Cloudbuster

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cloudbuster-ill0-by-Pat-Linse-lgThis is the story of a television star.  We shall call him, for convenience, Eliah.  To start, we must make clear that he never had big ambitions in life.  In fact, his mother remembers him as a very timid child whom scarcely made any friends and tended to spend most of his time indoors, in front of the television.  She and her husband worried a lot about their child then.  They feared that too much television was going to make him stupid.  Little did they know that Eliah would one day enter the tube to become a television creature himself.

It all begun quite accidentally really, as all true stories do. Eliah was in his late twenties, having lived a rather secluded and irksome life until then.  After college he landed a very ordinary job pushing paper forms in the endless labyrinth of a multinational corporation. Life had seemingly taken a predictable course, worthy of Eliah’s apathetic character and nothing seemed capable of ever changing that. However, due to the intricate and mysterious web of natural phenomena in our Universe, a number of apparently unrelated events conspired to hurl Eliah away from the ordinary and into the unknown.  The chain of events was put together long before he was even born, several thousand miles away, on a different continent altogether, in a desert.

It was during a night while everything was silent in the boundless desert plain, when a fireball came crashing down from the sky.  An enormous meteor hit the ground with a terrible thunder and the whole desert shook like it was the dawn of time. A huge cloud of dust rose from the huge crater caused by the crash.  The wind blew the cloud hundreds of miles away, over a city, during a thunderstorm.  The rain poured down onto the streets carrying with it the extraterrestrial dust from the fallen meteorite.  One of those drops hit the lip of a woman as she was crossing the street. She licked her lip, swallowed the dust and thus became immediately infected by an alien virus. She went home in a daze and started writing letters, long letters to people she never knew, picking their names from a telephone directory at random. Whatever the virus had done to her brain- before finally killing her in the two months that followed – the woman managed to write thousands of letters to all kinds of people.  She would write and write, ceaselessly, day and night.  In her letters she would reveal the secrets of the Universe; only it was very hard for the common person to comprehend her messages.  She wrote in convoluted verses and used riddles, proverbs and quotes from philosophers and poets no-one had ever heard about.  The vast majority of her recipients threw the letters away without ever bothering to read on after the first two lines.  The rest returned her letters unopened to the Post Office where, without a known sender,  they were stocked away for several years.

One day, the Post Office decided to make room for a new computer so they cleared their warehouse of old and unwanted items, including the letters of that virus-infected woman.  As they cleared the room to send the letters to the incinerator, one of them fell and landed on the floor.  It was found by a young employee whose interest in old stamps made him pick it up and keep it.  When he went back to his house he opened it and started reading it. He was the only person who ever took to reading the letter seriously.  He followed the advice written on it and became a millionaire by inventing a number of very useful household appliances.  His company grew so big that it soon became a multinational.  And thus it reached the country where Eliah lived.

The man’s company was filming a new commercial at the Shopping Mall, next to Eliah’s office.  On that day Eliah happened to be in the area where the camera crew was shooting, taking a stroll after his lunch-break. The commercial’s idea was to ask ordinary people to use the product and then exclaim their amazement at its extraordinary effectiveness, in the most natural way possible. Eliah though it would be a fun thing to do, so he let them film him too.  It was easy for Eliah. Having spent so much time in front of the television, words came naturally to him. Soon enough he was on national television for the first time.  The product – a vegetable peeler – sold like crazy.  The advertising company sought Eliah and signed him up for a number of follow-up commercials.  He had a natural gift.  He could sell anything over the TV.  That was the beginning of Eliah’s career.  Not long after that, Eliah became a host in one of the most successful reality shows in the history of television.  Eliah became a star, a household name, everybody’s fella.

Famous or not, however,  Eliah did not become a happier man. He remained a loner, a secluded child as ever, that spent his life now not only on one but also on both sides of the television.  As his wealth and fame increased so did his loneliness. At the peak of his career, with several shows running at the same time on satellite and cable, with interviews with Larry King, TIME and Newsweek, Eliah projected a radiant, extrovert, snappy image that had absolutely nothing to do with the inner workings of his soul and the vast ponderings of his mind.  No one ever perceived the enormous gap between the real Eliah and his fake television image.  No one except “the Khan”.  

II

The Khan was an unknown then. He was the child of a poor office clerk in equatorial Africa, one of six children.  He grew up in hardship and when his father died, his family came to the brink of starvation.  The Khan, being the eldest son, took to supporting himself as well as the rest of his family from a very tender age, doing all kinds of petty jobs, selling fruit on the streets, working at the canning factories of the white folks, anything to make a buck. And so with time he became a very willful person.  He felt that life owed him much more that it had given him and so he set off to achieve the highest goals.  He realised that, in order to achieve his ambitions, he ought to acquire an intimate understanding of the world and its peoples.  So he joined a pen pal club that the United Nations had set up for poor children like himself.  Soon the Khan had organised a vast network of friends in all the continents of the world.  He wrote to all of them asking about their lives, their countries, their hopes, their fears. With time he grew wiser and wiser.

One day, he received a letter from one of his pen friends.  Enclosed in that letter there was another letter which his pen friend had received from an unknown sender.  Although he understood very little of it, he had thought it funny so he was sending it to the Khan, to entertain him too.  The Khan read the strange enclosed letter with great interest.  Between the riddles and the abstract verses he read the mysteries of the Cosmos unfolding before his eyes. His life was changed forevermore.  He understood everything at once.  He became a cult leader.

By the time Eliah had grown into a worldwide TV star, the Khan had managed to organise his first cult centre.  There he grouped his followers, mostly old pen pals, and talked to them about the glory and the infinite power of the Cosmic Mind. In his spare time, when his students were busy meditating according to his instructions, the Khan watched satellite television.  Faithful to his foremost maxim, the deep comprehension of the world and its peoples was the key to true power.  Satellite TV was a window to the world, an eye in the mighty sky watching over the globe, the Khan’s eye.  Thus he came to encounter Eliah.  Through the eye in the sky.  The Khan saw through Eliah’s loneliness when everyone else simply enjoyed his shows.  He send his faithful to meet him and present him with the cult’s doctrines.  And then he went to meet him in person.

No-one knows what the two men said to each other during the long hours that they spend together.  One may speculate, by benefit of hindsight, that Khan presented Eliah with the inner teachings of his cult.  He must have told him about the great invention that could change the fate of the World and the enormous power that it could unleash.  The energy problem could have been solved forever.  So could starvation, the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, viral diseases, idiocy and all the rest of the terrible ailments that tormented mankind and our poor planet for millennia. The invention, a “gift of the Cosmic Mind” – as the Khan described his enlightenment experience he had with the strange letter that changed his life -  could affect the climate on a global scale.  It could re-program the earth’s biosphere at will, control the environment, the harvests, the migration of birds and whales, in fact it could control the whole of our planet’s Life.  The Khan named his invention the “Cloudbuster”.  He must have then told Eliah of the complexity and cost of his invention and how he could use his help.  When their discussion was over, Eliah was a changed person.  For the first time in his life he understood what he was missing until then: a purpose.  But now had one he: to help the Khan built the “Cloudbuster” and save the World.  Eliah became a cult member, the most prominent and loyal one of all. The Khan’s fortune, quite predictably, also changed for the better.

