Does "Are Angels OK" re-invent the wheel?

No, it doesn't

David Larsen thinks that Are Angels OK? "re-invents the wheel." Here is an extract from his review of the book.

"It’s curious that Manhire, in his lively and thoughtful introduction, fails to mention the large existing body of fiction and related criticism inspired by the sciences; fails, in fact, even to whisper the term that best describes this book. This is a science fiction anthology, and a damn good one."

I agree that it is a damn good book, but not that it re-invents the wheel. The collection is not just normal science fiction, and nor is it just unusually well-written science fiction.

To be sure, Are Angels OK? is unusual for its literary fire-power. All of the authors here are first-class literary figures, respected in their own community (New Zealand) and internationally. By way of comparison, imagine if Ian McEwan, AS Byatt, Martin Amis, and John Banville were joined up with Martin Reese, Stephen Hawking, and Lord Robert Winston. The result might be science fiction, but it would hardly be "re-inventing the wheel." (The comparison also shows how unlikely the collaboration is except for a community like New Zealand, which is big enough to have first-class writers and scientists but small enough and relaxed enough to undertake such a daring experiment as Are Angels OK?)

The thing to note is that this choice of authors effects the substance of the writing, making it different from typical science fiction. I take it that mainstream science fiction, of the Asimov and Clarke kind, is less about writing science into fiction than about writing fictional science ie. writing an imaginative account of the effects of advanced technology. There are other sorts of science fiction, of course, but advanced technology and its human consequences are the main planks of the genre.

Some of the authors in this book do treat science in this way. Elizabeth Knox and Witi Ihimaera both write stories where a piece of technology is the central character (time travel and end-of-the-universe space travel respectively). But even these stories have a twist to them that puts them on the borders of the category. Knox's story is "more about family than time-travel", and about the process of scientific discovery and not just the impact of technology on our lives. Witi Ihimaera's short story is probably the most recognisable piece of science fiction in the collection, but it has an unusual amount of scientific input. Ihimaera's collaborator was David Wiltshire, a distinguished working cosmologist with high standards of realism: "the rule of the game," he wrote to Ihimaera, "is that whatever you create has to be reconciled to the known laws of physics." And the story contains whole pages of abstruse equations.

On the whole, however, science and fiction interact differently in this collection than they do in standard science fiction. In some cases the science is neither futuristic nor technology-oriented. In Margaret Mahy's story the microscopic account of the human body draws only on mainstream chemistry, biology and physics -- the trick is that Mahy describes the science in vivid terms, and uses it as a metaphor for an old man's emotional state. Lloyd Jones' short story is a literary meditation on a loosely interpreted idea from physics (time cones and the "Elsewhen" outside the cone). Vincent O'Sullivan's poems are about science in general rather than any particular technology. Colquhoun's poems do refer to specific bits of science, but they deal with real equations rather than futuristic innovations like cryogenic preservation or DNA screening. Catherine Chidgey touches very lightly on science, using it as an inspiration for her images rather than her setting.

So if Are Angels OK? reinvents the wheel, it does so with enough variety and imagination that the result deserves to be called an innovation. After all, even the wheel is open to worthwhile advances. Are Angels OK combines science and fiction in new ways -- like train tracks and hovercrafts, it puts a new slant on an old product.

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Review of "Are Angels OK?"

Writers going bravely where science has already been - and vice versa

Bill Manhire and Paul Callaghan (eds.). Are Angels OK?: The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists, Victoria University Press 2007.

This brave and playful book is a collection of stories and poems with a scientific theme. This is not science fiction, however, and nor is it science education. It is a collaboration between scientists and writers -- as well as doing research and attending science lectures, each writer was teamed up with a group of (very good) working scientists. As science, the collection is not at all distinguished, and it was never meant to be. As a commentary on science, on its methods and spirit and motivations, it is interesting but not ground-breaking. As literature, it has some fine moments and some awkward ones, where the science jars. But as an experiment in a new genre it is marvelous. It is best read as an attempt to answer the question: in what ways science contribute to literature? The answer may be: not many ways. But this collection a courageous attempt to find as many ways as possible, with varied and charming results.

Writers tackling scientists -- in the nicest possible way

The challenge for these authors is not to put science in a poem or short story. It is to have lots of science in a short story, and to make it an active participant in the writing, an element that adds literary value to the work. The items in this collection show different degrees of interaction between their science bits and their non-science bits. And they have different ratios of science to non-science. Some take an idea from science, interpret it loosely in human terms, and make a story out of it. Others have real equations and real worm-holes. The authors also find different modes of interaction between science and non-science in the collection -- the science performs different roles in different pieces. Science serves as a setting, a source of metaphors, material for history lessons, and a target for explanation or description. The second of these is probably the most common, and it shows the lop-sidedness of the collection: by and large, science is used by writers to further the usual aims of literature, not the other way round.

