The way the river goes

Vagabond

2012-01-23T07:13:00.000-10:00

"Le Vagabond ne regrettait plus rien. Il ne désirait que l'infinie durée de ce qui était."

"La tête appuyée sur son bras replié, les membres las, il s'abandonnait à la douceur infinie de s'endormir seul, inconnu parmi les hommes simples et rudes, à même la terre, la bonne terre berceuse, en un coin de désert qui n'avait pas de nom et où il ne reviendrait jamais"

Isabelle Eberhardt, Le Vagabond, in Amours nomades.

Science explaining the battle of sexes?

2011-11-29T10:00:00.001-10:00

R. Dawkins takes notice of the comment made in a scientific paper written by Schuster and Sigmund:

Briefly, then, we can draw two conclusions: (a) that the battle of sexes has much in common with predation; and (b) that the behavior of lovers is oscillating like the moon, and unpredictable as the weather. Of course, people didn't need differential equations to notice this before.

Schuster and Sigmund (1981), Coyness, philandering and stable strategies, in Animal Behavior, 29, 186-92. Quoted by R. Dawkins in the note of p. 153 in his 30th anniversary paperback edition of The Selfish Gene.

Self-reference, once again, once again

2011-11-28T18:23:00.001-10:00

Another comment, this time from the biologist Richard Dawkins, that shows that importance of self-reference:

"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 4, The gene machine.

See this post and this one on self-reference. See also the last line of G. Chaitin quoted in this post.

The overly importance of the reference

2011-09-27T07:29:00.000-10:00

Il y a une quinzaine d'années, dans l'examen d'admission au volontariat d'un an, les examinateurs militaires donnèrent pour dictée aux candidats une page sans signature qui, citée dans divers journaux, y fut raillée avec beaucoup de verve et excita la gaieté de lecteurs très lettrés."Où ces militaires, demandait-on, étaient-ils allés chercher des phrases si baroques et si ridicules?"Ils les avaient prises pourtant dans un très beau livre. C'était du Michelet, et du meilleur, du Michelet du plus beau temps. Messieurs les officiers avaient tiré le texte de leur dictée de cette éclatante description de la France par laquelle le grand écrivain termine le premier volume de son Histoire et qui en est un des morceaux les plus estimés. [...] J'ai vu des connaisseurs rire de ce style, qu'ils croyaient celui de quelque vieux capitaine. Le plaisant qui riait le plus fort était un grand zélateur de Michelet. Cette page est admirable, mais, pour être admirée d'un consentement unanime, faut-il encore qu'elle soit signée. Il en va de même de toute page écrite de main d'homme. Par contre, ce qu'un grand nom recommande a chance d'être loué aveuglément.

Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure, Chateaux de cartes.

Savoir ignorer

2011-09-27T07:12:00.001-10:00

Dans la nuit où nous sommes tous, le savant se cogne au mur, tandis que l'ignorant reste tranquillement au milieu de la chambre.

Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure, À Lucien Blahfeld.

Etre beau...et mourir

2011-09-27T07:09:00.000-10:00

J'aurais fait les hommes et les femmes, non point à la ressemblance des grands singes comme ils sont en effet, mais à l'image des insectes qui, après avoir vécu chenilles, se transforment en papillons et n'ont, au terme de leur vie, d'autre souci que d'aimer et d'être beaux."

Anatole France, Le jardin d'Épicure, À Lucien Blahfeld.

L'élégance

2011-08-25T07:24:00.002-10:00

"Tout ce que j'ai appris de lui, c'est que l'élégance est un fruit qui mûrit en silence dans un jardin caché"

Sacha Ramos, Le complot des apparences, Mon mammouth.

Enfants philosophes

2011-08-14T08:03:00.004-10:00

"Rares sont les adultes qui comprennent que tout enfant est, naturellement, un philosophe."

Michel Houellebecq, lettre du 20 février 2008.

"Pourquoi écrivez-vous? Parce qu'on ne peut pas faire l'amour toute la journée. Pourquoi faites-vous l'amour? Parce qu'on ne peut pas écrire toute la journée."

Bernard-Henri Lévy, lettre du 27 mai 2008.

Extraits de Ennemis publics, par Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Not the job of science

2011-07-11T07:19:00.003-10:00

"H. Gomperz, Weltanschauungslebre, II/I (1908), p. 63, points out that a piece of the world, such as a sparrow nervously fluttering about, may be described by the following widely different propositions, each corresponding to a different aspect of it: 'This bird is flying!'--'There goes a sparrow!'--'Look, here is an animal!'--'Something is moving here.'--'Energy is being transformed here.'--'This is not a case of perpetual motion.'--'The poor thing is frightened!' It is clear that it can never be the task of science to attempt the completion of such list which is necessarily infinite."

Karp Popper, The poverty of historicism, note 28 of section 23 "Criticism of holism".

The way to say it matters

2011-04-03T10:27:00.004-10:00

"Ralph Gerard, the neuroscientist, was reminded of a story. A stranger is at a party of people who know one another well. One says, «72», and everyone laughs. Another says, «29», and the party roars. The stranger asks what is going on.

His neighbor said, «We have many jokes and we have told them so often that now we just use a number.» The guest thought he'd try it, and after a few words said, «63». The response was feeble. «What's the matter, isn't this a joke?»
«Oh, yes, that is one of our very best jokes, but you did not tell it well.».

James Gleick, The Information, Chapter 8.

Self-reference, once again

2011-04-03T09:52:00.005-10:00

"The entity being reckoned is fatally entwined with the entity doing the reckoning. As Douglas Hofstadter put it much later, «The thing hinges on getting this halting inspector to try to predict its own behavior when looking at itself trying to predict its own behavior when...» A conundrum that at least smelled similar had lately appeared in physics, too: Werner Heisenberg's new uncertainty principle. When Turing learned about that, he expressed it in terms of self-reference: «It used to be supposed in Science that everything was known about the Universe at any particular moment then we can predict what it will be through all the future... More modern science however has come to the conclusion that when we are dealing with atoms and electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being made of atoms and electrons themselves."

James Gleick, The Information, Chapter 7.

I am still surprised that, although Karl Popper has stated the same thing, there seems to have been little exchange of the same idea between these different scholars.

"Strophes pour se souvenir" de Louis Aragon

2011-02-21T10:42:00.002-10:00

Vous n'avez réclamé la gloire ni les larmes
Ni l'orgue, ni la prière aux agonisants
Onze ans déjà, que cela passe vite onze ans
Vous vous étiez servi simplement de vos armes
La mort n'éblouit pas les yeux des partisans.

Vous aviez vos portraits sur les murs de nos villes
Noirs de barbe et de nuit, hirsutes, menaçants
L'affiche qui semblait une tache de sang
Parce qu'à prononcer vos noms sont difficiles
Y cherchait un effet de peur sur les passants.

Nul ne semblait vous voir Français de préférence
Les gens allaient sans yeux pour vous le jour durant
Mais à l'heure du couvre-feu des doigts errants
Avaient écrit sous vos photos " Morts pour la France"
Et les mornes matins en étaient différents.

Tout avait la couleur uniforme du givre
À la fin février pour vos derniers moments
Et c'est alors que l'un de vous dit calmement:
"Bonheur à tous, bonheur à ceux qui vont survivre
Je meurs sans haine en moi pour le peuple allemand."

"Adieu la peine et le plaisir. Adieu les roses
Adieu la vie. Adieu la lumière et le vent
Marie-toi, sois heureuse et pense à moi souvent
Toi qui vas demeurer dans la beauté des choses
Quand tout sera fini plus tard en Erevan."

"Un grand soleil d'hiver éclaire la colline
Que la nature est belle et que le coeur me fend
La justice viendra sur nos pas triomphants
Ma Mélinée, ô mon amour, mon orpheline
Et je te dis de vivre et d'avoir un enfant."

Ils étaient vingt et trois quand les fusils fleurirent
Vingt et trois qui donnaient le coeur avant le temps
Vingt et trois étrangers et nos frères pourtant
Vingt et trois amoureux de vivre à en mourir
Vingt et trois qui criaient "la France!" en s'abattant.

En souvenir du Groupe Manouchian.

William Kunstler's "terrible myth"

2010-12-28T22:21:00.003-10:00

"And that's the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that's done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him. And therefore society can turn its conscience off and look to other things and other times.

And that's the terrible thing about these past trials is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their death through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich? Legal. Sacco/Vanzetti? Quite legal. The Haymarket defendant? Legal. The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where black men were condemned to death? All legal. Jesus? Legal. Socrates? Legal. And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretence."

William Kunstler

Zurek's improvement of the definition of entropy

2010-10-16T09:38:00.004-10:00

"A potentially important application of algorithmic complexity to physics was proposed by Wojtek Żurek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In order to rid Boltzmann's definition of entropy of its troublesome element of subjectivity, Żurek suggested an almost imperceptible modification of it. Recall that entropy is a measure of missing information about a system. It therefore depends on what an observer happens to know: a smarter being has more information, is missing less, and thus assigns a lower entropy to a system than a more limited creature. To render entropy more objective, Żurek recommended adding a measure of recorded information to that of missing information. The sum of the two remains constant --if you remove data from one column, it reappears in the other. The observant creature thus becomes redundant; only the entries in its notebook or computer memory matter.

But how to access the amount of recorded information? Żurek chose algorithmic complexity as the most natural measure. Accordingly, his new, improved entropy consists of two portions: the conventional entropy as measured by the formula on Boltzmann's tomb, plus a piece that is normally inconceivably tiny, and accounts for the algorithmic complexity of the listing of recorded knowledge about the system. A mathematical description of the size and shape of a vessel containing a gas might be a typical item in the list, while missing information includes the coordinates of a vast number of atoms. Notice that in the hypothetical case that every position and every velocity of every atom is known, the Boltzmann entropy of the system is zero, but the added term --the length of the description of what's known, in binary code-- will be huge, bringing the total entropy back to its previous value. After a hundred years the reek of subjectivity has finally been lifted from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In spite of its cogency, Żurek's improved entropy has not gained much support.

Hans Christian von Baeyer, Information, the new language of science, Chapter 12

Simple. It reminds me of the kinetic and potential energy in adiabatic mechanical system, in which the sum of the two stays constant at all times. I also remember vaguely that the history of the total energy followed the same trajectory than that of entropy; only one portion of the energy was first defined and only when the second portion was defined, the energy became a constant of the system and starting to be accepted with its components, as valid quantities.

Has the Universe finite or infinite complexity?

2010-08-24T18:37:00.004-10:00

"[L]et's now finally discuss whether the physical universe is like π=3.1415926... which only has a finite complexity, namely the size of the smallest program to generate π, or like Ω, which has unadulterared infinite complexity.
Well, if you believe in quantum physics, then Nature plays dice, and that generates complexity, an infinite amount of it, for example, as frozen accidents, mutations that are preserved in our DNA. So at this time most scientists would bet that the universe has infinite complexity, like Ω does. But then the world is incomprehensible, or at least a large part of it will always remain so, the accidental part, all those frozen accidents, the contingent part.
But some people still hope that the world has finite complexity like π it just looks like it has high complexity. If so, then we might eventually be able to comprehend everything, and there is an ultimate TOE [Theory of Everything]! But then you have to believe that quantum mechanics is wrong, as currently practiced, and that all quantum randomness is really only pseudo-randomness, like what you find in the digits of π. You have to believe that the world is actually deterministic, even though our current scientific theories say that it isn't!
[...]Wolfram believes that very simple deterministic algorithms ultimately account for all the apparent complexity we see around us, just like they do in π. He believes that the world looks very complicated, but is actually very simple. There's no randomness, there's only pseudo-randomness. Then nothing is contingent, everything is necessary, everything happens for a reason. [Leibniz!]
[...]
Or perhaps from inside this world we will never be able to tell the difference, only an outside observer could do that."

Gregory Chaitin, Metamath!, Appendix II.

Notice that the last argument has also been mentioned by Karl Popper in his Open Universe (see my review of his book).

The critical reductionist

2010-07-28T19:54:00.005-10:00

[W]e may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of the universe) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics. For even though Monod's suggestion of the uniqueness of life's origin is refutable --by attempts at reduction, to be sure-- it would amount, if true, to a denial of any successful reduction. With this suggestion Monod, who is a reductionist for reasons of method, arrives at the position which, I believe, is the one forced upon us all in the light of our earlier discussion of the reduction of chemistry to physics. It is the position of a critical reductionist who continues with attempted reductions even if he despairs of any ultimate success.Yet it is in going forward with attempted reductions, as Monod stresses elsewhere in his book, rather than in any replacement of reductionist methods by 'holistic ones', that our main hope lies --our hope of learning more about old problems, and of discovering new problems which, in turn, may lead to new solutions, to new discoveries.

Karl Poppper, The Open Universe, Scientific reduction and the essential incompleteness of all science.

Randomness cannot be defined

2010-07-27T19:04:00.004-10:00

"Borel's conclusion is that there can be no one definitive definition of randomness. You can't define an all-inclusive notion of randomness. Randomness is a slippery concept, there's something paradoxical about it, it's hard to grasp. It's all a matter of deciding how much we want to demand. You have to decide on a cut-off, you have to say «enough,» let's take that to be random."

Gregory Chaitin, Meta Math!, Complexity, randomness and incompleteness.

Rooms for letters

2010-07-21T20:02:00.003-10:00

"Writing, a cultural tool, has evolved to make use of the inferotemporal neurons'preference for certain shapes. «Letter shape,», Dehaene writes, «is not an arbitrary cultural choice. The brain constrains the design of an efficient writing system so severely that there is little room for cultural relativism. Our primate brain only accepts a limited set of written shapes."

Oliver Sacks, in A Man of letters, The New Yorker, June 28, 2010.

A naked, sweating animal

2010-07-11T19:02:00.004-10:00

"Actually, Dr. Bramble was surprised to find that all runnning mammals are restricted to the same cycle of take-a-step, take-a-breath. In the entire world, he and David could only find one exception:
You.
«When quadrupeds run, they get stuck in a one-breath-per-locomotion cycle,» Dr. Bramble said. «But the human runners we tested never went one to one. They could pick from a number of different ratios, and generally, preferred two to one.» The reason we're free to pant to our heart's content is the same reason you need a shower on a summer day; we're the only mammals that shed most of our heat by sweating. All the pelt-covered creatures in the world cool off primarily by breathing, which locks their entire heat-regulating system to their lungs. But humans, with our millions of sweat glans, are the best air-cooled engine that evolution has ever put on the market.
«That's the benefit of being a naked, sweating animal,» David Carrier explains. «As long as we keep sweating, we can keep going.»