III

 Eliah trusted all his possessions to the Khan in order to begin the construction of the Cloudbuster. But Eliah’s money was not enough.  More, very much more, was needed to pay for the scientists, the engineers, the labs, the raw materials and the rest of the infrastructure that could realise the invention.  So Eliah used his power over the television networks to come up with the resources.  He made the Khan’s cult known to millions around the world who came and paid their fees for the Teacher’s teachings.  Throughout that period, the “Cloudbuster” project was kept secret.  But the Khan did not need to reveal it to everyone in order to obtain followers.  His promise of telepathic powers, and happiness for ever after were enough to do the trick.  Money poured in from every corner of the globe.  Soon enough a prototype Cloudbuster was put together and was ready for the test.

During that time, a deadly little war was taking place on a rocky peninsula, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.  People of the same blood, torn apart by religious differences, had made it their purpose to exterminate each other. So they took up arms and the fratricide was on. Television had a ball.  Every night, all across the world there would be vivid pictures of original mayhem, of mutilated bodies, of burned cities, of maimed children.  Dinner tables in every household were showered daily with scenes of horror.  Until many “powerful nations” decided that that little but deadly war had started to really disturb their peoples’ digestion. So they came together and resolved to put an end to it.  They went and tried, in vain, to reason with the opponents who, unfortunately had already too much blood in their hands to end the slaughter. So the “powerful nations” decided to bomb them all and thus put an end to that hideous television show of a war.

Eliah was one of the TV personalities that covered most of the happenings in that war.  This was not by chance but under direct orders from the Khan.  The war offered a first class opportunity for the testing of the prototype Cloudbuster.  Cult faithful, disguised as camera crews, managed to infiltrate the teams of international journalists, sneaking along the prototype Cloudbuster, right to the warzone.  As the allied airforce was warming its jet engines to begin the bombing, Eliah turned on the Cloudbuster. The results were stunning.  The weather changed rapidly.  Thick clouds appeared from nowhere and amassed themselves over the warzone.  The sun disappeared and so did the bombing targets. The thick clouds stayed over the war-torn peninsula for days, preventing the allied airforce from executing their air raids.  The weather satellites of the world had gone crazy, and so did all the weather-forecast people.  No-one was able to explain that phenomenon.  No-one except Eliah and the Khan who saw their vision taking shape.

Several years passed since then.  Eliah became more and more involved in the Khan’s cult. Until the inevitable end beckoned.  This happened when, several members of the cult were arrested by the police for trying to put a bomb in one of the major world banking organisations.  It was all part of the Khan’s master plan.  The established financial system of exploitation had to be destroyed so that a new order of things under the protection of the Cloudbuster could take form. The police did not agree with the plan.  Neither did the Courts.  The Khan’s cult was outlawed and government investigators from around the world begun hunting down its members.  The Khan was arrested and imprisoned and so did most of the principal cult members.  Eliah’s stardom came to an abrupt end. His shows were canceled. But this was something that Eliah had been preparing for. As soon as the bomb case became known he packed his bags and quickly disappeared to the secret base of the cult, somewhere deep in the Australian desert.  There, the Khan and his followers were keeping the full version of the Cloudbuster, ready for Doomsday.

Eliah arrived at the base too late to save the day.  The Police were already there, waiting for him.  The Army had sealed the area and experts for various secret agencies were gathering around the sect’s base to study the mysterious device.  Several days after his arrest, Eliah was being driven by a police van to the Court Prison.  It was late in the evening.  The court case was nearing its end.  There was little hope for Eliah.  The jury had more or less decided the case. Witnesses were describing the terrible methods by which the Khan indoctrinated his followers and controlled their private lives.  It was only a matter of hours before they would send Eliah to jail for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, at the desert outpost, scientists had started taking the Cloudbuster apart eager to reveal its secrets, when a fireball came crashing from the sky.  All area around the Khan’s secret base was hit and set alight. It was like an explosion of a nuclear bomb and the seismic waves were felt as far as Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.  The cult’s base was completely destroyed and everybody who was there at the time perished.  A crater was left gaping at the very place where the Khan had installed his mighty invention. A huge cloud of dust rose from the crater of the crash.  The wind blew the cloud hundreds of miles away, over a city during a thunderstorm, the same city where the police van was now carrying Eliah to the Court Prison.  The rain poured down onto the streets carrying with it the extraterrestrial dust from the fallen meteorite.   The streets became slippery.  A passing car driver, losing control, fell onto the van.  Eliah died in the crash.  A woman who happened to walk by saw what happened and went into a shock.  When she recovered a few hours later in the hospital she was feeling a strange impulse to pick up the telephone directory and write letters, thousand of letters to everybody, to people she never knew before, using convoluted verses, riddles, proverbs and quotes from philosophers and poets no-one had ever heard about..

All about strings: An interview with Leonard Susskind

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Leonard Susskind

Leonard Susskind

Leonard Susskind is considered one of the fathers of string theory in physics. He is the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Institute of Theoretical Physics.This is an edited transcript of an interview with Leonard Susskind (Stanford 13/04/2004)

GZ: What are the big questions in physics today?
LS: The connection between cosmology, gravitation, quantum mechanics and string theory (if it turns out to be the right theory which is probably). For me these are the central questions. Of course there are questions which divide the universe into before year 2000 and after year 2000. There are questions left over from the twentieth century. The questions from the twentieth century are how we understand the pattern of elementary particles and so forth, how we understand what’ s called the Standard Model, how does it fit into something bigger and more complete.
Under 21st century physics I would classify questions that have to do with the structure of universe, as well as the origin of our laws of nature, our laws of physics.

GZ: Could string theory be the “theory of everything” and give all the answers?
LS: I dislike the term “theory of everything” and I would never use it myself and if knew who had said it first I would shoot him. It’s an inflammatory term and all kinds of people correctly say that it is not a theory of everything. It doesn’t explain how the brain works and so it’s a term which I would not use. If it is a theory which can, at some point, explain the origin of the universe and the spectrum of elementary particles and so forth, it remains to be seen. My feeling is that there’s probably only one quantum theory of gravity and string theory appears to be a part of that theory of gravity.
What we are discovering about string theory is very different from what we had expected and hoped for. The original hope of string theory was that it would provide an absolutely unique set of answers to the questions such as: what is the particles’ spectrum, what are the masses of particles. It would have been a very elegant answer, a beautiful mathematical answer and extremely unique. Unique in that we would find that, basically, the world could not be any other way that the way it is. That was the hope. The reality is extremely different. The reality is that the more we study of the theory, the more possible kinds of things we discover it can describe. We discover it’s a theory with a vast number of solutions. We simply find that there are enormous numbers of possible worlds that string theory can describe.