Lop-sided does not mean biased or narrow-minded or ignorant. The book comes with a rich set of authors' notes, and these show the respect the authors have for science, their awe and admiration for scientists, and the amount of thought and background reading that went into their writing. Witi Ihimaera read Simon Singh's Big Bang; Elizabeth Knox swallowed Richard Gott's Time Travel in Einstein's Universe; Lloyd Jones got his teeth into Eratosthenes and Godel. Many of these writers had a prior interest in some aspect of science. Margaret Mahy wrote The Catalogue of the Universe; Elizabeth Knox has written on time travel in her Dreamhunter Duet; Witi Ihimaera wrote an opera called Galileo. So it pleasant, but not surprising, to see the writers looking on the scientists with a mixture of deference and camaraderie. Vincent O'Sullivan wonders what poets, those "feathery dancers" and "rhythmic stompers", could know about science. But to him, both writers and scientists "turn to our separate mirrors for what/ whatever the ending, starts the same." Margaret Mahy writes that she is intimidated by the thought of reading a book on mathematics; but she sees the work of novelists and physicists as part of the "flow of human conjecture." The title of the collection does well to capture its mood: tentative but friendly.

Sketchy science, fine art: Lloyd Jones and "Elsewhen"
Image: Lloyd Jones, time writer

The lop-sidedness of the collection does not mean the work is of poor literary quality, or that science has nothing to do with it. Lloyd Jones' short story is a case in point. It is no more a work of science than it is a short story, but it is nevertheless a joy to read. It also owes something to Jones' exposure to science. He takes his cue from Godel and a lecture on time cones -- those diagrams, like sharp-edged hourglasses, that physicists use to describe where an object can and can not move through space-time. The story gets its title from the lecturer's whimsical reference to "Elsewhen", the points in space-time where an object cannot go (because it would have to travel faster than the speed of light to get there).

Jones takes Elsewhen to be a kind of limbo or side-line, a place (or time) that is away from the main action, a diversion from the events that usually hold our attention; all the better if the diversion changes dramatically the course of the official event. Jones' treatment of the idea is as important as the idea itself. He does not draw any diagrams of Elsewhen, but sets out to "find this place in the everyday transactions of life." Traffic jams; moments of death, when "time stops, then kicks on"; the intermission of a film; the life-histories of inanimate objects, like letter-boxes; the man who glances up at the window, while going to table-tennis, and sees his future wife: these are all sightings of Elsewhen.

The work is not really a story but a series of sketches. "Snapshots" might be a better metaphor, and the challenge to the reader is to make a film out of this flow of still images. This is hard to do when the snapshots are scattered across time and space, and appear together by accident. Jones' fine metaphor for a jumble of memories is the tip-face, "where the bits of life circulate," discarded but full of significance. "You can find anything", Jones concludes, "absolutely anything at all...by simply joining the dots in a whole new way never seen before."

What does all this have to do with space-time and world-lines? Not much, I think, except in a loose metaphorical way. Moreover, Jones' notion of Elsewhen as a particular kind of moment, where things stand still and accidents happen, may be based on a misunderstanding of physics. Physically, Elsewhen consists in all points in space-time that cannot be reached from a given point in space-time. So what counts as Elsewhen is relative to the given point. By choosing the right reference points, you can make anywhere (and anywhen) an Elsewhen. The literary analogue might be that any moment, no matter how typical or uneventful it seems, can appear novel and significant if we look at it in the right way. Perhaps Jones had this idea in mind. But I'm not sure that he did, because then (for example) the intermission of a film would be no more Elsewhen than the normal flow of the film itself.

Of course, whether or not Jones got the physics right is irrelevant from a literary point of view. The story would convey the same theme, with the same lyricism, if Jones cut out his references to Demeritus, Godel and a physics lecture. Perhaps he could also have hit on the theme without going to any physics lectures himself. The connection to physics in the story seems loose enough that any passing reference to Elsewhen, scientific or otherwise, would have set of the train of thought to which we owe this charming bit of writing.

Fishing for connections

Still, "Elsewhen" shows that, whatever else they have in common, writers and scientists are interested in some common topics. Time is one of them. Jones writes in his end-note that he is grateful to his scientific collaborators for "wrenching me out of worn cracks." But the reason Elsewhen works well as a topic for Jones, I think, is not because it breaks new literary ground, but because time is a standard theme of literature. Poets and novelists have no equations for time, of course, and have no theory of space-time entanglement. But they are interested in the different ways time can pass, and how passing time affects people and ideas. Time is linked to other standard literary themes, like memory, history, and death. These are important for writers because they are important for people. And it is no surprise that Jones' short story is joined by a story about time travel by Elizabeth Knox.

But it pays to be careful in searching out the common ground between scientists and writers. There is a fair bit of this searching in Are Angels OK? Bill Manhire and Paul Callaghan do it, in the introduction and afterword respectively. And a few authors take up the topic in their concluding notes. Between them they cover a lot of ground. Here, commonly cited links between writers and scientists are the use of the imagination, the use of language, and the "hunt for metaphors" (as Colquhoun puts it). Callaghan says that physics and novel-writing both require "constrained creativity": innovation guided by pre-existing standards. Manhire writes that poets and physicists have a common interest in paradox (quantum mechanics gets a good airing here). And Glen Colquhoun thinks that both use "compact forms of language."

