also a good reminder of the fact that
linguistic skills are the other main area after memory that is
affected in patients with Alzheimer, and often a good citerion
for differential diagnosis between Alzheimer and other milder
form of age related memory loss.

Alzheimer's disease currently affects 27 million people worldwide.
The descending parabola of Charlie Gordon is clearly a portrait of
the descent into the progressive and irreversible cognitive impairment
produced by Alzheimer, as many references in the story clearly point
to, from the sudden aggressive behavior exhibited by Algernon
shortly before dying, which is reminiscent of the emotional tantrums
and that people with dementia typically exhibit, to the encounter
of Charlie still in the early stages of his descent with his mother,
who rejected him on the ground of his poor cognitive abilities
as a child, and who is now herself suffering from moderate
dementia, the nearly final stage of Alzheimer disease.

Recent studies on Alzheimer's disease also observed an analog of the
Algernon-Gordon effect at work. Apparently, the more developed
and highly connected one's brain is before the onset of the illness,
which means the more years of educations one had, the more
intellectually challenging a job one did through most of one's life
and the more one kept intellectually active until old age, the more
rapid the decline of cognitive faculties is after the symptoms
of the illness become manifest. What seems to explain this
Algernon-Gordon effect is the fact that, people with higher
intellectual achievements have a higher level of "connectivity" in
the brain, so that the amount of damage to brain tissue has to
accumulate a lot more heavily before the first symptoms of
Alzheimer become visible, since for quite a long time the brain is
still able to compensate and bypass the damaged connections.
At the time when the illness becomes manifest in such people
the damage is already so extensive that the decline from that
point on is much more rapid than it would be in people who
start to exhibit symptoms at an earlier stage.
The other frightening aspect of illnesses like Alzheimer is
the fact that they have a strong genetic component: people
wonder about genetically inherited bombs ticking away in
their brains waiting to go off at the right time.

Charlie Gordon decides to live his descending parabola to
the end. In the "Flowers for Algernon" story, of course, one
main aspect of Alzheimer is missing, the one that links it
to old age. Charlie Gordon goes through his ascending
and descending phases in a relatively short span of time
still during his young age. In real life, for many people with
late onset neurological disorder, the question of how much
of the descending curve they will have to go through before
other age related complications might take over is an
entirely different one. That's where the Algernon-Gordon
effect becomes more difficult to evaluate: is the advantage
of warding off the early symptoms compensating for the
more rapid decline after symptoms appear? Is it in fact
granting people with a more highly functional brain a
longer span of "quality" living? With the global aging of
population in most of the developed world these are
questions with an important range of consequences.
Will anyone still remember to lay those flowers for Algernon?

William Utermohlen’s self-portrait with Alzheimer, 2000.

Don't help them to bury the light

2008-12-23T13:01:00.000-08:00

Hey you, don't help them to bury the light
don't give in without a fight!
(Pink Floyd -- "Hey, you")

I crossed continents once more and I am back soaked
in damp cold darkness. Every dimly illuminated surface
in this wintry urban landscape glows as if coated with a
film that reflects and radiates an essence of anguish
and bereavement. A feeling of loss: loss of life, of balance,
of will and desires. An acquiescent all encompassing darkness,
silent and slippery darkness. There is a sense that germinates
in this grey opaqueness of earth and sky that all is
past and lost and no ideal is worth fighting for any longer.
A sense of slow and tragic bitterness that is penetrating
the essence of life, just like this cold dampness and icy rain
penetrates to the bone. A sense of old torpor and leaden
heavy sadness, all traces of joy and life extinguished in an
all consuming slow decay.

Hey you, with you ear against the wall
Waiting for someone to call out
Would you touch me?

Rather than trying to fight against this all encompassing
darkness, I let its soft glow surround me and its coldness
drench me. There's a morbid sense of complacency at giving
in and letting the pain echo down the wells of consciousness.
It acquires a transcendental quality, a sense of
inevitability. One feels with enchanced intensity at
such times and, painful as it may be, it is worth
experiencing in full this descent into the underworld.
I am going through the kind of "Pink Floyd - The Wall"
decay and transformation experience, as if a wall had
progressively risen, sealing off my attempts to reach out
to others. As in the Pink Floyd movie the wall is at the same
time self built and imposed by a combination of external
forces and events of abandonment, disillusionment, and
progressive loss of stability.

Hey you, out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old
Can you feel me?

A number of somber thoughts have been accompanying me
these days. The reason that momentarily brought me back
to reside under these gloomy skies is an event involving
a young friend of mine from Baghdad, in whose scientific
training I've been quite heavily involved. Despite the
near collapse of civilization in his home country, he
succeeded with a lot of effort and hard work in earning
a PhD from a good European university. It's a story with
a happy ending, isn't it, so why am I so gloomy about it?
Well, because the truth is that, despite being able to
write a thesis with enough supervision and help from the
advisor, he still does not have a grasp on the basic
functioning of his discipline to be able to function
as an independent researcher, as would be ordinarily
expected from a recent PhD. The problem does not lie
with his ill will, nor with lack of hard work and
dedication, but with what looks now sadly like an
irreversible damage created by the desruption of his
previous education determined by the political events
of the years of the war and the wave of violence that
accompanied the military occupation of Iraq. What
went wrong did so at a very early stage. I would like
to be able to pinpoint where the damage is located,
so as to try to provide some sensible advise, but it
is not easy.

There are many different levels at which doing
research in basic science happens. Let us say one is
trying to do research in theoretical physics or in
mathematics. If it's mathematics, then one is trying
to prove a theorem. At one level, one needs to identify
which theorem one should be proving. This is often one
of the main difficulty that professional mathematicians
face. One may be attracted by famous and well defined
problem, in which case the statement (Fermat's last
theorem or the Pincare' conjecture, just to mention
the most famous recently solved ones) is clearly defined
and well known and one's own efforts are concentrated
on providing different but equivalent reformulations,
or stronger statements that would imply the desired one,
and from these devise a divide and conquer strategy that
will break down the problem into a number of steps that
become doable. Most mathematical research, however, is
not around trying to solve long standing problems (though
the latter certainly provide important motivation for
other developments). Most of the time one is not trying
to answer a given question, but to come up with both the
question and the answer at the same time. Thus, a
professional mathematician needs to have developed a
sense of what questions it may be interesting to ask
oneself, and among these which statements might have
important consequences if proved true. This sensitivity
that is very much needed to mathematical research can
be thought, even to a person approaching graduate
studies from a disadvantaged background. Following
closely the developments of the literature: looking
regularly at the eprints and attending talks and
conferences whenever possible will allow one to get
a sense of what topics and what questions are interesting
at a given time in a given field. The second challange
that faces a researcher who comes from a country with
poor infrastructure is the access to the literature.
Obviously the eprints have much improved the situation
with respect to the time when scientific literature
was only available in commercial journals, but one
still needs to know where and how to access the
information to make good use of it. I remember it
being one of the first things I showed to my friend
from Baghdad as he came out of Iraq, and I was surprised
to find out that, from what he told me, none of his
colleagues at the university there knew of the existence
of freely available scientific literature in the form
of electronic preprints repositories. This again is
something that can be easily taught. Specific notions,
definitions, existing results, techniques used in
certain contexts also can be taught, given enough
time, but there is one last ingredient, which unfortunately
lies at the foundation of all the rest, and it's the
stone upon which all the edifice of mathematical
creativity is built upon, and that's the structure of
logical thinking out of which the very texture of a
mathematical proof, any proof even the simplest one,
is made. If that step fails the rest will have nothing
to hang on to and will fail to take roots. Even if
one takes some of the most intuitively accessible
areas of mathematics, such as knot theory for
instance, one will not go anywhere with intuition alone,
or better, not with any kind of vague touchy-feely
intuition. Intuition of course exists and plays a
major role in mathematical creativity, but it's
an intuition that moves fully within the boundaries
of stringent mathematical logic and where the
underlying structure of implications, levels of
generalization, and rigorous definitions are
the very essence of what the intuitions are about.