Christopher McDougall, Born to run, Chapter 28.

The secret of the Tarahumara

2010-06-29T19:12:00.004-10:00

"That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle-behold, the Running Man."

Christopher McDougall, Born to run, Chapter 15.

"When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever."

Tarahumara's saying.

Mzoli's Meat

2010-04-28T16:00:00.004-10:00

The South African "township". This is a term that triggers in me mixed feelings and images. The home of most black South Africans. The home of matchbox houses and dirt roads. No sanitation, high unemployment, poverty, violence. Yet, the township is also the historical battleground of the freedom fighters; the place where oppression was met with resistance, where hope vanquished the infamous apartheid. Is this a place that I can visit as a citizen of the world, a place where I can feel welcome? Tomorrow, I am going to the "township".

Allen picks me up around three in the afternoon. It is hot and suffocating on this Sunday in Cape Town. I met Allen a couple of days ago. A waiter during the day, business student at night, his energetic naivety is enticing.

We drive for about half an hour to the outskirts of Cape Town. The air here becomes breathable. Allen is naming for me the various townships that we are passing. Some townships still look like those of the apartheid days with the electric poles as the only sign of improvement. Yet, these townships are doomed to disappear entirely according to Allen, and, although the process is slow, there is indeed some progress. Matchbox houses are being replaced by houses with concrete walls. Littering is becoming a thing of the past. Roads are being paved.

We come to a crossroad which is suddenly busy with cars and people. The place is not conspicuous. No tall building to signal it. But the electricity in the air is palpable, which tells me this is the place to be on this Sunday afternoon. Hundreds of people are crowding in a space no more than a hundred feet long. This is multiplied by the dozens of sport cars and motorbikes weaving through the crowd and whose engine rages “I'm here, I'm here”. My first impression is this must be a giant party spread over several blocks. But I am wrong. It is only a single block that vibrates. And it all revolves around "Mzoli's Meat".

Mzoli's Meat is, technically, a butchery. They offer a wide variety of meat. All sorts: beef, chicken, lamb, steaks, ribs, sausages. Because I do not eat meat often and it has been over ten years since I've been to my favourite French butcher, I am a little taking aback. Allen chooses the meat which is put in a large bowl. Seventy rand, about ten dollars. Not too bad. We then walk swiftly into a long and dark corridor, at the end of which we find the heart of the Mzoli's Meat: the barbecue.

The barbecue occupies two rooms of unequal size. Both rooms are dark, hot, full of smoke that barely escapes through small but wide windows located just below the ceiling. The service is a rare example of organized chaos. At first, it looks like it is a complete mess. People are yelling. Bowls of meat are being passed from hands to hands, more out of exasperation than out of any rational decision. A tiny piece of paper with your name on it is left on the side of the bowl. The juice of meat holds it in place. This is the only evidence that this meat is yours. The boss comes in once a while to yell at everybody. At that time, everybody becomes quiet, employees and customers; even the fire stops crackling. Then, quickly, chaos regains control. Watching this scene for some time, I realize the crowd of customers is constant; in the frenzy, bowls of meat are constantly being handed to the sweaty and exhausted customers who can finally leave and enjoy the party. As they leave, new hungry faces enter. Meats are flowing through the building; they enter cold and fresh and exit cooked and juicy. On this day, though, Allen and I are not so lucky. Our meat gets lost, and it takes us two hours before seeing it again. For the record, let's say that we are the exception that confirms the rule.

The real party is outside. There are about thirty tables under a green mezzanine, not enough to accommodate the crowd that spills onto the road. A DJ in the corner keeps the rhythm of the party alive, as if the people's pulses, waves of excitement and drunkenness are not enough. Allen and I succeed to make our way through and find a semi-quiet spot where we can finally enjoy our well deserved food.

We dance, talk, and eat for hours. Even once the sun is set, the butchery closed, the DJ mute, the street keeps rocking. A neighbour restaurant has taken the lead in blasting the music. It is dark now and feels like a nightclub under the stars. It is time for Allen and I to go home.

This Sunday's afternoon, in the township, all of my fears were laid to rest. I was welcome with warmth, smiles and happiness. Another victory of humanity.

(thanks to Anthony Dachille for the editing)

La France, terre d'accueil?

2010-04-25T16:22:00.004-10:00

"Si la France ne figure plus parmi ce qu'on appelle les Grands, il lui reste encore un moyen pour s'imposer à l'histoire: c'est d'être le dernier pays où l'homme exilé, désolé, désespéré, recontrera, sans qu'il ne lui soit posé de questions, une main qui se tende à lui, un foyer où refaire sa vie."

Emmanuel Mounier, Combat, 11 Mai 1946.

Schumpeter and democracy

2010-03-14T03:56:00.000-10:00

"To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian."

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

The grand cause of the economic crisis

2010-01-16T12:00:00.006-10:00

The grand cause of the economic crisis, according to French economist Pierre Larrouturou (Le Monde, Jan. 13, 2010) and Raghuram Rajan (University of Chicago, cited in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010), is that since the end of the 70s, salary income has increased slower than the cost of living, triggering an increase in the use of credit:

"Rajan argues that the initial causes of the breakdown were stagant wages and rising inequality. With the purchasing power of many middle-class households lagging behind the cost of living, there was an urgent demand for credit. The financial industry, with encouragement from the government, responded by supplying home-equity loans, subprime mortgages, and auto loans. (Notwithstanding the government's involvement, this is ultimately a traditional Chicago argument: in response to changing economic circumstances, the free market provided financial products that people wanted.) The side effects of unrestrained credit growth turned out to be devastating--a possibility that most economists had failed to consider."

John Cassidy, The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010.

John Cassidy makes here an important point within the parenthesis: the government, as any individual, is part of the market and reacts, as rationally as it can, to the course of the economy. More than that; the government did not prevent the course of the free market and even facilitated it by allowing easier access to credit. Simply single-handling the government as the source of the problem seems then to fall short of the whole story.

But what caused the start of the imbalance between cost of living and income at the end of the 70s and disrupted the Keynesianism equilibrium of the post-War years? Neither of the two articles explain this. Was it the oil crisis? The rise of Reaganism? A combination of both?

To be human is to know our own limits and the limits of our environment

2010-01-01T13:38:00.004-10:00

"That human limitlessness is a fantasy means, obviously, that its life expectancy is limited. There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.

This constraint, however, is not the condemnation it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans—that is, as animals (if the word still applies) capable of living not only within natural limits but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “watershed” or “place.” But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.

[...]

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.

[...]

We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy, ever-changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of living."

Wendell Berry, Faustian economics, Harper, cited in The Best American Essays 2009.

Science cannot prove that a theory is true. Is this true?

2009-12-17T22:45:00.006-10:00

I would like to discuss the notion, developed by Karl Popper, that science can only disprove a theory. I remember reading somewhere that if a theory is proven wrong, then the complementary theory is actually being proven right, which would then contradict the claim that no theory whatsoever can be proven right.

Let's take an example, the climate, not only because the conference on climate change in Copenhague in on this week, but also because it is the system that I am the most familiar with. Say, a theory states that El-Niño is caused by wind bursts in the western Pacific. As long as observations show that wind bursts do occur before the start of El-Niño, you are only observing the facts that the timing of the events might be related but you are not proving that the wind bursts do cause El-Niño. Each can independently be caused by something else. However, if one year, there is no wind burst but an El-Niño, then you are proving that El-Niño is not caused, at least not all the time, by wind bursts. In this case, we have proven that the theory "wind bursts do not always cause El-Niño" is true.

The difference between the two theories is that the first one is a predicting theory which is supposed to work all the time, while the second is not; in other words, the first one is useful, not the second. To prove a predicting theory, you need to prove that the causation works all the time but because the world is infinite and open to the future, you can never prove it absolutely. The more the theory succeeds the tests, the more likely it is, but that is it, no certainty. However, to prove a non-predicting theory, only one example suffices, which we have done above. And so here is the crux of the argument: Formal definitions of theory do include that a theory should be able to perform predictions. So the second "theory" above is actually not a theory. And so yes, indeed, science cannot prove that a theory is true but it can prove other things!

Murakami's small lesson

2009-12-13T10:34:00.003-10:00

"To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don't necessarily end up so."

Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about running, Chapter 9.

L'Allemagne et l'identité nationale

2009-12-10T08:23:00.006-10:00

Christian Estrosi, un parlementaire français, vient récemment de commenter que si l'Allemagne s'était posée la question de l'identité nationale, le Nazisme n'aurait pas existé. Ce commentaire est une distortion de l'Histoire. Même si on ne peut pas faire un lien directe entre la pensée Allemande du 18e et 19e et le Nazisme du 20e, et rendre pour responsable Herder, Goethe et Nietzsche (meme si Heidegger était lui-même un Nazi), il est en revanche faux de dire que l'Allemagne n'a pas participé à la question de son identité. Au contraire! Pendant plus d'un siècle, sous l'emprise d'abord d'un empereur-dictateur, puis envahie par un autre empereur-dictateur, Napoléon, un derivé malheureux de la Révolution Française, l'Allemagne n'a cessé de se poser cette question. Heder a été l'un des premiers a exprimé le plus clairement cette question et a posé les fondations d'une philosophie où le peuple Allemand peut enfin s'épanouir et definir une identité specifique au sein même d'un environnement universalisant.

Dans cette thèse de Cambridge (en Anglais), même si l'auteur démontre qu'il y a une cassure dans la pensée Allemande avec le Nazisme, il ne peut pas ignorer ce grand débat de l'identité nationale qui a fait vibrer l'Allemagne (lisez en particulier le lien "II.The Great Debate" de son introduction).

Restons fidèle à l'Histoire.

The psyche of the writer

2009-12-06T21:00:00.006-10:00

"There's a widely held view that by living an unhealthy lifestyle a writer can remove himself from the profane world and attain a kind of purity that has artistic value. [...]
Basically I agree with the view that writing novels is an unhealthy type of work. When we set off to write a novel, when we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place. [...]
So from the start, artistic activity contains elements that are unhealthy and antisocial. I'll admit this. This is why among writers and other artists there are quite a few whose real lives are decadent or who pretend to be antisocial. I can understand this. Or, rather, I don't necessarily deny this phenomenon. [...]
But those of us hoping to have long careers as professional writers have to develop an autoimmune system of our own that can resist the dangerous (in some cases lethal) toxin that resides within. Do this, and we can more efficiently dispose of even stronger toxins. In other words, we can create even more powerful narratives to deal with these. But you need a great deal of energy to create an immune system and maintain it over over a long period. You have to find that energy somewhere, and where else to find it but in our own basic physical being?
[...]
To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That's my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. [...] The healthy and the unhealthy are not necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. They don't stand in opposition to each other, but rather complement each other, and in some cases even band together."

Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about running, Chapter 5.

About the complexity of financial markets

2009-10-30T07:32:00.003-10:00

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

Henry Ford.

In Michael Moore's last movie, Capitalism: A love story, two important arguments were made about the complexity of financial markets: (1) the smartest students do not become any more engineers or scientists, but go work for financial companies (or become lawyers), (2) where they use their intelligence to create financial products and derivatives that a handful of people only can understand.

Following the idea of Darwin's evolution, there is a strong incentive for having the mechanisms of financial markets to be purposely muggy and incomprehensible. As Henry Ford recognizes, if the rest of us would understand, there would be a revolution. This hidden complexity does not do any good to the rest of the society, whatever your own economic or social values are. This needs to be changed.

Comment on reductionism by K. Popper

2009-10-17T08:33:00.001-10:00

"As a philosophy, reductionism is a failure. From the point of view of method, the attempts at detailed reductions have led to one staggering success after another, and its failures have also been most fruitful science."

K. Popper, in Scientific reduction and the essential incompleteness of all science, section IX, an addendum to The Open Universe.

See my review of his book.

Free will according to K. Popper

2009-10-17T08:30:00.002-10:00

"We are 'free' (or whatever you want to call it), not because we are subject to chance rather than to strict natural laws, but because the progressive rationalization of the world--the attempt to catch the world in the net of knowledge--has limits, at any moment, in the growth of knowledge itself which, of course, is also a process that belongs to the world.

Rational action without foreknowledge--of a scientific, a hypothetical, kind at least---is impossible; and it is this very same foreknowledge which turns out to be so limited as to leave room for action--that is, for 'free' action."

K. Popper, in The Open Universe, section 23.

See my review of his book.

Role of science according to K. Popper

2009-10-17T08:18:00.004-10:00

"The method of science depends upon our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification--the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit."

K. Popper, The Open Universe, section 15.

See my review of his book.

Victor Hugo and the death penalty

2009-09-16T18:44:00.002-10:00

"Que dit la loi ? « Tu ne tueras pas ». Comment le dit-elle ? En tuant !"

"You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why? Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by means of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "thou shalt not kill"? By killing."

Victor Hugo

Market, People and Happiness

2009-08-29T12:52:00.003-10:00

The Market was invented to make the People Happy.
The People are now oppressed to keep the Market Happy.

Have you been reading one unique book?

2009-08-10T21:52:00.003-10:00

Italo Calvino plays with his readers and allows several fictional readers to express their views on why and how they read. This one wonders if all the books he has been reading are not just part of one single grand book...

"Chaque nouveau livre que je lis vient s'insérer dans le livre complexe, unitaire, qui forme la somme de mes lectures. Cela ne se produit pas sans effort: pour composer ce livre général, chaque livre particulier doit se transformer, entrer en rapport avec les livres lus précédemment, en devenir le corollaire, le développment, la réfutation, la glose ou le texte de référence. Depuis des années, je fréquente cette bibliothèque et je l'explore volume après volume, rayon après rayon, et pourtant je pourrais vous demontrer que je n'ai rien fait d'autre que d'avancer dans la lecture d'un livre unique."

Italo Calvino, Si par une nuit d'hiver un voyageur, XI.

Sounds familiar, is not it?

Radical reductionism, by Italo Calvino

2009-08-10T21:29:00.006-10:00

"En me promenant le long de la Grande Perspective de notre ville, j'efface mentalement les éléments que j'ai décidé de ne pas prendre en considération. Je passe devant le siège d'un ministère, un palais à la façade surchargée de cariatides, colonnes, balustrades, moulures, corniches et métopes, et je ressens le besoin de la réduire à une surface lisse verticale, une lame de verre opaque, un diaphragme qui découpe l'espace sans faire obstacle à la vue. Même ainsi simplifiée, le palais continue de me peser dessus, de m'oppresser: je décide de l'abolir complètement; à sa place, un ciel couleur de lait plane sur la terre nue. J'efface de la même façon cinq ministères, trois banques et deux gratte-ciel, sièges de grandes sociétés. Le monde est si complexe, si embrouillé, si surchargé que pour y voir un peu clair il est nécessaire d'élaguer, d'élaguer."