Whatever the deeper links might be between the disciplines, science is a fruitful source of metaphors for the writers in this collection. Lloyd Jones plays loose with his analogy to light-cones. Margaret Mahy does for space what Jones does for time, linking the thoughts of a dying man, his decrepitude and longing for freedom and a "way out", to a downward scale of physical objects -- from the skin to blood cells to atoms to quarks. Catherine Chidgey's story about a precocious weight-lifter is less explicit about its physics analogies, but just as reliant on them. "Pressure, load, weight, force, how much a person can bear," Chidgey writes in her end-note. "Thinking about the meanings of these terms told me about my main character's nature and relationships as well as his special physical talent."

But there are dangers in fishing for connections, and some of them come to the surface in this book. One danger is that you cast the net too widely, and draw in too much. Margaret Mahy writes that science and science "are not closed-off compounds, but in their various ways are part of the human flow of conjecture." But it is hard to think of any mental activity that is *not* part of the "human flow of conjecture". So Mahy's observation hardly sets physics and writers apart as a promising couple. Another danger is to focus on aspects of science (or writing) that are present in, but not distinctive of or essential to, the disciplines in question. Manhire makes something of the "resonant power of words" in science and literature. He quotes with approval the Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and poet) Roald Hoffman: "[In science] words are being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words...[so] the language of science is inherently poetic." Paul Callaghan's response to this is a gentle rebuke, noting that although the language of physics has its moments, the words and their poetry are not the "nub" of science. "Scattering amplitudes" and "temporal surprise" may be loaded with rhythm, significance, and other forms of literary cash. But the scientist trades in a different currency.

A third danger, perhaps the biggest one, is to ignore the *differences* between science and literature. Neither Manhire, Callaghan, or Mahy fall into this trap. All of these authors recognise that scientific claims are subject to reality in a way that literary statements are not (though of course literary statements may be subject to constraints of other kinds, perhaps even other kinds of empirical constraint). And they all observe that, although the physicist and the poet both use language, their languages are completely different from one-another. To use Colquhoun's phrase, not many of us know the "secret handshakes of mathematics."

Nice tool, wrong job: Jo Randerson's "Everything We Know"

In some places the authors overestimate the combatibility of science and literature, and it tells in the results. Literature encourages a distinctive style of thought, as does science. In Are Angels OK?, friction between the two tell us as much about the value of the literary style as it does about its shortcomings. Consider first a shortcoming. The kinds of associations that writers make are not always helpful in framing rigorous arguments. It may not be true in general that free association is better than rigorous argument, or vice versa. But it is true for particular tasks. It is worth contrasting Lloyd Jones' short story with an essay by play-wright and comedian Jo Randerson, called "Everything We Know." Where Jones applies the literary style to a scientific concept, Randerson applies it to an argument about the nature of science and ethics. Randerson's piece is less successful, and part of the explanation for this is that it uses literary tools to do a non-literary job.

Randerson's theme is "relationships", and the goal is to find a pattern in natural relationships and apply them to human affairs. Randerson takes the "sandpile phenomenon" as her natural pattern. Apparently, if you drop sand into a pile and measure the size of each sandslide that occurs, you find that the frequency of any possible sandslide is inversely proportional to the size of that sandslides. Lots of small ones, a few medium-sized ones, and very few large ones. Nevertheless, it is hard to predict the size and timing of each sandside. For Randerson, this is a launching-pad for a meditation on the fundamental interrelatedness of all things. "Everything is connected in life", so connectedness is good. Therefore conflict is bad. And it follows (somehow) that heirarchies are bad. Boundaries are bad too. After all, "when you put a wall in a body, you get a clot. Blood gathers together in a thickened lump, which would then move fatally through the body." What follows from this Paracelsean logic? According to Randerson, "my testing disproves the hypothesis."

No doubt we should share Randerson's spirit of tolerance and affection for the diversity of things. But if the aim is to come up with sound political and ethical principles, we should be more precise than she is ("Everything is connected in life" is, by itself, not a very meaningful claim. It has a certain aphoristic ring to it, but no more than, say, "Real connections are rare.") And we should not be convinced by Randerson's style of argument, which is rich in imagery but poor in critical reflection. In a different context, her movement from sandpiles to blood clots to human wars would strike us as the light step of an accomplished writer. In this case it looks like a wobbly polemic.

"This lecture is like a flock of pigeons," Randerson writes, "and my goal, rather than caging them, is to liberate them and observe the patterns as they flutter out of sight." This captures Jones' piece nicely. There, an idea from science releases a flock of images, memories, jokes, phrases, incidents, and other literary things. Randerson tries to do the same thing, but the result is unconvincing. Why? I think it is because they have different goals: Jones to explore an area of human experience, Randerson to justify a political position. There's nothing wrong with doing either of those, but only the first one can be done well with just the tools of literature.