This failure in the basic grasp on the logical structure
of science is unfortunately what I saw happening to
my friend. The kind of things that involve correct
use of logical quantifiers and propositional calculus are
implicitly hidden inside any, even the most straightforward of
mathematical statements, and it would make all statements
vacuous or nonsensical if those rules of logic failed to
click in the right way as an automatism, to become second
nature to the mind of a trained mathematician. If that very
basic level fails, then no amount of further learning, of
hard work and dedication, no amount of literature reading,
of sitting in lectures, and so on, will ever make a
person able to work as a professional research mathematician
(the same goes without saying for physicists as well, and
for all the other sciences). When in the training of a
mathematician does one expect to learn that kind of basic
thinking? In many cases it happens at a very early age,
during the school years, either when some prepare for a
standard test for university admission or an entrance
examination, or just because of a like for certain kind
of logical puzzles and mathematical games that usually
accompany the childhood and adolescence of many future
scientists. One way or another, few people who will
become professional scientists usually have to wait until
college to learn how to manipulate logical quantifiers
correctly, or to complete a sillogism in the right way.
For those who might still have to go through that stage
at the time when they begin college education, there are
usually those sorts of remedial courses with names like
"Introduction to proofs" that are supposed to help
college students overcome the gaps between knowing
how to do some calculations and understanding the
basic logical thinking that is needed to correctly
organize the structure of a mathematical proof. Because
these are things that are learned at such an early
stage in the process of scientific education, it is very
hard to imagine a way to teach them to someone who is
already at the level of mid graduate school and who,
because of the disruption of normal functioning of
society in a war ravaged country, has not had the proper
training at the proper time. My friend's case is not
atypical: in fact, he even ranked among the best students
in his home country. The tragedy that this situation
reveals is that the failure of this early training
of students in the logical thinking needed to do
mathematics and science might as well have doomed the future
of science in Iraq for generations to come. Namely, if
the graduate students of today have not been taught at
the time when they were in high school or college how
to manipulate the logic of mathematical thinking, they
will never become fully capable scientists tomorrow,
no matter how much dedication and hard work they put
in the effort. If they will not be capable scientists
tomorrow, there will in turn be nobody able to teach
those very same skills of basic logical thinking to the
next generation of students. Of course, the quality
of highly cohesive and intricate logical structure
behind mathematical thinking requires the mind to be
able to concentrate fully on its task. A mathematical
statement is rigid and usually any minimal modification
of wording, a change of quantifiers, a reverse implication,
the replacement of one concept by a slightly more or
slightly less general one, will simply turn a true
and interesting statement into garbled nonsense. The
required kind of concentration is perhaps just something
that cannot be acquired when all one's mind is occupied
by urgent thoughts of survival, by trying to gauge how to
commute to work avoiding being blown up by a roadside bomb.
People who are left with post traumatic effects hardly
can find the peace of mind to ponder what exactly are
the correct hypotheses for that lemma. And yet, either
science will die out completely, signing in this way the
final demise of civilization in those parts of the world
that have been ravaged for years by senseless wars, or
there has to be a way to overcome this very fundamental
problem.

Perhaps more than all the tragic images of
destruction in Iraq that the media reverse
on us daily, the much more quiet and
private events I witnessed these days have
gotten me to fully understand the extent of the
devatation produced by the Iraqi war. My friend may
one day go back to Iraq as one of the people with
some of the highest scientific qualifications in the
country, since after all he does now have a PhD in a field
of basic science from a major European institution,
but I am now really afraid that that will only, all
the more, reveal the gaping hope in his background,
as large as those craters of bombs we are so used to
seeing portrayed by the media, a deep crater in the
middle of the road that supposedly leads to independent
scientific research and that nobody will be able to fill.

There was a time, centuries ago, when Baghdad was
the scientific capital of the world. Today is has
all but disappeared from the map of scientific
existence. A couple of years ago, a wave of
violence in Baghdad singled out people with
scientific and technical expertise, especially
those affiliated to universities, as primary
targets of violence.
Faculty members where gunned down on the way in
and out of their departments, students where blown
up by suicide bombers while coming out of classes.
Anybody with scientific training either fled the
country or died. The violence might have calmed
down by now, but the effects of the devastation
remain and will last for generations, because of
the devastation it caused on the young generation,
deprived of that crucial time and opportunity
to go through the early process of learning how
one does science.

Is there a way out now? I don't know. Just a
year ago I would have been a lot more optimistic.
I am one of those who read once too many times
Abdus Salam's "Ideals and Realities" and still
cultivated the dream that, freed from the chains
of colonialism, the many cultures of the world
could finally flourish in their own scientific
development and maybe one day Baghdad would again
be a capital center for advanced science as it
once was in history. It might have worked for the
countries like India and China: they did and do,
and all the more will in the near future, develop
their own path to scientific prominence and
excellence in research. Other countries, including
those who experienced the new wave of American
colonialism, sank into scientific oblivion.
Will there ever be again scientific splendor in
Baghdad? Today I am afraid the answer is likely no.
I have identified today the source of the defect
that undermines the Abdus Salam dream: one cannot
build science from the top down! The latest stage
of scientific training is of course crucial to
get people on to the right track of research, but
it's not a hanging garden: it needs roots that
lie far below. Without those roots the hanging
flower will die out as quickly as it tried to bloom.

At the same time while I have been seriously reflecting
upon the failure of my attempts to build over the ruins,
I am being forced into a more general painful reflection
on the course of my own work. Once again, trying to
reach out to those I hoped I could be gaining comfort
from had been increasingly like trying to be heard across
a wall.

Hey you, out there beyond the wall,
Breaking bottles in the hall,
Can you help me?

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the uncertain steps
of science in disadvantaged backgrounds lies the big machine
of big science: the system of harsh selection and government
fundings that guide the research activities in the US. Moving
between these two extremes, one sees even more strikingly
the width of the gap. In a climate of extreme competition as
the scientific community is where it moves at the edge of
things, there is no room for survival for anyone but the fittest.
It is harsh natural selection in its raw and unmitigated form and
people seem to be willing to bend the boundaries of the
acceptable professional behavior to dig their trenches. My most
recent experience with this environment resulted in two scientific
proposals, submitted to the standard funding agencies, both being
plundered for quick-and-dirty papers, possibly by people who where
supposedly bound, as reviewers, to treat the content as confidential.
Competition in the best spirit of capitalism, I would say. It does
serve some purpose: be it topological effects on the polarization
of the background radiation or arithmetic of Feynman integrals, it
will surely have the effect of accelerating my response time to
salvage my research plans. So, do we need to add basic lessons
in self-defense to the training of scientists? What are the qualities
that are being selected for fitness by this process? What will be the
resulting evolutionary effect on the scientific community.

If one is prone to deep reflections and great
uncertainties about one's own choices of research
directions, as I certainly am and at this particular
time more than ever, neither the awareness of the
extremely limited boundaries within which our
scientific community is confined (the habitable
zone for scientific thought, so to speak) nor the
repeated exposure to internal friction, professional
jealousies, and fights for access to limited funding
resources, can possibly help in generating a positive
reinforcement. Maybe somewhere, out there beyond
the wall, there lies still some hope of reverting this
course, but is there anybody out there?

Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone?
Open your heart, I'm coming home.

Hey you, dont tell me there's no hope at all:
together we stand, divided we fall.

Klaatu barada nikto

2008-12-14T16:49:00.000-08:00

Remember "the day the Earth stood still"? Yes, the 1951 black and white science fiction movie, a somewhat poetic call to disarmament at a time when the Cold War was in full swing and worries about an impending nuclear holocaust that would obliterate mankind were widespread. It was the time when the US were in the depths of the McCarthyist anti-Communist witch-hunt and the Soviet Union struggled with the final throws of the late Stalinism regime. On both sides fear and suspicion reigned, both prepared for as much an ideological and cultural war as for a real military and nuclear confrontation, both obsessed with eliminating imaginary internal enemies and pernicious external influences.

Well, as if often happens "the day the Earth stood still" just got a Hollywood remake, with up-to-date special effects and more palatable character roles for the world of today. So far so good, save for the fact that the original anti-militaristic and pacifist message of the 1951 movie got transformed into generic watered down environmentalism. Nothing wrong with the environmentalist stance, especially after the past eight years of politically driven denial of scientific evidence and the disastrous consequence such decisions had on the climate conditions. However, do we really want to archive the lesson of the Cold War as over and done with? Not quite. If anything, the instability is much greater now than in Cold War times and the threat of nuclear war is far from being over. Something better could have been made of this remake, if a remake was at all called for.

It is not my intention to comment about the movie though, but about the curious fact that 20th Century Fox arranged a free preview a day ahead of the official release of the movie for the whole Caltech community, as well as a debate on campus a few days earlier. How comes? Well, publicity of course, but perhaps one can ponder the fact that science and scientists play such a fundamental role in "the day the Earth stood still". It is to scientists that the alien Klaatu wishes to deliver his final message in the original version of the movie and in both the old and the new one, it is the crucial conversation with the Nobel laureate physicists that convinces him that human beings are worthy of survival.

Hidden beneath the naive appearance of the movie's core message lies some more serious consideration on the relation between science and society, and science and the politics of the Cold War.