Italo Calvino, Si par une nuit d'hiver un voyageur, Quelle histoire attend là-bas sa fin?

This reminds me of this quote by painter Georgia O'Keeffe:

"Nothing is less real than realism. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meanings of things."

Plurality of values

2009-08-02T13:41:00.004-10:00

There are conservatives and progressives,
There are Black and Whites,
There are women and men,
Spiritualists and materialists,
There are optimistic and pessimistic people,
There are rich and poor people,
There are doctors and engineers,
Lawyers and workers.

There are black engineers,
There are rich spiritualists and pessimistic women doctor,
There are white progressive lawyers and asian conservative workers,
There are poor optimistic materialists and rich pessimistic spiritualists.

Society is rich. People reflect all the dimensions of life.
None of us resemble to any.
The links that join people with the same value form an intermingled and complicated web that extends over a multidimensional world.

There is no one Party. There are not just two parties.
The people you agree today, you would disagree tomorrow.

This is the respect we need to realize.
To avoid one group of people to focus the entire political life of a country around a couple of issues, to constantly dig deep ditches, destroy bridges and fantasying that half of the country agree with them on everything.

Only by realizing this richness, and respect this richness, that we will finally get out the constant inertia and bitterness of political fights and move along toward a better world.

The tale of the two writers

2009-08-02T12:56:00.005-10:00

This is an excerpt (in french) of Italo Calvino, Si par une nuit d'hiver un voyageur (If on a winter's night a traveler). The book is one of the smartest book I read. So many books could be written in 5 or 10 pages (or lines!). This book, however, is so rich and full of intrigues in comparison. A must read!

I named this excerpt, The tale of the two writers:

"Deux écrivains, habitants deux chalets sur les versants opposés d'une vallée, s'observent a tour de rôle. L'un des deux a l'habitude d'écrire le matin, l'autre l'après-midi. Le matin et l'après-midi, celui des écrivains qui n'écrit pas braque sa longue-vue sur celui qui écrit.

L'un des deux est un écrivain productif, l'autre un écrivain tourmenté. L'écrivain tourmenté regarde l'écrivain productif remplir des pages de lignes uniformes, et le manuscrit monter en pile de feuillets bien rangés. D'ici peu, le livre sera terminé: sans nul doute un nouveau roman à succès --c'est ce que pense l'écrivain tourmenté avec une pointe de dédain mais avec envie. [...] L'écrivain tourmenté donnerait cher pour ressembler à l'écrivain productif; il voudrait bien le prendre pour modèle; son plus grand désir est désormais de devenir semblable à lui.

L'écrivain productif observe l'écrivain tourmenté tandis que celui-ci s'assied à sa table, se ronge les ongles, se gratte, déchire une feuille, se lève pour aller à la cuisine et s'y prépare un café, puis un thé, puis une camomille, lit un poème de Hölderlin (bien qu'il soit clair que Hölderlin n'a auncun rapport avec ce qu'il est en train d'écrire), recopie une page déjà écrite et puis la barre ligne après ligne, [...] déchire deux pages, met un disque de Ravel. L'écrivain productif n'a jamais aimé les oeuvres de l'écrivain tourmenté: à les lire, il a toujours l'impression d'être au bord de saisir un point decisif et puis voilà que celui-ci lui s'échappe et tout ce qui lui reste est un sentiment de malaise. Mais à present qu'il le regarde écrire, il sent que cet homme se bat avec quelque chose d'obscur, de noué, cherche à se frayer une route dont on ne sait où elle conduit; parfois, il a l'impression de le voir marcher sur une corde tendue au-dessus du vide et il se sent pris d'un sentiment d'admiration. Pas seulement d'amiration: aussi d'envie; parce qu'il sent bien que son propre travail est limité et superficiel par rapport à ce que l'écrivain tourmenté recherche.

Sur la terrasse d'un chalet, au fond de la vallée, une jeune femme prend le soleil en lisant un livre. Les deux écrivains l'observent à la longue-vue. «Comme elle est absorbée, comme elle retient son souffle! Avec quelle fébrilité elle tourne les pages! pense l'écrivain tourmenté. Elle lit surement un livre à sensation, comme ceux de l'écrivain productif!» «Comme elle est absorbée, presque transfigurée par la meditation, on dirait qu'elle assiste à la révélation d'un mystère! pense l'écrivain productif. Elle lit sûrement un livre riche de sens cachés, comme ceux de l'écrivain tourmenté!»

Le plus grand désir de l'écrivain tourmenté serait d'être lu comme lit la jeune femme. Il se met à écrire un roman écrit comme il pense écrirait l'écrivain productif. Cependant, le plus grand désir de l'écrivain productif serait d'être lu comme la jeune femme; il se met à écrire un roman écrit comme il pense que l'écrivait l'écrivain tourmenté.

L'un des deux écrivains, puis l'autre, entre en rapport avec la jeune femme. Chacun lui dit qu'il voudrait lui faire lire le roman qu'il vient juste de terminer.

La jeune femme reçoit les deux manuscripts. Quelques jours plus tard, elle invite les deux auteurs chez elle, ensemble a leur grande surprise.
- Mais qu'est-ce-que c'est que cette plaisanterie? dit-elle, vous m'avez donné deux exemplaires du meme roman!
Ou bien:
La jeune femme confond les deux manuscripts. Elle rend au productif le roman que le tourmenté a écrit à la manière du productif et au tourmenté le roman que le productif a écrit à la manière du tourmenté. Tous deux, en se voyant plagiés, ont une violente réaction et retrouvent leur manière propre.
Ou bien:"

...read the rest!

Le prisonnier, le gardien et la visiteuse

2009-07-30T19:17:00.003-10:00

"Chaque mercredi la demoiselle parfumée me donne un billet de cent couronnes pour que je la laisse seule avec le prisonnier. Et le jeudi, les cent couronnes s'est sont déjà allées en bière. Quand l'heure de la visite est passée, la demoiselle sort avec sur ses vêtements élégants la puanteur de la prison; le détenu retourne dans sa cellule avec sur ses vêtements de galérien le parfum de la demoiselle. Moi, il me reste l'odeur de la bière. La vie n'est qu'un échange d'odeurs."

Italo Calvino, Si par une nuit d'hiver un voyageur, Penchée au bord de la côte escarpée.

"Biology Is Just a Dance" by Brian Goodwin

2009-07-27T22:07:00.004-10:00

Here are some interesting extracts from an on-line article by Brian Goodwin published in Edge who past away recently:

"Will biology join up with physics, take on its flavor, have this notion of rules, organization, regularity, order? The new movement is transforming biology from a historical science, which is what it is at the moment, the objective of Darwinism being to reconstruct the history of life on Earth. Well, that's not the style of physics. Physics is about laws, the principles of organization of matter. We're doing the same thing in biology; we're looking for the principles of organization, the dynamics of the living process. Once that's understood, you're in a position to say, "Ah! History followed such and such a course in expressing and revealing the subtle order in this particular type of organization of matter we call the living state." Thus, the first thing is to understand the living state."

"The small-scale variation and the detailed adaptation of organisms to their habitats are very well explained by neo- Darwinism, but the global problem, the large-scale evolutionary problem, is unsolved. How do you get evolutionary novelty? Emergent order? The difference between squids and fishes and penguins. That's what the science of complexity is beginning to address — to demonstrate how emergent qualities can develop out of complexity, so that you get the emergence of order. The difficulty is making the theoretical work connect with the biological evidence. Most of the modeling currently done on computers is still very abstract, and there's not a lot of detailed evidence as to how that translates into what actually goes on in organisms."

So, what are the main tangible results so far?

You can read the entire article on the Edge website.

Humble models

2009-07-06T17:23:00.012-10:00

David Orrell got his PhD from the University of Oxford on the modelling of nonlinear systems. Although he got it only in 2000, he earned some authority and describes us in his book, The future of everything, his point of view of the failure of present models to predict correctly anything, from the weather to the economy.

His main argument is composed of two points. First, he notices that natural systems are like some theoretical systems that are called automata systems: they are systems based on a set of local interacting rules. Among the three classes of automata systems, one is composed of uncomputable systems: there is no way to speed up the calculation and the only way to know the future of the systems is to run the model.

The problem, which is his second point, is that we are not and may never use the right set of rules. All known models have some kind of parameterization of the processes that are not modelled -because we do not model from the atom to a society. The additional difficulty is that models of natural systems are like natural systems, full of feedbacks, which make them highly sensitive to any parameterization. They don't even have to be chaotic to be completely wrong:

"By varying a handful of parameters within apparently reasonable bounds, we can get a single climate model to give radically different answers"

David Orrell, The future of everything, Chapter 8.

And thus, we might never be able to predict the future as Laplace dreamed of:

"Lack of predictability is a deep property of life. Any organism that is too predictable in its behaviour will die. And in an unpredictable environment, the ability to act creatively, while maintaining a kind of dynamic internal order, is a prerequisite. The balance of positive and negative feedback loops, when combined with the computational irreducibility of life processes, makes the behaviour of complex life forms impossible to accurately model. The problem is not that such organisms are erratic, but that they combine creativity with control. House plants are quite stable (they tend to stay in their pots and don't suddenly walk off to join the forest), but it would still be impossible to predict the exact effect of moving a single plant from a shaded spot to a warm greenhouse, based only on a detailed understanding of its biochemistry. If we can't do it for a plant, we can't do it for a planet. Life, it seems, evolves toward rich, complex structures, which defy simplistic analysis."

David Orrell, The future of everything, Chapter 8.

Thus, should we even bother to try to predict? The answer is yes because although the models are wrong, they are one way to try to predict the future. What the authors try to put a term is on the confidence, and at times arrogance, of modellers. They should be the first to recognize that their models are not perfect and, on top of it, are not that objective at all -the models are full of assumptions that are, after careful look, just a set of subjective views of the world hidden behind technical terms. Thus, the author would like some kind of balance: between the objective ways to predict the future and the subjective ones:

"Objectivity and subjectivity must be in balance, and inform each other, just like the positive and negative feedbacks loops that characterize living systems. We will choose to protect nature only if we value it -and not just as an object, but because it is alive. The only way we will respect it is if we understand that we cannot control it.
In non-linear, complex systems, change often happens abruptly, like water turning to ice. Extreme change is normal. This makes prediction difficult, but it also holds out tremendous hope, because it means that a sudden change in course can be expected. Such change often comes from the bottom up, rather than the top down [...]. Unlike deterministic mechanical systems, we have a choice; we can determine our own destiny. We are not slaves to the initial condition, our genes, or the efficient market. We are unpredictable, and that's not a bad thing.
The science of complexity will not build a better GCM [General Circulation Model], and neither Gaia theory or earth system science. Their stories are more of humility than of human ingenuity. But if we as a species are standing at a precipice, it is better that we see the world feelingly than be completely blinded by our mental models; that we know what we do not know. Creativity often emerges from a state of uncertainty. Grasping for illusory knowledge by over-modelling our environment is therefore part of the problem.
[...]
Mathematical models will always be indispensable. Like language, they are a way to understand the world, and organize and communicate our thoughts. They help us perform hypothetical experiments, explore possible scenarios, and expose fragilities. Most of all, they help us comprehend what is happening now."

David Orrell, The future of everything, Chapter 8, italics are mine.

Thus, modellers, keep doing the good work. But please, drop the certainty and try to be more humble.

Notes from The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock

2009-06-20T20:28:00.010-10:00

First, let's start with a word of wisdom:

"The young usually find the constraints of convention too heavy to escape, except as part of a cult. The middle-aged have no time to spare from the conservative business of living. Only the old can happily make fools of themselves."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, Introductory.

The second point concerns entropy and the fact that has become more and more obvious to me recently, that for any achievement, from the construction of a building to that of an idea, waste is unavoidable and this waste represents the entropy that needs to be rejected for the achievement to be meaningful, to be out of the ordinary and randomness:

"You, as you read these words, are creating entropy by consuming oxygen and the fats and sugars stored in your body. As you breathe, you excrete waste products high in entropy into the air, such as carbon dioxide, and your warm body emits to your surroundings infrared radiation high in entropy. If your excretion of entropy is as large or larger than your internal generation of entropy, you will continue to live and remain a miraculous, improbable, but still legal avoidance of the second law of the Universe. «Excretion of entropy» is just a fancy way of expressing the dirty words excrements and pollution. [...] We animals pollute the air with carbon dioxide, and the vegetation pollutes it with oxygen. The pollution of one is the meat of another. Gaia [Planet Earth] is more subtle and, at least until humans appeared, polluted the region of the Solar System with no more than the gentle warmth of infrared radiation."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, What is Gaia?

I will write, tomorrow, "Entropy" on the side of my garbage cans.

We keep going with an issue concerning the stability of a system and its level of complexity. Is the more complex a system, the more stable? This is, from what I have heard still a controversial issue. In his book, James Lovelock agrees with the theoretical ecologist, Robert May: the more complex a system, the more fragile and unstable and inversely. This goes maybe against the naive assumption that if a system has a greater diversity, it has a greater chance to handle external perturbation. But May's mathematics prove the contrary: "increasing complexity makes for dynamical fragility rather than robustness". Thus, "the complex natural ecosystems currently under siege in the tropics and subtropics are less able to withstand our battering than are the relatively simple temperate and boreal systems." (R. May, in Theoretical Ecology, cited in The Ages of Gaia, Exploring Daisyworld)

In the chapter Middle Ages, James Lovelock mentions an extraordinary theory that Earth biosphere would be responsible in part to...the plate tectonics:

"The geologist Don Anderson has speculated that the deposition of limestone on the ocean floor [via, for instance, the dying and sinking of Coccolithophores and the burying of their calcium shells] is a key factor in the motion of the Earth's crust. He proposed that sometime far back in the Earth's history, sufficient limestone was deposited to alter the chemical composition of the crustal rocks of the ocean floor near the continental margins. As a result an event, called the basalt-eclogite phase transition by geologists, took place. This transition so altered the physical properties of the crustal rocks that it became possible for the great machinery of plate movement to begin turning."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, The Middle Ages.

This theory would explain why plate tectonics are not a universal properties of the planets. I have no idea, however, if this idea has been dropped or is still alive. More reading will be needed. But fascinating idea nonetheless.