GZ:String theory has often been called a “revolution in physics”…
LS: The word revolution has been tremendously overused. Super and revolution are the most overused words in physics. Everything is a revolution. Is string theory a revolution? We don’t know yet. I think we don’t know what string theory is yet. I think we’ve made very wrong guesses about what string theory will do for us. I think we got it completely wrong. We thought it would give us a unique theory of the elementary particles. Instead it’s giving us perhaps as many as 10500 different possibilities of what the universe could be like. This is very puzzling. What do we make out of it? Do we just randomly pick one of these possible universes? Or all of them are important? What’s going on? My own view for some time now, is that in an inflationary context you could have a patch of this universe, a patch of that, a patch of whatever else is possible. In string theory it looks like 10500 possibilities are possible, each with its own set of particles, set of interactions. My guess is that the universe is just exceedingly big, full of tremendous amount of diversity. All these different possibilities materialize at some place. We simply live where is possible to live, in that part of this giant structure which is not totally hostile or lethal to our existence.

GZ: String theory has captured the public imagination because it refers to hidden dimensions. Of course, science fiction stories have made a lot of hidden dimensions. Why do we need so many extra dimensions to explain nature?
LS: Wish I could give you a simple mathematical explanation, for I’m afraid nobody can explain it simply otherwise. It‘s a very complicated theory which fits together in a consistent way only if the number of dimensions are ten or eleven. Why does physics need them? Elementary particles in the ordinary view of things are point particles. A point can’t have many, many properties. A point is too simple to have properties. However, we know that elementary particles have a lot of properties. They have spin, they have electric charge, they have something called isotopic spin, they have a quantum number called color – it’s not got anything to do with ordinary color – they have generations that they belong to, there are whole catalogs of different kinds of quantum numbers, of different kinds of properties that quarks, electrons, netrinos, or photons have. It sounds unreasonable for a point to have that structure. So the feeling most of us have is that, at some level, if you look deeply enough into things, you‘ll discover that particles aren’t points. That they must have all kinds of internal machinery that gives them these properties. One of those machineries, one of the ingredients into understanding what the quantum numbers of particles are, is the idea of higher dimensions. I‘ll give you an example. The simplest and oldest theory of higher dimensions is called the Kaluza theory. It was invented by Kaluza in 1917. Einstein liked it very much. It postulated one extra dimension, i.e. a particle in the extra dimension could be regarded as a little circular dimension. The idea of Kaluza theory is that the particle can move not only in the usual three directions of space but it can also move around in this extra dimension. Well, the particle which moves around in the extra dimension is different than one that moves differently in the extra dimension. The amount of speed that is going in the extra dimension as well as the direction it goes matter a lot. What is this new option corresponds to? It corresponds to the electric charge of the particle in Kaluza’s theory. So, electric charge becomes motion in another direction, in a new direction. What’s going on now is that these extra directions – all of them – correspond in various kinds of ways to the extra properties that these points have. So I wouldn’t say that we needed the extra dimensions, but we needed the kind of structure, the kind of complexity in space that could explain why these other degrees of freedom are there.

GZ: Skeptics say that string theory will forever remain outside the realm of real science, because it’s not experimentally falsifiable.

LS: I would simply dismiss these people for lack of imagination. There are all these people who are constantly pontificating of what science is and what science isn’t. These people lack of imagination. I also lack of imagination but I have a lot of imagination to know that I lack of imagination. We do not know what people can do in the future. We do not know what the human intelligence is capable of collectively. True, we are in a new course of exploration s studying extremely remote things which are very, very difficult to establish experimentally. But we should not abandon our course.GZ: Let me take you back to what we discussed before about string theory predicting up to 10500 different possible universes. Is this perhaps an answer to the paradox that we live in a universe so finely-tuned. Is this the answer to the Anthropic principle?
LS: That may be. My view is that the fine-tuning of the universe, particularly with regards to the cosmological constant, is so exceptional that we can no longer ignore it. Nevertheless, we have to ask whether the Anthropic principle is really serious business. Different people mean different things by the anthropic principle. Some give a religious depth to that thing, that the Almighty created the universe for no other purpose than people to live there. That’s one theory to which I don’t subscribe. I think it’s the duty of physicists and scientists to take that theory only as an absolutely last resort, when everything else fails. Other people think it’s part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics that somehow we live in the one place we can.
My view is a little different. It’s similar to asking why we live on a planet which is so finely-tuned. Our planet is at just the right distance from the sun so that we do not get boiled or frozen. That’s a very small window of opportunity, it’s a fine tuning. To find the reason why this is so, you need at least two things: a set of very large alternative possibilities and a cosmology which creates all of these different possibilities. So, it wouldn’t be enough to know that the “planet equation” – whatever it is – has many, many solutions with different values of, say, the “right temperature”. I also want to know that the surrounding universe grew and expanded creating lots of planets. Those two ingredients make sense out of this anthropic idea. One, that the theory, whatever it is, has so many solutions that even though it takes a very fine tuning for life, there will still be enough other solutions, so that statistically there will be one. And that, whatever the cosmology of the universe is, it creates always different possibilities some place.GZ: How about string theory then. Does it fit your two requirements for an explanation?
LS: I think that string theory provides us with a space of enormous possibilities. By involving so many mechanisms put together in various combinations the number of possible universe is 10500or something. We don’t what the number is, but it’s vast. The other thing we need is something like Linde’s and Lincoln’s theory of eternal inflation, where inflation takes place constantly and spins off different environments. Their ideas seem to me to be very, very reasonable, that the universe expands to something enormously big and it creates patches of all different kinds of what Alan Guth calls “pocket-universes”.GZ: Could we ever find if that is true?
LS: For the moment it looks impossible because of the horizon problem. Our world has a horizon that we can not see beyond. Presumably these other worlds are behind this horizon. One of the things we’ve learnt from thinking about black holes in the context of string theory, is that at quantum level the horizon is not really a barrier to knowledge. What goes on outside the horizon is also equally well described by the Hawking radiation of the black hole. I suspect that cosmic horizons are scrambled in complicated ways. Cosmic microwave background, which is light Hawking radiation, has this information in it. Can anybody ever extracted it? Certainly not with experimental tools currently available. But as I said never say never. We don’t know what the limits of imagination, or the limits of intelligence, are and that’s something for the future to do. Young smart physicists want to be explorers. They want to explore those things which everybody else says are impossible.GZ: The LHC is underway and will soon start experiments for the Higgs particle . Will they find it?
LS: I think so. I don’t see any other good alternative.

GZ: So the LHC is money worth spent!
LS: Well, yes, whether we find the Higg’s particle or not. If we find it’s there, that’s wonderful and confirms everything we knew. If it’s not there, it’s even more radical and money will have been even better spent. It will mean that we have been thinking wrong about physics for thirty years now.

GZ: Is time is an illusion?
LS:Space is an illusion. You are an illusion.

GZ:This sounds very Buddhist to me.
LS:Well, physicists don’t think that way because it’s not a useful way to think. We can measure time, just like as we can measure space, just like we can measure electrons. So why pick on time as being an illusion? Everything is an illusion in that view. But it’s not a useful view for a physicist. If you can measure it, if you can describe it, then we regard it as real.