The gift of writing

The literary style is not good at rigorous argument, but it is good at dealing with concrete human situations: the "everyday transactions of life", in Jones' terms. Study the human voice in this collection and the special power of writers becomes clear. Even Margaret Mahy's story, with its rich descriptions of subcutaneous life, is at its best when describing human life. What is interesting about the science in the story, the musings on space and place and gravity, is not the science itself but what it tells us about the old man who is musing on them. For all the detail about lipids and unfolding proteins, the detail that catches in my mind are about human gestures and instincts and mannerisms, carefully observed by the author:

"The old man's slow fingers were pinching a fold in his bed cover, and rubbing it slowly backwards and forwards. His eyes opened."

Elizabeth Knox's short story "Unobtanium" is especially notable in this respect, because she treats human relationships in some detail. The details of time travel in her story are interesting and valuable, but it the real talent of the story is to take human foibles and eccentricities and give them color. For example, Mark is the gifted but wayward brother of Knox's narrator. Here, in the hospital just before his mother's death, Mark argues with a doctor. The passage neatly captures his misdirected brilliance.

"Mark flinched and snatched is arm back. He began to tremble, but he kept on talking. He had dredged up the name of the new drug. His voice cranked up a notch and in it, just detectable, was a hint of a boast about his recall, about what he knew -- an eagerness completely out of keeping with the deathbed.
The doctor said, plainly, that the drug wasn't suitable in these kinds of cases.
Mark went on as though he hadn't heard."

The special skill of these writers is not just to describe human psychology. They also appeal to human psychology in their descriptions of natural phenomena. Scientists, as scientists, have no interest in making nature vivid or easy to grasp to ordinary readers. But this is just what the likes of Knox and Jones are good at. Here is Jones writing on time:

"I never knew that time could bend like sheet metal. I sort of accepted that time came packaged in clocks and watches. I never realised that there was such a thing as big time and little time. Little time belongs to us. It sits on our shoulder from the time we are born and rides us all the way to the grave. Big time belongs to the cosmos. Big time is showtime -- space is a fat boy who just gets fatter."

This sort of writing is useless as science. And insofar as it lacks rigour or precision, it falls short of communicating science. True, it describes natural phenomena in terms that people can understand -- we all know what a "fat boy" is, and the metaphor of "riding to the grave" will move most of us. But the "fat boy" metaphor conveys nothing of scientific substance except the notion of perpetual expansion. All the other associations of "fat boy", rich as they may be, don't help us to understand the nature of the cosmos. In the trade-off between rigor and accessibility, Jones puts all his money on accessibility.

Is the literary style *necessarily* at odds with communicating science, with its precise concepts and detailed arguments? Is it better able to communicate science than, say, Richard Dawkins' style of writing? I'm not sure of either answer. What Are Angels OK? reminds us is that, whatever the answers, the literary style gives us something that science does not: a feeling for human psychology, how it plays out in real life and how it responds to words and images.

To conclude, here are a few lines from one of Vincent O'Sullivan's poems in the collection:

I like the stories, although the stories
are not what it's about...
..Rutherford as a boy when his mother
tells him, through a storm, what makes
lightening strike, he answers politely,
'No, no it doesn't, mum'
But that
is like liking the wrapping wrapped around
the gift, the gift as much in the dark
as the famous cat...

O'Sullivan is quite right that stories are not what science is about. Focus on the stories and you miss out on the real gift of science. But nor is science the nub of a story. Focus on the science in a story and you miss out on the real gift of literature. A stern critic would say that Are Angles OK? fails because it does not give us the best of science and the best of literature in one shot. But if the collection fails in that respect it is because the natures of science and writing do not allow it, not because of any weakness in Knox or Callaghan or Randerson. Where the collection succeeds is in exploring the many ways in science can sit side-by-side with literature. In doing so it traces out the limits of that project, and tells us something about the strength and weaknesses of the people on both sides of the lab door. The collaborative spirit wins out, even if some of the combinations look clunky. Scientists and writers may not be best friends, this book says, but they can make excellent neighbours.

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Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

A rich narrative of the “billionare of bizarre facts”

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Penguin 1992

“The full enigma of Darwin’s life has never been grasped.” In their biography of Charles Darwin, this observation leads Desmond and Moore in two directions. One is to show that Darwin’s life really was enigmatic, that is was filled with confusion, conflict, and inconsistencies. The other is to make those enigmas less mysterious by relating them to his social and political environment. Their method fits their goal: they want to open up Darwin’s inner life by sorting through his voluminous personal writings, making use of recent volumes of his letters, manuscripts, commentaries, and memoranda. On the whole the book is a marvellous success, though its richness causes it to raise new enigmas as well as settling old ones.

What is the enigma?  Darwin’s ambiguous attitude towards evolution, especially his long delay in publicizing his ideas on the topic.  And how do Desmond and Moore explain this?  Darwin’s science drove him towards a radical and godless doctrine; but his upbringing, his wife’s faith, his Cambridge connections, and many of his scientific acquaintances, coupled with his “instinctive reverence for rank”, all forced him into secrecy.