The balance of science and politics around 1951 was a complicated and intricate tangle of interdependence, on both sides of the then recently established Iron Curtain. I have just recently been reading the remarkable new book by Ethan Pollock, "Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars", based on a wealth of newly available material from the Russian archives. The book details the fascinating history, in the late forties and early fifties, of the scientific community in the Soviet Union and the "science debates" that came to shape the complicated interdependence of scientific research, ideology, and the perceived needs of Cold War propaganda. The book follows closely six different famous cases, each centered around a different topic of scholarly debate: philosophy, biology, physics, linguistics, physiology, and economics. In all such cases the book details Stalin's direct or indirect interventions, personally editing papers of biologists and physiologists to be presented at important meetings that would set the course of research, deciding the fate of theoretical physics conferences, personally contributing scholarly essays on linguistics and economics. The biology debate ended up in the infamous Lysenko affair and the rejection of modern genetic theory in favor of discredited theories vaguely based on Lamarckism, but more closely connected to a misreading of the meaning of experiments on hybridization conducted earlier in the century by the Russian botanist Michurin, whom Lysenko praised as the guiding figure to be followed in opposition to the authority of Western geneticists. As is well known, the victory of Lysenko's school in the biology debate of the late '40s set back the clock of biology research in the Soviet Union for a long time afterwards. Surprisingly, the linguistics debate took an apparently very different course, rejecting the Marrist school and averting in that way a debacle for the field that would have been comparable to Lysenko's rejection of well established scientific paradigms. While Stalin approved, at first privately and then openly, of Lysenko's approach to biology, he personally intervened to avoid the same fate for linguistics. This is a first apparent mystery that is analyzed and convincingly resolved in the Pollock's monograph. Similar as the two situations may appear, there are crucial differences that played a major role in determining the two very different outcomes. In the case of linguistics, key specialists in the field had direct access to Stalin through personal connections in the Party elite, while no serious biologist appears to have had that kind of access to point out the serious scientific mistakes of the Lysenko approach. Also Lysenko promised to deliver in a few years what genetics of the time could not yet do, something like "genetically modified crops" that would end the very real risk of famine in the postwar Soviet Union. That he had not a single shred of scientific evidence to base this promise on is something that only the real experts understood and they did not find the way to convince the political power of this fact. Finally, under Stalin the Soviet Union had shifted away from Communist internationalism and more and more into a sort of nationalistic ideology loosely dressed in Socialist clothes: Lysenko's appeal to Michurin as proclaimed national hero of biology fitted well with this ideological setting, while the Marrist internationalism did not make it an equally convincing model for linguistics. That both were equally wrong scientifically did not seem to be the decisive factor in determining the outcome of these debates. The case of physics was remarkable in its absence: while philosophical discussions on the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity and their compatibility or incompatibility with dialectic materialism were abundant at the time, the fact that modern physics was crucial to the development of nuclear weapons and the Soviet nuclear program had just then developed its first successful atomic tests, any further discussion was shelved by Stalin as irrelevant. The debate on physiology ended up in a quagmire of contrasting interpretations of the Pavlov heritage, while the field of economics was stalled for several years by the impossible request of producing the ultimate reference textbook on Socialist economy, a subject on which there was no real consensus and very little observable data, except for the history of the Soviet Union and of the early days of Communist China, and the nascent Socialist states of Easter Europe, full of contrasting experiences and different realities. What makes the whole history of these scientific debates extremely interesting is the overall crucial and central role that science was supposed to play in the heart of the Communist state, which was at once the blessing and the curse of Soviet science, at once honored as of highest importance to the nation, and at the same time unable to escape the excessive attention paid to its inner developments by the political government and its consequent heavy handed interference.

It is one of the references I've read that helps the most in illustrating the inner workings of the early stages of the Cold War and the mutual influence of science on the political scene (the atomic project) and of the political demands upon the development of science.

The virus of language

2008-12-11T21:13:00.000-08:00

There's this great book out there that I encourage everyone to read: Manin's "Mathematics as metaphor". OK, if you can read the Russian version go for it! It contains a lot more then the English version published by the AMS. In fact to be precise, the AMS version in turn has a few things that are not in the Russian version, but you'll miss some of the great stuff like the piece on the Strugatsky brothers and Visotsky, the poems, and all the parts involving cultural life in the Moscow 1960s ... it's a real pity that's not available in the English text. I'll probably return some other time to comment on the various parts of this book, but right now I want to point especially to the parts that have to do with linguistics and psycholinguistics. These, as I understand, originated from a rich interaction between mathematicians, linguists and philologists that happened in academic circles in Moscow and more specifically a seminar on psycholinguistics organized by the author for a period of time there. This interest in linguistics manifests itself, in this selection of writings, in two different directions, one pointing towards mathematical logic (and if you haven't read the author's book on mathematical logic please do so now, oh no, better wait in fact: there's a new edition on its way... don't miss it) and another pointing towards the early developments of language, and the trickster figure of Jungian psychology. I won't say more and leave it to the enjoyment of the reader to discover more. I prefer here to let my thoughts be carried along a chain of associations that were somehow triggered by reading some of these essays and that I try to reconstruct here in some approximate form.

By far the weirdest idea about the origin of language emerged from the beat literature. The provocative concept of "language as a virus" was most famously voiced in the "Nova Trilogy" of William S. Burroughs. Perhaps his most intriguing and challenging literary production, this cycle of three "science fiction" novels (to be read in arbitrary order) is based on the idea that language is indeed a sort of viral infection imposed on the human species by a form of alien invaders from the Crab Nebula, as a way to enslave and control us. The virus of language can be fought be destroying and deconstructing language, which is what the experimental form of writing used to compose the three novels ("The Soft Machine", "Nova Express", and "The Ticket that Exploded") effectively does. The breaking up of the linguistic structure, achieved via the techniques of "cut-up" and "fold-in", that is, starting with an ordinary text with its ordinary linear narrative and linguistic structure, one cuts it up in short pieces consisting of a few words at a time and reassembles them in a random order, or else one assembles different texts via a shuffle operation, consisting of again cutting up each piece in short bits and mixing them by alternating those in different texts while keeping the ordering within each text fixed (that's what one calls a shuffle product in mathematics).

This breaking up of language is also a breaking up of the linear structure of time. This is evident in the narrative of Burroughs novels, where the same events occur simultaneously in all three novels and the chain of cause and effect is altered beyond recognition. The result provokes the readers into a deep reflection upon the relation between language and our perception of thermodynamic time and between the notion of causality, time-like curves and linguistic structures. Is language intimately tied up to time perception? Can one exist without the other? One can argue that some form of time perception clearly exists in not language producing animals, but what seems more difficult to argue about is whether there is a possibility of language and linguistic structure disjoint from temporality. At least the Burroughs experiments seem to claim it impossible.

Some might remember the Laurie Anderson's piece "Language is a Virus from Outer Space", inspired by the Burroughs trilogy. If not, it's here on You Tube:
Laurie Anderson: Language is a Virus from Outer Space

The idea of breaking up the linear structure of language
by "fracturing time", used in Burroughs' cut-up technique,
may have a parallel in the context of the psychedelic
experience of the US 1960s counterculture, where it
was argued that the liberation from the ego achieved
through the semi-mystical experiences induced by the
use of LSD or magic mushrooms happened through, among
other psychic phenomena, the breaking up of language
and of the perception of time.

The classic text of the counterculture era on
drug induced states of consciousness was "the
psychedelic experience", the highly controvertial
text inspired by a reading of the Tibetan Book
of the Dead as a guidebook for the use of mind
altering drugs and hallucinogenics, produced by
a trio of Harvard psychologists, Leary, Metzner,
and Alpert, turned gurus of the new psychedelic
generation. The unconditional enthusiasm and
almost religious fervor that emanate from this
book are in stark contrast with the much more
measured and interesting analysis of similar
experiences reported in Huxley's "Doors of
Perception". Huxley manages to present the results of
his self-experimenting with magic mushrooms not
with the preaching tone of the zealous convert,
but with the detached observations of a curious
and unprejudiced mind. He does not meddle with
the (non-psychedelic) culture of ancient Tibet,
dubiously mixing it up with Latin American cults
like Leary does, nor he pretends to have found the
way to illumination for all. However, in his description
of the mental states induced by the assumption of
hallucinogenic drugs, one also finds traces of
both the breaking down of the usual linear time
perception, and of the simultaneous breaking down
of language as the main method of analyzing and
organizing thought and experience.

Breaking down language into building blocks,
regardless of the fanciful idea of the virus from
outer space, is part of the baggage of linguistic
theory. More so in certain schools and circles
of linguistics than in others. I've been through a
few linguistics books recently where, in one form
or another, the idea of the fragmentation of
language into elementary atoms comes to play
a significant role.

"From molecule to metaphor" is the more neuroscience oriented of the lot. It works on three levels: biology, meaning studies of neurons and brain activity; simulation, based on computer programs aimed at studying models of language formation in the brain, and linguistics and psychology. The question is the emergence of the syntactic and grammatical structure of language in brain activity. A long term task, though several interesting observations are collected in this essay that make it worth paying attention to.