GZ: Let me press this point of illusion a little further. Quantum mechanics introduces the observer into the very fabric in reality. Somehow if you take observers out, if you take consciousness out, “reality” ceases to exist. Does the universe exist when we do not observe it?
LS: I’m not a philosopher and I’m trying not to be philosophical. I’m trying to be more practical. Let’s see…Ask me the question again.

GZ: Is there something that we can call extended reality, a reality outside our perception? Or are we constantly creating reality through our measurements or our observations?
LS: We don’t really know how to understand the world of quantum mechanics. We know how to understand one special set of circumstances, where you can clearly separate the world in observer and system.
But the real world is not like that. We the observers are always part of the system. In the context of the laboratory we can usually make some separations. We cannot make that separation about cosmology of the universe. We are part of it. We influence it. So we do not really understand how to think about a system when we are a part of it, because of quantum mechanics. A very good friend goes so far as to say that he doesn’t think that quantum mechanics is complete because of this. And he thinks underlying the quantum mechanics is something much more deterministic. Most physicists think it’s a screwy idea. My answer is I don’t know.

GZ: When we talk about physics, when we talk about reality, we usually talk about energy, talk about matter, interactions between particles and fields etc. Let me for a moment suggest to you that the universe is not like that at all, the universe is made out of bits and information. Wolfram wrote a book about cellular automata which made quite of sensation. Could you believe in Matrix world? Could the universe be made out of bits, at an elementary level?
LS: Yes I think that it is made out of bits. It is nothing but information .

GZ: Could this notion change our physics?
LS: No, it can explain our physics. With respect to Wolfram, I’ m a physicist who thinks Wolfram’s ideas are interesting. But keep in mind that Wolfram’s ideas have no place for quantum mechanics. And the world is quantum mechanical. Wolfram believes that the world is cellular automata. But he knows that cellular automata are not quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from I don’t know. So I would say, until you can understand why the world is quantum mechanical, to say that it’s made of cellular automata is servicing a point. No quantum mechanics no cigar.

GZ: Einstein once said that the most inexplicable thing about this universe is that we can explain it. Are we now reaching the limits of our cognitive abilities? Do you believe that there are cognitive limitations to the human mind?
LS: Sure there are limitations. The human mind can not have more bits of information than the whole universe has. There are limitations to the human abilities in general. I would have bet anything on that no human being can play six musical instruments at the same time. I would have bet very much that nobody can jump as high as Michael Jordan. It turns out that the ranges of people have in the very, very far parts of the distribution are so amazing that nobody would have guess that they were possible. When people say such things as we’re reaching the limits, what they really mean is that I ´m reaching my limit. When they say they can’t conceive of anybody solving a certain problem what they really mean is that they can conceive of themselves solving this problem. The limits are probably way beyond what we imagine. They always are. The danger in trying to predict the limits of human abilities is always going in the wrong direction. It’s much more likely to underestimate than to overestimate. As long as it’s physically possible, as long as it doesn’t violate the laws of nature, it means there’s a possibility that human beings can do it. Forget individuals. Collectively human beings have such a diversity of different kinds or ways of thinking, they have the flexibility to be able to bend their own way of thinking about new things. We simply don’t know, but I would guess that when we try to estimate these things we ‘re in much more danger of underestimating to what people can do than overestimate it.

GZ: As we expand our knowledge of the cosmos through our physics, if we ever reach points that we don’t really understand and we can not possibly falsify, then are we in a danger that science, physics can regresses to religion?
LS: There is such a danger. So, on one hand there is such a danger and in the other hand I also say that you are also in danger of underestimating what people will be able to do in the future. Will they be able to do experiments that now seem to be so completely out of this world that they seem totally impossible? I‘ll give you two examples. The first is the inflationary theory of the universe. Everybody who saw that the first time said “well, that’s very nice Alan Guth, but your own admission of the inflation of the universe wipes out any evidence of itself. Nobody will ever be able to make science out of it”. That’s what everybody said, including Alan. Nobody expected that within twenty-five years people would figure out how to confirm observationally that the inflation theory was right. But it happened. I’ll give you another example. I can easily imagine people telling Darwin “nice theory Charles, but the only way to confirm it will be to go back a billion years and see what’s going on, and that’s simply impossible”. Well, it took a hundred years to make science out of evolutionary theory. It took a hundred years for people to get enough knowledge about biochemistry and genetics, to watch microorganisms evolve. It took a hundred years but it happened. And as I said the two dangers are, falling into a trap of t faith-based physics, but also giving up because it looks too hard.

GZ: Apart from technological development making life more comfortable what is the role of science in the 21st century? With regards to politics, society and perhaps ideologically. Does science play a role in modern world of religious conflict, fanaticism and lack of rationality?
LS: To a certain extent I think physicists have been the keepers of the truth. A case of point would be the Soviet Union during the dark days when the keepers of the truth were physicists, people like Zakharof and Orlof. They were people who simply believed in the concept of the truth. You know what’s happened to the concept of the truth in American society? It’s been replaced by advertising! All kinds of things which tend to make irrelevant to what’s true and what’s not true. Scientists in general are people who recognize what it means for something to be true. They are people who will question when something it’s not true. And their whole mental make up, their whole ideological basis, has to do with finding the truth. That’s necessary for preserving society.

GZ: So you are not a postmodernist?

LS: Postmodernism has some truth but it has been carried too far. It is true that the way humans think about the laws of nature, the words that we use to explain things, are dependent on culture and so forth. When new scientific ideas come into the front a lot of the argument about them tends to be dominated about the language that we should use to describe them. But, eventually, through some filter, what comes out of the other end is pretty much independent of the specific mentalities of the people who discovered it. And so yes, I believe there is real truth in the bottom of all of it, and it’s also true that the language we use to describe things depends on culture. So, that was a good idea, it was an important idea but it got carried too far when it said that there’s no such thing as objective truth.

Interview with Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Laureate in Chemisty (in Greek)

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Jean Marie Lehn

Jean Marie Lehn

This is an edited transcript of an Interview of Jean-Marie Lehn taken by George Zarkadakis in Athens on 3/05/2006)

Ο Jean-Marie Lehn γεννήθηκε στη μεσαιωνική πόλη Rosheim της Γαλλίας το 1938 και στα νεανικά του χρόνια αμφιταλαντεύτηκε να επιλέξει ανάμεσα σε πανεπιστημιακές σπουδές στη φιλοσοφία ή στη χημεία. Τελικά επέλεξε τη δεύτερη και το 1987 κέρδισε το Βραβείο Νόμπελ Χημείας για την έρευνά του στη μοριακή αναγνώριση, δηλαδή τον τρόπο που ένα μόριο-δέκτης εκλεκτικά αναγνωρίζει και προσδένεται σε ένα υπόστρωμα. Σήμερα ο Jean Mari-Lehn είναι Διευθυντής του Εργαστηρίου Υπερμοριακής Χημείας, στο Ινστιτούτο Επιστημών και Υπερμοριακής Μηχανικής του Στρασβούργου (ISIS).