The book uses Darwin's “social context” as a framing device rather than a set of theories about Darwin’s life and work.  It contains remarkably little analysis of its subject matter. Except for the introduction, authorial comments are thin on the ground, either in the form of moral or intellectual judgments, generalizations, or scrutiny of secondary sources.  Insofar as the authors draw parallels between Darwin’s thought and political events (French uprisings, the Reform Bill, Chartism, the Vivisection Bill, the Crimean War….) they do so implicitly, by showing not by telling.  Sometimes this pared-back approach is the opposite of enlightening.  For example, we never get a clear explanation of why Darwin, the gentle white-supremist, could upbraid his own son about the evils of slavery. And we do not find out whether Darwin’s ill-health was primarily physical or psychological in origin.

The upside of the book’s narrative form is that it licenses the authors to explore every aspect of Darwin’s life in great detail, and to recall them in a fresh and vivid way.  In this sense the book resembles Darwin himself, that “billionaire of bizarre facts.”  We already know that Darwin dropped out of medical school: what this book tells us is what Darwin and his brother ate when they arrived in Edinburgh, and the stench and horror of Darwin’s first dissection.  We know that Darwin disagreed with Owen: but in this book we see Owen drilling with the Honourable Artillery Company, and Darwin, the closet transmutationist, breakfasting with the Owens in London.  The writing helps a lot here. In this story, events move swiftly on the back of snappy prose.

Desmond and Moore reveal Darwin’s inner life indirectly, through his responses to outside events, so it is no surprise that the authors offer no summary assessment of Darwin’s character. Instead of a portrait we get a gallery of sketches: Darwin the heartbroken father, the calculating suitor; the grumpy recluse, the jolly companion; the impressionable youth, the grand old genius; the hater of Owen, the magnanimous rival of Wallace; the brave man of science, going forward alone; the timid Darwin, hanging on the approval of friends. Here are more enigmas. Desmond and Moore leave them hanging.

What of Darwin’s science?  It is true that Desmond and Moore show (for example) Darwin developing the principle of “division of labour” by analogy with industrial workshops, and the bloody Crimean war informing his chapter on the Struggle for Existence.  But the “enigma” that this book helps us to grasp is emotional and social, not intellectual. What “tortured” Darwin were not the implications of believing his theory of evolution (Lyell suffered the most from this kind of torture), but the implications of publicizing it.  If this is what the authors want us to grasp then the book is an outstanding success, even if it leaves some of the interpretative work in the hands of the reader. 

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The 'P' Word

Making sense (insofar as it is possible) of Kuhn

Journalist Waleed Al-Shobakky has a post on "the 'p' word": paradigm. He professes guilt at using this term in the past, and tells how it got him into trouble recently at the first conference of Arab science journalists. Al-Shobakky frames the post as a warning about the dangers of using this "too beautiful and brilliant" term of Kuhn's. It can land you in deep water, he says, because it's too easy to think that the "Western paradigm of science" is universal, whereas in fact it may not be.

But the post unwittingly gives a different warning.The main danger of the 'p' word is not that it will lead you into factual error but that it will lead you to make unhelpfully vague claims about science and culture. The best weapon against "the 'p' word" is not empirical research but the analytic knife. So here are some sources of vagueness in the post, and some warnings about them.

"I’ve written several articles about science initiatives in the Arab Gulf; would I have written them differently had I had a different, well, paradigm?"

There is no specific form of vagueness here, just undifferentiated vagueness in the use of the term "paradigm." There are lots of ways in which two people could write an article "differently", and these differences could be due to numerous background facts about the writers. If they went to different schools then one might indent the first sentence of each paragraph, and the other not. If one was working for the political section of the paper and one for the economic section, they would focus on different aspects of science in the Arab Gulf. And if one took the bible literally and the other did not, they would differ over the merits of an study in evolutionary psychology. Some of these differences are trivial from the point of view of philosophy of science; some may not be. It's important to distinguish between them because otherwise it's to easy to extrapolate falsely from one sort to another sort. So, for example, there is probably no sense in saying that one writer is "wrong" to use indents. But we shouldn't leap to the conclusion that there is no sense in saying that the creationist (or the evolutionist) is "wrong."

"In Islam and Science, Muzaffar Iqbal writes that the Islamic view is that there is a unified human knowledge domain where knowledge of the worldly is tributary to knowledge of the divine. So we know God better, for instance, by investigating how trees grow or why dinosaurs disappeared."

Best to distinguish between the methods of scientists and their motives, because different motives need not imply different methods. People can (and do) do science to earn a living, please their partners, discover the truth about nature, and get closer to their chosen god. But these differences in purpose need not mean they all carry out science in a different way -- indeed, they may all be working in the same lab, on the same problem. This is because their different ultimate goals can be served by the same proximate goal -- that of getting a sound understanding of some aspect of nature. So the fact that some scientists see science as "tributary to knowledge of the divine" may not lead to any relevant differences in the way they do science.