I will finish on an improved definition of Gaia's theory, that also gives some explanation on the origin of the interaction between the biosphere and its environment. James Lovelock, himself, has corrected a previous definition of Gaia's theory and has re-defined it in his book as follows:

"Living organisms and their material environment are tightly coupled. The coupled system is a superorganism, and as it evolves there emerges a new property, the ability to self-regulate climate and chemistry."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, Gaia since 1988.

In this definition, the co-evolution of the biosphere and its environment is the key to explain why the self-regulation of the system is a likely property. I know that there is a lot of criticisms against Gaia, even with this improved definition. Although I am also a bit skeptical, I am wondering why there is no such criticism relative to the thermal regulation of mammals. In this case as well, it should be hard to believe that cells can organize at such a higher level that the whole system succeeds in regulating its temperature. If such feast is possible for an organism, given the geological time over which evolution is working, why not for the Earth's system as well?

Einstein's empirical creed

2009-06-10T08:10:00.006-10:00

Max Born, in his Physics in my generation, reports Einstein's empirical creed:

"Concepts which have been proved to be useful in ordering things easily acquire such an authority over us that we forget their human origin and accept them as invariable. Then they become 'necessities of thought','given a priori', etc. The path of scientific progress is then, by such errors, barred for a long time. It is therefore no useless game if we are insisting on analysing current notions and pointing out on what conditions their justification and usefulness depends, especially how they have grown from the data of experience. In this way their exaggerated authority is broken. They are removed, if they cannot properly legitimate themselves; corrected, if their correspondence to the given things was too negligently established; replaced by others, if a new system can be developed that we prefer for good reasons."

quoted in Physics in my generation, Einstein's statistical theories.

Those are the conditions necessary to the evolutionary march of ideas. I also like the comment that ideas are and will always be of human origin, simple, beautiful and the counterpart, inexact. In such, they are formations of the brain to make nature more understandable to our eyes; but they are not nature itself.

View on Einstein on the determinism of nature

2009-06-10T08:03:00.004-10:00

Max Born, in his book Physics in my generation, relates Einstein's view on the determinism of nature:

"His conviction seems always to have been, and still is today, that the ultimate laws of nature are causal and deterministic, that probability is used to cover our ignorance if we have to do with numerous particles, and that only the vastness of this ignorance pushes statistics into the forefront."

Max Born, Physics in my generation, Einstein's statistical theories.

Now, nobody says that Einstein was always right. Indeed, the development of quantum mechanics went in the opposite direction to Einstein's view.

Comparison of Bush and Obama's speeches on Middle East

2009-06-04T10:53:00.004-10:00

I watched yesterday Obama's speech on the Middle East and found it courageous and fair. But am I objective, given that I am a strong Obama's fan? I found an old speech given by Bush that is revealing. Here is a comparison of the two speeches:

From my own account, I find Bush's approach to the issues aggressive, lesson-giving and most of all, lacking self-criticism. His description of the concepts of democracy and freedom are striking examples and are reminiscent of his own dual vision of the world: "we are the greatest, sorry; follow us or go to hell". I am not even sure I am being unfair here.

Notice also how he is not shy of critics of his "enemies". The issue of education at the beginning of the video is the perfect example of how to hurt an entire people: "[...] with primary schools teaching basic skills such as reading and math [rather than?] indoctrinating children with ideology of hatred." Unfair and completely counter-productive.

The "invisible hand" needs a hand

2009-02-18T09:00:00.003-10:00

Alan Greenspan, one of the chief advocate of laissez-faire capitalism over the past decade, has formally accepted the idea that nationalization of banks might be needed to help to overcome the present financial and economic crisis. Not that I think nationalized industries are competing better. I just appreciate and respect when one recognizes the limits and weaknesses of its own system and trends to a more balanced view of the world.

A bridge in the Khyber Pass has been blown up

2009-02-03T16:57:00.005-10:00

The Khyber Pass is a strategic and historic pass that links Pakistan to Afghanistan. As Paddy Docherty describes in his wonderful book (see my review), the pass has seen History passing through since Alexander the Great. Today, the role of the pass has not diminished.

Yesterday, a bridge in the Khyber Pass has been blown up, cutting the main road of supply to NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Across the scientific fields

2009-01-21T21:56:00.004-10:00

Philip Anderson argues that although reductionism is the effective way to do science, it does not necessarily lead to an understanding of the whole:

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe."

P. Anderson, More is different, in Science (1972), vol. 177.

For him, science is fundamental not only at the level of particles but also at every higher and more complex levels: an object, a fluid, an ocean, a body, a society, Earth, the Universe:

"The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other."

P. Anderson, More is different, in Science (1972), vol. 177.

This point of view of science(s) has also been recently expressed by Edward O. Wilson in his book Consilience. and Ian Stewart in his book Does God play dice?.

Is religion the root of all evils?

2009-01-21T09:03:00.003-10:00

These days, surely and rightfully because of the attacks on science by advocates of intelligent design, a wave of essays have attacked strongly religions. We can also find regularly essays that give the feeling that if religions would be wiped out on Earth, wars, ignorance, murders would go away with them.

I am a bit uncomfortable with that idea. Yes, religion has proven, more so in that far past than during the twentieth century, that it can kill a lot of people. The problem with that interpretation is that in many cases, religion was the fuel, the catalysis, the motivating stick, but not necessarily the actual cause of the problem. Many so-called religious wars have started, not because they were protestant and we were catholic, not because they were muslims and we were christians, but because of geopolitical reasons, money and power. Ignoring those reasons and blaming religions alone is a dangerous and self-blinding view of the world. And failing to recognize that power, in many cases, drives those wars and conflicts is taking the risk to be inefficient in the resolution of those problems.

The anthropic principle and the evolution of the universes

2009-01-17T09:11:00.010-10:00

This is a short note on the current controversies concerning the formation of our Universe, developed in the book What is your dangerous idea?. Recent research has come to the conclusion that for our present Universe to exist, the so-called 'universal constants' have to have precise values, otherwise, the formation of galaxies and stars would not occur at a pace for life to exist. Furthermore, string theorists are discovering that there is not a single solution (and a unique set of 'universal' constants) but a 'landscape' approaching 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions and there are thus maybe many other universes with different constants that lay beyond the limit of our own!

Those conclusions, although yet highly speculative, are in the same time 'exciting and humbling' according to Brian Greene, and I would add unsettling for some. Why unsettling? First, because it poses the fundamental question of the existence of our Universe and why we were so lucky in the first place that life can exist. One rhetoric is to state that it is not really luckiness because if our Universe would have different 'universal' constants, life would not exist and we would not be here to complain that we were not lucky: this is the so-called anthropic principle.

The second and most unsettling point of those conclusions is the realization that the idea of a 'universal' set of laws that would dictates all universes, laws that are fundamental and are at the bottom and origin of everything, might not exist. Instead, these laws would be valid only locally and be pure environmental facts:

"Well, [thoses ideas] do threaten physicists' fondest hope-the hope that some extraordinarily beautiful mathematical principle will be discovered that would completely and uniquely explain every detail of the laws of particle physics.
[...] What further worries many physicists is that the landscape may be so rich that almost anything can be found-any combination of physical constants, particle masses, and so forth. This, they fear, would eliminate the predictive power of physics. Environmental facts are nothing more than environmental facts. They worry that if everything is possible, there will be no way to falsify the theory-or, more to the point, no way to confirm it."

Leonard Susskind, The "landscape", in What is your dangerous idea?

"The end of «fundamental» theoretical physics (the search for fundamental microphysical laws-there will still be lots of work for physicist who investigate the host of complex phenomena at larger scales) might very well occur not with a theory of everything but with the recognition that all so-called fundamental theories that describe nature are purely phenomenological-that is, derivable from observational phenomena-and don't reflect any underlying grand mathematical structure of the universe which would allow a basic understanding of why the universe is the way it is."

Laurence M. Krauss, The world may be fundamentally inexplicable, in What is your dangerous idea?

I will conclude with two other ideas that, without resolving the problem and erase any controversy, are not the less interesting. One, presented in the book by Paul Steinhardt, is to make the assumption that the 'universal' constants are not constant but vary slowly with time, so slowly that 1) our universe had time to have shrink and expand cyclically many times already (which would suggest that the Universe is much older than actually thought) and 2) we have not yet been able to measure their variation. Accepting this assumption avoid to call for other universes. Instead, one universe, our own, would slowly drift across different regimes of the 'landscape' and the one we are now is just the one at a particular time.

The second and bolder idea, presented by Lee Smolin, is to see our present universe and its 'universal' constants not as a result of chance, but a result of natural section. The idea is to apply Darwin's ideas of selection and co-evolution to even the fundamental laws and constants. If true, the theory poses, as usual, new questions; for instance, is there a meta-law, like the second law of thermodynamic, that would dictate how laws evolve? Smolin concludes that if the theory, which can be falsifiable, come to be true

"Einstein and Darwin will be understood as partners in the greatest revolution yet in science, a revolution that taught us that the world in which we are embedded is nothing but an ever-evolving network of relationships."

Lee Smolin, Seeing Darwin in the light of Enstein;seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin, What is your dangerous idea?

The real reason why we should fight human-induced climate change

2009-01-14T13:16:00.006-10:00

The fight to convince people that we should act to prevent human-induced climate change has been on for many years now. Many rhetoric have been used but Oliver Morton, in What is your dangerous idea?, is afraid that some of the arguments might back-fire because they are missing the real reason. This is a controversial issue.

According to Norton, we should not fight necessarily because ecosystems are going to disappear. His point is that Earth has witnessed harsher changes, the living has endured (so far) far more dramatic blows (none of the least example being the Permian-Triassic extinction, 251 million years ago, when nearly 90% of life was killed), yet life and Earth still exist and are relatively healthy (to our standards).

If we have to fight, it is because people are going to suffer. They will suffer because they will be displaced by the rising sea level, because their way of life will be destroyed, because social disorders will trigger wars and diseases:

"The most important thing about environmental change is that it hurts people; the basis of our response should be human solidarity.
The planet will take care of itself."

Oliver Norton, What is your dangerous idea?, Our planet is not in peril.

Any other arguments are near-fallacies and may back-fire. Controversial, indeed.

Forever Young

2008-11-01T11:01:00.006-10:00

"[I]n the naivety lay the purity and the robustness, and in the sophisticated mockery of it the pervasive malaise. [...] It is commonly and truly said that young people who want to set the world to rights learn later to be grateful that the world is not worse than it is; but if they were convinced of that too early, we would lose their critical effect, and the world would be worse still."

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, Marc Bloch.

The structure of science

2008-10-28T09:05:00.008-10:00

Ian Stewart, in his book Does God Play Dice?, describes how science is structured. The explanations and theories provided by science are hierarchic; they start from the theories of fundamental particles and atoms, follow through theories of fluid dynamics, ecosystem, etc and finish with theories of sociology and art. Each explanation is constructed on top of the theories that are at a lowest level but in the same time, it does not care of the detail of these lower-level theories: the equations of fluid dynamics are constructed for a small water parcel, typically several moles of water, but it does not care about the individual atoms, nor about the fact that gravity has yet to be explained by the physics of particles. This important view of science is also shared by Edward O. Wilson in his book Consilience. Here is Ian Stewart's quote:

"Current science possesses no truly fundamental theories - not in the sense that they describe what nature actually does. They are all approximations, valid within some reasonably well-defined domain. Quantum mechanics work well at the submicroscopic level. General relativity is great for describing entire universes [...]. Science is a patchwork of models, each of which has been enormously refined within its own domain. The models habitually disagree when those patches overlap. Some disagreements are relatively harmless: atomic theory and continuum fluid mechanics disagree on the fine structure of water, holding it to be respectively to be discrete and infinitely divisible, but on macroscopic scales continuity and discreteness effectively approximate each other. Others are fatal: for example, as I write, the best current theory of astrophysics and the best current theory of cosmology compel us to accept stars older than the universe that contains them. Today's science is a pluralist patchwork of locally valid models, not a global monolith. Indeed it succeeds because it is a pluralist pacthwork of locally valid models.
Our concept of explanation is also a patchwork. A philosophical model that fits it well is what Richard Dawkins calls 'hierarchical reductionism', which sees scientific theories as a hierarchical structure, with some on different levels from others, corresponding to different levels of description of phenomena. (The hierarchy is not rigid and the levels need not be like layers of bricks in a wall.) For example, the complexities of ecosystems are explained by referring them back to those of organisms; organisms are explained by the growth of spatially organized proteins and other macromolecules; the complex organization of organisms is referred back to the linear complexity of their DNA code; the complexity of DNA is referred back to combinations of simpler atoms - and so on, right back to the Theory of Everything.
As Dawkins rightly remarks, it is not necessary to trace every phenomenon right back down this chain of reductions in order to understand it. Chemistry can be considered as 'given' for the purposes of understanding DNA; DNA can be taken as 'given' for the purpose of understanding protein manufacture in organisms, and so on.
[...]
What we tend to forget, when told a story with this structure, is that it could have had many different beginnings. Anything that lets us start from the molecular level would have done just as well. A totally different subatomic theory would be an equally valid starting-point for the story, provided it led to the same general feature of a replicable molecule. [...] It has to be or else we would never be able to keep a goat [within a wooden fence] without first doing a Ph.D. in subatomic physics."

Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?, Farewell, Deep Thought.

A flaw in the model

2008-10-28T08:55:00.004-10:00

Excerpt from the Government Oversight Committee (chaired by Rep. Waxman) interviewing Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US central bank on October 23, 2008 about the financial crisis:

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive — and this is your statement — “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to — to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality…

ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak. [...] I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms.

Thus if the banks themselves, the pinnacle of capitalism, fail to follow their own self-interest, what about the rest of the society. Where was that cherish "invisible hand"? invisible.

watch the PBS report.

see also this post from "A sociologist's commonplace book" blog.

"The shock doctrine" by Naomi Klein

2008-10-11T15:56:00.003-10:00

Naomi Klein lays down in "The shock doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism" a powerful thesis backed up by an impressive list of evidences, quotes and facts. She argues that, contrary to the claims of Milton Friedman and his followers, hard-core globalist capitalism has not been followed by peace and prosperity but rather by violence and the demise of democracies: Chile, Argentina, Russia are examples where that extreme breed of capitalism has lived on undemocratic regime. Using the pressure of the national debt, the pro-american international financial institutions even forced newly democratic governments to comply to their directives, open their markets to international companies, and shred down the existing net of social measures, all against the will and expectations of the people.