ΓΖ: Τι είναι η ζωή;
L: Δεν υπάρχει μεμονωμένη χημική ουσία που να μπορεί να θεωρηθεί έμβιο ον. Το ζήτημα είναι ποια, ποιο είναι το όριο πέρα από το οποίο ξεκινά αυτό που λέμε ζωή. Η απάντηση είναι οι ιοί. Οι ιοί είναι σαν ένα σακούλι γεμάτο πρωτείνες, το οποίο ωστόσο διαθέτει γονιδίωμα. Όταν ο ιός είναι απομονωμένος θεωρείται νεκρός γιατί πολύ απλά δεν μπορεί να πολλαπλασιαστεί από μόνος του. Όταν όμως προσβάλει κάποιο κύτταρο παίρνει από αυτό τα ένζυμα που είναι απαραίτητα για τον πολλαπλασιασμό και αναπαράγει τον εαυτό του. Τότε θεωρείται ως μορφή ζωής. Μόλις όμως αναπαραχθεί και βγει από το κύτταρο, αυτόματα χάνει την ικανότητα αναπαραγωγής και θεωρείται απλά ως ένα σύνολο μορίων.

ΓΖ: Η ζωή είναι πληροφορία;
L: Το γονιδίωμα είναι η πληροφορία. Ο ιός έχει μια δεδομένη δομή. Για να αναπαραχθεί αυτή η δομή, δηλαδή για να «ξαναφτιαχτεί» ο ιός, χρειάζεται η πληροφορία του γονιδιώματος. Στο DNA, για παράδειγμα, η πληροφορία είναι αποθηκευμένη με τη μορφή τεσσάρων γραμμάτων. Η ακολουθία και οι αλληλεπιδράσεις μεταξύ των γραμμάτων είναι αυτό που λέμε γονιδίωμα.

ΓΖ: Η εξέλιξη είναι μονόδρομος;
L: Όχι, πολλές διαδρομές. Οι προβιοτικοί χημικοί πιθανολογούν ότι η ζωή προχώρησε παράλληλα σε πολλές διαδρομές. Αυτό που συνέβη όμως ήταν το εξής: όταν μια μορφή ζωής ήταν επιτυχημένη συνέχιζε να εξελίσσεται Αντίθετα οι υπόλοιπες σταδιακά εξαφανίστηκαν. Αν η ζωή βρεθεί σε εξελικτικό αδιέξοδο δεν μπορεί να γυρίσει προς τα πίσω, προς το σημείο εκκίνησης, και να διαλέξει άλλο δρόμο εξέλιξης. Έτσι μπορούμε να πούμε η ζωή ήταν ένας συνδυασμός άτακτης και αυτοβελτιούμενης εξέλιξης.

ΓΖ: Τι είναι η «υπερμοριακή χημεία»;
L: Η υπερομοριακή χημεία ασχολείται όχι με τα μόρια των χημικών ενώσεων, αλλά με τις αλληλεπιδράσεις μεταξύ των μορίων μέσα στις χημικές ενώσεις. Η υπερομοριακή χημεία είναι η χημεία που μελετά με ποιες διαδικασίες τα μόρια αναγνωρίζονται μεταξύ τους και γιατί δημιουργούν επιλεκτικούς χημικούς δεσμούς.

ΓΖ: Ποιες είναι οι μεγάλες προκλήσεις της χημείας τον 21ο αιώνα;
L: Αυτό που προσωπικά με ενδιαφέρει είναι η έρευνα γύρω από την οργάνωση της ύλης, η μετάβαση από ένα μεμονωμένο μόριο σε πολύπλοκες μορφές ύλης. Ένας άλλος ενδιαφέρων τομέας της χημείας είναι η κατάλυση, δηλαδή το πώς θα δημιουργήσουμε χημικές αντιδράσεις οι οποίες θα είναι πιο αποτελεσματικές και ταυτόχρονα θα απαιτούν λιγότερη ενέργεια. Επίσης η νανοτεχνολογία, η σύμπραξη χημείας και φυσικής, και η προσπάθεια να ελέγξουμε τις κινήσεις των μορίων ώστε να κατασκευάσουμε μικρομηχανές με μοριακό μέγεθος.

ΓΖ: Πολλοί άνθρωποι θεωρούν τη χημεία συνώνυμη με τη χημική ρύπανση…
L: Καταρχήν να ξεκαθαρίσουμε ότι παράγουμε χημικές ουσίες επειδή ο κόσμος τις χρειάζεται. Αν για παράδειγμα οι άνθρωποι δεν οδηγούσαν αυτοκίνητα δεν θα είχαμε τόση πολύ ρύπανση. Οπότε ας σταματήσουμε να χρησιμοποιούμε το αυτοκίνητό μας αλόγιστα. Αν δεν θέλουμε να το κάνουμε αυτό, τότε πρέπει να δεχτούμε τις συνέπειες των πράξεών μας, δηλαδή την ατμοσφαιρική ρύπανση. Επιπλέον η χημεία ενοχλεί επειδή μυρίζει. Πράγματι, οι άνθρωποι είμαστε ζώα και η αίσθηση της όσφρησης είναι πολύ σημαντική για τα ζώα. Για παράδειγμα, αν βλέπαμε ένα κατακόκκινο σύννεφο το οποίο δεν ξέραμε ότι ήταν τοξικό και δεν μπορούσαμε να το μυρίσουμε, τότε όχι μόνο δεν θα μας ενοχλούσε αλλά μάλλον θα μας γοήτευε κιόλας. Πάντως τα τελευταία 30 χρόνια έχει γίνει μεγάλη πρόοδος στον τομέα της ρύπανσης. Και μπορεί να γίνει ακόμα περισσότερη αρκεί να είμαστε πρόθυμοι να πληρώσουμε. Ένα εργοστάσιο που θα εγκαταστήσει φίλτρα και θα χρησιμοποιήσει αντιρρυπαντική τεχνολογία θα πρέπει να ξοδέψει πολλά χρήματα. Προφανώς το προϊόν που θα βγαίνει από τη γραμμή παραγωγής θα είναι ελαφρώς ακριβότερο και το κόστος αυτό θα μετακυληθεί στον πελάτη. Σε κάθε περίπτωση όμως πρέπει να ξεκαθαρίσουμε ότι με όρους τοξικότητας η φύση παράγει πολύ πιο τοξικές ουσίες απ’ ότι ο άνθρωπος. Για παράδειγμα, υπάρχουν φυτά που χρησιμοποιούμε, μετά από κατεργασία βέβαια, ως φάρμακα και τα οποία είναι τόσο τοξικά ώστε στη φύση είναι άκρως δηλητηριώδη.