"The secular-sacred dichotomy, deeply established in Western thought, may actually not have an equivalent in the Islamic worldview." [Al-Shobakky takes this as a good challenge to the claim that "the conclusions of a paper in Nature are equally valid, and replicable, in China and Egypt, by a Buddhist or a Muslim researcher".]

The point to make here is that different ways of doing science need not be incommensurable -- they need not lead to irreconcilable disagreements about nature.

Suppose Islamic researchers do in fact do science differently as a result of their faith. They might use different equipment, make different assumptions, use a different form of maths. This would not be a ground-breaking discovery, nor would it interest Kuhn very much. What is ground-breaking is the idea that they could be completely different from other scientists yet their conclusions be just as correct.

Suppose that Islamic scientists and Western scientists disagree about (say) the formation of stars. Now suppose that no arguments from Western scientists could rationally oblige Islamic scientists to change their conclusions about the formation of stars. And suppose that the same is true about arguments from Islamic scientists directed at Western scientists. That would be interesting. That is what Kuhn argues for. It is a much stronger claim than just the claim that different communities do science differently, and get different results. According to the stronger claim, the conclusions of a sound Nature paper may not actually be replicable by a Buddhist or a Muslim researcher -- even by a very sound one, using the same instruments as the Nature researcher.* But if only the weaker claim is true, then the existence of cultures that have different methods and different conclusions from Nature researchers is not enough to challege the (quite plausible) claim that a sound Nature paper will be confirmed by any sound scientist who happens to be Buddhist.

The point is that to challenge the universality of a Nature paper it is not enough to point to cultures that have a different "worldview" from the Nature researchers. You need to show (at least) that the other worldview is sound. And in doing so you would need to come to terms with Kuhn's big idea: that paradigms can at the same time be different and right.**

*Of course, even Kuhn could admit that some paradigms are bad ie. even the members of some paradigm can be convinced that it is false, by members of another paradigm. So even if incommensurability is possible, it may not be a omnipresent.

**in the most rigorous sense possible of "right."

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Royal Institution Young Scientist Centre

Why you should go: Science education that is both scientific and educational. Why you want to go: Portable labs.

A new strain of science education is growing in the basement of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The Young Science Centre, up and running this September, is designed to make science fun (which is not unusual for this form of outreach) but also to make it intellectually stimulating (which is unusual).

To get to the Centre, make your way through the black Jaguars on Albemarle Street, Westminster, enter the Royal Institution, go past the plush lecture halls and glass cases, and drop down into the lower floors. Already there are a few eye-catching things on display. There are lots of bright lights in primary colours, and some big projection films featuring old labs. One curious thing is an empty white room. This is where working scientists come down to....work as scientists. Not a bad way to show kids how science works.

But the most interesting stuff will be behind a blue door marked: "Young Scientist Centre." At the moment the YSC looks very much like a museum basement in the middle of renovations. The main room is the size of a tennis courts and houses a lot of boxes, old books, and empty frames.

The room looks quite different in the mind of David Porter, who is managing the new project. In the blueprints it is cross between a lab and a moon-base. The furniture is a series of white circular benches, neatly tesselated and arranged in rings and lines. They have taps and power sockets like ordinary lab benches. But these benches are much more interesting. You can push each one around the floor to make new rings and clusters. You can adjust their heights, from waist level upwards. And nearby there is a smaller room filled with tiered, rounded sofas, the interior decorator's version of a bouncy castle.

This unusual decor is the backdrop for a series of interactive projects that Porter hopes to roll out once the Centre opens. The manoeverable and height-adjustable benches mean that students of all ages (and heights) can use them for many different kinds of hands-on projects. The bouncy break-out room is for planning and discussing the results of tests and experiments carried out in the laboratory. And Porter expects there will be more to discuss than playdough, dinosaur posters, and plastic models of the solar system, because the educational tools in the lab will be the tools of real scientists, from pipettes to microscopes to Geiger counters.

Porter also wants to equip the lab, and the students, with a scientific attitude -- something that they may not get at school. After 30 years working as a science teacher, he thinks he has a good idea of what works and what does not in science education. And he hopes that the combination of sleek instruments, funky decor, hands-on discovery, and inspired teaching, will illuminate science - real science - in a way that routine science classes cannot. The Centre will be a ray of light for teachers as well as students, if Porter has his way. Let's hope he does.

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One more look at the people of the screen

Why English profs shouldn't lose sleep over the Kindle

To recap the previous post, Christine Rosen from The New Atlantis is deeply concerned about technologies like the Kindle that encourage people to read online. She fears that "the paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information." I think her intentions are good but her fears are exaggerated.

Rosen's conclusions sit on a pile of different complaints, some anecdotal and some drawn from science: Ipods and idle chatter in the British Reading Room, the failure of e-readers for young children, the "outer-directedness" of screen-readers, librarians getting jobs entitled "media and information specialist". But Rosen's most interesting worries are that screen-readers (unlike novel readers) are not submissive but controlling, and that the internet is constantly distracting. Neither of these worries is as great as Rosen makes out, I think. The first is a bit bizarre and the second is easily fixed.