Given my own general cultural upbringing, except for an in depth five years study of comparative philology of the classical Indo-European languages, and especially of ancient Greek, my exposure to linguistics was mostly through the school of Noam Chomsky: parameters, transformative grammar, naturally. The idea of breaking down language in basic building blocks, responsible for correlations of certain types of grammatical structures across various groups of languages, is indeed central to that approach to linguistics, though highly contested by other schools. There is a fairly well known book that aims at popularizing the Chomskian approach and the notion of parameters in linguistics, aptly called "The atoms of language". It is pretty well written though it suffers from all the typical drawbacks of popularization, namely overemphasizing one point of view, using metaphors of dubious relevance (the whole comparison with the history of chemistry is too far fetched and mostly irrelevant to understanding the linguistic notions the book is describing). It has the nice feature of drawing plenty of examples from the large pool of native American languages, although once more some of the examples that the author draws "for effect" from exotic Australian aboriginal languages could just as easily be constructed in, say, Latin. In any case, the book is very entertaining and goes some way into presenting the main ideas of the Chomsky approach. I have to say though, that if I want to read about this particular brand of linguistics, I prefer to go directly for Chomsky's "Aspects of the theory of syntax" as I did many years ago rather than for the clever popularization of "Atoms of language", pleasant reading as the latter may be.

On a ground somewhere in between lies this other pretty interesting book, "Lingua ex Machina", another of the usual cool MIT press publications. It discusses, to some extent, the difficult evolutionary implications of Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. The point is to identify plausible evolutionary scenarios, partly grounded in the Darwinian idea of "conversion of functions" that may support glottogenesis in a Chomskian perspective. It is an intriguing book, better or at least more stimulating in my opinion than the other two I briefly reviewed here above. Especially the third possibility they discuss, the "corticocortical coherence" scenario, which would imply a threshold transition, is intriguing. In a series of recent books trying to integrate neuroscience and linguistics, this one still stands out as a particularly cleverly crafted effort.

Doctor atomic

2008-12-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent,
Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,
With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring—
All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.
(Bhagavad Gita)

A Stealth Bomber flies low over the skies of Los Angeles: a rehearsal of a staged flyby, and at the same time a reminder, in its improbable angular shape cast against unusual clouds, of how close we are to the heart of the military-industrial complex. The wings of the DoD loom large over campus and beyond the mountains lies a stretch of desert land those bombers belong to, a place of radioactive waste, nuclear silos, secret laboratories and the whole paraphernalia of dormant Cold War paranoia, flying saucers included.

It is the heritage of the Manhattan project that links the scientific elite to a continuation of this dubious alliance. Oppenheimer, with his joint appointments at Berkeley and Caltech, with his uneasy combination of poetry reading left wing radical and head of the atomic bomb project, is the most significant and almost archetypal image of the Californian scientific environment and its difficult relation to the demands of the more powerful forces behind the scenes of the American research highlights.

A recent interesting contribution to the collective and cultural reflectiion upon these themes is the new (2005) opera by John Adams "Doctor Atomic", on a libretto and choreography of Peter Sellars, the Los Angeles based theater director renown for his unusual and powerful transpositions of classic operas in modern context. The scene is set in the latest stages of the Manhattan project, shortly before the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb. All the lyrics are taken from historic documents: the discussions between Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Robert Wilson, the two polar forces pushing towards and against the final use of the atomic bomb against civilian targets, the rising tension between the scientists and the military, the uneasy alliance of Oppenheimer and general Leslie Groves. These "factual" reports of conversations between the Los Alamos main character in the run up to the first nuclear explosion are counteracted by two other elements in the opera, the character of Kitty Oppenheimer, the communist wife of the physicist who embodies and gives a channel of expression to the tragedy and horror of the atomic warfare that is being built and tested to perfection. The second counterpart is the one that adds a universal dimension to the tragedy being represented, through the use of poetry: the powerful chorus from the Bhagavad Gita's "At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous" in the middle of the second act shifts the center of the attention from the individual to the global tragedy. At other times in the opera, poetry is called in to produce the opposite effect, focalize on the human and individual aspects of the universal tragedy of the mastering of nuclear energy: this is the case with John Donne's sonnet at the end of the first act, or with the Tewa Indian song in the second act. The discussion between Oppenheimer and Teller in the second act over Bethe's calculation of the predicted power of the explosion and whether it would suffice to ignite the atmosphere is well chosen to exemplify the anguish of the inevitable uncertainties that plagued the most ambitious research project of all times. The opera ends on the scene of the trinity test explosion, superimposed with a background of voices of Hiroshima survivors in the immediate aftermath of the real explosion.

This is as far from 19th century opera as anything can be: for one thing, it deals with things that matter and it does so powerfully and uncompromisingly. No screeching sopranos lamenting lost loves or unlikely pharaohs propagating the malady of nationalism, no plump walkyries heralding the final transformation of that same nationalism into a hideous monster. Doctor Atomic may well be a convincing proof that opera did not die with Mozart, even without the need to invoke Stokhausen's Light cycle.

As for the Manhattan project, an excellent documentary movie, which goes well before or after watching Doctor Atomic, is "The day after trinity", a beautiful account of the events featuring extensive first hand recollections from many of the Los Alamos scientists. The history, the atmosphere, the tensions and doubts, are all captured and discussed at length. One does come out of watching it with a deeper sense of understanding of what brought to a completion the creation of the most ominous monster ever envisioned by the human imagination.

City of sorrow

2008-11-28T19:47:00.000-08:00

The ancient world had Rome and Byzantium. The 19th century had Paris and London, portrayed by Dickens or Balzac. The 20th century elected New York as the ultimate city-symbol, the shore of hope and dreams for the waves of migration across the Atlantic ocean, escaping from the poverty of Ireland and Southern Italy, later from the spreading menace of Nazi occupied Europe.
The 21st century has Mumbai.

A peninsula like Manhattan is an island, Mumbai is hardly ever reached by sea. The migration in search of hope and future usually enters by land. It is not the Gateway of India, but Victoria Terminus, more recently known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, that usually offers the first glimpse of the city, like the Statue of Liberty did for so many migrants getting by sea into New York. Victoria Terminus has as high a symbolic status in our time as the gateway to New York did in the past century. Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, is the new cosmopolitan city-symbol, with its low life of endless slums, appalling poverty and organized crime, and its high rises and fancy hotels, its peaks of science and technology of the new emerging world superpower, its lively cultural life merging the East and the West, its world trade center at Nariman Point.

Everyone can call Mumbai home: Hindu, Muslim, Jews and Christians; Westerners, South Asian, East Asian, African. There is a Mumbai for everyone amidst reclaimed land, chaotic avenues and back streets, gutters and splendor; art, science, and hunger. Mumbai is our future like New York represented the hopes and the envisioned future of the world a century ago.

Mumbai exists on too many layers of reality. Sometime they peacefully intersect, sometime they explode in violent contradiction. Mumbai coexists in the infinite future and the infinite past: information technology versus Ram and Allah, probes landing on the moon and sadhus practicing yoga at dusty street corners. This is our world, the emerging collective behavior of human society, never before so clearly displayed in its full broadness as in this overcrowded stretch of land surrounded by the waters. Because everything is in such close proximity with everything else in Mumbai, it is impossible not to see, not to compare, not to imagine. Parallel lives sharing the same pavements, the same suburban trains, pressed against one another and yet occupying infinitely distant universes of the mind. Everything exists in an instant of everlasting present, everything is always too real and too compelling in Mumbai.

Mumbai already had its Balzacs and its Dickens, it has been a city-symbol in novels, art, music, film, poetry. "Maximum city" was a perfect title for the forced tour across the low life of the megalopolis offered by Suketu Mehta's book, the modern Balzac of the new Paris. Magic-realist depictions of Mumbai were best rendered in Rushdie's "Midnight Children", "The Moor's last sigh", and "The ground beneath her feet". Hindustani classical music, jazz, and bollywood pop flow down the streets, as other music genres did once shape the culture Paris and New York in the not so distant past.

Symbols are targets in our world. It was demonstrated by the New York tragedy of 2001, and after New York it was inevitably Mumbai that would be mourning, hit at the very heart of its cosmopolitan essence. There is a part of humanity that generates diversity and creates a future for the entire world, and there is a part that rejects it violently as an overstimulated immune system would fight the intrusion of a foreign organism. Entrenched in an often highly mythologized vision of past and tradition as sources of safety and unquestionable certainties, this reactive and reactionary part of mankind especially rejects the places where cultures merge, where values and traditions are freely discussed and questioned, where science thrives on criticism and open mindedness. Mumbai, which is the ultimate symbol in our century of everything that projects humanity from the past into the future, could easily be singled out as a target for such extreme rejection of any future that is not identical to a stale, oppressive and stagnant past. Bombs and shootings tragically end lives leaving a trail of blood and destruction, but the fate of individual lives does not change the course of the river of history and Mumbai will keep on opening the way to humanity's future, with its dreams and nightmares alike.