ΓΖ: Βλέπετε να αλλάζει ο χάρτης της επιστήμης με την είσοδο νέων «παικτών», όπως η Κίνα ή η Ινδία;
L: Η επιστήμη είναι επιστήμη. Δεν έχει σημασία αν γίνεται στην Ανταρκτική, στην Αλάσκα ή στην Νότια Αμερική. Αυτό που ίσως αλλάξει είναι το επίκεντρο των επιστημονικών ανακαλύψεων. Η Κίνα και η Ινδία διαθέτουν λαμπρούς επιστήμονες και σίγουρα θα καταλάβουν δεσπόζουσα θέση στην παγκόσμια επιστημονική κοινότητα. Αναπόφευκτα η Ευρώπη θα περάσει σε δεύτερη μοίρα εκτός αν προσπαθήσουμε πολύ σκληρά. Αν δεν φτιάξουμε το σύστημα μας, θα μετατραπούμε απλά σε τουριστικό προορισμό και τίποτα παραπάνω. Επιπλέον πιστεύω ότι αν και στην Ευρώπη εδραιώθηκε ο ορθολογισμός, δεν έχουμε καταφέρει να τον περάσουμε στην κοινωνία. Για παράδειγμα πληροφορήθηκα ότι στην Ελλάδα δεν διδάσκεται η θεωρία της εξέλιξης των ειδών στα σχολεία. Αν αυτό ισχύει τότε υπάρχει πρόβλημα. Αντίστοιχα φοβάμαι την άνοδο του φονταμεταλισμού στην Ευρώπη. Η εντύπωση μου είναι ότι οι Κινέζοι εξαιτίας της κουλτούρας τους δεν έχουν ισχυρό θρησκευτικό φονταμεταλισμό, αντίθετα είναι πιο πρακτικοί.

ΓΖ: Πώς θα εξηγούσατε την αβεβαιότητα των επιστημονικών ανακαλύψεων σε ένα κοινό που αναζητά τη βεβαιότητα;
L: Οι άνθρωποι οδηγούν το αυτοκίνητό τους και πιστεύουν ότι σίγουρα θα φτάσουν στον προορισμό τους. Ξαφνικά όμως ένα δέντρο πέφτει στο δρόμο ή σκάει το λάστιχο και τότε… Η βεβαιότητα, το 100%, δεν υπάρχει πουθενά στη φύση γιατί λοιπόν να το απαιτούμε από την επιστήμη;

Interview with Christof Koch

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Christof Koch

Christof Koch

(Christof Koch is one of the most eminent researchers in consciousness studies and a collaborator of the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick. This is an edited transcript of an interview of Christof Koch, taken by George Zarkadakis on April 2004, in Tucson, AZ)

GZ: How would you define the problem of consciousness?

CK: The problem is very difficult to define. We are conscious right now, when you ´re talking to me you are conscious, you can hear things, you can see things, you can remember things, that´ s what we mean by consciousness. It becomes very difficult to define it in more rigorous ways. There is an objective aspect, a feeling aspect, the feeling of being hungry, the feeling of seeing something, of seeing a bird, the feeling of remembering something, because of our conscious sensations. There are many things going in our body that don´ t involve consciousness. I can move my eyes, I can drive a car, I can climb, I can run, all those things bypass consciousness. Where’s the difference in between? To define it right now is not possible. However it is not necessary to define everything rigorously in order to advance. Historically, definitions only happen by hindsight. If you see the history of biology – genes for example – even today it’s not easy to define what’s a gene.GZ: I see parallels between the difficulty of defining life and consciousness. Is there another parallel between the two that we should be aware of.
CK: Depending on which philosophers you believe the problem of life was one of the big problems in early 20th century. People saw no way that chemistry and physics could allow the transmission of information from one generation to next. People said we know chemistry, we know physics, we know there’s no way that all the information that makes you up, your eye color, your height, can be just chemistry. What people didn’t realize was the ability of one dimensional change in macromolecules. They just didn’t know about this so they said well, we probably need new principles. So the lesson here is that we want to be cautious about what’s consciousness is. Many people say we need some fundamental new laws, but perhaps they are wrong, and consciousness can be explained when we discover the neural mechanism that evokes it.GZ:Why is consciousness necessary for life?
CK: It is very difficult to speculate its functions. I mean why do you have only two arms rather than four arms? You can suggest various reasons but it’s difficult to confirm. Human psychology seems to need consciousness. Say there is an earthquake or a fire, you know we have to do something we have never done before, we have to quickly get out, we have to leave the building etc. That’s an unplanned contingency, so that’s what I think we need consciousness for. However for most things that you typically do you do without consciousness.

GZ:You are studying vision. Why so? Why not the hearing system or some other body system?
CK: It’s a tactical decision. I´ m a vision scientist, it’s my own personal interest. Also in vision we’ve learned to do things that are very difficult to do with any other body system, to manipulate the relationship between physical world and its subjective interpretation in a very precise way. We can use these techniques to manipulate the relationship between subjective person and physical stimulus, in order to track the footprints of consciousness in the brain.

GZ:The Holy Grail for neuroscientists is to identify the neural correlate of consciousness. What exactly is that?
CK: It is the minimal set of neural mechanisms that are sufficient for consciousness in a person. Once we have the neural correlate of consciousness we can track what happens in diseases like schizophrenia and autism that intervene with consciousness, what happens in a newborn baby, how do we know that a newborn baby is conscious, or what happens in patients in a coma. Once we have the neural correlate we can begin to tackle these questions in a rigorous way.

GZ: Do you think that the so called “hard problem” will fade away?
CK: Practically speaking, methologically speaking, conceptually speaking, intellectually speaking, it may turn out to be an easy problem. Because of the really difficult problem is that the brain is by far the most complex system in the known universe. We are missing many basic aspects. We don’t understand how very complicated networks of tens of thousands of millions neurons interact with each other. Once you understand this network, you say “oh that’s how it happened!”

GZ: Roger Penrose is suggesting what he calls “platonic realism” and says that consciousness is somehow a fundamental property of the universe and that through quantum effects it is being picked up from the brains and therefore we have qualia. What is your opinion?
CK: Even if you assume quantum gravity to be relevant to the brain it doesn’t really make answer why quantum gravity should solve the hard problem. By involving yet another physical law, not just electromagnetism or chemistry, you introduce just another set of physical laws that do little to solve the mystery. Once you understand the brain as a classical device, then from the energies and the time scales involved, there’ s no evidence of any short of quantum superposition. I will stick with studying the brain as a classical rather than as a quantum system.GZ:Why so many scientists are having a hard time accepting the fact that the brain can be explained?
CK: It depends who you talk to. Biologists, physicists which are not much involved are generally skeptical, but not the neuroscientists that deal with the problem of consciousness. Anyway, I think there are many people on the planet who don’ t want to hear about this kind of research because they are afraid of the picture of humans that may emerge.

GZ: What is like working with Francis Crick?
CK: I continue to work with him. It’s very intense. He’s 87 years old and he’s never seized to stop wondering, he’s never lost his curiosity and he is a person who, more than anybody else, questions every assumption, even his own assumptions.GZ: You do rock climbing. How do you combine consciousness and rock climbing?
CK: Rock climbing is very intense and you have to focus when you do it. So it’s a bit like science, if you do it you are totally absorbed into it, because you cannot afford to do anything else.GZ: Are you an optimist?
CK: Of course I am an optimist.GZ: You think is possible for science to enlighten people or is it a luxury only for an elite?
CK: In the long term science is going to make people healthier, safer and happier, living longer lives, no question about that. This has been happening for the last 2.000 years and I see no reason why shouldn’t continue in the future.