Master and student

James Paul Gee, a loud advocate of video games in education, thinks they help learning because they encourage user participation. The user makes choices, acts on them, and experiences the consequences; hence they learn strategic thinking and accountability. Rosen takes this to be a "profound misunderstanding" of books and the learning process, and outlines probably the most insistent and specific (and odd) of her concerns.

[When reading a novel] you enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master.

Historian David A. Bell draws the same link between submission and learning: “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns."

This idea doesn't bear the weight that Rosen puts on it. For one thing, it is at odds with a standard argument against watching videos, which is that the user is a passive absorber of data rather than an active participant. Many defenses of literature emphasise the amount of "engagement" a book gives us, the imaginative reconstruction and moral contemplation etc. that goes on in the mind of a reader. The argument goes back at least to Plato, who preferred the spoken to the written word (and dialogues to monologues) because the former is more likely teach the audience in the best way possible: by doing. More recently, David Novitz is one philosopher of art who has emphasised the value of literature in helping people imagine new scenarios and walk through them in our heads. It's hard to see why users of video gamers are less likely to develop these skills just because they get to decide which alley to go down and where to build your next city. Since when was spectatorship a better teacher than participation?

Insofar as Rosen's objection holds weight, it is thanks to the content and verisimilitude of video-games rather than user participation. Most video games test strategy rather than empathy. You could imagine games that test the latter, but I expect they would need a great deal more detail and sophistication than they currently do -- they'ld need novelists and psychologists, not graphic artists.

David Bell puts a different slant on the notion of audience submission. What books encourage, he says, and what the internet dissipates, is the discipline of sustained reading. At best, the people of the screen are distracted readers; at worst, they make ad-hoc jumps from one bit of data to another, without trying to link them together. A standard response to this criticism is to say that our minds are in fact stimulated by the challenge of linking together disparate bits of data -- we do more "cognitive work" with The Sopranos than with I Love Lucy.

The key here is to distinguish between fragmentation and reorganisation. It's the difference between a brainstorm and an essay. The first is a set of ideas randomly gathered and displayed. The second is no less a collection of bits of data, it's just that they are deliberately selected bits of data, thoughtfully arranged.

So far so obvious (at least since Johnson made it obvious). But the bibliophile can just respond that there is still something much different in the novel. All this ideas-networking is one thing, but the quiet, sustained contemplation of a novel is altogether different. But this response is weaker than it looks. Productive book-reading is not, by and large, a simple matter of moving linearly through a long series of ordered sentences. There's lots of zig-zag and cross-reference.

*The example is taken from Boris Johnson's book Why Everything Bad is Good For You, which introduced this idea of the stimulating confusion of popular culture.

A lot depends on the genre, of course. Consider the historian or philosopher who reads a book like the internet, checking one passage against a separate one, looking for occurences of the main idea or statements of the main claim, looking up unfamiliar terms or arguments, checking the references behind claims, going back to the primary documents, considering a passage from the book alongside a critic's comment on it. This sort of cross-referencing is not the same as a random walk through Wikipedia -- it's reorganisation versus fragmentation again. But the internet makes both of those tasks easier, not just the latter.

But perhaps Rosen is worried mainly about the novel reading. This is where she gets her examples from (Dostoevsky, Little Dorrit, Middlemarch). It also seems to be a point of difference between Rosen and Johnson, the latter using computer programming and political knowledge as examples of digitally-enhanced fields. Yet most of the real understanding I get from a book -- even a novel -- is not from the first reading but from the later analysis: the search for common themes, recurring symbols, for key passages that illuminate a character. The typical University English tutorial resembles more the zig-zag of an internet search than the marathon of novel-reading. The English zig-zag is not just random flitting, guided by taste. It takes concentration and memory to search for six appearances of stained-glass windows in David Copperfield, and find their common meaning.

An electronic search can do the same. Except the internet does all the mechanical searching for you -- the student is left to do the really worthwhile bit, the close contextual reading and study of common themes of the various "hits." One might argue that the internet search is too efficient. It gives exact hits without allowing the user to go down any creative sidetracks. If you electronically search David Copperfield for "stained-glass window", you won't accidently bring up a page that has no stained-glass windows but does have a "rose window" or a scene with a sunset seen through a window. But, as Rosen frequently reminds us, the internet has no shortage of creative side-tracks....

Distraction

Here is Rosen's round-up of the problems with the Kindle:

"...the tactile pleasures of the printed page versus the screen; the new risks of distraction posed by a device with a wireless Internet connection; the difference between reading a book in two-page spreads and reading a story on one flashing screen-display after another."

Of these concerns, the first and third seem to be mainly aesthetic, and I don't understand the third one at all (what difference does it make to read with two pages visible and not just one?). The second one makes more sense. Clearly it's easier to (say) click on your Youtube bookmark, while on the computer, than it is to go and read the mag in the kitchen, while sitting reading in your favorite chair. A caricature, perhaps. But it's what we would expect, the computer and the internet being designed for easy access and convenience. The internet age is also the age of handy time-wasters.