A new dawn

2008-11-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

Many thought this would have been the stuff of science fiction: a landslide victory for the first truly left wing president who also happens to be the first black president. Bible belt states suddenly turning blue, Florida and Ohio regained, popular vote near 70% in the Northeast and in much of California, people out in the street partying until the late hours. "Yes, we can." The 270 mark was crossed very early during election night: people scarred by the last two bitter election experiences, by the agony of the Florida recount of 2000, by the unexpected debacle of 2004, saw it coming in a flash this time, "a tsunami on its way" as the concession speech of one of the Republican candidates to Congress phrased it. The election was already won shortly after Ohio was called, but when Florida also was called people gathered to watch the results here in Los Angeles county broke into a "We have overcome today": it was not a victory but a landslide. The dream of the sixties is the reality of today. "The dreams of our fathers are the lives of our children." It is nice, for once, to see them come true.

They say the 20th century was a "short century" that really started in 1915 and ended in 1991. Perhaps the 21st century only started tonight. We have lived the past eight years trapped in a world without a future. Now a door has opened and suddenly we have been projected into the future. A future nobody dared to predict. It could have been the stuff of science fiction and perhaps it could not: no science fiction writer could have been so daring as to envision a world where, after eight years of xenophobic propaganda, people would come out en masse and vote a half-African young man with a Muslim name to be commander in chief. It happened.

In 1989 Stanislaw Lem published his last science fiction novel (the beautiful "Peace on Earth", a poignant story about the arms race). He argued that it would be his last because history had outdone the possibilities of the imagination: in that year, just as today, no science fiction writer would have dared to imagine the world that history made. When Philip Dick made the main character of his 1966 science fiction novel "A crack in space" a man campaigning to become the first black president of the US, he located it into a remote future, far away from our life time. The 1960s were the time when people started to dream the dreams that seemed to have died by the end of the century. What today's historic day shows is that they are alive and kicking, alive and ready to build that world that they had begun to envision half a century ago.

On the events that "ended" the 20th century, in the good and the bad, much had been said. On the event that "started" the 21st century today much will be said in the coming years, but one thing it proves for sure is that society is capable of regeneration. In the name of all those people who belong to the so called "underrepresented groups", an understated term for all those people who had been traditionally suppressed, denied full participation in the decision making processes, whose contributions have been denied, stolen, destroyed because of their physical appearance, because of the bigotry of traditional society, in their name today history has moved forward into the light.

Yes, there is a future. A future where science will be no longer suppressed in the name of religious fundamentalism, where education will finally become a priority, where the most powerful man in the world will finally no longer be a white man. Welcome 21st century, we are now ready to celebrate its coming.

Farewell to verticality (Sky City and the world of tomorrow)

2008-08-30T16:32:00.001-07:00

When Fritz Lang envisioned Metropolis, he colored it with the dreams of the architects of the early 20th century avantgarde: verticality. The towers of Metropolis merge with the sky, flying machines float among them, suspended bridged over abysses of steel, cement and glass. The metaphor of the tower of Babel, which is evoked in the movie by the female agitator android who guides the oppressed masses of workers to rebellion. The image of the "city in the sky" is painted against the background of the Socialist class struggle with capitalists flying above the clouds in their cocoon of privilege and wealth and workers confined to a parallel existence in a dilapidated underground city of oppression and exploitation in which the privilege above the ground has firmly established its roots.

Visions of vertical cities and socialist aspirations to building the world of tomorrow go hand in hand in the early 20th century avant-garde, finding their best manifestation in Tatlin's monument to the Third International, a spiraling whirl of vertical aspirations, lifting humanity up towards the skies and into the future, hinting both to the ancient Babilonian towers challenging the tyranny of god on mankind, and at the same time fully grounded in the language of cement and steel that fueled the modernist dream of the 20th century.

The model of vertical growth shaped the cities we came to think as emblematic of 20th century history: New York, Chicago; as well as the utopian cities of modernism: Brazilia, Chandigarh, with their skylines drawn by the elite of modernist architecture: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier. In recent years, verticality reached its peak in the East Asian skyscraper race: Tokyo, Shanghai, Tai Pei, Hong Kong, the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur. All rivaling for increasing economic influence, increasingly fast development, and a concomitant and symbolic invasion of the skies by the cityscapes. The East Asian cities of today much resemble the early visions of fantastic future cities, no longer growing into the sky in the name of humanity's ascent to an ideal new world of socialism and peace, but in the name of capitalism, corporation, and fierce competition, even in so called "Communist" China.

A later but no less impressive comer into this race for the skies is the Gulf state of Dubai, with its impressive highrise architecture and visionary dreams of ever more astonishing vertical structures. Verticality seems to have indeed been the successful and dominant form of city growth in most parts of the world. Needless to say, the tragedy of verticality will remain forever imprinted in the collective consciousness of the modern mind, after the collapse of the Manhattan Twin Towers in the terrorist attack of 2001.

Tragedy did not halt the dreams of more vertical cities, more impressive and technically challenging as scientific and technological progress advances. Perhaps the most spectacular of all verticality dreams currently within reach of existing technology is "Sky City", a Japanese building/city project of Takenaka Corporation, which would, if constructed, host 36000 people in a single building, one kilometer tall and half a kilometer wide at the base. Is Sky City an accurate image of the world of tomorrow?

It may well be, but on the other hand, just as the small mammals growing under the shade of the dominant dinosaurs, another model of city growth took hold of the other shore of the Pacific Ocean: the sprawl. The sprawl is as horizontal as the skyscraper is vertical: it does not aim at the skies, it covers the earth in a thin layer of small houses and low lying constructions, it spreads without much planning and much visible structure. When the famous movie "Blade Runner" portrayed a vertical Los Angeles by 2048, looking more like the Shanghai sky line, it badly missed by some centuries, if ever. Will verticality eventually replace the sprawl? The sprawl seems by definition impossible to plan, to direct and remodel. Can verticality adapt to such an environment? The high rises of downtown LA seems so isolated, surrounded by tens of miles of low growth urban sprawl in all directions.

The future of cityscapes and architecture is in large part a mirror of the future of the societies that generate them. Fast growing East Asia versus declining American superpower? Perhaps, or perhaps simply different forms of societies, of mobility within national and migratory international boundaries, come to shape the look of cities on the two different sides of the largest ocean. I am personally greatly fond of verticality: maybe exactly because I associate it with those early 20th century dreams of radiant socialist future for all mankind. Maybe just because I enjoyed it greatly to live on top of a highrise builing when I could, sitting out on the balcony in the night and hearing the music of the city that never sleeps, its lights reflected in the river beneath. But this was on the other side of the continent, back in old Boston on the East Coast where verticality has a greater role in the visions of cities then it has around here. I reluctantly abandoned the idea of living high up into the sky, for lack of anything standing taller than three or four floors around here. I got my loft anyway, and a pleasant and nicely industrial looking one at that, but I keep looking out for signs that maybe verticality will indeed one day take hold in the sprawl and we'll the the "Blade Runner" type LA, or perhaps another Sky City, becoming a reality.

Wish you were here

2008-05-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

So you think you can tell
heaven from hell,
blue skies from pain.
(Pink Floyd - Wish you were here)

Going home, am I not? Or perhaps just wandering further, towards the ends of the Earth, following that urge to nomadism that is deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious of the human species.
Yet even the Wanderlust needs a point of return, an origin to the coordinate charts of our wandering. I am trying to establish my fixed point in the most unstable ground on the Earth crust: moving continents, shifting grounds, mountains, desert, ocean - a focal point of archetypal symbolism.

There are no answers for a returning Ulysses, only questions. The stories of nostos of the Iliadic heroes are never simple and often tragic. From the madness of Ajax to the domestic banality of the former Argonaut and Troy War hero Nestor, after his own nostos back to Pylos. Odysseus wants and does not want to return, and in Dante's rendition of his last voyage beyond the pillars of Hercules, he frees himself finally of any desire of return. De Chirico captured well the futility of all nostoi when he painted his claustrophobic "Return of Ulysses", who navigates endlessly around in an enclosed apartment room.