The preferred technique, as Klein explains, is that of the shock doctrine: use a shock, either a natural disaster, a coup d'etat or a political revolution, to take benefit of the stress and the weakness of the people to impose the hardship of lawless capitalism:

Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture -a flood, a war, a terrorist attack- can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

Naomi Klein, The shock doctrine, Introduction.

One of the interesting example is that of South Africa that tries to explain why, several years after the coming in power of the African National Congress (ANC), more (black) people are poor than under apartheid: while negotiations for the share of political power were done in the open, the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was negotiating in secret with the international institutions and the economic power of the country detained by the white community. The political agreement gave full human rights to the blacks, while the economic agreement was stripping down the socialist chart of the ANC and was assuring that little economical power can be transferable to the rest of the population:

A longtime antiapartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. «They never freed us. They only took the chain from our neck and put it on our ankles.» Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition «was business saying, 'We'll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name... You can have political power, you can have the façade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else.'»

Naomi Klein, The shock doctrine, Democracy born in chains.

Although the book is convincing, I do not reject the possibility that a selection of the facts has been done to support overwhelmingly the thesis. Is Naomi Klein entirely balanced? Likely no, but nobody could argue against what happened in Chile, Argentina and South Africa and deny the role played by Milton Friedman and his supporters. Those examples, alone, are enough to make Klein's thesis a likely and worrying story.

Naomi Klein finishes positively by assuring that the people has learnt from the damages of the shock doctrine and will be ready next time. We are at the time of a serious financial crisis. Is it part of the hard-core capitalist agenda and is the people ready for a next round of salvaging measures? Or, on the contrary, is that crisis the end of that extremist capitalism and a return to a humbler, fairer and more social view of capitalism?

He disappeared, 30 years ago...

2008-10-11T12:59:00.000-10:00

Climate or financial crisis?

2008-09-25T09:12:00.007-10:00

When it's time to save the greedy
and irresponsible friends of the powerful,
There is no shortage of words and emotions
to describe the future.
Long-term financial destruction of the market.
Lost of jobs.
Collapse of the economy.
And We, the sensible, do understand.
But when We, the sensible,
ask them to do something about the climate,
They look down at us,
Tell us we are blind,
Tell us we are pessimistic,
Tell us we want to destroy the economy.

That is what we call a double standard.

The longest take off

2008-09-11T12:55:00.005-10:00

see it @ Boards of Canada.

see also Project Excelsior.

Help Haiti

2008-09-10T10:32:00.003-10:00

Haiti is the first democracy founded by then-free African slaves.
Haiti has been hit three times in less than 2 weeks by hurricanes.
Large cities are now underwater.
It is a Katrina disaster again.
Our governments all claim to support democracies.
Not much is being done for Haiti, however, and
the usual drama is not spinning this time.
That should not prevent us to do something.
Visit and donate @ yele.org.

Aloha

The promise

2008-08-28T21:54:00.006-10:00

"This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit, that American promise, that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours, a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead, people of every creed and color, from every walk of life, is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

"We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess."

Barack H. Obama, August 28, 2008

Review of "The Khyber Pass: A history of empire and invasion" by Paddy Docherty

2008-08-20T09:25:00.004-10:00

A nice flowing history of the civilizations of Eurasia, from Alexander the Great to US involvement in Afghanistan, from the perspective of one specific location, the Khyber Pass, a narrow passage through the mountains between modern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The choice to retrace History from that unique location enables the reader to finally put all the pieces that we have learnt in school together and gives the satisfaction of finishing a puzzle. But the book also teaches new pieces, such as the history of the Nomadic peoples that kept storming from the Eurasian steppe (why?), a history so wonderful but unfortunately so neglected in western education, or the history of the remnants of Alexander's empire, known as the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, who survived many centuries after Alexander's demise and left a profound influence of Greek culture in Asia. You will also learnt why so many former officers of the Napoleonian armies found themselves to serve the Sikh's king, or why the present events occuring in Afghanistan appear as the returning ghosts of what happened there over the last two centuries...
I highly recommend it. And the nice illustrations scattered throughout the book add another layer of beauty.

A pragmatic, positive and integrated use of the ideas of nonlinear science and complex systems

2008-07-27T10:58:00.005-10:00

Manuel De Landa closes his book, A thousand years of nonlinear history, with a reflection on the pragmatic use of the ideas borrowed from nonlinear science and the science of complex systems. The two main forces that De Landa has been recognized throughout his book are homogenization and heterogenization. The first force assures a pyramidal or stratified construction with a hierarchy and a strong commandment, the second a flat or destratified organization or meshwork with no central control.

De Landa recognizes that linear science, adapted to describe hierarchic and stratified systems, have dominated the western thought for the last three centuries and thus limited our view of the world. On the other hand, the actual homogenization of the world, in terms of economies or ecology and occuring over many scales, have rendered the world more linear:

"[A]s our industrial, medical and educational systems became routinized, as they grew and began to profit from economies of scale, linear equations accumulated in physical sciences and equilibrium theories flourished in the social sciences. In a sense, even though the world is inherently nonlinear and far from equilibrium , its homogenization meant that those areas that have been made uniform began behaving objectively as linear equilibrium structures, with predictable and controllable properties." Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

Still, the nonlinear contribution is important and indeed necessary to avoid the world and Earth to become a dead, predictable and uncreative body. So what should we do? First, De Landa cautions not to adopt the extremist view of destroying the homogeneous part of the system. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote:

"If you free [the system] with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged into catastrophe. Staying stratified -organized, signified, subjected-, is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus, pp 160-161, cited in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

What a balanced and moderate view from post-modernists such as Deleuze and Guattari that are supposed to be, according to what I heard about them, more nihilist that positivist! It reminds me of Camus who wrote in, L'homme rebel, that revolutions were not necessary. Revolutions are actually counter-productive. They may do more harm than good and only by changing the world small steps at a time, can we achieve the ideal dreamed. De Landa, Deleuze and Guattari expand that idea acknowledging the complexity and nonlinearity of the system:

"This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuum of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times." Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus, pp 160-161, cited in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

De Landa explains that

[a]ll these precautions are necessary in a world that does not possess a ladder of progress, or a drive toward increased perfection, or a promised land, or even a socialist pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Moreover, these warnings derive from a recognition that our world is governed not only by nonlinear dynamics, which makes detailed prediction and control impossible, but also by nonlinear combinatorics, which implies that the number of possible mixtures of meshwork and hierarchy, of command and market, of centralization and decentralization, are immense and that we simply cannot predict the emergent properties of these myriad combinations will be." in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

De Landa pursues:

"Thus the call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and for an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy." in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

He finishes by emphasizing that this approach does not necessarily mean a hopeless and boring view of life. Far from it:

"It is important, however, not to confuse the need for caution in our exploration of the nonlinear possibilities of (economic, linguistic, biological) reality, and the concomitant abandonment of utopian euphoria, with despair, resentment and nihilism. There is, indeed, a new kind of hope implicit in these new views. After all, many of the most beautiful and inspiring things on our planet may have been created through [partial] destratification. A good example of this may be the emergence of birdsongs: the mouth became destratified when it ceased to be a strictly alimentary organ, caught up in the day-to-day eating of flesh, and began to generate other flows (memes) and structures (songs) where the meshwork element dominated the hierarchical. The emergence of organic life itself, while not representing a more perfect stage of development than rocks, did involve a greater capacity to generate self-consistent aggregates, a surplus of consistency. The human hand may also have involved a destratification, a complete detachment from locomotive functions and a new coupling with the external environment, itself further destratified when the hand began converting pieces of it (rocks, bones, branches) into tools. Thus, despite all the cautionary tales about simplistic calls for anarchic liberation, there is in these theories a positive, even joyful conception of reality. And while these views do indeed invoke the «death of man», it is only the death of «man» of the old «manifest destinies», not the death of humanity and its potential for destratification." in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

A summary of "A thousand years of nonlinear history": the geological component and why the West dominates the World

2008-07-15T23:08:00.009-10:00

Manuel De Landa ambitiously borrows the vocabulary and concepts from the science of nonlinearity and complex systems and applies them to the history of Europe from the year 1000 to 2000. The main goal of the book is to draft a possible schematic trajectory explaining the domination of Europe during that period over the rest of the world, especially the empire of Islam and China. The idea is that this domination came up because of the lucky congruence of multitude of complex and interacting economic, climatic, geographic and social processes that triggered auto-catalytic processes, that it is processes fuelling themselves via positive feedbacks, and not because of either the fate of History as Marx suggested, the sole power of some top-down political and economical concept as capitalism and its (really) "invisible hand", or a fundamental dominating aspect of the European people, such as a psyche or a religion shaped for "success". In this sense, De Landa follows the traces of many (western) authors who have been trying to re-equilibrate the idea that we have of the creative power of the different cultures in the History and put back the spoiled child 'Europa' to its right place, as Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (one of the best book and theory ever) successfully did.

The originality of De Landa is to avoid at every instant the use of any subjective concious or unconscious explanations by constantly using the scientific language, metaphors but also actual processes from the science of complex systems.

The first part deals on the geological aspect of the European society, its cities, institutions and economical system:

"From this point of view cities arise from the flow of matter-energy, but once a town's mineral infrastructure has emerged, it reacts to those flows, creating a new set of constraints that either intensifies or inhibits them. Needless to say, the walls, monumental buildings, streets, and houses of a town would make a rather weak set of constraints if they operated on their own. Of course, they do not. Our historical exploration of urban dynamics must therefore include an analysis of the institutions that inhabit cities, whether the bureaucracies that run them or the markets that animate them. Although these institutions are the product of collective human decision making, once in place they also react back on their human components to limit them and control them, or, on the contrary, to set them in motion or accelerate their mutation."

Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Geological history: 1000-1700 AD

Notice the vocabulary of dynamics employed and the numerous feedback loops considered in that explanation. One of the virtuous cycle that exists, according to De Landa, is the combination of markets and anti-markets. The first are actual markets, composed of small-scale and truly capitalistic companies where competition rules, while the second are composed of large-scale companies that are anti-capitalistic by preventing competition to exercise its force:

"Markets and bureaucracies, as well as planned and unplanned cities, are concrete instances of a more general distinction: self-organized meshworks of diverse elements, versus hierarchies of uniform elements. But again, meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another.
[...]Thus, once markets grew past the size of local, weekly gatherings, they were ranked and organized form the top, giving rise to a hybrid form:a hierarchy of meshworks. The opposite hybrid, a meshwork of hierarchies, may be illustrated by the system of power in the Middle Ages."

Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Geological history: 1000-1700 AD

The chance of Europe, that Islam or China did not have, was that it was never too anarchic nor too controlled. Its chance has been the presence of that multitude of people, competing each other over that relatively small piece of land, where the virtuous cycle of markets and anti-markets survived until invading the institutions and the psyche of Europe. In some sense, even without mentioning it, De Landa describes here the concept of the edge of chaos, the limit between too much order and too much randomness; only at the edge, life and creativity survive. Islam and China have both a too strong central commandment that prevented, according to De Landa, the local market-like processes to develop and bring the innovations to the high level necessary for a civilisation to win the evolutionary game:

"The emergence of powerful nation-states, and the concomitant decrease in the autonomy of the cities they absorbed (and even of the city-states that remained independent), could have brought the different forms of self-stimulating dynamics we have described to a halt. That this did not happen was due yet to one more form of autocatalysis unique to the West: continued arm races. [T]his type of self-stimulation depended in turn on the fact that the nations of Europe, unlike China and Islam, were never able to form a single, homogeneous empire, and have remained until today a meshwork of hierarchies. It was within this meshwork that advances in offensive weaponry stimulated innovations in defense technology, leading to an ever-growing armament spiral.
[...]
Many of the inventions that Europeans used to colonize the world (the compass, gunpowder, paper money, the printing press) were of Chinese origin, while Europe's accounting techniques and instrument of credits (which are often cited as examples of her unique «rationality») came from Islam. Thus, nothing intrinsic to Europe determined the outcome, but rather a dynamics bearing no inherent relationship to any culture. [A]n excess of centralized decision making in the East kept turbulent dynamics under control, while they raged unobstructed in the West. To be sure, at several points in her history Europe could have become a unified hierarchy, and this would have ground these dynamics to a halt. This happened in the sixteenth century with the Hapsburg Empire, and later on with the rise of Napoleon and Hitler. Yet all these efforts proved abortive, and European nations remained a meshwork."

Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Geological history: 1000-1700 AD

As again, those theories and trajectories are hard to proved. They are only suggestive but they have the merit to bring a more moderate albeit complex view of the world and to liberate ourself from the extremist, at times naive and too simplistic, visions that we have of our world. The Truth might lay somewhere in between.

How did life survive?

2008-07-14T12:42:00.003-10:00

In Discordant harmonies, Daniel B. Botkin briefly describes the history of Earth, and the important role that life has played, especially in the formation of the present composition of the atmosphere. The idea is that life has always succeeding in exploiting the available chemical resources, which resulted after every major evolutionary move in a change of the main composition of the atmosphere. The question that struck me is then: how come did life succeed not to kill itself by over-exploiting Earth's resources, a question obviously of utmost important for the human race?

Several hypothesis: 1) there is a Gaia-like theological process where life keeps itself within limitis where it can survive, 2) just luck. Both answers are not satisfactory. The first one avoids to answer the question: why would there be such process? The second one does not provide any mechanism that we, human, could use to manage Earth correctly.

Dostoevsky on the predictability of human history

2008-06-19T06:00:00.005-10:00

"They fight and fight and fight; they are fighting now, they fought before, and they'll fight in the future... So you see, you can say anything about world history. Except one thing, that is. It cannot be said that world history is reasonable."

Dostoevksy, Notes from underground, cited by Niall Ferguson in The cash nexus.

This post follows the series on the relative importance in irrationality in human affairs.

"The good old days"

2008-05-28T17:42:00.002-10:00

Do you remember the "good old days" when, while trying to promote a bit of decency in the use of natural resources and some respect of Mother Nature, we were accused of dangerously playing with the health of the economy? Do you remember those days?

Well, what an irony. The economy is bad and nobody has done yet anything for the environment. What happened? Oh, yes. Oil (and the gridiness of speculators and bankers trying to get easy money on the back of mortgage-seeking people). Oil. That Grande Dame we were supposed to protect, without which the entire economy would fail. Thanks Madame. And thanks the economist and right-wing experts for this ultra vision of yours. What a prediction. Why did you not tell us that Oil itself will destroy the economies of the World? Why did you not see that?