GZ: So why most people read their horoscopes?
CK: You got to ask them if they really believe in the horoscopes. Also many people believe in superstitions, but I don’t think that these things affect dramatically the way we generally think, which is, basically, rational.

An interview with Steven Pinker

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imgresThis is an edited transcript of an interview of Steven Pinker, taken by George Zarkadakis on April 2004 in Tucson, AZ)
GZ: When did language appear?
SP: All human societies have a complex language and no one has ever discovered a tribe in a remote area that lacks language. Thus, it seems likely that it was present in the common ancestors of all humans before the diversion lead to different races and continental groups. So language must have developed at least 60.000 years ago, because that was when, by estimate, the Australian Aborigines first arrived in Australia. It could of course have been earlier than this. A recently discovered gene has been implicated in the disorders of speech and language. This gene has diverged from the corresponding gene in chimpanzees about 200.000 years ago. This must have been one of the genetic events that lead to modern human language. The development of language may have been even earlier than that, because people lacking that gene don’t lack language all together, they are just slower when using it.
GZ: How can a mutant gene “separate” humans from other apes, by means of impeding language? It sounds like a paradox.
SP: The effect of the gene is to delay acquisition of language, to make speech more laboure-intensive and in children easier than in adults. It causes one to make grammatical errors in speech and have difficulties in judgment about grammaticality of sentences, and some difficulties in comprehending complex sentences. It also has some affect in control of the speech muscles, but also when blowing out a candle or sucking on a straw. So, it has a number of effects, as most genes do, but the most dramatic effects are concentrated at speech and language. It ties into the theory in a couple of ways. One is that studies have showed that is a “turn” gene that has gone under modifications in humans compared to the similar gene in chimpanzees and other mammals and moreover these changes have been the result of natural selection rather than random processes.GZ: Why did language develop?
SP: Language allows us to communicate and allows us to negotiate agreements and therefore allows altruism to flourish amongst humans. Biologists tell us that that cooperation among non relatives can only evolve, if there are complex promises which produce a beneficial result and when there is a way to express and accomplish those promises. Language provides such a tool, facilitating social cohesion and organization in humans. Also it’s a way to transfer technology and know-how. You can share experience with your children, you can exchange for other information with other people in your group and so it multiplies the benefit of any kind of technological discovery and lowers the cost. You can acquire some of the necessary skills from other people by having them explaining to you. So, I ´ve always thought that language evolved in tandem with general intelligence, as the ability to figure out how the world works and apply the technology, social cooperation and language. Each one of them makes the other two that much more valuable.GZ: What systems in the brain “produce” language?
SP: Language is a complicated system because it involves a number of components that have to work together. There is the production of language, the control of speech muscles and of course comprehension. So, I think the language system in the brain has to tie together a number of different systems. Most of my research for the last 15 years have contrasted regular morphology, that is for forms like cat-cats, dog-dogs or past tense forms like walk-walked and wait-wait, which are completely predictable and I argue are generated in the mind by a mental algorithm. In contrast irregular forms like bring-brought in the past tense or foot-feet for the plural, are idiosyncratic and have to be retrieved from memory. Now these are the principal systems of language, for expressing combinations of concepts and words and for communicating familiar simple concepts. And they are likely to have a correspondence of systems of the brain that sub serve more general purposes. For example, reading memory is related to vision in general and the algorithm for combining bits of symbols into complex words, or words into phrases. Sentences probably relates to systems for planning and coordination.

GZ: Most research on language and the brain is done on western languages and mostly English. Would you expect differences in results for, say, the Chinese?
SP: I would not expect dramatic differences. I ´ve done some research on a language very close to English, German, which is interesting because they diverged about 600 years ago. By looking the similarities and differences between German and English we construct some of the steps that lead the languages to become different. But then I ´ve also done some research on a language that’s very much unlike English, the Hebrew, which is not an Indo-European language and we found that more or less the same patterns occurred in terms of the logic of the language. Other people have looked at patterns of language loss found on brain damage in Italian. I don’t think that anyone has done it for Chinese yet but I expect it to come out quite similarly.

GZ: How do we acquire language?
SP: My first research work was a detailed theory of how children acquire language. Well, it’s not enough for children to just to listen to the sounds. I think the child has to first of all make a guess to what the parents are intending to say. They do so by means of intuitive psychology. The child correlates the sound signal from ears with the guess of what the parent is saying. It tries to figure out rules that correlate to the meaning encapsulated in the sound. The child has a brain circuitry that tries to analyze the continuous speech sound into words, words into categories like nouns and verbs, and that creates rules that order nouns and verbs and subjective objects in a way that systematically relates to what they mean.

GZ: Some people suggest that certain animals have a kind of language. Do you agree?
SP: I don’t if anyone could successfully argue that animals can have the ability of language. They are neurologically very different than humans.

GZ: What about the songs of the whales or the clicks of dolphins. They suggest some kind of communication through sounds.
SP: Yes, it is certainly communication by sound but not language. Take birds, as another example. There is no way that a particular set of bird sounds maps on to a particular meaning. They seem rather to calls that show of the virtuosity of the singer, mostly used during sexual selection. But they have no meaning.

GZ: What is the future of language in today’s world where English gains dominance over other languages?
SP: I am afraid the situation is very poor. We’re seeing the extinction of languages spoken by indigenous groups in Russia, in Australia and in U.S. In South America languages are becoming extinct at a faster rate than species do. Larger languages, of hundreds of thousands, or millions of speakers, have nothing to fear. English will become increasingly a second language but it’s hard to make predictions because there are two forces working to different directions. On one hand there is the value of having a common language for international activities, science, business and English has become the language of science. On the other hand there’s simply large numbers of people who speak to each other in a different than English language. On top of that there’s the fact that language is a batch of ethnic identity and people are emotionally attached in their language. So even as global media like MTV and CNN spread English there’s also now an attempt for local versions of MTV in the local language. Which of these two trends will be more powerful it’s hard to predict.

Sex with robots: loving the mecha

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This is a summary of a more extended article published on Aeon magazine on March 26th 2013.

Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, delivers us Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor who carves the ivory statue of a perfect woman. He names her Galatea, the “one as white as milk”. The statue is so life-like that Pygmalion falls in love with it/her. He prays to Aphrodite so that the statue may come alive. Pygmalion is a tortured soul. Disillusioned with love he has denied the company of (real) women. He lives a secluded, celibate life. Aphrodite,  goddess of love, grants him his wish, for no mortal has the right to remained unloved. So one night, during the festival of the love-goddess, Pygmalion kisses his perfect creation and the simulacrum comes alive.

Pygmalion and android

Pygmalion giving life with a kiss.

Loving the mecha has haunted European literature ever since. Rousseau, Goethe, Shakespeare borrowed the theme in writings of their own. Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is a reinterpretation of the myth whereby the girl is brought to life by two men in speech, the goal for their masterpiece is for her to marry and become a duchess. The stories of Frankenstein, as well as Pinocchio, also feed from the ancient concept of the metamorphosis of dead matter into a living, feeling, thinking creature.