A different sort of mythological voyage is the fall of Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost. With great clarity and vision Lucifer accepts the destiny of his fall:

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
(Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, 251-263)

It is, in this case, not a return but a one way ticket to a new world, where the one who was cast out reinvents himself to a new life. In Milton's rendition Lucifer is the hero of the mythical story of the fall from Paradise. He is the one who stands up against the "tyranny of heaven" and its unchallenged consensus, the inquisitive mind that rises in arms against the divine oppression. So I like to think of Milton's Lucifer as looking more like William Blake's Newton than as one of the many mystical demons he painted around the Paradise Lost themes. Yet can we tell heaven from hell? It seems all a complicated pattern of multiple reflections in a kaleidoscope of mirror fragments: a jigsaw puzzle of pros and cons that casts one choice against another, picking one among a hoard of different possible futures. What matters most in the end is what remains with us, even at a physical distance, what gives continuity to life, a mind unchanged by time and place. Is there permanence through change? The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven, which perhaps means that all in all we just cannot escape from that deeply rooted self, no matter how much change the circumstances of life provide. Permanence and change formed one of the fundamental dichotomies of thought, since the time of the Presocratic philosophers of ancient Greece, but when is either heaven or hell, I don't think we really can tell.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
(Pink Floyd - Wish you were here)

When Stanislaw Lem wrote his novel "Return from the stars" he managed something that no other science fiction writer was quite able to achieve: presenting a truly bewildering and incomprehensible future. The main character is a cosmonaut who returns to the Earth after an interstellar trip. Due to relativistic time dilation, he lands almost two hundred years into the future of his own internal clock. In a civilization of rapid technological development, as we have witnessed increasingly in our time, this means that most of what he sees and experiences upon his return is utterly alien and incomprehensible. Lost in a city where pathways, buildings, and people present themselves in completely unexpected ways, amidst artifacts of unknown purpose, and incapable of understanding the modes of interaction between people, he is the ultimate alien on a strange and foreign world. Rather than taking the point of view of the omniscient narrator, Lem plunges deeply into the personal point of view of the main character and relays the world solely through his astonished and incomprehending eyes, leaving the reader as much as the character fumbling in the dark and in vane search for meaning. He does not give away easy solutions: the world of the future, in a phase of rapidly advancing technology, is simply beyond the comprehension of the people of the past, whether fictional characters or real flesh and blood readers.

This is the ultimate experience of the "return": finding a world one ought to know transformed into something new and incomprehensible. Every return is partly like this, because the changes that happen within us and in the world we leave behind do not proceed in tune with each other, and with time a gap forms, a divide that grows larger the more we wait or the more rapidly events evolve, between what we are and what we used to be. I had my own experience of displacement when I first returned to spend long periods of time in Europe after several years of nearly total absence. It was less than ten years and not the two centuries of Lem's novel, but they happened at a time when the great currents of history run through rough and troubled waters and change is swift and irreversible. I never fully adapted, never managed to fit back in, like Lem's returning cosmonaut destined to remain suspended between an irretrievable past and an incomprehensible future.

Every transit/relocation/voyage/displacement/migration, whichever way one wishes to call it, is made of three movements: going, staying, returning. In the "states of mind" series, Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni portrayed, in a famous pair of large canvases, the contrasting moods of "those who go" and "those who stay behind". He never attempted to portray those who return, perhaps because of the interspersed lapse of time the return requires breaks the simultaneity of the moods, and perhaps because returning is a much more complex affair than either staying or going. I imagine those who return as an image that exists simultaneously on many different planes, at impossible angles to one another. A figure that no longer resembles itself and yet somehow still does: it bears confused traces of many pasts, it is whole and fragmentary, natural and yet not fitting in the background. The capacity to navigate our surroundings, to tell what is what (can you tell a green field...) depends on belonging, on long acquired familiarity with places, words, people's habits. Displacement is the lack of such adaptation to the immediate surroundings: return is a state of permanent displacement.

Did they get you trade
your heroes for ghosts?
(Pink Floyd - Wish you were here)

On the face of it, the concept of "return" is a logical impossibility. There is no such thing as circular time, nor Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same, and we are bound to be always on foreign territory, unless we choose to live a life of eternal immobility. Thus, any choice of return is illusory, it is bound to crash against the fundamentally inextricable conflict between a nomadic existence and the civilization of the settlers. Society as we experience it through the institutions of national states, family structures, established roles of behavior, is dictated by the needs and the experience of the settlers, of those who live their life mostly in one place, where they establish their roots, their history and credibility, where society can classify them into a convenient labeling system that gives them or denies them access to benefits and privileges. Society does not know what to do with nomads: they don't fit in their grid of values and classifications. From the point of view of the settlers, we, the wanderers, simply do not exist. We are an inconvenient nuisance that is better ignored if not actively suppressed. Yet how many migrants, displaced multitudes, invisible crowds of unregistered individuals exist in the world of today. Our world is, and will more and more be, the world of migration and nomadism, no matter how much the civilization of the settlers will try to hide and suppress this fundamental truth. An existence that is a ghost existence perhaps, but no less real than the one that is sanctioned and approved by society. This is the modern "specter haunting Europe" and the world at large, the ghost of an existence that dares to be different from the approved canon.

I have a vision of the Songlines
stretching across the continents and ages;
that whenever men have trodden
they have left a trail song
(of which we may, now and then, catch an echo);
and that these trails must reach back, in time and space,
to an isolated pocket in the African savanna,
when the First Man opening his mouth
in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him,
shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, 'I am'.
(Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines)

Did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage?
(Pink Floyd - Wish you were here)

So am I trying to trade the nomadic existence I conducted for the past ten years or so for the one of a settler? It is highly questionable whether the society of settlers will consider me desirable. I slipped for so long in the cracks of the walls of the nation states fortress that I managed to move about freely in their world leaving little trace behind, but in the logic of the settlers it is these tangible traces of interaction with the established society that are sought as proof of reliability. Fat chance.

Settlement and nomadism are both valuable expressions of deep needs of the human nature. It is their contrast and complex interaction that brought about the dawn of the great civilizations. It is both "those who go" and "those who stay" that build the advancement of the human species and there should be more tolerance and acceptance in the society at large for both modes of existence.

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
swimming in a fish bowl,
year after year.
Running over the same old ground,
what have we found?
The same old fears
(Pink Floyd - Wish you were here)

Pink Floyd
Wish you were here: lyrics etc.
Pink Floyd - Wish you were here (Wikipedia)
Milton's Paradise Lost
William Blake archive
Giorgio de Chirico
Umberto Boccioni
Australian Aboriginal Artists
Sandy Skolund

May Day Mayday

2008-05-01T11:26:00.001-07:00

Même si le mois de mai
Ne vous a guère touché
Même s’il n’y a pas eu
De manif dans votre rue
Même si votre voiture
N’a pas été incendiée
Même si vous vous en foutez
Chacun de vous est concerné

Même si vous avez feint
De croire qu’il ne se passait rien
Quand dans le pays entier
Les usines s’arrêtaient
Même si vous n’avez rien fait
Pour aider ceux qui luttaient
Même si vous vous en foutez
Chacun de vous est concerné

Même si vous avez fermé
Votre porte à notre nez
Une nuit que nous avions
Les CRS aux talons
Si vous nous avez laissé
Matraqués sur le palier
Même si vous vous en foutez
Chacun de vous est concerné

Même si dans votre ville
Tout est bien resté tranquille
Sans pavés sans barricades
Sans blessés et sans grenades
Même si vous avez gobé
Ce que disait la télé
Même si vous vous en foutez
Chacun de vous est concerné

Même si vous croyez maintenant
Que tout est bien comme avant
Parce que vous avez voté
L’ordre et la sécurité
Même si vous ne voulez pas
Que bientôt on remette ça
Même si vous vous en foutez
Chacun de vous est concerné

The struggle carries on

2008-04-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

Никто не даст нам избавленья:
Ни бог, ни царь и ни герой.
Добьёмся мы освобожденья
Своею собственной рукой.

Well, I can't deny it, I still get stirred and moved when I listen to this song, what can I do about it? It's one of those reflex reactions that become hard wired in our brains at a very early age. The Internationale, the hymn that Anarchists, Socialists, and Communists shared since the late 19th century was translated and adapted to most languages of the world. The Russian translation is, naturally, among the most famous. It is fairly close to the original French text, more so than the versions in several other languages at least, but there are some remarkable differences with respect to the original.

There are a few lines in particular, in the Russian version of the song, that I am especially fond of. They are the ones I reported here above, the beginning of the second stanza. In the original French text the same passage reads "Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes/ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun./Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes/Décrétons le salut commun."

First notice how the Russian text, after a similar first line, replaces the triad "God, king, tribune" with the very telling "God, king, nor hero". Was it an early warning against the pitfalls of "hero worship" that undermined Soviet communism from within? No "little-fathers-of-the-nation", it says, no big brothers, no heroes to delegate one's life to. The "no god, no king" is the easy part, one can see where that comes from: it is the good old anarchist "no gods, no masters", but where does the "no heroes" come from? That's the part that touches a chord: the temptation to live a surrogate life is an extremely dangerous one. How easy it would be to just delegate responsibility to someone else, a hero, a savior. Deliver us from evil, we just wait till you're done with the job. The remaining two lines are also different from the French text, and they reiterate the same concept: "with our own hands" we need to achieve our liberation.