But this is not a problem if it's easily fixed. So why not have a "anti-distraction" device on the Kindle? Activate it and you lose the internet for an hour or two, either completely or in strategic chunks -- lose Wikipedia, lose facebook or other top time-wasters, lose email. There would be an emergency bail-out, as there always is for a real book. But the bail-out option would be as inconvenient as getting out of a comforting chair to get to the phone. Perhaps a password kept in the shed or loo or letterbox, or a number you have to dial on the real phone. Or, to keep it digital, some laptop chore that the user has specified in advance, like sending an awkward email or organising your Documents folder. More simply, there could be no built-in bail-out, and your last resort is a connected computer in another room.

There are drawbacks to this anti-distraction idea. No anti-distraction plan is proof against a sufficiently determined ditherer. And for the reader to activate such a plan they would have to have a firm commitment to sustained reading in the first place. But both of these drawbacks apply just about as well to ordinary book-reading. That is, anyone who would otherwise be a good book-reader would have the skill and dedication to overcome them.

Conclusion

The internet does certain things very well. It searches for things, links things together, and makes it easy to follow the links. It's also pretty good at just displaying raw language. Hard-copy books are only really good at the latter. If we have a choice between the two, we should take the one that does more useful things. So why worry that the internet is replacing hard-copy books?

The answers that Rosen gives us are a) the new function of the internet (all that linking) is bad for us and b) the internet is not very good at the old role (displaying raw language as a book does). To a) I say: all that linking is a valuable thing that we do anyway (only slower) when reading a book. And to b) I say: the problems with the screen as a book could be solved, with a bit of thought and technology, by anyone who has the skill and discipline to read an ordinary book.

There remain concerns about the aesthetics of books (the roughed edges, the smell of the binding). But somone who doesn't share a bibliophile's taste can still be a perfectly good reader of Dickens -- at least, I don't see any good reason to otherwise in Rosen's article. Personally, I'ld prefer to read books in hard-cover. But I think that other people can read them just as well on the screen.

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Another look at the people of the screen

Two points of method in the debate about online reading

Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.

This is Christine Rosen writing in The New Atlantis on the fate of reading in a digital age. Needless to say, it's not a very happy article. Rosen means the article as a counterweight to the work of "techno-utopians", who see the digitisation of books as an unalloyed good. But Rosen doesn't just balance things out -- she slides them into gloom. Screen-reading won't just be book-reading in a new medium, she says. It'll be a new activity altogether, where reading is shallow and aimless and readers are numb to their own humanity.

I'll look at Rosen's main worries in the next post. But first, here's a couple of general points about the debate, inspired by Rosen's article: compare like with like, and don't let differences of medium obscure similarities of function.

Compare like with like

To be fair, Rosen scolds a "technophile" (Steven Johnson in the London Guardian) for failing to compare like with like -- for comparing computer programmers with book readers in terms of their likely economic success in the digital climate. As Rosen points out, "Johnson would have done better to compare obsessive novel writers and obsessive computer programmers...Most of the people immersed in screen worlds are not programmers. They are consumers who are reading on the screen, but also buying, blogging, surfing, and playing games."

That's fair enough, but it rubs both ways. Rosen is as misguided as Johnson when she compares the book-reading community with the entire web community, in all its moods and activities. It's more plausible to compare the web community to the entire non-web community, where the latter includes (along with book-readers) its fair share of shallowness, idleness, and wasted time. The online community, like the offline community, has its disciplined and intelligent suburbs and its more scruffy one. The real question is whether the internet will give a net outflow from the former to the latter.

So if Rosen is right, and cognitive content of normal reading has been replaced by, and not just supplemented by, a "vaguely defined screen savvy", that's something to worry about. But if we do an equivalent of quality reading on the internet now, as before, there's no immediate concern. Importantly, this means that we may be OK even if we spent the majority of our internet time in the aimless, shallow, "power search" mode that Rosen laments.

Different medium, same function

Rosen scolds Johnson again for failing to distinguish between the values of the digital world and values within the digital world. Computer programmers might earn a lot in the "digital climate", she says, but that's no use if the climate itself is wrong. And there's truth in that. But the overall lesson of Johnson's article, in seems to me, is not just that techies achieve techie goals. It's rather that they achieve goals that everyone wants to achieve -- like professional success and political awareness. Activities in the digital medium can serve the same function as different activities in other media -- even if the difference of medium tends to obscure the similarity of function. In Johnson's words: "Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?"

With this in mind, the following claim from the article looks fishy: "People who read regularly for pleasure are more likely to be employed, and more likely to vote, exercise, visit museums, and volunteer in their communities; in short, they are more engaged citizens."* Perhaps your average blogger is less likely to go to museums or help out in the local soup kitchen. But they become engaged citizens in ways that are peculiar to the internet -- online donations, political awareness, writing open source code, getting involved in decent online forums.

*To be fair, the claim comes from a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study, not from Rosen. And she counters it with Harold Bloom's skeptical view of the link between books and civic engagement.

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