If people would not die of hunger because of that, I actually would be happy to see such high price of Oil. It is now expensive to move your car or to travel and we now all need to adjust ourself to this situation... or to invest in green technologies that are a win-win-win situation: 1) independence, 2) cheap and 3) less polluting. Where am I wrong?

The probabilistic basis of thought

2008-05-27T23:09:00.010-10:00

McIntyre (2007) argues that the process of thought, biology tells us, is not deterministic as the Platonic ideal has taught us, but is rather the result of a probabilistic mental calculation wired into our brains:

"[A]t the most fundamental levels - and I mean fundamental biologically as well as mathematically - there is no such thing as deterministic thinking. Our very thought processes, including mathematically thought processes, are fundamentally and inherently probabilistic."

Biologically, the reason is the following:

"The ubiquitous protein molecules called allosteric enzymes are logic elements. But they interact in massively-parallel information-processing «circuits» whose very «wiring» is probabilistic, indeed stochastic. Brownian motion - thermal fluctuation on picosecond timescales - connects those logic elements together in a fundamentally noisy way."

McIntyre pursues by saying that

"That of course is why, given the mechanical strengths of chemical bonds including hydrogen bonds, life can exist only in a rather narrow temperature range."

Interesting.

How then, Platonic, perfect, optimal, symmetric ideas or geometry can result from such noisy thinking process? One answer for this question may come from some ideas put recently by Mumford (2000) and, posthumously by Jaynes (2003) in a recent book. Those ideas are that mathematical reasoning, among which probabilistic reasoning, can be proved to be the result of a well-posed probabilistic theory

"the very foundations of mathematics should be reformulated on a stochastic basis"

according to Mumford.

McIntyre goes on by showing that, starting with weak, self-consistent assumptions, the whole basis of probability theory can be deduced. He also insists on the "conditioning statements" that are systematically undermined in the classic teaching of probability. Those statements are the a priori knowledge available to the observer and that has to be taken into account in the calculation of the probability of an event. For example, the statement "some roads are closed by the rain" could be a conditioning statement to calculate what is the most probable course taken by a FedEx truck. It appears that the explicit and careful description of those statements are essential to make the probability theory cleared of any subjectivity. McIntyre goes so far to state that in the classic debate between "frequentists" and "Bayesians", although the former claim that they do not add any subjective knowledge to the probabilistic calculation, they actually do with the additive information being in their case often implicit and/or unconscious.

McIntyre finally explains that the nearly perfect shape observed in Nature, the aerodynamical shapes of a wing or a fish, the roundish shapes of trunk or flowers, are not the result of some innate knowledge of perfect, Platonic forms but is rather the result of an optimization problem based on statistical inference. Many visual examples exist that illustrates that our brain can indeed perform such statistical inference: the brain can for instance guess that a man is walking just by the knowledge of the motions of several points located on the man's body.

McIntyre concludes, maybe surprisingly reminiscent of some post-modernists, that the concept of an absolute truth is dangerous, behind which there is often or always some kind of implicit knowledge or information taken for granted and not put forward explicitly.

For more, see

Jaynes, E. T. (2003), Probability theory: The logic of science, edited by G. Larry Bretthorst, Cambridge, University Press, 727 pp.
McIntyre, M. E. (2007), On thinking probabilistically, Proceedings Hawaiian Winter Workshop, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 172 pp.
Mumford, D. (2000), The dawning of the age of stochasticity, in Mathematics: Frontiers and perspectives, edited by V. I. Arnol'd, M. Atiyah, P. Lax and, B. Mazur, Providence, RI, Amer. Math. Soc., 460 pp.

Surprising optimistic vision of progress by a poet

2008-05-24T08:48:00.005-10:00

Poets and the like are usually rather pessimistic with respect to the course of civilisation and see the Machine as a dangerous agent that alienates humans. Not Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, poet and pilot at the beginning of the intercontinental airmail adventure, who sees the course of progress as an improvement where the Machine little by little is perfected and nearly disappears to the view of humans:

"La machine elle-même, plus elle se perfectionne, plus elle s'efface derrière son rôle. Il semble que tout l'effort industriel de l'homme, tous ses calculs, toutes ses nuits de veille sur les épures, n'aboutissent, comme signes visibles, qu'à la seule simplicité, comme s'il fallait l'expérience de plusieurs générations pour dégager peu à peu la courbe d'une colonne, d'une carène, ou d'un fuselage d'avion, jusqu'à leur rendre la pureté élémentaire de la courbe d'un sein ou d'une épaule. Il semble que le travail des ingénieurs, des dessinateurs, des calculateurs du bureau d'études ne soit ainsi en apparence, que de polir et d'effacer, d'alléger ce raccord, d'équilibrer cette aile, jusqu'à ce qu'on la remarque plus, jusqu'à qu'il n'y ait plus une aile acrrochée à un fuselage, mais une forme parfaitement épanouie, enfin dégagée de sa gangue, une sorte d'ensemble spontané, mystérieusement lié, et de la même qualité que celle du poème. Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. Au terme de son évolution, la machine se dissimule.

La perfection de l'invention confine ainsi à l'absence d'invention. Et, de même que, dans l'instrument, toute mécanique apparente s'est peu à peu effacée et qu'il nous est livré un objet aussi naturel qu'un galet poli par la mer, il est également admirable que, dans son usage même, la machine peu à peu se fasse oublier."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, L'avion.

The older, the stronger the friendship

2008-05-22T22:45:00.003-10:00

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry laments about the fact that the only true friendship is the one which has conquered the test of time:

"Rien, jamais, en effet, ne remplacera le compagnon perdu,. On ne se crée point de vieux camarades. Rien ne vaut le trésor de tant de souvenirs communs, de tant de mauvaises heures vécues ensemble, de tant de brouilles, de reconciliations, de mouvements du cœur. On ne reconstruit pas ces amitiés-là."

Et Antoine de finir

"Il est vain, si l'on plante un chêne, d'espérer s'abriter bientôt sous son feuillage."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, Les camarades.

Being Bourgeois

2008-05-20T09:14:00.002-10:00

Here is Saint-Ex's view of the "bourgeois":

"Vieux bureaucrate, mon camarade ici présent, nul jamais ne t'a fait évader et tu n'en es point responsable. Tu as construit ta paix à force d'aveugler de ciment, comme le font les termites, toutes les échappées vers la lumière. Tu t'es roulé en boule dans ta sécurité bourgeoise, tes routines, les rites étouffants de ta vie provinciale, tu as élevé cet humble rempart contre les vents et les marées et les étoiles. Tu ne veux point t'inquiéter des grands problèmes, tu as eu bien assez de mal à oublier ta condition d'homme. Tu n'es point l'habitant d'une planète errante, tu ne te poses point de questions sans réponse: tu es un petit bourgeois de Toulouse [Nice, Paris, New York, Honolulu, ou d'ailleurs]. Nul ne t'a saisi par les épaules quand il était temps encore. Maintenant, la glaise dont tu es formé a séché, et s'est durcie, et nul en toi ne serait désormais réveiller le musicien endormi, ou le poète, ou l'astronome qui peut-être t'habitait d'abord."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes, La ligne.

A warning to most of us.

Entropy = missing information

2008-04-16T08:35:00.004-10:00

If you want to learn more about what entropy is and represents, I invite you to this scientific post that I wrote and which summarizes Ben-Naim's book Entropy demystified. I hope it will be of some help.

The universal smile

2008-04-13T19:32:00.003-10:00

E. O. Wilson tells us here how smiling is a universal physiological character:

"Within the face the mouth is the principal instrument of visual communication. The smile in particualr is a rich site of secondary epigenetic rules. Psychologists and anthropologists have discovered substantial degrees of similar programmed development in the uses of smiling across cultures. The expression is first displayed by infants between the ages of two and four months. It invariably attracts an abundance of affection from attending adults. Environment has little influence on the maturation of smiling. The infants of the !Kung, a hunter-gatherer people of South Africa's Kalahari desert, are nurtured under vey different conditions from those in America and Europe. [...] Yet their smile is identical in form to that of American and European infants, appears at the same time, and serves the same social function. Smiling also appears on schedule in deaf-blind children and even in thalidomide-deformed children who are not only deaf and blind but also crippled so badly they cannot touch their own faces."

E. O. Wilson, Consilience, From genes to culture.

Robert F. Kennedy on Martin Luther King Jr.'s death

2008-04-04T23:56:00.002-10:00

"Ladies and Gentlemen,

I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some -- some very sad news for all of you -- Could you lower those signs, please? -- I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization -- black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with -- be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Thank you very much."

Robert F. Kennedy, April 4th, 1968

Camus and the philosophy of absurd

2008-03-27T22:55:00.006-10:00

Albert Camus develops in his impressive essay Le mythe de Sisyphe his positive view of the situation of Man. He put in perspective the entire existentialist movement, transcends its view and offers an admirable future: Man is condemned like Sisyphe but he is and will be happy in his condemnation.

First, it is an observation, the existentialist observation that Man cannot access the Truth: the world is irrational, relativist, what is true for one may be not for another. But it is also the recognition that Man is nonetheless driven by such Unity of Knowledge. From that confrontation is born the philosophy of absurd:

"[C]e qui est absurde, c'est la confrontation de cet irrationnel et de ce désir éperdu de clarté dont l'appel résonne au plus profond de l'homme."

[Les murs absurdes]

Camus notices, however, that the greatest existentialists failed to pursue their own philosophy and, afraid of their findings, either turned back, consciously or unconsciously, to the religious God they previously eliminated, or looked at this absurdity as a new God. In both cases, they betrayed themselves: they first find that Life has no meaning but finish by giving it a meaning via some artifact.

Camus, instead, thinks that there is no need to such despair:

"[L'homme absurde] reconnaît la lutte, ne méprise pas absolument la raison et admet l'irrationnel."

[Le suicide philosophique]

Or again:

"L'absurde, c'est la raison lucide qui constate ses limites."

[Le suicide philosophique]

Camus considers that Man should look at his fate not only without fear but proudly and live thoroughly and passionately such contradiction and absurdity. He sees the absurdity as an opportunity: instead of keeping oneself blind with illusions, he is fighting, constantly, ceaselessly, the more so knowing that there is no goal to reach. For Camus, the fight, the revolt is the only way of life:

"L'une des seules positions philosophiques cohérentes, c'est ainsi la révolte."

[La liberté absurde]

He seems to join some of the romantic movement who also came to the same conclusion.

What is left is actually a quite positive view of the world, where Man is in charge of his fate:

"Un monde demeure dont l'homme est le seul maître"

[La création sans lendemain],

free of past illusions:

"Non pas la fable divine qui amuse et aveugle, mais le visage, le geste et le drame terrestres où se résument une difficile sagesse et une passion sans lendemain."

[La création sans lendemain]

Camus concludes with the myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned by the Gods in Hell to continually roll up the hill a head-high stone which has to be let it down at the end of each cycle. Although most of us would see it as a punishment, Camus invites to imagine on the contrary the smile of Sisyphus among his time of despair:

"Je laisse Sisyphe au bas de la montagne! On retrouve toujours son fardeau. Mais Sisyphe enseigne la fidélité supérieure qui nie les dieux et soulève les rochers. Lui aussi juge que tout va bien. Cet univers désormais sans maître lui paraît ni stérile ni futile. Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minérale de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux."

[Le mythe de Sisyphe]

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

[The myth of Sisyphus]

Definition of mass and force and the experimental support of the classic laws of mechanics

2008-03-21T08:46:00.004-10:00

Henri Poincaré, one of the greatest mathematicians and rationalist of the 20th century, describes us in his little book, La science et l'hypothèse, how not only it appears at first difficult to define precisely what is mass and what is a force, but it is even impossible and one has to satisfy oneself only to axioms, that is to definitions which are not provable by experience.

Newton's famous law states that the force F is the product of the mass m and the acceleration a:

F = m . a.

According to Poincaré, all the great physicists have defined mass and force differently. For one physicist, mass is the density times the volume but for another one the density itself should be defined as the ratio of the mass to the volume. For another one, mass is the ratio of the force to the acceleration while for another one force is defined as mass times the acceleration. We are turning around and around.

Poincaré explains that for a definition to be useful and scientific, it needs to enable you to perform measurements:

"Quand on dit que la force est la cause d'un mouvement, on fait de la métaphysique, et cette définition, si on devait s'en contenter, serait absolument stérile. Pour qu'une définition puisse servir à quelque chose, il faut qu'elle nous apprenne à mesurer la force; cela suffit d'ailleurs, il n'est nullement nécessaire qu'elle nous apprenne ce que c'est que la force en soi, ni si elle est la cause ou l'effet d'un mouvement."

Poincaré goes on and explains that our experience gives us some ideas on how to measure a force in the case of an isolated system: we introduce the notion of the equality between action and reaction, we deduce that the centre of gravity of the isolated system has a rectilinear and uniform movement, etc. But because there is no perfectly isolated system, all of our deductions cannot be proven exactly by experience. The results of the experience will be close to our prediction but it will not be exact. Without surprise, because we know that, besides the entire Universe, there is no perfectly isolated system.

Thus, did we achieve anything? We have invented some principles using our experience but these principles cannot strictly be proven by experience. Our sole remedy, according to Poincaré is to take these principles as axioms, which would be true and provable by experience if we have a perfectly isolated system:

"Les principles de la dynamique nous apparaissaient d'abord comme des vérités expérimentales; mais nous avons été obligés de nous en servir comme définitions. C'est par définition que la force est égale au produit de la masse par l'accélération; voilà un principe qui est désormais hors de l'atteinte d'aucune expérience ultérieure. C'est de même par définition que l'action est égale à la réaction."

Thus, "[le principe de l'égalité de l'action et de la réaction] ne devrait être plus regardé comme une loi expérimentale, mais comme une définition." Furthermore, masses are only coefficients that have been introduced in the calculation: "les masses sont des coefficients qu'il est commode d'introduire dans les calculs." Indeed, Poincaré states, we could have chosen different values for the mass without contradicting the fundamental principles. The calculation would have been harder to perform, that's all.

One can wonder if all of this is useful? The answer is yes because although we cannot prove exactly the principles and axioms we have stated, the results of our prediction match almost perfectly the results of experience because in reality, many systems are almost isolated. This success should be enough -but is it?- to prevent existentialists, irrationalists and (cultural) relativists to state that science proves that no knowledge is attainable. Almost perfect knowledge is attainable, that is what Poincaré tells us. The fact that our knowledge is imperfect should in the same time reconcile everyone: that imperfection is maybe that little freedom of will, that little irrationality that little je ne sais quoi which is so important to fuel our imagination and creation. But maybe I already went too far...