It is no wonder that Stalin had the Internationale dropped as national anthem of the Soviet Union, lest it gave people ideas.

And it does, in fact. Humans are by nature social animals, they group together, form large aggregates we like to call civilization, create large structures of knowledge that transcend individual minds. With gregariousness, however, comes the monkey tribe instinct, the submission to leaders, the social structure of dominance and submission. These are animal traits which had survival value in the long evolutionary process that brought about the existence of the homo sapiens primates, but they could easily be dispensed of in the world of today. Or at least this was the dream: the "final struggle" that will eliminate oppression and create a society of equals. As we all know, something went wrong with that plan.

There is a voice in the human mind that cries out "deliver us from evil": it is the voice of the child in us, who expects the parents or adult guardians to intervene as a "deus ex machina", with knowledge of the world the child does not yet possess, to resolve the trouble, whatever that happens to be. Grownups are not immune to the lure of this inner voice. They project it onto imaginary higher beings, they invest state and police with the role of establishing and maintaining order, they demand rules to follow and laws to obey.

Yet, there is more: often what we really want to be saved from is ourselves. Hero worship is born of a desire to be delivered of oneself, to exchange the challenging task of living one's life, with all the uncertainty and the anguish that this involves, for a vicarious existence through someone else's life. Heroes do all the living for us, instead of us. "Neither god, nor king, nor hero!" It is the pressure to conform that makes cowards of us all, the pressure to move to the spectator seat and leave the fighting to someone else: cheering is easier than sweating. Comfortably sitting into the solid armor of a preestablished identity, what an easy cure against anxiety and the uncertainties of a real life! People who make this choice, who slip into the gregarious existence, do not usually look with sympathy at those who try to invent their own lives and keep on with the idea of giving it meaning without recurring to the strategy of blind submission.

Science is a great antidote to the notion of authority, and yet, how even there hero worship, passive acceptance of other people's choices, and gregariousness have found their way! Science, if we free it from the interference of social structures, can provide us with a unique way to achieve the kind of collective liberation advocated by the socialists ideals. What projects us into the future is our capacity to struggle, to rebel against accepted truths, to question assumptions, prejudices, and inherited worldviews. There is no future workers paradise to build, only the continuing struggle to push further the edge of the unknown, the struggle that is life itself, when lived in full.

We must achieve our own liberation, with our very own hands, even, or especially, when it comes to delivering us from the evil that is ourselves, from the dark recesses of our own mind, from its fears and lurking monsters.

I will reveal you a secret: you might have heard it sung triumphantly in Red Square parades, but the Internationale is actually a very sad song. I like to think of it sung in slow motion, a solo saxophone waiving slowly the harmony in the background. It is a song about life as endless struggle, the "final struggle" perhaps, but not one that we are going to win any time soon. The "wretched of the earth" are not portrayed in the act of conquering paradise, but are engaged in the struggle for the right to live a life with dignity, a life that is real and meaningful and not relegated to the role of passive spectator. A life that has no easy answers, no simple rules to follow, no higher examples to imitate acritically. My interpretation of the Internationale is perhaps more in the anarchist than in the communist tradition, but so be it. Even the final image, the radiant sun that will still be shining with its bright light, makes me think more of the brightness of desolation, the immutability of cosmic events that paints a sad celestial canvas as a background to human struggle.

Для нас всё так же солнце станет
Сиять огнём своих лучей.

The Soviet science fiction images in this post are from this collection

A collection of lyrics of the "Internationale" in 82 languages (Klingon included)

The Soviet Internationale on You Tube

Anarchy islands

2008-04-12T22:44:00.001-07:00

The theme of the utopian island is a very pervasive one in the history of Western literature. Thomas More's Utopia naturally set the stage, not to mention the more ancient Platonic utopia. The island itself is a powerful archetype suggesting a separate universe where evolution takes on a different course, in biology as must as in the structure of society. Not all literary experiments in the creation of utopian societies have been particularly successful, like not all mutations in isolated island populations are evolutionary winners. Much utopian literature created dystopic visions of tyranny. In the twentieth century especially, it may appear at first that the notion itself of utopia has all but sunk into dystopic despair reflecting what history made of the major utopian visions generated in the previous century by socialism and marxism. Dystopic literature abunds, from Animal Farm to Brave New World to, of course, 1984, but what about genuine utopia? A brand that better survived the harsh reality of twentieth century history is the anarchist utopia. A transformation of society that builds itself from the bottom up rather than in the top down manner soviet style socialism exposed us to. A utopia where laws and bureaucracy are useless, a reality of collectives and grassroot structures holding the society together.

After writing a major dystopian vision like "Brave New World", in his last major work Aldous Huxley tried his hand at a genuine utopian vision, in the beautiful novel "Island". The setting is a small island kingdom in an unspecified location in South-East Asia, somewhere between Sri Lanka and Sumatra. The kingdom, one soon figures, is very little of a kingdom indeed and the social structure is much more similar to the idea of collectives and cooperatives of the anarcho-socialist tradition. The happy society of the island of Pala has succeeded in eliminating the damages that religion and family inflict onto the mind of Western people without falling into the traps of soviet style (or Maoist style) communism. Family has been replaced with a loose association where children can adopt a number of different parents, thus freeing themselves from the trap of family neuroses and parental abuse, while still enjoying the benefits of adult role models. The inhabitants of Pala practice a mixture of Tantric Buddhism and Shivaism, with meditation both naturally and artificially induced, through the use of a local brand of "magic mushrooms", mixed a Tantric practice of love and sex that brings them to freely and happily practice free love in both the hetero and homo version. So far, clear echoes of a 1960s Utopia complete with drug enhanced paradise. However, at the same time their culture include a pervasive cultivation of Western science and its analytic method, with a strong emphasis on the role of education and learning. The two main components of the Palanese culture, the philosophical Buddhist tradition and the imported, but not imposed, advanced scientific culture, make this utopian experiment quite different from any other literary attempt in the same genre. The two components of the Palanese culture described so beautifully by Huxley correspond, naturally, two the two main clashing components of left-wing culture: the worship of science that was always a foundational stone for anarcho-socialist and communist came face to face in the 1960s with the new "soft" components of environmentalism, eastern philosophy and Buddhist religiosity, free love, drug enhanced perceptions that came to characterize much of the youth movement of the time. It is difficult to maintain a comstructive dialog between these two components within the same political tradition. Often left-wing militants sport and anti-scientific attitude in the name of environmentalism and an ill digested bland of easter mysticism, without realizing that science had always been the main historic focus of the Left. On the other hand, old time communists often look with suspicion at the "new age" of post 1960s left-wingers, without realizing that the love-not-war Buddhist is as much part of the soul of the Left as the science loving socialist hero. The message that Huxley brings home in his Utopia is that these two very different parts of the same culture can merge, blend, coexist, without losing their distinct identities, and fortify one another into a well harmonized successful world. It is a very visionary book in that respect, not last because it was written as early as 1962, when some of these trends in cultural development were just at the beginning. Island is the most pleasant and enviable utopia to be found in literature.

A more recent take on a very similar theme is Greg Egan's novel "Distress". On a utopian island of Anarchia, which as the name suggests has realized the best form of government ever to be envisioned by the human mind, a congress of high energy physicists is awaiting the breakthrough that will reveal the equation of the "theory of everything". Meanwhile, a strange epidemic of an unknown and deadly neurological condition named "Distress" swipes through the world population. The two events are subtly (or not so subtly) connected and while the island of Anarchia comes under a military attack, which seems to be the common destiny of all utopian paradises, the final steps are taken to unleash the usual cosmic catastrophe that is typical of the author's visionary writing style. Despite the fact that Egan's writing skills are not Huxley's, the novel has quite a few echoes of Island and takes a fresh look at the dream of the anarchist utopia.

Anarchist Archives

Greg Egan

The relay of the ghosts

2008-04-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

The relay of the Olympic torch is passed off by the media as a symbol of peace and fraternity among peoples, but in fact history reveals that it was introduced as a piece of Nazi propaganda on the occasion of the Berlin Olympiads of 1936, conceived by Nazi fanatic Carl Diem and carefully staged by the Goebbels propaganda machine.

The Olympic flame dances with many ghosts and so does Germany. Is the new Germany really living its new ideal of peace and fraternity of nations? I have myself benefited largely in recent years from the generosity of the German scientific elite, the prestigious net of eighty something research institutes that form their Max-Planck-Society, one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in Europe.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

Yes, I cannot deny that, to this day, I feel uncomfortable with Germany and Germans. If I have to explain why, I might best quote a recent episode that says it all about it. According to the news (see the Washington Post article linked below) at least seven famous American scientists working for the German Max Planck Society face criminal charges in Germany for using the courtesy title "Dr", despite the fact of having received their PhD's in little known American universities such as Caltech instead of world renown German institutions such as the Otto von Guericke Universitaet of Magdeburg. April fool? Not really: these people risk up to a year in jail for the "offence".