The advent of cinema, coinciding with the expansion of the industrial revolution, saw Pygmalion’s myth in a new light. No need for divine intervention anymore. Simulacra could now be constructed using machines and machine tools. In the classic 1927 “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang, Galatea  is now a mechanical woman, a simulacrum of living Maria. Her fist task is – what else? – to seduce.  Here’s the classic “dance of Babylon” scene from the film:

In 1982 Ridley Scott introduced us to a future where mechas are part of society. The scene of Zhora the stripper, hunted down by the Blade Runner, and dying by smashing though successive glass windows is an unforgettable ode to human self-destruction.

Zhora on the run

Steven Spielberg, taking up where Stanley Kubrick left, directs and produces AI in 2001. Here too, mechas are used as sex objects. Gigolo Joe, played by Jude Law, is a male prostitute mecha with the ability to mimic love.

Mecha sex workers

Alan Turing would have approved, for how can we really tell if someone loves us? What subtle messages lovers exchange during lovemaking that cannot be copied in a machine? Isn’t it the commonest experience in life the “betrayal” of love? In the imitation game of love there comes a time when all the words and actions shared vanish like dew under a scorching sun; when all that is left is the feeling of being fooled by a lie.

In the future, sex and love would be the first to bind humans and mechas, for only the latter will be able to mimic love so perfectly well as to make it look eternal. And that is exactly what we humans have been seeking all along.

Greece and Europe: a troubled relationship

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On March 25th 2013 I was invited at the Catholic University of Lille to give a lecture on Greece and Europe (see my slides above). My lecture explored some of the ideas in my Washington Post article.

March 25th is Greece’s National Holiday commemorating the Uprising against the Ottoman Empire in 1821. My talk attempted to provide a historical insight to the lack of trust between Greece and Europe. This lack of trust has become evident during the crisis. It plays very strongly nowadays in the Cyprus crisis. Since 2009 German media, and German voters, subscribed to the narrative of Greeks being untrustworthy, liars, lazy, embezzlers of other people’s money, etc.; and that they should be punished. Greek media, and Greek voters, adopted an equally hostile stance against their German “saviors” by portraying Chancellor Merkel as a female impersonation of Hitler and claiming that Greece is under a new German Occupation. This decoherence persists five years later and getting worse. Why?

My talk began by introducing three persons whom I consider important in the different ways that Greeks and Europeans regards each other: East Roman Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, German historian Jakob Philliipp Fallmerayer, and English naturalist Charles Darwin.

I went on explaining the idea of “Hellenism” in archaic and classical Greece; i.e. the idea of a cultural unity of people sharing the same language, religion and customs – and explained how it resembled the modern idea of “nation” but also differed, since for ancient Greeks it made no sense to have a “nation-state”. Greek city-states had a long tradition of fighting with each other.

Alexander changed that by uniting the Greeks and invading the Persian Empire. The result of his expedition was that Hellenism transformed from an exclusive to an inclusive idea: the Near East adopted the Greek language as lingua franca. The Hellenistic era was also responsible for geographically (re)positioning, and lodging, “Hellenism” from the Aegean and “Europe” (Southern Italy and Sicily were as Greek as Asia Minor and Greece proper) in the Near and Middle East and thus away from the West. (Interestingly, Alexander’s next military goal was to attack Rome and expand to the West, but he died before embarking on that plan).

Then came the Romans. In the centuries starting from the sacking of Corinth in 146 BC leading to the closure of the Athens Academy and the cessation of Olympic Games, and all the way to the reign of Emperor Heraclius, Hellenism gradually (and sometime violently) dies. The Eastern Roman Empire becomes a place of Greek-speaking Romans worshiping the One God Jesus. Inhabitants,  rulers and ruled, consider themselves to live in God’s kingdom upon Earth. As the Western Roman Empire is run over by Goths and other barbarians, the Eastern Romans feel that they are the only true descendants of Rome.

The Greek-speaking Roman Emperors of Constantinople get their first great shock that something has changed in the “barbaric” West when Charlemagne becomes Roman Emperor in 800AD. From this point on the Latin-speaking West is seen as an adversary by the Greek-speaking East. Things become progressively worse with Otto the Great’s coronation in 962 AD and arrive at an open, ideological, conflict with the Great Schism of 1054 AD. And then, only a few years later during the reign of Alexius I Comnenus, the First Crusade arrives in the East…

Alexius I Comnenus was the man who convinced the West that “Greeks” were not to be trusted when he failed to support the crusaders during the siege of Antioch. This was not due to Alexius being untrustworthy but because of the different world views between him and his western allies. For Alexius what was important was the integrity of his kingdom; this took precedence before supporting his Christian allies.

Interestingly, by then the West used to call the Eastern Romans “Greeks” not only because of their language but because westerners wanted to diminish easterners; by calling them “Greeks” they suggested that they were not “real Romans”, and not “real Christians”. Alexius’s daughter the historian Anna Comnena, accepted the characterization and turned it on its head: the Eastern Romans were indeed “Greeks”! “Hellenes”! The descendants of ancient Hellenes! Thus Anna, to counteract the rising military and political power of the West rediscovered Hellenism. The “Greeks” of Constantinople, as the Hellenes who founded civilisation, were now once again “superior” to the western barbarians. If there was any love left between East and West it was lost completely in 1204 AD when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and replaced the Greek-speaking monarchy with a Flemish one.

The Greeks reoccupied Constantinople and the Empire survived for a little while longer, till the arrival of the Ottomans in 1453. For the next four hundred years the Ottomans provided a safe haven of the crystallization of Hellenism as the dominant idea of Greek-speaking people within the Ottoman Empire. The antagonism between Greeks and western Europeans was thus further attenuated.

In 1821 Greeks fought for independence and in 1830 a Greek State was created in southern Greece. But who were these “new Greeks” that inhabited it? And how close were they to the ancient Greeks?

The dominant ideology in Europe at the time was race-based, and so the German historian Fallmerayer claimed that the new Greeks were in fact Slavs, Vlachs and Albanians. To oppose this idea Greece developed its national narrative based on race (“genos”); the narrative was institutionalized by the historian Paparigopoulos and persist to this date as the official history that Greek children learn at their school; i.e. that modern Greeks are direct, biological, descendants of ancient Greeks. This narrative is nationalistic, racist and unscientific – as shown by Charles Darwin and proven by evolutionary biology. Not surprisingly, Darwin is only taught at Greek schools as a “selective subject”, and even at Greek Universities biology students learn about evolution in their final year! I therefore consider Darwin important, indeed vitally important to this narrative decoherence, by his omission!

The racist, unscientific, historical narrative of Greece legitimizes the ideology of far-right party Golden Dawn and wins them popular support from Greeks who were taught exactly those things at school. It underpins the rhetoric of every other political force in Greece (excluding libertarians) who views Greece as a “victim” and  ”under occupation”. For most Greeks who suffer a brutal recession “Europe” is once again the un-Christian (i.e. protestant, catholic) barbarian who wants to destroy Greece because of envy.

There can be no relationship of trust between Greece and Europe unless we all understand our history, and our biology, better.