(all quotations are from Chapter 6 La mécanique classique in La science et l'hypothèse)

Euclidian or non-euclidian geometry?

2008-03-14T08:42:00.003-10:00

Euclidian geometry is a geometry familiar to us: only one line can go through two points, the straight line is the shortest path, etc. But there are other geometries which are non-euclidian. One example is the geometry over a sphere. In this case, an infinity of lines can go through two points and the straight line is not the shortest path.

Henri Poincaré asks the question if our experience can prove that the euclidian geometry is true, the non-euclidian ones wrong. The surprising answer is that actually our experience is unable to make the difference and in this sense, no geometry is more true than another. In his own words:

"Il est donc impossible d'imaginer une expérience concrète qui puisse être interprétée dans le système euclidien et qui ne puisse pas l'être dans le système lobatchevskien [on a sphere], de sorte que je puis conclure:
Aucune expérience ne sera jamais en contradiction avec le postulatum d'Euclide; en revanche aucune expérience ne sera jamais en contradiction avec le postulatum de Lobatchevsky."

Interesting to know that there is not an absolute in geometry as well.

The respective role of science and art

2008-02-28T08:02:00.007-10:00

This is a difficult subject mixing neurobiology with the interpretation of art. Edward O. Wilson offers, however, a simple distinction between science and art. Science can translate a certain perception into another language. "We [humans] can translate the energies of magnetism and electricity into sight and sound, the sensory modalities we biologically possess. We can read the active neural circuits of bees and fish by scanning their sense organs and brains". By doing so, we can then know what type of perception all species possess assuming that each perception corresponds to a specific and different neural activity.

But what science cannot translate is the feeling of the perception. We will a priori never be able to feel the magnetic and electric perceptions of the bees and fish. We can imagine it. We can study it. But we cannot experience it. "But", as Edward O. Wilson emphasizes, "incapacity is not the point" as art fulfils another role. "Art [...] transmits feelings among persons of the same capacity. In other words, science explains feeling, while art transmits it."

But Wilson wonders "how can we know for sure that art communicates this way with accuracy, that people really, truly feel the same in the presence of art?". My personal answer to this question is: who cares? Do we have to know if the feeling transmitted by art is the same for every person? As long as something is transmitted, as long as art triggers some kind of reaction, a good or a bad feeling, as long as an original message has been sent and received, that is what matters according to me. But this is my usual romantic definition of art. A bit anarchic and maybe too relativistic.

But what if art does transmits the same feeling? what a victory for a universal language. Wilson thinks that it is indeed the case. And how do we know it? "We know it intuitively by the sheer weight of our cumulative responses through the many media of art. We know it by detailed verbal descriptions of emotion, by critical analyses, and in fact through the data from all the vast, nuanced and interlocking armamentaria of the humanities".

A difficult and fascinating subject indeed.

A brief history and critic of complexity theory

2008-02-18T21:24:00.004-10:00

This is a brief history synthesized by E. O. Wilson in Consilience of the accomplishments and promises of the science of complexity as well as its present drawbacks and its objectives needed to be fulfilled to convince a larger portion of the science community.

"Complexity theory was born in the 1970s, gathered momentum in the early 1980s, and was envelopped in controversy by the mid-1990s. The issues of contention are almost as tangled as the systems the theorists hoped to unravel. I think it possible to cut to the heart of the matter, as follows. The great majority of scientists, their minds focused narrowly on well-defined phenomena, do not care about complexity theory. Many have not yet heard of it. [...] Those who care can be divided into three camps. The first comprises a heterogeneous scattering of skeptics. They believe that brains and rain forests are too complicated ever to be reduced to elementary processes, let alone reconstituted in a manner that predicts the whole. Some of the skeptics doubt the existence of deep laws of complexity, at least any that can be grasped by the human mind.

In the second camp are the fervent advocates, a band of audacious complexity theorists, exemplified by Stuart Kauffman (author of the The origins of order) and Christopher Langton, who work at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, unofficial headquarters of the complexity movement. They believe not only that deep laws exist but that their discovery is on the near horizon. Some of the essential elements of the laws, they say, are already emerging from mathematical theories that use exotic conceptions such as chaos, self-criticality, and adaptative landscapes.[...] Their grail is a set of hoped-for master algorithms that will speed passage from atom to brain and ecosystem, consistent with reality but requiring far less factual knowledge than would be needed without the algorithms.

The third group of scientists, of which I am a reluctant member, has settled along positions strung between the two extremes of rejection and unbridled support. I say reluctant, because I would like to be a true believer: I really am impressed by the sophistication and élan of the complexity theorists, and my heart is with them. But my mind is not, at least not yet. I believe with many other centrists that they are on the right track -but only more or less, maybe, and still far short of success. [...] The basic difficulty, to put the matter plainly, is an insufficiency of facts. [...] The postulates they start with clearly need more detail. Their conclusions thus far too vague and general to be more than rallying metaphors, and their abstract conclusions tell us very little that is really new.
[...]
None of the elements of complexity theory has anything like the generality and the fidelity to factual detail we wish from theory. None has triggered an equivalent cascade of theoretical innovations and practical applications. What does complexity theory need to be successful [...]?

Complexity theory needs more empirical information."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (Chapter 5)

Obviously, this discussion needs to be continued and I will keep posting critics and successes of complexity theory.

From complexity to reductionism and back to complexity

2008-02-17T23:07:00.003-10:00

Edward O. Wilson in his Consilience describes the two fundamental steps of science to understand Nature. First, you need to break down the processes into simple blocks. That is reductionism. Then you need to build back the complexity of the system. "To dissect a phenomenon into its elements, [...] is consilience by reduction. To reconstitute it, and especially to predict with knowledge gained by reduction how nature assembled it in the first place, is consilience by synthesis. That is the two-step procedure by which natural scientists generally work: top down across two or three levels of organization at a time by analysis, then bottom up across the same levels by synthesis" (Chapter 5).

"The greatest challenge today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems. Scientists have broken down many kinds of systems. They think they know most of the elements and forces. The next task is to reassemble them, at least in mathematical models that capture the key properties of the entire ensembles. Success in this enterprise will be measured by the power researchers acquire to predict emergent phenomena when passing from general to more specific levels of organization. That in simplest terms is the great challenge of scientific holism" (Chapter 5).

There is also an order of complexity. From "simple" to more complex, we find: physics, followed by biology, followed by sociology, with the arts closing the chain. "[T]he opposite journey from physics to end points, is extremely problematic. As the distance away from physics increases, the options allowed by the antecedent disciplines increase exponentially. Biology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics, and the arts equivalently more complex than biology. To stay on course all the way seems impossible. And worse, we cannot know before departure whether the complete journey we have imagined even exits" (Chapter 5).

"The profane word now having been spoken on hallowed ground, a quick disclaimer is in order. While it is true that science advances by reducing phenomena to their working elements -by dissecting brains into neurons, for example, and neurons into molecules- it does not aim to diminish the integrity of the whole. On the contrary, synthesis of the elements to re-create their original assembly is the other half of scientific procedure. In fact, it is the ultimate goal of science" (Chapter 10).

Such disclaimer should lessen the critics of reductionism. Reductionism is a fundamental stage that we need to go through to understand Nature. We have barely started to reconstruct the parts. Patience.

The brain and the learning process

2008-02-09T20:56:00.000-10:00

Edward O. Wilson explains why it is difficult to understand how the brain works; the brain was made to survive, not to understand itself:

"All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.
That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds-and why the fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest. It requires a journey into the brain's interior darkness with preconceptions left behind. The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 6.

Maybe, such explanation may give a beginning of answer of why passion -or the absence of reason- plays such an important role in human society.

Utopia according to Gabriel García Márquez

2008-02-08T22:33:00.000-10:00

This is an extract from the Nobel lecture given by Gabriel García Márquez when his received his award in 1982:

"On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, «I decline to accept the end of man». I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

cited by Jay Winter in Dreams of Peace and Freedom.

read the full lecture.

A salute to the Romantic and Postmodern movements

2008-02-06T20:20:00.000-10:00

Although Edward O. Wilson disagrees in general with the ideas of and motivations behind the Romantic and Postmodern movements, here is what he has to say about them:

"As today's celebrants of corybantic Romanticism, they enrich culture. They say to the rest of us: Maybe, just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away from all directions, bevoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism, even as it menaces rational thought. Another is the relief it affords those who have chosen not to encumber themselves with a scientific education. Another is the small industry it has created within philosophy and literary studies. Still another, the one that counts the most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need postmodernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? John Stuart Mill correctly noted that teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the postmodernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment, we will start over again. Because, as the great mathematician David Hilbert once said, capturing so well that part of the human spirit expressed through the Enlightenment, Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know, we will know."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 3

The notion of time

2008-02-06T19:43:00.000-10:00

This is a much too brief place to discuss the full history and meaning of the notion of time. This post will progressively fill up...with time.

The first idea that I would like to start with is the fact that time, in terms of the dynamical evolution of the objects and systems which surround us, has not always been an obvious concept in the History. A surprising example is the static view of the world that the Greeks had. Heracles may have been the only one at his time to notice that "you do not always cross the same river", that things are changing and are not immutable.

More generally, the Greeks thought the world was in balance. As Ludwig von Bertalanffy notices, "Greek physics did not contain a time dimension" (General System Theory, Chapter 10). That is why, among other things, the Greeks spent so much time on geometry.

The question that I would like to ask is if the notion of time was absent only from the teachings and the work of the scholars only or if it was generally absent from the psyche of people. On one hand, it is hard to imagine that anybody could not have noticed that objects can fall, things got unbalanced and stones have trajectories. Should apes notice that the world is constantly changing? Or did the humans have to learn such concept which appears so "obvious" to us?

If you see an ape or an ancient Greek, don't hesitate to ask him.

To be continued.

Wisdom

2008-02-03T20:51:00.000-10:00

Mysterious wisdom,
can an artist be wise?
Beautiful wisdom,
can the wise man be in love?

O wisdom where art thou?
Dans les yeux du fou,
in the hands of the priest,
in the lines of the professor,
in the sins of the sinner?

Or maybe you are here.
In the steps that I left in the sand.
Just behind me.

(inspired by a quotation of E.F. Schumacher cited by Cédric Chavanne)

Advantages and disadvantages of modelling

2008-01-30T22:52:00.000-10:00

Ludwig von Bertalanffy writes about any attempt to model Nature and its constituents:

"Conceptual models which, in simplified and therefore comprehensible form, try to represent certain aspects of reality, are basic in any attempt at theory; whether we apply the Newtonian model in mechanics, the model of corpuscle or wave in atomic physics, use simplified models to describe the growth of a population, or the model of a game to describe political decisions. The advantages and dangers of models are well known. The advantage is in the fact that this is the way to create a theory -i.e. the model permits deductions from premises, explanation and prediction, with often unexpected results. The danger is oversimplification: to make it conceptually controllable we have to reduce reality to a conceptual skeleton- the question remaining whether, in doing so, we have not cut out vital parts of the anatomy. The danger of oversimplification is the greater the more multifarious and complex the phenomenon is. This applies not only to «grand theories» of culture and history but to models we find in any psychological or sociological journal.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General system theory, Chapter 8

Congratulations Cam!

2008-01-19T16:03:00.000-10:00

Jerome's blue machine,
plus two crazy odd-speaking kin.
A new life in the Hawaiian kingdom,
freedom.
A feeling that this land speaks to his spirit,
that he is not alone, can't you see it?
Go far far away, my dear Canadian,
your heart will always pulse
this island, its first wave at dawn
or the last one at dusk.
Makamaka,
Ho'omaika'i 'ana
Mau Loa

A letter to Nicolas Sarkozy

2008-01-15T08:05:00.000-10:00

He presented himself as the candidate of change,
and promised to make France finally a modern land.
A land which, like a femme fatale, has to accept the new law of the invisible hand.
A doctor with a new drug.
Not curing the cause but only hiding the symptoms.
A psychological disease anyway.
Maybe even caused by the doctors themselves, eager to copy what others are doing.

The candidate of change,
the light to illuminate the dark corridors of globalism that France does not dare to walk in.

And we discussed. And we discussed.
About how France can undertake a smooth but nonetheless deep reform.
To finally arrive to the shores of modernity, with its wisdom of crowds, its rationalized happiness,
the freedom of all, the American dream, the spotless society where theory, the capitalist one,
can finally triumph in a field deserted by its opponents.

Ah, soon the dream! as Nicolas Sarkozy promised.

And now?
Well, apparently, modernity starts by a love affair. Typically french or stupidly anglo-sexist?
They say stubborness of unjust media driven by the primal curiosity of the people. What else can it be?

Can it be that this is it? The promise is being fulfilled? The minds are being changed? And France is finally brainwashed from its rationale and intellectual political life which has always been only a drag to its economy... The ships of modernity are arriving from the cliffs of Dover and the harbors of Maine. The best of them have left their home land to preach the good word. They are here. Pictures are everywhere, rumors of marriage are on every lip, from Calcutta to Buenos Aires. This is what the world needs, this is what the world needed, at least this is what they say. Modernity is here. The drug has arrived. French can finally have an artificial smile on their face. They can finally claim that they are happy and join the legions of other zombies.

Happiness is here. Our problems have disappeared. Thanks Nicolas and Carla.

A debate between theory and observations?

2008-01-13T17:42:00.000-10:00

It seems that there is in academia some debate opposing the theoreticians on one side and the observers on the other, between the creator of ideas and the gatherer of empirical data. And the debate questions which ones are the most useful to science, which ones do not spend his time and people's money on futile work.

I am afraid that such debate is nothing less than another victim of human's favorite game to create divisions where there is none. For instance, Ludwig von Bertalanffy amuses himself in noting how much theory there is actually behind any observations:

"According to widespread opinion, there is a fundamental distinction between «observed facts» on the one hand-which are the unquestionable rock bottom of science and should be collected in the greatest possible number and printed in scientific journals-and «mere theory» on the other hand, which is the product of speculation and more or less suspect. I think the first point I should emphasize is that such antithesis does not exist. As a matter of fact, when you take supposedly simple data in our field [...,] it would take hours to unravel the enormous amount of theoretical presuppositions which are necessary to form these concepts [...].
Thus even supposedly unadulterated facts of observation already are interfused with all sorts of conceptual pictures, model concepts, theories or whatever expression you choose. The choice is not whether to remain in the field of data or to theorize; the choice is only between models that are more or less abstract, generalized, near or more remote from direct observation, more or less suitable to represent observed phenomena.
On the other hand, one should not take scientific models too seriously. [...] I believe a certain amount of intellectual humility, lack of dogmatism, and good humor may go a long way to facilitate otherwise embittered debates about scientific theories and models."