In all the time I spent in Germany, I never failed to be astonished by the amount of significance that people there attribute to the silly strings of letters people attach or do not attach before their name. When I once went for a urine test and saw "Prof.Dr..." written on the label of my urine sample I couldn't help thinking that this must be the end of civilization as we know it. Well, I am allergic to this crap, I admit it readily. When I hear people using "titles" I feel like spitting in their face, but even without my high sensitivity, can one really conceive of sending respected scientists to jail on such charges?

"...an anonymous tipster filed a complaint with federal prosecutors against seven Americans at the prestigious Max Planck Society..."

That tipster is the tip of a huge eisberg which involves xenophobia, blind acceptance of absurd rules, even the perverse enjoyment of absurd rules, and the sense that it is admissible to hurt other human beings in the name of a written regulation, no matter if it was a stupid rule created under an atrocious totalitarian regime (the law invoked in this episode is a Nazi law passed in the 1930s). It also involves a culture where relations between people are based on a hierarchy of power, and the sense that something like "courtesy titles" have nothing courteous about them but exists simply to be used as a weapon to belittle and humiliate others.

Germany has beautiful international scientific institutions. Having worked for one of them myself, I know that they are capable of offering to their scientific members enviable working conditions that are hardly matched by even the most prestigious North American academic institutions.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

The flip side of the coin is this undercurrent of aggressive bureaucratization of the society, the humiliations inflicted upon the students and young people (especially the foreign ones) who do not yet have any "titles" to defend themselves with.

Is it acceptable to enjoy the privilege offered by these institutions while having to witness the general malady of the society that hosts them? When does one become an accomplice? The moment when one starts to write "Prof.Dr." on one's business card or webpage or email signature? Accepting to play by the rules of the game is sharing the responsibility. The episode I referred to above may seem trivial: surely we all believe that the courts will drop charges against those seven foreign scientists who
accepted to call themselves "Dr." because that seemed to be what was required of them in that environment, only to find out that it was a dangerous trap. The problem is the "slippery slope" effect: how far is accepting that people are treated differently according to the letter-code before their name from the code of colored symbols - triangles and David stars - attached to people's clothes, or tatooed numbers on people's arms?

The Olympic torch's shadowy past (BBC news)

Max Planck Gesellschaft

Non-European PhD's in Germany (Washington Post)

Enceladus and the fountains of paradise

2008-03-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

It's been just a few days since the news of the death of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. It got me thinking of the first time I saw the movie "2001: a space odyssey" with my mother, when I was in my early teens and stayed in the movie theater for four consecutive shows. I saw the movie many times again over time, after those consecutive four, and it was the first movie I owned on DVD.

"The fountains of paradise" is often regarded as Clarke's best novel. Its intricate themes revolve around the complex, tense and fragile balance between rationality and mysticism and the contrasting fascinations of progress and nature. The narration is structured in a succession of brief flashes, jumping back and forth between different intertwined histories. One of them is the story of the engineer Vannevar Morgan, who tries to realize his most ambitious project: a space elevator that connects a high mountain top on the Earth's equator to a space station in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above. This scenario is interlaced with a different story of grandiose plans and audacious engineering: that of the ancient king of Sri Lanka (renamed the island of Taprobane in the novel and relocated at a more equatorial latitude) who built the palace/fortress of Sigiriya (renamed Yakkagala in the novel) on a mountain top, a kind of step in between Earth and Heaven meant to elevate the king to the heights of the immortals, amidst improbable hanging gardens, with their magnificent frescoes and their "fountains of paradise". For all the brutality that characterizes his ruling, the king also represents another aspect of the same visionary power and drive that are embodied by the modern engineer Vannegar Morgan, an alter ego, a shadow that speaks through the ages. Interestingly, in the novel the king is named after the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, as if to forcibly superimpose his visionary and imaginative side over that of the brutal tyrannical ruler. There are two other subplots that also play a major role in shaping the meaning of the "fountains of paradise": one is the story of the monastery on top of the mountain and the scientist turned mystic, the Venerable Parakarma formerly Choam Goldberg, who mounts an opposition to Morgan which is in fact again only another aspect of himself. While being on the opposite sides of the rationality/mysticism divide they in fact share the same background and culture and are more keens than opponents. Not even the aliens are alien in this novel: the other, and most intriguing, subplot in the novel is the story of Starglider, the robotic alien probe that liberates Earth from religion. Starglider is again the same conscience of Morgan and Kalidasa, presented at yet another layer of abstraction, but once more a character that is one and the same with the other main characters of the story. The final vision of the artificial ring surrounding a cold future earth, with space elevators connecting it to the ground, and with the contact with the alien intelligence finally achieved, realize the merging of all these different shadows, who played out their roles in the previous parts of the novel, into a single fulfilled utopian dream.

"Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality" (Jawaharlal Nehru)

In these same few days I've been looking at the NASA images of the "Fountains of Enceladus" after the marvelous Cassini flyby of March 12. These veritable "fountains of paradise" revealed a hot core containing complex organic molecules, where nobody expected to find anything much but an inert frozen worlds. The richness of the many worlds in our solar system has still quite a number of surprises in store. It is that same dream that Clarke so aptly described in his novel that drives us now to color with wonder the latest images of the probe: how can a satellite like Enceladus be chemically similar to a comet?

I got in the habit of browsing the JPL website in the past few days out of a very natural curiosity, which has more to do with my imminent future and possible relocation. It's been a long time since I have been working for that type of institution. It reminds me of a time, more than ten years ago, when I was equally eagerly browsing through the web pages of the MIT labs, waiting for the end of my last semester of graduate school and waiting to start my first real job there. Life moves on in large waves that last several years and deposit you eventually on a distant shore after a long tumultuous ride. I am perhaps beginning to see a shore approaching where I'll set foot to ride a new and seemingly very different wave crest to the next destination. I cannot help trying to imagine what it would be like to ride that space elevator of Clarke's "fountains of paradise" taking in a broader and broader image of the world as it climbs up to orbit. Maybe this is in fact an even more fitting image of how life proceeds.

Vermilion sands of California

2008-03-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

California is the last Thule, the last shore of broken dreams, the ultimate boundary of the world. Beyond that there is only water, an ocean expanse covering half the planet, a separate world within a world, ocean half a way across until the distant Asian shores. On the other side of the water world is our deepest memory, the most ancient vestiges of human civilization on Earth, while on this side, after slowly tracing its course around the world, civilization is stripped down to its essentials, the capacity to dream. To dream and project our last hopes onto the immensity of the water, over precarious shifting ground between ocean and high mountains, a stretch of land for piling up humanities largest collection of dreams. A reservoir of wild hopes, unfulfilled desires, visionary schemes and shady cults, but also the propelling force of scientific vision catapulting us at great speed into the future, with no heavy load of history to carry along. Unfulfilled possibilities generate a warp of space in this overcrowded narrow stretch of land, where nature looms large like the Rockies, deep like the ocean, over fragile human shoulders that have already dumped the weight, too heavy, of culture. Water and sand resemble one another, dark, shifting, vast.

When Ballard wrote his collection of stories "Vermilion sands", he envisioned a community of artists settled in a village bordering the desert, in what appears to be an indefinite location of Southern Californian flavor. Amidst singing sculptures, poetry generators, houses that change shape according to the mood of their occupants, the recurring theme, story after story, is the sense of a life that justifies itself purely by its capacity to conceive dreams. No useful work is ever done, none of the characters seem to need to "make a living", the whole existence acquires the quality of a fata morgana in the desert haze. The whole purpose of this remarkable collection of stories is to capture the underlying sense of fatigue of this apparently energetic land of dreamers, the sense of being stripped bare down to one's own soul, with no protective layer of culture and history to provide comforting certainties. Only the capacity to dream the unknown into existence provides sustenance and continuity.

I spent a good period of time in Southern California a couple of years ago, a remarkably interesting and productive time at a research institute overlooking the ocean. Kelp forests moving silently beneath the waves, long bike rides down mission style villages, some smooth and relaxed thinking, which generated some pretty cool stuff, a good amount of reading of beat generation writers.

Through one of those twists of fate that are the real movers and shakers of our lives, it so happens that I am now possibly contemplating the idea of moving to Southern California in the maybe not so far future. I started packing my broken dreams, the most valuable possession on such a journey, and took one more look at the Ballard stories, with their universe of fragile and yet flamboyant characters, like a delicate equilibrium of glass hanging sculptures moving with the wind.