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General system theory, Chapter 7.

One's own place

2007-12-14T21:13:00.000-10:00

I kept my favorite quotation from The moon and sixpence by Somerset W. Maugham. Surely because it has some personal touch. This is about everyone trying to find its own place, like the Bohemians who never find theirs or at least are never satisfied and find everywhere a little bit of themselves.

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroudings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."

(Chapter L).

You can find other quotations in this post.

The moon and sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham

2007-12-14T20:28:00.000-10:00

Some quotations from the wonderfully written The moon and sixpence by Somerset W. Maugham. It is followed by two questions, in need of answer.

"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."

(Chapter XIII)

About beauty:

"'Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiviness and imagination'"

(Chapter XIX)

On the difficulty in expressing oneself and being understood:

"Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemmed to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house."

(Chapter XLII)

Once beauty is reached, it has to be destroyed. Neither the artist, nor anyone else can enjoy it again. And in any case beauty can be kept:

"'I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece. He had achieved what he wanted. His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.

(Chapter LVII)

Here are my two questions:

1) Why the title The moon and sixpence?

2) The central character of the book is Charles Strickland and his life is loosely inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin. At least, that is what I read everywhere. The story is told by a narrator using the first person, which we might think is Somerset W. Maugham himself. Everything should just be a fiction: Strickland, Maugham's meetings with Strickland, etc. But strikingly, the first chapter refers in footnotes three different books which supposedly describe the life of Charles Strickland. One reference reads:

A modern artist: notes on the work of Charles Strickland, by Edward Leggatt, A.R.H.A. Martin Secker, 1917.

Is this a real reference? And is Charles Strickland then real as well? I was not able to locate any the books, so I am wondering if I am not just the victim of Maugham's ability to push the fiction to such a realism that he does not hesitate to cross the line and violate the fragile convention that footnotes and references are part of reality and out of the fiction. And the joke might just be on me!

An unlikely place for a confrontation between universalism and complexity

2007-11-30T20:36:00.001-10:00

I found a very sensitive illustration of the confrontation between universalism/reductionism and complexity/relativism in a quite unlikely place. André Gorz writes in Lettre à D., Histoire d'un amour about the different way his wife, an englishwoman, and himself, influenced by French universalism, used to think:

"J'avais besoin de théorie pour structurer ma pensée et t'objectais qu'une pensée non structurée menace toujours de sombrer dans l'empirisme et l'insignifiance. Tu répondais que la théorie menace toujours de devenir un carcan qui interdit de percevoir la complexité mouvante du réel."

How lucid this statement is!

See also this post about the same confrontation.

Why writing and about what?

2007-11-30T20:14:00.000-10:00

André Gorz writes in Lettre à D., Histoire d'un amour that what matters is writing, not what is being written. The topic, the subject are only the raw products for the writing process to work. They are only secondary to the act of writing:

"Ce n'est pas ce qu'il écrit qui est le but premier de l'écrivain. Son besoin premier est d'écrire. Ecrire, c'est-à-dire se faire absent du monde et de lui-même pour, éventuellement, en faire la matière d'élaborations littéraires. Ce n'est que secondairement que se pose la question du «sujet» traité. Le sujet est la condition nécessairement contingente de la production d'écrits. N'importe quel sujet est le bon pourvu qu'il permette d'écrire."

The writer becomes a novelist once what is being written starts to organize itself into a well-defined project:

"L'écriveur deviendra écrivain quand son besoin d'écrire sera soutenu par un sujet qui permet et exige que ce besoin s'organise en projet."

Sounds easy!

Gödel's theorem

2007-11-30T18:20:00.000-10:00

Here is a short and naive description of Gödel's theorem that I draw from R. Penrose, The emperor's new mind. From what I understand, if you lay down precisely all axioms necessary to define a logical system, you will find a contradiction very similar to the following statement:

this sentence is false.

This infinite indecision, similar to the image reflected onto two facing mirrors, is one of the driving argument in The moment of complexity by M. C. Taylor.

One important consequence of Gödel's theorem is that you find, again within the axioms and rules you have yourself constructed, propositions that are true even if you cannot find any proof of it within the system. Said more formally

"What Gödel showed was that any such precise ('formal') mathematical system of axioms and rules of procedure whatever, provided that it is broad enough to contain descriptions of simple arithmetical propositions [...] and provided that it is free from contradiction, must contain some statements which are neither provable nor disprovable by the means allowed within the system."

Thus even when playing with a mathematical system, will we find that 'truth' has not an absolute meaning and even R. Penrose conceives that

"[m]athematical truth is something that goes beyond mere formalism."

Some comments on entropy

2007-11-19T10:53:00.000-10:00

Definition

Since I reviewed the basic teachings concerning entropy, I see entropy everywhere. The most helpful definition of entropy is the one regarding the state of order. The highest the order, the lowest the entropy. Thus, I declare myself an enemy of entropy, in the sense that I, we, always try to create some order, to put things in order: putting the plates away in the kitchen, entangling an electric wire, etc. Why is it actually easier to put things in disorder and to create entropy than the reverse? One useful explanation to comprehend this difference is to see that a state in order is an improbable state, while a state in disorder is a probable one: the electric wire is more likely to be tangled after so many years than to stay untangled, and there are many ways to put a mess in a room, but only one to put things at their places.

Entropy and time

There is some controversy concerning the relationship between entropy and time. The problem is that the fundamental laws of classical physics (from Newton) are reversible in time; that is whatever happens in one direction (toward to the future) can very well happen in the other direction (toward the past). Thus, as we see a drop of milk in a tea cup spreading and diffusing throughout the volume, we should see all the milk particles to come back and form the initial drop of milk. This is indeed possible according to Poincaré's recurrence theorem, although, because the state of the drop is very unlikely compared to all the states where the milk is spread, the probability that this happens is tiny (but in theory, it could happen!).

On the other hand, the second law of thermodynamics says that for a closed system, the entropy has to increase: the spreading of the drop of milk within the cup is a perfect example of entropy increase. Some, such as Prigogine, argues that entropy carries with itself the so-called arrow of time: because entropy increases, we can make the difference between past and future. But the question then remained, is the second law compatible to the reversible laws of classical physics? Roger Penrose, in his book The emperor's new mind, argues that the second law is not only compatible, but also, contrary to Prigogine's view, that the entropy does not carry the arrow of time with it. Whatever the direction, toward the past or the future, the entropy has to increase within a closed system, in particular within a system where there is no constraint on the entropy. In the case of the drop of milk, although toward the future there is no constraint and the entropy increases indeed, toward the past, there is the constraint of the initial conditions saying that the entropy is low at the beginning: thus, if you run the experiment backwards, there is the constraint that at the end, the entropy is lower than at the beginning. Because of this constraint, the second law does not apply as such and in consequence, the entropy does not itself carry the arrow of time. The arrow of time exists because our system started with a state of low entropy. The remaining question is thus, why and how did we start with a state of low entropy?

Source of low entropy

Both L. Botlzmann and R. Penrose describe the struggle for life as a struggle for low entropy, with the ultimate source of low entropy being the sun. L. Botlzmann writes

"The general struggle for existence of animate beings is therefore not a struggle for raw materials [...] nor energy [...], but a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth."

and R. Penrose says

"We do not need to gain energy from our environment because energy is conserved. But we are continually fighting against the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is not conserved; it is increasing all the time. To keep ourselves alive, we need to keep lowering the entropy that is within ourselves."

Thus, how do we get this low entropy? The ultimate source of entropy is the sun, and plants are the organisms which are using directly this entropy source, transforming it into molecular structures, themselves ready to be eaten. We, humans, via the food web, are eating plants or animals who themselves eat plants, to get low entropy for our body.

In this aspect, I am then wondering if we can class the food web in terms of entropy content. The plants would get a source of low entropy S_i, some of it would be used such that the entropy content gained in the eaten plant would be actually larger, S_i < S_plant . This process would repeat in that the higher in the food web, the higher the entropy content. In that respect, I would conclude that 1) humans would be organisms with some of the highest entropy (the most disorder) and 2) we should all be vegetarians in order to efficiently get low entropy in our diet. Do you agree with these conclusions?

Why the sun?

R. Penrose also explains why the sun is a source of low entropy and I was very surprised to learn that the reason is nearly a geometrical one. The sun is a hot spot, a small disk of light compared to the entire sky. Because of this geometrical configuration, the energy we receive from the sun has a much lower entropy that the energy sent back to space by earth because this energy is sent into all directions. Thus, if I understand correctly, if the earth was surrounded by many suns so much so that they would cover the entire sky, there would not be any source of low entropy and life would be unable to exist? Of course, one still needs to explain why the sun, itself a compact star and thus a source of low entropy, exists but the explanation goes on with cosmological arguments that I understand much less.

References
Ludwig Boltzmann, The second law of thermodynamics, in Theoretical physics and philosophical problems
Jean Bricmont, Science of chaos or chaos in science?
Roger Penrose, The emperor's new mind

Boltzmann on reason and passion

2007-11-05T18:59:00.000-10:00

Read what have to say great scientists, historical figures or artists on contemporary problems, popular culture or on the little things in life can be either worrisome, such as the recent comment by the co-discoverer of DNA saying that black people are less intelligent, or charming such as L. Boltzmann, the great scientist from the late 19th century, commenting on our everyday struggle between reason and passion.

Far from defending a pure rational behavior, L. Boltzmann not only accepts the human weakness of reacting instinctively but also recognizes that at times instinct can very much enlight people's life. L. Boltzmann writes:

"How far removed we are from pure rational grounds being the motives of all our actions! The innermost impulses to action mostly still arise from innate drives and passions, that is from instincts germinating within us without our concurrence, which do indeed become harmful and reprehensible if dominating the intellect, but nevertheless are necessary to lend our actions liveliness and our character its peculiar colouring. The machinery of the world maintains itself, as Schiller says, «today, as ever, by hunger and love, and the time is as yet far off when philosophy will hold the universal circuit together»."

Ludwig Boltzmann, On the principles of mechanics, in Theoretical physics and philosophical problems

Such observation has been made over and over during History. For instance, during the Thirty Years War, Sweden chancellor expressed it as followed:

"Nesci, mi fili, quantilla ratione mundus regatur"
"you don't know, my dear boy, with what little reason the world is governed"

cited by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General system theory.

The importance of small steps in science (and in life in general)

2007-10-25T18:37:00.000-10:00

One day, when finishing up my dinner in a Chinese restaurant, I cracked open my fortuneteller cookie and what I read stroke me and reminded me a long-time forgotten lesson that my mother used to teach my sisters and me. My mother's saying was like "the little rivers make the great ones". The Chinese one was something like "great things are achieved by small steps". I was quite amazed how I failed to remember this lesson which sounds so modest and powerful in the same time. Life around you goes so fast that at times it pushes you to burn the essential steps; but then, you burn yourself before reaching your goal.

Thus, it is with pleasure that I would like to refresh our Confucius-like philosophy today and reminded us of the importance of such simple lesson. What motivated me is this lesson appeared also in one of Ludwig Boltzmann's essay, a very important physicist of the late 19th century. This concerns science only but it applies, as he shows, to everything in life:

"Nowhere less than in natural science does the proposition that the straight path is the shortest turn out to be true. If a general intends to conquer a hostile city, he will not consult his map for the shortest road leading there; rather he will be forced to make the most various detours, every hamlet, even if quite off the path, will become a valuable point of leverage for him, if only he can take it; impregnable places he will isolate. Likewise, the scientist asks not what are the currently most important questions, but «which are at present solvable?» or sometimes merely «in which can we make some small but genuine advance?». As long as the alchemist merely sought the philosopher's stone and aimed at finding the art of making gold, all their endeavours were fruitless; it was only when people restricted themselves to seemingly less valuable quesitons that they created chemistry. Thus natural science appears completely to lose from sight the large and general questions; but all the more splendide is the success when, groping in the thicket of special questions, we suddenly find a small opening that allows a hitherto undreamt of outlook on the whole"

Ludwig Boltzmann, The second law of thermodynamics, in Theoretical physics and philosophical problems

It's the demography!

2007-10-23T08:27:00.000-10:00

Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage, an intellectual and a demograph, have written a book The rendez-vous des civilisations (a title that I would translate as "The civilizations will unite"), which takes an opposite view of the much controversial book by S. Huntington The clash of civilizations.

In this book, that I have not read but which is reviewed by Pierre Assouline, it is argued that Islam, which is at the center of the "problem", is, contrary to what we might think, already on its way of being westernized, and this is deduced by a pure look at the demography of muslim populations: the birth rate passed from 6.8 to 3.7 child per women between 1975 and 2005. The thesis is the following: the intellectual and cultural evolution of a people depends much on its demography than on its mood. In particular, the highest the birth rate, the more powerful religion is and inversely. Apparently, this lecture fits well the evolution of christian people in Europe and the authors argue in their book that this is what is happening as well in muslim nations. Thus, for them, the future is bright, and the different civilizations are already on a road of convergence.

Although optimist, this book has nonetheless received many criticism regarding the simplicity of their theory and the lack of cultural factors to judge the future. Critics that I think are well founded. But it is worthy and courageous to give a different perspective, one which contradicts the much too fearful theory of S. Huntington.

Mechanism of Nature, less dogmatic after all

2007-10-11T00:25:00.000-10:00

Jerry Fodor has written an interesting piece about some modifications concerning the theory of evolution in Nature ("Why pigs don't have wings"). Darwin's powerful idea that selective forces are the reason for what Nature is might not be as true as it first appears: some characteristics of individuals might just come for no specific reason or deep principle. Because even in the mechanism of Nature, life is also full of surprises and the road is just full of irrational bumps.

Paradoxically, that would make a lot of sense in many cases.

A definition of complexity

2007-10-08T21:33:00.000-10:00

Murray Gell-Mann gives a definition based on information theory of complexity in his book The quark and the jaguar. In this context, a measure of complexity can be associated with the actual length (in bits for instance) of the description of the regularities in a message.

If the message is perfectly regular, that is composed of only 1's, then the length of this regularity is short, "only 1's", and the complexity is small. On the other hand, if the message is perfectly random, so much so there is no regularity whatsoever, then the complexity is also low. Only when there is many different regularities together, the complexity will be large.

Although this definition might not satisfy a lot of people, at least it is the first time that I read any attempt to quantitatively define complexity.